I was watching the news this morning. FOX was reviewing last nights propaganda speech. The subject of the oil situation came up, especially about the so-called “oil reserve” Biden was releasing. It amounts to a three-day supply of oil in America.
Several thoughts came up regarding the situation between Putin and Biden. With all that the socialist put Trump through, (“Russia, Russia, Russia”) this geriatric dementia 80 something, is more in the pocket of Putin than the socialist accused Trump of being.
There is a meme going around of someone saying, “Instead of this Build Back Better businesses, how about just putting it all back the way you found it.” Indeed. We were oil independent, selling to other nations, and Putin was sitting on drilled oil. Our economy was robust, and we all could afford to drive our cars (there is a gas station a half block from us with prices of almost $6 a gallon). Do they really think we’re that stupid?
Everything these socialist’ have done is all designed around “control, control, control”. We all know now that this pandemic was more fear mongering than actual danger. Numbers inflated, bad advice, everything about it manipulated to grow fear in order for them to control almost every aspect of our lives.
After shutting down the Keystone Pipeline, and making us dependent on Russia for our oil (“Russia, Russia, Russia”), they shut down a robust economy buy shutting us up in our homes. Might as well have been house arrest. Supply lines cut off, making everything more expensive, and growing the fear that we might never have enough toilet paper.
Lie, after lie, after lie about face masks, numbers of deaths, and feeding more fear. Instead of a few weeks, or months, these manipulated lies have last two years. And miraculously, the China virus stopped it’s attack on the day of Biden State of the Union AS WE WANT YOU TO BELIEVE IT IS, BUT IN REALITY, WE HAVE DESTROYED IT FOR PUTIN AND XI.
Last night Biden threw up a speech someone else wrote, saying all the things he was expected to say, and meaning none of it, while stretching his dominion further. His greatest lies were those about Russia and Ukraine. We already have evidence of his manipulation of Ukraine leadership with his boast. Summed up, more Russian control of our economy by our dependence on Putin’s oil.
Now gasoline is over $5 a gallon, and climbing. Supply chains are growing, restaurants are so expensive, it’s prohibitive to eat out anymore. $9 for a Big Mac meal????? Heating our homes are down to multiple blankets, and electrical cost are criminal. And I think I have the reason all this has been engineered.
They locked us down to see if they could pull it off. Success. Once you give Socialist/Leftist power, THEY WILL NEVER GIVE IT BACK. So, make everything so expensive that Americans cannot afford to go out. Make gasoline so expensive that AMERICANS HAVE TO STAY HOME (LOCKDOWN). Add to that the Socialist/Leftist puts forth this geriatric dementia 80 something as a mock President, and you have a tyrannical government that is only interested in filling their own pockets, and those of the oligarchs that control them.
Angry enough America? Violence is not the answer, because that’s what they expect. Prayer? YES! Speak up, YES! Call them on their lies and manipulation? YES! Get out the vote and hold them accountable for their cheating? YES! Let’s start where we live and spread out nationally. I refuse to be controlled one more second. How about you?
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Andriy Dubchak
Amid the media’s 24/7 UKRAINE UPDATES, perhaps some enterprising journalist could write an article explaining how our esteem for that country’s borders benefits a single American — other than President Joe Biden.
Our own border has become a transmission belt for the third world, bringing in rapists, murderers, future welfare recipients and left-wing activists. The Democratic Party’s brilliant policy of defunding the police and emptying the prisons has, oddly enough, led to a breathtaking surge in violent crime. Our schools have been taken over by lunatics who teach white kids that they are evil — and probably transsexual. Inflation has hit a 40-year high.
U.S. media: Whither Ukraine?
Midterms must be coming!
In 2020, Democratic data scientist David Shor advised his party: “Talk about the issues [voters] are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration.” (Emphasis mine.) After the election, he said that the main way the media’s COVID hysteria hurt Donald Trump was by preventing anyone from “talking about Hunter Biden or immigration.”
Evidently, the only issue where voters don’t vehemently disagree with Democrats this year is the precise border of a country they’d never given a moment’s thought to until five minutes ago.
What Republicans should be doing: talking about the issues Democrats are trying to avoid.
What Republicans are doing: talking about Ukraine.
Whenever you see any media talking about Ukraine, your Pavlovian response should be, Oh, I see. They don’t want me to think about immigration or crime.
It’s not only the Democrats drawing benefits from the media’s sudden Ukraine obsession. There’s also the military-industrial complex.
President Dwight Eisenhower led Allied troops in World War II, but in his farewell address from the White House, he warned of the “unwarranted influence” on the government by “the military-industrial complex.” In the 60 years since, these bloodsuckers have been bleeding our country dry, solely to make themselves rich.
As Americans discovered to their dismay when the pandemic hit, we can’t make our own masks, pharmaceuticals or aspirin. We can’t make our own computer chips, razors, bicycles, toys, sneakers, Levi’s jeans and on and on and on. But boy, do we make weapons! In our ruling class’s ideal country, there will be nothing but defense contractors, Black Lives Matter activists and Latin American gardeners.
Just five companies receive the lion’s share of taxpayer money for “defense” weaponry. In 2020, the U.S taxpayer doled out $75 billion to Lockheed Martin, $28 billion to Raytheon, $22 billion to General Dynamics, $22 billion to Boeing and $20 billion to Northrop Grumman. Since 2001, these five companies alone have cost the taxpayer $2.1 trillion.
To put this in perspective, the annual budget of the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development is a little more than $50 billion. (And we should zero-out that whole budget, too.) During the COVID pandemic, when the government ordered people not to work, the entire supplemental food budget was about $70 billion.
Ronald Reagan’s victory in the Cold War should have been a sad day at Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing. Instead, it was the beginning of endless paydays. Today, the American taxpayer spends more on “defense” than during the Reagan buildup that crushed the USSR; more than during the Vietnam War, more even than the War on Terror after 9/11.
Worse, we’ve added a “think-tank industrial complex” — an army of useless, camera-ready blowhards to explain why our incessant meddling around the globe is always in America’s “vital national security interest.”
Why does NATO still exist? This alliance was the West’s response to Soviet aggression during the Cold War. Once the USSR collapsed (thanks to Reagan) and the Warsaw Pact disbanded, that should have been the end of it. Instead, we keep adding countries to the alliance — with a requirement of admission being that they buy their weapons from American defense contractors.
Everyone acknowledges that Vladimir Putin’s main concern is that Ukraine will be asked to join NATO. How about, as a compromise, the U.S. will pull out of NATO? (Another of Trump’s broken promises.)
Nope! Can’t shut down this utterly anachronistic organization, requiring America to defend the likes of Latvia, should some other pipsqueak nation violate its precious borders. (Why isn’t Latvia down in Texas right now, defending our borders?)
Far from unwinding NATO, our country’s leaders are constantly trying to expand it, thus increasing the odds that Americans will be forced to go to war over some other country’s sacred sovereignty. Pointless wars are the lifeblood of defense contractors! We pay the price and defense contractors get the money.
(Ike should be on Mount Rushmore for his “military-industrial complex” speech.)
This year, the worshipful reverence for Ukraine’s borders has the added bonus of blocking Americans from thinking about immigration and crime. Republicans ought to be talking their heads off about the unprecedented crisis at our border, Afghan “refugees” raping little kids in our country, illegal aliens hauling meth and fentanyl into our country, rampant shoplifting, carjacking and assaults destroying neighborhoods in our country.
Luckily, the GOP is too smart to fall for the media’s latest subject-changer.
Oh, wait —
@newtgingrich: “The Biden Administration talks and Putin acts. This is such a clear replay of Chamberlain trying to deal with Hitler that it is more than a little frightening. Putin is pushing day by day and has no fear of NATO because he has no fear of the United States or its President.”
GOP 2022 Contract With America: “Putin’s like Hitler.”
Mike Rowe on Tuesday criticized Canadian government officials for their response to Freedom Convoy truckers amid a national protest over COVID-19 vaccine mandates. For weeks, thousands of demonstrators have camped in Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, and blocked border crossings with the U.S. in protest of the mandate and other coronavirus restrictions placed on truckers crossing the border.
In response to what the Canadian government deemed an “unlawful assembly,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, a measure that grants authorities sweeping power to restrict travel, disperse crowds, arrest demonstrators, and freeze their bank accounts, among other actions considered necessary to stop assembly. Over the weekend, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson even suggested selling off dozens of vehicles seized during the Freedom Convoy protests to cover the city’s costs incurred during the demonstrations.
During an interview with BlazeTV host Glenn Beck on Tuesday, Rowe pointed out how quickly the situation has changed now that some truckers find themselves on the bad end of state directives. Truckers, once considered essential to the economy during the pandemic, have in short order become enemies of the state, the “Dirty Jobs” star suggested.
As Canadian officials debate auctioning off the Freedom Convoy protesters' trucks, @mikeroweworks gives me his take: "Truckers were the very definition of essentiality. Within the course of 2 weeks, they literally went from heroes to villains." pic.twitter.com/zV3bEJOspI
“You know what strikes me about all of this?” Rowe asked, adding, “And maybe this is somewhat of a silver lining [because] I kind of feel like we’re about to close the loop.”
“When this started, truckers were right on the leading edge of heroes. They were the very definition of essentiality,” he said. “[But] in the course of two weeks, they literally went from hero to villain.”
That’s how fast things can change in today’s chaotic socio-political climate.
Beck noted that protesters have yet to be convicted of crimes or even appear in court. Nevertheless, the government is floating an auctioning off of property. The Canadian government responded quickly and harshly to continued protests in Ottawa over the weekend.
Police descended on the crowds, arresting at least 191 protesters and towing at least 76 vehicles since Friday. In one scene caught on video, police are seen charging on horseback into a crowd of demonstrators and knocking down at least two people, including an elderly woman on a mobility scooter.
One trucker recounted to Fox News host Tucker Carlson the moment that police repeatedly struck him while he was on the ground, complying to orders.
“They drag me in, they lie me down on my belly, and I don’t — I don’t recall how many were on top of me … I felt like I was beaten, but I took it like a man,” the trucker recalled.
“They broke my body a little bit, but not my spirit,” he added.
Michigan basketball coach Juwan Howard believes he’s untouchable.
And why shouldn’t he? The rules imposed by our China-influenced institutions of government, education, sport, media (corporate and social), and art grant him a bigoted form of privilege.
Howard is black, elite, and a supporter of left-wing social justice. He checks all the boxes for the elimination of standards, accountability, and adult expectations. Our current culture immunizes Howard from real consequence. He took the blackcine, the alleged experimental cure for bigotry that injects people with the mindset that black people are inferior and can’t be held to the same standards as white, Asian, and Latino people.
Howard is fully blackcinated and boosted. He can’t be touched.
We saw that yesterday in the handshake line after the Wisconsin Badgers routed Howard’s Wolverines. Incensed that Wisconsin coach Greg Gard called a timeout with 15 seconds to play, Howard yelled at and attempted to walk past Gard without the customary handshake. Gard placed his hand on Howard’s elbow and tried to explain his use of a timeout. Howard responded by grabbing Gard’s shirt in the center of his chest and then pointing a finger in Gard’s face while repeatedly shouting, “Don’t f—ing touch me!”
Players and assistant coaches separated Howard and Gard. Moments later, Howard reached across several people and struck Wisconsin assistant coach Joe Krabbenhoft. Howard’s blow ignited a fracas among players from both teams.
Howard’s on-court, postgame behavior was embarrassing and justifies a season-ending suspension.
Howard’s postgame interview was troubling and justifies his firing.
“I didn’t like the timeout being called,” Howard told reporters, “and I’ll be totally honest, I thought it was not necessary in that moment, especially being a large lead. And then to have the timeout being called with 3, 4 seconds to go I thought that was – what I felt – wasn’t fair to our guys. So that’s what happened.”
There was no timeout called with 3 or 4 seconds to play. Howard is confused. Given time to collect his thoughts, Howard had no real idea what happened at the end of the game. With 48 seconds to play and leading by 19 points, Wisconsin emptied its bench and inserted its scrubs, including several walk-ons. Howard instructed his players to compete until the final second. The Wolverines pressed full court and caused a Badger turnover.
“It wasn’t a press,” Howard told reporters. “We were just five, pressure defense man to man. That’s what five is for us.”
So, it wasn’t a press. It was pressure defense man to man. Got it. Howard was in a total fog during his postgame media session. It’s like he blacked out. He lost a game and lost his mind.
“For someone to touch me, and I think that was very uncalled for him to touch me as we were verbalizing and communicating with one another,” Howard said. “That’s what ended up happening. That’s what escalated it.”
Getting touched in a handshake line is not unusual. It’s customary. Howard escalated the situation when he hit a Wisconsin assistant coach in the face.
“Oh yeah, it was more than that,” Howard responded when a reporter pointed out the point of a handshake line is to touch. “Yeah, he touched me unnecessary. There wasn’t cause for that when we were talking. At that point I thought it was time to protect myself.”
Five to 10 seconds after being touched by Gard, Howard protected himself by attacking Joe Krabbenhoft. It makes no sense. Howard sounded like a 12-year-old playground bully at best and a violent criminal with no emotional control at worst.
What he did not sound like was a leader, an adult capable of counseling young people not to be easily provoked. You can’t strike a man because someone touched your elbow or stepped on your favorite gym shoes. Striking the Wisconsin assistant was bad. The rationalization of the act was far worse.
How can Michigan have confidence in Howard’s ability to lead? Howard has less emotional control than his players.
Indiana University fired Bobby Knight 22 years ago, ending the era of out-of-control bully coaches. Twenty-years before Knight’s dismissal, Ohio State dumped its legendary football coach, Woody Hayes, for throwing a punch at a Clemson player.
Things we tolerated and/or overlooked decades ago, we no longer do. The Don Draper, Roger Sterling, Pete Campbell, and “Mad Men” era is gone. Juwan Howard can’t be retroactively grandfathered in. Replacing “Mad Men” with “Mad and Untouchable Black People” is a mistake and equally harmful and racist.
But that’s what we’re doing. We’re codifying cultural norms that lower or eliminate all standards of behavior and achievement for black people. You can see it in the education system, the criminal justice system, and the sports world. Leftists are defining black people as incapable of meeting traditional cultural norms. We’ve been defined as a special group worthy of a capital B that distinguishes us from the masses. The behavior of black people has been deemed irrelevant. Only the actions of white people matter. From the use of the N-word all the way to murder, we only care about the behavior of one group – white people. That’s why it’s forbidden to talk about the behavior George Floyd exhibited that contributed to his death. Discussing Colin Kaepernick’s career-destroying and illogical behavior is frowned upon. Criticizing LeBron James or Barack Obama is an unforgivable sin. Floyd, Kaepernick, James, and Obama are untouchable.
When people believe their actions are above scrutiny and irrelevant, their behavior typically becomes more erratic. That’s what we’re witnessing with Juwan Howard.
I first met Juwan when he was a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan and the most mature member of the famed Fab Five. I covered the team for the Ann Arbor News. Howard was an impressive young person. He was mature, respectful, and classy. He had a huge heart. He brought his best friend from childhood – a kid everyone called “Juice” – to Michigan. Juice was small and smart. He and Howard were inseparable. At the time, it seemed understood that Howard used his athletic gift to empower and educate his best friend from home.
I’ve always been impressed with Howard. I’m shocked to see Howard struggle with his emotions and behavior. A year ago, he had an over-the-top, on-court confrontation with Maryland coach Mark Turgeon. Turgeon says Howard threatened to kill him.
It was an ugly scene. Michigan took no disciplinary action against Howard. The team was nationally ranked and would eventually advance to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament. Howard should’ve been disciplined a year ago.
But he’s untouchable and knows it.
That’s why he was so offended that Gard had the audacity to protect his bench players from Michigan’s endgame, full-court press. Gard’s walk-ons were getting overwhelmed and embarrassed. The final 48 seconds of a blowout are a walk-on’s reward for practicing every day. Upset by the loss, Howard decided to ruin the reward Gard gave his scrubs. When Gard countered with a timeout, Howard emoted and eventually erupted.
Joe Krabbenhoft is white. Had he struck Howard, Krabbenhoft would have been fired Sunday night. He would be portrayed as the second coming of Derek Chauvin.
Howard has somehow been cast as the victim. Calls for his removal as Michigan head coach are being framed as a racist overreaction. For white bigots and black supporters of black inferiority, holding Howard to the same standard as a white coach would be racist. Like Al Capone, Howard is untouchable. He will not be punished for his bad behavior. In a year or two, Michigan will fire Howard for NCAA Tournament evasion.
Christian flag and American flag flying together | GettyImages/ sdgamez
I love America, but my hope for the future isn’t wrapped up in the American flag. If our government imploded tomorrow and all of our freedoms were jerked from our grasp, I would mourn, but I would not throw in the towel.
Some in the Christian community discuss politics as if our future depended on the outcome of every election. They say, “Our Christian freedoms are being eroded.” Many post scandalous, hateful, degrading memes about the opposition. Some advocate for a violent overthrow of the government.
For me, I’m a free man who was bought and paid for by the mercy of God. And since He owns me, I am here only to obey Him and glorify His name. When He bought me, I surrendered my old passport and voluntarily became a citizen of his kingdom. My citizenship is in Heaven (Phil. 3:20).
Did Jesus or the apostles give a hint of obsession about worldly governments? I can’t find it. The only thing Jesus said about government was, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Matt. 22:21).
Wasn’t Caesar corrupt? Weren’t elections rigged? Weren’t babies killed and innocent people executed? Did the citizens of the Roman empire have a Bill of Rights? The United States can’t hold a candle to the corruption of first-century Rome, but Jesus seemed to have no obsession with the quality of a government.
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t get involved and do good when we can — we should. But we are given specific instructions about how to be a leavening influence on culture, including politics.
Paul wrote, “I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people — for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness” (1 Tim. 2:1–2).
He’s talking about ushering in a revolution by praying and petitioning the Almighty to bring about political change.
He wrote, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves” (Romans 13:1–2).
In my opinion, there’s no ambiguity here. This passage says what it says. God is in charge.
Yes, work to change your culture, but if it becomes illegal to worship God again, should we just wait until we get the government’s approval before we can praise him? No, the advancing borders of God’s kingdom do not wait on worldly systems.
Sure, I openly speak about elections and social issues. I faithfully cast my vote. But all of my hope is in Jesus and His kingdom, not in any political system, including the United States of America.
Jesus said, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:33).
I made the decision a long time ago to seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness. Jesus promised that when I make his kingdom my number-one priority, God will supply all my needs, no matter how dire the political and social climate appears to be.
So far, Jesus hasn’t let me down.
The writer of Hebrews said about the persecuted saints, “They were foreigners and strangers on earth” (11:13).
Think about that. If I travel outside the United States, I don’t have the same rights as the citizens of the countries I visit. I can’t express my opinion about their government by voting in their elections. I can’t take up residence without getting permission to become a permanent resident. I am completely at the mercy of the systems that govern those countries. As a stranger in a foreign land, I often long for my humble abode on the banks of the Ouachita River.
Accepting that I’m a stranger here means I am liberated from the obligation to put my trust in anything that offers no hope beyond the here and now. It also sparks a desire to be with God in his kingdom where He wipes away every tear (Rev. 21:4).
There’s no more death, mourning, crying or pain. No corruption! No racism! No bigotry! No greed! And to top it off, our leader is a holy, righteous, perfect, all-powerful, and loving God. We will never see that in our worldly leaders. Never.
This realm in which we live is chock-full of disappointments. Sure, I experience joy and happiness here on earth, but when I look around, I can’t help but see pain and suffering: divorce, abuse, injustice, addictions, hatred, unrest, gossip, slander, discord, and other ugly sins. So, the promise to dwell with God where all that junk will be eradicated creates an intense longing to be there.
Peter wrote, “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with His promise, we are looking forward to a new Heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. 3:11–13).
I love America. And yet, a better dwelling awaits.
When I tell people to act like a kingdom-driven follower of Christ, I am saying to be liberated from the disappointing rules of worldly systems. I’m saying not to let the temporary things of this world control your life.
You will never regret when you turn control of your life over to the one who is eternal, the one who is good. One day, you will dance with joy that you did not give your allegiance to the systems of this world.
Phil Robertson is a professional hunter who invented his own duck call and founded the successful Duck Commander Company. He also starred in the popular television series on A&E, Duck Dynasty, and is now the host of the new subscription television series In the Woods with Phil on CRTV.com. He is a New York Times bestselling author of The Theft of America’s Soul, Happy, Happy, Happy and UnPHILtered. He and his wife, Kay, live in West Monroe, Louisiana. He has five children, 18 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. His newest book, Uncanceled: Finding Meaning and Peace in a Culture of Accusations, Shame, and Condemnation, releases Feb. 8, 2022 and will be available wherever books are sold.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
Vincent Zhou, the world-class figure skater forced to pull out of the Olympics because of COVID, can thank Anthony Fauci and our COVID-crazed media for his withdrawal.
In an agonizing Instagram post, Zhou expressed shock at the positive test, saying:
“It seems pretty unreal that of all the people, it would happen to myself. … I have been doing everything in my power to stay free of COVID since the start of the pandemic. I’ve taken all the precautions I can. I’ve isolated myself so much that the loneliness I felt in the last month or two has been crushing at times.”
His story is heart-wrenching not only because of his compelled withdrawal from the individual competition — and the loneliness he endured — but because our “public health authorities” lied to Zhou, leading him to do exactly the opposite of what he should have been doing to build up his immune system before the Winter Games.
Maybe nothing could have protected him — he was, of course, fully vaccinated — but the safest course would have been to expose himself to everything in 2021, not be the Boy in the Bubble. If only he’d gotten omicron back in December, like everybody else, his immune system wouldn’t have been a sitting duck for the tiniest whiff of COVID once he got to Beijing.
As Dylan H. Morris, a postdoctoral RNA virus researcher at UCLA, put it: “If you want to stay out of the hospital, giving your immune system a preview of the virus is valuable, even if that preview isn’t perfectly accurate.”
A few months into the pandemic, two basic models emerged for responding to COVID:
1) Make it endemic. Also known as “herd immunity” or, pejoratively, “Let ‘er rip!” Georgia and Florida, among other states, cautiously followed that path, as did the nation of Sweden.
2) Lock down the populace in order to prevent a single COVID molecule from ever drifting within 10 yards of a human being. Remember “Fifteen days to stop the spread!”? In the blue states, two weeks became two years — finally being abandoned this week only because Democrats fear the coming elections.
RESULT: Places that pursued the endemic route did no worse, and often quite a bit better, than the fascistlockdown states. Apart from preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed when the virus first hit New York, no benefit was derived from strict COVID policies.
The reason the virus hit so hard in 2020 was that our immune systems had never encountered anything like COVID before. “[T]he population was immunologically naive,” explained statistician Philippe Lemoine, “which means that nobody had immunity against it.” It’s the same reason Native Americans were annihilated by viruses that Europeans had lived with for centuries. Now their immune systems recognize those viruses, too.
Training your immune system to recognize the virus, through vaccination or the real thing, reduces the severity and duration of future infections. Additional exposures give the body practice dealing with the various twists and turns of each new variant. Avoiding contact with viruses to protect your immune system is like avoiding weight-lifting to protect your muscles.
The Scientist magazine, among others, has pointed out that there’s little reason to believe that omicron is actually less dangerous than delta; it just seems so because our immune systems now recognize COVID and are able to quickly kill it.
Zhou might have known all this, but whenever epidemiologists tried to tell us that, our “public health authorities” and doomsday media buried the dissenters in scorn and calumny. Back on Oct. 4, 2020, Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University produced The Great Barrington Declaration, pushing the endemic solution. Soon, thousands of scientists had signed the paper. Today, nearly 1 million have.
Four days later, on Oct. 8, 2020, Francis Collins, President Trump’s director of the NIH, emailed “The Science” Fauci, frantically warning that the declaration was getting too much attention! He urged a rapid response to discredit the signatories — one a Nobel Prize-winner in chemistry — and “take down” the paper’s ideas.
“The Science” permits no debate! (Though I suppose we’re lucky Collins merely called the renowned epidemiologists “fringe,” and not “white supremacists.”)
Governors, like Ron DeSantis in Florida, who listened to the epidemiologists rather than “public health authorities” were reviled by our media, amid florid predictions of disaster.
In April 2020, when Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia began lifting COVID restrictions, the Atlantic magazine blasted him with the headline: “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.” Longtime reporter Ron Fournier wrote: “Mark this day. Because two and three weeks from now, the Georgia death toll is blood on his hands.” (Take note, deplorables: Trump jumped on the bandwagon and publicly criticized Gov. Kemp for opening up, too.)
RESULTS: A month later, COVID cases in both states had declined, while cases continued to rise in the majority of other states.
Maybe that was a fluke. What’s the final score, two years later?
As of a week ago, among all 50 states, Georgia was ranked 15th in age-adjusted COVID deaths, well below communist-controlled New York and New Jersey. Florida was in the bottom half of all states, coming in at No. 31. Only 19 states did better.
As for Sweden, MSNBC and President Trump spoke as one in denouncing that country’s refusal to shut down. On April 20, 2020, Trump tweeted that Sweden was “paying heavily for its decision not to lock down.” A week ago, Sweden ranked 20th out of 31 nations in Europe in COVID deaths. Only 11 countries did better.
Even a tie score should go to the free states because their citizens didn’t have to stop living, learning, eating in restaurants, going to concerts, athletic events and on and on.
Not only did Armageddon not ensue in the free states, but their populations’ immune systems aren’t at risk of collapsing the next time a germ wafts their way. You know all those weird allergies to things like peanuts that didn’t exist 20 years ago? Wait until the kids who’ve spent their childhoods in masks encounter the Earth’s atmosphere again!
Naturally, there will be no consequences for our “public health authorities” who imposed cruel mandates and squelched opposing views: You can’t sue the government.
The rule should be that whenever our rulers claim emergency powers to impose draconian measures on the populace, they forfeit sovereign immunity. I know some epidemiologists who would be good expert witnesses for the lawsuits.
It’s now certain that the military’s health surveillance system — DMED — showed a massive increase in sickness and injury diagnoses in 2021 over previous years, particularly in the neurological, cardiovascular, oncological, and reproductive health categories. The military, in a very terse and cryptic statement to PolitiFact last week, admitted as much, but claimed without any further explanation that the data in the system accessed by several military doctors working with attorney Thomas Renz was only a “fraction” of the true numbers that existed. In the words of the Pentagon spokesman, it was a “glitch in the database.” Where those true numbers existed, why they weren’t in the system for five years, what exactly was in the system, and why the 2021 numbers were accurate according to the DOD account remain a mystery.
However, one by one, the military public health officials have been adding back random numbers to the 2016 through 2020 codes. I’m told by Renz and two of the whistleblowers that throughout the past week, they have queried the same data again, and in most of the ICD categories, they have found that the numbers from 2016 through 2020 were “increased” exponentially to look as though 2021 was not an abnormal year. This has been done without any transparency, any press release, any statement of narrative, and sloppily in a way that makes the already unbelievable narrative simply impossible to believe.
In addition to believing that every epidemiological report for five years was somehow completely tainted with false data — including during the first year of the pandemic itself — we would have to believe that the minute they discovered this from Renz, they suddenly discovered the exact numbers. A five-year mistake fixed overnight!
Just take a look at the following statement given to the Epoch Times, the only other public comment delivered by an authorized Pentagon spokesman:
“Comparing the DMED database to the source data contained in DMSS, AFHSD discovered that the total number of medical diagnoses from 2016-2020 that were accessible in DMED represented only a small fraction of actual medical diagnoses for those years. In contrast, the 2021 total number of medical diagnoses were up to date in DMED. Comparison of 2021 to 2016-2020 resulted in the appearance of significant increased occurrence of all medical diagnoses in 2021 because of the under-reported data for 2016-2020. AFHSD has taken DMED offline to identify and correct the root-cause of the data corruption,” said Maj. Charlie Dietz.
That’s it! They are only concerned with downplaying any potential culpability of the vaccine, not explaining how they were flying blind, according to their official narrative, on such an important endeavor for so many years. Just consider the fact that at last week’s meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), officials revealed that they have been monitoring vaccine safety data from the DOD, among other places.
You know what that means? The CDC was looking at data for months that showed insane safety signals and did nothing about it, and somehow nobody in HHS or the DOD all along thought the data was a “glitch.”
Moreover, the DOD’s new data (as presented on Renz’s website) that was somehow updated so quickly is impossible to believe for a number of other reasons. Take a look at the top-line number of ICD codes in 2016-2020, as reflected in the data before the DOD tampered with it to input the new updated numbers.
Here is the original data of total annual outpatient diagnoses in DMED before the Pentagon changed it:
And here is the top-line tally for 2016-2020 based on the new numbers added:
This is a bar graph presentation from Thomas Renz contrasting the 2016-2020 total outpatient ICD diagnosis codes in the military before the DOD change and after the change. As you can see, during a typical year, there were about 2 million diagnosis codes, jumping almost tenfold in 2021. However, based on the changes made last week, 2021 is exactly in line with every other year (even though 2021 remains slightly lower; the data does not include numbers from December).
Here’s the problem with such an alleged presentation of the data. Putting the vaccines aside, the DOD’s “new” model would literally erase the existence of COVID off the face of the planet as if we never had the biggest pandemic of our lifetime. Even if the vaccine never caused a single doctor’s visit, COVID alone had to increase the codes. Yes, the military is generally very young, and deaths and hospitalizations were relatively low, but it’s impossible to believe that especially during the vicious Delta outbreak since the summer, there was no increase in COVID-related doctor’s visits. Just long COVID alone had to register a meaningful increase. Ironically, the Biden administration is forcing a vaccine mandate for a virus that, according to this alleged new data, didn’t cause even a 1% increase in baseline outpatient doctor’s visits this year!
The data originally reflected on DMED that was downloaded by the whistleblowers a few weeks ago makes much more sense because it accommodates both COVID and vaccine injury, which would explain the unprecedented increase. Now, obviously, COVID alone can’t explain all the increases, because some of the specific data points presented have already been associated with the vaccine injury, per VAERS and other studies, as opposed to the virus.
More fundamentally, it is simply ludicrous to suggest that there are this many diagnoses in the military in a given year. All active-duty soldiers have to be medically screened. Obesity, diabetes, and heart conditions are very rare, and the population is generally very young. If we really have over 20 million diagnoses every year in the military (consisting of about 1.4 million active-duty personnel), there is something seriously wrong, and that in itself is a huge story.
Let’s drill down to some specific ICD codes to drive home this point.
Take a look at the data for nervous system diagnoses before the numbers were altered:
Now look at the new numbers:
We are to believe that there was ZERO increase in the year of the Delta pandemic as well as what we already know from the civilian world about vertigo and migraines following the shots? We were all shocked by the percentage increase, but to say there was no increase whatsoever defies any expectation. Moreover, we are to believe that there are nearly 1 million nervous system diagnoses in the military every year in a fighting force of 1.4 million?
To further explore this point, let’s look at the number of pulmonary embolism diagnoses before and after the DOD “fixed” the data. Blood clotting in the longs is a clear consequence of the spike protein, which sticks to CD-147 receptors on blood vessels.
Here are the numbers before:
And here are the numbers after the DOD alteration:
While even the “revised” numbers do show some degree of increase, it is not enough to account for the unprecedented nature of both COVID and the COVID vaccines. But the more serious issue is how can a military of healthy young people have such a high baseline of pulmonary embolisms every year? One estimate of pulmonary embolism prevalence in the U.S. is between 60 and 70 per 100,000 per year. But that is almost exclusively in the elderly and sicker population. Soldiers 20 to 25 years old don’t exactly get pulmonary embolisms. So even accounting for the fact that these are diagnosis codes and not unique individuals (some might have had a few visits in a year), the numbers are way too high.
Finally, it’s important to note that the DOD is so overprotective of the vaccine that it revised numbers to show zero increase in ailments that are universally understood to have increased – at least to some extent – because of the vaccine. Although they were smart enough to still show a baseline increase in myocarditis (everyone knows that), the new numbers would indicate zero increase for pericarditis.
Here is the original data queried by the whistleblowers:
And here is the new data, which seem to indicate no unusual increase, even if we add in the missing month for 2021:
The silence both from the media and congressional members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees is astounding. One of two things is true: Either there was mass vaccine injury in the military, or our military has been very unhealthy and the Pentagon completely lost control over epidemiological surveillance of these health issues for years. Either way, this is the story of the year.
It’s utterly senseless. Pfizer is now asking to authorize a dangerous, outdated shot for babies and toddlers, for whom the virus does not pose a statistical risk and for a virus against which the shots have failed to show any benefit. Yet, just as taxes and death are a certainty in life, you can bank on the FDA never turning down any Pfizer request. This is where Republican governors must serve as the safety net for the people. They must actively oppose expanding the shots to the final control group against the greatest experiment on mankind.
In one of the most shocking and immoral moves since the beginning of the pandemic, Pfizer is submitting its request this week for emergency use authorization of its COVID shot for babies as young as 6 months old through 5 years old. They are quite literally pushing a shot with the hopes of ameliorating symptoms (not stopping transmission) of a virus that is a cold for young children and much less dangerous than RSV. But here’s the kicker: The trial they conducted showed that two doses failed to even produce positive results, and they are still working on a trial for a three-dose regimen. Plus, we have a new variant. So, what exactly are they seeking authorization for?
As other countries are already recommending against vaccinating those under 12, our government will likely approve this shot for babies and young children based on a failed trial. There was never any efficacy in the shot because no child in the trial got seriously ill to begin with. So, they chose a trial endpoint around levels of antibody titers. Putting aside for a moment the premise that higher antibody titers (as opposed to T cells) are necessarily a good thing and won’t cause original antigenic sin, their own trial failed to achieve these endpoints in 2- to 4-year-olds. Which is why Pfizer announced in December that it was beginning a trial on a three-dose regimen. So how can they seek authorization of the failed two-dose trial for what is essentially a new virus?
One of the precepts of the Nuremberg Code: “The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.” There is no way pursuit of an already flawed vaccine can be justified on young children, even if it still had a degree of efficacy and wasn’t outdated. A recent study from the U.K. showed that even immunocompromised children were not at an elevated risk for severe COVID. The study of 1,527 immunocompromised children and young adults found “no increased risk of severe SARS-CoV-2 infection.” None of those even more vulnerable children died.
While there likely have been a tiny number of severely ill children who have died of the virus, it’s extremely hard to tell how many of the recorded deaths were legitimately caused by the virus itself. A large COVID study conducted in Germany found just three pediatric COVID deaths out of a million. The same analyst found zero deaths occurred in children under 5.
Already among older children, no positive benefit was found in the vaccine, even when the vaccine was working better. An Israeli study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found ZERO deaths or severe illnesses BOTH in the vaccinated and in the control (unvaccinated) groups of 12- to 18-year-olds in a 29-day follow-up of their vaccination. Under what pretext could the government possibly justify COVID as an emergency in this age group, and based on what evidence does this vaccine address that “emergency?”
On the flip side, the CDC, in a study in published in JAMA just conceded that the VAERS data on myocarditis was indeed an accurate reflection of an increased risk of heart inflammation following the vaccines. “Based on passive surveillance reporting in the US, the risk of myocarditis after receiving mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines was increased across multiple age and sex strata and was highest after the second vaccination dose in adolescent males and young men,” concluded the CDC researchers. “This risk should be considered in the context of the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination.”
More broadly, over 22,600 vaccine deaths and over 1 million injuries have been reported to VAERS. We already know from previous studies that VAERS only captures 1% of adverse events, and no other shot has come with such a stigma against reporting it for harm, often at the threat of the physician losing his job. Medicare data seems to hint at a much broader cohort of vaccine casualties. The military’s epidemiological database also seems to indicate a very disturbing trend of neurological and cardiological disorders rising in association with the take-up of the vaccine.
How can this be foisted upon the youngest children — with no apparent benefit — when they concede, “Long-term outcome data are not yet available for COVID-19 vaccine–associated myocarditis cases”?
There are no long-term cancer studies, there are no long-term studies on what this does to one’s immune system, and there are no long-term studies on autoimmune diseases, even though the VAERS data and the Pfizer surveillance data from early 2021 raises some concerns. Plus the vaccine is for a virus that is not a threat to children.
Think about it: Monoclonal antibodies can get their existing EUA pulled based on the arrival of a new variant, yet shots that have already proven to be outdated – and are associated with greater infection rates – can secure official full approval and then EUA for babies with a new variant that was never run through a clinical trial.
As such, for a governors to merely take a neutral stance while allowing this travesty to plague the children of their states is unacceptable. Governors have a responsibility to direct their respective health departments to conduct the proper oversight that the FDA has abdicated and demand a moratorium on shots for children until a proper cost-benefit analysis can be conducted. At a minimum, they should join together in a lawsuit to enjoin the EUA because Pfizer has failed to prove the shots meet the eligibility thresholds in the EUA statute.
Moreover, Republican governors and legislators have an obligation to treat Pfizer like Planned Parenthood and cut all political ties with the company’s lobbying groups. Bio-medical fascism and the breach of informed consent is a greater pro-life cause than opposition to abortion right now, because its practitioners are encouraging all children to get something with only a potential downside. It is the equivalent of forcing abortions upon us, not just permitting them.
The final precept of the Nuremberg Code reads as follows: “During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.” If after everything we have learned, they won’t even discontinue this experiment on babies, then we truly have learned nothing since that dark era of history.
Democrats are quick to smear election integrity legislation as racist, but a recent discovery proves just how easy it is for people to commit fraud.
Last week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents seized 1,200 counterfeit driver’s licenses from more than 20 states, according to the agency’s website. The fake IDs were part of three shipments from Hong Kong declared as $20 worth of “Game Card,” with one labeled for a Chicago destination and the other two headed for New York.
Many of the identification cards reused photos with different names and had dates of birth consistent with people of college age. They were knock-offs of licenses from states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Texas, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois and Ohio.
“Counterfeit driver’s licenses have historically been used by those under 21 years of age for the illegal consumption of alcohol, but fake IDs ……
On MSNBC, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) claimed that the January 6 committee is going to “blow the roof off the house” with its findings. He even managed to get every Marxist talking point into one outrageous sentence: “We`re looking at that mob riot which surrounded a violent insurrection of domestic violent extremist, white nationalist groups surrounding a presidential coup against the vice president and against the Congress.” It’s time to push back on their Marxist narrative with the truth, and BlazeTV’s Mark Levin is ready to take them on.
On a recent episode of “LevinTV,” Mark played a video clip in which Raskin told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan that, unlike the Senate impeachment trial that was “about one guy, Donald Trump, and one crime, incitement to violent insurrection,” the mandate of the “select committee” is “much more sweeping.”
“We`re looking at all of the events of the day, all of the causes, and what needs to be done to fortify democratic institutions in the future,” Raskin said. “So, we’re looking at that mob riot which surrounded a violent insurrection of domestic violent extremist, white nationalist groups surrounding a presidential coup against the vice president and against the Congress. And we`re going to tell the story of each dimension of this attack on American democracy.”
“[Democrats] are going to destroy these people, Trump, his followers, the Republican Party, and they’re spending American tax dollars on this,” Mark exclaimed. “These guys are going out publicly saying what they’re going to do: ‘We want to get Trump indicted. We want to prevent him from being president of the United States’ … and this guy’s out there saying, ‘Yes, this is going to be a spectacular public hearing!’ Look at the smirks on their already smirk-like faces. It’s unbelievable. “
“God help us. I just hope this isn’t the narrative for the next 50 to 100 years in this country, because the Democrats are working very, very hard to make it the narrative,” he added.
Levin went on to unpack Raskin’s claims one by one, exposing the fallacies, hyperbole, and flat-out lies, before concluding, “[Democrats] can go after everybody and anybody for anything … and seek an indictment against them from our always objective and independent attorney general. The Department of Justice will go after them if they don’t submit. I am telling you, this is precisely what the framers of the Constitution rejected. This is a disgrace.”
Watch the video clip below or find more “LevinTV” here:
Want more from Mark Levin?
To enjoy more of “the Great One” — Mark Levin as you’ve never seen him before — subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com., and WhatDidYouSay.com.
Source: AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack
Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing a bill through the Florida legislature to put a stop to the modern pedagogy of making little girls cry because they’re white. The bill, called “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act (WOKE),” prohibits classroom instruction that contradicts these concepts:
“No race is inherently superior to another race”;
“An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex”;
“An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.”
The left has been having a sneer-fest over the proposed law, howling that it protects “white people” from feeling “uncomfortable.” SNOWFLAKES!
E.g.:
“A bill pushed by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that would prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel ‘discomfort’ when they teach students or train employees about discrimination in the nation’s past …” — The Associated Press (emphasis added)
“The right likes to talk so much about, you know, snowflakes. It seems like they may be raising snowflakes because if they think people are going to be uncomfortable by the actual facts — facts are uncomfortable.” — CNN’s Don Lemon
“Ron DeSantis and his GOP allies are pushing a bill … that would prohibit public schools [from making] white people squirm. Those poor, wittle babies.
“Their feelings are hurting. Some poor, wittle white people are uncomfortable about the hundreds of years of racism and hate that built this nation.” — Laura Washington, Chicago Sun-Times
(Saving the best for last …)
“[H]e’s trying to make it illegal, Governor Ron DeSantis, to teach history that would make white people uncomfortable. Does that law include saying you can’t make black people feel uncomfortable or indigenous people? The history of indigenous and African Americans could make one uncomfortable? Is that illegal too, or is it just white people?” — MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid
To know the answer to Joy Ann’s question, you’d have to actually read the bill. Or an article about the bill. Or commentary on an article about the bill. Joy Ann Reid: highly literate and well-informed Harvard graduate. But, duh: A bill prohibiting the teaching of race hatred will primarily prevent the teaching of white hatred for the simple reason that it’s the only race we’re allowed to hate. Not merely allowed to hate, but taught to hate, encouraged to hate, paid to hate.
We’re now entering the sixth decade of open, widespread, official discrimination against white people on the basis of their race. Even the Asians suing Harvard dare not stress the humungous advantage given to blacks and Hispanics. No, their beef is about white applicants getting preferential treatment over Asians.
This is odd, to say the least. According to the plaintiffs’ own expert witness, an Asian with a 25% chance of admission to Harvard would increase his chances to 36% if he were white — but to 77% if Hispanic, and to 95% if black. Asians sure have assimilated to our culture!
Everybody’s copacetic with the idea that universities discriminate against white people — in abject defiance of the clear language of our civil rights laws. They have done so, loud and proud, at least since 1973, when Allan Bakke was rejected from the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, because he was white. In fact, no one under the age of 50 has ever lived in an America where universities and other elite institutions have not discriminated against whites. Three generations of hating whites are enough.
School districts around the country teach white children that they were born racist and assign books like, “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness,” that portrays “whiteness” as a contract with Satan.
So yes, a race-neutral law that prohibits teaching race hatred will, in practice, prohibit teaching hatred of whites because that’s the only race-hate that’s taught.
Liberals jeer at whites who object to this constant disparagement, calling them “poor, wittle babies.” Does the left have any self-awareness at all?
A 6-year-old girl is a total pussy if she can’t take a little abuse for being white — at a school her parents are paying for. But our entire country has been turned upside down for the past half-century to prevent any other race from experiencing a fleeting moment of discomfort.
Historic Confederate statues are torn down and melted; newspapers refuse to identify the race of criminals — or even show photos of the arrestees; the Oscars will not consider a movie for Best Picture that does not have 30% non-whites. Otherwise, black people might feel uncomfortable.
Professor Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania Law School is routinely threatened with suspension or firing from her tenured position for stating facts about black students’ performance. Her remarks make black people feel uncomfortable.
Hey, where’s the rush to review Charles Murray’s recent book “Facing Reality” about black crime and I.Q.? Nope, might make black people uncomfortable.
A few years ago, Kansas City officials were advised not to impose a curfew in response to the violent mobs of black teenagers descending on a shopping plaza because, as the black mayor said, it would “make a lot of black kids angry.” His remark inspired the title of Colin Flaherty’s book about black crime, “Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry” — a book that is currently banned from Amazon. It might make black people uncomfortable.
Anti-whiteness books are flooding the grade schools, but you aren’t allowed to spend your own money to purchase books on Amazon that make some people “uncomfortable.” Not only Flaherty’s book, but:
— Ryan Anderson’s “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” — might make transgenders uncomfortable.
— The Kindle edition of the widely praised 1973 dystopian novel by French author Jean Raspail, “Camp of the Saints” — might make third worlders uncomfortable.
The FBI allowed the 9/11 attack to happen by blowing off an Arizona agent’s warning that a lot of Arabs were enrolled in flight school. Three thousand Americans had to die because noticing Arabs in flight school might make some people uncomfortable.
Last week, a Muslim terrorist, Malik Faisal Akram, seized a Texas synagogue and held four hostages for 10 hours. The media universally identified Akram as: “British man.” He didn’t even call himself “British”! A week later, the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt went on MSNBC and tried to suggest “Republicans” were responsible for the attack. The truth might make Muslims uncomfortable.
Before we go, here’s another “actual fact,” as Don Lemon put it, and “facts are uncomfortable” (especially for the black Harvard grad on MSNBC who can’t read a bill): By Harvard’s own admission, nearly 60% of the black students it admits are there only because they are black.
It’s so great that liberals have finally turned against snowflakes so we can discuss “actual facts” again!
In a seemingly never-ending sea of hot topics, gender equality is always near the forefront. Whether it’s called ‘women’s rights,’ ‘female empowerment,’ or ‘the feminist movement,’ it’s all pushing the same agenda. According to society, if you’re not crying ‘I am woman, hear me roar,’ then you’re not supporting other women. Well, I respectfully disagree.
According to mainstream media, to be a woman who supports women, you must be: pro-choice, pro-LGBT, and celebrate all-female life choices. You must think Cardi B grinding on Megan Thee Stallion (ask yourself why that’s her stage name) on national television is sexual empowerment. You must watch your step as to not cut yourself on the remnants of the shattered ceiling of Kamala Harris becoming the first female Vice President. Meanwhile, don’t forget to cheer while Miranda Hobbs has a sexual awakening and leaves her husband for a non-binary comedian (a female named Che, formerly known as Cheryl) on the new Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That…
To the overly aggressive agenda-pushing media and entertainment industry, I say no. No, I will not support abortion because it is murder. I will not perpetuate the LGBT movement because there are two genders and woman was made for man and vice versa. I’m never going to celebrate someone holding public office that I fundamentally disagree with regardless of their gender. I’m never going to cheer as a family is torn apart, regardless of the circumstances. (I’m aware there are valid reasons for divorce — I’m not referring to that here.)
I will not compromise my morals under the guise of women supporting women. This does not make an anti-feminist. It means that I am rooted in my beliefs and I’m not wrong for saying such.
Every religious stand in this country, great or small, is met with a deafening outcry denouncing the cause. So, where are the Christian women? Where are the fierce, Bible-believing wives and mothers? Why is it acceptable to tolerate the outcry of every opposing thought that hits the airwaves but the conservative, family-centered matriarch is expected to sit down and shut up? If the church is not influencing our nation, then conversely, one can assume the nation is influencing the church.
God created man in His image. Then from the ribs of the man, He created woman. Genesis 2:21-24 tells us how He brought the woman out of the man and now they are one flesh. This is the nucleus of the family unit. This was God’s design. When you step back and look at the many movements concurrently running through our society, you’ll discover they all seek to destroy the Biblical family unit. If you remove gender from society, then you remove the image of God. That is the ultimate goal after all — to remove Christ and His influence from the world.
Ephesians 2:2 tells us that Satan is the prince and the power of the air meaning that he rules on the earth. He has tremendous influence and reach on the earth but that doesn’t mean that Christians are expected to sit back and endure silently. Matthew 5:13-16 tells us that we are salt and light, and we are to let our light shine before others so that they may see the Father through us. Salt retards corruption and light outshines the darkness. We have a purpose and it’s to spread the message of Jesus Christ to a fallen world.
Truthfully, a God-fearing woman is the ultimate feminist. There is nothing more feminine and empowering than finding your God-appointed mate and creating life out of that love. Proverbs 31:10-31 describes a Godly wife and mother. The world has this distorted view of Christian women as lowly, meek pushovers who are afraid of their powerful husbands. While this might be the case for some, I assure you that is not what God intended. There is no gender priority according to God. One can simply not exist without the other. We were created with a specific design in mind. We were created uniquely and with specific responsibilities for home and for the body of Christ.
Christian friends, we need to be strong advocates for Christ and His design. The world’s effort to derail Christianity will only increase so now is the time to be rooted in our dedication to the Lord.
Ladies, be proud of being a Christ-centered woman. Love your husband unapologetically. Raise your children to know and love Jesus. Men, love and respect your wives and guide your families according to His Word. It takes strong men and women to boldly speak the truth in a dark world. Rise up and be proud of exactly who Christ created you to be.
Erica Caudill is a lifelong Christian who runs a blog. She is a married mother of two children. She can be reached at mrscaudill@me.com.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office, File
Last week, we reviewed our ruling class’s strange lack of interest in Jeffrey Epstein’s child molestation ring, in which so many of them played a part. The media cover-up is second only to the government cover-up, with prosecutors delivering loss after loss in cases they’ve been forced to bring (by the police and the public) against the child molester.
This week, we’ll look at the government’s long record of zealously trying NOT to unravel the case.
Barry Krischer was the first prosecutor to let Epstein off for child molestation. The local police presented then-Palm Beach state attorney Krischer with bales of evidence. They had affidavits from dozens of witnesses: girls abused by the pederast, the women who recruited them, the butler who cleaned up sex toys after the “massages,” as well as records of Epstein’s molestation appointments, one delayed because of a victim’s “soccer practice.”
Pretty much everything we know today about Epstein’s sex ring was unearthed by the Palm Beach Police back in 2005 and handed to Krischer on a silver platter.
Five underage girls had given police sworn statements that Epstein had sexually abused them, backed by 17 other witnesses, but when Krischer brought the case to the grand jury, weirdly, he allowed only one of the girls to testify — and then attacked her on the stand! (Epstein’s attorneys had helpfully provided Krischer’s office with the girl’s posts on MySpace, where she talked about boys and drinking, the little harlot.)
According to an extensive review by The Palm Beach Post, most of Krischer’s 2,800-page investigative file on the case consists of dirt against the teens — and against the police — given to him by Epstein’s lawyers. (Thanks, Epstein attorneys! Do we owe you anything?)
The grand jurors, who’d been meticulously kept in the dark by Krischer, ended up voting only for a single charge of “solicitation of prostitution” against Epstein in 2006. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years’ probation. No jail time, no record as a sex offender — no criminal record whatsoever.
According to Nexis, only one newspaper, The Palm Beach Post, reported at the time — or ever — that Palm Beach prosecutor Krischer gave Epstein probation for his years of child abuse.
Epstein’s friends claimed he was the victim of a crusade by Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter, whom they called a “born-again nutcase.” Apparently, anyone who thinks prison is appropriate for the mastermind of a massive child sex ring has gotta be “born-again.” (How does he feel about teenage girls talking about boys and drinking?) In fact, there’s no evidence that Reiter is even a Christian — other than the fact that he’s never won an award from the ADL.
(In 2018, the Anti-Defamation League gave a “Jurisprudence Award” to … Barry Krischer! The award praised him for “exemplifying the principles upon which the Anti-Defamation League was founded.” Hey, Jonathan Greenblatt, was Harvey Weinstein out of town?)
At that point, the enraged Palm Beach chief of police took his evidence to a completely separate law enforcement agency — the federal government, even though these were mostly state crimes. U.S. attorney Alex Acosta proceeded to make a deal with Epstein — with Krischer essentially operating as Epstein’s defense counsel — resulting in a plea only slightly tougher than Krischer’s pat on the head.
According to journalist Vicky Ward, Acosta later defended this sweetheart deal to the Trump transition team, explaining: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence‘ and to leave it alone.”
Most recently, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York brought a gentle prosecution against Epstein’s pimp and fellow child molester, Ghislaine Maxwell. Federal prosecutors called a mere four girls who claimed to have been recruited and/or abused by Maxwell. They could have put dozens of her victims on the stand.
Most notably, the Southern District did not call the star witness, Virginia Giuffre, who has openly named the rich and powerful men she says these creeps forced her to have sex with, including Prince Andrew, former Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, former New Mexico governor and presidential candidate Bill Richardson, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, French model scout Jean-Luc Brunel, and the hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, among others.
Immediately after the Southern District accidentally won five guilty verdicts against Maxwell, the prosecutors quietly revealed that, weeks earlier, they’d dismissed all charges against the prison guards who failed to check on Epstein for more than eight hours the night he allegedly committed suicide — despite an explicit directive that they check on him every 30 minutes.
The feds not only did not move Epstein to a super-maximum security prison as some observers recommended, but they also did this:
— The day before Epstein died, he was taken off suicide watch.
— Against orders, his cellmate transferred elsewhere, leaving Epstein completely alone in his cell.
— All the cameras on Epstein’s floor were mysteriously broken.
— Even the footage of his earlier suicide attempt had been mistakenly erased and the backup footage destroyed “as a result of technical errors,” according to assistant U.S. attorneys Jason Swergold and Maurene Comey.
How many times can they use the “we’re completely incompetent” defense? (Hey, does anybody know if this case implicates rich people?)
Maxwell’s brother soon announced to the press — and to anyone else who might be interested! — that his sister was no snitch. She wouldn’t rat out any of Epstein’s fellow child molesters in exchange for a lighter sentence.
Maxwell is facing up to 65 years in prison, and her brother has just admitted she can name names. Hello? SDNY? Any thoughts about applying some pressure?
Unfortunately, these are the same prosecutors who just did everything in their power to blow the case against her. My prediction of their next conversation with Maxwell: This is our last offer: 30 hours of community service — and we’re not kidding! OK, 20 hours. Damn — you’re one tough negotiator.
Most strange, the ink wasn’t dry on the guilty verdicts before one of the jurors ran to the press and announced that he’d lied on his juror questionnaire. Although he’d denied ever having been sexually molested, he had been! Not only that, but — hoo boy — did his experience with sex abuse sway the jurors during deliberations!
The defense immediately moved for a mistrial and the chatty juror moved to a villa in the south of France he’s just inherited from an unknown relative. OK, the second part isn’t true (that I know of), but are you kidding me??
Are prosecutors even investigating any contact between Maxwell’s representatives and the jurors? Will he be tried for perjury?
However this ends, once it’s over, we’ll never hear about Epstein again — unlike, say, Jan. 6, which we will never stop hearing about. If America got to vote, which story do you think they would find more interesting?
Which story is more important? Doesn’t the public have a right to know how big Epstein’s sex/blackmail club was, who among America’s ruling elite were compromised, and to what end?
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on ending the war in Afghanistan, August 31, 2021, in front of the Cross Hall of the White House. | White House/Adam Schultz
The media has largely moved on from the Afghanistan debacle, and many are all too eager to sweep the consequences of President Biden’s botched withdrawal under the rug. Yet, the repercussions will last lifetimes.
Currently, hundreds of parents and family members are seeking help for their starving children. Last year, the United Nations warned that one million Afghan children were at risk of starvation, and now many are struggling to make it through the winter.
On the best of days, Afghanistan has a near-universal poverty rate. Now, a famine and economic collapse are making it virtually impossible for many to meet their families’ basic needs. In sheer desperation, some parents are being driven to sell their young daughters into future marriages just so the family will have a few months’ worth of food. It’s an unthinkable choice — but one that some feel is their only chance to evade death by starvation when there is no work to be found.
One father’s decision has him in agony. He told CNN reporters that he could no longer sleep at night because he sold his nine-year-old daughter into marriage. The guilt and shame have “broken” him. Following unsuccessful attempts to find work, even traveling to the provincial capital, he said, “We are eight family members. I have to sell to keep other family members alive.” The money from the sale will feed the family for only a few months.
Sadly, the economic collapse in the wake of the Taliban’s rise was predicted and shouldn’t take Biden administration officials by surprise. The question now is how to respond.
The U.S. government is rightly being careful to avoid giving any financial aid to the Taliban. And although the United States donated funds through international humanitarian aid groups, Olivia Enos, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, has pointed out that current aid levels are expected to meet only 40% of the anticipated needs to get through the winter months. The Biden administration should seek effective solutions to get substantial help directly to suffering Afghans.
When it comes to promoting religious freedom in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has always fallen far short. The past 20 years of U.S. involvement in the country failed to produce a cultural acceptance of religious freedom or pluralism. The consequences continue. And for the Afghan Christians most endangered by the rise of the Taliban, the Biden administration’s actions (and inaction) were shameful.
Although certain groups of Afghan nationals were given Priority 2 (P-2) designation for the U.S. refugee program — which allows more direct access for individuals to apply when they are at immediate risk — religious minorities were not offered P-2 status. This is in spite of the Taliban openly threatening religious minorities and the number of minorities who would have utilized the program being small and manageable. The Biden administration should fix this error and extend P-2 status to Afghan religious minorities.
When private NGOs tried to help vulnerable Christians, women and others fleeing the Taliban, the State Department was accused of thwarting these rescue efforts. Josh Youssef, president of Help the Persecuted, helped organize refugee flights out of Afghanistan with endangered religious minorities. When he reached out to the State Department for help, he was told that he would have a better chance of the plane taking off if there were LGBT-identifying persons on board.
But religious minorities aren’t the only people with reason to fear. Amid the Taliban’s rollback of women’s rights, many women who had public professions are scrambling to hide their identities. Female athletes are on the run, changing locations every few weeks to avoid being caught and punished by the Taliban.
Women who served in the Afghan military or police are also hiding. Samima, who served in the Afghan Air Force, fled to a new location with her husband after she received phone calls from Taliban fighters and the Taliban began going door to door looking for former Afghan military members. She told The Wall Street Journal, “Thousands of girls like me are receiving threats, face an uncertain future and are being tracked by the Taliban.”
Countless Afghan girls and female university students have been kept at home and out of school since the Taliban’s return. For many, their dreams were put on hold in 2021, perhaps permanently.
Meanwhile, there are still Americans who remain stuck in Afghanistan. Not to mention the countless Afghan allies who worked for the U.S. military and were promised protection in just such a circumstance as a U.S. withdrawal.
The White House would be happy for us all to forget that the grossly mishandled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan ever happened. But we must not. America spent 20 years involved in this country; the people of Afghanistan deserve better than to be abandoned and ignored in their hour of most dire need. Furthermore, the American people deserve far better leadership than President Biden has shown throughout this ordeal largely of his own making.
By electing Joe Biden, Americans entrusted him with our foreign policy. The resulting human suffering in Afghanistan ought to be remembered as a grave stain upon Biden’s presidency.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: New York State Sex Offender Registry via AP
Question: Is our ruling class trying to make us to think they’re a bunch of pederasts? Our media could not be less interested in Jeffrey Epstein’s child molestation ring, and with the sole exception of the Palm Beach Police Department, every arm of government has bent over backward to bury the case. (Who says our media and government can’t work together?)
The jury’s courageous delivery last week of five “guilty” verdicts against Epstein’s pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell, was a sort of reverse jury nullification. The U.S. attorney’s office — the prosecution — did everything it could to get an acquittal, but the jurors defied them.
As for media coverage, did you even know that the FBI found Epstein’s cache of sex tapes labeled “(name of underage girl) + (name of VIP)” — and then lost them? Immediately after Epstein’s arrest at Teterboro Airport in July 2019, the FBI executed a search warrant on his New York mansion. Following a daylong search, agents discovered a hidden safe in the closet of a fifth-floor dressing room, used a saw to break into it, and found an enormous collection of photos of naked girls, and CDs of the girls apparently having sex with influential men. Then, the agents left — abandoning the photos and CDs, with Epstein’s employees free to wander about the place. As Kelly Maguire, FBI special agent in charge of the search, explained during Maxwell’s trial, they only had a warrant to search the house, but not to remove evidence — evidence at the heart of the entire sex trafficking scheme.
It didn’t occur to Maguire to leave a single agent behind to guard the CDs? How about the intern who just gets coffee?
You’ll never guess what happened next.
The CDs and photographs disappeared. By the time the FBI returned with a new warrant — four days later — to remove the CDs and photos, they were gone. Later, after a few phone calls, Epstein’s lawyer, Richard Kahn, “returned” the cache in two suitcases. I had no idea they were important! I was just tidying up!
Were the videos tampered with? Were all of the photos returned? Who knows!
This was testified to by Special Agent Maguire. That’s the last time I trust the lawyer of a pedophile! Boy, is my face red! Darn it! … Oh well, what are you going to do?
(Before moving on, let’s take a moment to honor the historic appointment of Kelly Maguire as FBI special agent. Another glass ceiling shattered!)
How could any search warrant for Epstein’s residence fail to specify videos? The reason the tapes are kind of important is that it was perfectly clear — certainly by 2019 — that Epstein had no legitimate source of income to fund his Caligula lifestyle, and further, that he was farming out underage girls for sex to the rich and powerful — with hidden cameras running everywhere. It sure looked like his underage sex ring was a blackmail/kompromat operation.
Obviously, the most important question is: On behalf of whom? The tapes of “(underage girl) + (important person)” would have gone a long way toward answering that. What did the search warrant specify, if not videos and photographs?
If I didn’t know better, I might think that those in power don’t want us to know anything about Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation.
As further evidence that there is ABSOLUTELY NO COVER-UP: The New York Times has never breathed a single word about the CDs lost in the FBI’s botched search. Nor has The Washington Post. Nor the Chicago Tribune. Nor the Los Angeles Times. Wait — I’ll make this easier: Here’s a list of all the major U.S. newspapers that did report on Maguire’s breathtaking revelation:
1) The Miami Herald
2) The New York Post
The end.
Oddly, media in the rest of the world seemed to find Maguire’s testimony about the vanishing CDs somewhat more newsworthy. The story of the missing tapes was covered — repeatedly — in The Daily Telegraph (London), The Independent (United Kingdom), The Daily Mail (Ireland), Economic News (Russia) and the Daily Mail (U.K.), among others.
The totally not-a-cover-up gets weirder and weirder.
Epstein had vast wealth, and we still don’t know where it came from. Normally, the IRS is extremely curious about unexplained flows of riches. Did the IRS decide in this case, Well, he may be a committed and energetic pedophile, but as far as we know, he’s a conscientious taxpayer!
Similarly, there are vague claims that he made his money from “investments.” The SEC wasn’t the least bit interested in finding out how he got this rich from secretive “investment” services?
And this: Epstein spent decades aggressively cultivating powerful, important men, quite a few from foreign countries — evidently taping all their activities. Why wasn’t the CIA concerned? Couldn’t he have sold dirt on U.S. politicians to foreign intel agencies?
Finally, it’s odd that our government wasn’t concerned about how much blackmail material Epstein had gathered on high-level U.S. officials. Doesn’t the FBI try to prevent that sort of situation? Or the Secret Service?
How was it that all these agencies let Epstein keep up his activities for so long?
There’s much more to this story. Stay tuned for next week!
COVID-19 isn’t all bad. It appears that one of its side effects is turning Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers into a combination of Muhammad Ali and Navin R. Johnson.
Of course, you remember Ali, the greatest boxer of all time. Ali fell under the spell of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X and risked prison and invited national scorn by refusing induction into the military and participation in the Vietnam War.
But do you remember Navin Johnson, the jerk? He was the lead character in the 1979 movie classic “The Jerk.” Comedian Steve Martin played the role of Navin, the white adopted son of black Southern sharecroppers. Navin hilariously has no idea that his black parents adopted him.
Rodgers has fallen under the spell of podcasters Joe Rogan and Pat McAfee and has refused the COVID vaccine injection. The quarterback’s defiance apparently is going to jeopardize his chance to win the NFL’s MVP award and has invited national scorn.
One of the 50 voters for the Associated Press’ MVP award, Hub Arkush, labeled Rodgers the biggest jerk in the league and a bad guy and stated that he won’t vote Rodgers MVP for that reason.
Rodgers is the jerk. He had no idea that deciding what’s best for his body would provoke lunatics to treat him like a 1960s black man.
“I don’t think you can be the biggest jerk in the league and punish your team, and your organization and your fan base the way he did and be the most valuable player,” Arkush said during a radio interview. “Has he been the most valuable on the field? Yeah, you could make that argument, but I don’t think he is clearly that much more valuable than Jonathan Taylor or Cooper Kupp or maybe even Tom Brady. So, from where I sit, the rest of it is why he’s not gonna be my choice.”
This is the kind of utter lunacy COVID has sparked among the Branch Covidians, the mask-wearing leftists who believe “my body, my choice” only applies to killing children in the womb.
Arkush reminds me of David Susskind, the popular American TV host who trashed Ali on national television shortly after a jury disregarded Ali’s religious objection and convicted him of refusing the draft.
“I find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man,”Susskind said. “He’s a disgrace to his country, his race, and what he laughingly describes as his profession. He is a convicted felon in the United States. He has been found guilty. He is out on bail. He will inevitably go to prison, as well he should. He is a simplistic fool and pawn.”
I find nothing amusing or tolerable about the way Rodgers has been treated since it was discovered his COVID immunization didn’t include taking the experimental medical trial that is being hailed as the corona silver bullet. Arkush gave voice to a sentiment that could derail Rodgers’ MVP candidacy. Arkush was dumb for publicly admitting his bias, but he’s not remotely alone.
Many people within corporate media think it’s perfectly fine to discriminate against the unvaccinated. Rodgers could face additional discrimination because he appears to be flirting with the concept of publicly embracing conservative values.
During ESPN’s Monday Night Football broadcast, Rodgers yukked it up with Peyton and Eli Manning, bragged about reading Ayn Rand’s pro-capitalism manifesto “Atlas Shrugged,” and mentioned his Chuck Norris bobblehead. Norris, the action movie star, is a prominent, unashamed Hollywood Republican.
Back in October, I wrote a column about Rodgers cleverly supporting comedian Dave Chappelle by ripping cancel culture and the woke mob during a podcast interview with McAfee.
From way on the outside, it looks like someone slipped Rodgers the red pill.
Or maybe the No. 1 side effect of COVID is the red pill? The red pill is ivermectin?
COVID isn’t all bad. It’s forcing people to wake up and recognize the lies global elites, politicians, Hollywood, Big Tech, and corporate media are shoving into our brains and veins. The beauty of COVID is that it impacts all of us. Men, women, and children. Rich and poor. Old and young. Black, white, and brown. Believers and nonbelievers. Educated and uneducated. Famous and unfamous. It’s unifying in the same way that critical race theory has unified parents concerned about what is being taught inside our public schools. Teaching kids to view our country as a force for evil makes a rational person pause, ponder, and push back.
That’s what’s happening with Aaron Rodgers and people across the globe as it relates to COVID and the alleged vaccines. There are too many lies to be ignored or written off as honest mistakes, too many negative consequences to not raise your voice out of concern.
The lockdowns and isolation have sparked a rise in suicides and depression. The normal, healthy development of kids has been compromised. The experimental medical trials don’t seem to prevent COVID as advertised.
The COVID pandemic just might save freedom. It might make men stand up. It has certainly inspired Aaron Rodgers, the NFL’s most talented and interesting player. Rodgers is remaking “The Jerk” into a superhero movie.
“When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health, that of the family, but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community. And in other words, you become a dead end to the virus.”~Dr. Fauci, Face the Nation, May 16, 2021
“Negative efficacy.” Get used to that term, because every day more data suggests we are already in the vaccination twilight zone of all pain and no gain – just as with the lockdowns.
It is tearing humanity apart. COVID fascism is the most serious human rights threat we’ve faced in our lifetimes, and the latest science and data demonstrate that it’s all built upon a false premise. While people tuned out the news over the holiday week, many have missed the growing incontrovertible evidence that not only is there risk and zero benefit to taking any of the COVID shots, but there is actually negative efficacy against the virus. In other words, not only does it put you on the hook for known and unknown short-term and long-term injury without stopping COVID, it now, actually, makes you more vulnerable to COVID.
As you read these latest points, just remember that this is the injection for which police in Europe are now using dogs and batons against those protesting it. All these human rights abuses for a shot that, especially with the new variant, has become moot.
1) 96% of all Omicron cases in Germany among vaccinated: The respected Robert Koch Institute reported last week that among the 4,206 Germans infected with Omicron for whom their vaccination status was known, 95.58% were fully vaccinated. More than a quarter of them had booster shots. Given that the overall background rate for vaccination in Germany is 70%, this means that the shots now have a -87% effectiveness rate against Omicron.
2) Omicron among vaccinated outpacing unvaccinated by 28% in Ontario: The government in Ontario posts continuous data on case rates by vaccination status. The fact that the vaccinated have rapidly overtaken the unvaccinated in new infections demonstrates a clear negative effect of the shots against Omicron.
3) In Denmark, 89.7% of all Omicron cases were among fully vaccinated: As of Dec. 31, just 8.5% of all cases in Denmark were unvaccinated, according to the Statens Serum Institut. Overall, 77.9% of Denmark is fully vaccinated, and Omicron seems to hit younger people for whom there is a greater unvaccinated pool, which indicates clear negative efficacy. Even for non-Omicron variants, the un-injected composed only 23.7% of the cases.
4) Just 25% of the Omicron hospitalizations in the U.K. are unvaccinated: Not only are the vaccinated more likely to contract Omicron, but they are likely more at risk to be hospitalized. While American hospitals put out unverifiable information about “nearly everyone seriously ill with COVID being unvaccinated,” the U.K. continues to put out quality continuous data that shows the opposite. According to the U.K.’s Health Security Agency’s latest “Omicron daily overview,” just 25% of those in the hospital with suspected Omicron cases are unvaccinated.
Although that is roughly in line with the percentage of unvaccinated overall in the U.K., we know that Omicron cases are overwhelmingly among younger people who have a greater share of the unvaccinated. Dr. Abdi Mahamud, the WHO’s incident manager for COVID, said last week that Omicron has not hit most of the elderly yet.
According to the latest U.K. vaccine surveillance report (p. 21), between 32% and 40% of the age groups under 40 are unvaccinated. Which means that, with a 25% hospitalization rate, the unvaccinated are very possibly underrepresented in the Omicron hospitalized population, which again indicates negative efficacy to the shots.
5) 33 of 34 hospitalizations in Delhi hospital were vaccinated: The Indian Express reported that 33 of the 34 people hospitalized for Omicron in Delhi’s Lok Nayak hospital were fully vaccinated. Two of them received the booster shot. While some of them were international travelers, it’s important to remember that India has a much lower vaccination rate than the West. This is another small indication that not only might one be more likely to get Omicron after having gotten the shots, but possibly could be more vulnerable to hospitalizations, very likely due to some form of antibody dependent disease enhancement (ADE).
6) Vaccinated exponentially more likely to get re-infected with COVID: A new preprint study from Bangladesh found that among 404 people re-infected with COVID, having been vaccinated made someone 2.45 times more likely to get re-infected with a mild infection, 16.1 times more likely to get a moderate infection, and 3.9 times more likely to be re-infected severely, relative to someone with prior infection who was not vaccinated. Although overall re-infections were rare, vaccination was a greater risk factor of re-infection that co-morbidities!
Hence, the findings of this first-in-its-kind study harmonize with what a Public Health England survey found in October; namely, that the vaccines seem to erase a degree of N (nucleocapsid) antibodies generated by prior infection in favor of narrower S (spike) antibodies. “Recent observations from UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) surveillance data that N antibody levels appear to be lower in individuals who acquire infection following 2 doses of vaccination,” stated the week 42 report from the U.K. (p. 23).
This finding also correlates with what researchers from Mount Sinai in New York and Hospital La Paz in Madrid found last year – that the second dose of the vaccine “determines a contraction of the spike-specific T cell response.” In that report, researchers already observed that other research has shown “the second vaccination dose appears to exert a detrimental effect in the overall magnitude of the spike-specific humoral response in COVID-19 recovered individuals.”
At this point, how is there any benefit, much less a net benefit, from the shots? There are currently 21,000 deaths reported to VAERS, along with 110,000 hospitalizations and over 1 million total adverse events. Most deaths and injuries are never reported to VAERS. Now that the efficacy is, at best, a wash and at worst negative, why are we not discussing the short-term and long-term liabilities of the shots?
Remember, the VAERS numbers don’t even begin to quantify the long-term concerns, such as cancer and auto-immune diseases. A heavily redacted analysis of the Pfizer shot (p. 16) from the Australian Therapeutic Goods Agency (TGA) flatly conceded, “Neither genotoxicity nor carcinogenicity studies were performed.”
Consider the fact that the CEO of Indiana-based life insurance company OneAmerica, which has been around since 1877, revealed last week that the death rate among 18- to 64-year-old Hoosiers is up 40% from pre-pandemic levels. That is four times above what risk assessors consider catastrophic. Yes, some of this has been due to the virus, but given the age group, OneAmerica CEO Scott Davidson said that most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths. Brian Tabor, the president of the Indiana Hospital Association, who spoke at the same news conference as Davidson, said that Indiana hospitals are flooded with patients “with many different conditions.” Any wonder what those ailments are if not COVID itself? Indeed, those who say the injections are a “medical miracle” are correct, just not in the way they meant it.
Professional sports are no longer a force for good. They do not unify us. They do not inspire us to seek our better selves. They do not provoke participants to take bold and courageous stances. For the first time in my lifetime, I believe professional sports do more harm to American society than good.
This is what ran across my mind yesterday as I watched Tampa Bay wide receiver Antonio Brown strip off his uniform mid-game, toss his equipment to the ground, wave to the crowd, and run off the field.
Professionalized football – collegiate and the NFL – exacerbated the emotional problems that have plagued Brown since childhood. Because of his immense talent, football afforded Brown the opportunity to ignore the mental scars a dysfunctional upbringing in South Florida wrought. Worse, the new social media demands of professional sports sank Brown further into the mental abyss.
Over the next few days, you will hear plenty of analysts and Twitter pundits speculate that Brown is suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy – CTE. CTE and white supremacy are the popular and corporate-media-approved explanations given any time a professional football player, particularly a black one, behaves poorly. They’re bogus excuses that ignore the fact that bigotry and head trauma in sports have been around since gladiators fought lions for the entertainment of the masses. If CTE is real and the cause of unstable behavior, then Spartacus, Bronko Nagurski, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Walter Payton, and Joe Montana should all have melted down.
No, what’s new and what explains both Antonio Brown’s plunge into bizarro world and the rapid decay of professional sports as a force for good is the importance of social media brand-building. Brown has no more or less CTE than Troy Aikman, Jim Brown, Joe Montana, Dick Butkus, or any prizefighter.
Brown is suffering from mass formation psychosis. Yep, the psychological disorder Dr. Robert Malone discussed in his infamous Joe Rogan interview. Malone, of course, was talking about our exaggerated fear of COVID-19. Malone compared modern America to Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
“A very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad,” he said. “When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.”
Here’s how I translate Malone’s explanation: America, the land of individualism and independent thought, is suffering from social and corporate media-induced groupthink. It’s made us choose group fear over individual freedom. It’s made us crazy. Antonio Brown is nuts, and his addiction to Instagram and Twitter is making him crazier. He turned a rather routine sideline dispute between himself and Bruce Arians into a career-ending confrontation and walk-off. It’s not all that surprising if you have been following Brown’s descent. In 2018, ESPN’s Jesse Washington wrote a prescient piece on Brown and his love affair with the social media matrix. The article perfectly captures the negative impact social media was having on Brown’s reality and worldview.
Brown is the micro. Professional sports are the macro. Social media has eroded the value and integrity of professional sports. It’s done the same thing to corporate media and public discourse. It’s at the root of American division. Social media is a cancer. Mass formation psychosis is just a strand of social media cancer.
For today, I don’t want to stray too far from sports.
Let’s look beyond Antonio Brown. Let’s look at a football player with an impeccable reputation and the damage social media is doing to him: Tom Brady. He suffers from mass formation psychosis, too. You will never convince me Brady believes in the experimental COVID vaccines. Never. The man is meticulous about what he puts into his body. But he has a social media brand he must protect, so he pretends to be on board with the experimental medical trials being forced on the American public.
Pro athletes are cowards. They’re tools of major corporations. They’ve completely sold out for money. They live in fear of the social media mob. Combined, Brady and his wife, Giselle Bundchen, are worth close to a billion dollars. Brady has the money and the accomplishments to say and do whatever he wants. He could use his voice and his platform to speak against the vaccine mandates and the stupid and divisive NFL COVID protocols. He remains silent.
The same goes for LeBron James. He’s a slave to his social media following. Pretending that cops are on a murderous rampage against American black men pleases social media and the Chinese Communist Party. The point of view is detached from reality and a symptom of mass formation psychosis.
Professional sports used to reveal and sharpen a man’s character. We’re all flawed. Participation in sports used to shave some of our flaws. Now the games solely reward talent and men willing to swallow and promote whatever agenda Big Tech and global corporations dictate.
Antonio Brown won the talent lottery. That’s why the Steelers, Raiders, Patriots, Buccaneers, and Tom Brady kept bending their standards to make room for Brown. For me, the Great Reset is turning into my personal Great Awakening. Professional sports and their participants solely serve the dollar. The difference between Antonio Brown and Tom Brady isn’t as significant as you might think.
When filmmaker Woody Allen was publicly exposed in 1992 as having an affair with the adopted daughter of his partner Mia Farrow (Soon-Yi Previn, 34 years his junior), his defense was simply, “The heart wants what it wants.”
In quoting a statement made in an 1862 Emily Dickinson letter, Allen perfectly sums up the rationale underpinning today’s prevailing secular worldview, which is a deadly combination of post-truth and pragmatism, and driven solely by the adherent’s heart wanting what it wants.
And so what ends up happening?
The heart wants what it wants so it elevates itself above everyone else, putting others last, thus becoming the quintessential, prideful Captain You-Planet.
The heart wants what it wants so it commits smash-and-grab, follow-home, and brazen what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it robberies, taking from others what it hasn’t earned.
The heart wants what it wants so it goes to a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic to end the life of a person it finds currently inconvenient.
The heart wants what it wants so it breaks its marriage vows and destroys its family all for nothing more than a muscle spasm.
The heart wants what it wants so it refuses to work and lives off of others because it bizarrely believes it is entitled to do so.
The heart wants what it wants so it suppresses truth and rewrites history to fit a lying narrative that furthers its agenda and enriches itself.
The heart wants what it wants so it cancels disagreement and slanders others because they threaten its echo chamber’s false peace.
The heart wants what it wants so it misuses religion in order to murder, suppress, oppress, and exploit people in hopes of getting the power, position, and wealth it desires.
The heart wants what it wants so it deliberately thinks with its feelings instead of using the mind and facts to arrive at conclusions that may be distasteful at first, but saving in the end.
In his article for The Blaze, Jason Whitlock writes, “My problem [with today’s culture] is its aspiration to redefine every form of sin as a natural desire we should not tame. “Do what thou wilt” is the unstated overarching theme of progressive politics. “Do what thou wilt” is the primary tenet of the Thelema occult practice established by English writer Aleister Crowley, a Satanist.”
This dovetails exactly with how the Bible describes the natural, sinful heart. Scripture says that “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5), that the heart is “more deceitful than all else and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9); that we are “brought forth in iniquity” (Ps. 51:5) and “he who trusts in his own heart is a fool” (Prov. 28:26); that “the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives” (Ecc. 9:3) and “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders” (Matt. 15:19).
Needless to say, it’s a terrible thing when that kind of heart gets what it wants.
What God’s heart wants
God knows the sinful heart wants what it wants and so He’s provided a cure that’s announced throughout Scripture. His Law acts as a tutor (Gal. 3:24) to bring us what we really need because, says Tim Keller, a sinful heart is one where “law only restrains the heart; it doesn’t change it.”
That being true, we find early in the Old Testament God said, “[I] will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul” (Deut. 30:6). In the pages of the prophets, God says: “I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in My statutes and keep My ordinances and do them” (Ez. 11:19-20), and “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it” (Jer. 31:33).
The awesome end result is a person where “the law of his God is in his heart; his steps do not slip” (Ps. 37:30-31) and they say, “I delight to do Your will, O my God; your Law is within my heart” (Ps. 40:8).
The miraculous change is perfectly captured in a verse from John Newton’s hymn, “We Were Once as You Are”: “Our pleasure and our duty, though opposite before; since we have seen His beauty, are joined to part no more.”
And so what ends up happening?
The heart wants what God wants so it elevates others above itself and washes others’ feet.
The heart wants what God wants so it doesn’t rob others and steal what it hasn’t earned.
The heart wants what God wants so it values the life of everyone, including the unborn.
The heart wants what God wants so it is loyal to its spouse and keeps its marriage vows.
The heart wants what God wants so it works with its hands to support itself and is generous to others.
The heart wants what God wants so it upholds and speaks the truth in love, following the narrative of Scripture.
The heart wants what God wants so it respectfully engages dissenting voices and is in no way threatened by different opinions (Phil. 1:28).
The heart wants what God wants so it engages in pure and undefiled religion (James 1:27), serving those around it with no self-centered agenda.
The heart wants what God wants so it is deliberately mature in its thinking (1 Cor. 14:20) and is Holy Spirit led vs. emotions driven.
Needless to say, it’s a fantastic thing when that kind of heart gets what it wants.
In truth, Woody Allen’s explanation for his actions is correct. However, the effect of “the heart wants what it wants” on culture is dependent on whether the heart in question is one that gives itself over to its natural, sinful desires or one that is born again (John 3:3) and acts under the direction of God.
Needless to say, what the world desperately needs today is the latter where everywhere society turns, it sees people who are, “a letter of Christ … written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Cor. 3:3).
Robin Schumacher is an accomplished software executive and Christian apologist who has written many articles, authored and contributed to several Christian books, appeared on nationally syndicated radio programs, and presented at apologetic events. He holds a BS in Business, Master’s in Christian apologetics and a Ph.D. in New Testament. His latest book is, A Confident Faith: Winning people to Christ with the apologetics of the Apostle Paul.
“Remember the reason for the season!” is the sign we see all over once the holidays start popping up. What is that exactly?
It’s funny, when I was growing up, everyone knew what the reason was. Not everyone recognized or believed in the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made for the sins of the world. But we lived in a culture and a country that at least knew what it was, even if some rejected it.
It’s different now.
Our culture, our nation, has splintered. There are many many reasons for this, but one of those is that we just don’t celebrate Christianity in as unified a way as we used to. People in the Western World simply don’t have as much space for any faith, much less Christianity, as we used to.
But the central reason for Christmas is still one that all people can recognize, despite their faith, or lack thereof. The reason for the season is that no man is an island, and we all have people that came before us that sacrificed in order for us to be where we are, to have what we have and be what we are. And it is good for us to stop and think about those sacrifices made for us, and be thankful, and grateful.
And this is true in every spheres of our lives.
As an American, a central part of my identity is to be grateful for all the people who sacrificed so much for this incredible nation to be created and maintained for decades until I was lucky enough to participate in it. Part of my identity is to continue that work, in whatever way I can, to preserve and maintain the institutions upon which this country is founded, and those that made it great.
Part of my identity is to recognize the sacrifices my father and my mother made to make me who I am, and to be grateful to them and respect those sacrifices by living a life they would be proud of. That extends to my own family now, I have to repay the sacrifices made for me by sacrificing for them.
Even as simply a person who was born at a time where the world has advanced to such an incredible age, I have to force myself to stop sometimes, quit taking things for granted, and look around and marvel at the awesome miracles that technology and our human inventiveness have produced for us to share and flourish. Even those are gifts from a God who planted that inventiveness into the human soul and provided the elements in creation for us to invent with.
Part of the reason I believe in Christianity is that I have so much to be grateful for. The central story, the incredible narrative at the center of the Bible is that a holy and perfect God came down to save humanity and made an unfathomable sacrifice for us, to redeem us from our sins, and draw us to Him in a way we could never do on our own. It is the highest most perfect sacrifice that encompasses all others.
As I look around at every miraculous good that God has provided to me, to all of us, I am reminded at the reason for this holy season.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
They’re doing it again. The New York Times is aggressively hiding relevant facts on a matter of public interest simply in order to promote the narrative of black victimhood.
OK, we didn’t get away with it last time, but we probably will this time. Let’s try!
Daunte Wright is the half-black man fatally shot by a police officer in Minnesota earlier this year. According to Nexis, he has appeared in well over 100 articles in the Times. But one thing Times readers will never be told is that Wright was facing criminal charges for trying to choke a woman to death while robbing her at gunpoint. They will also never hear about the lawsuit accusing Wright and an accomplice of shooting a guy during a carjacking.
In a bold departure from customary practice, the Times did make two passing references to another lawsuit claiming Wright shot a guy in the head, permanently disabling him, but in both cases, quickly added: “The lawsuit offers no direct evidence tying Mr. Wright to the shooting.”
And those are just the crimes he’s accused of committing lately, during the brief year and a half since he turned 18 and was no longer treated as a juvenile.
When it comes to Wright’s legal problems, the Times didn’t even pull its usual trick of putting all the interesting information in paragraph 20. These grisly allegations, as set forth in police reports and lawsuits, have been completely, 100% censored from the Newspaper of Record.
This isn’t a genteel refusal to “put the victim on trial.” Wright’s short but exciting criminal record is highly relevant to the convulsions this country has been going through since George Floyd’s death at the hands of the police in 2020 — convulsions painstakingly fostered by the Times.
Contrary to the media’s black victimhood narrative, there’s a very good reason Wright was in a position to be confronted by the police and in a way that most people are not.
In addition to allegedly committing a slew of gun crimes before the age of 20 (based on only one year and six months of public records), Wright was stopped for driving with expired license plate tags. He didn’t have car insurance. He also didn’t have a driver’s license. (And yes, white people are busted for these infractions all the time.)
When the officers ran his name, they discovered that Wright was driving on a suspended license, there was a restraining order against him, and a bench warrant for his arrest on a weapons charge. They had no choice: They had to arrest him. But as one officer began to handcuff him, Wright resisted, jumped back in his car and was about to flee — along with an officer trapped in the passenger window, trying to get control of the gears.
That’s when Wright got shot.
In other words, this case isn’t exactly a primo example of “Driving While Black.” That’s why The New York Times hides all the pertinent facts.
For example, last week, the Times finally — glancingly — mentioned Wright’s lack of a driver’s license and insurance. (That’s if you don’t count a recent article about how Minnesota laws adversely affect minorities — “even regulations about driver’s licenses and renewal of tags.”)
On the other hand, the Times has run 16 articles about Wright’s … air freshener! (E.g.: “How a Common Air Freshener Can Result in a High-Stakes Traffic Stop”). That 16 more than all its articles on Hunter Biden’s laptop!
What is the Times talking about? It seems that, immediately after the shooting, Wright’s mother told the media that he’d been stopped merely for having an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror — AND NOW HE WAS DEAD!
That’s completely untrue, but it’s the story the Times is going with. No new information will be allowed to penetrate the paper’s BLM cocoon.
Times reporters must have heard about the armed robbery/choking incident, because they’ve repeatedly quoted Wright’s accomplice in the crime, Emajay Driver. On April 13, Nov. 30, Dec. 8 and Dec. 17 the Times ran some version of this quote:
“‘He loved to make people laugh,’ said Emajay Driver, a friend of Mr. Wright. ‘He was just great to be around. There was never a dull moment.'”
And that’s all we get from Mr. Driver.
New York Times: Say, we saw that police report about you and Daunte nearly choking a woman to death while committing an armed robbery. So naturally, we have to ask: Do you by any chance have any heartwarming stories about him?
Somewhat more important than Daunte’s love of laughter are the details of that incident, given at length in America’s Greatest Newspaper, the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
On Dec. 1, 2019, Wright and Driver crashed at the apartment of a 20-year-old woman they’d been partying with. The next morning, the woman’s roommate went out to get $820 in rent money, handed it to her, then left for work.
Just before the attack, Wright locked himself in the victim’s bathroom for a noticeably long time in order to make videos of himself with a gun, and to empty a bottle of hand sanitizer onto his gun. (Daunte, with his simple, trusting nature, apparently believed an urban legend that sanitizer “blocks” fingerprints.)
Minutes later, as the three of them were exiting the apartment, Wright suddenly blocked the door, pointed the gun at the woman’s head, saying, “Give me the f-ing money. I know you have it.” (Me to The New York Times: Give us the f-ing facts. We know you have them.)
She refused, asking “Are you serious?” Wright barked, “We’re not playing around,” and grabbed her by the neck, choking her, as she dropped to her knees, with the gun in his other hand still pointed at her head. “You look into his eyes,” the victim later said, “and it’s so evil.”
Next, he tried ripping her shirt open to get the money, perhaps having seen her hiding it in her bra earlier. She screamed, and Wright began choking her again. (As Wright’s accomplice so poignantly said, there was never a dull moment with this guy.)
Finally, Wright and Driver ran off, hopping into a white Cadillac that was waiting for them.
They were arrested five days later. Driver pleaded guilty to first-degree aggravated robbery, his second felony conviction. He was facing 20 years in prison, but only got probation, leading some to speculate that he’d made a deal to testify against Wright.
Again: The Times hasn’t printed a single detail of Wright’s give-me-the-f-ing-money robbery attempt. Or the lawsuit about the carjacking. In one of more than 100 articles, there were two brief mentions of his shooting a guy in the head.
As for the trial of Kim Potter, the officer who shot Wright, neither the prosecution nor defense disputes that it was a mistake, that she thought she was holding her Taser. Several officers, and the defense’s use-of-force expert, testified that Potter would have been fully justified in shooting Wright in order to protect the other officer from being dragged by the car.
But Wright “loved to make people laugh.” That’s all the Times wants you to know.
“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” —George Orwell
There is nowhere to run or hide from the growing observations that the closer we come to universal vaccination rates in many countries, the worse the pandemic has become. We have always known that leaky vaccines have the potential to create viral enhancement, but the recent data is unmistakable. At the same time, the COVID cultists are panicking over an emerging variant that actually might be the mildest of all while mainly affecting the vaccinated — a perfect refutation to the mass vaccination push. All signs point to the need to suspend the shots and focus exclusively on monoclonal antibodies and other early treatment. Or is there an ulterior motive?
At this point, we better pray that Omicron becomes dominant in the U.S. as quickly as possible. The most devastating observation of 2021 is that more people have died from COVID under the mass vaccination regime during the existing variant than before there was a single jab. According to the CDC’s “Data Table for Daily Death Trends,” there have been 127,184 COVID deaths from September 1 through November 30 this year, which is 45% greater than the 87,829 recorded deaths over the same period in 2020. And some of the deaths from this year are still lagging and likely to be updated.
Typically, viruses mutate down and become less virulent. Last year, there was much less built up immunity, we had fewer treatment options, and we had zero vaccines. It is nearly impossible to ignore the fact that the narrow-spectrum leaky vaccine has made the virus much worse.
During the peak of the winter wave in January, there were 19 recorded deaths for 15- to 17-year-olds. In August, when the vaccines began to leak and we likely experienced vaccine-mediated viral enhancement, kids noticeably got sicker. Although deaths were still very rare, there were 63 recorded deaths among that age cohort, and the numbers have generally remained higher.
Imagine if we had put all the funds for the leaky shots into the monoclonal antibodies and an outpatient treatment regime built on the latest research of dozens of therapeutics that have shown promise in combatting the virus. Yet rather than focus on alternatives and investigate what went wrong with the injections, our establishment leaders are doubling down, even as the failure is undeniably in plain sight. As such, it’s hard to escape the sinister conclusion that they intended this all along.
Consider the fact that Cornell University has an ironclad vaccine and mask mandate, yet 3.5% of the entire campus tested positive last week alone. The school has now switched to online learning.
Consider the fact that before the NFL season started, 52 of 53 players on the L.A. Rams’ roster were vaccinated. Now they lead the league with 11 players on the COVID list.
Consider the fact that Newton, Massachusetts, has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with 97% of the entire population vaccinated, including 99% of 12- to 15-year-olds and 87% of 5- to 11-year-olds. Yet, despite this and indoor mask mandates, the town has more cases than this time last year and is likely headed toward a record.
Consider the fact that a country like South Korea barely recorded deaths during the entire pandemic, but now has many more cases and deaths, with nearly all adults vaccinated and one of the highest vaccination rates for a country that large (over 50 million).
Consider the fact that England and France, both with very high vaccination rates and large prior COVID waves, have recently set case records.
Likewise, Portugal, with the highest double-vaxxed rate in Europe, now has more cases than during the winter peak.
Several months ago, a Harvard study published in the European Journal of Epidemiology, the only one to look at thousands of U.S. counties and different countries to study correlation between vaccination rates and case rates, found zero correlation. “In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people,” concluded the author.
The establishment suggests that the shots at least provide some with temporary protection from critical illness. But what good is that if the shots actually make the virus more virulent for everyone and then offer a degree of preventive protection for its consumers while screwing everyone else?
Let’s not forget that Dr. Fauci warned from day one that you need a perfect vaccine because a half-baked one runs the risk of making the virus worse. In an interview with Mark Zuckerberg last March, Fauci said in response to those who wanted rushed vaccines, “If you vaccinate someone, and they make an antibody response, and then they get exposed and infected, does the response that you induce actually enhance the infection and make it worse? The only way you’ll know that is if you do an extended study [not on volunteers, but on the public].”
"If you vaccinate someone, and they make an antibody response, and then they get exposed and infected, does the response that you induce enhance the infection and make it worse? The only way you'll know that is if you do an extended study [not on volunteers, but on the public]." pic.twitter.com/OJbXAzGobh
“This would not be the first time, if it happened, that a vaccine that looked good in initial safety actually made people worse,” he continued when the Facebook CEO pressed him on rushing forward with a vaccine.
A month later, Fauci warned at a press conference that “the worst possible thing you could do” is vaccinate someone and create enhancement.
Well, a year and a half later, isn’t that exactly what we are seeing? Remember, the FDA warned during the initial emergency approval period that “risk of vaccine-enhanced disease over time, potentially associated with waning immunity, remains unknown.” And that’s at a time when the FDA didn’t know just how badly these shots would wane … or did it? Is it perhaps the intent to create the need for endless shots to fix the immune suppression and viral enhancement created by the first round – just like a heroin addict who constantly needs more poison to temporarily assuage the latest withdrawal symptoms, until he descends into a death spiral?
It is now universally accepted that the vaccine first suppresses your immune system, possibly for six weeks following the first shot, before it provides any protection for a few months thereafter. To encourage people to vaccinate even more while the numbers are high is the surest way of enabling more people to get the virus. This will create an endless feedback loop, driving a vicious cycle of suppressed immune systems, vaccine-mediated viral enhancement, and excess mortality from both the side effects and from COVID, which in turn generates fear to pressure more boosters in the hardest-hit areas. The German state of North Rhine-Westphalia is making boosters available for people to take every four weeks. Thus, the more the shots fail, the more the makers succeed. It’s no longer enough to oppose mandates. It’s time to stand athwart history and yell “STOP” to this entire vicious cycle.
Inflation. COVID-19. Ballooning federal debt made worse by irresponsible spending in Congress. Lost jobs from medically coercive mandates. A supply chain crisis. Racist and sexually explicit narratives flooding public schools while concerned parents are targeted as terrorists. A heartbreakingly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. An aggressive dictatorship in China that perpetuates horrific human rights abuses. A border crisis.
Conservatives pride ourselves on our ability to see the world without the rose-tinted lenses of progressives. If men were angels, we would need no government (or government accountability), we say — but men are no angels and thus we must be skeptics.
That candid recognition of our world’s imperfection often leaves us discouraged. We are frustrated that so many naively buy the blatant lies of the corporate press and corrupt politicians, and that even basic truths like “don’t kill babies” and “boys and girls are different” meet vicious opposition.
Yet, unlike the utopian dreams of the globalist left, our goal is not and has never been the perfection of the system. Conservatives should not hope to “fix” the world — nor be despondent when it proves unfixable. While we should seek to cultivate and steward our culture and our communities, our inability to shut off the fire hose of foolishness, evil, and sin in our world today should remind us we await another one.
We Are Made to Long for the Eternal
The Advent season is a time to recall the ancient posture of a world awaiting its savior. We recall the longing of a people who had waited 400 years for the voice of God and millennia for his promised salvation.
But there is another Advent, or arrival, to which we look. We long for the day in which we will surrender our earthly failures and enjoy the presence of a heavenly God. Far from discouraging us, the shortcomings of Earth should embolden our hope. If men were angels, neither heaven nor salvation would be necessary.
For this reason, Christians should take heart at worldly turmoil. “Rejoice that such fruitful times are in store for you, for in them you will be weaned from earth and made meet for heaven,” said the great Baptist theologian Charles Haddon Spurgeon, in an evening devotional based on Job 1:9.
“You will be delivered from clinging to the present, and made to long for those eternal things which are so soon to be revealed to you,” he continues. “When you feel that as regards the present you do serve God for nought, you will then rejoice in the infinite reward of the future.”
Meanwhile, rather than withdraw from a hopeless world, Spurgeon threw himself into practical ministries as well as evangelical ones, founding an orphanage in 1867 and speaking out against the injustice of slavery. Evil in the world should not send Christians into resigned indifference — we are called to “do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.”
We Engage the Present Because of Our Future Hope
In today’s America, that calling might mean fighting to keep schoolchildren from being vulnerable to political agendas that push sexually explicit material in the classroom and allow rapists access to girls. It can mean speaking up for people like Jack Phillips and Barronelle Stutzman whose livelihoods are targeted for their religious convictions, or fighting for the safety of women in prisons and shelters. It certainly means pleading the cause of the unborn.
Not all of the means by which we as Christians should seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly are political, of course. But our hope of heaven itself should not dissuade us from stewardship of our communities. We are not of the world, but we are in it.
As we anticipate Advent, our posture is one of hope. But — although church traditions vary — in one common symbolism, hope is only one of four virtues signified by the four candles lit each Sunday of the Advent season. Peace, love, and joy mark the other three, and we are called to live these out in the present even as we look with anticipation to heaven.
Because we have hope, we are to love those around us in a way that demands no return. Because we have hope, we may have peace with even dismal circumstances. Because we have hope, we can look upon a fallen world and know the fullness of joy.
God “wants [men] to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present,” C.S. Lewis said through his character Screwtape. “For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which [God] has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them.”
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
Those who believe in the freedom of bodily autonomy are celebrating a slew of recent court rulings enjoining the Biden administration’s injection mandate. However, no GOP state attorney general has bothered to fight the equally immoral, illogical, and inhumane mask mandates that are still in place. Despite nearly two years of evidence that strict mask-wearing has zero effectiveness in stopping the spread, the mandates on 2-year-olds on planes and in many schools still continue. Slovakia is a perfect case study of the mask mendacity.
On May 13, 2020, the Atlantic published an article lauding Slovakia for, at the time, having the lowest per-capita COVID death rate in Europe. The article’s prediction should now be the laughingstock of the world:
When this pandemic ends, and when the reckoning over how the world responded invariably begins, Slovakia will likely be among those highlighted as a success story, whereas the United States—which was supposed to be the country best prepared for such a crisis—will be remembered as among those that suffered the worst. How Slovakia was able to flatten its curve comes down to more than just quick decision making and the widespread adoption of face masks. Perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned from Slovakia is of the value of leading from the front.
Well, that was before Slovakia’s first winter wave. One can excuse people for mistaking low spread at the time for mask efficacy rather than the fact that the country just didn’t get its turn yet. But for countries to continue this inhumane mandate despite what we now know demonstrates that masks are not a means to public health but an end in themselves of tyranny.
At over 2,000 new cases per million per day, according to Our World in Data, Slovakia now has more cases per capita than any country in the world. To put this in perspective, that is almost three times the level of the winter peak in the U.S., a country that has not exactly performed well in the pandemic!
It’s true that some individual states closer to the size of Slovakia have had more severe waves. However, even the worst counties in the upper Midwest are tracking about 1,200 new cases per million per day.
And here is the epidemiological curve presented by the inimitable Ian Miller, juxtaposed to policy solutions:
It’s not just Slovakia. Wherever you turn in Europe, both masks and vaccine mandates have failed miserably, and the spread is now worse than ever. Belgium is now six weeks into the new mask mandate, and it has more cases than ever before, even though the Belgians already suffered one of the deadliest waves in all of Europe. Oh, and 87.4% of adults are vaccinated.
To begin with, the CDC, as late as May 2020, was citing the 10 randomized controlled trials that showed “no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks.” The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford also summarized six international studies that “showed that masks alone have no significant effect in interrupting the spread of ILI or influenza in the general population, nor in healthcare workers.”
The only randomized controlled trial studying mask efficacy against COVID published last year was the now famous Danish study that failed to show any meaningful reduction in spread from mask-wearing. Then, several months ago, the media trumpeted a large study done in Bangladesh that seemed to show efficacy. Well, now that the authors have released the actual data, we see that indeed no such claim can be made from the study. It turns out that out of over 340,000 individuals over a span of eight weeks, there were only 20 fewer cases of COVID detected in the mask group over the control group – 1,106 symptomatic individuals confirmed seropositive in the control group and 1,086 such individuals in the treatment group.
Even these results are hard to interpret because of numerous confounding factors. University of California Berkeley professor Ben Recht critiqued the study as follows:
This study was not blinded, as it’s impossible to blind a study on masks. The intervention was highly complex and included a mask promotion campaign and education about other mitigation measures including social distancing. Moreover, individuals were only added to the study if they consented to allow the researchers to visit and survey their households. There was a large differential between the control and treatment groups here, with 95% consenting in the treatment group but only 92% consenting in control. This differential alone could wash away the difference in observed cases. Finally, symptomatic seropositivity is a crude measure of covid as the individuals could have been infected before the trial began.
Given the numerous caveats and confounders, the study still only found a tiny effect size. My takeaway is that a complex intervention including an educational program, free masks, encouraged mask wearing, and surveillance in a poor country with low population immunity and no vaccination showed at best modest reduction in infection.
It’s not OK for Republican-controlled states to continue to ignore the facts that masks are inhumane and they simply don’t work. Consider the fact that Head Start has now mandated masks on 2-year-olds, many of whom have special needs. Oregon has moved to make its mask mandate permanent. Why are no red state governments at least suing against the federal mandates, and why are so few red states even banning mask mandates within the states?
The courts are all political. They only responded to the lawsuits against the vaccine mandate when they saw robust political opposition within the political branches of the red states. They see no such opposition regarding the mask mandates. Thus, absent a unified effort from state attorneys general, they are unlikely to respond to a handful of individual lawsuits. The same legal rationale denying the feds the power to force vaccines also denies them the power to cover our breathing holes. But the courts only respond to political momentum.If nearly two years of masking failing to work anywhere is still not enough to end the most invasive human mandate of all time, then we truly are no longer a free people.
Jussie Smollett destroyed his career and reputation trying to live up to a racist expectation of “blackness.” It’s the same mistake former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick made. Popular culture’s puppet masters — academia, Big Tech’s social media apps, the executives running the TV, movie, music, and sports industries, and the political left — have established victimhood as the highest form of blackness. Attaining victim status is the primary expectation placed on American black men. Meeting this expectation is especially important for mixed-race, wealthy celebrities. In the culture created by the left, victimhood is their rite of passage into the fraternity of blackness.
As much as I despise Smollett for the 2019 racial hoax he staged in Chicago, the alleged crime that currently has him on trial, my disdain for the culture that baited him into the act far exceeds my disgust for Smollett.
Smollett, the child of a black woman and a white Jewish man, did what the culture told him to do and what the culture puts enormous pressure on half-black, half-white kids to do: prove their blackness. In modern American culture, there’s nothing blacker than being worthy of a white man’s aggression. Smollett isn’t worthy. So, he allegedly paid two black men to pose as white and attack him.
The whole scenario is funny until you consider the sadness of the mental state that would devise such a scheme and a culture that would entice it.
Smollett and Kaepernick, the self-made national anthem martyr, are victims. They’re victims of the racist expectations imposed on them by a sick, secular culture. At different levels, all American black people are victims of this culture. Human beings respond to expectations. Expectations can be and should be the greatest gift imposed on human beings. Expectations inspire behavior and shape mindsets.
Tuesday night, I had dinner with two friends. We engaged in a debate about white privilege. What is it? Does it exist? Can it be fixed? I argued that white privilege certainly exists in America and that the greatest white privilege is expectations that align with success. White people are expected to achieve academically. They’re expected to master the English language. They’re expected to have good credit. They’re expected to show up on time. They’re expected not to use the N-word. They’re expected to make an effort to avoid racist thoughts and actions. They’re expected to wed the mothers or fathers of their children. Do all white people meet these expectations? Absolutely not. But being born into a world that expects you to adopt principles and behaviors that lead to success is a privilege that puts you far ahead of people who don’t have those expectations on them.
Black people, as a collective, don’t have those expectations on them. Popular culture, as controlled by liberals, removes virtually all expectations from black people, particularly black men. We’re expected to excel at football and basketball. And we’re expected to meet the liberal standard of blackness. Anything we do or achieve beyond that is considered a bonus.
The lack of expectations imposed on black people is the most racist act in America. It’s far more racist than Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck and back. Had George Floyd entered a world that expected him to achieve beyond the athletic field, he would have been much less likely to find himself needing to be restrained by police.
The lack of expectations placed on black people is systemic racism. Victimhood being the highest level of blackness is systemic racism. Jussie Smollett is a victim of the systemic racism maintained by white liberals.
On Tuesday, while being cross-examined by the prosecution, Smollett complained that the white prosecutor was offending the black people in the courtroom by reading aloud Smollett’s direct messages to one of his black attackers. Smollett repeatedly used the N-word in the direct messages. The prosecutor apologized and asked Smollett to read the direct messages. Smollett obliged. We expect black people to call each other derogatory names. It’s acceptable and appropriate. We’ve been programmed to hate ourselves and express our self-hatred in writing, music, and acts of violence. We expect it.
Our expectations for white people are much different. We’re shocked and outraged when they mimic our anti-black behavior. We don’t expect that from them. We’re determined to rid them of the negative behavior. Our expectations for ourselves are much lower and/or nonexistent. That’s why it’s easy for us to ignore thousands of gang murders in black neighborhoods and hold summer-long protests over a tiny handful of police-involved shootings. That’s why Jussie Smollett has no problem saying the N-word repeatedly, but is mortified when a white man reads his words inside a courtroom. We’re victims of the racist expectations we’ve adopted.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org
Wow, the opposition press isn’t what it used to be!
In a Sunday interview with “The Sexiest Man Alive,” Anthony Fauci, CNN’s Jake Tapper played a clip of Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., criticizing Fauci for keeping the public in a state of raw panic over COVID.
Johnson: “Fauci did the exact same thing with AIDS. He overhyped it. He created all kinds of fear, saying it could affect the entire population, when it couldn’t. And he’s doing — he’s using the exact same playbook for COVID.”
At that point, the anchor is supposed to say something like, “Dr. Fauci?” and let him respond. But CNN apparently thinks Fauci is too delicate a flower to answer an attack all by his lonesome.
So, before turning it over to the interviewee, Tapper blathered: “Obviously, that’s a bizarre and false assertion. President George W. Bush gave you the Presidential Medal of Freedom because of your leadership in the AIDS crisis. But I did want to give you an opportunity to respond.” (I guess this is how you apply for Chris Cuomo’s job at CNN.)
At that point, Fauci merely had to join Tapper in sneering at the senator: “Jake, how do you respond to something as preposterous as that?”
Thank you, Dr. Fauci for that penetrating response. Next up on CNN …
Actually, Fauci then went on to use the Hillary Benghazi defense: HOW DARE YOU QUESTION ME WHEN PEOPLE DIED!!!
He said: “Overhyping AIDS? It’s killed over 750,000 Americans and 36 million people worldwide. How do you overhype that? Overhyping COVID? It’s already killed 780,000 Americans and over 5 million people worldwide. So, I don’t have any clue of what he’s talking about.”
That would have been a fantastic answer if Sen. Johnson had questioned whether anyone had ever died from AIDS or COVID. Unfortunately, he didn’t do that. Rather, he accused Fauci of overhyping the risk of COVID, terrifying everyone — as he did with AIDS — instead of concentrating protections on high-risk groups.
Overhyping car accidents? Cars have killed over 3.6 million Americans and multiple millions of people worldwide. How do you overhype that?
Yes, but you recommended that people drive blindfolded.
Long after it was clear that COVID was dangerous nearly exclusively for older people and the obese, Fauci lied, just as he once lied about AIDS being a risk for heterosexuals long after it became clear that it was almost entirely a problem for gay men and intravenous drug users.
Instead of devoting massive resources to shutting down bathhouses and shooting galleries to stop the spread of AIDS, and blanketing older Americans with protections in the case of COVID, Fauci repeatedly claimed that everyone was at risk.
This isn’t a matter of It’s a new virus! No one knew anything! I knew the high-risk groups back in March 2020. (bit.ly/3oBu8Et)
It seems that Fauci believes in “science” — except when he needs to terrify heterosexuals in the cause of destigmatizing gays, or frighten the entire population so as not to stigmatize the elderly and obese.
AIDS first appeared in 1981 in gay communities in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Two years later, 72% of cases involved gay men, and 90% of the non-homosexual AIDS victims were intravenous drug users. Most of the rest were children born to AIDS-infected mothers or victims of AIDS-tainted blood transfusions.
This wasn’t a big secret. According to CDC, by June 1983, out of 1,552 AIDS victims, only 37 were not gay men, drug users, hemophiliacs or Haitians. Frontline doctors actually dealing with AIDS patients were assuring the public, “The average person has nothing to be concerned about,” as a New York cardiologist told The Associated Press. (Then, as now, you can trust your doctor; you can’t trust “public health authorities.”)
But Fauci was out there, alarming the entire population about the odds of contracting AIDS. In April 1983, he said: “As the months go by, we see more and more groups … AIDS is creeping out of well-defined epidemiological confines.”
A month later, he wrote: “The finding of AIDS in infants and children who are household contacts of patients with AIDS … has enormous implications with regard to ultimate transmissibility of this syndrome.” (This was based on a study of eight infants in Newark, New Jersey — who may or may not have had AIDS, in households with people who also may or may not have had AIDS. So it was a solid study.)
By 1985 — four years after AIDS first appeared — 73% of the cases were in gay men, 17% in intravenous drug users, 3% in Haitians, 2.2% in those who’d received blood, and 1% in sexual partners of AIDS patients. Less than 4% didn’t fit into one of these categories.
With zero cases of proven heterosexual transmission, in February 1985, Fauci said, “Am I worried about [heterosexual transmission]? Yes.”
By 1987, only 4% of AIDS cases could possibly be attributed to heterosexual contact — and half of those were in Africans and Haitians.
And yet, here was Fauci in March 1987, still babbling about the risk of AIDS to heterosexuals. Asked if AIDS could be transmitted to men by vaginal intercourse, he answered, “Absolutely.” He actually warned the public about French kissing: “[H]ealth officials have to presume that it is possible to transmit the virus by exchange of saliva in deep kissing.”
If some of these quotes sound familiar, I cited a few of them in that March 2020 column, at a time when “public health authorities,” cable news hosts and the president were demanding nationwide lockdowns.
Today, Fauci is doing the exact same thing with COVID, treating teenagers as if they face as much danger as people in their 70s, despite the latter having a 300 times greater chance of dying from COVID than those under 20. For young people who contract COVID, the chances of dying are less than the risk of dying from sunstroke over the course of their entire lives. Even for those in their 30s, the odds are about the same as their lifetime risk of dying by choking on food.
If he’s ever interviewed by a serious journalist, perhaps Fauci could explain why his idea of “science” is about avoiding stigmatizing certain groups, and not about saving lives.
In a recent online exchange, the YouTuber Casey Neistat posted his fury after his car was broken into and the contents stolen. Los Angeles, he railed, was turning into a “3rd-world s—hole of a city.”
The multimillionaire actor Seth Rogen chastised Neistat for his anger.
Rogen claimed that a car’s contents were minor things to lose. He added that while living in West Hollywood, he had his own car broken into 15 times, but thought little of it. Online bloggers ridiculed Rogen. No wonder: The actor lives in multimillion-dollar homes in the Los Angeles area, guarded by sophisticated security systems and fencing. Yet both Neistat and Rogen accurately defined Third Worldization: the utter breakdown of the law and the ability of the rich within such a feudal society to find ways to avoid the violent chaos.
After traveling the last 45 years in the Middle East, southern Europe, Mexico, and Asia Minor, I observed some common characteristics of a so-called “Third World society.” And all of them might feel increasingly familiar to contemporary Americans. Whether in Cairo or Naples, theft was commonplace. Yet property crimes were almost never seriously prosecuted. In a medieval-type society of two rather than three classes, the rich in walled estates rarely worry that much about thievery. Crime is written off as an intramural problem of the poor, especially when the middle class is in decline or nonexistent.
Violent crime is now soaring in America. But two things are different about America’s new criminality. One is the virtual impunity of it. Thieves now brazenly swarm a store, ransack, steal and flee with the merchandise without worry of arrest.
Second, the left often justifies crime as a sort of righteous payback against a supposedly exploitative system. So, the architect of the so-called “1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, preened of the riotous destruction of property during the summer of 2020: “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.”
Third Worldization reflects the asymmetry of law enforcement. Ideology and money, not the law, adjudicate who gets arrested and tried, and who does not.
There were 120 days of continuous looting, arson and lethal violence during the summer of 2020. Rioters burned courthouses, police precincts and an iconic church. And there was also a frightening riot on Jan. 6, when a mob entered Washington, D.C.’s Capitol and damaged federal property. Of those arrested during the violence, many have been held in solitary confinement or under harsh jail conditions. That one-day riot is currently the subject of a congressional investigation. Some of those arrested are still — 10 months later — awaiting trial. The convicted are facing long prison sentences.
In contrast, some 14,000 were arrested in the longer and more violent rioting of 2020. Most were released without bail. The majority had their charges dropped. Very few are still being held awaiting capital charges.
A common denominator to recent controversies at the Justice Department, CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon is that all these agencies under dubious pretexts have investigated American citizens with little or no justification — after demonizing their targets as “treasonous,” “domestic terrorists,” “white supremacists,” or “racists.”
In the Third World, basic services like power, fuel, transportation and water are characteristically unreliable. In other words, much like a frequent California brownout.
I’ve been on five flights in my life where it was announced there was not enough fuel to continue to the scheduled destination. The plane was required either to turn around or land somewhere on the way. One such aborted flight took off from Cairo, another from southern Mexico. The other three were this spring and summer inside the United States.
One of the most memorable scenes that I remember of Ankara, Old Cairo, or Algiers of the early 1970s were legions of beggars and the impoverished sleeping on sidewalks. But such impoverishment pales in comparison to the encampments of present-day Fresno, Los Angeles, Sacramento, or San Francisco. Tens of thousands live on sidewalks and in open view use them to defecate, urinate, inject drugs, and dispose of refuse.
In the old Third World, extreme wealth and poverty existed in close proximity. It was common to see peasants on horse-drawn wagons a few miles from coastal villas. But there is now far more contiguous wealth and poverty in Silicon Valley. In Redwood City and East Palo Alto, multiple families cram into tiny bungalows and garages, often a few blocks from tony Atherton. On the main streets outside of Stanford University and the Google campus, the helot classes sleep in decrepit trailers and buses parked on the streets.
Neistat was right in identifying a pandemic of crime in Los Angeles as Third Worldization. But so was Rogen, though unknowingly so. The actor played the predictable role of the smug, indifferent Third World rich who master ignoring — and navigating around — the misery of others in their midst.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and author of the book The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
Ethnic Uyghur members of the Communist Party of China carry a flag as they take part in an organized tour on June 30, 2017, in the old town of Kashgar, in the far western Xinjiang province, China. Kashgar has long been considered the cultural heart of Xinjiang for the province’s nearly 10 million Muslim Uyghurs. At an historic crossroads linking China to Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, the city has changed under Chinese rule with government development, unofficial Han Chinese settlement to the western province, and restrictions imposed by the Communist Party. Beijing says it regards Kashgar’s development as an improvement to the local economy, but many Uyghurs consider it a threat that is eroding their language, traditions, and cultural identity. | Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Being a self-confessed history buff, I admit that I have often found myself wondering, “What must it have been like to live through some past era?”
Usually, these musings are motivated by curiosity about, for instance, “how could America have been so blind about the monstrous evil that was metastasizing in Hitler’s Third Reich?”
How could so many American corporations have continued to do business with the Nazis? How could America have failed to recognize the systemic squelching of all human rights and the brutal anti-Semitism directed toward the Jewish population?
My curiosity about this particular historical phenomenon began when I was assigned to read both Mein Kampf (1925) and The Communist Manifesto (1848) in an accelerated honors Civics class in my public high school. As I was reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf, I distinctly remember going out to the kitchen and asking my mother incredulously, “Didn’t anybody read this book before the war? The horrible things Hitler wanted to do are all right here in the book.”
My mother said, “Well, people just thought he was crazy.” He may have been insane, but he did gain control of one of the most powerful countries in the world (and it wasn’t even his own country, since he was Austrian by birth).
Frankly, up until now, I was incredulous as to how America could have been so blasé or ignorant about the evils of the Nazis that they would send their athletes to the obviously propagandized 1936 Berlin Olympic Games where our own American Olympic Committee agreed to discriminate against our Jewish athletes.
Frankly, it bewildered me, until now. As I have watched the widespread collaboration of American corporations with the Chinese Communist (CCP) regime in China, I now see how it could have happened, because it happening again.
The closest analogy to the Nazi regime in Germany from 1933 to 1945 that the world has seen since is the current Chinese Communist (CCP) government in China.
They are practicing full-fledged genocide against the Uyghur Muslims, including concentration camps and slave labor. In fact, we know more about the genocide of the Uyghurs at this point than we did about the Holocaust until midway through the Second World War.
The CCP regime is imposed on a country that is 92% ethnically Han Chinese, and they reportedly have at least as much confidence in their ethnic superiority as the Germans assumed for themselves in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Gestapo could only dream of having the amount of social and thought control the CCP is exercising over its population through the latest in technology (much of it either stolen from or supplied by, American technology companies).
Many Americans have been shocked at the abject “kowtowing” of so many segments of American business, which routinely passively surrender to CCP demands which violate basic human rights and American values.
For example, Apple has self-censored and removed a popular Bible app as well as a Quran app at the direct insistence of the CCP.
China has an estimated Christian population of approximately 97 million people, the majority of whom worship in “unregistered” churches. Reports continue to surface that the CCP is aggressively pursuing “Sinicization,” an official state campaign to “Chinasize” religious groups within the country. For example, the CCP’s Administration of Religious Affairs has “ordered Christians to study President Xi’s book and memorize his speeches.”
It is reported that the Chinese CCP has an official policy of what they call “decapitation.” In this strategy, the CCP consciously seeks to coop a country’s elites, entangling them in lucrative business deals which then keeps them from criticizing the CCP. When one looks at the extensive business ventures of American political families with the Chinese (the Bidens, the Kerrys, the Pelosis, the Boxers, the Feinsteins, the McConnells, etc.), it is not difficult to conclude that they have attempted to apply this strategy to the U.S., and have done so with considerable success.
Perhaps no segment of American business has been more spineless and abjectly servile in acquiescing to the CCP’s demands than the American Entertainment industry. At CCP demand, they have self-censored themselves on numerous occasions. For example, when the remake of Red Dawn was undertaken, the North Koreans were substituted for the Chinese at CCP demand. Paradoxically, currently, the most popular movie in China depicts the Chinese military routing U.S. forces. And, if anyone speaks up for the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans, they are reportedly blacklisted by the demand of the CCP.
In the sports world, the one bright sport of moral courage in standing up to the bullies of Beijing, the Women’s Tennis Federation (WTA), has stated that it will halt all of its tournaments in China until it is satisfied that Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai is safe. Ms. Shuai had made an accusation of sexual assault against a senior government official and was promptly “disappeared.”
Even though this decision could cost women’s tennis millions and millions of dollars, the WTA’s chief executive Steve Simon declared they will boycott China until they know Ms. Shuai is safe.
In stern but fair language, Mr. Simon stated,
“Chinese officials have been provided the opportunity to cease this censorship, verifiably prove that Peng is free and able to speak without interference or intimidation, and investigate the allegations of sexual assault in a full, fair and transparent manner….Unfortunately, the leadership in China has not addressed this very serious issue in any credible way.”
We should all be grateful for this sterling example of moral leadership provided by Mr. Simon and the WTA. The contrast with the graveling response of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is both revelatory and instructive.
And yes, I believe we should lead an international boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing and host alternative international games in a country that respects human rights. Do not give President Xi and the CCP their Olympic “Berlin Moment.” The CCP is not part of the civilized family of nations and it should be treated as the pariah that it is.
In the realm of athletics, no segment of our society has been more scandalously servile in its interactions with the CCP than the National Basketball Association. The CCP has been very successful in intimidating and silencing any NBA criticism of their frightfully repressive regime and their oppression of the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, and the people of Hong Kong.
Enes Kanter, an immigrant from Turkey, is a 13-year veteran center for the Boston Celtics and a brand new American citizen. In honor of the event, he officially changed his name to Enes Kanter Freedom. Like many immigrants to our country, he truly appreciates the freedoms we enjoy as Americans and too often take for granted.
He has used his platform as a professional athlete to denounce political repression in his native Turkey and he has had the courage to wear shoes in NBA games that declare “Free Tibet,” “Modern Day Slavery,” and “No More Excuses” despite the fact that NBA officials “tried to force him to remove his ‘Free Tibet’ shoes before a recent game at Madison Square Garden.”
I thank God for new Americans like Mr. Freedom. All of us as Americans should draw inspiration from new citizens like him to remind us of what a wonderful heritage is our birthright.
We need to draw on that heritage and birthright to denounce the dehumanizing CCP and its desire for world dominance which also mimics Nazi Germany.
We stood astride the Nazi’s path, foiling their dreams of world domination. May we be used again to thwart the CCP’s plan for world domination and the subsequent trampling of human rights on a global scale.
The stakes are enormous. A world dominated by the CCP would be a world where human freedom and human rights would be trampled in favor of Chinese hegemony and totalitarian state power. Every freedom-loving human being of whatever nationality or ethnicity has a tremendous state in thwarting the CCP’s dark vision for humanity’s future.
May God give every freedom-loving human being the wisdom to see the looming danger and to rise up to meet it before it is too late. The Third Reich is back, masquerading as the CCP.
Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.
Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.
Imagine having an 80-14 majority in a red-state legislature a week after Democrats were defeated in a blue state, and you are considering legislation on Biden’s unprecedented injection mandate at a time when he likely has a 20% approval rating in the state. One would expect the GOP legislators to easily take “yes” for an answer from their constituents and categorically ban all COVID fascism. Instead, they listened to the special interests that are in cahoots with the federal government, rejected a popular bill that would have tackled the problem, and instead passed a bill that explicitly greenlights the mandate.
Last night, the North Dakota House passed HB 1511, a bill that essentially does nothing to protect North Dakotans. Sure, it bans state government mandates, but those were never really a threat. The issue at hand is that the federal government is threatening businesses that they must require injection passports for their workers. The only way to combat that mandate, and yes, restore the pre-COVID free market, is to ban (with the threat of legal action and/or fines) the imposition of such a mandate on employees.
So, what is in HB 1511? It never even attempts to ban the vaccine mandates, but only stipulates that employers must allow for exemptions, which include religious/philosophical objections, medical concerns, prior infection, and a testing opt-out. That might sound like a reasonable compromise that is worth passing, as other states have done, and if written properly, it would effectively protect anyone who wants out of the needle rape. The problem is that the final section of the bill voids even the religious exemptions to the extent that they conflict with the federal regulations. Thus, just like the Wyoming House did (with overwhelming GOP majorities), the North Dakota GOP opposed the federal mandate, unless the feds actually enforce it!
Even the rest of the bill is weak, and worse, it downright greenlights discrimination. The bill does bar any denial of service to customers based on vaccination status, but then places an exception for health care. Thus, at a time when we need a bill doing just the opposite – to ban hospitals from mistreating or denying surgeries and organ transplants to those without the unsafe and ineffective injections (as another draft bill that was rejected purported to do) – this bill explicitly blesses such immoral and illogical discrimination. This bill makes current law worse by explicitly blessing the requirement that someone gets a shot in order to obtain medical care, something that cannot be done under current state and federal anti-discrimination law.
Also, even the ban on vaccine mandates among state institutions was given a carve-out for all state colleges, which are now allowed to deny admission or employment based on someone’s injection status. The bill supporters hang their hats on the fact that the bill bans vaccine passports, but the issue is not a specific piece of paper. Students and others will still be required to show some proof of the shot.
There was a better bill that would have categorically banned most vaccine mandates and confronted the feds directly. HB 1510 was drafted similarly to the Montana bill, which was the first in the country to bar mandates. Even that bill had a compromise carve-out for health care. Shockingly, only 38 Republicans out of 80 voted for it!
Here is the target list for the upcoming elections:
The watered-down bill that did pass the House passed the Senate 33-14 on Friday. Ironically, even this bill, which in many ways makes current law worse, was too conservative for a handful of Republicans (there are only seven Democrats in the chamber).
The seven Republicans who thought somehow that even this bill was too compassionate for their constituents were:
Howard Anderson, District 8
Randy Burckhard, District 5
Karen Krebsbach, District 40
Judy Lee, District 13
Dave Oehlke, District 15
Nicole Poolman, District 7
Jim Roers, District 46
Watching the Senate debate this morning, I heard one Republican after another suggest, “There’s still people dying in the hospital,” “We’re all in this together,” and “We have responsibilities, not just rights.” Ironically, these are all arguments against the failed status quo that has gotten us to a point where things are worse than they were before the injections, yet North Dakota Republicans are now to the left of even what Bill Gates and others are now conceding about the failures of the shots.
Why is it that conservatives have to be made to feel like we are asking from our legislatures a trip to the moon? We are not asking to reform our entire government and end the Great Society. We are simply asking them to completely erase the now-discredited approach to COVID that has killed so many people without saving a single life. What is so hard? These are the types of bills you would pass when you have divided government, not when you have supermajorities at a time when Democrats are on the ropes and lives are on the line.
On a positive note, the House did pass HB 1514, a bill that bans the medical board from taking action against doctors or nurse practitioners who prescribe ivermectin and against pharmacists who fill the prescriptions. But the original proposal also stopped pharmacists from denying prescriptions, which is the bigger problem on the street. It also had a provision to allow patients in the hospitals the right to try ivermectin and barred any discrimination of care against those without the shots.
“Well, take what you can get, Daniel.”
But why should any of these provisions be removed from the bill? How could anyone – Republican or Democrat – be opposed to these ideas? Again, all these tactics are evil, are unscientific, and reek of medical fascism. The GOP’s reluctance to take a categorical stand is incomprehensible from a policy standpoint, as well as from a moral and even electoral standpoint.
And remember, at least North Dakota was willing to go this far. We have numerous other deep red states that won’t even get into session and haven’t passed a single meaningful bill in 19 months to push back against the greatest threats against our liberties, bodies, and well-being. The science is now 100% clear that all these measures are causing harm, making the virus worse, and blocking our ability to properly treat people. Ideally, if states would actually follow the law, science, and the Nuremberg Code, they would ban the administration of these shots altogether and completely reorient our approach to this virus. So what we are asking for, to begin with, is a compromise.
There’s a time to compromise on the will of the people, and there is a time to fully embrace the will of the people. When it comes to countering “Faucism” in red states, it is the wrong time, the wrong place, and the wrong issue to embrace compromise – especially one that actually makes current law worse.
Expressing the sentiments of RINO legislators across the country, Ohio Speaker Bob Cupp recently suggested it’s time for us to move on from fighting COVID fascism. “They are reflecting what they hear in their district, but it’s, it’s clearly time to move on,” Cupp recently said of efforts from his rank-and-file Republican members to fight for medical freedom. Well, if Democrat districts can get representation for their tyrannical views, why can’t our districts get representation for liberty and medical freedom? We will move on from fighting COVID fascism when the RINOs and Democrats move on from imposing it upon us.
Former Trump administration State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus clearly made House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff uncomfortable when she pressed him on Tuesday about his promotion of the debunked Steele dossier.
Last week, special counsel John Durham charged Igor Danchenko with five counts of lying to the FBI. Danchenko is a Russian national who worked at the liberal Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and is believed to be a primary source of information contained in the infamous anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. That document was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and was used to help launch the Russia probe in search of ties between the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
Ortagus, who was a guest-hosting ABC’s “The View” on Tuesday, questioned Schiff about his promotion of the Steele dossier and the false narrative underlying it.
“You’ve been really prolific over the past few years being the head of the Intel Committee. You defended, promoted, you even read into the Congressional Record the Steele dossier,” Ortagus said.
“And we know last week the main source of the dossier was indicted by the FBI for lying about most of the key claims in that dossier. Do you have any reflections on your role in promoting this to the American people?” she asked.
Schiff first responded in a reasonable fashion, saying any who lied to the FBI should be prosecuted.
He then defended his conduct.
“We couldn’t have known, for example, people were lying to Christopher Steele. So it was proper to investigate them,” Schiff said.
The congressman added that one benefit of the investigation was learning that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had given polling data to Russian intelligence. Schiff was playing pretty fast and loose with the facts. According to The Associated Press, Manafort gave polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian and Ukrainian political consultant, who allegedly passed it along to Russian intelligence.
“But Mueller’s team said it couldn’t ‘reliably determine’ Manafort’s purpose in sharing it, nor assess what Kilimnik may have done with it,” the AP reported.
That sort of exaggeration by Schiff was typical throughout the Russia probe.
Ortagus reminded Schiff that Manafort was removed from the campaign in the summer of 2016 when questions arose regarding his past lobbying work for pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs. Further, it should be noted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, though filled with Democratic investigators, “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated” with Russia, according to the Justice Department’s Mueller report.
Ortagus then brought the conversation back to Schiff’s role in promoting the whole collusion false narrative and the dossier.
“You may have helped spread Russian disinformation yourself for years by promoting this. I think that’s what Republicans and what people who entrusted you as the Intel Committee chair are so confused about your culpability in all of this,” Ortagus said.
“Well, I completely disagree with your premise,” Schiff responded. “It’s one thing to say allegations should be investigated, and they were. It’s another to say that we should have foreseen in advance that some people were lying to Christopher Steele, which is impossible of course to do.”
The Californian sells himself short. He was constantly out in front of the cameras claiming he was privy to intelligence that he could not share with the public validating the collusion charge. For example in March 2017, NBC “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd asked Schiff if there was anything beyond circumstantial evidence suggesting the Trump campaign’s connection to Russia.
“I can tell you that the case is more than that and I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now,” Schiff said.
Further questioned whether he had seen direct evidence, the representative responded, “I don’t want to get into specifics but I will say that there is evidence that is not circumstantial and is very much worthy of an investigation.”
.@RepAdamSchiff on Trump/Russia connection: "There is more than circumstantial evidence now…and is very much worthy of investigation." pic.twitter.com/qvw7drsqQX
Despite making claims like that for many months, Schiff never came forward with such evidence, even after Mueller issued his report.
On Tuesday’s showing of “The View,” the Democrat pivoted away from discussing the dossier to raising the issue of the 2019 House Democratic impeachment of Trump and the Capitol incursion to prove investigating him was justified.
You’ll recall it was during the impeachment hearing that Schiff famously made up his own fanciful version of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to build his case that the American leader conducted a shakedown to secure an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden’s shady dealings in Ukraine. This performance was even after Zelensky himself said he felt no pressure from Trump’s call and his country launched no investigation into the Bidens.
Schiff told Ortagus, “None of that is undercut. None of that serious misconduct is in any way diminished by the fact that people lied to Christopher Steele.”
“No. I think just your credibility is,” Ortagus shot back.
Schiff then opted for the verbal attack of a schoolboy, saying, “I think the credibility of your question is in doubt.”
Having boasted about so much with so little pushback from the media, it was refreshing to see his feet actually held to the fire for once.
Randy DeSoto has written more than 2,000 articles for The Western Journal since he joined the company in 2015. He is a graduate of West Point and Regent University School of Law. He is the author of the book “We Hold These Truths” and screenwriter of the political documentary “I Want Your Money.”@RandyDeSoto
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Alex Brandon
The White House’s official press release announcing the Build Back Better Act (BBB) pitches it as a “PLAN TO REBUILD THE MIDDLE CLASS.” It rhapsodizes about “working families” squeezed by the economy, and reminds voters that “Biden promised to rebuild the backbone of the country — the middle class.”
A cartoon illustrates the sort of person who would benefit from Biden’s Build Back Better programs: “Linda,” a white woman, who works at a manufacturing plant but struggles to raise her son, “Leo.”
One thing the White House’s official press release did not mention is that almost all of the $2 trillion doled out under BBB is expressly designated for Black, Latino, Native American, Asian American, Pacific Islander and non-English speaking individuals. White Americans will get nothing and like it.
Over and over again, the bill is written expressly NOT to help the hardworking Linda, apparently because she is white. Here are just a few examples:
— $1 billion to Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian communities for housing “needs.”
— $500 million for minority-serving schools of medicine.
— $112 million for teacher preparation programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs).
— $75 million for culturally appropriate care management and services for older individuals who are racial and ethnic minorities or are underserved due to sexual orientation or gender identity.
— $75 million to study maternal health for pregnant and postpartum minority individuals.
— $50 million study maternal mortality among minorities.
— $50 million to improve behavioral health outcomes for communities of color with substance abuse.
— $75 million to increase research capacity at minority-serving institutions.
And on and on and on.
The very first item in Title II of the bill, titled “ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION,” is a program to distribute more than $100 million in grants to address “low diversity within the teacher and school leader workforce.” To be eligible for a grant, the recipient must have a plan “to increase the diversity of qualified individuals entering into the teacher, principal, or other school leader workforce.”
Similarly, the first provision of BBB’s “ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT” section is: “Minority Business Development Agency.”
But wait — here’s a plot twist! This part also includes something for rural America! (So Democrats have heard of Appalachia.) Twenty-one percent of the country is rural. Twenty-four percent is non-white. Guess how the money is divvied up?
One billion dollars for minorities and $200 million for “rural business centers.”
Even provisions that don’t explicitly exclude whites, turn out, on closer examination, to exclude whites. I’ve never seen so many synonyms for “non-white,” such as “persistent poverty communities,” “historically economically distressed,” “historical injustice” and “underserved communities.”
Hang on, Ann — what makes you think “underserved” means “non-white”?
I refer you to page 111 of the bill:
“This section also defines an ‘underserved community’ as a group of people who have been systematically denied the full opportunity to participate in aspects of economic, social, and civic life. Underserved communities include Black, Latino, Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, other persons of color, [etc.].”
How about changes to our environmental laws? White people love the environment! Sorry, out of luck, again, white boy.
BBB allocates almost $7 billion for “national service programs to carry out projects related to climate resilience and mitigation.” Unfortunately, however, all those billions have to go to “entities that serve and have representation from low-income communities …; utilize culturally competent and multilingual strategies; … implemented by diverse participants from communities being served.”
One billion dollars of the “Climate Resilience and Mitigation” loot is specifically directed to “individuals who were formally incarcerated.” [Sic.] Sure, climate change is important — but not as important as giving money to convicted felons!
What the hell happened to Linda?
Linda is wearing a hardhat, so her job has probably been outsourced. Maybe she’ll be helped by BBB’s humongous expansion of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program (TAA). That’s the law passed in the 1960s to compensate American workers whose jobs have been shipped abroad by globalist swine who couldn’t care less about their fellow Americans and don’t mind that every single thing we need, including masks and medicine, is made in China.
Surely, some white people will qualify for that — steelworkers, autoworkers, glass, plastic and paper manufacturing employees.
In fact, the BBB hijacks the whole idea of compensating globalism’s losers and turns the TAA into just another massive welfare scheme. Both the eligibility requirements and payment amounts are expanded beyond all reason, entitling “workers” to years and years of payouts, with no minimum employment period required, and no stipulation that trade has anything to do with the loss of their jobs.
Thus, for example, a program that is — again — meant to remunerate workers whose jobs were shipped abroad will now offer assistance to public sector employees. How does a government employee lose a job at all — much less to trade? (I only wish we had Chinese people running our grade schools.)
Naturally, states will be required to work with “training providers” that have a proven track record serving “Black, Latino, Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, other persons of color, members of other minority communities” and so on.
Republicans seem to think that if they just talk about how much Biden’s BBB plan costs, their job is done. They ought to read the bill. It might prompt them to finally say something about the Democrats’ clear animus against white Americans.
They are not even trying to convince us any more. They are now using brute force to coerce us into COVID fascism, including forced injections, so they have no need to even hide their false information.
In Pfizer’s FDA briefing document prepared for the Oct. 25 meeting was an admission that even according to the company’s own unverified and misleading math, there is a scenario where there would be more hospitalizations among children for myocarditis — just one side effect — than from COVID. “Under Scenario 3 (lowest incidence), the model predicts more excess hospitalizations due to vaccine-related myocarditis/pericarditis compared to prevented hospitalizations due to COVID-19 in males and in both sexes combined,” states Pfizer in page 33 of the document.
How in the world could there be any universe where we would approve a shot, much less promote and force it in many settings, when there is a possibility of greater harm than benefit, when the harm is man-made and the virus is left to chance? They know quite well that this approval will eventually lead to soft and hard mandates, which have already begun in California schools.
The document concludes by expressing the same callous attitude toward those raising concerns as toward all their interventions from day one. “However, in consideration of the different clinical implications of hospitalization for COVID-19 versus hospitalization for vaccine-associated myocarditis/pericarditis, and benefits related to prevention of non-hospitalized cases of COVID-19 with significant morbidity, the overall benefits of the vaccine may still outweigh the risks under this lowest incidence scenario.” In other words, sure, we have no clue what’s going to happen, but it’s always better to err on the side of shoving this on children who have a 99.9% recovery rate.
Moreover, there are a couple of obvious factors that demonstrate clearly, by their own admission, the shots pose more risk than benefit:
Already in March, 42% of children 5-17 have had the virus, according to the CDC, and that number is likely much higher following the prolific spread of the Delta variant. So the benefit in terms of lives saved is much less than they predict, because the majority of children likely already have protection even from mild illness. We are not beginning with a clean slate with 100% of children vulnerable to getting the virus. Plus, studies have shown among adults that those who already had the virus not only don’t need a vaccine, but these shots pose a greater risk to them than to those without prior infection.
Even the infinitesimal risk of serious illness among young children is clearly limited to a very defined pool of very sick and severely obese children. It would be one thing to just make it available for those children. But if you isolate healthy children, it’s quite evident that so many more lives would be lost than saved because healthy children essentially do not get seriously ill from this virus.
COVID hospitalizations among children are grossly exaggerated in the data and conflated with those admitted for other ailments who just had COVID incidentally. A study published in the Journal of American Academy of Pediatrics found, “Nearly one-half of the infected children had coinfection with other common respiratory pathogens.” Scientists from University College London and the Universities of York, Bristol, and Liverpool studied the data from all pediatric COVID-19 infections in the U.K. and found that 61% of the reported pediatric COVID deaths were overstated.
This analysis still assumes that the vaccines are over 90% effective. In reality, Sweden’s extremely large study has shown that the efficacy wears off to zero after seven months, and the U.K data demonstrate that thereafter the vaccinated are more likely to get COVID than unvaccinated people. Thus, if the entire benefit of injecting children, as suggested by Pfizer, is to prevent mild non-hospitalized cases, the vaccines actually contribute to the risk incurred, not the benefits reaped from the shots.
This analysis ignores the fact that there are numerous other treatment options for children and adults alike that will reduce chances of death without causing side effects like myocarditis. We need not be faced with the false dichotomy between poisonous shots and not treating the virus. Why are these shots getting approval for children’s use before the monoclonal antibodies, which are much safer and have been shown to work even pre-emptively up to eight months later?
Are we really going to trust Pfizer’s numbers? In reality, independent studies have found the risk of myocarditis to be much worse. A preprint from University of California Davis found that “for boys 12-15 without medical comorbidities receiving their second mRNA vaccination dose, the rate of CAE [cardiac adverse event ] is 3.7 to 6.1 times higher than their 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization risk as of August 21, 2021.” A recent study of the Danish population published in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal found that “the incidence of myopericarditis after COVID-19 vaccination among males appears higher than reports from the United States.” Have you ever wondered why it always seems that the negative information on the vaccines is downplayed and the supposed positive benefits are exaggerated in the U.S. more than elsewhere? Clearly, the signals regarding cardiovascular side effects are greater than U.S. authorities are willing to admit. In September, the U.K. Telegraph reported, “Data from Public Health England (PHE) shows that during that period there were 2,103 extra death registrations with ischemic heart disease, 1,552 with heart failure, as well as an extra 760 deaths with cerebrovascular diseases such as stroke and aneurysm and 3,915 with other circulatory diseases.”
The question everyone should be asking is, “What is the Number Needed to Vaccinate (NNTV) to prevent a single COVID-19 fatality in this age group, and how many people will we kill, maim, and weaken their immune systems on the way to achieving that number?” Dr. Toby Rogers, an economist and statistician, laid out the numbers in simple arithmetic last week. He concludes that if you give Pfizer 80% effectiveness against the 57 reported fatalities over this six-month period, it would work out to saving 45 lives after vaccinating 28 million children. So, the NNTV to prevent a single COVID death would be 630,775 (28,384,878 / 45), but because it’s a two-dose regimen, you would need 1,261,550 total injections.
Now what about the risk? If you take the 128 reported vaccine deaths among those ages 12-24 as a baseline, then utilize Kirsch, Rose, and Crawford’s estimate that VAERS undercounts fatal reactions by a factor of 41, that would amount to 5,248 fatal side effects during the same period of time. Thus, in order to save 45 children, we’d kill 5,248 — for a ratio of one kid saved for 117 killed. And again, this analysis doesn’t account for the fact that for healthy children, there are essentially zero COVID deaths, more than half the children likely already had COVID, there are other treatments available, and on the risk side, we don’t know if there are long-term side effects that will create excess deaths well beyond the shot’s six-month window of efficacy.
Additionally, we don’t even know if those getting the shot now will enjoy anywhere near this degree of efficacy given that the virus is rapidly changing. What we do know, however, from the adult vaccinations, is that adults are more vulnerable to the virus for the first month, then again as the vaccine wanes after six months. Plus, Pfizer’s trial shows that more than half the children experienced cold or flu-like symptoms from the shots. So they admit that there were no cases of serious illness in the control group and are thus using the shot to merely prevent a flu, yet it will likely give them flu-like symptoms up front and make it more likely they will get the virus after six months.
Indeed, there has never been such a lopsided risk-benefit ratio to any medical device approved by our government, even on a limited basis, much less used to bribe and shame children into injecting. As Dr. Eric Rubin, member of the FDA’s advisory committee on vaccines and editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, said during the Oct. 26 meeting: “We’re never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is unless we start giving it, and that’s just the way it goes.”
Editor’s note: This article has been corrected to note that Dr. Rubin is a member of the FDA’s advisory committee on vaccines, rather than the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
Scott Smith, whose daughter was raped by a male wearing a skirt in a girls’ bathroom at her high school in Loudoun County, Virginia, appears on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle,” Oct. 12, 2021. | Screenshot: Fox News
When the Quisha Kings and Scott Smiths in a nation are considered by the regime in power to be the enemy, it says more about the danger of the regime than those the rulers consider as threats.
Quisha King is a Florida mother and a leader of Moms for Liberty, a group seeking to inform and inspire mothers and fathers to assert their parental rights in the face of a ravenous government and its allies, lackeys, parasites, and sycophants.
The regime now consists of the elite establishments of Big Entertainment, Big Information, Big Academia, Big Government, Big Corporations. The leviathan is bloated with the muscle of all those entities and seems to grow steadily in its capacities of repression. Together, they become the consensus establishment, the regime that determines what is permissible and what is not so a compliant culture can cash in its liberty and acquiesce to the demands of the regime.
Within that cluster is the National School Boards Association (NSBA).
Moms for Liberty, among other things, resists the mandated teaching of critical race theory (CRT), forced mask-wearing and other incursions against parental rights in the public schools their children attend. NSBA sent a letter to President Biden suggesting that, in accord with the Patriot Act, such people and their ilk should be handled like domestic terrorists because they demand their school boards be accountable to parents.
Scott Smith’s daughter was assaulted in a school bathroom by a transgender boy, and was also labeled a “domestic terrorist” because he rushed into a school board meeting and demanded that the board take responsibility for what had happened to his daughter.
As Smith was being pulled down to the floor and arrested his wife cried out, “My child was raped at school, and this is what happens!”
Apparently, all citizens so concerned about the direction of public education in America that they challenge the authority of their school boards, suddenly become, in the eyes of the leviathan government and elitist establishments, enemies of the state—itself increasingly the enemy of the freedoms established in the constitutional system.
The Biden White House sent the NSBA letter to the Department of Justice. Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed the FBI to get involved, exacerbating, and strengthening the resolve of the parents whose response shook the political barometers at the White House.
The outcome was an apology from NSBA, regretting their letter, and acknowledging that “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”[1]
Quisha King believed that if NSBA’s apology was genuine, instead of “calling us domestic terrorists, they would have investigated and questioned these school boards to see if there was any validity to any of what the parents are actually saying.”
There is something chilling here: NSBA’s suggestion that people like King are domestic terrorists who need to be reeled in under the Patriots Act calls to mind other regimes that have regarded the people of their nation as the enemy of the state.
For example, the Soviet Union under Stalin.
In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev (who would later prove himself as a totalitarian), then new leader of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union, shocked his fellow Marxists with a speech that revealed the monstrous nature of Stalinism. In doing so he exposed characteristics of any regime that sees its own people as the enemy.
“Stalin originated the concept ‘enemy of the people,’” said Khrushchev. Actually, the wording could have been, “the people are the enemy.” That term, Khrushchev continued in the Communist Party Congress speech, “made possible the usage of the most cruel repression, violating all norms of revolutionary legality, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against those who were only suspected of hostile intent, against those who had bad reputations…”
Khrushchev went on to say that “this concept, enemy of the people, actually eliminated the possibility of any kind of ideological fight.” Thus, the bottom line is that anyone labeled an enemy of the people or of the state were judged as guilty and pushed out of the public square where they might have defended their views.
Today’s regime in the United States has also pushed those considered as public enemies out of the public square, and, as much as possible, cut off their voice. Consider, for example censorship by Big Tech sites of groups deemed not worthy of public exposure because of their religious, political, or social views.
Silencing the enemies of the regimes is also the aim of the Cancel culture and Wokeism. Men and women who violate the value system and worldview specified by the high priests of Wokeism are ridiculed and banished. The regime cluster even turns on its own, like JK Rowling, who once helped build the Woke culture. She was cancelled for giving public support to Maya Forstater who said, “men cannot change into women.”
In an eyeblink, Rowling became the enemy in the eyes of the cultural regime.
However, when the regime considers the people as the enemy, then it is the regime that is itself the enemy of the people. That means action must be taken.
Throughout the history of civilization, the “public square” has been the locus of revolutionary resistance. So, the public square has to be the place of resistance in this current battle. Presently, however, that “square” has come under the censorship of authoritarian regimes. Under this repression the church and the home must be the primary places of resistance… forming worldview that will awaken a slumbering mass who at times seem not to want to be disturbed.
Churches must wake up to what is happening and recover the prophetic voice. Discipleship ministries must teach the biblical revelation concerning nations and cultures, and dare address the spiritual foundations of the nation. Parents must make their homes centers of worldview teaching and formation for their children.
Without this, we face a Stalinized future with the elite consensus establishment imposing its will upon us and our posterity.
[1] Florida mother says she does not accept NSBA’s apology for letter that likened parents to domestic terrorists | Fox News
With 99.7% of adults in the Irish county of Waterford having received the COVID shots, they have the highest per-capita case rate of COVID anywhere in the country. Are they now going to suggest it’s the fault of the 0.3%?!
The Irish Times reported last week that with one Waterford city district at a 14-day incidence rate of 1,486 cases per 100,000 of the population, Waterford has the highest incidence rate of anywhere in Ireland. The COVID case rate is three times the national average, which in itself has been increasing steadily in recent weeks, despite 91% of Irish adults being vaccinated. However, Waterford takes the cake.
“Waterford has the highest rate of vaccination in the country with 99.7 per cent of adults over the age of 18 (as registered in the last census) fully vaccinated,” reports the Irish Times. “The county has gone from having one of the lowest rates of Covid-19 infection in Ireland to one of the highest.”
How can a vaccine that is this leaky, and apparently even counterproductive, continue to be pushed on a population even if it had zero side effects? How many more examples of this do we need to see?
According to Our World in Data, most Irish began to get vaccinated in April/May, which is exactly when we saw a reversal of fortunes, with more cases than we’ve seen in months.about:blank
What else have we seen rise at the same time? You got it. COVID cases.
about:blank
And no, it’s not just mild cases. Ireland has the highest number of people in the hospital with COVID since March, and the trajectory is getting worse. This is with the highest vaccination rate in the EU – over 90% of those over 16 – and it’s particularly bad in the most vaccinated county of Ireland. The state’s chief medical officer, Dr. Tony Holohan, said he was “increasingly worried about the rising incidence of the disease nationwide” and that the primary focus “must be to protect the most vulnerable from Covid-19.” He then proceeded to blame the unvaccinated! Gee, if just 9% of those over 16 in the country are unvaccinated and just 0.3% in the worst area, what percentage of the vulnerable do you think are not vaccinated?! And wasn’t the vaccine designed to protect “the most vulnerable?”
At some point, there is nowhere to run or hide from the botched vaccine that not only fails to stop transmission, but causes viral immune escape and makes more virulent variants. A recent analysis of the emergent A.30 strain published in Nature shows that “the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 variant A.30 is heavily mutated and evades vaccine-induced antibodies with high efficiency.” This is what happens when you “shoot at the king and miss,” so to speak, by fighting a virus with weak, narrow-spectrum, and waning antibodies. We’ve gone backward. U.K. data already shows that the vaccinated are infected at a greater rate per capita – in some cohorts twice the rate – for every age group over 30.
It’s becoming clear that not only does this vaccine create greater transmission, but it also fails to protect against critical illness, especially for those who need the protection the most. Even the studies that continue to rely on old data – before the vaccines fully waned – show that the protection against critical illness doesn’t really work for the immunocompromised.
A new study from Sweden published as a preprint in the Lancet claims that the vaccine efficacy against serious illness is still holding up. There’s just one catch. “The effectiveness against severe illness seems to remain high through 9 months, although not for men, older frail individuals, and individuals with comorbidities,” conclude the authors. Well, isn’t that why we needed a vaccine in the first place? Even the Swedish study shows that after 210 days, there is zero efficacy against symptomatic infection, after which there seems to be negative efficacy. Researchers found just 52% efficacy against severe illness in all men after six months, which means you can no longer count on it for protection.
It’s also important to remember that many people in Sweden – more than most other countries – already had the infection, possibly asymptomatically. So, it’s possible that the efficacy of the shots is being overstated because some of those people benefited from natural immunity.
Thus, where are we nine to 12 months after the shot? Negative efficacy against symptomatic infection for all, as witnessed by the hard data in places like the U.K. and Ireland, and very low and spotty efficacy for serious illness, going down to zero for those who need it the most. But this is not cost-free. Who is to say that the effectiveness against severe illness won’t go negative as well, following some sort of pattern of antibody dependent disease enhancement? Moreover, who’s to say more mass vaccination of children and boosters for adults won’t create even more viral immune escape that will strengthen the virus and subject people to the risks of the shots without even protecting them for another month against these new self-perpetuated mutations?
This week, the Irish parliament was issued a “stark” warning from health officials about the growing threat of the virus. During sane times, policy leaders would reject the definition of insanity by engaging in introspection and changing course from existing failed policies. Yet in their warped minds, no matter how much the vaccines make the virus worse, you can always vaccinate more! So long as there is a single human being who didn’t receive the latest number shot, there’s always a way to project the viral enhancement on those who didn’t create it.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Ben Gray
If you really, really miss Donald Trump, MSNBC may just be for you! Biden is cratering, fuel prices are skyrocketing (hey, anybody seen Greta Thunberg?), hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens are pouring across our border, and the murder rate keeps hitting historic highs. But the establishment media can’t stop talking about TRUMP.
So for my friends in the media, here are a few thoughts on your Trump obsession.
Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of Dr. Evil, has become an unlikely hero among the Can’t-Get-Enough-Trump media — because she can’t stop talking about Trump either.
Cheney says:
— Jan. 6 was dumb (true: As David Cole says, “What was supposed to happen?”);
— Trump is hurting the GOP (true: He endorsed Stacey Abrams and says his voters won’t come out in 2022 and ’24 if Republicans don’t make the “Presidential Election Fraud of 2020” their No. 1 issue); and
— Trump is lying about the Arizona recount (also true).
But then she had to add: Oh, and now I’m for gay marriage! Isn’t Bush the greatest?
Is there a political party for people who think Jan. 6 was dumb, notice that we don’t have a wall, and can read an election report, but still say Bush is a male bimbo and pretty much everything liberals said about him was true?
“Trumpism Without Trump” is the winning formula. We’re keeping the policies, but getting rid of the 8-year-old.
The main lesson out of the Arizona election hand recount a few weeks ago isn’t about the election at all. It’s that media misinformation is a serious problem in a democracy.
We got some very confusing messaging on the results of the recount. First, there were headlines all over saying it resulted in Biden winning again. I didn’t really care one way or another, except then Trump started going around claiming that the hand recount clearly showed … HE WON!
It’s a simple yes-or-no question: Did Trump win Arizona or didn’t he?
This turned out to be an epistemological puzzle. You see, both sides are gigantic liars, so whom to believe?
In this instance, the media were telling the truth, because the truth favored them, and Trump was lying, because it didn’t favor him.
But thanks, media, for so debasing yourselves with idiotic lies over the past five years — e.g., Russian collusion, the “Access Hollywood” tape, Trump’s remarks on Charlottesville — that I had to look up a basic fact question for myself because I simply couldn’t trust you.
Trump lost Arizona. The hand recount was conducted by a hardcore conservative Christian, Doug Logan, famed for his integrity, and who was, therefore, viciously attacked by liberals. The recount was ordered up by Trump Republicans in the Arizona legislature. It was paid for by Trump supporters.
If you don’t believe Logan, right-wingers, you won’t believe anyone, except the guy who promised to build a wall; bring manufacturing home; and end anchor babies, the carried interest loophole and the war in Afghanistan — but didn’t do any of those things.
Logan’s hand recount of the ballots resulted in Biden receiving 99 more votes and Trump receiving 261 fewer votes. The report is here in black and white.
When Trump says, We have conclusively proven that we won, he’s just doing the salesman thing he always does, telling you that a used car is a fantastic deal, an amazing car, runs like a top!
But the transmission just fell out.
I’m telling you, it’s a humdinger!
Yeah, and we have a big, beautiful wall. Thousands and thousands of miles.
File this under: At Least He Was Thinking of Us, Briefly.
The New York Times reported this week:
Trump’s Pentagon Chief Quashed Idea to Send 250,000 Troops to the Border
“Top national security aides to former President Trump also talked him out of launching military raids against drug cartels inside Mexico.”
Typical Trump. He talks a good game, then one person raises an objection and he says, OK, I’ll just tell my supporters I wanted to do it.
Of course, the Times’ take is: Isn’t he awful? Yes, New York Times, because he didn’t do it. Not because he said he would.
A tale of two drugs. One has become the standard of care at an astronomical cost despite studies showing negative efficacy, despite causing severe renal failure and liver damage, and despite zero use outpatient. The other has been safely administered to billions for river blindness and now hundreds of millions for COVID throughout the world and has turned around people at death’s doorstep for pennies on the dollar. Yet the former – remdesivir – is the standard of care forced upon every patient, while the latter – ivermectin – is scorned and banned in the hospitals and de facto banned in most outpatient settings. But according to the NIH, a doctor has the same right to use ivermectin as to use remdesivir. And it’s time people know the truth.
Although the NIH and the FDA didn’t officially approve ivermectin as standard of care for COVID, it is listed on NIH’s website right under remdesivir as “Antiviral Agents That Are Approved or Under Evaluation for the Treatment of COVID-19.” It is accorded the same status, the same sourcing for dosage recommendations, and the same monitoring advice as remdesivir … except according to NIH’s own guidance, remdesivir has a much greater potential for severe reactions in the very organs at stake in a bout with acute COVID.
Now, let’s take a closer look at the details.
As you can see, they admit that remdesivir causes renal and liver failure! One of the symptoms is “ALT and AST elevations,” which are indications of liver damage. Is that really the drug you want when someone is at risk for a cytokine storm and thrombosis? They even have a monitoring requirement for these side effects. Also, it does have some drug interactions as well.
Now, let’s move on to the ivermectin side effects.
Notice how the NIH is essentially saying it has no side effects by the fact that it prefaces the section by noting the drug is “generally well tolerated,” a distinction not accorded to remdesivir. Then it proceeds to list the same boilerplate GI and nausea warnings on every drug under the sun. There are almost no drug interactions and ZERO specific guidance for monitoring!
Just looking at the NIH’s own table, why in the world would remdesivir be the expensive mandatory standard of care and ivermectin, buttressed by 64 studies, be relegated to hemlock status even for patients about to die and with no other options?
Yes, we get the message – every one of those studies is supposedly low-powered, a fraud, and all the thousands of doctors turning people around on ivermectin are some how frauds even though they have nothing to gain and everything to lose from pushing it. But if that is our standard for ivermectin, it raises the obvious question about remdesivir. How could remdesivir not only be approved but made the standard of care when it has negative efficacy in trials, has a negative recommendation from the WHO, and, by the NIH’s own admission, causes liver and kidney failure?
Even if the medical establishment dismisses the preponderance of evidence and reality of the past 18 months, with ivermectin saving so many people, just from a safety standpoint, why would they not allow people to at least try something this safe while forcing on them a dangerous drug like remdesivir? In addition, these are the same hospitals that administer Olumiant, which has a rare FDA black box warning for blood clots, even though these very patients are at high risk for a pulmonary embolism and other clotting disorders?
In other words, there is no way anyone can justify the war on ivermectin (and every other cheap treatment that has been and will be proposed) as being rooted in anything related to medicine and science. If that were the case, the medical establishment would be dead set against remdesivir and Olumiant. Moreover, to the extent remdesivir has any efficacy that is worth its risk, it would be outpatient during the viral stage. There is quite literally no scientific way remdesivir can work in the pulmonary inflammation stage. Unlike ivermectin, which tones down inflammatory cytokines such as IL-1beta and IL-10 as well as tumor necrosis factor alpha, remdesivir has no anti-inflammatory qualities.
Gee, is there any wonder hospitals will fight patients in court – including those whom they already recommend to remove from life support – to not even try ivermectin as a last resort?! So much for the desire to flatten the curve of hospitalizations. They want people in the hospital! If they really cared about the run on hospitals, they’d promote treatments that work early and outpatient so that nobody would need to come to the hospital.
Here’s one other strong piece of evidence that this is not about any shortcoming of ivermectin, but stems from unrelenting war on anything off patent that might work, in order to run interference for expensive, dangerous, and ineffective tools of big pharma. Let’s go back to that NIH chart of potential antiviral drugs for COVID. There is actually a third one on that list aside from remdesivir and ivermectin.
Nitazoxanide, much like ivermectin, is a (potentially) cheap off-patent anti-parasitic that has been praised for years as a very safe, broad-spectrum anti-parasitic mechanism and is written about glowingly in studies. And it actually has an even longer and more direct precedent of research and clinical use against viruses than even ivermectin. It is the standard of care for norovirus and rotavirus in Brazil and has shown promise against not just flus and hepatitis, but coronavirus colds, SARS, and MERS. This research has been known even in the media for well over a year! Gee, we have an antiviral that is so safe it’s given to young kids for viral diarrhea and has been known to work against coronaviruses. Yet our government has refused to pursue any meaningful research for 18 months!
Originally, it was as cheap as ivermectin, but one company seems to have bought it up, and now it is prohibitively expensive in the U.S. However, were the government to promote it, this off-patent drug could easily be mass-produced for pennies on the dollar and costs just a few dollars for a full regimen in Mexico and Brazil.https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=BMDC5574376707
Notice that, just like with ivermectin, the NIH prefaces the side effects section on nitazoxanide by saying it is “generally well tolerated” and then proceeds to list the boilerplate of typical minor side effects that are disclosed for every drug under the sun. Anyone merely looking at this NIH page alone can see how the government and medical establishment’s treatment of remdesivir vs. every other therapeutic that has been tried is built upon control, greed, and something much darker than that. Now, just remember, these are the same people who will look you in the eye and say the shots are 100% effective and carry zero risk. It’s all in the $cience. What is self-evident from the NIH’s disclosure, which was updated as late as July 2021, is that ivermectin and nitazoxanide work for a lot more than just parasites. It’s primarily the political parasites that fear that those drugs.
There is nothing free-market about “private” businesses joining in the violation of the Nuremberg Code. In fact, the entire concept of a rushed therapeutic that wanes quickly and causes a shocking number of known and unknown injuries never would have gotten off the ground under the free market. Socialism, subsidization, monopolization, government using taxpayer funding to create, market, coerce, censor, and reshape society with the shot — all the while being exempt from legal liability — are the only reasons why any business even under 100 employees, much less a larger business, would be mandating it at this point. The only effective, prudent, fair, and free-market position is to use equal and opposing force to restore the balance of the free market. It’s show time for the state legislatures.
Legislative bodies throughout the country are meeting over the next few weeks to debate measures that would counter the mandates being illegally promulgated by the Biden administration. Most GOP-controlled states are going to take some form of action, but the question is whether they will take the right action or be intimidated by the visceral response of the big business and health care cartel that has become a giant arm of government tyranny. Several Iowa lawmakers have put together a bill that is the gold standard of what other red states should adopt this coming week.
The crux of the bill, Iowa SF 193, sponsored by Sens. Guth, Johnson, Schultz, Whiting, and Carlin, categorically bans all human rights violations in relation to “Pfizer” government mandates. It prohibits an employer from failing or refusing to hire, discharge, penalize, or otherwise discriminate against an employee with respect to compensation or the terms, conditions, or privileges of employment based on the employee’s vaccination history or the refusal of the employee to receive a vaccine or provide proof of immunity. It provides a cause of action in court to anyone discriminated against, along with a prescribed remedy of back pay plus 10% from the employer.
This is what we do in the context of every other form of discrimination, including when employers legitimately terminate problematic workers. So, until we get rid of all those laws and the EEOC at the federal level, we don’t need to hear about “the free market.”
Next, rather than providing an exception to this rule for hospitals and health care settings, this bill specifically bans any discrimination against health care workers or discrimination on the treatment side for patients in a health care setting. It spells out every form of medical professional, including medical students and residents. Importantly, this bill bars any health care provider licensing authority from denying or revoking a license to any applicant because they decline the shot.
At this point, it is abundantly clear that the shots provide no more protection against transmission than not having the shots, which makes any form of any mandate unjustified, even if we are to believe one can govern another’s body. For example, in health care settings, where health organizations are arguing that they must protect cancer patients who didn’t get the shot, those patients are at least as likely to get the virus from a supposed vaccinated person as from an unvaccinated person, especially if the latter individual already had the virus. Moreover, research has consistently shown that people within 14 days of the first or second shot are the most vulnerable to catching COVID because of the suboptimal levels of antibodies. Having thousands of health care workers suddenly get the shots within a period of a few weeks would expose those patients to the most risk in health care settings.
Another important provision of the Iowa bill is that it bars all insurance companies from discriminating against those who don’t get the shot. This means they cannot reject; deny; limit; cancel; refuse to renew; increase the premiums for; limit the amount, extent, or kind of coverage available to; or otherwise adversely affect eligibility or coverage for the group health policy, contract, or plan for health insurance.
We’d all love to live with a market in which any providers can offer any insurance plan they wish. But that ship sailed with Obamacare. The only things worse than full socialist mandates are half-manipulated mandates, which induce totalitarianism in addition to socialism. Thanks to Obamacare, we cannot start our own insurance companies because of the actuarily insolvent mandates. Yet the same government that pushed universal coverage now gets to manipulate the government-sponsored “private” monopoly companies to bar coverage for large groups of people based on zero scientific evidence. Repeal Obamacare, and then we will remove this provision. Until then, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Next, the bill bars any owner or manager of a public accommodation from discriminating in services against someone who has not taken the shot. Again, this virus has been used as an excuse to prohibit all landowners from evicting anyone, including those who are disruptive, destructive, and late on rent. We will not allow the socialists to use their control over the “private” sector to suddenly encourage them to discriminate against people with no cause. I’m fine with ending most discrimination laws. But if we are going to have them, the worst outcome is for government to manipulate a perfectly perverse standard of who is subject to them and who is exempt from them. When businesses can deny services or employment to those with HIV or with certain sexual behaviors, or thwart Obamacare, Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, OSHA, and ADA regulations, then come back to me about “the private sector can do what they want.”
More provisions of SF 193 include the following:
A prohibition on including someone’s immunization status on their driver’s license.
Expansion of the exemption process for vaccine requirements in schools related to existing vaccines.
Anyone administering the vaccine must obtain written consent from the patient prior to reporting the administration of the vaccine or immunization to the statewide immunization registry.
At present, all private businesses over 100 employees are on the hook for a looming federal mandate to require a shot that the government has essentially created and manipulated with taxpayer funding that the free market never would have sustained. Both government and the pharmaceutical companies are exempt from liability. This is not free market; this is fascism. As such, for any state to merely pass a neutral law without providing equal and opposing force to prohibit (rather than exempt from) the federal mandate is not an exercise in free market ethos but in submission to totalitarianism.
How come none of these business and health organizations cried bloody murder about “rights of the private sector” when governors placed the ultimate regulation on them – a crippling shutdown or cumbersome capacity mandates? In this case, they are not regulating affirmative expensive compliance measures – just simply a dictate to apply existing discrimination and health privacy law to where it’s needed most in order to counter Nuremberg violations by the federal government. Private business owners don’t need to lift a finger and spend any time or money on this. Just don’t harass your workers. “Well, we’re scared of COVID,” they are saying. In that case, you have the shot, so what do you care about someone else not getting it?https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=BMDC5574376707
The private sector or free market did not conjure up the riskiest and leakiest shot in history or mask-wearing; it was all induced by the federal government through fear, intimidation, misinformation, threats, and censorship. In the case of big business and health care, there has been downright collaboration with the federal government at every stage – a violation of the ultimate antitrust principles. Therefore, every state has an obligation to interpose between the federal coercion and the safety of the people. Allowing every business in every state to remain a conduit for that federal tyranny is not respect for private rights. It’s collaboration with a very dark tunnel of tyranny. We don’t want to discover what’s on the other side.
How badly have we lost our way? It is an important question that many Americans, including this one, can no longer avoid asking just because we intuitively know we are going to be profoundly depressed with the answer.
Yes, we have lost our way as a nation in foundational ways. It will be difficult to find our way again without divine intervention. The moral compass of a significant number of our fellow citizens has been desensitized and demagnetized. Is it a plurality, a majority, or just a significant minority?
Does that really make much of a difference? I don’t think it does, really, because whatever the percentage is, it is enough to vitiate and blunt the basic Judeo-Christian morality upon which this nation was founded, and to which a majority of its citizens aspired to achieve. Eventually, even many of the blind spots resulting from their human frailty were confronted by the foundational ethos embedded in the founding document, their sine qua non as a nation, “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 is indeed a revolutionary credo that has impelled the nation to an evermore expansive understanding of the depth and breadth of that truth.
Tragically, somewhere along the way, America veered seriously off course and we are now confronted with a collapse into full-blown paganism.
What triggered this lugubrious conclusion? I have seldom been both as shocked and saddened as I was after reading the Rev. Rebecca Todd Peters’ op-ed in USA Today, “Faith Guided Our Decision on 2 Abortions.” Rev. Peters identifies herself as a Presbyterian minister (John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and Peter Marshall, among others, would find that statement astounding considering the op-ed’s content.)
The Rev. Peters also states that she is “a wife and a mother of two” and that she has “also had two abortions.”
She immediately follows this by asserting, “I did not make my abortion decision despite my Christian identity and faith, but rather because of it.”
As my heart sank and my spirit was distraught, my mind immediately went to the first chapter of the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. There Paul describes the ever-downward spiral of human sin where one of the most distinguishable things about sin is its ability to generate ever greater sin and depravity (Rom. 1:18-32).
After all, the Apostle Paul confronted a Roman society that was as depraved, if not more so, than our own era. Even the pagans noticed and were offended. Seneca observed that it was an age “stricken with the agitations of a soul no longer master of itself.” Tacitus opined that “the greater the infamy, the wilder the delight.”
As the masterful New Testament scholar William Barclay so discerningly observed of the people of that time, “He has so erected an altar to himself in the center of things that he worships himself to the exclusion of God and man.”
Before we go any further, let us be clear — “Waterford crystal clear.” The Reverend Peters does not represent any historic form of the genuine Christian faith — Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant.
The Roman civilization into which the Christian faith was birthed out of Judaism was one in which the life of the child was discounted and devalued perhaps more than ever before or since until the modern pro-abortion era in the West. Abortion was common, as was infanticide.
Will and Ariel Durant in their multi-volume The Story of Civilization report that when a child was born it was placed in front of the father. If the father picked up the child and acknowledged it, the baby lived. If the father turned away, the child was literally abandoned. This abandonment was commonplace.
The only real difference between then and now in the extreme pro-abortion regime in America is that in Rome it was the father who had absolute power of life and death over their child, and in modern America, it is the mother who wields such absolute power. By the way, the Durants reported that after the first girl was safely delivered in a family, 99 out of every 100 subsequent girl babies were discarded to die.
The Jewish civilization was the only ancient civilization in the Mediterranean Basin which did not routinely practice infanticide and abortion.
It was into this pro-death, anti-child milieu that Christianity burst forth in the first century AD with a courageous and uncompromising pro-life message. As Michael J. Gorman has pointed out in Abortion and the Early Church: “Writers of the first three centuries laid the theological and literary foundation for all subsequent early Christian writing on abortion…three important themes emerged during these centuries: the fetus is the creation of God; abortion is murder; and the judgment of God falls on those guilty of abortion.”
In fact, the Didache, the first widely acknowledged post-Apostolic teaching of the early church (circa 134 AD) vehemently condemned abortion and declared that it was beyond the pale for those identifying themselves as followers of Jesus Christ.
For the Reverend Peters to assert that “without a doubt…the two decisions we made to have children were far more morally significant than the decision to end two pregnancies” is quite literally blasphemous. Morally significant for whom? The two babies she killed would undoubtedly have pleaded with their mother to let them live.
We are talking about two babies, her babies, and she says killing them can be “a moral good.” Every abortion stops a beating human heart. In this case — two of her babies’ beating hearts.
In Paul’s analysis of the moral degeneracy of Roman civilization, he declares the downward spiritual spiral of degradational sin produces people “without natural affection” (Rom 1:31). The Greek root of that phrase is Storgē(astorgos), a special word in the Greek language, standing for “mother love” or “family love.”
In first-century Rome, as in 21st century America, the natural love a parent has for a child was in serious decline — a decline evidenced by Reverend Peters’ proud declaration of her “moral” decision-making. The Christian church, in all its historic traditions, until the last half of the 20th century, would rightly have declared the Rev. Peters’ theology “apostasy.”
In another part of the New Testament, the Apostle Paul warned of those bearing at least the name “Christian” and the consequence of teaching false doctrine leading to their consciences being “seared” or cauterized as if by “a hot iron” (I Tim 4:2).
I fear that the Rev. Peters is emblematic of far too many Americans who have had their consciences seared and deadened by the child sacrifice of at least 65 million of our unborn citizens.
The contrast with those who still have a sensitive and accurate moral compass was illustrated for me in a particularly dramatic way just a few days ago. Fox newscaster Ben Domenech was reporting on the resurgent pro-life movement while noting that America has one of the most radically extreme pro-abortion legal regimes in the world, keeping gruesome company with Communist China and North Korea.
In the course of his report, he began to relate an episode recounted by the remarkable Whittaker Chambers in his even more remarkable memoir, Witness. Chambers and his wife were Soviet Communist spies operating in the U.S. Chambers later became a Christian, turned away from Communism, exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, and authored a memoir, Witness, which had a huge influence on a large number of people, including Ronald Reagan.
Chambers records that in 1933 he and his wife discovered that they were pregnant. Realizing that this would be very different considering they were both Communist spies in America, Mrs. Chambers went to make arrangements to abort the child. When she came home a few hours later she was very subdued and quiet.
Chambers explained, “My wife came over to me, took my hands, and burst into tears.’
“‘Dear heart,’ she said in a pleading voice, “we couldn’t do that awful thing to a little baby, not to a little baby, dear heart.’”
As Domenech’s voice broke and he teared up, he quoted Chambers’ response: “A wild joy swept me. Reason, the agony of my family, the Communist Party and its theories, the wars and revolutions of the 20th century, crumbled at the touch of the child.”
Whittaker Chambers and his wife, while then atheists, had not had their consciences seared and neither has Mr. Domenech. The current struggle over killing our unborn babies at horrific rates will reveal just how cauterized and desensitized many Americans’ consciences have become as a consequence of having been submerged in the ever-burgeoning culture of death.
I pray to God that we have not been so fatally, morally impressed as a people that we cannot be convicted and moved “at the touch of the child.”
Aldous Huxley once observed, “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that the other set of people are human.” Our unborn babies are human beings and God has a plan and purpose for each one of them and I tremble for my country when I think of the massive child sacrifice of our children which we have already allowed to be perpetrated.
Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.
Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.
People hold up signs during a rally against “critical race theory” (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021. “Are you ready to take back our schools?” Republican activist Patti Menders shouted at a rally opposing anti-racism teaching that critics like her say trains white children to see themselves as “oppressors.” “Yes!”, answered in unison the hundreds of demonstrators gathered this weekend near Washington to fight against “critical race theory,” the latest battleground of America’s ongoing culture wars. | AFP via Getty Images/Andrew Caballero-Reynolds
Our shocking slide into the surreal world of leftist leadership has led to this: American parents are now the enemy. Big Education and a weaponized Department of Justice are going after the very people who should have the most say in public education. School boards and public school administrators, like in Loudoun County, Virginia, where I live, have faced unprecedented informed dissent from parents of every background. Instead of acting like public servants, they act like the petty gods of Mount Olympus recklessly wielding their (unconstitutional) power as they try to strike down (e.g. silence, fire, dox and demonize) anyone who dares to challenge their rule.
But like typical progressives, they’re the victims. They’re more than deserving of the outrage and peaceful protests by American parents. We’re fed up with the pollution of our children’s minds with LGBT pedophilia and porn, racism, colorism, anti-capitalism, religious bigotry, anti-free speech, and other anti-American propaganda.
I don’t advocate violence in any form. I fully advocate parent-led education and fully oppose government-led indoctrination. My wife and I withdrew our school-aged children from Loudoun County Public Schools. I won’t be silenced by those who think parents have no right to help shape what our children learn in schools funded by our tax dollars. We now homeschool all of our children and are passionate about school choice. Sorry, Terry McAuliffe. Not sure why you “don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” There are no schools without students. There are no students without parents. Parents are the primary educators, the primary influencers, and the primary individuals who have to deal with the emotional and psychological fall-out of public education’s increasingly destructive liberal indoctrination.
The National School Boards Association, bolstered by the leftist news establishment’s false narratives, has called for President Joe Biden (whose children didn’t attend public schools) to sic the Department of Justice on dissenting parents, now grotesquely labeled as domestic terrorists.
Let me introduce you to some of the parents leading this fight in my county. These are passionate individuals who never would’ve thought they’d be forced into such a battle. These are everyday moms and dads who defy the fake news caricatures. I’ve shared the stage with each of these remarkable women and men. So, I’ve asked them why they’ve chosen to get involved.
Meet Xi Van Fleet.
Xi fled communist China. She knows, firsthand, about the suppression of basic human rights like life, free speech, and religious liberty. She knows what unlimited government control looks like. “Many black/brown/Asian parents speak up against Critical Race Theory. The Left always uses the Trump card to divide Americans and to discredit those who dare to push back on their radical agenda,” Xi explains. I asked her why it matters if you use someone’s “preferred” (and made up) pronouns. “This is not about pronouns,” she says. “The radical Left is altering reality and forcing us to conform. The goal is not to help transgenders. The goal is to control everyone else.”
Meet Joe Mobley.
Joe is another Loudoun county parent. He’s a podcaster and describes himself as an “uncloseted conservative”. One of the viral videos with his informed dissent focused on the insanely sexually explicit “diversity” books offered by the school district to young children (see it here.) I asked him about the most shocking thing he learned since getting involved in fighting LCPS [Loudon County Public Schools]. “LCPS’ willingness to openly lie, even when the truth is a matter of public record. Like saying CRT isn’t in our schools while CRT Develop Planning is a line item in the budget,” Joe explains. “Media Matters says we’re billionaire-backed professional activists. I can assure you I am struggling to stay in the fight for my family, community, and country. I have a real job that is extremely demanding and important, I’m active in my church. We are about to have our fourth child under seven. The only support I have is emotional support from my family.”
Meet Patti Hidalgo Menders.
Patti is the president of the Loudoun County Republican Women’s Club (the largest in Virginia). For some reason, it’s only a problem when a conservative is involved politically. On the Left, it is a standard operating procedure. Her parents fled communist Cuba; they were branded “enemies of the state.” Now, Patti has become the enemy of Big Education as she was blacklisted by a private Facebook group made up of former and current LCPS teachers and board members who wanted to target her publicly. She’s also a mom of six boys, one of whom is still a student at LCPS.
I asked her why she’s involved. “If parents don’t get involved, then the school boards will continue to dictate what is best for their children. I do not coparent with the government. I do not coparent with the school board. This Loudoun County school board continues to listen to special interest groups and equity consultants instead of listening to the parents and the children/students. Parents need to take a stand!”
Meet Michael Rivera.
Michael is yet another Loudoun County parent, with two children in LCPS. He’s a public safety professional who is deeply concerned about the safety of children’s minds in public education. “Students may not have the intellectual wherewithal to ‘fight’ per se but we can educate our children. As a result of the indoctrinating topics being proliferated, our job as parents got harder,” he explains. “We need to explain things to our children by stating and explaining reality and facts. That explanation includes ugly facts about the history of the United States. We need to give our children evidence and truth so they can debate and refute radical political ideologies. In the end, our children will be independent thinkers, but it is our job as parents to guide them down the right paths.”
Michael opposes the blatant CRT principles being pushed on students in government schools. “I’m not white, but I prefer not to lead with that fact. There is absolutely NO good that comes from reinforcing judgment of others solely by color. We know for a fact that it is illogical and was a false proposition during the awful years of slavery and oppression of blacks. I look to all of the successful minorities in America and only see progress for all. How ironic and ludicrous is it that wealthy, powerful, successful black Americans are trying to destroy the very [capitalist] system that allowed them to be who they are?”
Meet Shawntel Cooper.
Shawntel is a working, fighting mom. She is a no-nonsense warrior for her children who doesn’t mince words. Her speeches at school board meetings are straight fire! I asked her if she’s the parent fake news keeps talking about that wants to oppress black and brown people (insert eye-rolling and laughter here). “I’m black, and I’m very happy with my natural skin tone. I have noticed a lot of flip-flopping with the school system stating they are not teaching CRT. But then they changed the name to Culturally Responsive Framework anti-bias with the same curriculum they lied about. I was taught to never listen to rumors but check the facts before assuming. I’ve seen so many people marching for BLM, and we all witnessed BLM didn’t do a thing for those communities they encouraged [activists] to burn down. When I saw the shooting and looting, I knew then and there it was a political move to keep racism alive.”
Meet you.
The great thing about these parents, who apparently threaten Big Education and the Biden administration, is that they not only peacefully oppose the destructive policies being passed, but they also offer detailed alternatives. There are lots of great teachers and administrators in the public education system. My wife was a private and public school teacher for thirteen years (and continues as a homeschool educator). But Critical Race Theory, Feminist Theory (FemCrit), Queer Theory and other radical ideologies have been supplanting actual education for years. And the National Education Association (here, here and here) and the American Federation of Teachers (here, here and here) insist on this radicalization.
As a parent, are you willing to be silent while our children’s minds become experimental grounds for forced political activism?
There are resources to help inform and equip you like Fight for Schools, Parents Defending Education, and Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). There is a battle going on for the very heart and soul of our youth who are daily bombarded with dangerous and divisive ideologies. We must have zero tolerance for schools marginalizing parents and pretending our voices don’t matter. It’s a struggle parents cannot lose. It’s a struggle America must win.
Ryan Bomberger is the Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of The Radiance Foundation. He is happily married to his best friend, Bethany, who is the Executive Director of Radiance. They are adoptive parents with four awesome kiddos. Ryan is an Emmy Award-winning creative professional, factivist, international public speaker and author of NOT EQUAL: CIVIL RIGHTS GONE WRONG. He loves illuminating that every human life has purpose.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent views of Townhall.com., and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast
This isn’t a Chicago story. It’s a Democratic Party story.
Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney for Cook County and darling of MSNBC, has managed to increase murders in Chicago to astounding levels even at a time when we’re all getting used to astounding crime figures. Nationwide in 2020, murder and non-negligent manslaughter were up 29.4%, according to the FBI. That’s more than double the previous record of 1968, when murders increased by 12.7%.
Under the careful management of Foxx, murders in Chicago were up 55%. To put this in perspective, last year, there were nearly as many murders in Chicago (population: 2.7 million) as in New York City and Los Angeles combined (total population: more than 12 million).
Perhaps you’ve heard about the Wild West shootout in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago two weeks ago? One group of gang members shot up the house of rival gang members at around 10 in the morning. They blasted the house with more than 70 rounds, using handguns that had been modified into automatic weapons.Their rivals fired back from inside the home, in a gun battle that lasted so long, it was still going on when the police arrived.
All of this took place in full view of police street cameras, as well as the first officers on the scene.
Of the four initial shooters, one was shot dead at the scene and left behind. The other three took off in two (stolen) Dodge Chargers. One gang member drove to a medical center, dumped his wounded comrade, then led police on a car chase ending in a fiery crash. The other Charger turned up nearby, in flames.
Police arrested the two gang members from the hospital, as well as the three gunmen inside the home.
Foxx refused to bring charges against any of them on the grounds that it was “mutual combat.” At this point, the Chicago PD’s only option may be to resubmit charges on environmental grounds — polluting the air with lead.
Who knew that when Foxx talked about not prosecuting the small stuff, she was talking about murder and mass shootings? In today’s Chicago, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is legal.
Foxx’s bullheaded refusal to prosecute in this case was a shock to everyone in the country, except anyone living in Chicago. This is nothing new for the Democrats’ favorite DA. The police ought to put together a calendar of Foxx’s Released Murderer of the Month.
In July it was the murderer of Chrys Carvajal, a 19-year-old National Guardsman who was gunned down when he stepped out of a house party over Fourth of July weekend. Three eyewitnesses and video evidence led the police to a notoriously violent 38-year-old gang member.
Foxx refused to bring charges, claiming there wasn’t enough evidence.
August’s Murderer of the Month shot at a guy, missed him, but managed to hit two little girls sitting in the backseat of their family’s car after returning from church. Six-year-old Aubrey Broughton took a bullet through her lung, was rushed to the hospital and survived. But another bullet lodged directly in the heart of Aubrey’s sister, 7-year-old Serenity, killing her.
Again, the police investigated, found the suspect’s vehicle, evidence inside the car, and cellphone records pointing to a 24-year-old parolee.
Foxx refused to bring charges. (On the other hand, she did remind Serenity’s parents that she too, is a “mother,” so that was nice.)
Serenity’s mother complained that the police and prosecutors are “just bickering.” That was her assessment of the situation — not that Chicago has a prosecutor who won’t prosecute murder. This may explain why — in addition to George Soros’s $2 million donation — Foxx was reelected last year.
September’s Murderer of the Month was the killer of 18-year-old Manuel Porties Jr., who showed up for a fist fight and instead was repeatedly stabbed in the neck after being knocked to the ground. Naturally, the killing was captured on cellphone cameras of bystanders.
Foxx refused to bring charges against Porties’ killer, on the grounds that it was — again — “mutual combat.”
Due to the popularity of drive-by shootings and a “snitches get stitches” ethos, there’s already only about a 20% chance of being arrested if you commit murder in Chicago. Those are pretty good odds for taking another human life.
But even if the police catch you and present the prosecutor with video evidence, eyewitnesses, cellphone signals or a dead 7-year-old girl, Foxx is there to ensure that you will NOT go to prison. At this rate, Foxx might eventually kill off every living human being in Chicago.
But as I said, this is not a story about Chicago. Kim Foxx is a dangerous nut, but she’s not a random dangerous nut. She is the Democratic Party’s beau ideal of criminal justice.
Liberal moneybags George Soros has spent millions of dollars installing criminal-friendly prosecutors around the country. (Back before it was “anti-Semitic” to mention Soros’ pro-murder campaign, The New York Times ran an article boasting of the old prune’s role in electing inert prosecutors, like Foxx.)
A few hundred thousand dollars dumped into a minor DA’s race is more than enough to decide an election. Soros has spent millions. Foxx was Soros’ first success in electing DAs who would refuse to put another black man in prison.
They’re cool with dead black teenagers and dead 7-year-olds. The only black lives the Democrats care about are the lives of black criminals.
MSNBC, mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, was ecstatic the night Foxx won the election that would make her Cook County’s top prosecutor, with Lawrence O’Donnell giddily interviewing the pro-criminal Foxx. She was triumphantly interviewed again that weekend by Al Sharpton.
When has any prosecutor’s election drawn such celebration? When has it even drawn notice?
There is not a Republican in the nation who is not required to publicly state his position on Donald Trump. How about asking Democrats to take a position on Soros’ campaign to install nolle prosequi prosecutors? Apart from Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, will any Democrat in the country criticize Foxx?
No, of course not. As dead bodies pile up in Chicago under Kim Foxx, remember: This is the criminal justice “reform” Democrats want for the entire country.
THE VIEWS OF THE AUTHOR, AND THOSE OF THE PARTICIPANTS, DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT THOSE OF WHATDIDYOUSAY.ORG.
The front cover for the book “Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America” by J.P. De Gance and John Van Epp, which was released Sept. 6, 2021. | J.P. De Gance and John Van Epp
For years, Duval County, Florida, and its biggest city, Jacksonville, were known for having among the highest divorce rates in the state. And then something happened.
Various faith-based groups, including the Culture of Freedom Initiative, now called Communio, coordinated efforts with dozens of local churches to try and counter the tide of failed marriages.
The results were telling: From 2015 to 2017, Duval County saw its divorce rate drop by 28% and Jacksonville saw a 24% drop in its divorce rate.
Now Communio President J.P. De Gance wants to expand the initiative to help kickstart “the next Great Awakening in our country” by joining professional counselor John Van Epp, developer of the Relational Attachment Model series, to champion stable homes and families nationwide.
According to the authors, the way to save the declining American family is to have churches across the country more actively pursue family and relationship ministries.
“The message of the book is simply this,” they write. “Churches in America have the opportunity and responsibility to build relationship ministries and outreaches into their congregations and communities — congruent with their faith — that speak to the needs of singles, couples, and families, and, as a result, will grow their churches and transform their communities.”
The Christian Post interviewed Gance and Van Epp about their new book, including topics regarding how broken families are the leading reason why churches are in decline, why the Church is key to reviving the family unit, and advice to pastors on how to make sure their family ministries are strong. The following is an edited transcript from that interview:
CP: Why did you decide to write this book?
Van Epp: Both of us have a history of working with organizations in the community marriage movement, so nonprofits. Churches were not directly involved, per se.
A lot of times, faith-based people were working with nonprofits to try to impact their communities to lower divorce rates, improve quality of relationships in general, and almost all were doing it with government funds. And we both had different involvement.
Our frustration with all of that was as much good as it could accomplish, it never could change mainstream trends. And we came to believe, independent of each other, that it’s only, truly the Church in America that has the potential, the opportunity, and we believe the responsibility, to truly impact marriage and family trends, and dating trends, especially.
Not only among their people, but to reach out into the community and to step off the campus and into the community to build a relationship and offer that kind of content that will then warm people up to the Gospel of Jesus, but will also truly impact trends that are ultimately eroding the transmission of faith in America. So we believe the breakdown of the family is breaking down faith in America as well.
De Gance: My work before connecting with John was a combination of working with nonprofits that were secular and faith-based, but then we also did end up working with churches.
This is with our work in Jacksonville, Florida, which lowered the divorce rate substantially, and it was through trial and error that we recognized “wow, the church can be a huge change agent for marriage.” Not only because the church can affect its own membership, but we recognize that churches had the power to affect the community in a way that other NGOs can’t.
We recognized churches have the ability to affect their membership, we also realize that they can go way outside of their membership and affect their community, inviting folks in.
We need to have a call to action for the church to save the family.
CP: In the book, you wrote, “I had come to Washington to help save the country. But what if the best way for me to contribute to ‘saving the country’ didn’t involve Washington at all?” Do you believe too many people focus too much on using the federal government to change the country, and not enough on other ways?
Unsplash/Jude Beck
De Gance: Yes, absolutely. We have gotten away from our Tocquevillian past where problems were solved by voluntary civil society, by men and women working in their own communities, working through their churches to change real outcomes.
While politics is very important — I’m not dismissing it as important, and politics can change the culture, there have been examples of that — too many times, people of faith conclude that the best way to do it is “there ought to be a law” or “let’s come to Washington and lobby for changes,” when there’s a lot of work we can do, without getting anybody’s permission, right now, working in our church, working in our community.
Van Epp: Our government and our Constitution, we believe in separation of church and state, but some of what is happening in relationships, or you might even say a lot of what goes on in relationships, does have a true spiritual dimension.
The Church needs to speak to both the practical skill side of how to build and maintain relationships in healthy ways. So they need to have that kind of well-rounded understanding, but they bring to it the values, the consistent values of faith and a spiritual dimension that truly brings ultimate fulfillment in whether its romantic dating relationships, or ultimately marriage and family relationships, and that’s something that our government really can’t do.
If we become too dependent on [the government], which we believe is what has happened and we shirk our responsibility, then ultimately, the trends will not stay consistent with faith values and will head toward unhealthy, which is definitely what has happened in America.
CP: You argued in the book that the “collapse of the family is the major driver of the decline of Christianity.” Some say that things like the occasional major Church scandal or secular public education curriculums are the major drivers of Christianity declining in America. Why do you believe is the decline of the family instead of those other commonly claimed factors?
De Gance: This is a big challenge with polling organizations who try to understand the reason why faith is declining by just simply asking people, “Hey, why don’t you go to church?”
The way surveys are drawn up, the respondents will give a left brain rationalization as to why they don’t do something. You got to dig deeper to get the underlying emotional cause of it.
We show that once you control for family structure, if you look at a millennial, and you look at a baby boomer, they go to church at almost the exact same rate. If I know one thing about both people, it’s that if they grew up in a home of continuously married parents, there’s almost no difference whatsoever.
So what that means is, if family structure was the same for millennials as baby boomers enjoyed, then millennials would be going to church as frequently as baby boomers. And, to me, family of origin just settles any questions on correlation and causation.
The data overwhelmingly shows that church attendance varies significantly based on family structure, it’s the family structure that’s changed over the last 60 years and most folks who are trying to solve the problem of faith, are focusing on what we call “the smoke.” The symptom of the fire, the real fire is in the collapse of marriage and the home.
Van Epp: Look at how much money is spent on youth ministry. Because you think, “Hey, if we really just focus on this generation of young people growing up and really impact them, then we’re going to change the trajectory of their life because we’re going to infuse in them faith and faith values.”
And yet, with all of the emphasis of anywhere from $2 billion at a minimum, to up to maybe $6 billion a year spent on the youth industrial complex, from Christian college campuses, Cru and Navigators and InterVarsity, all the way down to staffing and churches, and look at that, it didn’t seem to make a dent in the trend line of each generation, from the baby boomers to the present, each generation moving by about a 10 percent increase away from faith, becoming more religious nones.
So we’re not trying to criticize investment in the youth, but point out that that was not correcting the problem. And what JP just mentioned, by just keeping the family, the parents married, and a young person growing up in an intact family, you have no decrease over the last three generations, you have no decrease in involvement in church. So therefore, that family structure seems to be the transmission belt of faith.
We have several chapters we call “the decoupling effect.” … Marriage was really viewed as a package deal socially, and what was coupled to marriage was sex, life partnership and parenting.
Of course, all through history, somebody had sex, a baby or partnership outside of marriage. But socially, it wasn’t until the ’60s decoupled those three things and they became really viewed as not only independent of marriage but personal rights.”
Fatherlessness also is highly related to the breakdown, the erosion of the transmission of faith.
De Gance: There’s significant evidence that the inability to attach to a father is a huge ingredient to expressions of agnosticism and atheism.
So we start to track that those young adults in our research with the right brain people, who said they reported being the most emotionally unattached or uninterested in church, also overwhelmingly reported having something other than a good relationship with their father.
While we all know there are good single dads or unmarried dads that are out there, on the aggregate, statistically speaking, an unmarried father is generally an uninvolved father and an unattached father. And that might be the secret ingredient as to why the collapse of marriage is destroying fatherhood, which is destroying faith.
CP: You noted in the book that while most pastors believe their churches have a strong family ministry, few actually do. What are some of the warning signs for pastors that they do not, in fact, have a strong family ministry at their church?
Unsplash/Samantha Gades
De Gance: First is, do you have a skills-based ministry where people are taught the skills to have a good marriage and good relationship and that those skills are practiced?
So a lot of times churches and pastors confuse preaching and teaching with practice.
Is your relationship and marriage ministry exclusively wrapped up in sermons or in just a witness talk or are you giving people the chance to practice the interpersonal skills that make marriages flourish?
[Often, churches have] the virtue of marriage down. They hold up marriage, they might champion marriage, in basic teaching, but the skills of marriage are non-existent. There’s almost this idea that faithfulness to the Gospel just begets great marriage skills and the reality is, as John noted, the decoupling effect over the last 60 years has created a lot of wounds in our culture and in our hearts and in our families.
And it’s more important than ever that the Church is teaching the skills to have a great relationship. Helping singles discern a good spouse, a good partner, to have the right cadence of relationship so that they can move into a healthy marriage. It’s so important for them — those who are married — early in their marriage to be taught and to practice the skills to have a good marriage.
The reality is, is the ingredients for a great marriage and a great relationship are known and knowable and are able for all of us to practice.
So if I am talking to a pastor, I would ask the question, “how are you helping your people know the skills of relationship health and practice them on a regular basis?”
Van Epp: Very simply, what JP just said, I would add that I have a relationship series that actually involves sermons. It’s a six-week series. It’s described in the book as called The RAM series, but churches license it, they get it, and they do it, and it has sermons, but it also involves everybody in the church.
However, I do think a lot of lead pastors lean a little bit toward being what I call “series junkies.” So once you do a really great series, as soon as you’re done, or even before you’re done, the big question is, “OK, what’s the next big series we want to do?” And they just bounce off of one. So a lot of churches do something about relationships, and then leave it.
So a real warning sign is, is healthy dating, healthy marriage content and skills-based content, part of your ongoing calendar every year?
Let’s look at the real practical side of things, let’s look at money. Does your budget have any money that is allocated on a consistent basis every year to marriage ministry and to help the singles with their dating relationships?
Because we’ve got to go upstream and help people long before they actually get married. And we’re not just talking money for the youth, let’s put that aside. We’re talking specifically for adult single dating and marriage family ministry. Is there really money in the budget?
Your wallet talks.
De Gance: We need, as a church, to recognize that even before the pandemic, the number of people getting married every single year was down 31% since the year 2000. It’s dropped 61% since the year 1970.
We can either keep doing what we’ve always been doing. If we do that, the last one out should turn the lights off, because that’s the direction the Church is heading if we don’t wrap our hands around the flight from marriage.
CP: What do you hope readers take away from you book?
Van Epp: My hope is that in reading the book or if they do the [RAM series] that it does kick off a real paradigm shift of their priorities going forward into the next 10 to 20 years.
We’re not talking about something that we think can be fixed in just a couple of years. We could make a huge impact if we get lots of churches involved, in working together in a particular community, like what Jacksonville had, they had over 90 churches working in the city of Jacksonville and over a three-year period, they made a huge dent of over 23 percent drop in divorce rate. If churches really work together.
My hope for the book is that it’s truly embraced by the Church in America, both Catholic and Protestant alike.
De Gance: We are not cultural fatalists. Anybody reading the book should be incredibly hopeful that healthy marriage is written into the human heart. And solutions to this are possible, and it’s the church that has the solution.
I always tell people, the fact that 85 percent of churches are spending nothing in this area is actually really great news. It means family and marriage has been in a free fall over the last 50 years and the church hasn’t yet entered the ring for real battle.
If churches actually became strategic, applied best practices, and reached out to their communities to renew relationships and marriages, we could see the next Great Awakening in our country in the decades ahead. And that’s what I hope pastors, and church leaders would conclude.
Seldom, if ever, have I been more dejected at having been proven right about my prediction for over three decades now about the catastrophic impact the spiritual and emotional cancer of hard-core internet pornography would have on all levels of our culture.
Imagine my surprise when I began to read my copy of TheNew York Times on September 25, 2021 (I should confess I have been reading TheNew York Times every day since age 18. Considering how far the former “paper of record” for the country has fallen from its former glory, it is more of an addiction than a search for knowledge).
Ms. Goldberg reports what I suspect was a very surprising development to her. She reports philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s experience while teaching students at the University of Oxford about “second-wave anti-porn activism.” Ms. Srinivasan assumed that her Oxford students (late millennials and early Gen Z’ers, who have been immersed in a porn-saturated culture, as were their parents, would “find the anti-porn position prudish and passé.”
On the contrary, they seemed to be channeling the spirit of Andrea Dworkin in their responses. Responding to the massive and impassioned response of her students, Ms. Srinivasan said, “The warnings of the anti-porn feminists seem to have been belatedly realized.” Somewhere Ms. Dworkin and her supporters are saying, “I told you so.”
The responses of the Oxford students are revelatory. They overwhelmingly affirmed the belief that porn bears “responsibility for the objectification of women,” the “marginalization of women,” and “sex and violence against women.” One young man in the Oxford class expressed doubt about whether “sex that was ‘loving and mutual’ was even possible.”
How indescribably sad, and yet how predictable. When one looks at descriptions of the content of online porn (I would not advise anyone to view the actual product—you don’t want those images burned into your consciousness), it is impossible not to see it as grotesquely anti-woman.
Real feminists who understand what hard-core porn really is would picket every “adult” bookstore and porn outlet in the country if they had the courage of their convictions. And women are not the only victims. The average age of first exposure to hard-core porn for American males has dropped from 17 to 11 with the advent of the internet. Now, every home in America is just one of two clicks way away from having material that was previously confined to the worst areas of the worst cities in America ooze up into their hearts and minds through the internet.
Hard-core internet pornography is analogous to an electronic river of malignant and toxic emotional slime running just under the surface waiting to be uploaded into the hearts and minds of Americans, young and old alike.
While pornography does exploit and objectify women, it also victimizes young men. Millions of these boys and young men are receiving their sex miseducation from internet porn. Having been exposed and too often addicted to this twisted view of human sexuality, they are daily having their ability to become the husbands and fathers they desire to be stunted, twisted, and destroyed.
Hard-core internet pornography has poisoned the basic building block of human relationships, the man-woman interaction that produces marriage and families. When I hear the responses of Ms. Srinivasan’s Oxford students, my heart breaks for both the male and female students as they testify to how pornography has shaped their interaction with each other.
Those of us who came of age before the tsunami of hard-core internet porn engulfed us have a difficult time understanding the world which this has created for millennials and Gen Z’ers. I continue to be haunted by a story related to me by a women’s dean at a prominent liberal arts college. She expressed to me how painful it was to have a steady stream of young women come for counseling with the lament that they felt extremely pressured to have casual sex and that they just “wanted sex to mean something”! How unspeakably sad.
I believe that internet porn is the Madison Avenue ad campaign that promotes sexual immorality and creates the market for sexual slavery. I believe that Satan has figured out that the most powerful weapon in his arsenal in his incessant attempts to degrade and defile humanity is hard-core internet pornography.
One measure of the level of his success is that vulgar and leud terms for sexual intercourse are now routinely used to describe acts of hostility and aggression and exploitation. The devil has taken the relationship that God intended to be the most giving and loving relationship between husband and wife and has deformed it into synonyms for the exact opposite.
It is well past time for Christians of all denominational persuasions to covenant together to seek to reclaim God’s gift of gender and sex and to redeem them for the purpose for which God gifted them—to make of the two one flesh, a knowing and a being known beyond the human capacity of speed to describe.
Let us be about our Heavenly Father’s business.
Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.
Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.
“How can I get hold of ivermectin in case I get sick?” is probably the most common email inquiry I receive daily. It’s a shame we didn’t make this safe, Nobel prize-winning drug as available as we do needles in San Francisco for the injection of dangerous drugs. Perhaps we can ask the Mexican cartels to get into ivermectin production.
In all seriousness, given the data behind ivermectin, it is shocking how our government refuses to even embark on a study. In the meantime, insurers refuse to cover it and pharmacists refuse to dispense it — and that’s if you can get hold of a doctor willing to prescribe it.
Until now, despite dozens of studies and doctors all around the world with no financial gain at stake vouching for its efficacy, our government has balked at ivermectin because, it claims, the studies are too small. Well, the Argentinian Provincial Ministry of Health just published the results of a retrospective study of a trial of over 21,000 participants. The results were unmistakable among those participants above age 40, all non-vaccinated. Overall, when adjusting for confounding factors like less healthy people joining the ivermectin group, those in the ivermectin group had a 66% lower ICU admission rate and a 55% lower mortality rate than those in the control group. Anyone in the ivermectin group was treated with a dose of 0.6mg per kg of weight one time a day for five days.
This is just the latest study, but the key is to look at the preponderance of the evidence. A meta-analysis posted earlier this week of 65 total studies netted the following pooled results.
As the author notes, while many of the studies are small sample sizes, taken together, “The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive as the 65 studies is estimated to be 1 in 403 billion.”
So many people, including actor Louis Gossett Jr., are human testimonies to ivermectin being more than a theoretical statistical benefit. They are alive today, even after having used it at a late stage. The war on ivermectin and the embargo against early treatment are truly a crime against humanity.
Ultimately, it’s important to keep in mind that this has never been about any one treatment. Imagine if along with making ivermectin cheap and available;
exercise more rather than gaining a ton of weight over the pandemic.
Imagine if our government had encouraged doctors to treat this early and often with a cocktail of several drugs plus made the monoclonal antibodies available for everyone the minute they came out, over one year ago,
Well, then the reduction in mortality would have been closer to 100%.
Vitamin D alone could have saved anyone who has gotten seriously ill recently, a year and a half after our government should have been encouraging people to take high-dose supplements. There are now at least 113 studies vouching for the correlation between high vitamin D levels and positive outcomes. The results of a recent systematic review and meta-analysis of eight vitamin D studies showed that the risk of COVID mortality for people with D levels at 50 ng/ml is close to zero.
Then, of course, there is exercise and obesity. Weight is such a strong factor in determining risk of serious illness that BMI is now being used as a way of vetting people for eligibility for the monoclonal antibodies. Yet our government encouraged a lifestyle that caused obesity to skyrocket. The rates have gone up so quickly that, according to the latest CDC data, 16 states now have obesity rates of 35% or higher, an increase of four states in just one year.
Rather than encouraging people, in addition to seeking early COVID treatment, to pound vitamins, exercise, and eat right — which would induce a cascading confluence of benefits in every other area of health and wellness — they placed all of their eggs in the vaccine basket. Now what do they have to offer those people getting infected despite taking on so much known and unknown risk from the shots?
Finally, more than any one drug or therapeutic, it’s about the art of practicing medicine, which involves having a competent doctor prescribe the right course of action for the right patient for the given symptoms at the right time. Every primary care doctor should have been encouraged, rather than discouraged, to treat this virus early with their respective patient workloads. Each drug alone might have a 30%-60% efficacy rate, but a good doctor putting it all together achieves close to 100% success.
Drs. Brian Tyson and George Fareed posted a summary of their patient outcomes after treating thousands of COVID patients in Imperial County, California, since last March. Out of 6,000 patients they treated, they never lost a patient who came to them within the first week of symptoms. What Dr. Tyson explains is so simple, yet eloquent:
“We started seeing inflammation, so we used anti-inflammatories,” Dr. Tyson explains. “We saw blood clots, so we used anti-coagulants. We saw patients having trouble breathing, so we used asthma medications. … It wasn’t just one drug. It was the art of what we see and how those patients responded to what we gave them.” As Tyson notes, if you are not in favor of early treatment, that’s fine, but why do you have to attack others who try to treat the virus? “If I’m wrong, people are still going to die,” asserted Tyson. “But if I’m right, how many thousands of lives would have been saved?”
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.com.
Source: AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery
Great news! For the millions of U.S. immigrants who really wanted to immigrate to Haiti, but couldn’t get in … Guess what? The country you’re living in is about to become Haiti. This will also come as good news to the GOP’s top-dollar donors, whose sole political thought is: HOW DO WE WIN THE BLACK VOTE? (Next goal: Reverse the rotation of the Earth.)
Apparently, it’s absolutely humiliating for people who live in 100% white neighborhoods to belong to a party that appeals to white people. Consequently, for several decades now, the GOP has slobbered over Colin Powell, Alan Keyes, Condoleezza Rice, Allen West, Michael Steele, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, John James, Tim Scott, Candace Owens, Herschel Walker and so on.
I, too, slobbered over some of these fine black Republicans. But unlike the Masters of the Universe, I noticed, after the first half-dozen or so, that the GOP is never going to win more of the black vote. (The GOP’s donor class is dying of embarrassment right now, horrified that their party appeals to white people, aka “the only swing voters in the country.”)
For the last half-century, African Americans have given approximately 90% of their vote to the Democrats. (Hispanics: 70%; Asians: 70%) But the Hamptons-Manhattan-Palm Beach Brain Trust is focused like a laser beam on increasing the GOP’s minority vote. Somehow they’ve made billions of dollars, but cannot grasp, if their lives depended on it, that every election outcome is determined by the white vote.
QUIZ: What is the one demographic Trump lost in 2020 compared to 2016? Answer: White men.
[For more on Republican donors’ neurotic obsession with the black vote, see “Adios, America!,” Chapter 16, I Wrote This Chapter After Noticing How Stupid Rich People Are.]
With hordes of Haitians pouring across our border — because a certain lying conman didn’t build a wall — this weird compulsion of the donors will only get worse. Before Republican geniuses start proposing “enterprise zones” for Haitians, maybe they should take a look at Haiti.
Haitian President Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier (1957-1971) began his regime by killing off or exiling the educated elite for being too light-skinned, then expropriated the peasants’ small parcels of farmland, leading, like night into day, to mass starvation. Result: Haitian peasants adored him! Even after a regime of mass murder and widespread starvation, followed by Duvalier maneuvering his teenaged son into the presidency, the Associated Press reported in 1980 that “the Duvalier family’s support comes from the dark-skinned peasants of the countryside.”
Downside: insane execution squads, malnutrition, illiteracy and chaos. Upside: Duvalier persecuted light-skinned Haitians and embraced voodoo.
GOP donors: What if we offer them school vouchers?
George Mason economics professor Garett Jones has a vitally important article posted on the Evonomics website right now titled, “Do Immigrants Import Their Economic Destiny?”
He asks whether immigrants bring cultural attitudes, religious beliefs, a work ethic, etc. that will kill “the golden goose of first-world prosperity.” Phrased otherwise, do immigrants make “the countries they move to a lot like the countries they came from?”
Ann’s answer: Duh.
Jones’ answer: Duh — with a lot more data and analysis.
He cites a study by economists Diego Comin, William Easterly and Erick Gong of Dartmouth, New York University and Middlebury College, respectively, published in the American Economic Journal, showing that the descendants of people who were the most technologically advanced in 1500 A.D. today live in countries vastly richer than countries populated by the descendants of those not as technologically advanced in 1500 A.D.
The New York Times described the results of the study thus: “As it turns out, technology in A.D. 1500 is an extraordinarily reliable predictor of wealth today.”
Forget 1500. How’s Haiti been doing for the last 50 years? A report by the Council on Foreign Relations describes Haiti as “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” And that’s despite more than $13 billion in international aid in the past decade.
Let’s just hope they bring their Satan-worshipping voodoo! As Haitians worldwide descend on our country, it’s worth mentioning that their homeland is often described as “90% Catholic and 100% voodoo.”
While The New York Times (which hates our country and wants it destroyed) burbles giddily about Haitian voodoo — “a healing-based religion,” “an affirmation of national pride,” “a vibrant but gentler faith,” “equal parts happening and psychoanalysis” — other news outlets have produced vivid accounts of the actual ceremonies.
Quote:
“(A) group of men and women dressed in white circled a pole. … A few hours later, the drumbeat had intensified … A few of the women grabbed live chickens and whirled them in the air before ripping the heads off with their teeth. Then, with their hands clenched like claws and their chins dripping with blood, the women jumped up and down, screeching, ‘Ke-ke-ke, Ke-ke-ke.'” — Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 1994
Quote:
“Suddenly, the woman’s body jerks upright. She spins wildly, arms and legs flailing, and her eyes roll back in her head until only the whites show. Two men rush to her side and support her in their arms. A yellow kerchief slips off her head and her shiny, straightened hair tumbles down.
“Body rigid, muscles taut, she stomps the ground with her bare feet. She whips her head from side to side, eyes stretched wide, sweeping the room with a fierce gaze …” — The Ottawa Citizen, 2000
You can read more about these “vibrant” rituals in the book “Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans.” Or just wait for them to show up in your neighborhood.
If you thought moving 100,000 Somalians into Minnesota posed challenges to assimilation, that will be a pleasant dream compared to the multitudes of Haitians Biden is letting into the country right now.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki fields questions at a White House news briefing on Monday, where she had to answer for a comment from President Biden on Friday that discouraged the prime minister of India from taking questions from the media. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
On Jan. 24, just days after President Joe Biden took office, official CNN Democrat brown-noser Brian Stelter shared a chyron from his television show on Twitter.
“Psaki Promises to Share ‘Accurate Info’ (How Refreshing),” it read. The insinuation, of course, is that there wasn’t any accurate info from the Trump administration — but don’t worry, help was on the way!
Now, as it turns out, there’s a caveat to that refreshing promise: Psaki will be sharing “accurate info” (if often incomplete or misleading), but if President Joe Biden is going to be sharing information, your questions had better be “on point.” If they’re on a topic he doesn’t like, he’s not going to answer. (Psaki herself will probably promise to “circle back” to whatever the question was at a later date.)
On Friday, Biden met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Before their meeting, however, the president badmouthed the U.S. media and counseled Modi not to take any questions.
“The Indian press is much better behaved than the American press,”Biden told Modi. “I think, with your permission, you could not answer questions because they won’t ask any questions on point.”
WATCH: President Biden, during meeting with Indian PM Modi:
“The Indian press is much better behaved than the American press…I think, with your permission, you could not answer questions because they won’t ask any questions on point.” pic.twitter.com/VppL7973ma
That didn’t seem quite so refreshing, particularly after an incident with U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson earlier in the week when Biden’s staff shooed away reporters in the Oval Office.
During a meeting between Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, staff abruptly order journalists to leave. pic.twitter.com/kJ4itX2kU4
Psaki was called on the carpet by the Washington press corps on Monday, given that reporters weren’t happy at the president telling the Indian prime minister to avoid taking questions. The White House press secretary tried to recontextualize — and made the problem worse in the process.
“I think what he said is that they’re not always on point,”Psaki said.
“Now I know that isn’t something that anyone wants to hear in here, but what I think he was conveying is, today he might want to talk about COVID vaccines, some of the questions were about that,” she continued.
Psaki was just confronted by two reporters about Biden asking Indian Prime Minister Modi to not take questions from the American press.
Psaki then embarrassingly justifies the remark by saying sometimes the Press doesn't ask about what Biden wants to talk about.
“Some of the questions are not always about the topic he’s talking about in that day. I don’t think it was meant to be a hard cut at the members of the media, people he’s taken questions from today and on Friday as well,” she added.
Another reporter — CBS News Radio’s Steven Portnoy — followed up, saying, “It happened that he was sitting next to prime minister of India, the world’s largest democracy, when he said that. It also followed the incident on Wednesday when he was sitting next to the prime minister of Great Britain. Is the president reticent to take questions when he’s sitting next to a foreign leader in the Oval Office? Can we expect him to do that in the future?”
“Steve, he took questions earlier that day on Friday. He’d already taken questions that day. I think that was the context of his comments,” Psaki said. “And he’s taken questions standing next to a foreign leader many, many times in the past, and will continue to.”
Good on @WSJ's @Catherine_Lucey & @CBSNewsRadio's @StevenPortnoy for repeatedly pressing Jen Psaki on the fact that Biden blew off the press last week with U.K. PM Boris Johnson & took a swipe at them last week behind their backs, telling Indian reporters not to ask questions. pic.twitter.com/dUS24W8X90
There was also one other problem with Biden’s remark, as Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich noted.
“The president said that the Indian press was better behaved than the U.S. press, but the Indian press is ranked 142nd in the world, according to Reporters Without Borders, for press freedoms,” she asked.
“How does he say that about the U.S. press compared to the Indian press?” she asked.
“Well, I would just say to you that, having now worked for the president, serving in this role for nine months, having seen that he’s taken questions from the press more than 140 times, including today and Friday, that he certainly respects the role of the press, the role of the freedom of free press,” Psaki said.
“We ensure that we have press with us, of course, when we travel, that we have press with us for sprays in foreign capitals, and we will continue to. I think that should speak to his commitment to freedom of press around the world.”
It’s worth noting that Psaki had all weekend to work on her answer to this. She knew full well this was going to be one of the things she had to answer when she walked into the Brady Press Briefing Room in the West Wing of the White House. The best the press secretary and her team could come up with: You guys need to start asking the kinds of questions the president wants to hear. Talk about what he’s talking about. See, this is why he never takes questions from the press. Focus, people!
It was an embarrassment — to Psaki and the president. And even the shamelessly pro-Biden press corps had to know it.
For whatever reason, Brian Stelter hasn’t weighed in on how refreshing that answer was. Perhaps he missed it.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes
As with Robert Frost’s two paths diverging in the woods, the COVID pandemic has hit a fork in the road.
Back in 2020, when the virus first presented itself, anything could be forgiven. Trump could shoot hydroxychloroquine up his butt; Fauci could sneer at masks, then a week later demand that we wear 17 masks; governors could order everyone to stay home, while they cavorted at parties, restaurants, hair salons and protests.
The lies, hypocrisies and idiocies were all stuffed in our burlap bag, as we bounced along Coronavirus Road.
Then, in a triumph of Western medicine, A VACCINE APPEARED! That’s when our path in the woods diverged into the sane and insane.
It’s pretty clear now that the vaccines work, with few side effects — although our public health experts would really do us a solid if they’d stop lying about there being no side effects. At a minimum, the vaccines prevent serious illness and death. They’re even more effective than the flu vaccine, and that’s pretty good.
Between widespread natural infection — something else it would be nice if authorities would stop lying about — and mass vaccination, COVID IS NOW OVER. It wasn’t “the flu” in 2020, but it is in 2021.
Liberals sulked as people began getting vaccinated and living their lives again, but then seized on the delta variant to announce: Let’s lock down again!
The very people demanding that everyone get vaccinated are the same ones telling us vaccines don’t work all that well, so maybe we’d better just keep wearing masks, quarantining, working remotely and staying home from school.
Do the vaccines work or don’t they? If they work, we’ll thank you to stop bossing us around now.
Going further into crazy town, liberals decided to pretend that Anthony Fauci was not an escaped mental patient.
Our most visible “public health” authority continues to issue lunatic pronouncements like a third world despot: The vaccinated must wear masks! Children should be vaccinated! Even 2-year-olds need to be masked! Everybody has to get a third vaccine shot! (That last bright idea led a couple of experts from the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel to resign in protest, followed by the panel unanimously voting to recommend booster shots only in certain cases.)
Apart from just coming out and telling us he doesn’t believe the vaccines work, Fauci is telling us he doesn’t believe the vaccines work.
This is the nut, you will recall, who knowingly lied to the public at the outset of the pandemic for what he, Anthony Fauci, in his sole discretion, decided was a higher cause. Without a scintilla of scientific evidence one way or the other, he condescendingly announced that masks don’t work against COVID — simply for the greater good of preventing a mask shortage.
What if he considers it a greater good for Anthony Fauci to keep appearing on TV? Like an aging football star who dreams of being back in high school, Fauci longs to be in the spotlight.
Except we have vaccines now! So thanks, but we’ve heard enough from you, Fauci.
Also, we know things that we didn’t in 2020.
A Bridge Too Far
We now know, for example, that COVID is bad, but it’s not Ebola. Eighty-year-olds have survived it. Trump survived it. The 800-pound Chris Christie survived it. And that was before we had all the therapies we have now. Or, come to think of it, any idea what we were doing at all. (Remember the mad rush for ventilators?)
We know that cases are good; deaths are bad. The media frantically report “cases” only because their panic porn attracts readers, so who cares if it’s irrelevant?
As long as you don’t die, which would be bad, a COVID infection is nature’s vaccination shot! As multiple studies have shown, immunity from prior infection is stronger and more durable than that from vaccination.
Infections are especially good if you’re already vaccinated. Then you’ll have super-immunity. You won’t die of COVID — although you might die with COVID, especially if you’re old or sick or have just taken a massive dose of fentanyl.
Like George Floyd. Remember? He had COVID when he died. But unlike Floyd, the media will broadcast your death as a cautionary tale to again harangue us to wear masks and get vaccinated. How dare you not get a vaccine and put the vaccinated at risk!
But the vaccinated aren’t at risk. You know why? Because the vaccines work.
We also know that COVID poses virtually no risk to young people. We knew this early on, and for some reason ignored it, but by now the evidence is overwhelming.
Since COVID landed on our shores, 95% of dead the U.S. have been 50 or older. Nearly 80% of the dead were 65 or older — and not only are they heavily vaccinated, but they make up only 16% of the population. The 64.5% of the population under age 50 — in its entirety — has a 5% chance of dying from COVID.
Combine the minimal risk of death to young people — less than the flu during a normal flu season — with what we now know about the strong immunity from prior COVID infection, and, throughout 2020, we should have been putting little kids into giant, Japanese-size classrooms and encouraging young people to blow beer foam in one another’s faces, get drunk and make out with strangers. Our entire under-30 population would be immune.
Remember the college kid on spring break when COVID first hit the news in February 2020, who had his life destroyed for nonchalantly telling a TV interviewer, “If I get corona, I get corona”? If only we’d listened to him instead of Fauci!
Alphabet Mafia and sports power couple Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird have loaned their names, reputations, and expertise to the abortion-rights debate. The soccer and basketball superstars joined 500 other female jocks in signing a friend-of-the-court brief presented to U.S. Supreme Court justices deliberating a Mississippi law that would ban the killing of fetuses who have lived more than 15 weeks inside a woman’s womb.
According to Reuters news agency, the athletes argued in their brief that ending the growth of babies inside the womb has helped the growth of women’s sports. Quoting directly from the brief, Reuters reported: “The physical tolls of forced pregnancy and childbirth would undermine athletes’ ability to actualize their full human potential.”
The brief failed to mention that the physical toll of abortion undermines a baby’s ability to actualize his or her full human potential. Pregnancy, according to 500 female athletes, is now an issue about the growth of sports, not the growth of babies.
Rapinoe, a star on the U.S. women’s national soccer team, said in a statement: “As women athletes and people in sports, we must have the power to make important decisions about our bodies and exert control over our reproductive lives.”
Rapinoe is engaged to Bird, a guard in the WNBA. Rapinoe and Bird, two birthing people, cannot create a child through scissoring, strap-ons, digital penetration, or other forms of same-sex intimacy. Short of rape, they have complete control of their reproductive lives. Their need for an abortion is quite remote unless they changed their minds after intentionally inseminating themselves with male sperm.
Their passion for the abortion issue strikes me as odd. It’s the equivalent of me issuing a statement on skinny-jeans rights. The issue is of no importance to me given my fast-food lifestyle. But here we are in modern America. Professional athletes and other pampered celebrities are the smartest, most informed people on the planet. Their ability to kick, dribble, and throw a ball gives them remarkable insight into abortion rights, criminal justice reform, police-involved shootings, insurrections, and viral videos capturing alleged instances of oppression and systemic racism.
LeBron James struggles to write tweets and Instagram posts at a grade-school grammar level, but he is one of America’s foremost public intellectuals and authoritative voices on racial discrimination. LeBron, the new Muhammad Ali, once analogized his reaction to learning the N-word was scrawled on the back gate of his $20 million mansion in a predominantly white neighborhood to Emmett Till’s mother opening the casket of her murdered 14-year-old son.
Money and fame are the sworn enemies of self-awareness. Today’s athletes have zero self-awareness and even less humility. They don’t know what they don’t know. There’s no reason for them to seek answers. Their handlers, their corporate sponsors, and rigged social media apps provide them all the answers they need.
Let me know the next time Rapinoe, James, or Colin Kaepernick take a public position that isn’t supported by Twitter groupthink. They’re not rebels. They’re voices for the establishment — Big Tech, global corporations, corporate media, and the Democratic Party — pretending to be anti-establishment radicals. The establishment is pushing for radical change, a great reset. Rapinoe, James, and Kaepernick are useful idiots of the establishment.
Do you know how stupid you have to be to reduce the issue of abortion to the growth of women’s sports? Ignorance is the Devil’s best friend. Dishonesty is his spouse.
I keep saying that a lot of what the left supports is satanic. Rapinoe’s stated support of abortion rights is exhibit A, B, C, and D. What else would cause a person to prioritize the growth of sports ahead of the growth of a child?
Technology has given human beings more control over reproductive issues than at any time in the history of mankind. Condoms, contraceptives, and abortions before week 15 give us a lot of control over our reproductive lives. It’s mind-boggling to hear an accomplished athlete argue that abortions after 15 weeks are an infringement on reproductive control. You can’t reach Rapinoe’s level of athletic success without being disciplined and without making sacrifices. Abstinence, requiring men to wear a condom, birth control pills, and female condoms are all highly effective ways of preventing unwanted pregnancies. They’re not foolproof solutions. But they’re better than standing before the world and writing a letter that says protecting the growth of sports is far more important than protecting the growth of life.
That argument is insanity that borders on wickedness. It’s an argument a dumb jock would make at the behest of her handlers. Megan Rapinoe is a dumb jock. She thinks we’re all dumb, too. And worse, she thinks applying discipline, restraint, and sacrifice are behaviors we should use in pursuit of athletic greatness and avoid in our reproductive lives. For Rapinoe, sports are a higher priority than life.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
What Did You Say? 
You must be logged in to post a comment.