Tag Archive for: federal government

Kamala Harris: ‘We Love’ Abortionists

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Former President Bill Clinton tried to soften the Democratic Party’s image as extreme liberals by insisting, “I am not pro-abortion.” Over the weekend, Kamala Harris opened a widely panned speech on abortion by saying she and President Joe Biden “love” abortionists, before concluding her speech, “God bless America.”

The vice president went on to imply that Americans’ unalienable rights do not come from our Creator; omit the right to life from the Declaration of Independence; hint that the national anthem supports abortion; accuse pro-life advocates of attacking the “foundations of freedom; and claim an LGBT riot, in which drag queens tried to burn policemen alive, represents “the strength of our nation.”

Harris delivered an address in Tallahassee, Florida, on Sunday to mark what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, an anniversary aborted last summer when the Supreme Court overturned the case, which first invented a constitutional right to abortion. Planned Parenthood had already planned to hold a “Rally in Tally” before Harris joined their lineup; Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson spoke earlier in the event. An abortionist with Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, named Sujatha Prabhakaran, introduced Harris after leading the crowd in a rousing chant of “Abortion is health care!” (In reality, the Hippocratic Oath states, “I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my art.”)

“We love” abortionists. Arriving at the podium, a confused Harris began by asking where Prabhakaran had gone. “We love all of our frontline folks,” said Harris, referring to abortion industry employees. “And this room is filled with them.”

Harris then delivered a speech that rang alarm bells nationwide for its secularism and historical revisionism.

Erasing the Creator and the right to life. Harris seemed to state that Americans’ unalienable rights do not come from God but from a social contract among voters. “America is a promise; it is a promise of freedom and liberty, not for some, but for all — a promise we made in the Declaration of Independence,” she said. Harris then left out our founding document’s reference to the right to life, saying, “We are each endowed with the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Be clear: These rights were not bestowed upon us. They belong to us as Americans.”

The Founding Fathers designed a form of government that would restrain the government from violating Americans’ God-given rights, including the right to life. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” (Emphases added.)

Both Joe Biden and Barack Obama regularly omitted the Declaration’s reference to “the Creator” — a rhetorical gambit that critics say undermines freedom and liberty.

“We need to know our history and challenge those who want to selectively edit or change our founding documents, because it matters that our rights come to us from God — that they are not a grant from government,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” Monday. “When you take God out of the equation … it enables these power-hungry bureaucrats and politicians to try to usurp those rights.”

Secularism also attacks the foundations of our freedoms, said a lifelong student of the Founders’ views. “In every nation in the history of the world, there’s only really been two options: They either have a really big government or a really big God. They don’t have both, because if you have a really big God, you don’t need a really big government,” Tim Barton of WallBuilders told Perkins Monday. “You don’t need it to be God in your life.”

“But if there is no God, then you need a big government,” Barton continued, “because instead of, ‘My God shall supply all my needs,’ it tends to be, ‘My government shall supply all the needs.‘”

Star-Spangled abortion? Harris continued reimagining the nation’s founding when she implied that abortion rings through every line of our national anthem. “Here is a collection of words that mean everything to us as Americans: the heartfelt words of our great national anthem, that America is ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave,’” she said. “But let us ask, can we truly be free if a woman cannot make decisions about her own body?” Abortionists destroy a child’s body by suction/aspiration or dismemberment; they have also injured or killed the mother.

Protecting 6.9% of babies from abortion is extreme? Harris chided “so-called leaders at the statehouse here in Tallahassee” for passing “a radical abortion ban.” Thanks to the bill, she said, “health care providers face prison for up to five years for simply doing their job.”

Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill last year protecting unborn babies from abortion after 15 weeks, or slightly after the first trimester. Abortionists commit “nearly all” U.S. abortions (93.1%) before 13 weeks gestation, according to the Biden-Harris administration’s most recent abortion surveillance. A full 72% of Americans support such a law, according to a Harvard/Harris poll.

The “health care providers” Harris mentioned were abortionists, whose job entails ending the life of a child, which begins at fertilization.

“How dare” Republicans protect life? Pro-life politicians “attack the very foundations of freedom,” Harris continued. “Republicans in Congress are now calling for a nationwide abortion ban. Some even from the moment of conception” — which, embryologists agree, marks the moment a child’s life begins.

“How dare they?! How dare they?!” Harris bellowed.

Allowing abortion-on-demand does not contradict any faith? Harris once again tried to appeal to Americans to lay aside faith-based objections to abortion. “One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree that the government should not be telling people what to do with their own bodies,” she claimed. Christians have held that abortion violates their faith, and should be illegal, for 2,000 years. Orthodox Jews also say they hold a pro-life faith. However, the Satanic Temple regards abortion as a sacrament.

The “strength of our nation” was secured by LGBT rioters who attacked police. Harris told the crowd of abortion industry employees and lobbyists that they must have “the kind of determination” that motivated “our greatest patriots,” including “those Americans who fought a Civil War to end the sin of slavery, who organized at Seneca Falls to secure a woman’s right to vote, who launched the Freedom Rides to advance civil rights, and spoke out at the Stonewall Inn to defend human rights.”

On June 29, 1969, six New York City police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a seedy bar operated by the Mafia without a license, on a morals charge. Thousands of LGBT rioters surrounded the half-dozen cops, pelted them with bottles, and attempted to burn the bar to the ground with them inside. “Our goal was to hurt those police,” said rioter John O’Brien. “I wanted to kill those cops.”

In 2016, Barack Obama named the Stonewall Inn a national monument.

Harris attempted to encourage the crowd, dispirited by pro-life gains since the Dobbs ruling. “We’re on the right side of history,” she told the crowd.

“May God bless you, and may God bless America,” she concluded.

Inverting historical, moral, and religious truth so completely is not accidental but an attempt to demonize the Founding Fathers, repeal the Constitution, and establish an alternate form of government, Barton said.

“I think it’s very hard to argue that Kamala Harris or President Biden don’t understand the positions they’re taking, and they’re doing it intentionally to promote a political ideology philosophy,” Barton told Perkins. “They are working, as President Obama once said, to fundamentally transform America.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Joe Biden: The Bull Connor of the Pro-Abortion Movement

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For a man who ran for president to save the soul of America from racism, former segregationists’ buddy Joe Biden resembles few people more than the infamously abusive police chief Bull Connor. Both allowed domestic terrorists aligned with the Democratic Party to vandalize, bomb, and set fire to their opponents’ churches with impunity while using maximum force to arrest peaceful, Christian, protesters.

Sixty years later, little more than the names and faces have changed: Connor’s allies rallied behind the banner of white supremacy, while Biden’s supporters mobilize around “abortion on demand without apology.” The Biden administration’s refusal to protect pro-life Christians bears an eerie resemblance to Bull Connor’s collusion and selective prosecution. Imagine how civil rights protesters would have fared if George Wallace won the 1964 presidential election, and you get a sense of Biden’s treatment of peaceful, prayerful, pro-life advocates.

‘We’re Going to Allow You 15 Minutes….’

The Freedom Riders, who tested Southern segregation laws from Virginia to New Orleans, planned to stop in Birmingham on May 14, 1961. The Ku Klux Klan — and the Alabama lawman they helped elect Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor — had other plans. The KKK plotted a series of coordinated strikes against the protesters spanning multiple cities. Klansmen knew the details of the demonstrators’ travel itinerary, because the Birmingham sheriff’s department told them — and the sheriff’s department knew, because the FBI told them. As the protesters departed Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr. warned the Freedom Riders, “You will never make it through Alabama.”

In the days leading up to their arrival, Bull Connor personally gave the Klan the green light to rough up Yankee “meddlers.” Connor’s right-hand man, Birmingham Police Department Sgt. Thomas H. Cook, arranged for a meeting with a man named Gary Thomas Rowe, a member of a violent chapter of the Klan — but also an FBI informant. Historian Raymond Arsenault recounts the scene:

Unaware that Rowe planned to relay his words to the Birmingham FBI office, Cook laid out an elaborate plot to bring the Freedom Ride to a halt in Birmingham. He assured Rowe that other members of the Birmingham Police Department, as well as officials of the Alabama Highway Patrol, were privy to the plan and could be counted on to cooperate. “You will work with me and I will work with you on the Freedom Riders,” he promised. “We’re going to allow you 15 minutes. …You can beat ‘em, bomb ‘em, maim ‘em, kill ‘em. I don’t give a s***. There will be absolutely no arrests. You can assure every Klansman in the country that no one will be arrested in Alabama for that fifteen minutes.”

“By God, if you’re going to do this thing,” Cook later told the Imperial Wizard of the Alabama Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Shelton, “do it right.” Similarly, Bull Connor instructed the Klan to “make them look like a bulldog got a hold of them.”

The Klan didn’t have to be told twice; they planned to strike twice. They swarmed the first of the two vehicles, a Greyhound bus, when it arrived in nearby Anniston, breaking its windows and slashing its tires. Police escorted the protesters as far as the city limits … where the Klansmen were waiting. One Klansman threw an explosive device into the back of the bus and, as protesters scurried out of the door for their lives, the mob beat them savagely. “Then, God Almighty intervened,” remembered Hank Thomas: The bus’s gas tank exploded in two bursts, frightening the crowd away. “A miracle happened in Anniston.”

Klansmen posed as passengers of the Trailways bus carrying the other group of Freedom Riders. In Anniston, the Klan insisted the riders segregate the bus and pummeled several passengers — including Walter Bergman, then age 61 — to make their point. Although Bergman would remained partially paralyzed for the rest of his life and have to learn to feed himself again, a local policeman told his assailants, “Don’t worry about no lawsuits. I ain’t seen a thing.”

Unfortunately, the real violence awaited in Birmingham. Confident they would face no repercussions, the Klan invited CBS News reporter Howard K. Smith to witness the violence as the bloodied protesters descended the bus stairs to desegregate the terminal’s lunch counters. A mob of Klansmen (including the FBI informant, Rowe) and members of the National States Rights Party swarmed, sometimes beating protesters 12-on-one. The melee continued until one of Connor’s detectives, Red Self, told the Klansmen: “Get the boys out of here. I’m ready to give the signal for the police to move in.”

Faced with local intransigence, the FBI would soon arrest the four people responsible for firebombing the Greyhound, but it would be far from the last act of unpunished violence. A tragic 40 unsolved bombings over two decades earned the city the nickname “Bombingham.”

Not content to outsource his brutality to the Klan, Bull Connor ordered his police to use all means necessary to quash the message of Christian civil rights protesters.

Release the Guilty, Jail the Innocent

Bull Connor’s police proved more likely to arrest peaceful protesters than the Klansmen perpetrators. In April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” courtesy of Connor’s constabulary. As King and his supporters went to jail for “parading without a permit” (holding unauthorized demonstrations), Connor said:

[W]e are not going to stand for this in Birmingham. And if necessary we will fill the jail full, and we don’t care whose toes we step on. I am saying now to these meddlers from out of our city, the best thing for them to do is stay out if they don’t want to get slapped in jail. … I’ve never seen anyone yet look for trouble who wasn’t able to find it.

Volunteers evaporated from the desegregation campaign. King’s group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), responded with “The Children’s Crusade,” recruiting more than 1,000 schoolchildren to march through Birmingham on May 2 and 3, 1963. As the youngsters left the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church carrying signs with such messages as, “Segregation is a sin,” Connor’s men arrested 959 the first night. But they did not merely apprehend the marchers: Police blasted young children with high-powered firehoses, beat them with batons, and sicced police dogs on them.

The cruelty was the point. The pretense of law masked ruthless hatred, as segregationists used overwhelming force to discourage them from ever again publicly voicing views disfavored by the powerful.

As the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Joe Biden Bull-ies the Pro-Life Movement

Fast forward 60 years, and violent hatemongers with powerful political allies have again received free rein to terrorize their nonviolent, Christian foes. But Jane’s Revenge has enjoyed more than a 15-minute reign of terror. Since the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling last May 2, pro-abortion fanatics have launched a wave of arsons, vandalism, and death threats against at least 101 pro-life churches or pregnancy resource centers. Abortion activists firebombed pro-life pregnancy resource centers in the same way Bull Connor let the Klan firebomb Freedom Riders’ buses — with the same number of arrests: zero. Leftist extremists perpetrated 52 attacks before the FBI even announced its investigation.

This wave of violence, like most cowardly violence, targets the powerless — unborn babies, their desperate mothers, and the nonviolent Christian churches and nonprofits that serve them — but this wave also victimized the powerful with impunity. On June 13, two people threw a lit flare into the offices of Washington State Rep. Andy Barkis (R). Eight days later, vandals smashed the windows at the local office of U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.). Like the Klan in Alabama, pro-abortion fanatics feel confident enough to leave their calling card — often scrawling, “If abortion isn’t safe, neither are you” on pro-life women’s centers and churches — and to alert the media they will take “increasingly drastic measures.”

Biden’s nonfeasance embodies the administration’s defiant message that its ideological opponents enjoy no legal protection — a far cry from the promise Biden made the day after the media declared him winner of the 2020 election: “I will work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did.” The atmosphere of hatred has resulted in an 84-year-old pro-life woman being shot. (The male suspect said he shot her by accident.)

At least one congressman has connected the dots. The wave of anti-life terrorism represents “the death cult’s echo of the KKK’s burning cross — brazen, violent intimidation,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.). “But the federal government responded to the KKK. Where is the Biden Justice Department amid this violent campaign of national scope?” The administration, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), instead aim to “put a stop” to pro-life pregnancy resource centers.

“To my knowledge, no one — no one — has been prosecuted under the FACE Act,” noted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) as House Republicans passed a resolution condemning violence against pregnancy resource centers on January 11. J. Edgar Hoover, who shared the racial views of his time, arrested the Anniston bombers in a matter of days. In a world of high-definition security cameras and facial recognition software, Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have apparently arrested no one in eight months.

At least, no one who shares the administration’s extreme commitment to abortion. “But if you’re a pro-life activist, and you’re praying outside of an abortion clinic like Mark Houck, guess what happens to you?” asked Jordan. “The FBI kicks in your door, arrests you, puts you in handcuffs, and does it in front of your wife and seven children,” using dozens of heavily armed agents. Biden’s DOJ meted out similar treatment to Paul Vaughn, a 55-year-old father of 11. Just as black-and-white footage of Bull Connor unleashing his dogs on children inspired national revulsion of segregation, Biden’s overreach should inspire outrage at federal collusion with the abortion industry.

As pregnancy resource centers burned, in July Biden’s Justice Department established the Reproductive Rights Task Force to take “proactive and defensive legal action” to protect the abortion industry (and punish its foes) — and tapped as its leader Vanita Gupta, who as a “civil rights” officer in Obama’s DOJ tried to force all public schools to allow men to use women’s restrooms, showers, and overnight accommodations or lose all federal funding. She applied her ideological fervor equally well to abortion. Biden’s Justice Department arrested 26 pro-life advocates by last October, with more following, including:

  • Franciscan friar Fr. Fidelius Mocinski (whose birth name was Christopher), just as local New Jersey prosecutors dropped charges for conducting his “Red Rose Rescues”: entering abortion facilities and giving mothers red roses. In this case, he lay down in front of an abortion facility’s entrance, just as protesters in the ‘60s laid down in front of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential limousine. (“If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car,” cracked segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama (D) during the 1968 presidential campaign, “it’ll be the last car he’ll ever lay down in front of.”);
  • Nine defendants who entered a Washington, D.C., abortion facility and sang “let there be peace” (as a live-stream of the event shows) in October 2020. At least one of the women had participated in Rose Rescues;
  • Eleven defendants who entered an abortion facility in Tennessee in March 2021. If convicted, some of the defendants stand to serve up to 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars;
  • Pastor Daniel Courney of Enfield, N.J., one month after it wrung an agreement out of him not to commit “future FACE Act violations” — which, out of fear, would effectively cause him to end his presence outside abortion facilities; and
  • Bevelyn Williams and Edmee Chavannes, who happen to be black women from the South, for allegedly violating the FACE Act as far back as June 2020. (Curiously, their indictment begins with peaceful pro-life activity in 2019.) In one alleged violation in the indictment, Chavannes told an abortion facility employee, “Do not touch me.”

The arrest total seems all the more lopsided, since pro-life women’s centers are 22 times more likely to be attacked than abortion facilities. Both Gupta and Garland touted their work prosecuting pro-life advocates at a civil rights assembly last December. Both invoked Martin Luther King Jr.

As noted, in many cases the Biden administration presses pro-life advocates to sign agreements not to protest any more — a similar tactic employed by the Obama-Biden administration. A federal judge questioned whether the Obama-Biden administration’s prosecution of Mary Susan Pine “was the product of a concerted effort between the Government and the [abortion provider], which began well before the date of the incident at issue, to quell Ms. Pine’s activities.” (Ultimately, the DOJ paid Pine $120,000 in legal fees.) One could be forgiven for asking the same question of these cases.

A trial may conclude some of these acts violated the law, just as civil rights protesters violated the law of their day — the law their peaceful, prayerful actions aimed to change. But today’s prayerful pro-life advocates see their homes raided, not aided, by the federal government led by a vice president who raised bail money for the BLM’s “mostly peaceful” rioters. They face enormous legal bills, a criminal record, huge fines, and perhaps more than a decade in prison.

Despite these pressures, the pro-life movement has not buckled, as the terrorists and their federal government enablers wished. When bombed, they have rebuilt. When denied protection, they have secured their ministries of mercy. When denied justice, they hired their own private investigators. They have suffered long and done good. They have emerged from the fiery crucible of persecution with a stronger resolve to help the weak and save the innocent. The pro-life movement is “hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed — always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body” … And, one day, manifested in our laws.

We shall overcome.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Top 5 Biden Administration Fails This Week

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The new year began on a grim note for the Biden administration. On the first day back in the office after the New Year’s holiday, news broke that almost 80% of Americans projected 2023 to be a “year of economic difficulty.” Things haven’t gotten much better since then for the White House. It has indeed been a particularly rough week for the Biden administration. Here are five of their biggest fails.

1. Mishandling of Classified Documents

It was discovered this week that President Biden apparently mishandled top secret classified documents, which could be prosecuted as a federal offense. Some were found in his garage in Wilmington, Del. next to his Corvette, while others were found in “a box, locked cabinet — or at least a closet,” according to the president. Still other top secret documents were found at Biden’s think tank in Washington, D.C.

On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that an investigation would be opened into the matter and appointed a special counsel to lead the probe.

2. FAA System Failure Grounds Thousands of Flights

In the largest single incident of grounded flights in one day since 9/11, a failure of the Federal Aviation Administration’s pilot alert system led to the agency halting all domestic departures on Wednesday. Over 2,900 flights were cancelled, while almost 8,000 more flights were delayed. The reason behind the system outage is still being investigated.

Numerous pilots have contended that the grounding of all domestic flights was an “overreaction” by the Biden administration, as multiple backup systems are available to ensure the safety of flights. “They didn’t have to ground all the flights. We would have been fine,” one pilot told Fox News.

3. Administration Official Considers Banning Gas Stoves

On Monday, U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. told Bloomberg News that gas stoves are “a hidden hazard. Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” With around 40% of all homes in the U.S. using gas stoves and with the appliances considered to be the industry standard for restaurant food preparation nationwide, the backlash to the news was swift.

“This is a recipe for disaster,” tweeted Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). “The federal government has no business telling American families how to cook their dinner. I can tell you the last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on.” His comment encapsulated the outrage, and even left-wing late-night host Stephen Colbert couldn’t help but quip, “You can have my gas range when you pry it from my hot, sizzling hams.”

On Wednesday, the Biden administration walked back the possibility of a proposed ban. “To be clear, I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so,” said CPSC Chairman Alex Hoehn-Saric. A White House spokesman also stated, “The president does not support banning gas stoves.”

4. Biden Team Shields President from Immigrants while Visiting Overrun Southern Border

On Sunday, President Biden made a “tightly controlled” three-hour visit to the southern border in El Paso, Texas. He visited a deserted section of the border wall with Border Patrol agents, a processing center, and had brief meetings with CBP officials and leaders of local NGOs.

Curiously, the processing center that Biden toured was inexplicably deserted at the time of his visit. In response to a CNN inquiry as to why the president visited this specific center and did not interact with any migrants, an administration official said, “There just weren’t any at the center when he arrived. Completely coincidental. They haven’t had any today.”

Shortly after Air Force One touched down in El Paso, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) greeted the president and handed him a letter, which noted that Biden’s “visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs,” adding that the city “has been sanitized of the migrant camps which had overrun downtown El Paso because your Administration wants to shield you from the chaos that Texans experience on a daily basis.” The Daily Signal reported that “[c]ity officials dismantled homeless migrant encampments in El Paso ahead of Biden’s visit.”

5. Biden White House Fails to Comment on Whether Babies Born Alive Should Be Saved

It appears that the White House has no official comment on the passage of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which was passed in the House on Wednesday. The bill simply requires medical personnel to administer lifesaving care to an infant that is born after a failed abortion attempt, just as they would any other infant in any other life-threatening circumstance.

Biden’s second in command, Vice President Kamala Harris, was unimpressed by the bill’s basic attempt to establish a baseline for humane treatment of infants. “House Republicans passed an extreme bill today that will further jeopardize the right to reproductive health care in our country,” she tweeted, despite the fact that the bill does not address abortion law. “This is yet another attempt by Republican legislators to control women’s bodies.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘An Indefensible Assault’: Conservatives Call for Halt to Omnibus

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As an impending snowstorm in the Washington, D.C. area and Senate Democrats put mounting pressure on Congress to push through a last-minute 4,155-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill before the Friday deadline and Christmas recess, conservative lawmakers are voicing strong opposition to the measure, citing irresponsible delays and reckless spending on progressive special interest projects.

“These people, I would not put [them] in charge of a Minute Mart and three gas stations, much less a $6 trillion economy,” said Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “They know the deadlines, they fail every year. They bring it to Christmas and then they blame conservatives.”

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) took to Twitter to lambast the bill in a series of tweets. “This omnibus spending bill is the worst of business as usual in Washington and is an indefensible assault on the American people. We will not abide it,” he said. The congressman pointed to a host of inclusions he deemed wasteful, including “$982k for motel vouchers in LA”; “$817k for partnerships with ‘justice-involved individuals’ in Glendale, CA”; “$2 million for ‘improving coordination’ in the NYC Mayor’s office”; “$8.6 million for ‘gender advisor programs’” at the Pentagon; “$65 million for salmon”; and “$3 million for bee-friendly highways,” among other controversial insertions.

Other GOP lawmakers, including Reps. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) as well as Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind.) slammed a provision for $3.6 million to be spent on a “Michelle Obama Trail.”

Multiple earmarks amounting to millions of dollars have also been designated for LGBT-themed special interest projects, along with millions more allocated for “diversity, equity, and inclusion”-themed ventures.

Still, despite the multitude of progressive priorities embedded in the spending bill, pro-abortion groups like NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and others expressed dismay Tuesday that it did not include specific new funding for abortion. “At a time of great crisis for reproductive health in this country, Congress has again utterly failed to safeguard access to the birth control and sexual health services made possible by the nation’s family planning program,” said Clare Coleman, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association.

Family Research Council, however, has argued that language is included in the omnibus that paves the way for abortion expansion. On Tuesday, FRC sent a letter to senators informing them that the organization would score against the bill for a variety of reasons, including language that “seems intent on making clear that VA [Veterans Affairs] facilities need to upgrade to be ready for an influx of abortions by female veterans and their families. The Omnibus should not be a vehicle for the Biden administration’s abortion expansion priorities.”

The letter went on to note that a section of the omnibus dedicated to funding for future pandemic response includes “grant programs that use vague, undefined terms such as ‘health equities,’ leaving the door open for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers to gain access to taxpayer dollars.” The letter included the example of the city of Rochester, N.Y. recently setting aside a “$5 million grant of federal COVID-19 relief funding for Planned Parenthood for being an ‘anti-violence organization.’”

Connor Semelsberger, FRC’s director of Federal Affairs for Life and Human Dignity, underscored that final passage of the omnibus is in the hands of the GOP, which has the choice to delay passage of the spending bill until next January when Republicans will control the House.

“Senate Republicans really control the cards,” he explained on Tuesday’s edition of “Washington Watch.” “No piece of legislation can get through the U.S. Congress without bipartisan support thanks to the filibuster. And so, the Republicans really could band together [and] help their friends out over in the House to set them up for a good spending opportunity [that is in] their own interests next year.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘The Border Is Not Open,’ Says White House Press Secretary

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Hours before the Supreme Court paused the end of Title 42 (scheduled for Wednesday) until the Tuesday after Christmas, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre achieved new levels of Orwellian Newspeak on Monday for insisting, repeatedly, that the southern border was not “open.” And further, she argued that anyone claiming the border was open was actually aiding the Mexican cartels who commit human trafficking.

“I want to be very clear here,” Jean-Pierre said, “The fact is that the removal of Title 42 does not mean the border is open. Anyone who suggests otherwise is simply doing the work of these smugglers who, again, are spreading misinformation, and which are — which is very dangerous.” And, in case the preposterous comment could be mistaken for a flubbed sentence, she emphatically repeated the point four additional times.

Something like a door is open when it is possible to pass through. Something is closed when it isn’t possible to pass through. Border Patrol is encountering around 200,000 migrants per month (2.2 million in Fiscal Year 2022). They apprehend them (except for criminals, the migrants usually surrender themselves), process them, and then release them into the U.S. Over the weekend of December 9-11, border patrol encountered more than 7,000 migrants in the El Paso sector alone, and was forced to release hundreds into the streets of El Paso to clear out room in the processing facility for new arrivals. For these migrants, passing through the border (from the Mexico side to the U.S. side) was possible. For these migrants the border was open.

The Biden administration doesn’t deny that migrants cross the border. As the state attorneys general, who requested a stay from the Supreme Court, wrote in their filing, “DHS [The Department of Homeland Security] estimates that daily illegal crossings may more than double from around 7,000/day to 15,000/day once Title 42 is terminated.” DHS divisions such as Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collect and respond to real-time data proving that the border is open.

I don’t know for certain what Jean-Pierre meant by saying, “the border is not open,” as she never explained what she meant by the term. Based on the context, Jean-Pierre seems to argue 1) if potential migrants hear that the border is open, they will be more likely to come; 2) if migrants come, smugglers are likely to exploit them; therefore 3) migrants must not hear that the border is open. She never argues that calling the border open is factually incorrect. Rather, she claims that calling the border open is morally wrong because it will put migrants in harm’s way.

Jean-Pierre’s claim that “the border is not open” is based upon a worldview assumption that telling the truth can sometimes be wrong if it leads to bad effects.

That same assumption underlies much of the rationale for “transgender-affirming” care. The oft-repeated argument goes, persons questioning their biological sex should be affirmed in making the transition because if they experience opposition or “hate” (any form of non-affirmation or less-than-effusive affirmation) they will be driven to commit suicide. But that claim is unsubstantiated, and frequent repetition is not proof.

Similarly, Jean-Pierre’s effects-based argument for lying about the border does a poor job calculating the effects. One might ask, why do potential migrants hear that the border is open? Because, in fact, it is. This is confirmed by all sorts of official and media reporting, first- and second-hand experiences, and the various effects an open border causes (the opioid epidemic, for example). We live in the information age and have a free press, after all. If the border were closed, would potential migrants hear that it is open? Perhaps smugglers might spread such misinformation, as Jean-Pierre suggests. But those reports would lack credibility in the absence of corroborating evidence. Reports about the openness of the border rely on the underlying facts of the situation.

In other words, the best way to persuade migrants that “the border is not open” is to close the border. Trying to shame everyone into pretending something is true that isn’t won’t accomplish anything.

Christians should be cautious about ever rationalizing a lie because of the effects it produces. If “on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak” (Matthew 12:36), how much more weighty are the lies we are tempted to tell? God always tells the truth. In fact, “it is impossible for God to lie” (Hebrews 6:18), whereas the devil “is a liar and the father of lies,” and those who lie are his children (John 8:44). Our corrupted hearts might deceive us into believing that a lie is justified because it might get us out of a scrape, or sooth another’s feelings, or otherwise produce a good effect. But Jesus tells those who are truly his disciples, “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

So, if the Biden administration wants us to say that “the border is not open,” they should make it so.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The FBI’s Twitter Censorship an ‘Apparent Violation of the Law’: Expert

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The federal government made an “apparent violation of the law” by pressuring social media outlets to ban or suppress American citizens’ accounts, or to ban the Hunter Biden laptop story as a foreign intelligence operation, an expert has said. Meanwhile, the federal government exploited the same online platforms to spread U.S. government propaganda, new disclosures from Twitter have revealed.

The seventh and eighth batches of the “Twitter Files” focused on the FBI’s suppression of the explosive contents of Biden’s laptop, which threatened to link 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to a murky web of foreign influence-peddling, as well as military intelligence campaigns using fake accounts to echo the Pentagon’s party line. Previous accounts showed how the FBI established a one-way portal to Twitter to request officials place certain accounts under a “shadow ban” or remove whole posts altogether — requests often received, and honored, by a plethora of former FBI agents and other government officials burrowed deeply into every level of the platform.

“The FBI was abusing its authority to target and abuse the First Amendment rights of American citizens and seems to me an apparent violation of the law,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm on Tuesday. “When you have collusion to suppress the civil rights of U.S. citizens” between the government and the private sector, “that violates federal law.”

The FBI paid Twitter more than $3.4 million in taxpayer funds as reimbursements for processing its ban requests. “We have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” wrote a Twitter official in early 2021. That means “American taxpayers paid Twitter via the FBI to censor themselves and help Joe Biden win” the 2020 election, noted Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.

Social media officials engaged in “surveilling, sharing information about the typically constitutionally protected activities of U.S. citizens, and then censoring U.S. citizens at the behest of the FBI,” said Fitton. “If you get paid to do things like that, it sounds to me like you’re operating as an FBI informant or asset.” Freedom of speech is “a God-given right, and the FBI just can’t go in and ask someone to suppress it,” Fitton told Backholm.

Yet the effort has not lightened. In a January 2020 email from Carlos Monje Jr., Twitter director of Policy and Philanthropy, he stated, “a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our” policies, “including by whispering to congressional staff.”

That coordination is par for the course for the Left, former FBI Special agent Jonathan Gilliam told Backholm on Monday’s “Washington Watch.” “The Democrat Party and the leftist socialists in this nation are very oppressive; they want to make people think the way they do, and they want to block people from spreading information that they don’t agree with.” FBI officials “moved from an observation platform to actually telling social media platforms what they would like to be pulled off. In effect, they were dictating [to] these social media platforms — and it’s not just Twitter.”

“Twitter [has] the same ideological stance as these leftists in the government [who] were basically doing the government’s bidding to oppress the First Amendment and to censor free speech,” he said.

Journalist Michael Schellenberger focused on the federal government’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story across social media platforms, beginning when the FBI intercepted the computer from repair store owner John Paul Mac Isaac on December 9, 2019. Arrests and prosecution did not follow bur rather “an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms,” he wrote. “[D]uring all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed [high-ranking Twitter official] Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation.”

The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and other federal agencies held weekly meetings with Twitter, Roth revealed in December 2020, where “federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October.” U.S. officials claimed the misinformation would be the work of APT28, a Russian intelligence unit. These alleged forthcoming foreign leaks were “discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.” Nor were the FBI “warnings” limited to one social media platform. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the intelligence community similarly “warned” his security team of a coming “dump.”

The FBI also surveilled Rudy Giuliani, who had received a copy of its contents and prepared to publish them before the 2020 election.

Just one month before the New York Post’s publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the feds had Roth and other social media figures take part in a “tabletop exercise” about a potential foreign intelligence agency’s “Hack-and-Dump” operation related to Hunter Biden. Formerly confidential documents about the exercise, run by the Aspen Institute, show social media agents reacted to a theoretical dump of documents from “Bidencrimes.info” implicating Joe Biden in illegal activity related to his son’s employment by Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. The scenario shows the forces of the intelligence community, MSNBC, NPR, and social media squaring off against a misinformation campaign emanating from Rudy Giuliani, Fox News, and Mike Pompeo.

When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke in October, Yoel Roth said it “set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leak campaign alarm bells.”

Internal documents show Roth admitted the New York Post story isn’t “clearly in violation of anything” in Twitter’s policy. But, he said, the platform came to believe the “suggestion from experts” of an elaborate conspiracy theory: “there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware.”

On that basis, they suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, likely changing the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. “So on top of the suppression of civil rights, you have potential election interference,” Fitton told Backholm. Enough Biden voters in swing states say they would have voted for another candidate had they known about the laptop story that it would have reelected President Donald Trump to a second term, according to a Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics poll.

“They were grooming Twitter employees throughout the autumn of 2020 to immediately recognize our story … Russian disinformation, hacked material,” New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, author of “The Laptop from Hell,” told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday night. “And they sweetened the pie by giving Twitter $3.4 million of taxpayer money.” The federal government set up “an entire censorship regime … to ensure no derogatory material about Joe Biden from the laptop would ever see the light of day before the election. It was strangled at birth.”

“Unfortunately, half of the country believes that, because their media organs of choice have completely ignored the Twitter files,” Devine said. Legacy media outlets instead “peddled lies from the intelligence community from the very beginning of the Trump campaign, the Russian collusion lies that just now blended into these lies about the Hunter Biden laptop also being Russian disinformation. And it all helps one side of politics, which is the Democrats.”

Twitter Files #8, released on Tuesday by Lee Fang, revealed the U.S. government used a “vast network of fake accounts & covert propaganda” to promote official U.S. policy, and possibly spread misinformation about its enemies, on Twitter and other social media platforms. Twitter “whitelisted” a handful of accounts, which military officials in time presented as legitimate accounts of people living in the Middle East, not intelligence assets recycling propaganda. Twitter officials were “well aware” of at least 157 such accounts, many of which it “discovered” on its own. A separate investigation found the network extended beyond Twitter onto other social media platforms, where phony accounts, complete with artificially generated photos accused Iran of “threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,” and other war atrocities propaganda.

Gilliam sees little hope for change on social media at large, “as long as the leftists are in charge” of the government and social media platforms. “And the Republican Party is full of careerists that don’t do anything.”

Yet Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) promised that the incoming Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee will investigate the FBI’s actions thoroughly. “Thankfully, we now have evidence and facts to be able to bring in these individuals and depose them,” Congressman Steube told Backholm Monday. “And we’re looking forward to doing that.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

RELATED ARTICLE: LinkedIn Joins the Social Media ‘Cabal’ Censoring the Truth about 2020 Election, Covid Vaccines and Biden 

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trans-Identifying HHS Official Admits Gender Transition Procedures Can Cause Sterility

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Rachel Levine, a biologically male senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who identifies as a transgender woman, recently stated publicly that he was happy to have undergone gender transition procedures later in life because it allowed him to have children. Experts, however, are pointing out that the policies promoted by Levine favor allowing minors to undergo gender transition procedures despite the fact that such procedures can lead to permanent sterility.

At a recent public event, Levine stated, “If I had transitioned when I was young, I wouldn’t have my children. I can’t imagine a life without my children.”

Levine expressed relief about having not undergone gender transition procedures such as receiving puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones as a minor, which can cause irreversible, permanent sterility. Notably, however, Levine publicly advocated for minors to in fact be able to undergo such treatment in July. “We really want to base our treatment and to affirm and to support and to empower these youth not to limit their participation in activities and sports, and even limit their ability to get gender affirmation treatment in their state,” he said.

The Biden administration has backed statements like this up with policies. In July, Biden’s HHS proposed a rule that revised Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to include “sexual orientation and gender identity” and “reproductive health care services” including “pregnancy termination” to existing “protections against discrimination on the basis of sex.” Critics say the rule would have forced conscientious-objecting health care workers to violate their religious beliefs, not only through having to carry out abortions but also having to carry out gender transition surgeries to remove healthy organs and administer puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones. In December, a federal appeals court agreed, ruling that the proposed rule violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The administration has also endorsed gender transition procedures for minors in a series of documents, and administration officials have endorsed using taxpayer dollars to fund these procedures.

Meanwhile, a number of individuals who have detransitioned out of the transgender lifestyle after having undergone irreversible procedures as minors have expressed disillusionment and regret at the prospect of how it will affect their future families. Chloe Cole says she was pushed into undergoing a double mastectomy at age 15, and is heartbroken that she will be unable to breastfeed her future children. “Adrian” has similarly been left “despairing and sterile.” Other examples of those who were pushed into transition procedures and have come to regret them abound.

Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, the director of the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council, noted the disparity between what studies show and the actions of the Biden administration.

“Levine’s comments are illustrative of a psychological disconnect that is embedded in the approach and the implementation of transgenderism,” she told The Washington Stand. “Every front that you look at with the transgender ideology, you see this disconnect between science and the practice, the ethics and the practice, the knowledge of what we know about development and the practice. It is the most disassociated ideology.”

She continued, “Here we have from the very top someone who is illustrating this very dynamic by saying, ‘In my personal life, I’m so grateful that I didn’t transition as a child so that I was able to have what I wanted, but let me impose this on everyone else.’ It’s distressing and at the same time not surprising because it is such an apropos representation of an ideology that promotes disassociation — the right hand literally does not know what the left hand is doing.”

Bauwens, who formerly worked as a clinician providing trauma-focused treatment to children, pointed to a seemingly willful ignorance of science on the part of the Biden administration.

“For someone who is in Health and Human Services and isn’t aware of the studies that are going on in other government agencies that have clearly shown that most brains aren’t even developed until 25 — disregarding all of that knowledge and imposing your own view, which isn’t even your own experience,” she observed. “This approach is not rooted in science, so there’s no grounding in the scientific method onto practice, and everything we know about scientific ethics and protecting vulnerable classes of people — which children are included in that class — that’s just thrown by the wayside.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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

PODCAST: Help Wanted, IRS, Candidate Must Be Willing to Use Deadly Force

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UPDATE: ‘In A Tyrannical State, You Have To Rule By Fear’ – Why Are IRS Agents Armed?

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” – Club of Rome, a premier environmental think-tank, consultants to the United Nations.

These globalists believe the common man is the enemy. So it makes perfect sense that the IRS is armed when they come for your taxes, or DOES IT? Will you comply?

All policies in the Green Broke Deal can be found in UN Agenda 21. This document is over 300 pages, 40 chapters of total control over the means of production and distribution of all means of human activity.

After the raid on Mar-a-Largo, do not for one minute think you will not be next. This is the way intimidation works. This is what globalists use to keep you in line. Prepare. Read about communists, and dictators taking over. They are at their end game, where they reveal themselves because they think they won. But they got sloppy and now will lose.

We are being set up, so be on your guard. Pay attention locally and to your state politics. Sadly Globalists have taken the worst plans their evil leaders offered, plans that ultimately hurt people without remorse, were definitely over budget, and full of graft and corruption.

We will be hit with many things that don’t make sense. Don’t pay attention. Choose your battles wisely.

Sometimes we must look at things through different lenses. Join us al listen to some stories of people who were forced to live under a communist regime.

Is America worth saving? Join us on The Prism of America’s Education and find out…

GUESTS

Chris Wright is an independent liberty activist in the leadership of the Potomac Tea Party, a national Tea Party based in Northern Virginia. He is also president of the first and only nonprofit formed to empower grassroots activists with small grants. A long-time student of public affairs, Mr. Wright, began his Daily Skirmish commentaries in 2020 to directly confront the Left and deconstruct its phony narratives. Daily Skirmish Commentaries, Website:  www.Liberato.US, and www.Spider-and-the-Fly.com.

Erik Seligman is co-host of the  Stories of Communism podcast. Erik served from 2013-2017 on the board Oregon’s 4th largest school district, helping to oversee the education of about 20,000 students. He was continually frustrated with the entrenched socialist philosophy being promoted in the schools. After leaving the board, he started the Stories of Communism podcast (with his friend Manuel Castaneda, a successful local businessman & immigrant), to share the real stories of those who had suffered under socialism. He earns his living as an engineer, having recently retired from Intel after nearly three decades there, and is now a Senior Product Engineering Architect at Cadence Design Systems. He also produces a podcast called Math Mutation in his spare time. He now lives in the suburbs of Wichita, Kansas, with his wife, daughter, and cats.

The Prism of America’s Education can be heard on weekends at 1 pm ET, with an encore at 9 pm ET. Listen on iHeart Radio, our world-class media player, or our free apps on Apple, Android, or Alexa. All episodes can be found on podcast networks worldwide the day after airing on talk radio.

©. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: New IRS “Special Agent” Job Post Description: “Carrying Firearm and Willing to Use Deadly Force”

Report: True National Debt Exceeds $123 Trillion, or Nearly $800,000 per Taxpayer

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The Democrat-CCP continues to impose more crushing debt on the American people, kill businesses, lockdown whole cities throw millions of out work.

China is taking over. Note what’s important and prioritized in their strategy for world domination – debt and spending. Balanced against the value of its commercial assets, the federal government had a combined total of $103.7 trillion in debts, liabilities, and unfunded obligations.

COVID was an act of war  by China– launched during a US presidential election exploited and weaponized by the party of treason.

True National Debt Exceeds $123 Trillion, or Nearly $800,000 per Taxpayer, Report

By Mark Tapscott, The Epoch Times, April 19, 2021:

America’s national debt now exceeds $123 trillion, according to a new report, or more than four times the official figure of $28 trillion, as calculated by the U.S. Treasury Department at the end of March.

Federal spending related to the CCP virus pandemic and economic lockdown added nearly $10 trillion to the total in 2020, according to the latest edition of the “Financial State of the Union 2021” report, compiled and published annually by Chicago-based nonprofit Truth in Accounting (TIA).

But spending amid the pandemic represents only a small portion of the total difference between the official government figure and TIA’s calculation.

“Our measure of the government’s financial condition includes reported federal assets and liabilities, as well as promised, but not funded, Social Security and Medicare benefits,” the report stated.

“Elected and non-elected officials have made repeated financial decisions that have left the federal government with a debt burden of $123.11 trillion, including unfunded Social Security and Medicare promises.”

The TIA report includes in its total debt calculation $55.12 trillion in unfunded Medicare benefits and $41.20 trillion in unfunded Social Security benefits.

Treasury officials don’t include unfunded benefits because they claim recipients have no right to future payments, only to those under current entitlement laws.

The total debt, according to the report, “equates to a $796,000 burden for every federal taxpayer. Because the federal government would need such a vast amount of money from taxpayers to cover this debt, it received an ‘F’ grade for its financial condition.”

Unlike many state governments, the federal government doesn’t maintain a cash reserve to deal with spending necessitated by unexpected crises such as a virus pandemic.

“The coronavirus pandemic and related stimulus packages have caused some of the deterioration because the government had to borrow money to weather the pandemic. If the federal government was properly prepared for a crisis with a true rainy-day fund, it would not have had to borrow money,” TIA stated.

Defense and veterans’ benefits accounted for the largest share of federal spending in 2020 at 23 percent, followed by health and human services with 19 percent, Social Security with 16 percent, interest on the debt at 5 percent, and 2 percent on education. Fully a third (35 percent) of the spending went to what TIA described as “Other.”

Responses

Spokesmen for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), respectively the chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate Budget Committee, didn’t respond to The Epoch Times request for comment.

Similarly, a spokesman for House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), didn’t respond.

Mondays are typically “travel days” for senators returning from their states and representatives from the districts.

A spokesman for Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the budget panel’s ranking minority member, referred to a March 31 statement in which Smith criticized news spending proposals from President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats.

“Washington Democrats are embracing an historically disturbing appetite for spending. They just passed a nearly $2 Trillion bailout bill. President Biden is now proposing they turn right back around and cut a check for another $2 trillion to spend on a massive grab bag of policies all tied together with talking points,” Smith wrote.

“All the while, the President reportedly has yet another $2 trillion spending proposal in his back pocket awaiting its own news cycle.”

Consultants Agree

Campaign strategists and nonprofit activists interviewed by The Epoch Times about the TIA report expressed agreement that debt requires serious attention to get it under control.

Jim Manley, former communications director to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), said “at some point, both parties are going to have to have a serious negotiation regarding the need to get our fiscal house in better order, and that includes both taxes and spending, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon because our politics are just too toxic.”

But, Manley said, “in the meantime interest rates are low and the economy is digging itself out of the hole the pandemic caused, but there is no reason for Democrats to be at all concerned about the Republicans’ new-found focus on cutting spending after everything the last administration did.”

He was referring, he said, to 2017 tax reform legislation enacted by Republican majorities in the House and Senate and signed into law by President Donald Trump.

Another Democratic campaign strategist, Kevin B. Chavous, told The Epoch Times: “This has been an issue that both parties have simply failed to address. It will not be fixed, though, by doing the same things.”

Chavous said he expects “the infrastructure bill will create jobs and grow the economy by investing in modern technology and cleaner energy sources. Things like a nationalized electric grid and expanded broadband access will make Americans more productive and more competitive in the years to come. It is an expense we have to make sooner than later.”

Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) President David Williams pointed to the need to cut federal spending. “A debt of $123 trillion should be a wake-up call for the country. The bill is coming due very soon, which could have dire consequences for taxpayers and the country.”

Williams said Biden and congressional leaders “are seemingly oblivious to the stark fiscal crisis happening right under their noses. Worse yet, if they are aware of the deep financial issues, they are clearly not doing anything to fix the problem. Instead of finding ways to spend more money, Congress and the president need to find ways to cut spending.”

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) President Tom Schatz noted that President Thomas Jefferson said the nation’s representatives shouldn’t accumulate debts that can’t be paid in their own time, and while this has been problematic for years, it has never been this significant.

Schatz said he believes “members of Congress have an obligation to attempt to bring spending under control and ensure that present and future taxpayers are not forced to fund any federal program that is duplicative, wasteful, and inefficient.”

When The Epoch Times asked TIA President Sheila Weinberg if it’s reasonable to depend upon future economic growth to solve the debt problem, she said no, and noted that the Treasury Department agrees.

“The authors of the Financial Report of the U.S. Government have deemed that under current law and policy, a massive implied increase in the ratio of reported debt to GDP—e.g. future debt will be growing faster than GDP—is simply unsustainable,” she said.

“In other words, under current law and policy, we can’t grow our way out of this, especially considering Medicare grows faster than inflation.”

RELATED ARTICLES:

Schweizer: China’s Influence on U.S. Government a ‘Massive Problem’

Unlike Hobbled U.S., China Stops COVID Stimulus Spending, CUTS It’s Deficit To 3.2%, Economy Recovers Pre-China Virus Momentum

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Quick note: Tech giants are snuffing us out. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense permenently banned us. Facebook, Twitter, Google search et al have shadowbanned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. Help us fight. Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW more than ever. Share our posts on social and with your email contacts.

Retired DHS Intelligence Officer Blows Whistle on Federal Government’s role in Islamic terror threat

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — One day after a prominent U.S. Muslim leader reacted to the November 2015 Paris attacks with a declaration that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has nothing to do with Islam, President Obama made the same assertion.

Who exactly is the enemy we face, not only in the Middle East but also within our borders? Is it “murderers without a coherent creed” or “nihilistic killers who want to tear things down,” as some described ISIS after 130 people were brutally slain and another 368 injured in a coordinated attack on Western soil that authorities say was organized with help from inside France’s Muslim communities.

After the Paris attacks, Obama, himself, described ISIS as “simply a network of killers who are brutalizing local populations.”

But how much do words and definitions really matter? According to the legendary military strategist Sun Tzu, if “you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one (battle) and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

When the Department of Homeland Security was founded in 2003, its stated purpose was “preventing terrorist attacks within the United States and reducing America’s vulnerability to terrorism.” The Bush administration’s definition of the enemy as a tactic, terrorism, rather than a specific movement, proved consequential amid a culture of political correctness. By the time President Obama took office, Muslim Brotherhood-linked leaders in the United States were forcing changes to national security policy and even being invited into the highest chambers of influence. A policy known as Countering Violent Extremism emerged, downplaying the threat of supremacist Islam as unrelated to the religion and just one among many violent ideological movements.

When recently retired DHS front-line officer and intelligence expert Philip Haney bravely tried to say something about the people and organizations that threatened the nation, his intelligence information was eliminated, and he was investigated by the very agency assigned to protect the country. The national campaign by the DHS to raise public awareness of terrorism and terrorism-related crime known as If You See Something, Say Something effectively has become If You See Something, Say Nothing.

To be released by WND Books on May 24, 2016, in See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad, Haney – a charter member of DHS with previous experience in the Middle East – and co-author Art Moore expose just how deeply the submission, denial and deception run. Haney’s insider, eyewitness account, supported by internal memos and documents, exposes a federal government capitulating to an enemy within and punishing those who reject its narrative.

Haney discloses:

  • How the Bush administration stripped him and other front-line officers of their ability to define the threat;
  • How much the Obama administration knew in advance of the Boston Marathon bombing and how it launched an ongoing cover-up on behalf of a major ally;
  • The administration’s stealth policy to protect Islamic leaders with supremacist beliefs and violent-jihadist ties, allowing them to freely travel between the U.S. and the Middle East;
  • The scope of access to the White House and the classified information the Obama administration gave to members of Muslim Brotherhood front groups;
  • The damning intelligence on Muslim Brotherhood-linked leaders invited to sit at the table and help form national-security policy;
  • The “words matter” memo imposing the demands of radical U.S. Muslim leaders on the DHS, including stripping intelligence and official communications of any mention of Islam in association with terrorism;
  • The purging of training material that casts Islam in a negative light;
  • The erasing and altering of vital intelligence on terrorists and terror threats;
  • The fear-based tactics imposed by the Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the U.S. and their accomplices that paralyze officials, members of Congress and any Department of Homeland Security employee who dares to expose or resist their agenda; and

Much more …

In this well-documented, first-person account of his unique service with DHS, Haney shows why it’s imperative that Americans demand that when they see something and say something, the servants under their charge do something to prevent a cunning, relentless enemy from carrying out its stated aim to “destroy Western Civilization from within.”

ABOUT PHILIP B. HANEY

Philip Haney studied Arabic culture and language while working as a scientist in the Middle East before he was hired as a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. After becoming an armed Customs and Border Protection officer, he served several tours of duty at the National Targeting Center near Washington, DC, where he quickly was promoted to its Advanced Targeting Team, an unprecedented accomplishment for an agent on temporary duty assignment. Officer Haney won numerous awards and commendations from his superiors for meticulously compiling information and producing actionable reports that led to the identification of hundreds of terrorists. He has specialized in Islamic theology and the strategy and tactics of the global Islamic movement. He retired honorably in July 2015.

ABOUT ART MOORE

Art Moore is an editor for online news giant WND. He entered the media world as a public relations assistant for the Seattle Mariners and a sports correspondent for Associated Press Radio. Moore served for ten years in Eastern Europe with a Christian organization and earned a master’s degree in communications from Wheaton College. Before joining WND shortly after 9/11, he was an editor for the news service Worldwide Newsroom and senior news writer for Christianity Today magazine.

See Something, Say Nothing will be in bookstores nationwide on May 24, 2016

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