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Survey: Two-Thirds Of Elites Say There’s Too Much Freedom In America


BY: EVITA DUFFY-ALFONSO | JANUARY 19, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/19/survey-two-thirds-of-elites-say-theres-too-much-freedom-in-america/

Elites

The nation’s ruling class holds deeply authoritarian opinions widely divorced from the rest of the American electorate, finds a survey out this week. It found nearly 60 percent of American “elites” think there is too much individual freedom in America. Meanwhile, nearly 60 percent of registered voters have the exact opposite opinion, reporting the United States has too much top-down control, limiting liberty. 

The study, titled “Them Vs. U.S,” defined the American “elite” as “having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile.” Such people account for about 1 percent of Americans. The study also examined a sub-sample of the 1 percent who graduated from Ivy League schools or other name-brand institutions such as Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago.

The study from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity found ruling class opinions on climate policies were particularly harsh and despotic. More than two-thirds of the 1 percent support rationing vital energy and food sources in an attempt to control the globe’s weather. That number jumped to nearly 90 percent among the Ivy Leaguers. Around two-thirds of normal registered voters, however, oppose rationing vital resources.

Limiting food and water consumption is a serious proposition to global leaders. For example, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, an environmentalist organization of city leaders across the globe, has proposed annihilating meat and dairy consumption by 2030. 

“An astonishing 72% of the Elites – including 81% of the Elites who graduated from the top universities – favor banning gas cars,” the study authors continued. “And majorities of elites would ban gas stoves, non-essential air travel, SUVs, and private air conditioning.”

Elites’ view of other elites is very different from regular registered voters’ view of elites. On the education front, “Two-thirds (67%) [of the 1 percent] say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.” Only 38 percent of registered voters felt the same. 

“About six of ten elites have a favorable opinion of the so-called talking professions—lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and journalists,” wrote the study authors. Additionally, “In stark contrast to the rest of America, 70% of the Elites trust the government to ‘do the right thing most of the time.’”

Unsurprisingly, “about three-quarters of these cultural elites are Biden supporters.” While only 20 percent of Americans say they are better off financially under Biden, nearly three-quarters of the elites say they are better off under Biden.

The study comes as global leaders meet in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting to discuss draconian climate policies and crackdowns on freedom of speech and therefore freedom of thought. So far at the conference, elites have discussed establishing a “new world order,” lobbied for censorship in the name of “disinformation and misinformation,” and labeled farming and fishing “ecocide.” 

The WEF policy proposals and the results of this survey reveal what the Committee to Unleash Prosperity describes as a “Grand Canyon-sized chasm” between regular citizens and those who largely claim the expertise and power to rule over others with or without their consent. 

“These results confirm what people have long suspected,” wrote the study authors: “Today, there are two Americas. One is wealthier, more highly educated, and attended the best schools. They put much more trust in big government ‘to do the right thing’ and, by their own admission, benefit from more expansive government policies. They have also been hurt far less by the high inflation of the Biden presidency than those who live from paycheck to paycheck and are in the lower and middle classes.”


Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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Ann Coulter Op-ed: ‘Ohio Man’ Rapes 10-Year-Old


Commentary by Ann Coulter | Posted: Jul 20, 2022

Read more at https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2022/07/20/ohio-man-rapes-10yearold—p–n2610564/

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.

'Ohio Man' Rapes 10-Year-Old

Source: AP Manual Upload

I, for one, am tickled pink that our ruling class has finally come out against child rape. This is something new. For several decades now, the position of government officials, both political parties, think tanks, the Bush family, district attorneys and the entire media has been: We’re going to foist primitive, peasant cultures on America and then lie to the public about how this is changing our country.

We recently found out about one big way that third-world immigrants are enriching us. Soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the media began talking nonstop about a “10-year-old rape victim” who couldn’t get an abortion in Ohio and had to travel to Indiana. The “10-year-old rape victim” was discussed on a loop on MSNBC and even made it into a speech by President Joe Biden.

But then, a bunch of spoilsports started questioning whether “10-year-old rape victim” existed. The attorney general of Ohio said on July 12 he had no evidence of a 10-year-old rape victim, despite the reporting of such a crime being mandatory.

With their backs against the wall, the pro-abortion crowd broke longstanding strictures against mentioning the rapey-ness of our “New Americans” by producing the rapist: Gerson Fuentes, 27, an illegal alien from Guatemala.

Oh, now I see.

The abortion ladies thought they could get away with revealing the child rape victim, while refusing to reveal the child rape perpetrator. When that failed, they wantonly defied the rest of their coalition and told the truth about one of the Democrats’ pets, an illegal immigrant.

Once the pro-abortion crowd identified the rapist, nothing about the story was surprising. It has all the earmarks of an immigrant child rape:

The crime is particularly vile — CHECK!

The raping had been going on for some time — CHECK!

The mother defended her daughter’s rapist — CHECK!

The rapist is shocked that anyone thinks he did anything wrong — CHECK!

Luckily, I am Johnny on the Spot when it comes to immigrant child-rapists, having included nearly 100 such cases in my book “Adios, America!” — as well as the sensational, flood-the-zone news coverage the U.S. media devote to criminal immigrants. (Sarcasm.)

As far as I know, there’s only one group in the country trying to keep a running tally of immigrant child rapes: North Carolinians for Immigration Reform and Enforcement (NCFire.info). Here’s NCFire’s list of illegal immigrant child rapists in North Carolina, so far this year.

2022 Monthly Child Rapes by Illegal Aliens:

6. June 2022: 20 illegal aliens arrested for 42 child rape/child sexual assault charges

5. May 2022: 18 illegal aliens arrested for 42 child rape/child sexual assault charges

4. April 2022: 19 illegal aliens arrested for 72 child rape/child sexual assault charges

3. March 2022: 30 illegal aliens arrested for 110 child rape/child sexual assault charges

2. February 2022: 27 illegal aliens arrested for 84 child rape/child sexual assault charges

1. January 2022: 18 illegal aliens arrested for 96 child rape/child sexual assault charges

Again, that’s only in a single state. And only when the immigrant is illegal.

WHY DOESN’T THE PUBLIC KNOW ABOUT THIS?

Unfortunately, our media are too busy reporting on apocryphal gang rapes by the Duke lacrosse team and “frat boys” at the University of Virginia to bother mentioning the epidemic of child rape by immigrants from peasant cultures pouring into our country by the million.

How far into the stories about UVA and Duke did you have to read to find out that the (falsely) accused rapists were “privileged white men”?

By contrast, whenever the media deign to mention an immigrant rapist, the story will appear in — at most — one local newspaper. Further, both the heinous nature of the crime and the immigration status of the rapist will be hidden. (How about a news report on the Duke lacrosse case, appearing exclusively in the local paper at the bottom of page A-18, titled, “Area Men Arrested.”)

In 2013, an illegal alien from Guatemala, German Rolando Vicente-Sapon, was convicted of kidnapping his 16-year-old cousin, transporting her to the U.S. (also illegally), and holding her as his sex slave for years.

Only one newspaper in the country reported the story: the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Quiz: Was the headline —

“Illegal Alien Sentenced for Incest, Child Rape, Kidnapping and Sex Slavery,” OR

“Man Guilty in Case of Human Smuggling”?

I think you know the answer.

There’s no question that the national media would never have breathed a word about the Fuentes case — but for the doubters. So, a big shoutout to the feminists for putting abortion-on-demand above open borders. If only politicians cared as much about our country as pro-choicers do about abortion.

No, Those Who Pushed Lockdowns Can’t Hide from the Consequences Now


Reported BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 11, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/11/the-people-who-brutalized-children-to-grab-emergency-powers-are-not-experts-theyre-evil/

Boy wearing mask while playing baseball

Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.

This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expert—or, like me, just someone who reads and has common sense—predicted this false “cure” would hurt worse than the disease.

Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a “limited hangout.” That’s admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.

So we have outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, which have throughout the Covid era worked as government butt-coverers, now publishing articles admitting that lockdowns and continued rolling blackouts of school instruction is irrevocably damaging Americans, especially children and even more especially the poorest. The kids, as I pointed out in April 2020 and numerous times thereafter, will never as a generation recover.

Now that the damage is done, major corporate media organizations have decided to pivot to acknowledge just enough of the truth to cover their complicity. The Atlantic, for example, last week published an article titled “America’s Covid Rules Are A Dumpster Fire” (It took you two years to figure out what was apparent within the first month?).

CNN’s Brian Stelter recently did a segment acknowledging the foreseeable “mental health crisis” from lockdowns that is causing suicides, ruining marriages, putting formerly perfectly normal kids into rocking fetal positions, and erasing the credibility of formerly mostly ignored “public health experts” at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Stelter made multiple statements that have gotten numerous conservatives punished by and erased from social media, such as that “Covid zero is…an impossibility” and “the CDC has turned into a punchline.”

Where was Stelter a year and a half ago, when data reflecting the exact same outcomes were also plentiful? Heck, Stelter was still legitimizing Covid panic one month ago, when CNN and other news organizations reinstituted lockdown measures amid omicron panic they helped inflame. Six months ago, Stelter was indicating Fox News had “blood on its hands” for reporting less hysterically than all the other major media organizations about Covid.

Clearly, Democrats are becoming ensnared by their own trap, and they’re trying to get out with this public reversal of their messaging. The limited hangout is afoot.

Brave NYT truth-teller David Leonhardt also recently published an article and an accompanying tweetstorm on the topic.

“The number of E.R. visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12- to 17-year-old girls rose by 51 percent from early 2019 to early 2021, according to the CDC,” he tweeted.

“Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit,” he noted in the article.

No sh-t, Sherlock. So why did The New York Times run hit pieces on Trump medical advisor Scott Atlas for being one of the few scientists courageous enough to point this long-ago known data out more than a year ago, when the damage could have been mitigated? Why did Stanford University colleagues and formerly respected medical journals, boosted by corporate media attack campaigns, try to discredit Atlas and colleagues such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for saying things The New York Times, Atlantic, and CNN are admitting now?

Why did the CDC punish world-renowned vaccine scientist Dr. Martin Kulldorff for publicly disagreeing with them on vaccine safety? Why does Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook shadowban nearly every Federalist article on anything touching Covid-19, and why did they spend two years on massive information suppression campaigns against scientists, politicians, podcasters, and just ordinary citizens who had some questions, contrary data, and objections to elites’ demanded Covid response?

Because it was politically expedient to sacrifice science, Americans’ civil rights, human lives, and the world’s future then, and it is not politically expedient to face the consequences for that choice now. And they think nobody can or will hold them accountable for their deadly and despicable lies.

All the misery these too-late admittals underscore appears to be true, but it also could have been prevented. CNN and The New York Times not only did nothing to help prevent this kind of irreversible damage, they willingly, even gleefully, participated in this completely unwarranted mass abuse of Americans. The left lied, children committed suicide.

The corporate left’s morally abominable Covid propaganda operation demands justice. The people who could and should have known, and in fact likely did know, that lockdowns would harm millions of innocents while not protecting the vulnerable can never be trusted again.

Did any of these people tell the truth back when it could have saved the generation that comprises the world’s future? Nope. They not only watched it happen, they cheered it on and viciously ostracized all who told the truth.

All these people have erased all their moral authority and their claims to expertise. The same goes for all the education “experts” and “leaders” who didn’t spend the last two years screaming at the top of their lungs that school shutdowns are a stupid, scientifically unwarranted, and evil idea. Yes, that’s basically all of them.

Experts who knowingly allow mass child abuse because they don’t want to harm their careers are not experts, they are cowards. They deserve not one ounce of public trust or even to retain their jobs. They certainly should have no public funds nor authority over any portion of the upbringing of American children.

Not one parent or elected official should give these education and public health “experts” the time of day. In a time of dire need, these keepers of the nation’s children and controllers of billions in public funds piled American children on a funeral pyre, lit it on fire, and cheered as it burned. Requiring that they find a more honest line of work would be an act of mercy.

These “experts” and “leaders” have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent at discharging their crucial public trust and duties. They should be relieved of those duties as soon as possible. If state lawmakers will not do it, citizens must. If they do not, they are also complicit cowards and also deserve to be sanctioned and socially shamed for their willingness to sacrifice the most vulnerable for their personal comfort.

For a long time now, American parents have registered deep dissatisfaction with the public schools they feel forced to stick their kids in. Even before lockdowns, unscientific and education-damaging forced masking in schools, ridiculous repeated quarantines of healthy kids, and rolling “brownouts” of in-person schooling, polling shows most American parents wish they didn’t feel like the public schools in their ZIP code were their only option.

After all this incompetence-imposed life chaos, the current surge of parent outrage at local school board meetings is only the tip of the spear. As more evidence emerges of the unnecessary harms we knew beforehand would result from lockdowns, public anger will only grow. It won’t be limited to schools, either.

If more exciting school board meetings, primaries for craven politicians, and parents yanking funding from schools that don’t serve them are what it takes to run every one of these moral cretins out of every position of power they’ve abused throughout their careers, then go, Americans, go. Do it for the kids. Our future will remember who stood up for the truth, lives, and liberties, and who made billions of precious humans needlessly suffer.


Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

Without President Trump, On Whom Will The Left Blame Their Failures?


Without President Trump, On Whom Will The Left Blame Their Failures?

There is honor among thieves. There has to be, if they are to be successful. Even lawbreakers require some sort of law, both in reality, where organized crime requires organization, and in fiction, where it is a standard trope that the Guild of Assassins (or whatever) has rules. The wicked still need some virtue to be effective, although it must be severed from the whole of virtue.

This explains a lot about politics. The rules and organization necessary for societal or group survival and success are not the same as justice; indeed, they may be nothing more than a predatory morality that enables cooperation in oppression.

Governments often begin as the biggest band of brigands around, and many never rise much beyond that. As Augustine put it in “The City of God,” “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?” He illustrated this point with the tale of a captured pirate who told Alexander the Great that the difference between piracy and Alexander’s empire was only of scale.

Adherence to the norms and manners of the ruling class does not assure personal virtue or political justice. This is obvious to those on the outside, but members (and aspiring members and hangers-on) of the ruling class have an interest in not seeing it. This willful blindness also explains a lot about the recent election.

The Biden campaign told us that the election was about the soul of the nation. A multitude of Democrats, media figures, and Never-Trump leftovers told us that it was about restoring decency to the White House. Even now, in apparent victory, they remain appalled that anyone voted for President Trump, let alone more than 70 million Americans—don’t we know how indecent he is? But it is not that we think Trump is decent, it is that we doubt that his opponents are.

We suspect that by decency they mean nothing more than the professional civility of the educated class, and we know that true decency is more than civility. It is certainly more than not being Donald Trump.

This is not to say that civility does not matter. Conservatives know that manners matter. Manners can force us to be restrained, to at least make a show of treating political opponents with respect, and by inculcating these habits, they can make us better.

But manners can also be weaponized. They can become tools of exclusion that keep those with different beliefs and backgrounds out. They can conceal great wickedness behind a pleasing mask.

There is a persistent temptation to focus on the superficial form of decency (as manifest in politeness) over the substance of virtue. So we are treated to lectures on decency from men who have cheated on a succession of wives or traded in the wife of their youth for a young research assistant—and from a presumptive vice president who slept her way into politics.

Nor is such wickedness confined to personal sins; it extends throughout political positions. Consider the Democratic Party’s fanatical support for abortion. There is nothing decent about tearing a baby limb from limb and displaying her still-beating heart on a tray—if decency encompasses support for unrestricted, taxpayer-funded late-term abortion, then to hell with decency and the decent.

Likewise, the bipartisan establishment embrace of China is indecent, unless decency merely means civility in the service of ruling-class interests. There is nothing decent about closer bonds with the Chinese Communist Party and the genocidal totalitarian slave state that it runs. All the civility and cheap consumer goods in the world cannot wash away that guilt.

The pretense of decency also asks us to ignore that our ruling class is neither civil nor trustworthy. The same people who spent years suggesting that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election are now outraged that he has not conceded this one. And remember when Senate Democrats accused Brett Kavanaugh of being a high-school gang-rape mastermind?

Remember when the media tried to destroy a high school student for smiling awkwardly while wearing a Trump hat? Remember when they told you the most expensive riots in American history were mostly peaceful? Remember all the times they’ve called you and your friends and family ignorant, racist bigots—as epitomized by Hillary Clinton’s consigning you to an irredeemable basket of deplorables?

The response to this litany of leftist indecency is predictable—what about this and that and the other thing Trump did and said? Well, what about them? People who have concluded that our leaders are corrupt and indecent will not support them just because Trump is also indecent.

Furthermore, Trump will soon be out of office, while our elites will remain in their positions in media, academia, entertainment, business and government. Without President Trump, what excuse will they then have for their failures of virtue and justice?

Trump leaving office will not make America more decent if it just returns power to those whose garb of civility covers corrupt hearts. What is needed is not further recriminations over Trump, but a commitment to seek justice and the common good. This renewal must be led by those who have the power to shape institutions and culture.

I don’t say this to deny the need for all of us to repent of our sins. I merely state the obvious, which is that those with the power to shape the culture bear the most responsibility for it. If we are as indecent a nation as they say, then perhaps the likes of New York Times writers, Ivy League professors and pop stars should spend less time lecturing Trump voters and more time in sackcloth and ashes.

Nathanael Blake is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist. He has a PhD in political theory. He lives in Missouri.
Photo Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian

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