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Hamas-linked CAIR’s Zahra Billoo: ‘Know your enemies,’ oppose even ‘the polite Zionist’

December 5, 2021/in Courts & Law, DrRichSwier.com, Featured, Politics, Religion /by DrRichSwier.com

By Robert Spencer

Elder of Ziyon notes: “Billoo declares that practically every Jewish organization in America is an enemy of Muslims. Not only that, but any organization that supports a two state solution is an enemy of Muslims. She doesn’t call them out explicitly, but that includes J-Street, that includes Peace Now, that includes Breaking the Silence. And she explicitly says that Hillels, the ADL, the Jewish Federations and even essentially all synagogues in America are the enemies of Muslims.”

Will this speech herald a crack in the coalition between Leftist Jews and Islamic supremacist groups? Stay tuned.

Original video:

MEMRI excerpt:

“CAIR Official Zahra Billoo: The Two-State Solution Is ‘Laughable’; Any Organization That Promotes It Is An Enemy; ADL, Jewish Federation, ‘Zionist Synagogues,’ Hillel Chapters Will Throw You Under The Bus,” MEMRI, November 25, 2021:

American activist Zahra Billoo, the executive-director of the San Francisco Bay Area branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-SFBA), said in a panel at the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) Annual Conference, which took place in Chicago on November 27, 2021, that the two-state solution is “laughable” and that any organization that supports it is an enemy. She told the audience that the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Federation, “Zionist Synagogues,” and Hillel chapters on “our campuses” are not their friends. Billoo said that they will throw the Muslims under the bus. She further urged the audience to donate monthly to AMP, because if they pay U.S. taxes, this means that they financially support “apartheid” every month.

The panel was streamed live on the American Muslims for Palestine YouTube channel, and CAIR executive-director Nihad Awad also participated in the panel (see MEMRI TV clips 9208, 3536, 3701, and 5279). Attendees included Linda Sarsour (see MEMRI TV clips nos. 6935, 6808, and 6111), Lamis Deek (see MEMRI TV clip no. 3430), and Taher Herzallah (see MEMRITV clip no. 7071).

Zahra Billoo: “We need to pay attention to the Anti-Defamation League. We need to pay attention to the Jewish Federation. We need to pay attention to the Zionist synagogues. We need to pay attention to the Hillel chapters on our campuses, because just because they are your friends today, doesn’t mean that they have your back when it comes to human rights.

“So oppose the vehement fascist, but oppose the polite Zionist too. They are not your friends. They will not be there for you when you need them. They will take your friendship and throw your Palestinian brothers and sisters under the bus. Oh! You get along because you are all in Girl Scouts together? Talk to them about what is happening in Palestine, and see how that conversation goes.

“And so, when we think about Islamophobia and Zionism, let’s be clear about the connections. There is no difference between domestic policy and foreign policy when it comes to our human rights. There is no difference between domestic policy and foreign policy when it comes to those who seek to target us.

[…]

“By the way, you should be a monthly donor to American Muslims for Palestine. Build it into your budget and forget about it. Make it your monthly contribution, because you are contributing to the apartheid monthly. It is a part of your budget. You are paying your taxes, so you should be giving money to AMP monthly.

[…]

“The list goes on. Know who is on your side. Build community with them, because the next thing I am going to tell you is to know your enemies. And I am not going to sugarcoat that, they are your enemies. There are organizations and infrastructures out there who are working to harm you. Make no mistake of it. They would sell you down the line if they could, and they very often do behind your back. I mean the Zionist organizations, I mean the foreign policy organizations who say they are not Zionists but want a two-state solution. I am not a Palestinian myself, but it is my understanding that that is laughable. So know your enemies.”

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VIDEO: Project Veritas RESPONDS to New Twitter Policy

December 5, 2021/in Courts & Law, DrRichSwier.com, Featured, Politics /by DrRichSwier.com

By Project Veritas

CLICK HERE TO TWEET OUT THIS VIDEO

Twitter updated their policies this week which no longer allows the sharing of media without people’s prior consent. This from Twitter safety: “Beginning today, we will not allow the sharing of private media such as video of individuals without their consent.” Twitter also says it will, “try to assess the context in which the content is shared,” and “if a particular image and the accompanying tweet adds value to public discourse or is shared in the public interest,” it will be allowed.

The exception provided is subjective, political, and one that will inevitably be applied unequally. With this policy, Twitter is essentially banning journalism. It’s also a direct attack on organizations like us, Project Veritas. Now, all of this comes on the heels of a Department of Justice filing with a federal judge last week arguing we’re not journalists. Why? Well, the government argued that our reporting, “consists almost entirely of publicizing, non-consensual, surreptitious recordings.”

There’s that consensual word again, just like the new Twitter policy, but here’s the thing: good journalism requires publishing what someone else doesn’t want published, making public disclosures others want kept secret for the wrong reasons. Anything else you do is just public relations, and public relations is not journalism.

In fact, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is currently asking the government questions about why the FBI raided the homes of reporters at Project Veritas, and in a court proceeding this week, a lawyer for Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Katie Townsend, told the magistrate judge, citing Chief Justice Berger from another case, “It’s difficult for the public to accept what it’s prohibited from observing.” Thank you, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Thank you, lawyer Katie Townsend for defending principles, journalism and investigative reporting.

Thanks to the ACLU for coming to our defense in recent weeks. I’m getting ready to release a new book, American Muckraker, next month. It’s an eye-opening glimpse into undercover reporting as seen by the muckrakers who defend press freedoms and a brave new world of video journalism. American history is replete with award-winning journalists who have used undercover reporting to seek truth, uncover corruption, and bring their stories to the world. Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, William Gaines of the Chicago Sun-Times, Pam Zekman, just to name a few. There’s a whole chapter called Privacy in my forthcoming book which outlines a lot of this.

Sissela Bok, an expert in ethical journalism, wrote, “It would be wrong to conclude that journalists ought to write only about persons who have given their consent. Those who use secrecy to cover up for abuse is often resort to spurious claims that privacy, confidentiality or national security it’s important for reporters not to take those claims at face value.” Some experts have argued that the ability to record something, as long as you’re next to the person you’re talking to, is closely connected to the ability to write and speak.

In fact, a Michigan appeals court argued in a 1982 case, “A recording made by a participant is nothing more than a more accurate record of what was said. Legal scholar Laurence Tribe has argued that the public’s right to know “means nothing more than a mirror of such a right to speak, a listener’s right that government not interfere with a willing speakers liberty.” If you think about it, a recording device is just a sophisticated piece of note taking equipment. One of the lawsuits we’ve won before a federal jury trial — and by the way, you don’t know that because it’s never reported in the media and it’s certainly not on our Wikipedia page — a federal judge made the case for covert recording.

In a rare Rule 50 Directed Verdict, Judge Reidinger, a federal judge, pointed out to the people suing us and their attorney, Dixie Wells, that there was no distinction between a recording and, say, the taking of notes. Here’s a transcript, again, in my forthcoming book, “James O’Keefe says we go out there, we interview people, we find out what the facts are and report the facts that we learn.” The lawyer’s response, “Your honor, you’ve called it an interview, and I may have slipped and called it that as well. This was taped at a bar in different places, where the person did not know they were being interviewed.” The judge’s response to that lawyer, “But he knew he was being asked questions.”

You see, without a recording device, the facts sometimes get distorted. In the 1906 magazine article titled, “Is the Jungle True?” Upton Sinclair, you all know who he is, the most famous muckraker of all time, conceded that he had presented a selected version of the truth, having reserved the right to “dramatize and interpret” what he reported. But with video, the speaker’s cadence, inflection, and tonality, as well as other important context captured in a recording, limit people to, “interpret.”

For Twitter to ban surreptitious audio and video recordings entirely, and for the government to consider that not journalism, would only remove information from the public sphere that offers a more accurate depiction of what actually occurred. Or, as another State Supreme Court has held, “Society would not consider reasonable an expectation of privacy which would result in a more inaccurate version of the events in question.”

Another expert on journalism we cite currently teaches at Stanford University, Theodore Glasser, who literally wrote the book, Ethical Journalism, and he vigorously defended the use of concealed recordings, which comes into conflict with what Twitter’s policy now says, which if you’re broadcasting videos of individuals without their consent they should be prohibited. As Glasser puts it, “The use of a concealed tape recorder, at least when one party is present.” That means when you’re with the person you’re recording, “It’s not nearly the moral quandary its opponents would have us believe; it is not an invasion of privacy, it is not an active deception, it is not a form of eavesdropping, and it does not constitute entrapment.”

So, what then is the problem with photographing and recording people that you’re with? The newest attack on this type of journalism is that it harms people. The Twitter statement says as much. It says it could be, “threatening to broadcast images without people’s consent.” We saw that with our story in California, involving a teacher who said into a hidden camera at a coffee shop, he wanted to “scare the fuck” out of kids. By the way, that’s a direct quote.

As a result of our reporting, and the parental outrage that subsequently followed, that teacher, Gabriel Gipe, was ultimately removed from the school. Parents made informed decisions in their communities and the correct outcome occurred. It wasn’t an outcome that we advocated for. We quoted the man, and people in this society have to make informed decisions about the information, but corporate media was not willing to identify his name in subsequent media coverage in order to protect him. This, from the Sacramento Bee, “The Sacramento Bee is not identifying the teacher because he has received threats. And it is unclear whether he consented to be recorded by Project Veritas.”

There’s that word again. “Consent.” We’ve seen it with the US government. We’ve seen it with Twitter’s policy, and this was after he said he wanted to scare children. You can see the irony in that. Now, reporting is becoming about safety of the people committing malfeasance, but in gathering truthful information, in the course of his or her duties, the journalist will affect certain individuals in a negative way.

In pursuing the right to know, this is almost inevitable. As former Washington Post editor, Leonard Downie, writes in a book called The New Muckrakers, “The investigative reporter must face the fact that his stories will hurt people.” Isn’t it interesting that all the sources I cite are from decades ago? Maybe real journalism is falling out of fashion.

In fact, 20 years ago in a seminal Supreme Court case, Bartnicki v. Vopper, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the First Amendment provides protection even to speech that disclose the contents of an illegally intercepted communication, “Exposure of self to others in varying degrees is a concomitant of life in a civilized community. The risk of this exposure is an essential incident of life in a society which places a primary value on freedom of speech and the press.” Does Twitter think they’re now above the United States Supreme Court because what must never be forgotten is that in a free society, a free Republic like ours, protecting the people’s right to know is necessary if citizens are to make informed decisions.

Whether it’s Upton Sinclair using his pencil or a Project Veritas journalist using a button camera, we honor a tradition as old as the Republic itself with concepts that go back to Cicero. Critics of surreptitious recordings seem more troubled by the medium than with the findings. Video can be unflattering, but then again, the truth can be unflattering. So do not be fooled by a narrative about privacy, consent, and safety. These are not legitimate arguments as legendary 60 Minutes producer, Don Hewitt, said decades ago, “People committing malfeasance don’t have any right to privacy. What are we saying, that Upton Sinclair shouldn’t have smuggled his pencil in?”

Troubled Waters

December 5, 2021/in Featured, National Security, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Ralph l. Defalco III

When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Manila, Philippines during a 2018 state visit, he assured all that the two nations had entered a new era of diplomacy that promised to turn the long-disputed areas of the South China Sea into a “sea of peace.” Xi had previously issued an official communique that told the tale of how famed Chinese mariner Zheng He, with the massive Treasure Fleet of the 15th Century Ming Dynasty, had embarked on seven great voyages of “peace and friendship.” On one such voyage, claimed Xi, the Chinese explorer Zheng, and his fleet sailed into Manila Bay.

It was a fanciful tale on two counts: Zheng never sailed into Manila Bay and Xi’s regime in Beijing has brought no peace to the South China Sea (SCS).

Behind Beijing’s once-beguiling diplomacy is the now unconcealed Chinese design to encompass nearly the whole of the SCS as territorial waters of China. China claims sovereignty over virtually all the islands of the SCS and the adjacent territorial waters, even though much of this area is in the demarcated Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ) inside the 200 nautical mile limit of the coastlines of Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Taiwan.

The Nine-Dash Lines

The significance and consequences of these Chinese claims cannot be overstated. China’s intention is to make more than 80-85 percent of that region part of its own EEZ at the expense of other nations and the international community. China wants to claim sovereign territorial rights to these waters and, thereby, the justification to control the passage of the world’s ships—both merchant and military—in what have always been international waters. Some $5.3 trillion in global trade and 30 percent of global oil exports ship through these same waters annually. In addition, these claims would give China exclusive rights, according to a diplomatic note Beijing penned to the international Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, “to the relevant waters and seabed and subsoils thereof,” and the vast fisheries, minerals, and fossil fuels in these waters—which the US Energy Information Agency estimates hold 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

At the center of China’s unprecedented claim is a crude map of the ‘nine dash lines’ that encompass nearly all of the islands in the SCS. The map was created after World War II by the Kuomintang government of the Republic of China and quickly adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to represent the Chinese nation’s historic legacy of territories from the Ming and Qing dynasties and bolster the Party’s irredentist claims. Unlike its geopolitical rivals—with foreign policies and plans that can turn on the result of an election—China’s strategy for this region is rooted in Party orthodoxies and mapped out over decades. Beijing is positioned here to play the “long game” to outlast its rivals, exhaust any opponents, and present a fait accompli to the international community of ownership by occupation in the SCS. That strategy is bolstered by a cunning campaign of propaganda that stirs Chinese pride and patriotism and bolsters the standing of the Xi regime.

Beijing’s 2009 announcement of territorial claims in the SCS put it on a collision course with the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia—all nations that officially protested the use of the line to establish PRC territories in the SCS. Since 2016, Beijing has taken increasingly bellicose actions in the region—actions that have moved from strident diplomatic demands, through a phase of low intensity coercion to brazen displays of military muscle. In so doing, China is acting outside the norms of international behavior and ignoring the rule of law. In response, other nations are left with very few options to dissuade, to deter, or to deny China’s extraterritorial ambitions in the SCS—and all are fraught with risk.

Little room is now left for SCS nations and the international community to rely on diplomacy and suasion to pull China back from its unlawful island occupations or steer Beijing away from a course that risks regional armed conflict and threat of a wider war. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) would seem well positioned to help resolve the dispute. China, however, is not an ASEAN member state, so the dispute is not an intra-ASEAN issue. Moreover, any action taken by the United Nations inimical to China’s interest would immediately draw Beijing’s veto from its seat on the Security Council.

Diplomacy and the Law of the Sea

Beijing regards disputes in the SCS as matters for bilateral negotiations. Bilateralism gives Beijing greater control over the outcomes of its diplomacy and the ability to conduct negotiations privately. China has little or nothing to gain from multi-lateral initiatives and so refuses to be a party to international efforts to find a diplomatic solution. The most meaningful attempt at international diplomacy was made in 2013 when the Philippines sought formal arbitration to resolve its dispute with China over possession of territory in the Spratly Islands. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague ruled in 2016 there was “no legal basis for China to claim historic rights,” to exclusive control of the waters and resources inside the dash lines. The tribunal also found China had violated Philippine sovereignty and caused “severe harms” to the environment.

The nations aggrieved by China’s claims welcomed and accepted the unequivocal and unprecedented ruling. China purposefully declared the ruling “null and void.” Paramount Leader Xi bluntly rejected the ruling outright and stated flatly “China’s territorial sovereignty and marine rights in the South China Sea will not be affected by the so-called Philippines South China Sea ruling in any way.”

Xi was as good as his word. The Xi regime is using China’s vast resources and all the levers of the nation’s power—diplomatic, informational, military, economic—to intimidate, overmatch, and coerce nations bordering the region to gain and keep control of the islands and waters of the SCS.

Beijing has invested heavily in its debunked nine dash narrative as a part of China’s administrative territory. These claims play to the Party’s nationalist overtures and are ingrained in a studied campaign of propaganda to build national unity and a broad view of the Party as guardian of the nation’s sovereignty. The nine dash line now appears on passports and maps; in schoolroom texts, books, movies, television programs, and on-line games; on leaflets; and even on t-shirts. The movie Abominable—co-produced by US and Chinese animation studios in 2019—provoked censorship in Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines by including a glimpse of the nine dash line map. It’s a clever and well-orchestrated information campaign and a telling demonstration of China’s ability to pull one of the levers of soft power. Then, in 2020, China unilaterally announced it had established two new administrative districts in the Spratly Islands and the Paracel Islands, both of which are claimed by Vietnam.

In the face of failed diplomacy and the Xi regime’s resolute defiance of the results of international arbitration, some SCS nations seek to deter China from using force to establish more than just titular administrative control of the region. None of these nations, however, seem willing or even able to act in concert for mutual defense. The best that can be said of any effort at building a military deterrent is that it may be sufficient to make it costly for China to resort to the overt use of force in the territorial waters of a rival claimant.

Vietnam, for example, now has military capabilities that arguably give that nation a credible military deterrent. The Vietnam People’s Army (VPA) procured Russian-built arms that include six modern Kilo-class diesel submarines, frigates, and corvettes. In addition, the VPA has added a network of anti-area missiles that include the Russian Bastion shore based anti-ship cruise missile system and modernized its air forces with long range strike aircraft. Vietnam has also improved its island outposts in the Spratlys, adding guided rocket artillery launchers on several installations—weapons capable of striking Chinese land-based targets in the region.

Given continued Chinese provocations in the SCS, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines all plan to upgrade and modernize their armed forces but are hamstrung by both limited budgets and the dead weight of old and obsolete equipment. The Philippines, for example, carry in inventory ships that are four decades old and even some that were commissioned during World War II. Manila has been more successful in rebuilding its coast guard and—with Japanese funding and shipbuilding—will take possession of the first two of ten, armed, 300-foot, multi-role response vessels in 2022.

But there is no naval arms race underway in the SCS. The reality is that SCS nations with claims in the region would be hard-pressed to mount any effective response to Chinese maritime intervention and have no means of projecting power, of sustaining offensive operations, or even of maintaining a Fabian defense in their own waters. China’s military capabilities are overwhelming already and still growing. With a fleet of 300 surface ships and submarines, the Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is the largest in Asia; the flotilla of the Chinese Southern Theater Navy is the dominant force in the SCS.

Projecting Power

But Beijing’s military strategy is not just to achieve regional maritime dominance. The PRC aims to amass power projection capabilities from forward operating bases on islands throughout the SCS. During the last decade, China has been engaged in a sustained effort to build bases on what once were little more than small island strips of sand, shallow reefs, and rocks. Some 3,200 acres of new land for bases has been created by massive dredging operations in the disputed Spratly Islands and hundreds more acres have been created in the Paracel Islands. These bases are now the site of port facilities and airfields to support maritime logistics, sea patrols and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. China has also fortified these island outposts with bunkers, radar installations, upgraded sensors and anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles. In 2019, China conducted an anti-ship ballistic missile test near the Spratly Islands to showcase an enhanced naval capability and demonstrate the Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) ability to counter any military interventions.

Beijing has yet to permanently deploy forces of the PLAN, or the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) to these military outposts. But deployment of PLA forces to these forward bases would give China the capability to handily defeat the weaker military forces of other SCS nations and project power deep into the surrounding ocean areas. This war-time deployment would likely be Beijing’s military response to the worst-case scenario of concerted action by SCS nations, or Western or US intervention to deny China control of the region.

If the Xi regime succeeds and realizes its extraterritorial claims, without resort to force of arms in a broad conflict, China will present Asian nations, the West, and the United States with a stunning setback.

Instead, China will, in the near term, continue to rely on coercion and intimidation tactics—radioed threats, shadowing, ramming ships, using water cannons, tracking with fire control radar—short of the overt use of armed force. These so-called “gray-zone” tactics engage the China Coast Guard (CCG) in supposed maritime law enforcement operations and the Peoples Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM) in harassing commercial fishing fleets, small merchant vessels, and exploration and survey ships of other nations operating in the SCS. The CCG is the largest such force in the world with more than 300 vessels. More than 70 percent of all major “incidents at sea” in the SCS involve CCG and PAFMM vessels. Earlier this year China’s new Coast Guard Law transferred control of the CCG from civilian to military hands and, ominously, authorized the CCG to use lethal force on foreign vessels that fail to heed orders to leave waters claimed by China. There are teeth in that threat to use force, too. All CCG ships are well-armed and in 2017, the CCG added a 12,000-ton cutter to its forces in the region. It’s the most heavily armed coast guard ship in the world and a vessel larger than a US Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser. Beyond the CCG, the Southern Theater Navy is just over the horizon, and, once committed, land-based attack aircraft can sortie from fortified Chinese-held island bases throughout the SCS in support of any Chinese maritime force.

More worrisome is China’s engagement in slow intensity conflict—forceful actions to press up to and even past the maritime frontiers of nations in the region—and create a de facto permanent presence with its large fishing fleet and with PAFMM and resource survey ships. The Xi regime seems intent to do so even in the face of the lawfully adjudicated claims of neighboring nations, in contravention of international agreements and law, and at the risk of the opprobrium of the world community. China has also assumed an increasingly bellicose posture in the region and, lately, a willingness to engage in saber-rattling and massive show-of-force demonstrations. This year China conducted some 20 amphibious landing exercises in the SCS and in the Taiwan Strait, launched more than 100 aircraft over a three-day period to test Taiwan’s air defense systems, and kicked off a series of robust naval exercises immediately before combined drills for the United States, India, Japan, and Australia took place off the coast of Guam.

Taiwan presents the only robust military force in the region, but Taipei’s Operational Defense Concept is a defensive strategy oriented to preserving assets after a first strike, fighting a decisive battle in its immediate littoral region, and destroying invading forces during landing. Taiwan does not possess an expeditionary capability and is unlikely to commit forces to the undefended Taiping Island in the SCS. Taiwan’s most credible deterrence lies in its unique relationship with the United States. Washington has never explicitly committed to a defense of Taiwan and has lately sent mixed signals of its future intent. But military to military contacts between the two nations are extensive and the US has enhanced Taiwan’s security with substantial and regular arms sales. More critically, defense of Taiwan is regarded as a litmus test for US resolve in its relations with friendly nations and partners in Asia.

Deterrence Lost

The grim reality is SCS countries are simply overmatched. Beijing’s constant campaign of coercion, harassment, the use of gray zone tactics, slow intensity conflict, and the threat of massive use of force are all intended to sap the strength and weaken the resolve of other claimants in the SCS. The nations of Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, and Vietnam have few options to effectively counter future Chinese military operations. Diplomacy and dissuasion have failed to produce results. Deterring Chinese aggression in the SCS is possible but can only be achieved by nations with credible military capabilities and the readiness to engage in armed conflict. This level of deterrence is only possible with the support of the international community and leadership from the West, and especially from the United States. To deny Beijing control over the islands and waters of the SCS risks not only regional conflict, but the possibility of a wider Pacific war.

Beijing’s revanchist foreign policy at play in the South China Sea is rooted in a strategy that constantly seeks to legitimize the Communist Party as the guardian of the state. The nation’s territorial sovereignty is imperative to a government that demands absolute authority to protect the homeland from fractious internal unrest, from the predations of bordering countries, and from foreigners, like those who occupied China during its Century of Humiliation. China’s foreign policy in the South China Sea also demonstrates the Party’s determination to claim historic rights to territories even as reputable historians debunk those claims. Simply put, Beijing cannot back down from its claims in the SCS; there is no way to do so that permits the Xi regime to save face.

If the Xi regime succeeds and realizes its extraterritorial claims, without resorting to force of arms in a broad conflict, China will present Asian nations, the West, and the United States with a stunning setback. Beijing will also have succeeded in legitimizing the Xi regime and the territorial goals of the Communist Party, undercutting US influence in the region, and reaping the rewards of unchecked aggression.

*****

This article was published on December 3, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from Law and Liberty.

The Long Cycles in Markets and Political Order

December 5, 2021/in Economy, Education, Featured, Liberty, National Security, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Joakim Book

The best class I took in all my economics education was called “Cyclical Fluctuation,” taught by Dr. Susan Schroeder at USYD. It was a broad-scope class in the many heterodox ideas that economists have about what causes business cycles, and what makes the output, employment, and financial prosperity fluctuate so wildly around otherwise steady long-term trends.

One kind of explanation goes by the name of “long waves” – perhaps the most famous of which is Kondratieff waves, developed by the Soviet and Marxian economist Nikolai Kondratieff. Many other theories exist that try to account for fluctuations through long-dated cycles, identifying historical patterns over 50 or 100 years. I see these stories quite a lot: the historian Niall Ferguson had plenty of long-arc thinking in his latest book; and the generational theory by William Strauss and Neil Howe (The Fourth Turning), is all the rage in the crypto world.

Usually, cycle theories or long-wave patterns suffer from problems of overfitting past data – or pushing past events through vague-enough definitions such that almost anything goes. They lack nuance or don’t offer enough evidence. Personally, I always found it absurd that a world so unlike the past from which it came could be governed by motions in that (pre-industrial) past. If “it’s different this time,” there’s no point bothering with elaborate cycles; quite a lot of things are different, but not all. If indeed enough trends echo the past, there might be a future trajectory that an astute eye can detect.

Ray Dalio, the prolific writer and founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest and renowned hedge funds, has if not changed my mind, then at least massively shifted the needle on how I see cycle theories. Released today, his latest 500-page tome, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail, aims very high: analyzing five centuries of markets, currency collapses, and changes to the world financial and political order.

Dalio avoids most of the traps associated with cycle theories. Changing World Order is jam-packed with charts, showing long-run changes in major countries, often reaching back centuries. Population, real GDP per capita, asset returns (of various portfolios and the main asset classes), mortality from war or famine are all included. At the core of Dalio’s view on markets and politics lies a conviction that underlies all cycle theories (“Knowing how things have changed in the past leads me to consider the possibility that something similar might happen in the future”). But he also improves on that by observing that over the longer horizon, cycles and the rise-and-fall of empires notwithstanding, cycles operate on a trend that for reasons yet unclear continues upward – through pandemics, world wars, inflations, and natural disasters

He shows us the result of the indices of competitiveness, technology, or military strength that he uses to analyze the world and inform his investment decisions. He manages to do what many successful investors writing books about their investment lens fail at delivering something new and interesting without giving away precisely the secret sauce that fueled his success.

What I like the most is the metrics of the rise and fall of reserve currencies. The Dutch guilder, Europe’s dominant reserve currency after a century or more of Dutch economic outperformance, was overtaken by the pound sterling when Britain’s industrialization and military strength later surpassed the Dutch. In turn, it subsequently lost to the US dollar during the first half of the 20th century. A dominant currency observes Dalio, lags heavily the economic punch its economy packed in the past.

We’ve only had three or four of these global monetary transitions, so it’s hard to assess Dalio’s claim that this is a universal pattern. And if so, what does it say about the renminbi? About currencies like bitcoin, which are unconnected to a nation-state?

To analyze markets, Dalio combines the money-credit focus of Ludwig von Mises with the macro-debt focus of Hyman Minsky: “Unless you understand how money and credit work, you can’t understand why the world changed as it did.” His turning points for the debt cycles are also distinctly Minskyiate: when income isn’t enough to service debt; when people’s excesses and decadence vastly exceed their ability to create tangible value; when fear and greed are rife, jealousy and domestic conflict imminent. To this, Changing World Order expertly adds the big-picture history of people like Ferguson, Deirdre McCloskey, and Jared Diamond. Halfway through, Dalio reveals his main role model: the British historian Paul Kennedy, whose door-stop-sized The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is on the curriculum of every undergraduate history program.

We get lots of schematic cycles, so many that I quickly lost track. The money-capital markets-debt cycle is the one he’s most known for, to which he adds cycles about internal order (values, institutions, and conflicts within a country) and cycles for external order (military, trade wars, and technology differences between countries). These are all mapped out in a fairly detailed way, with a half-dozen stages and their relative components explicitly marked.

“Most investors,” Dalio writes, don’t look for history, “because they think history and old investment returns are largely irrelevant to them.” He soothes my initial skepticism of cycle theories with plenty of graphs showing smoothed lines that move in discernable wave-like fashion.

While his long cycles are stuck in a limited history, he offers an outstanding amount of real-world evidence for this thesis: asset returns, currency debasement against gold or consumer baskets, and the expansion of debt and financial markets.

Even if his main pattern of political and economic power is broadly correct – that innovativeness, competitiveness, and education leads to prosperity, which eventually lead to excesses and decadence, decline, and conflict – it’s not clear to me what to do with that. Spain in the 1500s, fueled by Potosí silver, withered away over a hundred years; the Roman decline similarly took centuries; the Russian tzar reign ended abruptly. How do we know which historical echo signals our immediate future?

The reader must overlook the occasional statements where Dalio slips into the mistakes of other cycle theories. Like most of them, Dalio is forced into making vague, trivial, or often meaningless claims – like “most cycles in history happen for basically the same reasons.” “All markets,” he adds “are primarily driven by just four determinants: growth, inflation, risk premiums, and discount rate.”

Or this, about the internal struggles and disorder cycle:

While the length of time spent in each of these stages can vary a lot, the evolution through them generally takes 100 years, give or take a lot and with big undulations within the cycle.

With a main pattern of a century, with “a lot” of fluctuation around the start and end-points, on top of “big undulation within the cycle,” almost anything seems to fit the pattern. And “after self-interest and self-survival, the quest for wealth and power is what most motivates individuals, families, companies, states, and countries.”

At a high enough level of abstraction, these statements are plausible – even undeniable – but it is unclear what they give us. Yes, they’re true; but also very diluted in meaning. History may rhyme, but the ways in which poets can play on words is almost infinite – so what does identifying a vague, broad, or imprecise pattern really give us?

I wasn’t overly fond of the parts dedicated to China – over one-fifth of the book. It makes sense as a case study of a rising power, and is very relevant considering the many brooding U.S-China conflicts over technology, trade, and geopolitics. It pays homage to Dalio’s belief that China is rising in the many indicator curves against the stagnating (and even declining) indicators he reports for Europe and the US. But those chapters are long, detailed, and hard to follow for those without intricate knowledge of China’s past.

To nitpick, I don’t like how he tweaks established terms for no apparent reason: “store of value” became “Storehold of wealth”; “exorbitant privilege” was replaced by “extraordinary privileged.” One unconventional phrasing is useful: describing bonds and other liabilities as debt assets and debt liabilities to emphasize their role in balance sheets for different economic agents.

It is a very rare country in a very rare century that didn’t have at least one boom/harmonious/prosperous period, so we should expect both. Yet, most people throughout history have thought (and still think today) that the future will look like a slightly modified version of the recent past. […] Because the swings between great and terrible times tend to be far apart, the future we encounter is likely to be very different from what most people expect. […]

No system of government, no economic system, no currency, and no empire lasts forever, yet almost everyone is surprised and ruined when they fail.

The big curveballs are the turning points of history – modern tools of finance, the machine age, inclusive societies, or the scientific method. We can’t anticipate them, yet per Dalio’s own cycle theory we should still try to identify them, understand them, and adapt. That conflict runs through Dalio’s impressive book but doesn’t detract much from a thesis that I found much more persuasive than I had anticipated: some historical patterns are real, wave-like, and operate over long horizons. With skill, data, and humility, we can uncover the likely prospects for our own times.

*****

This article was published on November 30, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.

Dispelling 3 Common Myths About Abortion

December 4, 2021/in Featured, Life Advocacy, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Melanie Israel

With the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case before the Supreme Court and the ongoing litigation over the Texas heartbeat law, the issue of abortion looms large in our national discourse.

Too often, pro-abortion actors make claims that are simply not true, and those claims are repeated without challenge in the media. Therefore, it’s vital that the American public be made aware of facts that challenge the pro-abortion narrative.

Here’s the truth you need to know about three core claims of abortion activists:

Myth 1: Abortions Are Safer Than Childbirth

Abortion activists claim that abortions are safer than childbirth. But that’s the exact inverse of reality—and for a number of reasons.

First, this framing of the debate denies the humanity of the unborn child from the outset. Because every fetus is a human possessing fundamental dignity, their health and safety must also be taken into consideration.

No procedure that destroys life can be considered safe. By definition, abortion is always fatal for at least one party involved; namely, the unborn child. Therefore, by definition, abortion is never “safe.”

Second, besides the fact that abortions necessarily involve the killing of unborn children, abortion is not necessarily the safer option for women.

After getting an abortion, women have approximately an 80% higher risk of experiencing mental health issues, including suicidal tendencies and substance abuse.

According to Dr. Ingrid Skop, an obstetrician-gynecologist, potentially fatal complications from abortions include “vaginal or intra-abdominal hemorrhage … infection … incomplete removal of the remains of the aborted baby, damage to the cervix, uterus, or other pelvic or abdominal organs … anesthetic reactions or overdoses, amniotic fluid, septic, or thrombotic embolisms, cardiac, or cardiovascular events.”

Such complications hardly render abortion safe for women.

Third, the assumption that abortion is the safer option for women ultimately rests on incomplete data.

The federal government as well as 22 states do not require abortion providers to report critical data on postabortion complications. This inevitably skews abortion activists’ numbers, especially when a state like California, one of the states that doesn’t require abortion providers to report data, is estimated to have over a quarter of all abortions performed in the U.S.

Likewise, according to data collected in 2019, there were no states that required doctors, coroners, or emergency rooms that don’t provide abortions to report abortion-related deaths. So, if a woman goes to an emergency room with abortion-related complications and dies, the hospital is not required to report it as an abortion-related death. That skews abortion-related mortality rates.

Therefore, abortions aren’t safe for unborn children, and they aren’t always safe for women.

Myth 2: Abortion Is a Woman’s Only Practical Option

Studies show that most abortions are chosen for reasons related to factors such as finances or personal relationships.

According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, 74% of abortions are chosen out of a fear that the baby would interfere with education or work, or that the baby would make it difficult to take care of dependents.

An overlapping 73% claimed they could not afford a child, and nearly 50% had relationship issues or did not want to become a single mother.

Even among third-trimester abortions, as reported by Dr. James Studnicki, “most late-term abortions are elective, done on healthy women with healthy fetuses.”

It’s clear from these numbers that medical emergencies do not motivate most abortions.

In contrast, the pro-life movement stresses providing the resources women need to give birth and raise their children.

Pregnancy resource centers help pregnant women and their families navigate challenges such as the pregnancy itself, financial management and needs, threats to job security, unsupportive partners and family members, and more.

According to one study, in 2019, pregnancy centers performed ultrasounds for 486,213 mothers-to-be free of charge and provided mothers and families with material resources such as diapers, baby clothes, and the like.

In total, they provided $266,764,916 worth of services, and 9 out of 10 people working at pregnancy resource centers do so on a voluntary basis.

Despite activists’ claims, abortion doesn’t solve any of those problems. By reducing “care” for women to the elimination of the unborn life, the mother is not helped.

Myth 3: Most Americans Support Abortion

The claim that most Americans support abortion is misleading when checked against data from a 2021 Knights of Columbus/Marist Poll.

Despite a slight majority (53%) of Americans identifying as “pro-choice,” 55% of pro-choice individuals are in favor of abortion restrictions.

According to the poll, 76% Americans support significant restrictions on abortion, with 70% of Americans in favor of restricting abortions after the first trimester—which would bring U.S. law in alignment with the rest of the world, including 47 out of 50 European countries.

Likewise, when asked if they support abortion based on a diagnosis of Down syndrome, 70% of participants opposed such an abortion. Additionally, 58% opposed taxpayer money going to abortions.

Ultimately, these numbers reflect a nation that wants to do more to protect unborn children and is not remotely aligned with the abortion lobby’s position of abortion on-demand, for any reason, through all nine months of pregnancy.

Sadly, that hasn’t kept Democrats from calling for the elimination of the Hyde Amendment, which would clear the way for taxpayer-funded abortions.

Conclusion

The facts indicate that abortions are not safe for unborn children and carry significant risks for the mothers who receive them.

Most abortions are not done for cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. Lastly, most Americans do not support radically permissive abortion policies. In fact, most Americans support policies that further protect unborn children than what is currently permitted under Roe v. Wade, which allows for elective abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

We are being presented with the greatest opportunity of our lifetime to turn the tide for life. We must tell the truth about abortion and not allow pro-abortion arguments to rule the day unopposed.

*****

This article was published on December 1, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

Respecting the Corona Virus

December 4, 2021/in Economy, Featured, Healthcare, Liberty, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Neland Nobel

It is one thing to describe something. It often is different actually to experience it. In this case we are talking about the Corona virus.

I am a 73-year-old, unvaccinated male in generally good health who came down with the Chinese virus almost exactly two weeks ago. It came along just in time to screw up Thanksgiving and the beginning of Hannukah.

Everyone is different and so what I will describe is simply my experience. Of course, that could differ from another person’s experience. No doubt many had it easier, and a number had it worse. Overall, I feel fortunate it was not worse than it turned out to be. I feel bad for those who have had a more severe case or lost someone they loved.

My wife had it first so we went down pretty much two days apart. She had a milder case and I had it a bit more severe. I had all the standard ailments: cough, fever and chills, loss of taste, brain fog, fatigue, and weakness. The body wanted to sleep, even after the most minor exertion. Weakness followed in the wake of other symptoms retreating.

The beginning was mild, days three to four were rough, and by the end of the first week, I started feeling better, and have continued to gain strength. As I write, we are exactly two weeks from initial symptoms, and I was able to take a short hike and get outside in the glorious sunshine.

I used the word respect in the title. My wife and I expected to get infected and were surprised it took so long. We never curtailed our activities, flew on airplanes, hugged friends and relatives, lived as best we could in this confusing period. Thus, we were exposed. We knew if we got it, it could be severe but chose to live our lives without undue fear. We knew from others and from reading, most will recover but a minority of those with preconditions and advanced age are at greater risk. We did not take the bug for granted.

We know so many vaccinated people who have gotten it, we decided we would take our chances getting natural immunity, which seems far superior to the short-term benefits of the jab. That was our decision to make and we faced the consequences.

We pre-positioned ivermectin which we took for five days, had thermometers, oximeters to watch oxygen levels, took our own blood pressure, and tried to get extra rest.

Over the recent weekend, news of the Omicron variant hit the news. Stock markets tanked and Governor Kathy Hochul of New York declared a state of emergency. She said she was concerned about a cold-weather variant, even though it came from South Africa, where it is summer. No cases have been reported in New York, but she has gone into “emergency mode.” The doctor who discovered the new variant has described it as “mild.”

Still, though, Governor Hochul thought it was wise to panic.

Meanwhile, the Courts are striking down Federal vaccine mandates, and the White House just caved on mandatory vaccines for Federal employees.

As we suggested earlier, a healthy respect for the bug certainly is due, and intelligent people should take preparations because it is clear the much-touted vaccine does not stop one from getting it. The virus will do its thing, therefore respect its power. As a society, we are not going to stop it. It was foolish to think we could. Better to be prepared and learn to live with it.

Having gone through this now on a personal level, turning our society inside out seems both unnecessary and damaging.

The arrogance of our officials is on display. Not only do they think by seizing power and changing the Constitutional order they can change these natural processes, they continue to behave this way in the face of obvious failure. Stifle your hubris. You are not going to stop the virus and you are not going to change the climate of the earth either.

During the worst of the illness, I thought to myself, despite all the inflation of prices, the disruption of life government policy has caused, I still got it and must suffer through it. While many of us will get it, we all, in the end, suffer alone. And so, must my fellow citizens. Government cannot save us.

The chief job of any public officials is to protect the liberty of its citizens.

Having just come through this experience, I have to say the fear mongers have done a great disservice to the world. The virus is nasty to be sure, but not so much nastier than other illnesses I have had. Such concentration on ineffective vaccinations while largely ignoring, dare we say even prohibiting, the development of treatments, looks particularly stupid. This is particularly so as it becomes clear the vaccines don’t work as advertised and that variants and boosters will be in a constant arms race.

My wife and I had to jump through a number of hoops to get the ivermectin we wanted. The government did not only not help, it actually actively got in the way of us helping ourselves. Big media and much of the medical profession were equally useless.

Respecting and fearing are two quite different things. Taking steps to inform people objectively, giving them broad choice for their individual circumstances, respecting their autonomy to make decisions, respecting their property, prosperity, and liberty; all seem to be much better than the one size fits all dictatorial panic from “experts” like Dr. Fauci and Governor Hochul.

When you look at the actual results of policy, Sweden and Florida, look so much better than Austria and New York, it can’t be ignored. And if the health outcomes are not demonstrably better in Austria and New York, how can these constant panic attacks by the government be justified?

It is time for government and health professionals to grow up and show some maturity. Most of us will survive this thing, but we may not survive the destruction to society these Covid policies are inflicting.

We have reached a point where the governmental reaction to Covid poses a greater threat to both health and liberty than the virus itself. Respect the power of the virus but governmental panic neither stops the virus nor helps the people.

As government becomes so much more entangled in our lives, it is worth asking, if I am going to get it and suffer with it, is the government over reach in my interests or theirs? And why in the heck are our tax dollars being used to develop this plague, that was then set upon the land?

The virus needs to be respected but irrational fear is hardly a helpful public policy.

While the government did little to get me through this virus, I have renewed respect for the wonderful body God gave me. I took some meds, drank water, and slept. My immune system, which runs pretty much on its own, did the rest. That is true for most Americans and that is why about 99% of us will survive.

That is something truly to be thankful for.

FLORIDA: Governor DeSantis Activates Florida State Guard

December 3, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Elections, Featured, Politics /by DrRichSwier.com

By Dr. Rich Swier

“We want to be able to have a quick response capability and re-establishing the Florida State Guard will allow civilians from all over the state to be trained in the best emergency response techniques and have the ability to mobilize very, very quickly.” – Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL), December 3rd, 2021

The Florida State Guard (FSG) is trained and funded by the state and therefore cannot be federalized and is available to the governor of Florida whenever needed. Florida law allows the governor of Florida to create and maintain a Florida state defense force should he decide to do so.

Florida Governor DeSantis Activates the Florida State Guard

Governor Ron DeSantis has announced that he is activating the Florida State Guard.

I am proposing more than $100 million for our National Guard, active-duty military and veterans, and to re-establish the Florida State Guard to assist our National Guard in state-specific emergencies.

I am committed to supporting our military and keeping our state safe.

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) December 2, 2021

NorthEscambia.com reported:

In Escambia County Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced more than $100 million in funding proposals to support Florida’s National Guard and establish the Florida State Guard, a civilian volunteer force that will assist the National Guard in state-specific emergencies

The Governor’s budget proposal includes:

$87.5 million to expand the existing readiness center in Miramar and to establish three new armories in Homestead, Gainesville and Malabar;

$8.9 million for existing armory maintenance;

$2.2 million for a new headquarters for the National Guard Counter Drug Program;

$5.1 million to support Florida National Guardsmen seeking higher-education degrees; and

$3.5 million to establish the Florida State Guard.

[ … ]

The establishment of the Florida State Guard will further support those emergency response efforts in the event of a hurricane, natural disasters and other state emergencies. The $3.5 million to establish the Florida State Guard will enable civilians to be trained in the best emergency response techniques. By establishing the Florida State Guard, Florida will become the 23rd state with a state guard recognized by the federal government.

Watch Governor Ron DeSantis’ remarks about the Florida State Guard.

Bottom Line

It appears that Governor DeSantis has activated the Florida State Guard to protect Floridians from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Foreign enemies may include illegal aliens shipped to Florida by Biden. Domestic enemies might be Biden, his administration and members of Congress who support Biden and his draconian policies.

Just some thoughts upon hearing this news after seeing the sign at Governor DeSantis’ news conference stating, “Florida State Guard, Leave Us Alone.”

Covid-19 exposes the link between Safetyism and Wokeism

December 3, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Featured, Healthcare, Politics, Science /by DrRichSwier.com

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

‘Wokeism’ and ‘Safetyism’ are closely linked.

In their now justly famous 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff proposed “Safetyism” as the name for a novel “moral culture” that had originated on college and university campuses and was rapidly colonizing the larger American culture. Haidt and Lukianoff define Safetyism as “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”

This was followed by other cultural treatments, such as Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s The Rise of Victimhood Culture, some of which more emphatically connected this novel Safetyist culture to the new form of political leftism that has been increasingly ascendant since at least 2013. It’s often been referred to as “social justice” leftism but is increasingly being labelled “Wokeism,” “woke leftism,” or some variant thereof.

The core of this ideology consists in a combination of philosophical postmodernism and political leftism; like classical Marxism, it dictates that all social phenomena are to be viewed through a lens of oppression and domination, but it extends this Marxist thesis beyond economic class to encompass all social identities whatsoever. The goal of this ideology is to categorize all such identities as either “oppressor” or “oppressed” and to politically mobilize the latter against the former.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, my first thought was that a Safetyist culture, as ours had increasingly become, was the worst possible type of culture for handling such a threat to public health. My concern wasn’t only that such a culture would prioritize safety from the virus over all other concerns, such as the negative impacts of economic lockdowns.

I also worried that Covid-19 protective measures would provide cover for the spread of Wokeism.

The alliance of Safetyism and Wokeism

Why would I think this? Because Safetyism and Wokeism are fellow travellers, joined at the hip in many more contexts than not. They find their greatest purchase in the same demographics, most prominently what Charles Murray identified in Coming Apart as the “new upper class,” the elite-educated members of which “run the nation’s economic, political, and cultural institutions.” This class includes politicians and the wealthiest percentile of managers and professionals, as well as “journalists, academics, and public intellectuals in general.”

Safetyism and Wokeism also originate from the members of this “new upper class” and the institutions they control, not least academia and the postmodernist leftists dominating it. And the two ideologies also share a host of characteristic features. Because bureaucratic elites’ heavy-handed response to Covid-19 is rooted in Safetyism, submission to Covid-19 Safetyism also strengthens Wokeism, even if only indirectly.

A prime feature of both Safetyism and Wokeism is the semantic inflation of safety-related terms and concepts—including, most prominently, “safety” itself. As Haidt and Lukianoff note, “In the twentieth century, the word ‘safety’ generally meant physical safety. . . . But gradually, in the twenty-first century, on some college campuses, the meaning of ‘safety’ underwent a process of ‘concept creep’ and expanded to include ‘emotional safety.’”

In the case of Covid-19 Safetyism, the lines between physical safety and psychological comfort are blurred almost as frequently as in the case of Wokeism. The most glaring example of this is the infamous “wearing cloth facemask while alone outside” phenomenon, something I observe with astonishing frequency.

Other parallels are hard to miss. One of the most obvious is the institution of a novel orthodoxy, the censorship of any heterodox opinions, and the ostracism of heretics who dissent from the orthodoxy.

In the case of Covid-19 Safetyism, we see safety measures being carried out under the aegis of “The Science,” as though scientific findings always reach uniform conclusions that conveniently align on one side of the political divide. Invocations of “The Science” often function dogmatically rather than rationally in this context, and any dissent is vigorously suppressed. For example, now-credible theories about the virus accidentally leaking from a Wuhan research lab were initially met with an exasperated dismissal that was nearly uniform in the mainstream media. Often in the name of safety, progressives invoke science as a supposedly indisputable basis for their positions.

Another parallel between Wokeism and Safetyism is captured by Douglas Murray’s “runaway train” metaphor in his 2019 book, The Madness of Crowds: namely, the more identity-based oppression is actually eliminated, the more inflated claims of oppression become relative to reality, which propels the proposal of more extreme policies (the closer the train gets to its destination, the more it speeds up). The most familiar examples of such “progressophobia” from Wokeism concern race, as when Ibram Kendi characterized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by saying “racism did not end—it progressed,” or as when Charles Blow wrote that “American racism has evolved and become less blunt, but it has not become less effective” since the era of slavery and the Civil War.

Such claims echo ones made earlier by academics, such as Critical Race Theory progenitor Derrick Bell, who in 1987 wrote that “progress in American race relations is largely a mirage,” and Microaggression Theory progenitor Derald Wing Sue, who in 2010 wrote that racial microaggressions “may have significantly more influence on anger, frustration, and self-esteem than traditional overt forms of racism.”

If conditions have not in fact improved for a historically oppressed group, then the unsafety of that group would indeed warrant radical, progressive policies to rectify this. Conversely, if we admit that progress has been made on a given problem, we would have to admit that the threat has subsided, which would diminish the need for affirmative policies that purportedly combat it. In other words, the political activation potential for supposedly oppressed groups would decrease. If people recognize significant improvements in a given form of oppression, the basis for a political ideology almost entirely founded on the goal of solving that problem would be severely weakened. Moreover, it would threaten the perceived legitimacy of those empowered to enforce those policies.

Safetyism and medical theatre

The ballooning of what is considered “safety” has also led to resistance to rational argument about the relevant evidence.

Consider many universities’ mask policies. Masks are often required for those indoors at all times except when alone in a room, any type of mask satisfies this requirement, and the vast majority of people wear cloth or surgical masks that are only really effective in preventing spread by respiratory droplets. But transmission by respiratory droplet occurs primarily through coughing and sneezing, which are symptoms of Covid-19, and all persons exhibiting such symptoms are typically barred from public university spaces by school policy. So what rational purpose does requiring non-N95 masks serve?

At this point, some people might propose that such policies constitute “medical theatre.” This point is worth considering for a moment. What is the purpose of theatre? Generally speaking, theatre aims to elicit audience emotions rather than conduct rational argument. And it is impossible to miss how frequently Safetyist rhetoric, specifically vis-à-vis Covid-19 policies, is framed in terms of feelings of safety that are decidedly irrational.

At Rice University, an assistant teaching professor and health sciences advisor recently went on record as saying: “I am fully vaccinated, but I have two young children who are ineligible to be vaccinated. . . . With masks, I personally feel more comfortable being in the classroom and have less worries about exposing my children to the virus through me.” Never mind that the sort of transmission these masks prevent is already prevented by other policies, and never mind that children face miniscule risk from Covid-19. The point, at least from the perspective of medical theatre, isn’t to make people safer, but to make them feel safer.

Still, why not just wear a mask without objection if it does in fact make others feel safer—isn’t this an altruistic end worth some minor inconvenience on your part? I hear this argument all the time, often formulated as: “Just don’t be a jerk.”

If it sounds familiar, that’s because it was first and frequently deployed in defence of mandating the use of people’s “preferred pronouns.” Rather than signifying objective reality, Woke and Safetyist language alike more often cater to subjective desires and are used to manipulate emotions. Both Safetyism and Wokeism elevate people’s subjective and emotional experiences (so long as they point in a progressive direction) over biological reality and scientific fact.

Resisting Wokeism and Safetyism’s expanding frontiers

The point is that Safetyism and Wokeism leverage our altruistic instincts to effect submission to irrational policies that were never designed to be rationally justifiable in the first place. Instead, it seems increasingly clear, both ideologies function sociologically like religion. More and more people seem to be noticing this, both in relation to Covid-19 Safetyism and in relation to Wokeism. But what goes less remarked upon is the connection between these two novel forms of secular religion, and specifically how they mutually reinforce one another.

For consider: if you are willing to submit to irrational Covid policies for the sake of helping others feel safer—however irrational you may think those feelings are—then why wouldn’t you do the same in the case of the various norms and policies of Wokeism? The future frontiers of Wokeism are often unpredictable, and its awakenings might demand of dissenters impossible violations of conscience—as they already have for many.

As Safetyism’s star continues to rise, so will Wokeism’s, and for the same sorts of reasons. And if Wokeism is the great threat to free speech, impartial justice, and liberal education that it is so often—and rightly—made out to be, then its connection to Safetyism should be sufficient reason to resist unreasonable Covid-19 policies. It is time for both conservatives and traditional liberals to wake up to this reality, which requires more consistently translating our convictions into action.

This article has been republished from The Public Discourse with permission.

Just When You Thought The World Couldn’t Get More Idiotic

December 3, 2021/in Commentary, DrRichSwier.com, Elections, Featured, Politics, Religion /by DrRichSwier.com

By Robert Spencer

Here’s the latest installment in the Annals of Idiocy: “Inclusiveness: a European Commissioner recommends no longer using ‘Christmas,’ ‘Christian’ names and the masculine,” translated from “Inclusivité : une commissaire européenne recommande de ne plus utiliser “Noël”, les noms “chrétiens” et le masculin,” Valuers Actuelles, November 29, 2021 (thanks to Medforth):

European Equality Commissioner Helena Dalli launched an internal guide for inclusive communication at the end of October. This prohibits a number of expressions deemed to be stigmatizing according to gender, sexual identities, ethnic origins or culture, the Italian daily Il Giornale revealed on Sunday (November 28). These recommendations aim to “reflect diversity” and to fight against “stereotypes deeply rooted in individual and collective behavior.”

One “stereotype” that racists have is that many black people have names like “Dequan” and “Lashonda” and “Takeesha.” So in order to combat that stereotype, all such names should be banned. No sense giving white racists grist for their mill.

Using Italian names for gangsters in movies about the Mafia simply reinforces stereotypes about “Italo-American” criminals. The only solution is to make sure that no Italian names are used for Mafia members. “Henry” and “Charles” are acceptable as gangster names, but “Enrico” and “Carlo” are not. No Mafia gangster should be shown either cooking, or eating, a plate of pasta. Garlic should also not be mentioned.

Similarly, in a movie about Mexican drug traffickers, their names must not lead anyone to think that they are in any way “Mexican”; that would not be fair, as such names would only reinforce a “stereotype” that far too many of us unthinkingly accept. Give them names like “Randolph” and “James” and “Alice.” Under no conditions should any Mexican drug trafficker be called “El Chapo” or “El Gordo” or “El Mata Amigos.”

In general, the report suggests that no one should be identified on the basis of their particularity or in a way that is not [sic] offensive. For example, the use of the masculine form “by default” should be prohibited and the salutation “Dear Sir or Madam” should be replaced by “Dear Colleague.” Gender-specific terms such as “workmen” should also not be used. As the document – Dalli’s internal guide –is written in English, some recommendations are not applicable to other languages. The text also provides that one should never ” imply ” a person’s sexual orientation or even their gender identity. Similarly, it considers that a reference to elements of Christian culture “assumes that all people are Christians.” It therefore recommends deleting the reference to Christmas and speaking instead of “holidays.” Christian names such as “Mary” or “John” should be banned, according to the Commissioner.

But how can you write, say, an application letter for an academic job and use as your salutation — as Helena Dalli recommends – “Dear Colleague”? You aren’t anyone’s “colleague” yet – that’s what you are applying to be – and use of that salutation would merely come across as presumptuous, and likely nip in the bud your chances to be hired.

To eliminate all gender specific names, start with the easy ones. Thus “workman” can become “worker.” But what do we do when we come, say, to weddings, where there is an insufficiently “inclusive” focus on the “man” and the “woman”? Revise the text. “Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband” should instead become “Do you take this man or woman or non-binary other, to be your lawful wedded husband or wife or non-binary other”? Eventually it might be a good idea to provide a single word that can refer equally to both “husband” and “wife.” We’re working on it.

Using the “masculine” form “by default” should. be avoided, according to Helena Dalli, EU Equal Opportunities Commissioner, working tirelessly to make the world a better place by erasing all distinctions. But “Dear Sir or Madam” doesn’t use the “masculine” form “by default” – it carefully allows, in full diversity-inclusivity-equity mode, both the masculine and the feminine possibilities.

The claim that a reference to “elements of Christian culture” necessarily “assumes that all people are Christian” is utter nonsense. If I mention “the Bamiyan Buddhas,” does this make me guilty of assuming “that all people are Buddhist”? If I write that “the holiday of Diwali is observed differently by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists, creating a rich tapestry of cultural traditions and customs,” have I thereby assumed that everybody in the world is either “Hindu, Jain, Sikh, or Buddhist”? If I mention “Hanukkah” or a menorah, or show on YouTube a lesson on “how to spin a dreidl,” have I assumed that everyone in the world is “Jewish”? Should all references to the Bible be eliminated, because such references would be unacceptable, as “too Christian” or too “Judeo-Christian”? Surely we can’t have that in our brave new world that hath such creatures in it as Helena Dalli. Indeed, as the Bible itself is a venerable vehicle for what we now recognize as sexism, why not go beyond forbidding the reading of the Bible, and make possession of the book itself a crime?

Helena Dalli, the powerful EU Commissioner, thinks we need to rid the world of names that are too linked to Christianity. She mentions as examples of names that must no longer be used “Mary” and “John.” But these are just the names that come immediately to mind. We need to get rid as well of other names smacking of Christianity, including “Peter,” “Simon,” Thomas,” “Joseph,” “Martha,” “Christopher,” George” (which makes one think of “Saint George”), “Andrew,” “Samuel” and so many more names that are “too Christian” for Christians – or anyone else — to use.

But why does Helena Dalli not mention the need to abolish names that are “too connected” to the religion of Islam? Why should “Mary” and “John” be eliminated, but “Mohammed” and its many variants — Mahmoud, Ahmad, Muhammad, Magomed, Mahmad, Mehmet, Mamadou, Muhammadu, Mahamed, Mohamad, Mohamed, Mohammad, and so on – be tolerated inside the EU? Helena Dalli should provide us with a list of names that she believes are unacceptably linked to religions other than Christianity, the sole faith she mentions and for which she appears to bear a deep animus. Then we can get to work banning those names as well.

She’s also against mention of the very word “Christmas.”

Even the expression “colonizing of Mars” is considered negative, as it would be reminiscent of colonialism, and should be replaced by the phrase “sending people to Mars.” The report [by Helena Dalli] also advocates a form of positive discrimination. It suggests not convening working groups where only one gender is represented and thinking about inviting people from different ethnicities to events and photo shoots. Helena Dalli has already been criticized for the polemical campaign “Freedom with the Hijab” and the participation of Islamist associations in the campaign.

It will be fascinating to see if the EU Commissioner manages to make every single working group at the EU “gender diverse.” How will such a rule work in practice, particularly with the Muslims, whose unequal treatment of men and woman is legitimized in the Qur’an itself and who insist even on separating male from female worshippers in the mosque?

A verse in the Quran – 4:34 – gives husbands the right to “beat” their wives if they even suspect them of “disobedience.” Honor killings by Muslim men of their wives, daughters, sisters, and daughters-in-law – which may be prompted by a multitude of sins committed by females in the family, such as refusing to wear a hijab, or being seen talking to a non-Muslim boy – lead to very light punishment or in some cases to no punishment at all. The misogyny of Islam can also be seen in the fact that a Muslim woman’s testimony is worth only half that of a man, and a daughter inherits only half what a son receives. Will Helena Dalli be able to force Muslim males to include females in their meetings? I suspect she will not even try. Her desire to impose restrictions of all kinds on “religions” ends up with her applying her humorless and bizarre restrictions to one religion only – Christianity.

As for doing away with the very word “Christmas,” the cast of Seinfeld, trying to be as ridiculous as possible, already provided some years ago a different word for that day, even less “Christian” than the word “holiday” (which derives from “holy day”); they called it “Festivus.” That should please Helena Dalli. A Festivus Tree, Festivus Lights, Festivus Presents, Festivus Cards. What’s not to like?

I know what you’re thinking. You are thinking that her idiocy will be rejected all those who have kept their wits about them, that the thinking world will rise up and laugh to scorn Ms./Mrs.Mr./Non-binary/Equal opportunity Helena Dalli. But she’s not just some Hyde Park Corner lunatic; she’s the EU Equal Opportunities Commissioner. In that post she can do – she’s already done — a lot of damage. She needs not just to be laughed at, but to be relieved of her position. Please, EU, put her, and therefore us, out of her misery.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

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Biden’s Climate Power Grab Via Trillions of Dollars in Annual Federal Procurement

December 3, 2021/in Economy, Email, Environment, Featured, Liberty, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By David Wojick

Spending by federal agencies is governed by the extensive Federal Acquisition Regulations or FAR for short. In response to a Biden executive order, the FAR Council is conducting a silly public inquiry as to how climate change should be factored into federal spending. The Federal Government spends over $6 trillion a year so this is a very big deal.

The concept is ridiculous and some of the ideas are illegal but this foolish agency action deserves serious attention. The FAR Council has issued an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rule Making (ANPRM) titled “Federal Acquisition Regulation: Minimizing the Risk of Climate Change in Federal Acquisitions“. Comments are due by December 15. I urge people to comment.

See https://www.regulations.gov/document/FAR-2021-0016-0001

Advanced Notices like this are asking for ideas prior to proposing regulations, including that the whole idea is nuts. One of the worst things mentioned is that in competitive procurements agencies should give preference to bidders who are cutting their emissions. I cannot believe this is legal but there it is.

The ANPRM includes this list of leading questions:

(a)How can greenhouse gas emissions, including the social cost of greenhouse gases, best be qualitatively and quantitatively considered in Federal procurement decisions, both domestic and overseas? How might this vary across different sectors?

(b) What are usable and respected methodologies for measuring the greenhouse gases emissions over the lifecycle of the products procured or leased, or of the services performed?

(c) How can procurement and program officials of major Federal agency procurements better incorporate and mitigate climate-related financial risk? How else might the Federal Government consider and minimize climate-related financial risks through procurement decisions, both domestic and overseas?

(d) How would (or how does) your organization provide greenhouse gas emission data for proposals and/or contract performance?

(e) How might the Federal Government best standardize greenhouse gas emission reporting methods? How might the Government verify greenhouse gas emissions reporting?

(f) How might the Federal Government give preference to bids and proposals from suppliers, both domestic and overseas, to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions or reduce the social cost of greenhouse gas emissions most effectively?

(g) How might the Government consider commitments by suppliers to reduce or mitigate greenhouse gas emissions?

(h) What impact would consideration of the social cost of greenhouse gases in procurement decisions have on small businesses, including small disadvantaged businesses, women-owned small businesses, service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, and Historically Underutilized Business Zone (HUBZone) small businesses? How should the FAR Council best align this objective with efforts to ensure opportunity for small businesses?

The questions imply proposals that clearly make federal spending an instrument of alarmist policy. Suppliers are required to report their greenhouse emissions and to take steps to reduce them. The result can only be to drive up the cost of goods and services, which taxpayers pay for.

I see no statutory authority for this nonsense. Surely only Congress can make rules like this. Agencies cannot just decide what to buy based on Biden’s climate power agenda.

Some of this is truly far out, like asking procurement officials to measure the life cycle emissions of products and services. Complex products up to and including warships can have components, sub-components, etc., from all over the world, and lead long complex lives. In fact, the Defense Department is a lead agency in this ANPRM, as is NASA.

Imagine trying to measure the life cycle emissions for $6 trillion a year’s worth of products and services, and then basing procurement decisions on these measures. This is truly absurd.

There is also this vaguest of concepts: the “climate-related financial risks” to the Federal Government, which are supposed to be both mitigated and minimized. The real risk here is doing silly stuff in the name of climate alarmism.

And of course, there is the nutty “social cost of greenhouse gases”. This goofy number is claimed to measure to the dollar the damage done over the next 300 years by a ton of today’s emissions. I am not making this up!

The Biden Administration is trying to grab power it does not have, using regulations that have no statutory authority. I urge people to comment, especially saying how stupid and dangerous this proposed rule-making really is.

*****

This article was published on November 26, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

Challenging Technocensorship, Rutherford Institute Appeals to Federal Court to Prohibit Facebook From Censoring COVID-19 Vaccine Critics

December 3, 2021/in Email, Featured, Healthcare, Liberty, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Editorial Staff

Rutherford Institute Appeals to Federal Court to Prohibit Facebook From Censoring COVID-19 Vaccine Critics

Warning against the rising threat to free speech posed by the government’s collusion with large technology companies in order to regulate and control what ideas can be shared on the internet and through social media, The Rutherford Institute has asked a federal appeals court to reverse a lower court ruling and prohibit Facebook from censoring and de-platforming critics of the COVID-19 vaccine in violation of the First Amendment. In calling on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to allow the lawsuit in Children’s Health Defense v. Facebook to move forward, Rutherford Institute attorneys argue that Facebook acted in concert with U.S. government officials and agencies to suppress and punish Children’s Health Defense for sharing information critical of the COVID-19 vaccine.

“We should all be alarmed when prominent social media voices are censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous, extremist or conspiratorial,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “At some point, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes ‘extremism,’ we might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other and subjected to technocensorship.”

Founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending childhood health epidemics by exposing causes, eliminating harmful exposures, seeking justice for those injured, and establishing safeguards to prevent future harm. CHD, an outspoken critic of the proliferation of childhood vaccines, seeks to inform the public about vaccines and the health dangers posed by vaccines and wireless technologies. CHD’s mission has brought it in conflict with the pharmaceutical industry, which obtains huge profits from the sale of vaccines; the United State government, which accepts millions of dollars in funding from the pharmaceutical industry; and big-tech internet companies that profit from expanded wireless technologies. Crucial to CHD’s mission of educating the public is its use of social media, including Facebook, to provide links to studies and information provided by experts on public health that exposes the dangers of vaccines. However, since January 2019, Facebook has waged a campaign to discredit CHD: repeatedly posting labels and overlays on CHD’s Facebook page labeling information provided as “false,” preventing persons visiting CHD’s Facebook page from making donations to CHD; and otherwise asserting that CHD violated Facebook’s terms of service by posting false information. In August 2020, CHD filed a lawsuit alleging that Facebook’s actions, in retaliation for CHD’s speech critical of vaccines and wireless technologies, violated the First Amendment’s guarantee to freedom of speech. The lawsuit alleges that Facebook acted at the behest of and in concert with the U.S. government to suppress “vaccine misinformation.” In June 2021, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted Facebook’s motion to dismiss the First Amendment lawsuit. The social media giant argued that because it is a private entity, it is not subject to the First Amendment.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

*****

This article was published on November 9, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Rutherford Institute.

Twitter Bans Sharing Photos, Videos ‘Without Consent’ on New CEO’s 1st Day

December 2, 2021/in Courts & Law, DrRichSwier.com, Elections, Featured, Politics /by DrRichSwier.com

By Discover The Networks

Just one day after far-left activist Jack Dorsey was replaced as the CEO of Twitter by the company’s former CTO, Parag Agrawal, the platform has banned the sharing of any images or videos of people without their explicit consent. The totalitarian Agrawal stated, “The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.”

“Feeling safe on Twitter is different for everyone, and our teams are constantly working to understand and address these needs,” reads his statement. “We know our work will never be done, and we will continue to invest in making our product and policies more robust and transparent to continue to earn the trust of the people using our service.”

Monday on FNC’s Fox News Primetime, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) offered his interpretation of the new rule. “I promise you what it won’t mean, and the people whose privacy won’t be protected, are normal Americans who want to express their views, particularly if they have conservative views. I promise that you their privacy won’t be respected. They will still get censored…

“Let’s just remember what Twitter does by the way how they make their money,” he added. “They track us around the web everywhere they — everywhere we go. They collect a dossier on us. They sell our information. They profit off of us. I promise you they are not going to stop doing any of that stuff. And at the end of the day, Pete, here’s the deal: the last thing America needs is another big tech robber baron who doesn’t care anything for free speech, and that’s exactly what Twitter is giving us.”

Antifa Exploits Twitter Rule Change to Harass Journalist Ngo

December 2, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Email, Featured, Politics /by DrRichSwier.com

By Discover The Networks

Breitbart News reports that Antifa-supporting Twitter accounts — yes, Twitter allows violent Marxist revolutionaries to have accounts, but former President Trump is permanently banned — are exploiting the social media giant’s new ban on the sharing of private photos to stop people from sharing mugshots of far-left rioters and looters. In addition, they are trying to get independent journalist Andy Ngo, who has done more than any journalist to expose Antifa tactics, organization, and violence, banned from the platform.

Ngo was hospitalized after a brutal Antifa attack in 2020. The movement’s anarchic members regularly call for him to be killed.

Twitter says it will not allow the sharing of “private media” without consent, but defines this as “media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted.”

Police mugshots are not “private media” — they are owned by the police precinct and widely distributed to the public and the press. It is unclear if Twitter’s policy extends to publicly-available photos of people, or photos and footage captured legally in public places.

“The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities,” says Twitter.

Translation: Twitter will protect violent leftist radicals like Antifa, but not their political opponents like Andy Ngo.

59 Known Connections

Antifa Attacks Journalist Andy Ngo

On May 28, 2021, Antifa radicals chased and beat conservative journalist Andy Ngo in the streets of Portland, Oregon while he was covering protests in that city. “No journalist in America should ever face violence for doing his or her job,” Ngo said in a tweet on June 2. “… I was chased, attacked and beaten by a masked mob, baying for my blood. Had I not been able to shelter wounded and bleeding inside a hotel while they beat the doors and windows like animals, there is no doubt in my mind I would not be here today. Their words, like their actions, speak for themselves.”

To learn more about Antifa, click here.

15 States Threaten To Pull $600 Billion From Banks That Won’t Give Equal Service To Energy Industry

December 2, 2021/in Economy, Email, Environment, Featured, Liberty, National Security, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Tristan Justice

Fifteen state financial officers sent a letter to U.S. banks last week noting $600 billion in assets they pledge to take elsewhere if the financial institutions embrace corporate wokeism and prohibit financing to the fossil fuel industry.

Led by West Virginia Republican Treasurer Riley Moore, the group promised “collective action” in the form of an “economic boycott.”

“Just as each state represented in this letter is unique in its governing laws and economy, our actions will take different forms,” they wrote in the letter obtained by The Federalist. “However, the overarching objective of our actions will be the same – to protect our states’ economies, jobs, and energy independence from these unwarranted attacks on our critical industries.”

Signatories to the letter putting banks on notice include chief financial officers from Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Alabama, Texas, and Kentucky, in addition to West Virginia.

“How can we as states get dollars from severance taxes and then park it in banks that are at the same time trying to diminish those dollars by trying to boycott our industries?” Moore said in an interview with The Federalist. “This is just more of the same from these woke capitalists, globalist interests out there when it’s them trying to dictate to us the way we need to live our lives.”

Asked why more states haven’t joined the letter, considering at least 22 state financial offices are run by Republicans, Moore said it was a consequence of standard hesitancy.

“I do believe there are going to be more states that are going to join this coalition effort. I think they want to see a little bit of how this plays out,” Moore said. “How long are we just going to take it in the face and not do anything?”

President Joe Biden has been aggressive in quickly curtailing oil and gas development as promised on the campaign trail. Beyond the illegal suspension of new leases on federal land, the prohibition of new drilling sites on major untapped reserves, and higher fees in the pipeline for new energy exploration permits, however, it’s the administration’s pressure on Wall Street to refuse investment in the capital-intense industry that’s dealt the biggest blow to producers, spiking prices at the pump in the process.

“We can’t get capital because they’re putting so much pressure on banks not to lend to us in the name of climate change,” explained Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Denver-based industry trade group Western Energy Alliance.

Biden’s nominee for an important regulatory role at the Treasury Department however, shows no sign of an administration easing up on Wall Street. Cornell Law Professor Saule Omarova, who was tapped to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, has said she wants fossil fuel industries to “go bankrupt.”

If confirmed, Omarova would lead an agency tasked with “ensur[ing] banks and federal savings associations operate in a safe and sound manner, provide fair access to financial services, treat customers fairly, and comply with applicable laws and regulations.”

Considering the administration’s crusade against fossil fuels, it’s conceivable Omarova would weaponize the department to deter investment in an industry vilified by Democrats as single-handedly destructive to the planet.

In 2017, Omarova already urged Congress to delegate a “golden share” responsibility to federal agencies, which she defined as “a wide range of legal arrangements giving the government special, exclusive, and nontransferable corporate-governance rights in privately owned enterprises.”

State financial officers who are engaged in the tug-of-war with the Biden administration wrote in their letter last week their taxpayers would not tolerate public funds being managed by institutions that destroy economies and Americans’ health in the name of climate change.

“We have a compelling government interest when acting as participants in the financial services market on behalf of our respective states, to select financial institutions that are not engaged in tactics to harm the very people whose money they are handling,” they wrote. “Any financial institution that has adopted policies aimed at diminishing a large portion of our states’ revenue has a major conflict of interest against holding, maintaining, or managing those funds.”

*****

This article was published on November 30, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

Judge Stops Federal COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate in Medicare, Medicaid Facilities in 10 States

December 2, 2021/in Economy, Featured, Healthcare, Liberty, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Joe Mueller

U.S. District Judge Matthew T. Schelp on Monday ordered a preliminary injunction against the Biden Administration, stopping mandated COVID-19 vaccinations for health care workers in Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) facilities.

“Because it is evident CMS significantly understates the burden that its mandate would impose on the ability of healthcare facilities to provide proper care, and thus, save lives, the public has an interest in maintaining the ‘status quo’ while the merits of the case are determined,” Schelp wrote in a 32-page memorandum and order in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Missouri.

Missouri Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt led a 10-state coalition filing the lawsuit on Nov. 5 to stop the CMS vaccine mandate. On the courthouse steps in St. Louis, Schmitt, a candidate for the seat of retiring Republican U.S. Senator Roy Blunt, stated many will benefit from the ruling.

“This is a significant ruling and the first of its kind in the country,” Schmitt told reporters. “What the court said today was CMS and the Biden administration has no statutory authority to do this, none whatsoever.”

Starting in late October, Schmitt led coalitions of states in filing three lawsuits against federal vaccine mandates – for federal contractors and federally contracted employees, for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s mandate on private employers with 100 or more employees, and CMS.

The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans blocked the private-sector OSHA mandate earlier this month.

Schmitt said Monday’s ruling will help all Missourians and all served in CMS facilities.

“Our office may have led the charge on this, but it is the health care workers in Missouri and across the country, it’s the rural hospitals here and elsewhere facing certain collapse due to this mandate, and it’s the patients of those hospitals who are the real winners today,” Schmitt said.

Judge Schelp stated five times in the ruling that it’s likely Schmitt and the coalition will ultimately succeed if the ruling is appealed. The ruling only applies to the 10 states in the lawsuit – Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

“I would expect this to be appealed and I would expect this to go all of the way to the Supreme Court,” Schmitt said. “But the fact is we won.”

The ruling stated CMS lacked clear authorization from Congress to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine. Currently, CMS doesn’t require any vaccinations for health care workers.

“CMS failed to adequately explain its contradiction to its long-standing practice of encouraging rather than forcing – by governmental mandate – vaccination,” Schelp wrote. “For years, CMS has promulgated regulations setting the conditions for Medicare and Medicaid participation; never has it required any vaccine for covered facilities’ employees – despite concerns over other illnesses and their corresponding low vaccination rates.”

Schelp also stated CMS violated its own regulations by not accepting comments on policies.

“Moreover, the failure to take and respond to comments feeds into the very vaccine hesitancy CMS acknowledges is so daunting,” Schelp wrote.

Schelp highlighted the vaccine mandate’s negative impact on staffing at rural hospitals.

“As an example, for a general hospital located in North Platte, Nebraska, implementation of the mandate would result in the loss of the only remaining anesthesiologist,” Schelp wrote. “Understandably, without an anesthesiologist, there could be no surgeries – at all. Thus, such a loss irreparably causes a cascading effect on the entire facility and a wide range of patients. Other examples show the mandate’s far-reaching implications not just on the administration of health care itself, but the functioning of the facilities in general.”

Schmitt said the virus will always be present and the federal government needs to understand citizens and their rights.

“The truth is COVID is with us and there is always going to be a variant,” Schmitt said. “But I think the people have had enough of the government locking people down. They have had enough of government instituting mask mandates and vaccine mandates. Every time there’s an overreach, we’re going to push back.”

Bureaucrats who have never driven the back roads of Missouri or visited its rural hospitals have no idea of the effects of the vaccine mandate, Schmitt said.

“Here in flyover country, we’ve had enough and we’re going to fight back every single time they try to take our freedoms away,” Schmitt said.

*****

This article was published on November 29, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

Trump’s White House Doctor Calls Omicron A Midterm Elections Trick

December 1, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Elections, Featured, Healthcare, Politics /by DrRichSwier.com

By Pamela Geller

Omi-con is merely the Democrats’ ticket to stealing 2022 mid-terms.

Trump’s White House doctor calls omicron a midterm elections trick

“Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant!” Ronny Jackson tweeted Saturday.

By Joseph Guzman | The Hill, Nov. 29, 2021

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) spoke out on news of the omicron variant Saturday.

“They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election – but we’re not going to let them!” he said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) classified a new coronavirus variant, dubbed omicron, a “variant of concern” on Friday.

A Republican lawmaker who previously served as White House doctor under former presidents Trump and Obama claims Democrats will use the new coronavirus variant of concern to cheat in the midterm elections.

The World Health Organization (WHO) classified a new coronavirus variant, dubbed omicron, a “variant of concern” on Friday due to preliminary evidence suggesting it carries an increased risk of reinfection compared to other variants. WHO officials said the new variant poses a “very high” risk across the globe, but noted that there is still much to learn about the strain.

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) spoke out on news of the variant of concern Saturday, saying the strain would serve as a pretext for absentee voting, which Democrats would use to somehow cheat in the 2022 midterm elections.

“Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant!” Jackson tweeted Saturday

Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election – but we’re not going to let them!

— Ronny Jackson (@RonnyJacksonTX) November 27, 2021

“They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election – but we’re not going to let them!” he added

Jackson’s office did not immediately respond to Changing America’s request for comment.

Jackson was appointed as a White House physician during the George W. Bush administration and shot to national prominence in 2018 when he gave former president Trump a glowing medical evaluation.

A March report from the Pentagon’s inspector general found that Jackson carried out “inappropriate conduct” during his time as White House doctor. The report said Jackson disparaged, belittled, bullied and humiliated subordinates, creating a toxic work environment. It also found that he used alcohol while on duty.

Jackson has explicitly denied the report’s findings.

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Rediscovering the Arizona Constitution

December 1, 2021/in Featured, Liberty, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Clint Bolick

Do you support the Constitution?

I hope your answer is yes. But an even better response would be to ask: which one?

Mention the Constitution and Americans instinctively think of the United States Constitution and its magnificent Bill of Rights.

But Americans do not have one constitution. We have 51. And if we are to protect our freedoms far into the future, we need to restore our understanding of state constitutions.

Every state has its own constitution. Many constitutions pre-date the United States.

The Constitution, and indeed many of the rights embraced in the Bill of Rights were based on state constitutional provisions.

Every state constitution contains protections of individual rights and restraints on government power that are unknown to the national constitution. What’s more, in our system of federalism, state courts are free to interpret provisions in our constitutions — even when worded the same as provisions in the Bill of Rights — to protect greater freedom than the U.S. Supreme Court recognizes.

Our national constitution thus provides the baseline for the protection of our rights, which all 50 states are free to surpass.

Viewed in that light, state constitutions ought to be very important. But if our civic understanding of the U.S. Constitution is dismal — and it is — our understanding of state constitutions is far worse.

That is odd because for most of our nation’s history, state constitutions were the only protection against abuses of rights by state and local governments. That began to change following the Civil War with the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protected individual rights against infringement by the states.

But it wasn’t until 1925 that the Supreme Court began slowly “incorporating” the Bill of Rights — protection by protection — against the states. Only in this century, for instance, did the Court apply the Second Amendment to the states.

As federal rights grew in importance, state constitutional rights receded. Americans came to recognize the U.S. Constitution as the source of our rights. That shift was reflected in legal education: “Constitutional Law” encompasses only the federal constitution; state constitutional law is an elective that few law students take.

The pendulum began to shift back in the 1970s and ‘80s. Justice William Brennan, a liberal icon, grew worried over the erosion of rights by a more conservative Supreme Court. He urged advocates to recourse to state courts to secure greater protection for the rights of criminal defendants and others. Many heeded the call.

More recently, conservatives and libertarians are catching up, led by groups like the Institute for Justice and Goldwater Institute, which are joining liberal groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union in giving greater attention to state constitutional rights.

Jeffrey Sutton, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, penned an outstanding primer on state constitutionalism called 51 Imperfect Solutions. I believe Arizona’s constitution is less imperfect than the rest, for as the 48^th State, we had lots of lessons from which to draw.

Among many other provisions, Arizona’s constitution provides greater protection for speech than its federal counterpart. Its right to keep and bear arms is more explicit than the Second Amendment. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, we have an express protection of privacy, and a prohibition of gifts of public funds through subsidies and otherwise. And we have an extensive Victims’ Bill of Rights. Those provisions barely scratch the surface of its contents.

In the coming months, I plan to write about some of those provisions in greater detail. In the meantime, take a look at the Arizona Constitution. It will surprise you!

You can pick up a free pocket copy of our state constitution at the Arizona State University’s School for Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL). Tell them Clint sent you. The protections you will find in those pages are precious — but they are meaningful only if we know what they are and take them seriously.

Clint Bolick is an Arizona Supreme Court Justice and teaches Constitutional Law at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law. You can find his opinions and articles at azjustice44.com.

*****

This article was published on November 22, 2021, in Western Tribune and is reproduced with permission from the author.

INFLATION: Each Worker’s Slice of After-Inflation-Income Pie Is Shrinking.

December 1, 2021/in Economy, Featured, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Wolf Richter

A look at per-worker personal income, what’s left of it after inflation.

Adjusted for inflation, consumers’ personal income from all sources – from wages, interest, dividends, rental income, unemployment compensation, stimulus checks, Social Security benefits, etc. – so “real” personal income dipped by 0.2% in October from September to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $17.7 trillion, up by only 0.8% from a year ago, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Personal income last year and earlier this year gyrated wildly and was grotesquely inflated by the various stimulus payments and special unemployment benefits. Most of the pandemic specials have now expired:

Personal income without stimulus and transfer payments, after inflation – so this is personal income from labor, interest, dividends, rental property, etc. but without transfer payments from the government, such as unemployment benefits, stimulus payments, Social Security benefits, welfare benefits, etc. – was flat for the month, at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $14.3 trillion.

And it has gone nowhere over the past five months, with all nominal income gains getting eaten up by inflation.

But wait… More people working, each making less after inflation

This “real” (inflation adjusted) income without transfer payments is a function of two factors:

Amount earned by each consumer.
Number of consumers who are earning money.

Real income without transfer payments has been flat for the five months through October. But in October, 2.4 million more people worked than five months earlier.

In other words, the number of workers making money with their labor grew from 151.6 million workers in June to 154.0 million workers in October, and yet all workers combined made the same amount of money adjusted for inflation over those five months. Meaning, on a personal level, on average each worker lost ground to inflation.

For the past five months, inflation, as measured by the BEA, has eaten up any and all income gains from promotions and hiring bonuses and higher wages paid to attract workers, and hire wages to retain workers, etc., plus some.

This chart shows the seasonally adjusted annual rate of “real” income without transfer payments, divided by the number of workers (Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey which I discuss here).

Bringing more people back to work increased overall income before inflation; inflation then ate all the gains in aggregate; and then on a personal level, more workers divided up the same “real” income pie, and each is getting a smaller slice.

*****

Continue reading this article at Wolf Street.

There is a Big Difference Between R’s and D’s

December 1, 2021/in Education, Featured, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Bruce Bialosky

Many people will jump in and say that there is no distinct difference between this country’s two political parties. If you take out the extremes of each party, you cannot slip a sheet of paper between the two. Yet there is a big difference in philosophy that divides the two parties that define what each believes and is at the heart of almost all respective actions. That was exemplified by an interaction I had on a matter that you would never guess would be so defining.

Over the past 50 years, I have participated in planning our class reunions. It is an interesting position for me because I came to Los Angeles as a high school sophomore and was not that involved in my high school’s activities. I was more involved in an outside religiously based organization. Over the years I became closer to many of my high school classmates and worked with the principal person who stayed in touch with the class and helped organize the reunions.

Some of my friends were afraid we would not have a real reunion for our 50th and contacted me to make sure it was at a nice place and properly planned. I stayed in touch with the person organizing the event. That person had asked me to take over after our 45th reunion but then decided to take it back a couple of years later.

When I called to make sure the 50th had a proper location, I was told a proper location was being narrowed down. Then I received a call. “You will not be happy to hear this, but we are not going to have a reunion next year (2022 is our 50th year). We will have to postpone it until 2023 because of COVID.” I responded that was nuts because first, that event is fourteen months from now; and second, that is not your decision to make. The class can decide.

Then the battle began between the two of us. The other person asserting the decision was made for everyone and myself asserting that these people are grownups; they can vote for themselves. I stated we have an email tree so let’s get the class’s input.

Finally, the other person acquiesced and offered a version of what we could send to the class. The suggestion: “Hi everyone… Yes, I know it’s been quite a while. Hope everyone is doing as well as possible considering what’s going on in the world these days. We all know that our 50th reunion is upon us…but due to that naughty Covid we will need to rethink things. We certainly can’t have an indoor reunion, and I’m not even sure that an outside event is a good thing either. Do you really want to chat with old friends while wearing a mask?”

“Anyhow… please send me your thoughts and ideas… on anything and everything that’s been on your mind.”

Does anything say your thoughts and ideas are not needed or wanted more than the above statement? When asking for their input this person had no interest in hearing what their thoughts were other than what is “predetermined.”

My reply: “That is so leading why don’t you just tell them what to think. These people are grownups. They don’t need your guidance.” I was asked what I would state. My reply:

As you know, next year will be our 50th reunion time. Please let us know whether you are intending to attend the event.

That is all one needs to say or should say. They will give you their thoughts. If they are concerned about attending because of COVID, they will say so.

Democrats believe they are better at making decisions for people and that the people need to have these decisions made for them. Republicans believe that people are perfectly capable of making decisions for themselves. If they need to seek counsel for deciding, they will do such through trusted advisors whether they be family, friends or professionals.

Over the years in areas where Democrats have been in charge, their strong-arm tactics of top-down decision-making have crippled the ability of many people to make decisions for themselves thus making them wards of the state which appears to be exactly what the Democrats want to accomplish.

Democrats consider themselves smarter than everyone else. They consider themselves enlightened intellectuals. As Thomas Sowell stated, “Intellectuals stay relevant to the decision-making process by convincing nonintellectuals that their own knowledge is inadequate.”

People are better off making their own decisions and taking responsibility for their own lives. There is a major difference between Republicans and Democrats that runs through almost every aspect of government.

*****

This article was published on November 28, 2021, in FlashReport, and is reprinted with permission from the author.

An American Revolution Version 2.0?

November 30, 2021/in Courts & Law, DrRichSwier.com, Featured, Politics /by DrRichSwier.com

By Dr. Rich Swier

“[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” – Declaration of Independence

“Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.” ― John Parker

We are now in the 256th year since the beginning of the American Revolution on March 22nd, 1765. “The shot heard round the world” occurred when British soldiers and minutemen—the colonists’ militia—exchanged gunfire at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts.

Questions: Is it time for a Second American Revolution? Will there be a second shot heard round the world?

It is ironic that Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the Democratic Party, was a spokesman for freedom, an American Founding Father and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

Looking at the Declaration of Independence to Understand

Today Thomas Jefferson would not recognize the party that he created. In fact it would be highly likely that Jefferson would lead a revolution to stop the despotism happening today in these United States of America.

As Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence,

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Jefferson wrote,

The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

We are seeing a new King George III today in Biden and his administration.

Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence listed, “Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Let’s compare Jefferson’s facts as listed in the Declaration of Independence to what we are seeing today.

King George: He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. Biden: He has refused assent to laws by imposing draconian mandates upon American citizens that are against the public good.
King George: He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained, and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. Biden: He has attacked governors, like Ron DeSantis in Florida, for enacting legislation and implementing policies to stop the federal mandates, end abortion, insure the right to self-defense and to keep and bear arms.
King George: He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. Biden: He and his administration and the Democrat controlled congress are passing laws that favor select groups of people, e.g. blacks, LGBTQ+, illegal aliens, those who only agree with him and his agenda versus large districts of people.
King George: He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. Biden: The Democrats control of Washington, D.C. has now become the center of power intent on fatiguing every American into compliance with its onerous measures to control their lives via new laws, taxes, mandates and rules.
King George: He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. Biden: His party and administration has doe everything it can to invade the rights of the people by using our own representative houses against us.
King George: He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within. Biden: He and his administration have declared war on individual states for flexing their powers over the federal government. He has even sent agents to arrest we the people for standing up and speaking truth to power. Bidens DOJ now labeled parents who speak out against school board policies as domestic terrorists.
King George: He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. Biden: He and his administration is now encouraging the population of these states by allowing illegal aliens to freely cross our borders and bringing in “refugees” from places like Afghanistan.
King George: He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. Biden: He has told companies to ignore ruling of the courts against his Covid mandates.
King George: He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. Biden: Has begun a commission to pack the Supreme Court, giving Democrats a permanent majority on the highest court of the land.
King George: He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance. Biden: As part of his Build Back Better agenda Biden and Democrats plan, using the reconciliation bill, on expanding current offices like the IRS and creating a new office called the Civilian Climate Corps (CCC).
King George: He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our legislatures. Biden: He and his Joint Chiefs of Staff are fundamentally transforming our military to the ideals of “Wokeism.” Biden is also begun defunding our military.
King George: He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. Biden: Is doing exactly the same.
King George: He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
- For protecting them by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
- For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
- For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
- For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
- For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
- For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
- For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
- For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
- He has abdicated Government here by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. Biden: He is doing many of these very same things listed above today. In essence Biden has declared war against any and all Americans who disagree with him.
King George: He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. Biden: He and his allies in Black Lives Matter and Antifa are looting our nation, burning our towns and destroying the lives of law abiding citizens. He is plundering our land, our national sovereignty, taking away our ability to make our own healthcare decisions and creating a government that is bent on taking away our individual freedoms and enslaving us via social mandates.

Time for New Guards for Our Future Security

Question: Is it time for American Revolution Version 2.0?

Tom Paine wrote,

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”

Today in America we are clearly seeing abuses and usurpations. The goal is absolute despotism.

When we the people see these truths to be self-evident, that our despotic government does not hold that all men as created equal. When our government takes away our inalienable rights, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it is time to take action.

We the people must either alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

George Washington wrote:

“Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; this is all we can expect – We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die…”

Give me liberty or give me death.

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Looking at the Declaration of Independence to Understand

Time for New Guards for Our Future Security

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