Food Banks Straining to Meet Demand Show the Real Human Cost of Progressive Policies

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Families are seeing the pinch at home, but so too are the charities that pick up the grocery bill for those who can’t make ends meet.

Thanks to inflation, Americans increasingly cannot afford their grocery bills. Global food prices are projected to increase 23 percent this year, on top of the 30 percent they increased last year. And per usual, those already living on the margins are feeling the consequences the most.

Food banks are struggling to keep up with the increased demand they’re experiencing. Families are seeing the pinch at home, but so too are the charities that pick up the grocery bill for those who can’t make ends meet. Many are struggling to keep up with the increased demand on top of the increased cost of food.

Forgotten Harvest, which serves the metro Detroit area, said demand increased 25 to 45 percent since December. According to the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index, grocery bills increased by 10 percent in March compared to the year before while restaurant charges went up by 6.9 percent.

Furthermore, Feeding America, one of the nation’s largest charities working to prevent hunger with over 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries, reported 85 percent of their food banks saw increased demand for food assistance.

Tim Fetsch, the chief operating officer of the St. Louis Area Foodbank, which provides nearly 400,000 meals per year, told the Wall Street Journal, “We have had to work harder to secure the food needed to support the community.” He went on to explain that his organization is grappling with supply chain issues, increased transportation costs, and the increase in food prices. And he pointed out that while retail stores used to donate heavily to their program, they too are facing many of the same challenges.

For its part, Feeding America has begun purchasing its food for the first time to make up for the loss in donations. However, their President and Chief Operating Officer Katie Fitzgerald indicated that might not be a permanent solution, telling the Journal, “We’re still trying to purchase that food, but now it’s costing us 40 percent more.”

How do you say “we told you so” in progressive?

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the left has mocked those of us who said the response to the coronavirus might be worse than the disease itself. We were called grandma killers, selfish, idiots. (Never mind the fact that Democratic governors actually killed grandmas by sending infected patients back into nursing homes.)

But every step along the way we have been horribly right.

In March of 2020, we at FEE.org published a headline that read, “Panic Has Led to Government ‘Cures’ That Are Worse than the Disease, History Shows.”

While the New York Times called for more stimulus spending, Tyler Goodspeed (a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute) wrote in The Hill, “Back to ’70s inflation? How Biden’s spending spree will hurt your wallet.” That was in July of 2021. The Washington Post was advocating lockdowns even as recently as this past December writing, “Lockdowns can be necessary to slow the spread of the coronavirus.” Meanwhile, my colleague at FEE.org has been presciently pointing to the unscientific nature of such claims—reporting all the way back in May of 2020, “Sweden’s Top Infectious Disease Expert Says COVID-19 Lockdowns Are Not Based on Science. History Shows He Could Be Right.”

It’s been like watching a car crash in slow motion while being unable to intervene and stop it.

The response to the coronavirus was worse than the disease, which has a less than 1 percent death rate for the vast majority of people, and for which a vaccine was quickly developed.

There are myriad repercussions we can point to that stemmed from lockdowns and stimulus spending: increases in domestic abuse, loss of education, an increase in poverty, staggering inflation, increases in hunger. The list goes on.

All of these repercussions were predictable and predicted by many who understand the tendency of central planning to generate adverse unintended consequences. Kids can’t just make up for years of learning lost. Trapping people in their homes can be dangerous when their living situation is unstable. Shutting down the economy was always going to lead to supply chain disruptions and shortages, while printing trillions of dollars is bound to lead to inflation.

Our government decided to be truly detached from economic reality and pursue both lockdowns and money printing—meaning you had a huge increase in dollars chasing a decreased number of goods. That’s the specific recipe for high inflation and anyone who didn’t say that all along should probably revisit basic economics.

And lastly, it was clear all along we would see an increase in poverty and hunger as a result of pushing people out of work, limiting the supply chain, and creating high inflation. All of this goes hand-in-hand.

This is yet another example of how the left’s policies hurt the very people they claim to stand for the most. It’s good to care about the poor, but we can’t help them if we don’t understand the economic factors that actually lead to prosperity. A bleeding heart paired with an economically illiterate mind never lifted anyone out of poverty.

Regrettably, those who were already on the margins in our society are being pummeled by the reckless policies of progressives. And let’s be clear, there were plenty of Republicans in the progressive camp as well. Many supported stimulus spending and even lockdowns. Trump himself and many of his supporters even tried to have Representative Thomas Massie (R, KY) kicked out of the GOP when he stood against stimulus spending in 2020.

But saying “I told you so” doesn’t feel good when there are real lives on the line. This story is a heartbreaking one that represents countless children and parents going to bed hungry tonight.

As economist Murray Rothbard once said, “It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”

Those who waged economic war on the American people over the last two years need to stand down and let entrepreneurs and workers rebuild our ravaged economy.

AUTHOR

Hannah Cox

Hannah Cox is the Content Manager and Brand Ambassador for the Foundation for Economic Education.

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

No Increase in Flight Cancellations After CDC Mask Mandate Lifted, Data Show

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Data suggest that fears of widespread cancellation of flights in the wake of the CDC mask mandate being lifted are baseless, thankfully.

It’s been two week since a federal court threw out the CDC’s transport mask mandate, to the glee of some and the outrage of others.

While many people—including flight attendants and passengers on planes—celebrated the court’s decision, others predicted the move would have dire consequences.

CBS News, for example, reported that European airlines were forced to “cancel hundreds of flights as they grapple with coronavirus-related staffing shortages weeks after they ditched rules requiring passengers and staff to mask up in the air.”

The news agency noted that UK airlines alone canceled 769 flights in total between March 31 and April 7 because of a shortage of flight crews due to illness. CBS quoted Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist, who said such outbreaks were needless and predictable.

“It’s very clear that the airline industry is particularly vulnerable, and this creates a cascading effect on society more than, say, a restaurant closing would,” Feigl-Ding said. “This is critical infrastructure and these are essential employees, and we’re endangering our economy. Stopping COVID is good for our economy, ‘letting it rip’ is the exact opposite.”

Few would disagree with Feigl-Ding that airlines are important infrastructure, but his claim that mask mandates are crucial to their success bears scrutiny.

First, it’s worth noting that the 769 UK flights canceled between March 31 and April accounted for just 4 percent of those flights, which means that 96 percent went off without a hitch. Even more importantly, a single airline—EasyJet—accounted for roughly 40 percent of the canceled flights.

This suggests the UK’s numbers were skewed to a large extent by a single outbreak that disrupted many flights. Whether a mask mandate would have prevented this outbreak from occurring is impossible to know. But what we do know is that similar cancellations—much larger ones, in fact—occurred when mask mandates were still in place, so the idea that such mandates can prevent cancellations is simply not true.

We also have fresh data on cancellations of US flights since the CDC’s mask mandate was lifted. One astute Twitter user analyzed the data, which can be found here, and pointed out that in the two weeks since the CDC’s mask order was struck on April 18, there was no widespread cancellation of flights.

On the contrary, the four largest airlines in the US—American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and Southwest Airlines—all had a cancellation rate of 0 percent, as did JetBlue and Allegian. Frontier Airlines, meanwhile, had a cancellation rate of 1 percent, and Alaska Airlines had a cancellation rate of 7 percent. (Since the publication of the tweet, Alaska’s cancellation rate has fallen to 4 percent, and Delta’s has increased to 1 percent.)

The total number of canceled flights within, into, or out of the US in the past two weeks currently stands at 72—about 0.15 percent of the roughly 45,000 flights the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) oversees each day, on average.

To be sure, we’re still in a pandemic, at least in the sense that many people are still getting COVID-19, still getting sick, and still dying. This means that we can expect there will be times when flights are interrupted by spikes of illness.

That said, so far the data suggest that fears of widespread cancellation of flights in the wake of the mask mandate being lifted are baseless, thankfully.

In many ways, this should not surprise us.

Even mask champions like The New York Times have come around to the idea that cloth masks are not very effective against Covid, which is why many scientists have long doubted their efficacy. (And even if cloth masks are effective, are we really supposed to just overlook the fact that there’s a period of time on flights when patrons just remove them to eat and drink, which hardly seems like an effective virus containment strategy?)

None of this is to say masking isn’t or can’t be effective. Perhaps it is. But I think we have an abundance of evidence that shows mask mandates are not effective, and the absence of a surge in flight cancellations following the striking down of the mask mandate is one more piece of that evidentiary record.

All of this brings to mind a crucial lesson of economics. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once observed that one of the biggest problems of the modern world is how we assess public policy.

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results,” Friedman noted.

There’s no better example of Friedman’s adage, I think, than masks, which became a symbol of supporting “the common good,” which is why so many people publicly vowed to continue wearing them even after the CDC policy requiring them on transportation was struck down.

If people wish to continue wearing masks to show they’re not “selfish” or because they believe it will protect them, they are of course perfectly free to do so. That’s the beauty of choice.

But how much pain could have been avoided during this pandemic if only we’d embraced the freedom of choice from the beginning, instead of succumbing to fear?

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.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

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

Durham Builds Case On Clinton Disinformation Factory As Biden Launches ‘Disinformation Governance Board’

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Just as the Biden administration was gearing up to announce the head of its new “Disinformation Governance Board,” Special Counsel John Durham was busily working toward one of many clear conclusions: the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign was central to the spread of harmful disinformation throughout the media.

To truly gauge the level of harm the Clinton disinformation factory caused would be a difficult task, but it did contribute in some ways to locking the FBI up in a costly and lengthy investigation that ultimately found no Trump/Russia conspiracy. It also resulted in a series of corrections and reckonings at media outlets already struggling with national trust.

As it happens, the new head of Biden’s disinfo board – dedicated to tackling misinformation and disinformation as the 2022 midterm elections loom – Nina Jankowicz herself promoted a piece of disinformation Durham recently concluded to be an outright fabrication by Clinton-hired researchers. Jankowicz, a self-styled “globally recognized” expert on disinformation, also propped up former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier that one former CIA Moscow station chief described as likely “a part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot.”

“Listened to this last night — Chris Steele (yes THAT Chris Steele) provides some great historical context about the evolution of disinfo. Worth a listen,” Jankowicz wrote in one 2020 tweet.

Russian-born Igor Danchenko – allegedly Steele’s top source for the dossier, according to the Washington Examiner – was charged in 2021 as part of Durham’s inquiry for “making false statements to the FBI.”

On other occasions, Jankowicz pushed misleading claims surrounding the dossier. In one instance, she claimed that the Republican Party “funded the dossier first.” Her tweet was in response to Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s question of whether there was “collusion between DOJ and Fusion GPS to use Democratic funding dossier for political and legal purposes.”

“You’re probably aware that [the Steele dossier] began as a Republican opposition research project,” Jankowicz wrote in a separate tweet in 2020, according to The Washington Examiner.

The conservative Washington Free Beacon, which initially hired Fusion GPS, said in 2017 it “had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier.”

“The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele,” the Beacon’s editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti and chairman Michael Goldfarb wrote in a statement at the time, according to NPR.

In fact, the Steele dossier came about after he was hired by an opposition firm in 2016. That firm, Fusion GPS, was hired in part by the general counsel for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Examiner noted.

With Jankowicz prepping to lead the administration’s “disinformation” board, Durham’s court filings have served as insight into another apparent disinformation push.

Durham noted in one April 2022 court filing that the CIA determined data from former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann surrounding Russia-Trump organization links was “user created” and not “technically plausible.”

Sussmann was charged by Durham last year with lying to the FBI during a 2016 meeting.

Durham more recently alleged that Fusion GPS sent hundreds of unverified claims regarding Trump to journalists, The Washington Times reported. The hundreds of emails, according to Durham, resulted in various news articles tying together Trump and Russia.

Individuals tied to Clinton’s presidential campaign have argued that research from Fusion GPS should be protected, citing attorney-client privilege. They’ve also claimed the opposition firm’s work was to supply legal services, The Washington Times reported.

Durham responded in court filings by noting that, if true, Fusion GPS would have taken more care with its unverified allegations prior to spreading them around to journalists.

“If rendering such advice was truly the intended purpose of Fusion GPS’s retention, one would also expect the investigative firm to seek permission and/or guidance from [the Clinton campaign] or its counsel before sharing such derogatory materials with the media or otherwise placing them into the public domain,” Durham wrote, according to The Washington Times.

On Wednesday, Durham saw his latest small win when the judge presiding over Sussmann’s case agreed to do a review of records being withheld by Clintons’ presidential campaign, the Washington Examiner reported.

AUTHOR

SHELBY TALCOTT

Senior White House correspondent. Follow Shelby on Twitter

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Disinformation And Wizard Rock: Meet Biden’s New ‘Minister Of Truth’ At DHS

The List Gets Longer: All The Ways Hillary & The Government Spied On Trump

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

ABSURD: AG Merritt Garland’s New Office of ‘Environmental Justice’ yet another Marxist attack on science and free speech

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My God, just when I thought it can’t get any worse, the Department of In-Justice and its Chief Arbiter, Marxist Merritt Garland announces a new Federal Agency the “Office of Environmental Justice.”  This is yet another Marxist frontal assault on science and freedom of speech. Watch:

The Office of Environmental Justice,

“[W]ill seek to redress health risks from climate change faced by minorities and low-income people in the United States.”

Another draconian measure designed to force and enforce their Climate Change Agenda. I’ll bet it will also create more Federal Agents with unchecked arrest power as well.   If you think we have bad inflation roaring at 8.5% just wait until this ridiculous agency kicks in and causes costs of everything to soar.

Biden DOJ Announces New ‘Office of Environmental Justice’

“Although violations of our environmental laws can happen anywhere, communities of color, indigenous communities, and low-income communities often bear the brunt of the harm caused by environmental crime, pollution, and climate change”

Merrick Garland announced on Thursday that the Department of Justice is launching the Office of Environmental Justice. It speaks volumes about the priorities of this administration.

There are so many major problems in the country right now, and this is their concern.

It’s likely that this is just to remind the left how committed Biden is to fighting climate change. And of course to politicize the language around the topic and criminalize dissent.

Breanne Deppisch reports at the Washington Examiner:

DOJ launches new Office of Environmental Justice

The Justice Department is launching a new Office of Environmental Justice, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday, which will seek to redress health risks from climate change faced by minorities and low-income people in the United States.

You can guess where this is going.

Read full article.

RELATED ARTICLE: Free speech concerns mount over DHS ‘disinformation’ board as lawmakers, critics weigh in

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©Royal A. Brown, III. All rights reserved.

The VA Bought 10,000 Smartphones during the Pandemic. 85% Were Never Used

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There’s a right way and a wrong way to help homeless veterans.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs wasted $1.8 million in data plan costs for unused phones, according to an inspector general’s report released on Wednesday. The Veterans Health Administration had spent $7 million to purchase 10,000 phones with unlimited prepaid calling plans for homeless veterans, but 85% of the phones went unused. The report also found that $571,000 was wasted on data plans for iPads sitting in storage due to poor oversight.

“The smartphones and iPads were purchased as part of the efforts to increase homeless veterans’ access to telehealth,” the Associate Press explains. “The veterans were enrolled in a Department of Housing and Urban Development VA Supportive housing program.”

The report called for the VA to “establish a realistic goal for days in storage along with a process for closely monitoring days in storage for each data plan provider and taking corrective actions when the goal is not being met.” It also called on the VA to create a process that starts the data plan charges only after the device has been issued to a veteran.

Regrettably, government waste and mismanagement like this is nothing new. From $2 million bathrooms to $400,000 camel statues, governments have managed to throw mad amounts of money down the drain over the years. In fact, government waste is so common that Senator Rand Paul prepares an annual “Festivus” report detailing the most egregious examples of wasted resources from the year.

But while government waste is nothing new, what’s intriguing about this particular case is the reason that was given for the problem.

“The inspector general concluded that Veterans Health Administration officials…made a good faith effort to help veterans get smartphones,” the Associated Press notes. “But they found there was a ‘lack of information for officials to be able to determine the quantity needed for the targeted veteran population.’”

If this assessment sounds familiar, well, it should. As the Nobel-prize-winning economist F. A. Hayek famously asserted, the “lack of information” possessed by government bureaucrats regarding the “quantity needed” of various resources is in fact the key problem with central planning. Waste is inevitable in these systems precisely because they can never accumulate, let alone manage, the knowledge that is required for determining the best allocation of resources.

Hayek spells out the knowledge problem in his famous essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society.

“The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.”

The solution to this problem, says Hayek, is decentralization and market prices. With market prices, we can learn what people find valuable and direct production to those ends. But without market prices, we are “groping in the dark,” as Mises says. This is why Veterans Affairs wasted over a million dollars on these data plans. They had no way of knowing the demand for these phones, so they ended up buying way more than were needed.

Of course, none of this is to say we shouldn’t help homeless veterans. The question here is what’s the most effective way to help them. The government approach, or the market approach?

The government approach, as this story illustrates, is to assume that we know what homeless veterans need, buy a bunch of it, and then realize that we actually misjudged the need and wasted a bunch of money.

The market approach, on the other hand, begins with the assumption that we don’t know what’s best for other people or what their specific needs are. Following from that, we realize that it makes little sense to have central planners spending money on their behalf. Thus, rather than trying to guess what they need, we focus our efforts on getting out of their way. We get rid of minimum wage laws and occupational licensing requirements that might be keeping them out of jobs. We cut taxes so they can save money, and we tear down crony regulations that make everyday goods more expensive than they need to be. In other words, we let the market work.

To be sure, the market approach is radically different from what we’ve been doing. But given how things have turned out, perhaps radically different is exactly what we need.

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.

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.

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

GOP Sen. Braun to Becerra: Govt Shouldn’t Push Gender Surgery for Kids

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At a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies hearing, Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) confronted Health and Human Services (HHS) Sec. Xavier Becerra over how the Biden administration is promoting life-altering surgeries for children — including breast and genital surgeries.

“Could you explain what irreversible top and bottom sex-change surgeries are and why that is on the portal as well?” Braun asked.

“Senator there as you’ve just indicated, there are many different types of procedures that can be deployed,” Becerra said. “What I will say to you is again, in any case, no individual, no patient, will proceed forward unless his or her doctor has advised of the procedure. And it is considered by the FDA and others who have to go ahead and certify a medicine or procedure to be safe and effective.”

“So, I’ll try to distill it into a more simple form. In what case would it be appropriate to perform irreversible sex-change surgery on kids?” Braun said.

“Those decisions are made by that individual in consultation with physician and caregivers, and no decision would be made without having consulted appropriately,” Becerra said.

“You know, I think the government shouldn’t be pushing or have an out there on a portal that moves you towards irreversible sex change therapy, and I think we just need to think about it carefully,” Braun, who called the surgeries “almost grotesque.” “Because we’re navigating into territory that we’ve never done before as a government.”

Xavier Becerra

40 Known Connections

Becerra Identifies “Health Equity” As Top HHS Priority 

During a March 18, 2022 address marking his first year in office as HHS Secretary, Becerra said: “Health equity has to be part of everything we do. You will see health equity pervades everything we do.”

On March 19, Breccan Thies of Breitbart.com provided the following context for Becerra’s remarks: “For the left, ‘equity’ means rationing and redistributing resources based on perceived oppression, privilege, and social status — typically based on race or gender identity. Becerra’s commitment to the ideology marks an important milestone for a movement that has been proliferating among medical schools and professionals.” (Click here for details about this movement and the ideology that drives it.)

To learn more about Xavier Becerra, click here.

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

FLORIDA: Monroe County Cuban Republican Caucus Endorses KW Miller for Congress in Florida’s 28th District

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MIAMI, May 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — The Cuban Republican Caucus of Monroe County Florida has endorsed KW Miller for Congress in Florida’s 28th district. The Cuban Caucus represents business owners and entrepreneurs who contribute significant economic revenue, employment and goodwill in Monroe County Florida.

The America First Political Committee Chairman KW Miller is running in Florida’s newly created 28th Congressional District which includes a portion of southwestern Dade County and all of Monroe County Florida.

KW Miller embraces his Spanish heritage and fully supports the Cuban American Community. He will continue will promote policies and laws to allow the Cuban community to continue to achieve the American Dream.

Americans from Spanish heritage should never forget why they and their families came to the United States. Socialism is where people become enslaved to the liberal elites.

KW Miller wants to lift the blockade against Cuba, but does not want to help the Communist Government of Cuba. We must first remove Socialist RINO Democrats like Carlos Gimenez from Congress to advance Cuba policy in Florida’s 28th Congressional District and nationally.

The meaning of the Cuban Flag has significant historical meaning. The blue stripes represent the three Cuban districts at the time the flag was designed. The white stripes represent purity. The triangle is an equality symbol. The colors reflect those of the American flag.

About America First Political Committee:

Our mission is to protect the integrity of the U.S. Constitution, promote conservative political candidates and policy that puts America First.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

Is the Left Agitating for War With Russia so it Can Cement Domestic Tyranny?

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It has been odd and alarming watching the powers-that-be relentlessly escalate the proxy war our government is waging against Russia. It’s not just that we’re sending billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine, are calling Vladimir Putin a war criminal and issuing other fightin’ words, are training Ukrainian troops and are trying to effect Moscow’s economic destruction. It’s also, senior American officials have now revealed, that via intelligence aid the U.S. has helped to:

  • kill Moscow’s generals;
  • down a plane carrying Russian soldiers; and
  • sink one of Putin’s warships.

The kicker: By revealing this publicly — perhaps as strikingly inappropriate as leaking a Supreme Court draft opinion — Biden administration officials appear to be bragging about these “exploits” and rubbing the Russians’ noses in them. If you wanted to provoke a hot war, this is exactly how you’d do it.

But why would our officials seek conflict with the nation boasting the world’s largest stockpile of nukes (6,000) in the name of thwarting aggression that, as I explained here and here, globalist policy invited and is none of our affair? It all has a very Dr. Strangelove-esque quality about it.

But there may be method to this madness. And, no, a mere desire to enrich weapons-manufacturer political donors doesn’t explain it. There is one motivation that would, however:

A serious conflict would provide the Left an opportunity to seize complete domestic control, to cement its power — perhaps permanently.

For certain is that locking horns with Russia would be used to further curtail civil liberties.

We know this because major conflicts always are thus used. Abraham Lincoln arrested opposition journalists and publishers during the War Between the States. WWI saw the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, the latter of which absolutely infringed upon freedom of speech. And Franklin Roosevelt is notorious for having interned U.S. citizens of Japanese and also of German descent and for persecuting some Italian-heritage Americans.

Civil rights’ trampling would surely be worse under a major-war scenario today. Not only are we much farther down the rabbit hole of moral nihilism and wanton constitutional trespass, but Americans who even question our Ukraine policy are already labeled “stooges of Putin.” Moreover, Democrats have already made crystal clear what they want: Complete power — by any means necessary.

This desire has manifested itself in politicians such as Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) calling for violence against political opponents and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) threatening SCOTUS justices who dare vote contrary to the Left’s agenda.

Heeding such calls, the Democrats’ de facto storm troopers have effected hundreds of violent riots, more than 600 in 2020 alone. One Democrat operative, Scott Foval, was caught on hidden video in 2016 talking about inciting violence at Trump rallies and unabashedly said, “We’re starting anarchy here.”

This violence is again now being ratcheted up, just in time for the midterms, with news that the unconstitutional Roe v. Wade opinion could be overturned. This is attended by threats made against the “conservative” SCOTUS justices and the doxxing of them, with activists encouraging protests at their homes.

All the while that this violence is tacitly approved by Democrat leaders — and it is — conservatives are hung out to dry if they step even one inch out of line, as the January 6 martyrs’ plight proves. In contrast, 2020’s CHAZ, or Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, takeover of part of Seattle was by definition an insurrection but was sloughed off. Why, its “warlord” leader, Raz Simone, was apparently never even charged with a crime.

This, not mention that Nancy Pelosi called the longest ever occupation of an American government building — leftists’ 2011 takeover of the Wisconsin Capitol — an “impressive show of democracy in action.” This statement was, of course, as true as claiming that the stolen (and it was) 2020 presidential contest was “the most secure election in U.S. history.”

Get the picture?

It’s not pretty, and it adds up to this: A major war under Biden’s handlers’ watch would become a pretext for the greatest Big Brother seizure of control in U.S. history. The question is, however, would the radicals in charge be crazy enough, or desperate enough, to risk nuclear war for power’s sake?

Note two matters when assessing this. First, being completely un-American and unpalatable, the Democrats have nothing to run on in the midterms aside from the just ginned up Roe v. Wade abortion controversy. Second and as I often warn, these demagogues aren’t normal. They’re power mongers.

Just as people can lust after food, sex or money — motivations everyone can understand — so can they exhibit that rarer phenomenon: lust for power. And just as a man may endanger his marriage and career to indulge his prurient desires, megalomaniacs may assume great risk to satisfy their dark cravings.

For certain is that cementing total power requires something Marxist revolutionaries would call “crisis,” the third stage of communist subversion. The first, “demoralization,” is the undermining of the nation’s moral foundation; Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov said this was “more than complete” in the mid-’80s already. The second, “destabilization,” is what we’ve seen with the violence, the toppling of statues and the intensified attacks on our institutions the last many years. Now all we need is a crisis and what it facilitates: revolution — a final seizure of power.

A major war (along with food shortages) could certainly fit the bill. And while this may appear a crazy theory, the people in charge may just be crazy enough for it to be true.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on MeWe, Gettr or Parler, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Wants to “Help” Americans By Bringing in Russians

Elon Musk To Serve As CEO Of Twitter

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UPDATE:

Maybe Pamela Geller will be reinstated. We shall see.

Elon Musk set to become temporary CEO of Twitter: report

By Summer Lane, RSBN, May 5, 2022

Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is reportedly set to serve as the interim CEO of Twitter when his purchase of the social media platform for $44 billion is completed, sources told CNBC.

There has been rampant speculation regarding who would take over Twitter as CEO in light of reports that Musk was allegedly planning to clean house at the company shortly after entering a deal to acquire it.

This comes days after Reuters reported that Musk may be appointing a new CEO to take the place of Parag Agrawal.

However, if Musk himself steps in to take control of the company, major changes could come to the platform sooner rather than later.

According to the CNBC report, a SEC filing on Thursday confirmed that the billionaire investor had secured the necessary funds in equity, $7.4 billion, to begin his purchase of Twitter.
Musk hints at changes coming for Twitter users and government or commercial entities.

After the Twitter deal was announced last week, Musk stated that he intends to make Twitter a place where “matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” He also shared, “Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

Musk’s purchase of Twitter has been met with excitement by proponents of free speech on Twitter, while others have threatened to leave the platform. On Wednesday, Musk hinted that there might be financial changes coming down the line for certain Twitter users. “Twitter will always be free for casual users,” he stated in a tweet, “but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users.”

RELATED TWEET:

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. All rights reserved. Follow Pamela Geller on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social.

FLORIDA: Textbook Publishers Surrender To DeSantis, Scrub Woke Propaganda

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Great American hero saving our children’s minds.

Florida Textbook Publishers Surrender To DeSantis, Scrub Woke Content

By: Kendall Tietz , Daily Caller, 

Textbook publishers are surrendering to Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ demands that math instructional materials get in line with state standards, allowing more books to be added to the approved list, according to the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE).

“Publishers are aligning their instructional materials to state standards and removing woke content allowing the department of education to add 19 more books to the state adoption list over the past 17 days,” the FLDOE announced on its website.

The FLDOE announced on April 15 that it had rejected 41% of math textbooks proposed by publishers for public instruction because they contained “indoctrinating concepts” such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and Common Core, which are prohibited by the state according to the Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking (B.E.S.T.) Standards.

The FLDOE explained that publishers could substitute or revise their submitted bids to meet Florida’s specifications or appeal the decision.

Additional books have been added to the adoption list “because they removed woke content and made other changes to meet state standards,” FLDOE Press Secretary Cassie Palelis told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Tuesday.

“We have high standards and reject books with unacceptable content because we know that publishers can easily adjust their materials to meet our guidelines, as displayed by the fact that it took less than two weeks for additional publishers to amend entire books, resubmit them and get put on the adoption list,” Palelis told the DCNF.

After initially declining to provide examples of rejected textbooks over copyright concerns, the FLDOE published a few examples of the materials in question on April 21.

Examples included a graph that measured racial prejudice according to political identification that showed conservatives are reportedly more racist than liberals and multiple “social-emotional learning,” activities, which critics have argued is a loophole to repackage CRT and disseminate the material throughout public schools……..

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Follow Pamela Geller on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social.

EXPOSED: The ‘poster girl for the Marxist Revolution’

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Frank Gaffney of Centre for Security Policy, points out last night’s Tucker Carlson did a fine job of exposing the poster girl for the communist revolution all but complete in the US today. Here is what the former undersecretary of Defence under Ronald Wilson Reagan had to say at the 30:00 minute mark:

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Nina Jankowicz has been plucked from obscurity to be the famous person she yearned in song to become. In her new role as arbiter of what is unacceptable “mis- and disinformation,” she has become the poster girl of the now-intensifying Marxist Revolution in America.

Tucker Carlson observed last night that Ms. Jankowicz’s past antics – notably, her sometimes salacious and deeply partisan renderings of popular music, her screeds inveighing against ideological opponents and, yes, her own actual and absurd disinformation – obscure, like Joe Biden’s affable senility, serious “Stalinist” tendencies.

What can possibly go wrong with having such a person given free rein in a law enforcement capacity to go after political opponents – even school board-criticizing moms now officially called potential “domestic terrorists” – simply because she deems their exercise of First Amendment rights to be impermissible?

The short answer is “plenty.”

 

RELATED VIDEO: Revealing the World Economic Forum’s own website claims and intentions.

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes blog posed by  is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Mayorkas claims he ‘wasn’t aware’ of Disinfo Board top dog’s TikTok video cheering censorship

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He wasn’t aware of this, but Alejandro Mayorkas is a busy man with weighty responsibilities. He can’t be expected to be aware of every last detail. But you can be absolutely certain that he and Nina Jankowicz will be perusing a complete dossier on you if you state publicly that “the 2020 election was stolen” or “Islam is not a religion of peace.”

DHS Mayorkas ‘wasn’t aware’ of disinformation chief’s TikTok videos

GWN, May 4, 2022:

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted on Tuesday that he was unaware that President Biden’s disinformation chief uploaded “early” TikTok videos before his appointment to the disinformation committee.

“When the department cast her, did the department know about her TikTok video?” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Mayorkas during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.

“They’re really, really precocious,” Kennedy added of the Nina Jankowicz videos.

“I was not aware of these videos,” admitted Mayorkas.

In a newly discovered video, Jankowicz used TikTok to impersonate her male trolls.

“Women should not be involved in government. They cannot be trusted,” she said in imitation. Jankowicz said in another clip, “The real reason she’s mad is that no Chad would hit it and stick with it.”

Jankowicz has also dubbed herself the “Mary Poppins of Misinformation” on TikTok to alert individuals to “atrocious” content. The video shows her singing a song with the air of Mary Poppins.

Mayorkas was not only aware of Jankowicz’s use of Tik-Tok, as he was also unaware that she was suggesting that Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” was Russian disinformation.

“I don’t know about those statements,” Mayorkas replied Thursday to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) asking whether or not he was aware of Jankowicz’s political stance on Hunter Biden’s authenticated laptop….

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden: ‘MAGA crowd’ is ‘most extreme political organization’ in ‘recent American history’

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

A Cloud Hangs Over Trans Medicine + Video Documentary ‘Transbarnen’ [Trans Kids]

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“For almost forty years, I’ve considered it an honor to be a doctor. I believe in our role as healers, and I believe in our role as truth-tellers. The truth we need to confront right now is that medicine and science are being politically perverted around the country in ways that destroy human lives.”

That’s Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Rachel Levine, a USA Today Woman of the Year, and the Biden Administration’s most prominent transgender bureaucrat.

Speaking a few days ago at Texas Christian University, Levine declared: “Gender-affirming care is medical care. It is mental health care. It is suicide prevention care. It improves quality of life, and it saves lives. It is based on decades of study. It is a well-established medical practice.”

However, transgender care is far from being “well-established”, as Admiral Levine must surely know. In recent months, health authorities in one country after another in Europe have expressed their alarm, citing serious medical and psychological problems amongst people who have received “gender-affirming care”.

  • In France, the National Academy of Medicine declared on February 25: “great medical caution must be taken in children and adolescents, given the vulnerability, particularly psychological, of this population and the many undesirable effects and even serious complications that can be caused by some of the therapies available”.
  • In Sweden, the National Board of Health and Welfare issued new guidelines for gender-affirming care in February. It said, based on current knowledge: “the risks of puberty suppressing treatment with GnRH-analogues and gender-affirming hormonal treatment currently outweigh the possible benefits, and that the treatments should be offered only in exceptional cases.”
  • In the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published two systematic reviews of puberty blockers in March 2021. It found that they “lead to little or no change in gender dysphoria, mental health, body image and psychosocial functioning. In the few studies that did report change, the results could be attributable to bias or chance, or were deemed unreliable.”
  • In Finland, the Finnish Health Authority (PALKO/COHERE) reversed course in 2020. Its new guidance stated that “psychotherapy, rather than puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, should be the first-line treatment for gender-dysphoric youth”.

Admiral Levine would benefit from viewing the last of four programs produced by the Swedish national broadcaster SVT about transgender medicine. Transbarnen (The Trans Children) examines the case of “Leo”, a ten-year-old girl who decided that she was really a boy. It is an appalling tale of abysmal medical care – at one of the world best hospitals, the Karolinska. The searing revelations from the SVT’s investigative reporters were one factor in the new guidelines in Sweden.

Here’s what Uppdrag Granskning (Mission Investigation) found.

At the age of 11, Leo embarked upon puberty blockers. The child and her mother were told that this was standard treatment and reversible.

“Leo was little when she wanted to become a he,’ her mother Natalie told the reporter, Carolina Jemsby. “I thought if this was his wish, I should agree with it. Everyone said Leo was brave to come out and I should be proud of him.”

The puberty blockers were meant to stop Leo from developing breasts, wider hips and menstruating. Their use is based on the so-called Dutch Protocol, developed in the Netherlands in 2011. But, as Jemsby points out, some experts have grave misgivings about this repeatedly-cited research. “The worry comes from the lack of long-term studies and that the Dutch study alone is not sufficient evidence. It has too few subjects, no control group and was done at only one clinic.”

Since a well-known side-effect of puberty blockers is a serious decrease in bone density, patients are supposed to be checked regularly. They should receive the powerful drugs for no longer than two years.

Leo was on the medication for four years and his bone density was never checked.

The effects were little short of catastrophic. Leo now suffers from severe osteoporosis, a weaking of bones which is normally seen in people in their 60s and 70s. It is almost irreversible. His mother says that he was in pain from skeletal damage; he was constantly depressed; and he attempted to commit suicide several times.

“But information about the potential risks and lack of evidence never reaches Leo and his family,” says Jemsby.

In fact, one of the most dismaying features of the Swedish journalists’ report is mismanagement in the medical bureaucracy. One group diagnosed children’s gender dysphoria; another administered the medications. They didn’t appear to communicate with each other. If this is one of the world’s best hospitals, what happens elsewhere?

Jemsby showed doctors incident reports not only on Leo, but on several children who had serious complications after embarking upon puberty blockers. The response? A lot of creased brows and finger-pointing and no answers. No one, it appears, was responsible.

“I think everyone involved in this case had good intentions,” Dr Ola Nilsson, a paediatric endocrinologist, says. “But now it’s time to take a step back and try to get really good data regarding what’s best – how best to diagnose and treat this group so we do more good than harm. Much more good than harm. Minimal harm and a lot of benefit is the goal of all healthcare.”

Unfortunately, the picture painted by the Swedish journalists is one of minimal benefit for children and a lot of buck-passing by doctors.

Leo’s back, shoulder and hips are constantly aching. His distraught mother says: “A 15-year-old shouldn’t have to deal with that. His bones shouldn’t look that way. A healthy skeleton that’s been destroyed by this medicine.”

Gender-affirming care “improves quality of life, and it saves lives,” says Admiral Levine. But it didn’t for Leo and for many other children. So many, that European healthcare regulators are slamming on the brakes for transgender care – while the Americans are turbo-charging it.

To cite Rachel Levine’s ill-chosen words, medicine and science are being “politically perverted”, but not by trans sceptics, but by the Biden Administration.

AUTHOR

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet. He lives in Sydney, Australia. More by Michael Cook

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

There’s an upside to the Alito draft leak

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Why should close reading, historical insight and an abundance of footnotes delegitimate the Court?

The leak of Justice Alito’s draft of the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, unfortunate as it may be, should not delegitimate the US Supreme Court.

If a snarky, plotting, election-related draft had been revealed, that would have truly delegitimated the court. But in the draft one only finds very solid scholarship, even if one disagrees with it. It’s exactly the sort of thing that one would have wished for in a profoundly serious, deeply researched opinion.

Why should close reading, historical insight and an abundance of footnotes delegitimate the Court?

As a pro-life writer, I actually was a bit disappointed in the draft’s content. It contains no mention of the horror of abortion, except for a few initial citations from Mississippi. Nor does it mention any of the procedural flaws of Roe, especially the lack of a factual record (re life and re women) tested at a trial proceeding. And, an even bigger gap, it doesn’t mention any of the arguments that abortion hurts women. (Justice Kennedy did better a few years ago.)

So I think Justice Alito bent over backwards to go easy on the supporters of abortion. His text only hammers hard at the surface incorrectness of the reasoning of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey.

In this regard, the leak has a silver lining. People will read through the draft opinion with greater care than they would ordinarily lavish on an actual Supreme Court opinion, where only the final result matters to most of us. Of course, even here many will be only concerned with where Alito comes out, but even then they will scrutinise it in order to figure out the best counterblow. And people find it plain exciting to read stuff that’s supposed to be secret.

Here is some evidence for my silver lining. The Washington Post yesterday published an annotated albeit somewhat simplified version of the text. I thought that both the abridgment and the textual comments were remarkably fair-minded, really devoted only to explicating Alito’s reasoning, not to unfairly debunking it.

Others are no doubt doing what the Washington Post did. This will soften support for Roe. If more and more people learn what an unfounded opinion it was, they will have less reverence for it. (I will concede that showing the extreme sloppiness of Roe does delegitimate the Supreme Court of 1973 quite a bit, but at the same time it elevates the legitimacy of the current Court. So I’m not sure how that eventually washes out in terms of the historical trajectory of legitimacy.)

I’m not denying that the main political event that we are seeing right now is the marshalling of the mob. But that would have occurred in any event, as soon as the Court announced its decision in June .

But maybe advance titillation is slightly better than a done-and-dusted announcement in June.

AUTHOR

Richard Stith is a professor emeritus of law at Valparaiso University. He is active in the Consistent Life Network, although the positions taken in his essays are not necessarily those of the CLN or its… More by Richard Stith

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

Liberal Psychobabble is Torturing Our Collective Brains

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Here’s our recent episode of Shout Out Patriots:

​Liberals want to turn our God-given brains into psychobabble mush

Is liberal psychobabble torturing your brain?

Consider these non-scientific fantasies that can turn your brain into compliant mush if you let them:

Humans evolved through natural selection. Unborn babies are not human. Climate change will destroy the earth. Men can have babies too. Gender is not determined by biology, but by choice.

Scripture pummels all these bizarre theories.

In this episode of Shout Out Patriots, we look at what the Bible says about liberal delusions while injecting our own remarks, smirks, rants and sniggers into the narrative.

Speaking of delusions, yesterday, Joe Biden said MAGA supporters are “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in recent American history.”

Yet, at the same time, the Capitol Hill Police was erecting a fence around the United States Supreme Court to prevent pro-abortion activists from storming the High Court and possibly harming the justices.

A little bit of irony, I guess, for that iron fence.

Where was Sleepy Joe back in 2020 when Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters were setting fire to cities, threatening violence against white-skinned restaurant customers, and actually establishing seditious Autonomous Zones in cities across America, such as the one in Seattle that told residents, “You are now leaving the USA.”

Is there no end to the libs torturing our minds with inexhaustible deceit and fanciful illusions?

If you look at history, the root cause of such thoughtless trite, I believe, is Charles Darwin’s evolution.

If God can be removed from creation, then man can start paving an imaginative road of self-conceit.

That imaginative road is now on full display with such eye-popping phrases as birthing people, chestfeeding, and people who bleed (menstruation).

At Shout Out Patriots, we needed time to vent, bash and bring a biblical perspective to people who replace reality with fairy tale stories and pseudo-science illusions.

Doing so is our job as Christians and Patriots.

“We tear down arguments and every presumption set up against the knowledge of God; and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” (2 Cor. 10:5)

©Shout Out Patriots. All rights reserved.