An online dictionary defines the term “grooming” as “when a sexual or other kind of predator sets the stage for abusing another.”
Such a definition certainly applies to the gangs of Pakistani immigrants in the United Kingdom and Jeffrey Epstein who “groomed” and sexually abused underage girls.
Notwithstanding a ludicrous claim by a Republican political operative named Matthew Dowd that, “If Jesus Christ was alive today, he would be called a groomer,” such a charge is not only deeply offensive to the world’s Christians, it is utterly unwarranted.
Retired Navy Captain James Fanell, however, has coined a new and very apt application of the term when he described as “CCP groomers” prominent Americans who are setting the stage for the Chinese Communist Party to abuse all of us by obscuring – and enabling – its true, predatory and genocidal designs against our country.
This is Frank Gaffney.
The Secure Freedom Minute – the most interesting, informative and life-saving 60 seconds of your day.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-21 11:51:152022-04-21 11:51:15BEWARE: ‘The Communist Chinese Party groomers’
Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory.
While smaller in scale than other aspects of Spygate, the Yotaphone hoax represents an equally serious scandal because it involved both the mining of proprietary information and sensitive data from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the apparent surveillance of Trump’s physical movements.
When Special Counsel John Durham charged former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann in September 2021, the indictment focused on the Alfa Bank hoax that Sussmann, tech executive Rodney Joffe, and other cybersecurity experts had crafted. The indictment detailed how Joffe and other tech experts had allegedly mined data and developed “white papers” that deceptively created the impression that Trump had maintained a secret communication network with the Russia-based Alfa Bank.
Then, allegedly on behalf of the Clinton campaign and Joffe, Sussmann provided the Alfa Bank material to the media and to the FBI’s general counsel at the time, James Baker, with Sussmann falsely telling Baker he was sharing the “intel” on his own and not on behalf of any client. That alleged lie formed the basis for the one count, Section 1001 false statement charge against Sussmann.
There’s Another Alleged Lie
The 27-page indictment, however, also spoke of Sussmann sharing “updated allegations” on February 9, 2017, to another U.S. government agency, namely the CIA, while allegedly repeating the same false claim that he was not sharing the “intel” on behalf of any client. From the framing of the indictment, it appeared that what Sussmann had shared with the CIA concerned the same Alfa-Bank data provided to the FBI several months earlier, albeit updated.
But then two months ago, as part of the government’s “Motion to Inquire Into Potential Conflicts of Interest,” Durham’s team revealed for the first time that when Sussmann met with the CIA in early 2017, he provided agents with internet data beyond the Alfa Bank conspiracy theory. This data, Sussmann claimed, “demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.”
The “supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones” were “Yotaphones.” Following Durham’s filing of the conflicts of interest motion, it appeared Sussmann bore responsibility for peddling a second conspiracy theory to the CIA. But the details contained in the government’s motion proved insufficient to understand the Yotaphone angle to Spygate. That all changed on Friday, when the special counsel filed two CIA memoranda memorializing what Sussmann said about the Yotaphones and the data Joffe and his tech experts had compiled.
What Sussmann Told the CIA
The first memorandum, dated January 31, 2017, summarized what Sussmann told a former CIA employee in hopes of scoring a meeting with the CIA. Sussmann said his client “had some interesting information about the presence and activity of a unique Russian made phone around President Trump.” Sussmann claimed the activity started in April 2016 when Trump was working out of the Trump Tower on its Wi-Fi network. That phone was also used on the “Wi-Fi at Trump’s apartment at Grand Central Park West,” according to Sussmann.
The memorandum then noted that “when Trump traveled to Michigan to interview a cabinet secretary, the phone appeared with Trump in Michigan.” The unnamed cabinet secretary apparently refers to Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos, whose husband Richard DeVos was chairman of the Michigan-based Spectrum Health in 2016.
According to the notes, Sussmann also told his contact that “the phone was never noticed in two places at once” and was seen “only around the President’s movement.” The memo noted that once, when Trump was not in Trump Tower, the phone was active on the Trump Tower WiFi network. Then, “in December 2016, the phone disappeared from Trump Tower Wi Fi network and surfaced on [the Executive Office Building] network,” the memorandum said, with Sussmann claiming it was the same Yotaphone and that it “surfaced” at the Executive Office Building after Trump moved to the White House.
The Yotaphone is rare, Sussmann told his contact, with only about a dozen or so present in the United States, and Russian government officials often receive a high-end version of the phone as a gift. According to Sussmann, the Yotaphone connected to Trump made a number of WIFI calls to Moscow and St. Petersburg from April 2016 until February 2017.
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https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-21 11:51:142022-04-21 11:51:14New Documents: Democrats Sicced the CIA on their Domestic Enemy, President Donald J. Trump
If anyone has reason to be furious about GEICO’s decision to invite Linda Sarsour to participate in a diversity seminar honoring Middle Eastern and North African Heritage Month for the company’s employees in early April, it’s the company’s corporate owner, Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway.
For a company whose entire raison d’etre is to mitigate risk, GEICO’s selection of Sarsour is bewildering. Without meaning to, GEICO provided a clinic on how companies can make gross errors in partnerships when they move forward without an iota of research or an eye towards actual risk for the company, its communities, and our country. Even a few moments with that elusive search engine, Google, would reveal Sarsour’s incendiary and divisive rhetoric is hardly the message that a national insurance company in the business of risk management should promote.
In 2017, Sarsour called for “jihad” in America, comparing Donald Trump, an elected president, with unelected authoritarian tyrants in the Middle East. And at the height of the George Floyd riots during which protesters were destroying store fronts and setting buildings on fire in cities throughout the country, she declared that reforming law enforcement practices in the United States was impossible. “Burn it all down, start over,” she said.
In both instances, Sarsour said she wasn’t promoting violence, but given the realities of intergroup conflict in the U.S., it’s hard not to conclude that some of her listeners would interpret her words as license for attacks on property owned by GEICO customers.
It just doesn’t make sense for an insurance company to promote such a speaker, but that’s what GEICO did when it asked Sarsour to speak at a celebration of Middle East and North African Heritage Month.
GEICO officials did the right thing by canceling Sarsour’s presentation, but the company put itself into the proverbial Islamist frying pan and is not yet out of trouble. GEICO is facing an onslaught of bad publicity from Islamist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its allies who now absurdly claim that its change in programming for its employees is surely a sign of “Islamophobia.”
Many Muslims would argue that the only anti-Muslim bigotry seen so far from GEICO officials was their perception that civilizational jihadists and Muslim Brotherhood legacy group sympathizers like Sarsour somehow represent “diversity” among the Arabic and Muslim communities. If events proceed as has other Islamist bullying episodes, CAIR and its allies will not stop until they force the company into apologizing for canceling Sarsour’s presentation and admitting to the sin of Islamophobia.
I’m certainly not a fan of cancel culture, as the Islamists have targeted me on a number of occasions. When I was targeted, however, I was booked to speak on the very principles our reform-minded Muslim organization promotes.
In this instance, GEICO did the right thing. When GEICO realized it booked the wrong person for the event they were hosting, the corporation changed direction.
By anointing Sarsour as a representative of Arab Americans with its invitation, GEICO unintentionally portrayed this community as being at war with the country where they live, and that’s simply not how it is, not to mention the venomous antisemitism that Sarsour embodies in her support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel.
Most Arabs and Muslims living in the U.S. are not interested in promoting “jihad” in the streets of the cities in which they live, nor are they interested inflaming tensions in a country that has endured so much violence in recent years. They want to live in peace with their neighbors and have little tolerance for Sarsour’s inflammatory and self-aggrandizing rhetoric.
Sarsour also brings Islam into undeserved disrepute with her antics. The cycle is all too predictable. First, she engages in divisive rhetoric that incites tensions. And then, when people complain, she calls them white supremacists and Islamophobes, transforming Islam from a pietistic faith that changes people’s lives into a club with which to abuse her opponents in the public square.
GEICO didn’t know how unpleasant Sarsour was, but they did the right thing upon finding out.
The company needs to do more.
In particular, GEICO needs to promote the work of moderate, reform Muslims on the American scene. Not only will this help improve intergroup relations in the U.S., but will preempt attacks from CAIR and its allies to portray GEICO as a bastion of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry in the U.S.
First off, GEICO should contact the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), an organization founded to advocate for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state.
GEICO could also contact the Muslim Reform Movement which seeks to “reclaim the progressive spirit with which Islam was born in the 7th century to fast forward it into the 21st century.” The organization’s website declares, “We support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by United Nations member states in 1948.”
The company should consider hosting a talk by Asra Nomani, Raheel Raza, or Soraya Deen. They are all Muslim Reformers and women’s rights activists outspoken against the separatist Islamist ideas Sarsour touts. Soraya praised the company for canceling Sarsour’s talk and confronted Sarsour’s rhetoric directly, declaring that she is “is proud of her hate of Israel, Israeli Jews and Muslim reformers and atheists, not to mention conservatives, cops and the US military.”
GEICO made a terrible mistake by inviting Sarsour to speak at a “diversity and inclusion” seminar. Sadly, the cancelation of the event where she was slated to speak rendered the company vulnerable to attacks from Islamist groups like CAIR. The damage can be minimized and the attacks countered by highlighting Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. who love their country and want to see it succeed.
If GEICO does the right thing, it will help the U.S. turn a corner and start to heal from the ugly divisiveness and hostility that has dominated its public square for far too long.
It will also perhaps learn its own actuarial lesson in loss-prevention.
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser (@DrZuhdiJasser) is a physician, a former US Navy Lieutenant Commander and founder and president of American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) and co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement. He is also a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy. His weekly podcast, Reform This! can be heard on the Blaze Podcast Network.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-21 00:51:402022-04-21 00:51:40GEICO blundered with invite to Islamist, will it fix the mess?
Below was reported as being part of a Letter to the Editor in a recent WSJ article in reference to their editorial on the consequences of the The Shrinking U. S. Navy. I think it applies to all our military services these days.
Here’s the attachment to the letter to the editor:
You can relax about our military preparedness. In terms of manpower, we have far more diversity coordinators and gender advisors than the Russians and Chinese. In materiel, our advantage in maternity flight suits is overwhelming. Faced with such potent weapons of war, who would dare engage us in armed conflict?
Harry O. McKinney Southfield, Mich.
I feel much better about our military now – how ’bout you?
Thank you Fake POTUS Biden, SecDef Austin, Chair JCS Milley and all the other WOKE senior officers who have reduced the morale and fighting spirit of those soldiers in the trenches.
Yes and let’s not forget:
the female Navy Officers who graduated from Canoe U (USNA) with poor seamanship training and were in charge on the Bridges of 2 Navy Destroyers which collided with other ships at the cost of sailors lives;
the Navy Officer who surrendered two well armed gun boats to Iran without firing a shot;
the Army hierarchy which has reduced standards for PT tests;
Ranger School Graduations, installed field lactation stations for pregnant female soldiers;
the Air Force for installing a Lesbian Commandant of Cadets at the AFA and a black Commandant whose #1 priority was weeding out cadets he felt were racists or sexual harassers;
the Marines for reducing standards for their officer training program to commission more women;
SecDef Austin for ordering a 50 day stand-down to ferret out soldiers considered extremists (i.e. Trump supporters);
Chairman of JCS Milley for touting Critical Race Theory, etc. etc.
Our entire military is now WOKE and more concerned at the top with Climate Change, the environment and Diversity, Equality and Inclusion than combat readiness and warfighting.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-21 00:51:392022-04-21 00:51:39Letter to the Editor of the WSJ RE: Military Preparedness
We came across an interesting tweet from Roland S. Martin, a journalist and former CNN contributor. Here’s the tweet:
I don’t give a damn what some grossly unqualified Donald Trump judge said, I’m double masked and wearing goggles on this Nashville to DC flight. I had COVID in December. Y’all can KISS MY ASS about me not wanting it again. And any fool saying they don’t matter is a damn liar. pic.twitter.com/cHJ9oUYWo4
We wanted to dissect Roland’s tweet to better understand who he really is.
Roland: “I don’t give a damn what some grossly unqualified Donald Trump judge said…”
Analysis: Roland hates Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle who was indeed appointed by President Donald J. Trump. Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle followed the U.S. Constitution and her ruling limited the powers of the federal government over we the people. Roland uses the word “unqualified” for U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle for the Middle District of Florida who ruled against the CDC.
NOTE: We are wondering what Roland would say about the qualifications of Ketanji Brown Jackson who couldn’t or wouldn’t define the word “woman” during her Senate confirmation hearing.
Roland: “I’m double masked and wearing goggles on this Nashville to DC flight.”
Analysis: Research reveals that prolonged use of Covid masks, homemade or N95, can cause anywhere from five percent on up to 20 percent loss of oxygen, leading to hypercapnia (excessive carbon dioxide in the bloodstream typically caused by inadequate respiration), panic attacks, vertigo, double vision, tinnitus, concentration issues, headaches, slowed reactions, seizures, alterations in blood chemistry and suffocation due to air displacement. According to Amesh A. Adalja, MD, and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Maryland, “wearing a mask day in and day out can lead to alterations in blood chemistry,” and that leads to “changes in level of consciousness.” A German neurologist, Dr. Margarite Griesz-Brisson, MD, PhD (in pharmacology), who specializes in neurotoxicology and environmental medicine, warns that oxygen deprivation from prolonged Covid-mask wearing can cause permanent neurological damage. She states in her research, “The re-breathing of our exhaled air will without a doubt create oxygen deficiency and a flooding of carbon dioxide. We know that the human brain is very sensitive to oxygen deprivation. There are nerve cells for example in the hippocampus, that can’t be longer than 3 minutes without oxygen – they cannot survive. The acute warning symptoms are headaches, drowsiness, dizziness, issues in concentration, slowing down of the reaction time – reactions of the cognitive system.” An article titled “Do masks actually work? The best studies suggest they don’t“, appeared in The Washington Examiner on August 12, 2021 stated: “Of the 14 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless — whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone — or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.”
NOTE: Roland is double masked and wearing goggles. This mean Roland is risking double hypercapnia (excessive carbon dioxide in the bloodstream typically caused by inadequate respiration), panic attacks, vertigo, double vision, tinnitus, concentration issues, headaches, slowed reactions, seizures, alterations in blood chemistry and suffocation due to air displacement.
Roland: “I had COVID in December.”
Analysis: On Instagram Roland on August 14th, 2021 posted this comment, “This ain’t hard, y’all. Get the damn vaccine!!!!” Our guess is that Roland was vaccinated before December and he still got Covid in December.
Roland: “Y’all can KISS MY ASS about me not wanting it again. And any fool saying they don’t matter is a damn liar.”
Analysis: It’s interesting to see a journalist tell his Facebook followers to “KISS MY ASS” and calling them fools and damn liars. Roland seems over the top and too emotional.
We thank Roland for setting the standard of being double masked and wearing a goggles. We’re guessing that the next time we fly we’ll be able to immediately recognize the Democrats because they will be, interestingly, exercising their freedom of choice by ignoring the judges ruling to not wear a face masks on aircraft.
That, as they say, is their choice.
BTW. Here’s Roland on April 3rd, 2022 without a mask in a very large auditorium:
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-21 00:51:382022-04-21 00:51:38How to recognize a Democrat on your next airline flight? Their the ones wearing a mask.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the state could take action against Twitter Inc. for launching a poison pill defense to thwart an unsolicited bid by Elon Musk.
“Why would you reject the 20% premium?” DeSantis said Tuesday at a press conference, accusing the company of censorship. “I don’t think that was a rejection based on financial concerns or business judgment. They rejected it because they know they can’t control Elon Musk. They know that he will not accept the narrative.”
Watch Governor DeSantis explain how the Sunshine state will hold Titter’s Board of Directors accountable:
DeSantis announces that Florida is going to look at ways to hold Twitter’s board of directors accountable for breaching its fiduciary duties to the state, which is a shareholder of Twitter stock. pic.twitter.com/DpKdMrHUkr
The Governor has a fiduciary responsibility to insure that Florida’s pension fund, and the companies the pension fun has invested in, increase the value of their stock to keep the fund solvent. Twitter’s stock has not performed well and dropped 10% on April 20th, 2022.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 22:53:332022-04-20 22:53:33Governor Ron DeSantis, ‘Florida is going to hold Twitter’s board of directors accountable for breaching its fiduciary duties’
The lesson of 1989 is that today’s culture and ideas are tomorrow’s politics and policies.
In August 1989, Poland’s parliament did the unthinkable. The Soviet satellite state elected an anti-communist as its new prime minister.
The world waited with bated breath to see what would happen next. And then it happened: nothing.
When no Soviet tanks deployed to Poland to crush the rebels, political movements in other nations—first Hungary, followed by East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania—soon followed in what became known as the Revolutions of 1989.
The collapse of Communism had begun.
‘Marx’s Ideological Heirs’
On October 25, 1989, a mere two months after Poland’s pivotal election, the New York Times published an article, headlined “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges,” describing a strange and seemingly paradoxical phenomenon. Even as the world’s great experiment in Marxism was collapsing for all to see, Marxist ideas were taking root and becoming mainstream in the halls of American universities.
“As Karl Marx’s ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders,” wrote Felicity Barringer.
There were notable differences, however. The stark, unmistakable contrast between the grinding poverty of the Communist nations and the prosperity of Western economies had obliterated socialism’s claim to economic superiority.
As a result, orthodox Marxism, with its emphasis on economics, was no longer in vogue. Traditional Marxism was “retreating” and had become “unfashionable,” the Times reported.
”There are a lot of people who don’t want to call themselves Marxist,” Eugene D. Genovese, an eminent Marxist academic, told the Times. (Genovese, who died in 2012, later abandoned socialism and embraced traditional conservatism after rediscovering Catholicism.)
Marxism wasn’t truly retreating, however. It was simply adapting to survive.
Watching the upheaval in Poland and other Eastern bloc nations had convinced even Marxists that capitalism would not “give way to socialism” anytime soon. But this would cause an evolution of Marxist ideas, not an abandonment of them.
”Marx has become relativized,” Loren Graham, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Times.
Graham was just one of a dozen of the scholars the Times spoke to, a mix of economists, legal scholars, historians, sociologists, and literary critics. Most of them seemed to reach the same conclusion as Graham.
Marxism was not dying, it was mutating.
”Marxism and feminism, Marxism and deconstruction, Marxism and race – this is where the exciting debates are,” Jonathan M. Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, told the paper.
Marxism was still thriving, Barringer concluded, but not in the social sciences, “where there is a possibility of practical application,” but in abstract fields such as literary criticism.
A Strategic Shift
Marxism was not defeated. The Marxists had just staked out new turf.
And it was a highly strategic move. “Practical application” of Marxism had proven disastrous. Communism had been tried as a governing philosophy and had failed catastrophically, leading to mass starvation, impoverishment, persecution, and murder. But, in the ivory tower of the American university system, professors could inculcate Marxist ideas in the minds of their students without risk of being refuted by reality.
Yet, it wasn’t happening in university economics departments, because Marxism’s credentials in that discipline were too tarnished by its “practical” track record. Instead, Marxism was thriving in English departments and other more abstract disciplines.
In these studies, economics was downplayed, and other key aspects of the Marxist worldview came to the fore. The Marxist class war doctrine was still emphasized. But instead of capital versus labor, it was the patriarchy versus women, the racially privileged versus the marginalized, etc. Students were taught to see every social relation through the lens of oppression and conflict.
After absorbing Marxist ideas (even when those ideas weren’t called “Marxist”), generations of university graduates carried those ideas into other important American institutions: the arts, media, government, public schools, even eventually into human resources departments and corporate boardrooms. (This is known as “the long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by Communist student activist Rudi Dutschke, whose ideas were influenced by early twentieth-century Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci.)
Indeed, it was recently revealed that federal agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars on programs training employees to acknowledge their “white privilege.” These training programs are also found in countless schools and corporations, and people who have questioned the appropriateness of these programs have found themselves summarily fired.
A huge part of today’s culture is a consequence of this movement. Widespread “wokeness,” all-pervasive identity politics, victimism, cancel culture, rioters self-righteously destroying people’s livelihoods and menacing passersby: all largely stem from Marxist presumptions (especially Marxism’s distorted fixations on oppression and conflict) that have been incubating in the universities, especially since the late 80s.
As it turned out, what was happening in American universities in 1989 was just as pivotal as what was happening in European parliaments.
Especially in an election year, it can be easy to fixate on the political fray. But the lesson of 1989 is that today’s culture and ideas are tomorrow’s politics and policies.
That is why the fate of freedom rests on education.
To advance the cause of freedom for today and tomorrow, please support the Foundation for Economic Education.
Correction: This article originally stated that Gramsci coined the phrase “the long march through the institutions.”
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 22:53:322022-04-20 22:53:32The New York Times Reported ‘the Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges’ 30 Years Ago. Today, We See the Results
Ending the Department of Education may seem like a radical idea, but it’s not as crazy as it sounds.
The debate over the federal role in education has been going on for decades. Some say the feds should have a relatively large role while others say it should be relatively small. But while most people believe there should be at least some federal oversight, some believe there should be none at all.
Rep. Thomas Massie is one of those who believes there should be no federal involvement in education, and he is actively working to make that a reality. In February 2021, he introduced H.R. 899, a bill that perfectly encapsulates his views on this issue. It consists of one sentence:
“This bill terminates the Department of Education on December 31, 2022.”
This position may seem radical, but Massie is not alone. The bill had 8 cosponsors when it was introduced and has been gaining support ever since. On Monday, Massie announced that Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) decided to cosponsor the bill, bringing the total number of cosponsors to 18.
Though it may be tempting to think Massie and his supporters just don’t care about education, this is certainly not the case. If anything, they are pushing to end the federal Department of Education precisely because they care about educational outcomes. In their view, the Department is at best not helping and, at worst, may actually be part of the problem.
“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” said Massie when he initially introduced the bill. “States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students.”
Massie is echoing sentiments expressed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, who advocated dismantling the Department of Education even though it had just begun operating in 1980.
“By eliminating the Department of Education less than 2 years after it was created,” said Reagan, “we cannot only reduce the budget but ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children.”
Before we rush into a decision like this, however, it’s important to consider the consequences. As G. K. Chesterton famously said, “don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”
So, why was the federal Department of Education set up in the first place? What do they do with their $68 billion budget? Well, when it was initially established it was given 4 main roles, and these are the same roles it fulfills to this day. They are:
Establishing policies on federal financial aid for education, and distributing as well as monitoring those funds (which comprise roughly 8 percent of elementary and secondary education spending).
Collecting data on America’s schools and disseminating research.
Focusing national attention on key educational issues.
Prohibiting discrimination and ensuring equal access to education.
Now, some of these functions arguably shouldn’t exist at all. For instance, if you are opposed to federal funding or federal interference in education on principle, then there is no need for the first and fourth roles. As for the middle two roles, it’s clear that we need people collecting data, disseminating research, and pointing out educational issues. But the question here is not whether these initiatives should exist. The question is whether the federal government should pursue them.
On that question, there’s a good case to be made that leaving these tasks to the state and local level is far more appropriate. Education needs vary from student to student, so educational decisions need to be made as close to the individual student as possible. Federal organizations simply can’t account for the diverse array of educational contexts, which means their one-size-fits-all findings and recommendations will be poorly suited for many classrooms.
Teachers don’t need national administrators telling them how to do their job. They need the freedom and flexibility to tailor their approach to meet the needs of students. It is the local teachers, schools, and districts that know their students’ needs best, which is why they are best positioned to gather data, assess their options, and make decisions about how to meet those needs. Imposing top-down national ideas only gets in the way of these adaptive, customized, local processes.
The federal Department of Education has lofty goals when it comes to student success, but it is simply not the right institution for achieving them. If we really want to improve education, it’s going to require a bottom-up, decentralized approach. So rather than continuing to fund yet another federal bureaucracy, perhaps it’s time to let taxpayers keep their money, and let educators and parents pursue a better avenue for change.
This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.
Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 22:53:312022-04-20 22:53:31Reagan’s Goal to End the Department of Education Is Finally Gaining Momentum
“I have this intense rage in me over the harm that was done to me…” — Julie, 27
When Julie woke up from her double mastectomy in the children’s hospital in Syracuse, she expected to feel elated. Instead, she only felt numb. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, she thought. Years later, she looks back with anger at the “collaborative idiocy” that crushed her spirit, permanently scarred her body, and left her feeling empty, betrayed, and alone. Like so many victims of the mutilating treatments this White House calls “livesaving,” Julie will never fully get her life back. We’ve gone too far, the survivors of this movement are crying out. And no one, not even the president, is listening.
For Suzy Weiss, who tells their stories, the emotions must be difficult to contain. In a powerful piece called “The Testosterone Hangover,” Weiss is a witness to the pain of these trusting souls — women who were pushed along a path that would ultimately destroy their young adulthood.
Chloe was only 15 when her mother sat nervously in the waiting room, waiting for word on her daughter’s breast removal. Like so many of the teenagers sucked into this world, she was unhappy with how she looked and spent a lot of time on Tumblr, immersed in trans messaging. She remembers sitting on her bed at the tender age of 12, wondering if she was meant to live as a boy. Two years later, Weiss recounts, she was taking puberty blockers and testosterone injections. By June of 2020, she was wheeled into an operating room for a drastic surgery that she would regret for the rest of her life.
Eleven months later, she was still confined to her bed, struggling with the restrictions of “nipple grafts” and other side effects. She started to miss “being pretty” and made the brave announcement that she was going to detransition — a move that made her even more of an outcast at school. Today, she misses the feminine body that she left behind. “I was looking for a niche to fit in and a sense of fulfillment.” Now, she tells Weiss, “I don’t really believe in gender identity at all.”
Meanwhile, people at the highest levels of government seem fixated on casting our sons and daughters in these horror stories — even going so far as to force taxpayers to fund the harm. Congresswoman Mary Miller (R-Ill.), one of the many Republicans appalled by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra’s insistence that children are “entitled” to these treatments, pushed back. She demanded to know if it was “child abuse,” as the American College of Pediatricians has labeled it, to perform sterilizing surgeries on kids as young as 12. He refused to answer. “[The Biden administration is] doing nothing but engaging in extreme woke politics with children being their victims,” she said angrily on “Washington Watch.” “I can’t even think of enough bad adjectives to describe this. It’s evil, it’s insane.”
And the mainstream press is enabling it. Just this past week, the much-maligned PolitiFact, whose obvious political agenda has made its “fact-checking” a punch line, weighed in on the exchange between Miller and Becerra. “Miller said the Biden administration is ‘encouraging children to take chemical castration drugs and undergo surgeries,’ and ‘are lying to children by telling them puberty blockers are reversible…’ We rate this claim as FALSE.”
That’s news to the medical community, groups of which have openly admitted that puberty blockers are not “fully reversible.” The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) has warned repeatedly that “[l]ittle is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria.” As experts repeatedly point out, several of these hormones are off-label drugs that haven’t been studied for their impact on children. But there are plenty of things experts do know about the side effects, including: “When puberty blockers are administered in early puberty and followed by cross-sex hormones,” SEGM notes, “sterility is expected.”
Even transgender activists — many of whom blazed this trail and underwent radical operations themselves — have been horrified at the rush to transition children. One, a doctor, is speaking out publicly — sounding the alarm that this wave is rooted in social influence, not genuine gender dysphoria. “I have these private thoughts: ‘This has gone too far. It’s going to get worse. I don’t want any part of it,’” said Erica Anderson, who, until recently was “on the forefront of transgender care.” He underwent dramatic surgery in his late 50s but believes strongly that the pendulum has swung “to an extreme.”
“A fair number of kids are getting into it because it’s trendy,” he told the Washington Post. “I think in our haste to be supportive, we’re missing that element… Teenagers influence each other.” Anderson thinks kids are leaning into gender treatments, hoping it helps with other psychological problems — and then struggle to dig out of the depression when it doesn’t. “I have a dictum: When in doubt, doubt,” she told the LA paper. “Questioning is a good thing. How are you going to find out if you are lockstep with whatever conclusion you come to first?”
Helena Kerschner, an outspoken detransitioner with one of the biggest platforms, is grateful for anyone who raises a red flag. “I had a ton of issues with my academics and my mental health, but I never really got help with that,” Helena said. “As soon as I said I was trans, it was all-hands on deck.” But after a year and a half on drugs, she started to cut herself. “The reality I was living was not lining up with the fantasy I’d had as a teen… It was a crushing and terrifying feeling.”
To her, this White House’s obsession with gender treatments is terrifying. “The fact that there [are] adults as high up as in the Biden administration putting out these claims that young people need to medically transition is really dangerous. There’s no logic to it.”
Fortunately for this generation, there are leaders like Mary Miller who will lay it all on the line to stop more Julies, Chloes, and Helenas from living this nightmare. When PolitiFact and the rest of the Left’s bullies come after her, she says, “I’m going to fight back. If they want to fight, they can bring it on. Because… I’m not backing down.” Thank goodness.
For more on the mountain of facts the Biden administration is covering up to force this issue, check out FRC’s paper by Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, “Transgenderism Has a Science Problem.”
Monday afternoon, airline passengers whooped and hollered when flight crews informed them the federal mask mandate was finally over. Crews and passengers responded to the news by ripping off masks mid-flight. Most commercial airlines and Amtrak quickly followed suit to drop their masking policies, as did rideshare services Uber and Lyft. Airlines “were urging that the mandate be lifted sooner,” said Dr. Andrew Bostom, clinical trial epidemiologist at Brown University.
The president who promised to shut down the virus has a strange way of showing it. “Had he been smart, Joe Biden could have owned that glee,” notedNational Review‘s Charles Cooke. “Instead, it came in spite of him, courtesy of a Republican-appointed judge.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki called the decision “disappointing” but when asked why airplane cabins should be subjected to harsher rules than the White House briefing room, she could only retort lamely, “I’m not a doctor. You’re not a doctor.” Who knew advanced medical degrees were required to form opinions on questions of law, justice, and public policy?
Meanwhile on “Washington Watch,” Bostom, who is a doctor, laid out the science. Since 2008, 14 studies (12 for influenza and two for COVID) have used randomized, controlled trials, which are “the gold standard [for] evidence,” to study whether “mass masking is an intervention which works” for airborne viruses. Bostom said the results of those studies are “uniformly negative.” Nevertheless, “public health authorities have managed to push through mandates,” he continued, essentially turning “the whole evidence-based paradigm on its head.”
Other science opposing the mask mandate concerns the airplanes themselves, which are armed with “highly efficient filtration systems” and “biocidal technology to kill a virus,” explained Bostom. For comparison, “in a restaurant, the air may recirculate through a filter about every 15 minutes. In an airplane, that’s every 30 seconds,” said Ken Klukowski, the attorney representing FRC Action in its own lawsuit against the mask mandate. According to a Defense Department study conducted last year, he said, “it would take 54 hours on an airplane to get infected” with COVID — three times longer than the world’s longest flight.
However, the basic question in the judge’s opinion was legal, not scientific. Klukowski explained, “the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)… sets forth the requirements that agencies need to meet when they’re putting legal obligations or restrictions on you and me.” “A broad body of Supreme Court precedent” holds administrative agencies to a standard of “reasoned decision making,” which the judge found was not met. Thus, “forcing people to wear masks on airplanes meets the definition of what the law calls arbitrary and capricious…. The judge did the right thing,” Klukowski concluded.
The mask mandate was soundly thumped by the gavel, but it’s not quite dead yet. The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced plans to appeal, “subject to CDC’s conclusion that the order remains necessary for public health.” Of course, given the CDC’s preference for political science, they may calculate that opposing the overwhelming weight of medical data is worth it to ingratiate the president with his base. The White House’s continued insistence on encouraging mask-wearing is “consistent with their zealotry, but it’s not consistent with the data,” noted Bostom, nor “with the desires, as you can see by the popular reaction, of the vast swath of the population.”
However, the DOJ has avoided requesting a temporary stay on the ruling, an unusual move which allows the judge’s decision to remain in effect for now. That could indicate the DOJ is tired of getting pummeled in court and wants to rest its sore ribs, that they expect to lose on appeal, and that they’re only appealing on their doubly-boosted boss’s orders. So too, the CDC could, as it has done before, stick its finger into the political winds and then “discover” that “the science has changed.”
In the meantime, honest citizens won’t get kicked off a plane because they can’t keep a two-year-old’s mask on, or struggle to read a book that’s half obscured by a cloth mask serving only to virtue-signal. Americans can board their flights with all the comfort their economy-class ticket allows. You are now free to breathe about the country.
Residents screaming from windows? Children taken from parents? What is going on?
According to official reports, over 25 million Shanghai residents were placed under strict lockdown from March 27, due to rising cases of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. And when they say “lockdown,” they don’t just mean, “essential travel only.” They mean, do not leave your apartment even to purchase food. Shanghai residents must wait inside their apartments for food supplies to be delivered to them. According to a BBC report, Shanghai authorities have admitted that there have been problems with the food supply chain, corroborating complaints of food shortages made by residents.
Day 17 of my Shanghai Covid lockdown and food remains the priority
As usual, I woke up at 6am to try ordering deliveries
I have 10 apps that I cycle through repeatedly from various stores/platforms for several hours trying to find anything
The city has set up testing sites to implement mandatory mass testing, shuttling off Covid-positive residents to hospitals and makeshift quarantine facilities. Loudspeakers blare out, “Get tested now.” Isolating at home is not an option.
One particularly disturbing aspect of the Shanghai lockdown is the separation of parents from children who test positive and are sent off to quarantine facilities. It must be pretty heart-wrenching to see one’s child carted away to a quarantine facility, completely deprived of the support of family and loved ones.
One of the scenes that seems to encapsulate the hopeless plight of Shanghai residents, trapped in their apartments by their own government, is the sound of residents screaming in protest from their windows. This scene was captured on social media, and picked up by many mainstream media, such as The Guardian, as well:
What the?? This video taken yesterday in Shanghai, China, by the father of a close friend of mine. She verified its authenticity: People screaming out of their windows after a week of total lockdown, no leaving your apartment for any reason. pic.twitter.com/iHGOO8D8Cz
Shanghai authorities announced on Monday, April 11, that they would implement a “limited easing” of restrictions. But this comes two full weeks into one of the strictest and most far-reaching lockdowns since the pandemic began. Who knows how many people will by now have been deprived of access to essential medical services, or have gone hungry due to broken supply chains, or have been sunk in depression due to prolonged isolation from friends and loved ones?
Most of the world has by now come to accept that we must live with Covid-19 for the foreseeable future, and that all hopes of a “zero Covid” future were a naïve pipe-dream that will never come to pass. Yet China seems to cling to the fantasy of a zero-Covid world, refusing to accept that such a fantasy has lost every shred of credibility in this endemic phase of the virus.
The severe two-week lockdown in Shanghai has not been successful at containing the virus. Even if it were successful, this success would not be sustainable, since you cannot just keep locking down a large population every time a highly transmissible virus pops its head above the parapet.
To indulge a fantasy privately is one thing; to allow public officials to inflict that fantasy, come hell or high water, on a population of 25 million citizens is quite another.
But as we survey Shanghai from Western nations that have, at least for a while, recovered most of the liberties we were stripped of in the name of public health, we cannot afford to be complacent. For the Orwellian nightmare that we see unfolding before our eyes in Shanghai is just the logical consequence of the very same sort of Covid containment absolutism that ruled the roost across much of the West during a large part of the pandemic.
And this cruel, inhumane, and absolutist approach to disease control, though it has been significantly tempered in most Western nations in the latter months of the pandemic, has only been explicitly disavowed by a fraction of Western governments. So the new public health absolutism unleashed in 2020 has certainly not been laid to rest in the West.
Furthermore, the notion of a WHO-led pandemic “treaty,” now being publicly mooted by the WHO, raises the spectre of an even more tightly coordinated international pandemic response, in a world in which many political and scientific elites, with a limited appreciation for the principles of liberal constitutionalism and individualised medicine, have yet to publicly distance themselves in a principled way from the recklessness and inhumanity of lockdowns and medical coercion.
The Covid containment absolutist fancies himself as a humanitarian, who just wants to save lives, but in reality, embraces a bizarrely selective form of humanitarianism, fixing his attention almost exclusively on lives endangered by Covid infections. Indeed, he is so single-mindedly preoccupied with reducing infections that virtually every other dimension of public health and societal well-being seems to disappear from view.
The Covid containment absolutist is like a grand Chess Master, who has crafted a Master Plan for his army of chess pieces to faithfully follow. If a chess piece protests or resists, it must be put back in its place. At least, in theory.
The trouble is, human beings are much more than chess pieces. They are living, breathing persons with hopes, fears, desires, aspirations, loves, and aversions. They are equipped by nature to be masters of their own destinies, not just pawns on a chessboard.
To shove people around, ship them off to quarantine camps, mandate them to test repeatedly even when they are in perfect health, punish them for not vaccinating, order them to stay at home, confine them within a two-kilometre radius of their homes, or restrict the number of visitors they may receive in the privacy of their own home, is essentially to treat them as cattle, or as pawns on a chessboard, not as autonomous individuals with valid life plans and choices of their own.
To treat people as mere disease vectors, or utility functions in a Covid Containment Plan, is to trample on their dignity and to make their liberties contingent on the questionable musings of an “expert class,” a class that has, for the most part, exhibited a blinkered and impoverished social imagination, and proved itself hopelessly inept at managing a complex public health problem. The disproportionate faith this expert class has placed in containment measures like universal masking, vaccine passports, and lockdowns, has proved delusional.
Shanghai may appear to us now as a distant Orwellian nightmare. But in reality, it is just a slightly accentuated version of the Orwellian nightmare Western governments needlessly inflicted on their own citizens in 2020 and 2021, in the face of a virus that poses no serious threat to young and healthy people and has an estimated Infection Fatality Rate in the range of 0.2-0.3%.
Shanghai’s current lockdown shares with its Western counterparts an inhumane and reckless approach to disease control characterised by dehumanising attitudes toward citizens, a mono-dimensional vision of public health and well-being, and a manifest contempt for human rights. Sadly, this infelicitous approach took root among many leaders of the international public health establishment soon after it was first put on display in Wuhan back in January 2020.
If we are shocked by the way Chinese authorities imprison their citizens in their homes and ship infected citizens off to makeshift isolation camps, then we should probably take a long, hard look in the mirror.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 12:51:582022-04-20 12:51:58Shanghai’s Orwellian Nightmare is a Reminder of the Inhumanity of Absolutist Approaches to Disease Control
Only seven percent of journalists in the United States’ national media scene identify as conservatives or libertarians.
Why do so many experts seem to be so very wrong, so often? This is the curious question recently posed by a contrarian American political scientist at Kentucky State University, Wilfred Reilly. His catalogue of things the experts got wrong, featuredin a recent article in the online magazine Spiked, is an impressive one.
On just the narrow topic of hate crime hoaxes, Reilly’s list includes Jussie Smollett, the Covington Catholic boys, Kyle Rittenhouse, Erica Thomas, Michael Brown, and Jacob Blake.
In each of these instances, the chattering class — whether in media, politics or academia — had us believing the precise opposite of what turned out to be true.
Another list provided by Reilly concerned longer term, larger scale calamities that failed to materialise: “global cooling, Y2K, peak oil, prevalent acid rain, the predictions and tables in ThePopulation Bomb and An Inconvenient Truth, and so on.”
Reilly observes that this phenomenon is not new — that thinkers as far back as Socrates saw that “set-in-their-ways ideological monocultures are more likely than other groups of smart people to be grievously wrong.”
Warns Reilly, “such monocultures exist to a truly remarkable extent across mass media and academia in the contemporary US.” The statistics couldn’t be clearer on this.
Only seven percent of journalists in the United States’ national media scene identify as conservatives or libertarians, according to a major 2004 poll from Pew cited by Reilly. Only but the most ideologically entrenched would deny that American newsrooms are now crowded with liberal coastal elites who live in a different world from most of their readers.
Moreover, a study conducted a year later found that among academic sociologists, 59 per cent are loyal Democrats, 41 percent are independents or support a minor party, and zero per cent are Republicans. If this was true in the 2000s, one can only imagine what wokeness has done to academic fields like sociology.
Reilly laments that “one of the most intimidating things about being a ‘heterodox’ thinker is having to constantly say that ‘the experts’ are wrong”. While often appearing as just another form of hubris to outside observers, heterodoxy creates its own cascade of introspective doubts: “How can all of these very intelligent people be wrong? Surely it must be me who is wrong instead?”
And yet wrong “the experts” so often are — and at what seems to be an accelerating pace.
Consider gender ideology. Even if we grant the rather contested notion that a person’s biological sex can be wholly separate from their gender identity — what Reilly describes as “how masculine or feminine you feel in the context of current social norms” — the groupthink of the expert class still makes little sense.
“Road races are run not by people’s souls but by their bodies,” writes Reilly, “and there seems to be no logical reason for adult male-bodied people to ever compete in the women’s division.”
Indeed, if gender identity and biological sex form some kind of hardware-software relationship — if a person can truly be “trapped in the wrong body” — would it not make more sense to edit the “software”, rather than update the “hardware” through very costly, sometimes gory, and always irreversible procedures? And once those procedures are complete, what of every chromosome in every cell in that body that still testifies to the truth? Must they be censored, too?
Or take systemic racism. Among its central claims are that America and other Western societies are defined by white privilege, maintained by an apparatus of white supremacy, and protected for the sake of white fragility. And yet as Reilly – who is black — observes, “six or seven of the 10 most financially successful ethnic groups in present-day America are not white”. Talk about inconvenient truths.
The dogma that any gap in performance between racial groups must be due to racism is easy enough to grasp. But it is also a naked logical fallacy, known as “begging the question” — a circular argument in which the conclusion is included in the premise.
Similar to someone adamantly claiming that their watermelon was blue on the inside until the skin was pierced and the flesh turned red, no proof could ever be mustered to convince systemic racism enthusiasts that they have it wrong.
In fact, the watermelon illustration fits neatly with Wilfred Reilly’s diagnosis of the problem we face. How can so many experts can be wrong and not see it? Why are so few willing to testify that the emperor has no clothes? Reilly explains:
“My thesis: most truly bizarre theories arise when smart people adopt a premise that sounds plausible, even if it is factually incorrect, due to factors like peer-group pressure, and then reason forward correctly from that premise.”
Give me a dozen explanations for how piercing the skin of a watermelon could change the colour of the flesh inside, and you might gain an intellectual following. Convince me that my own vision or faulty perception is to blame for the watermelon changing colour, and I may even be convinced.
But that doesn’t mean your watermelon actually turned from blue to pink — and it certainly doesn’t mean the masses should be demonised for questioning the idea that watermelons change colour. “Premises, like facts and like ‘lives’ of various kinds, matter,” Reilly declares. And his solution:
“If an apparently intelligent person says something to you that seems basically insane, ask them how they got there and what their underlying worldview is. Listen well and sincerely to their response. But remember – if you reject their starting premise for logical reasons, it really doesn’t matter how many credentialed people parrot the conclusions that follow from it: they are still wrong.”
Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 12:51:572022-04-20 12:51:57Why do so many ‘experts’ screw things up so often?
The sickening revelations from the Rochdale sex abuse scandal are a reminder that abortion and abuse go hand in hand.
In the UK, Police have issued an apology and paid substantial damages to three women now in their 30s, who as children were repeatedly sexually abused and raped by organised gangs.
Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Stephen Watson apologised the failings of the police under his predecessors. They had “failed to protect them or investigate their abusers”. Mr Watson told the three victims, referred to as Amber, Daisy and BXW: “GMP could and should have done much more to protect you and we let you down.”
This lawsuit will set a precedent for dozens of other survivors whose lives were ruined by the Rochdale child sex abuse scandal, say campaigners. The revelations of the scale of the abuse in Rochdale and Rotherham was front-page news in the British media for months. The grooming gangs targeted young girls who were in government care because of behavioural problems or dysfunctional home situations.
The stories related by the three women are sickening.
Legal documents show that Amber was 14 years old when the abuse started. According to the Daily Express: “She was first raped while intoxicated and thereafter raped and sexually assaulted by numerous men. She was threatened with a gun and a knife on separate occasions when she refused to comply.” Daisy was only 12 when the abuse began and it continued for another five years.
BXW said she was happy that the police had acknowledged their responsibility for their ordeal. In her case, she said that the abuse began when she was 12 and continued for four years, during which “she was passed ‘like a ball’ between ‘thousands’ of men for rape and sexual abuse. She was impregnated by one man, Adil Khan, when she was 13 and had an abortion”.
The Manchester Police did worse than nothing about this terrible situation. Subsequent investigations showed that they dismissed complaints from the victims and ignored warnings about the abuse.
A police operation to tackle the gangs stopped in 2004 — and just eight years later, nine men ended up being convicted for sexually abusing children in Rochdale.
The Police apology is the result of a legal challenge launched by the three women assisted by lawyers from the Centre for Women’s Justice charity. They contended that “from the early 2000s there was growing evidence that gangs of men were grooming, trafficking and sexually abusing girls” in Rochdale, Lancashire. The case was clear and the Police settled out of court.
Much of the controversy which surrounds the Rochdale grooming gang and the even bigger Rotherham grooming gang is related to the racial background of the offenders. Most were British Pakistanis and there were strident allegations of racism.
But this overlooks a central feature of these crimes – abortion. This appalling story shows once again how abortion for under-age girls has facilitated vicious and organised sexual abuse of minors, not just in Rochdale but all over the country, many of them supposedly in state care.
As Sara Rowbotham, a health worker and local politician who blew the whistle on the abuse, commented to the Daily Express: “This is good news for the three girls involved, but what about all the others? There are at least 180 other survivors of the Rochdale grooming gangs. They should also be apologised to and compensated.”
The government itself has been found guilty — sadly, only in the court of public opinion — for breaking its own law. Children cannot legally consent to sexual relations – but they can get abortions.
No wonder, seeing so little respect for the law from those at the top, the very dregs of society, in the shape of those opportunistic paedophiles, exploited it.
As Canadian journalist Jonathon van Maren observed: “The evidence of these crimes just happens to be babies. So often one repulsive crime is entwined with another, and robbing one of innocence so often means snuffing out another innocent just a little further down the road. Evil men use violence against pre-born children to cover up their violence against girls.”
The men responsible for these crimes have demonstrated by their own vile conduct — treating children as worthless playthings — that they themselves are worth very little. Some have been jailed. But this kind of abuse will not end until the governing elites stop ignoring that the state uses abortion, the so-called “right to choose”, as the perfect cover-up for rape and even for organised crime.
Ann Farmer, mother of three, grandmother of five and permanently disabled, is based in Woodford Green, Essex. She is a poet, illustrator, writer and pro-life feminist devoted to defending the natural family… More by Ann Farmer
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 12:51:562022-04-20 12:51:56Abortion: The Perfect Cover-Up for Rape
by Bill Melugin and Adam Shaw, Fox News, April 18, 2022 (thanks to the Geller Report):
EXCLUSIVE: Border Patrol apprehended at least 23 people coming across the southern border whose names are on the terror watchlist in 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data obtained by Fox News.
Between Jan. 20 and Dec. 27, 2021, there were 23 encounters with individuals whose names matched on the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB)….
The Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) contains information about the identities of those who are known or “reasonably suspected” of being involved in terrorist activities. Republicans lawmakers have repeatedly called for the number of those encountered at the border to be made public by the administration….
Former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott has repeatedly sounded the alarm over the number of TSDBs coming across the border, telling fellow agents last year that it was “at a level we have never seen before.”…
Fox News reported earlier this month that over 62,000 illegal immigrants evaded Border Patrol agents in March, averaging about 2,000 a day….
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 12:51:552022-04-20 12:51:55Border Patrol Stopped 23 People on Terrorist List at Southern Border in 2021 — How Many Got Through?
Murder: Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human with malice aforethought. This state of mind may, depending upon the jurisdiction, distinguish murder from other forms of unlawful homicide, such as manslaughter. – Wikipedia
One of the questions I get asked the most these days is when the world will be able to go back to the way things were in December before the coronavirus pandemic. My answer is always the same: when we have an almost perfect drug to treat COVID-19, or when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.
More and more information is coming from the CDC, FDA and multiple scientific studies about the ill and deadly effects of taking the Covid vaccine or booster shots. These ill and deadly effects are becoming crystal clear.
With nearly six months of data since the unconstitutional Food and Drug Administration provided emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s deadly COVID shots for kids aged 5-11, we’re seeing it is even more deadly in the kids than the adults. Those who continue to peddle the lie that these are “safe and effective” are clearly complicit in the deaths of those taking them.
So far over 10,000 cases have been filed to VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) of deaths and injuries among children in this age group following the experimental COVID-19 vaccines. (Source.)
By way of contrast, there have been 939 cases of vaccine adverse events during this same time period for all of the FDA approved vaccines for children in this age group. (Source.)
That means there has been an increase of over 1000% of vaccine injuries and deaths for this age group following the COVID-19 vaccines.
As of April 19th, 2022 the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VEARS) database showed more than 1.2 million Covid vaccine injuries. Remember, the (VAERS) reporting is voluntary.
Megan Redshaw from the The Epoch Times on April 17th, 2022 reported:
VAERS data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention included a total of 1,226,314 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 26,976 deaths and 219,865 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released new data showing a total of 1,226,314 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.
The data included a total of 26,976 reports of deaths — an increase of 277 over the previous week — and 219,865 serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 2,564 compared with the previous week.
QUESTION: How many vaccine injuries and deaths remain unreported by a gravely compromised medical establishment?
Because products failed and were never pulled off the market when deaths began to occur. No investigation, no safety review, no disclosure to the govt or coerced consumer. Pre-purchased products was the gravy train that drove large-scale bio-pharmaceutical corporate fraud. pic.twitter.com/fYoEdtiU38
— Peter McCullough, MD MPH (@P_McCulloughMD) April 18, 2022
Covid’s Serial Killers
Have governments turned our medical professionals into serial killers? Is administering the Covid vaccine a short and long term danger to all of mankind?
Nine out of 10 deaths in England were reportedly those people who have been fully vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccines, according to reports.
While England recorded 9 out 10 deaths from those who received two COVID-19 vaccines shots, 4 out 5 deaths also came from people who triple-vaccinated. This is according to the data published by the U.K. Health Security Agency.
The Expose site an independent British news outlet reported on February 22, a table that would show a confirmation the vast majority of deaths were among the vaccinated on page 41.
This report revealed that about 73.5% of the population of England has been fully vaccinated, and 56.9% have received a booster shot, as of Feb. 28.
We have witnessed four pandemics during our lifetime. The last two were H1N1 and SARS under the Obama administration.
Former Senior Advisor to the President and current Ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel said,
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
Covid gave Biden, the Biden administration, politicians from the city, to county, to state and in Washington, D.C. an unprecedented opportunity to do things that they or no-one before could do – shutdown an entire nation!
It’s the 800-poundgorilla in the pandemic. The debate over forced vaccination with an ever-waning vaccine is cresting right around the time when the debate should be moot for a lot of people. Among the most fraudulent messages of the CDC’s campaign of deceit is to force the vaccine on those with prior infection, who have a greater degree of protection against all versions of the virus than those with any of the vaccines. It’s time to set the record straight once and for all that natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is broader, more durable, and longer-lasting than any of the shots on the market today. Our policies must reflect that reality…
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
Watch this tweet on the reason for lockdowns was to force people to get jabbed:
WOW: “You use lockdowns to get people vaccinated.” ~ Dr. Fauci
Fauci is essentially admitting that lockdowns were used to condition and control the public—putting people in such a heightened state of desperation for freedom as to compel us to take the vaccine. pic.twitter.com/PNIOqngVog
The world is experiencing a deep seated form of vaccine “doublethink” in which many believe their governments are telling the truth about Covid, the vaccines and effects of getting jabbed. They believe that what their governments are telling them is scientifically true.
But science demands truth, while Covid lockdowns and mandates demand obedience.
Hence Covid Doublethink = Obedience.
Our bodies are the best and longest lasting defense against Covid and its variants.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 10:52:392022-04-20 10:52:39Are those who administer any of the Covid vaccines or booster shots serial killers?
Maybe to some people, Joe Biden’s fixation with gender identity feels out of character. But to others, who’ve watched the president undergo his own radical transformation in recent years, it makes more sense. The man who stood in front of America and defended the rights of little children to change their identities has, in many ways, done the same thing himself — splitting from decades-old policy positions to assume a completely different political persona. When a reporter asked about Biden’s transition — was he officially identifying as a progressive? — White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki replied that the president “is not eager to be labeled.” Well, Joe Biden may not know what he is, but at least we know what he’s not: a moderate.
It only took 24 hours for Americans to realize what an unconvincing lie Biden’s promise to “govern from the middle” was. The same Democrat who, two years earlier, believed in common sense limits on abortion, immigration, Senate rules, and the Supreme Court got right to work alienating core constituencies with attacks on life, energy, biology, border law, and taxpayers. The myth of the moderate was blown. “The bait was he was going to govern as bipartisan, but the switch is he’s governed as a socialist,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has complained.
And nowhere has the “evolved” Biden made more enemies than in his crusade for LGBT indoctrination. While the former vice president was always light years ahead of his boss, Barack Obama, on radical changes like same-sex marriage, no one could have dreamed that the father of four would one day call parents’ involvement in education “hateful.” As the Federalist’s Rachel Bovard points out, Joe Biden of 1994 was completely on board with a much stricter law than Florida’s Parental Rights bill 30 years ago. Then-Senator Biden didn’t blink when it came to voting for a policy that didn’t just stop conversations about gender identity — it outright banned LGBT materials from schools.
Then, much like now, Republicans held up graphic books and curriculum, arguing that they couldn’t even quote from them “because to put them on the airwaves in any way, shape, or form,” New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith said, “would be considered obscene.” Fast forward 30 years, and leaders in states all across the country are still having the same debate. There’s just one difference: Democrats are siding with obscenity!
When Psaki was pressed about Biden’s support for those reasonable limits in 1994, she refused to entertain the idea that this president might understand where parents are coming from. “In terms of his views and comments from 25 years ago, I think the most important question now is: why are Florida leaders deciding they need to discriminate against kids who are members of the LGBTQ community?”
To most grassroots Democrats, that was an eye-opener. Sure, Bovard said on “Washington Watch,” the two parties don’t agree on a lot of things, but most moms and dads “want a say in their child’s education.” For some reason, that’s only a controversial view here in Washington, “where it seems like this very, very loud minority within the Democratic Party… not that big of a faction — but a very loud and aggressive [one] has taken over the Democratic Party in Washington and is forcing these transformative social views on a party where I would wager not a lot of their base actually support.” (She’s right, Democrats are hugely opposed to Biden’s position on the Florida law.)
It’s going to be an interesting test for the midterm elections, Bovard went on. “I suspect that a lot of parents in the Democratic Party are scratching their heads saying, ‘You know, we can debate some of these hot topics. But the fact that you want to bar me from knowing what’s going on in my child’s school, that’s probably a bridge too far’… So I do think it is this like nexus of a minority within the party that is just incredibly loud. And they have cowed a lot of the Democratic politicians into submission.”
In the real world, where D.C. Democrats refuse to live, there’s a lot more agreement on social issues than the mainstream media will admit. On things like girls’ sports, sex education, privacy, and parents’ rights, the overall pushback to Biden’s agenda is something that “even moderate Democrats” embrace. They’ve watched the Left — formerly the party of “live and let live” — abandon that motto in favor of “imposing progressive values on everyone,” Bovard warned. “It’s [either] you agree with them, or you’re a racist and a sexist and a bigot — and whatever else they want to throw at you. So the battles lines have been drawn.”
It’s been a remarkable shift, she would agree, not just for Biden — but for the whole Democratic Party. “Even in my lifetime, if you think back to the Clinton administration… saying, ‘Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.’ ‘Rare’ was a big component of that. That’s gone now. That moderation is gone. They have gone completely radical…” If you care about cultural issues — values like life, human dignity, biology, or natural marriage and sex — “it’s a binary choice for you at this point… You’re either voting Republican or voting Democrat. There’s no in-between… And Joe Biden has been a proxy for that question. His career, I think, really reflects how the Democratic Party has evolved on this.”
For a party that claims to like “choice,” they’ve certainly given voters a clear one.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 10:52:382022-04-20 10:52:38VIDEO: Under Biden, the Party’s over for Moderates
Project 21 co-chair Horace Cooper and former Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek join ‘Fox News @ Night’ to discuss the rise in violent crime across the U.S.
Support of Black Lives Matter and calls to defund the police reverberated across America in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, igniting social justice protests and riots at a time when the coronavirus and lockdowns upended society in unprecedented ways. What was left in 2020’s wake was a massive increase in the number of murders, dealing a disproportionate blow to Black Americans.
“Certainly, the protests and riots mid-2020 after the death of George Floyd followed a pattern of spiking violence that we’ve seen following past viral police incidents, such as the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. This pattern has been termed the ‘Ferguson Effect’: police pull back while violent crime spikes precipitously,” Hannah Meyers, director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital.
Murders across the board spiked by nearly 30% in 2020 compared to the year prior, according to FBI data, marking the largest single-year increase in killings since the agency began tracking the crimes. Among Black Americans, the number of deaths spiked by more than 32% compared to 2019.
In 2019, at least 7,484 Black Americans were murdered. That number shot up to at least 9,941 murders in 2020, meaning there was an increase of 2,457 Black Americans murdered over the previous year.
The number of Black murders was also far higher than White murders in 2020. The FBI data shows there 7,043 White people murdered that year, meaning 2,898 more Black people were killed compared to Whites.
Between 2010 and 2019, there was an average of 5,954 White murders, which is roughly 16% lower than the 10-year average of Black murders. During that same time period, an average of 6,927 Black Americans were murdered each year, meaning Black murders shot up by 43% in 2020 compared to the previous 10-year average.
The figures are more staggering considering White Americans make up 76% of the population compared to Black Americans representing only 13%, according to Census data.
Murders in the 2010s first broke the 7,000 murder benchmark in 2015 after the high-profile deaths of Freddie Gray that same year and Michael Brown in 2014, jumping by nearly a thousand in one year. Brown was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer and Gray died after he sustained injuries in the back of a Baltimore police van. Their deaths sparked protests and riots similar to the ones following Floyd’s death.
Prior to Brown’s death, Black murders had fallen the previous four years.
Fox News Digital reviewed murder data from 2014 and 2015 and found a spike of 15% in year over year data. At least 7,000 Black Americans were killed each year thereafter without ever exceeding the 8,000 mark……
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 10:52:372022-04-20 10:52:37BLM’s Defund Police Movement Cause of Massive Increase in Black Americans Murdered
“Many people are not living their dreams because they are living their fears.” – Les Brown
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt
One of the many great things done by President Trump was putting in place a conscience rule whereby Health Care workers could refuse to perform certain medical procedures or work if it conflicted with their sincerely held religious or moral beliefs.
The bill was never actually put in place as democrats and leftists in dozens of blue states and other liberal advocacy groups tied it up from 2019 onwards in Federal Courts.
Had it been implemented as planned, it would have allowed any and all health workers to legally refuse to provide services like abortions, contraception, gender affirming care, or any other procedure they objected to on religious and/or moral grounds.
The Democrats, as they get closer to losing power, and understanding that as many red states are introducing legislation to reduce or eradicate abortions and transgender care, they are telling this illegal regime occupying the White House to ensure that the Trump conscience bill never becomes law.
After all, these lefties love abortions! Especially those up to birth!! Destroying lives for political gain is their game. Just suck those babies out!! Murder them and call it a “woman’s choice” while refusing certain Americans the choice of if to take the poison – whoops – I mean China Virus Shot!
The plans to permanently remove Trumps conscious clause is underway at the Office of Management and Budget. Weird place to me to do this but what ever works I guess for these tyrants.
Progressive advocates see the removal of the clause as a major step in dismantling the Trump administration’s policy on reproductive rights, something every libtard in the nation hated. After all, they know better so don’t argue! If you do they will call you names covering everything they think will harm you, like racist, homophobe, anti LGBTQUI etc. What was that old expression? Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me! We need to go back to that and stop fearing everything the left throws at us.
Planned Parenthood, one of the most reprehensible and disgusting companies out there that deal in blood, murder and mayhem, are delirious that the Biden Administration may get this done! Certainly no wailing and gnashing of teeth there!! Especially as they keep sucking up tax payers money!!
Jacqueline Ayers, the senior vice president of policy, organizing and campaigns for Planned Parenthood stated joyously “as state politicians continue to strip people of their sexual and reproductive rights and freedoms, it’s imperative that the Biden-Harris administration revoke this discriminatory policy and help ensure people can access the healthcare and information they need when they need it.” Healthcare? Since when did callous pre thought out murder of a living human being become healthcare? Just asking…..
Originally U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer, a Hussein Ovomit – I mean Obama appointed federal judge with a very leftist past and career, was the Judge who initially killed the Trump conscious clause. He got his law degree at Harvard… a liberal bastion of lefties, commies and America haters. He and his wife are both very progressive and woke Jews. Enough said and his bias is obvious.
We will continue seeing this administration under Dumbo in Chief, attacking and destroying as fast as they can, Trumps legacy and finest work.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 10:52:362022-04-20 10:52:36Biden to Revoke ‘Conscience’ Rule for Health Workers!
Noted antisemite and sharia-supporter Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) incurred a flood of social media condemnation — and rightfully so — over the weekend for her remarks about a video of passengers singing Christian music on a plane.
In the now-viral video, captioned “Worshipping Jesus 30,000 feet in the air,” passengers are seen singing a popular Christian worship song inside an airliner. The clip was originally posted by Jack Jensz Jr., founder of Kingdom Realm Ministries, who has been assisting Ukrainian refugees in Europe along with his congregation.
The Muslim congresswoman retweeted the clip, adding, “I think my family and I should have a prayer session next time I am on a plane. How do you think it will end?”
“I think you should shut up and stop being a bigot,” responded conservative author Kurt Schlichter.
“Ilhan Omar @IlhanMN attacks a group of Christian volunteers on an @easyJet flight in Europe delivering aid to Ukraine, because they’re singing,” wrote activist and businessman Avi Kaner.
“Why does this person who lives free and liberated because of the compassion of our country not appreciate that we’re a Judeo-Christian society uniquely founded to protect those of all faiths?” wrote talk radio host Joe “Pags” Pagliarulo.
“Why does she constantly denigrate the place that offered her so much?” he asked. “Praying for her.”
“I spent decades flying in the Middle East. We weren’t even allowed to bring Bibles into the countries or worship. This sort of impromptu singing would turn into arrests and imprisonment,” wrote former congressional Republican candidate and Air Force pilot Buzz Patterson. “I’ll celebrate our freedoms here. You do you.”
“I doubt that people would care one bit. It’s the slitting of throats with box cutters and flying jetliners into buildings that we have an issue with. Next question,” wrote conservative commentator Todd Starnes.
“Stop with the Christianphobia, Congresswoman,” wrote conservative author and YouTube personality Mark Dice.
“If someone yelled Allahu Akbar I’d freak out, YOU’d freak out and ANY Muslim would freak out given the fact we still have many radical Islamists in our religion (Hizbollah, ISIS, Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas etc) all would love to hijack a plane for another 9/11 who we kidding..,” wrote former Miss Iraq Sarah Idan.
On May 3, 2021, Omar told MSNBC host Joy Reid that she and her fellow black Democrats were becoming exhausted by people who refused to concede that America was a racist nation. “I think there is a lot of emotional exhaustion that many of us who are black lawmakers and black people in public service are experiencing,” said Omar. “Because every single day you know that there are ways to transform the justice system, the policing system, and you have to have conversation[s] with people who want to turn a blind eye to the injustices that exist within our systems, who continue to insist that this country is not a country that is racist, that our systems don’t have racism embedded in them.”
EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 10:52:352022-04-20 10:52:35Ilhan Omar Blasted for Anti-Christian Bigotry Over Video Comment
“Block the far right”. The slogan, a little wobbly, remains etched in people’s minds while Marine pushes more and more to the left, like a vacuum cleaner picking up crumbs from rebellious French people and everything that remains to be taken, even the dust of Lutte Ouvrière. She is on the left, Marine, Little Red Riding Hood bringing a basket of food to the retired grandmother at 60, to the single mother, to the smicard who cannot fill up, to the small trader whose margins are shrinking, to the exasperated suburban and rural.
Journalists, for the sake of impartiality, ask the various commentators to quote at least one measure from Marine Le Pen’s program which is on the far right. The answer is rarely satisfactory. It would be better to ask how its ideology is populist and what exactly is populism.
Communism has never succeeded in pooling the means of production to obtain a fair share of the wealth created. Wherever it is imposed, communism gives the same result: misery for the people, wealth for the nomenklatura, scorned freedoms. The dictatorship of the proletariat? It is the dictator who arrogates to himself the powers promised to the little people who had put him in place. As a result of all this, the left in our democracies is reduced to a trickle.
Populism is taking over. And it works ! A dozen candidates in the first round? Nothing appetizing for populist popular people. This democracy of elections, governments, laws and management is rotten. We want direct democracy.
Yes, for example, the occupation of the Sorbonne. Graffiti and filth. Well, here we are faced with extreme populism. In the case of Marine, it’s policed. But no less dangerous. The people of the populist government will not be better off than the proletariat of the communist regime. Because the people are not what we would have you believe. It is not a collective and direct democracy is the tyranny of special interests.
Precisely, the Yellow Vests. Leaving aside the disparate demands that have attracted almost generalized sympathy, we will discover the mechanisms of populism at work: the impossibility of concerting and developing common projects, endless and increasingly violent internal conflicts , anarchy, vulnerability to opportunistic actions such as Black blocks, antifa, scum. It’s a miserable every man for himself. The forces released are destructive. Who takes the bet? The strong man. Inflated with the mismanaged energies of the people, he seizes power and exercises it tyrannically.
Marine president, the people will decide by referendum to stop the immigration which has tormented them for decades without any elected government being able to control it. Why entrust “direct democracy” with the task of settling an essential question? Why not act through democratically elected institutions? Because “direct democracy” is not democratic, just as populism is not the government of the people. By dealing with the question of immigration democratically, we allow all streams of society to express themselves, to defend their interests and, in the end, to accept the decision reached.
The referendum is a simplistic answer to a simplified question. And that’s not all. We also have to wonder why Marine Le Pen is 100% confident that her referendum will produce the answer she wants. It is because it intends to dictate its will to the people without fearing the unforeseen events of freedom. Isn’t that what populist elected officials around the world do?
In fact, the referendum can give everything and its opposite. Didn’t those who tell us that demography is destiny imagine that one day we could impose by referendum the veil prohibited by the previous one? Democracy protects minorities and protects us from minorities. When it doesn’t work (for example, wokism), we need more democracy, not less.
The National Front, which has become Rassemblement National, which has simply become Marine, is not a democratic party. It’s a clan. Transmitted turnkey to Marine, it continues to function as a clan and to defend an undemocratic policy. Despite her incompetence and failures, Marine is the one and only presidential candidate. She decides everything. The others, from lieutenants to infantrymen, follow her orders, defend her against all odds, offer her faces and extras. There is no question of challenging the established line. No currents, no boss battles. Since the defeat of 2017, Marine has surrounded himself with a brigade of young men of roughly the same size, rather handsome and virile, like the “leader”, Jordan Bardella. They look awfully similar. It reminds me, in a radically different style but with a similar uniformity, the vendors at Mariage Frères. It is not insignificant.
Simili-nationalism
In the midst of the war against Ukraine, faced with an incredible shock that is hitting the European people, Marine Le Pen and the other pseudo-nationalists shamelessly gargle about the power of an independent France. Without daring to clearly state the breaks they advocate, they advocate half-cuts in our ties with Europe, NATO and the United States. Like a sweater that you undo by pulling on a thread. They mock our allies, glorify the illusory strength of a single, unrelated French voice and hide the alliances they intend to forge, once France is freed from (democratic) shackles. All this, as Ukraine struggles to survive against Russian brutality.
This aggression would not have taken place if Ukraine had been a member of NATO. But the pseudo-nationalists turn reality upside down and make Ukraine guilty of having provoked the attack by wanting to join NATO. Faux-nationalism does not defend the nation, its territory, its values, its freedom, it hides the nation behind compromises with hostile forces. Putin today. Tomorrow, who knows?
Voting instructions
As a foreigner, I depend more than anyone on the goodwill of French citizens. When Jews are urged to vote Zemmour, I feel targeted, even without the right to vote. When someone would like me to believe that the extreme no longer means anything, that there is no longer or never has been a dividing line, I have to answer. Yes, there is a line and some candidates are placed on the other side, where we should not venture.
According to the polls, 85% of those who voted for Zemmour in the first round will go to Marine Le Pen in the second. It was with them that the Z intended to achieve the union of the rights? With Lepénistes temporarily seduced by the newcomer? They wanted the intellectual, but the small mind will also be appropriate? I was urged as a Jew to vote Zemmour. I was called names if I lacked enthusiasm for the wonder boy . All this to choose Marine?
I will never forget Marine Le Pen at the GGMO, questioned about the possible transfer of the French embassy to Jerusalem in the event of her victory. Behind the holes, no eyes. Nothing. An abyssal void. No neurons to catch the question and send it through some circuit. No Jerusalem circuit, no French embassy route, no Israel box, nothing. She ended up standing, as a good student, on the line of the Quai d’Orsay. Later in this show, she fought tooth and nail for the kosher slaughter ban. Animal welfare lit up a face that had shown no sign of life on the issue of the Jewish state’s capital. Then, turning on her carnivorous smile, she reassured the Jews, correcting Jordan Bardella’s untimely announcement of the double penalty: no kosher slaughter, no import of meat slaughtered in this way. Of course we will not prohibit the import!
I come back, once again, to this primordial question which says a lot about the massive transmission of the Zemmour vote to Marine Le Pen. One cannot condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine by taking up the Putinian narrative that justifies it. And Jews, practicing or not at all, cannot fully enjoy their citizenship in a France where kosher meat is prohibited (and then circumcision?). If the practice affects only a minority, the symbolic is aimed entirely at us.
And yet, the warning of the presidents of the CRIF and the Consistory against the extreme right causes, in certain circles, hysteria. However, if there is an authentic dividing line, if Marine le Pen is not a candidate like any other, this exit from the reserve is justified. Signaling the danger of an undemocratic choice is not the same as expressing a preference.
bird names
It’s true, for a long time we stuck with the label “extreme-right” the mouth of the true speakers on the threat of conquering Islam. But the balance of power has changed. One wastes one’s energy redoing battles already won. It’s true, the extreme right label is still stuck on the Rassemblement National, despite its left-wing economic policy. But ultimately, it’s right-wing leftism. The RN changes its acronym but keeps the core of its links with the historic far right, while integrating an Arab-Russian component, that is to say an update of tyranny.
A revealing pre-debate
I followed on LCI Monday evening the debate, rich in teaching, between Oliver Véran and Jordan Bardella. The acting president of the RN accuses the government minister Macron: You suck, you did nothing. It’s worse than incompetence, you’re in cahoots with the Islamists. We will do everything right away. Then, faced with the difficulties or even the impossibility of imposing a measure, for example, the ban on wearing the veil in public, Bardella lowers his voice: we will do it little by little, we will give people the time to comply. They will, as a good citizen. We will take into account the age and the motivation but we will end up removing it, this veil, banner of the Islamists.
We saw the face of France RN appear. Petty. Without scale, without opening, without horizon. Calculations without dimension, without dynamics. Refusing to recognize the benefits derived from exchanges of all kinds, we close the wallet. Finished ! We don’t give anything anymore. Circuits are clogged. The RN proposes extravagant measures, soaked in gratuitous hostility: a foreigner in a regular situation who works in France and pays his contributions would not be entitled to social benefits. Zero benefits! Bardella holds on to it like a dog to his bone. No compromise, no understanding. It’s like that. The French first. The ban on kosher slaughter is in the same spirit.
Bardella slips away on the question of the war against Ukraine: We condemned the invasion without ambiguity but we did not vote for measures that will hurt the French, our first priority. Pushed to his limits on the good relations with Russia advocated by his candidate after the war, Bardella lost the mask of kindness of the RN cuvée 2022. Twice he summoned Véran to answer the solemn question, posed sotto voce: What do you want? you ? Do you want to go to war with Russia?
That’s it. For almost two months, we have been witnessing the cruel destruction that is falling on Ukraine, and the interim president of the RN accuses our government of waging war on Russia.
In summary, this proto-debate reveals the weakness of a contemptuous approach, knitted with degagist ruminations and undermined by the absence of a sense of reality. Arrogance, in my opinion, is on the side of the RN. And this could cause for Marine Le Pen, Wednesday evening, a crash worse than that of 2017.
Then, once the anti-democratic force has been removed, everything will remain to be done.
