Horrific Waukesha Deaths Preventable Result of Ill-Considered Bail Policies thumbnail

Horrific Waukesha Deaths Preventable Result of Ill-Considered Bail Policies

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By Amy Swearer

After a summer of wildly destructive civil unrest followed by the looming shadow of the high-profile trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, residents of Wisconsin suffered another blow in the form of unspeakable tragedy.

Five people were killed and more than 40 injured when a driver plowed through participants of an annual holiday parade, appearing to intentionally speed up and swerve into lines of marchers, before speeding off.

Hours later, police arrested 39-year-old Darrell Brooks as the suspected driver of the vehicle. He is charged with five counts of homicide.

Investigators are still looking into possible motives, including, according to some reports, the possibility that Brooks did not necessarily target the parade but was instead attempting to flee from a knife fight.

Whether the act was intentional or merely reckless and without regard to others, one thing is already clear—what happened in Waukesha was entirely preventable.

Darrell Brooks should have been in jail several times over. The devastation he wrought happened only because grossly reckless bail policies touted by local officials enabled the release of an unrepentantly violent man whose actions routinely placed members of the community in serious danger.

Brooks is a career criminal with a long rap sheet. His history of violence—including violence toward women—is well documented, and wide-ranging.

In 1999, Brooks pled guilty to felony battery with intent to cause bodily harm, and was sentenced to six months in jail and three years’ probation. Over the next seven years, Brooks had a series of short stints in jail for various drug and obstruction charges.

In 2006, he was convicted of felony statutory sexual seduction for impregnating a 15-year-old girl. Brooks was 24 years old at the time. He was sentenced to probation and required to register as a sex offender.

In 2010, Brooks pled no contest to felony strangulation and suffocation charges, as well as to violating the terms of his probation. He was sentenced to 11 months in jail and three more years of probation.

Brooks spent much of 2011 and 2012 in jail, serving two separate 180-day sentences for charges of drug possession and bail jumping, and a 37-day sentence for misdemeanor resisting arrest.

In 2016, Brooks was arrested and charged with failing to obey Nevada’s sex offender registration laws. He posted bail, then fled the state and never returned to court. He still has an active warrant out for his arrest in Nevada.

In July 2020, Brooks was again arrested after allegedly getting into a fist fight with his nephew over a cellphone and then firing a gun at the nephew’s car as the nephew drove away. Arresting officers found Brooks still in possession of the firearm as well as a small amount of meth. He was charged with a slew of serious felonies, including possession of a firearm as a firearm and two counts of second-degree recklessly endangering public safety with the use of a firearm.

Brooks’ bond was initially set at $10,000 but was quickly lowered to $7,500. He remained in custody until his Feb. 9 trial was postponed. His attorney then successfully argued for Brooks’ bail to be dropped even lower, and on Feb. 21, Brooks posted $500 bond and was released.

On Nov. 5, with his 2020 charges still pending, Brooks was again arrested and charged with several serious felony offenses after a woman—reportedly the mother of Brooks’ children—told police that he purposefully ran her over with a vehicle after an argument. According to reports, the vehicular assault left tire marks on the woman’s pants and injured her so severely that she was hospitalized.

Incredibly, despite two decades of violent behavior, an open felony warrant in Nevada, routine failures to abide by his probation or bond conditions, and an active case involving the violent use of a weapon, Brooks was allowed to post $1,000 cash bail. By Nov. 11, he was back in the community.

When all relevant information comes to light about possible motive or premeditation, it seems incredible that no one could have reasonably foreseen that Brooks would commit this specific type of violence and leave this amount of carnage in his wake.

Brooks’ propensity for violence and his lifetime spent disregarding the safety of others made a violent tragedy anything but unforeseeable.

It also could have been foreseen that this kind of tragedy would inevitably occur as a result of the well-intentioned but ill-thought-out and poorly executed bail reform policies that progressives are putting into effect across the country.

In fact, John Chisholm, the rogue George Soros-backed prosecutor in Milwaukee County who released Brooks when he should have sought no bail, issued a prophetic statement in 2007. He said: “Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? … You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen.” He went on to argue, though, that “does not invalidate the overall approach.”

We disagree. And now that the dire consequences of these rogue prosecutors’ policies are sparking public backlash, Chisholm has called for an investigation into Brooks’ “inappropriately low” bond.

Unfortunately, this is emblematic of the rogue prosecutor movement more generally. They take a criminal-first, victim-last, passing-the-blame approach.

And while the consequences here were undoubtedly tragic, it’s far from the only example of rogue prosecutors’ lax bond policies wreaking havoc on their communities.

In Philadelphia, for example, rogue District Attorney Larry Krasner’s policies led to the murder of Philadelphia Police Cpl. James O’Connor by an individual whom Krasner released through his lenient policies. Former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain said, “The murder was the direct result of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s pro-violent defendant policies.”

In Chicago, police have pointed to the “skyrocketing use of electronic monitoring as a key factor in the city’s shocking 50% rise in killings” last year.

And no wonder. In Kim Foxx’s Chicago, there are apparently no consequences for violating bail terms. According to the Chicago Tribune, “About 400 people are charged every year with felony escape. During [her predecessor’s] last three years in office, she dropped a total of 55 such cases, compared with 420 for Foxx.”

And then there’s San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin. As two of us (Cully and Zack) have previously written, “Since taking office, Boudin has also been criticized for releasing suspects with long criminal records who have gone on—surprise, surprise—to commit other crimes.”

The events in Wisconsin were tragic. But the nightmare was a completely avoidable consequence of a criminal justice system run by Soros’ rogue prosecutors.

*****

This article was published on November 23, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

If Kavanaugh And Barrett Betray Pro-Lifers, We Must Blow Up The Conservative Legal Movement thumbnail

If Kavanaugh And Barrett Betray Pro-Lifers, We Must Blow Up The Conservative Legal Movement

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By Rachel Bovard

Editors’ Note:  We share the concern of the author. One of the great failures of the Trump Administration was the reliance on executive orders, largely because he lacked clear majorities in the House and Senate and was also opposed by many Republicans. The latter may have been a product of his successful but bruising tactics during the primaries leading to his nomination. These executive orders were quickly reversed by the incoming President Biden, showing the weakness in relying on executive orders. His other failures had to do with personnel choices for many executive positions. There was an uncommon amount of turnover among cabinet positions and those that remained were often ineffective. It is in the area of judicial appointees that it was hoped for a long-lasting reversal of liberal policies. Now coming before the Supreme Court are major decisions about abortion, the Second Amendment, immigration, and the overreach of the administrative state with policies relating to the Covid crisis. The court has already shown significant cowardice on issues of election integrity and religious liberty. It is not saying too much to suggest coming Supreme Court decisions will determine whether history will judge the Trump Administration as a successful  Presidency or merely a spectacular reality show that failed to deliver a significant shift in the historical trend. The reliance on a particular organization, The Federalist Society, to vet judges, may prove to be his most consequential decision.

If we don’t have justices who are comfortable overturning outrageously unconstitutional abortion rulings, it will be proof of the conservative legal movement’s utter failure.

Less than a handful of years after their hard-won elevation to the Supreme Court, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are sending a chill down the spines of conservatives with a string of bad signals from their seats on the court.

In July, Kavanaugh and Barrett joined the court’s leftist majority in declining to hear Arlene’s Flowers v. Washington, a critical religious liberty case. They again sided with the court’s left in a similar decision to turn away a religious exemption challenge to Maine’s vaccine mandate — which Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas took pains to note was staggering in its hypocrisy.

“A State may not assume ‘the best of individuals engaged in their secular lives while assuming ‘the worst’ about the habits of religious persons,” the trio wrote.

Just this week, Barrett and Kavanaugh embraced a theory of judicial supremacy out of step with a more conservative tradition when they both appeared openly skeptical of the construction of the Texas abortion law, which bans the practice after six weeks of pregnancy.

All of this should make the guts of conservatives churn in the leadup to next month’s oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the biggest abortion case the court has heard in decades. I’ve written about the importance of this case before:

While abortion cases post-Roe have trickled up to the Supreme Court on rare occasions, none have presented the clear and fundamental question that Dobbs now brings: whether or not bans on pre-viability elective abortions violate the Constitution.

In ruling on this case, the Court will have the opportunity to overturn both Roe and Casey, which together form the architecture for a constitutional entitlement to abortion.

It is not an understatement to say this is the case pro-life conservatives have been waiting for. It’s why many in our movement willingly shed blood in the vicious fight for the confirmations of Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Gorsuch. The prospect of a majority conservative court was a key reason millions of Republicans turned out to vote for Donald Trump.

So the trepidation conservatives now feel about where Kavanaugh and Barrett may end up on Dobbs is both unexpected and unwelcome. There is a distinct possibility that Barrett, Kavanaugh, and possibly the George W. Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts will find a way to hedge; to “both sides” their way into a narrow and distorted opinion in a case that, as Mississippi’s Attorney General Lynn Fitch has laid out, demands a clear imperative with regard to the dubious constitutional standing of Roe and Casey.

To be clear, with a 6-3 allegedly conservative court, anything less than a decision ringing with clarity on the dismissal of Roe and Casey should be viewed as a failure. Despite the goal-post-shifting going on in establishment Republican legal circles, there is no “long game” here. Although some will argue that any ruling that chips away at Casey is good enough, Roe is the case that created the constitutional entitlement. It is the architecture upon which the legal abortion structure is built. Both Roe and Casey must go.

As Notre Dame law professor Sherif Girgis argued recently, “Upholding the Mississippi law without overruling the court’s previous abortion cases would lack support in any legal source, send even more abortion cases to the court and curb the justices’ ability to overrule Roe down the road.”

We have played the long game for the last 50 years. And we have finally arrived at the decision point, with a case that demands a clear accounting of rulings that Justice Thomas has criticized as “creat[ing] the right to abortion out of whole cloth.” Here to litigate it is a Supreme Court that doesn’t again require “just one more justice,” but is finally positioned to address the question.

If the outcome of Dobbs is indeed a hedge that splits the court’s conservatives — or, to put it more bluntly, if the conservative legal movement has failed to produce Supreme Court justices who are comfortable overturning two outrageously constitutionally defective rulings on abortion — we will be left to justifiably wonder what the whole project has been for.

The Judges Are Our Politicians Now

That we are even in the position to openly speculate where Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Roberts might end up on such a foundational conservative legal question should itself prompt reflection, not only about the expanded role the court now plays in our self-government but also about how we select our judicial masters.

The court has become an extension of our politics, and that is just as much a choice from Republicans as it has been from Democrats. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The American founders envisioned a judiciary that was largely subject to a muscular legislature, not the branch that ruled it. But this inversion is what the modern Congress has come to prefer.

The profound questions of our social order — immigration policy, questions of human dignity and the sanctity of life, of marriage, religious liberty, and civil rights — are no longer determined by the legislature, but by unelected and thus unaccountable jurists.

As a case study in congressional preference for judicial decisionmaking, view the collective shrug that resounded from Republicans in Congress when Gorsuch tossed sex and gender identity into the 1965 Civil Rights Act in 2020. Or consider the lack of comprehensive effort among congressional Republicans to challenge President Joe Biden’s sweeping and unprecedented vaccine mandate, now that the Supreme Court has repeatedly sidestepped it.

Also consider the limp non-response from congressional Republicans to the court upholding President Obama’s clear abuse of rulemaking in creating the illegal amnesty program known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Add the one pro-life vote Republican majorities allow each year in lieu of an energized campaign to persuade, expose, defund, and actively legislate on one of their key platform issues.

Republicans in the Senate, in particular, will huff about not having 60 votes as a reason none of these policies would be possible. But such a position ignores the actual work of lawmaking: using a majority to vote relentlessly on priority issues, messaging constantly toward a specific policy end, and creating a voting record unfavorable to the opposition.

The last legislative pro-life victory, the ban on partial-birth abortion in 2003, invoked nearly all of these methods. Today, it’s a rarity for the Senate, regardless of party control, to show up for work more than 2.5 days a week.

A New System of Judicial Vetting

In 2018, this largely implicit preference to outsource policy-making to the courts became explicit when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided to forgo using the Senate GOP majority to try and legislate, but rather to confirm as many judges as possible.

There were pros and cons to this choice, but the clear upshot of asking judges to make every consequential determination about how the country will be ruled is that judges become, effectively, our politicians — unelected politicians with lifetime appointments, but politicians nonetheless. Yet on the right, we do not vet them as such. Not even close.

I’ve addressed the contradictory and self-defeating aspects of this position before:

…expecting judges to rule on matters of policy and politics while simultaneously refusing to vet them for their beliefs in those matters is both contradictory and unsustainable. A party cannot on one hand expect judges to issue the correct policy decrees while on the other hand studiously fail to take any steps to guarantee that outcome.

While the left has not been shy about their practice of nominating stone-cold activists, the right has always held to the norm that judges should be interpreters of the text in front of them rather than ideologues who use the bench to invent new values-driven legal theories that impose their own views on the country.

This is, of course, the prudent and correct standard of judging and of judicial interpretation, writ large. But it fails to account for the intentional shift of expectations that have taken place from the “judge-as-textualist-interpreter” to our current conception of the “judge-as-legislator.” In many ways, the right’s ideological position of applying the normative standard of restrained judicial vetting seems out of step with the current post-normative reality of how the country is actually ruled.

The left accounted for this shift long ago, and it is why they never suffer a surprise decision from their nominees. They already know exactly where their judges stand on every issue, minuscule to monumental. But since the right is now a regular and active participant in placing the burden of self-government onto the judiciary, it would seem as though we should do more to ensure that the people we place in those positions will actually uphold our interests.

For starters, this should mean that the imprimatur of the Federalist Society requires more questions, not less. We should applaud, not condemn, Republican senators who do their jobs and vigorously question the nominees of both the right and the left, and who hold exacting standards for nominees on constitutional questions. Also, the conservative movement as a whole, not just a select few, should be welcome to offer input into the selection process for nominations to key judicial positions.

If Congress is going to continue passing off the questions of self-government to the court — that is, if they are going to force judges into making choices that are inherently political — then perhaps the cleanest response is to simply put the politicians on the court.

Among Republicans in the Senate, there are three former Supreme Court clerks: Sens. Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley. If another vacancy presents itself under a Republican administration, perhaps it’s time we skip the backroom Federalist Society coronation of some pre-selected circuit court judge and simply elevate a senator to the Supreme Court.

At least senators have a record of votes we can examine. Unlike Kavanaugh, Barrett, and even Gorsuch on transgender issues, there will be mercifully few surprises about where they actually stand. The conservative movement cannot afford bitter surprises, at least not when the Supreme Court has taken for itself, with the willing encouragement of the legislature, a dual role of interpreting the law as well as making it.

*****

This article was published on November 6, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

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Fossil Fuels Form The Basis Of Our Medical And Food Supply Chains

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By Ronald Stein

Under Biden’s plan to rid America of fossil fuels, such a plan would eliminate the medical industry that is totally reliant on the products made from petroleum derivatives, and eliminate oil-based fertilizers to grow the crops that feed the 8 billion on planet earth. Surprisingly, Biden must be oblivious to the consequences of his plan as efforts to cease the use of oil could be the greatest threat to civilization, not climate change.

Biden supports the end of fracking, oil exploration, and oil importing which cuts off the supply chain of crude oil to refineries. Without any crude oil to manufacture, the elimination of the supply chain to the 131 operating refineries in the U.S. would eliminate that manufacturing sector.

Without refineries, there will be none of the oil derivatives that are manufactured from crude oil that are the basis of more than 6,000 products in our economy and lifestyles.

Without the supply chain of crude oil, not only is the refining industry history, but the domino effects are the destructive impacts on the medical, food supply, electronics, and communications industries as they are all totally dependent on the products made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. Any grade school-educated kid can understand that breezes and sunshine, can only make weather-dependent intermittent electricity.

The medical industry is reliant on the products derived from the derivatives manufactured from oil that produce all the critical medical equipment like ultrasound systems, defibrillators, exhalation valves, inhalation valves, CT systems, X-ray, medicines, masks, gloves, soap and hand sanitizers for hospitals, and protective gowns, gloves and face shields gear for doctors and nurses.

Is Biden oblivious to the fact that all those medical products begin from crude oil, or as the Wall Street Journal states – Big Oil to the Coronavirus Rescue? Vaccines need refrigeration, and refrigeration need electricity, especially in the hospital sector where redundant generation capacity for continuous uninterruptable electricity is a mandate.

While Biden attempts to lower emissions at any cost, in favor of some weather-dependent electricity from breezes and sunshine that can only survive with massive subsidies, coal imports and exports continue to increase internationally to meet the electricity generation needs of developing countries as reflected in the Merrill Lynch Global Energy Weekly report.

At least 80 percent of humanity, or more than 6 billion in this world cannot subsidize themselves out of a paper bag as they are living on less than $10 a day. To reduce emissions in the developing countries that control most emissions, the wealthy countries would need to step up and subsidize electricity generation from breezes and sunshine, to replace more than 3,000 coal fired power plants in developing countries like China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Africa, and Vietnam with billions of people seeking affordable electricity.

The oil that reduced infant mortality, extended longevity to more than 80+ and allowed the world to populate to from 1 to 8 billion in less than 200 short years, is now required to provide the food, medical, communications, and transportation infrastructures to maintain and grow that population.

A key question for President Biden before America attends the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Conference in Glasgow, Scotland in November:

How dare pro-humanity individuals and governments support the banishment of fossil fuels, when their banishment would be the greatest threat to civilization resulting in billions dying from starvation, diseases, and weather-related deaths?

Getting off fossil fuels would reverse most of the progress humanity has made over the last few centuries. The inventions of the automobile, airplane, and the use of petroleum in the early 1900’s led us into the Industrial Revolution and victories in World Wars I and II. The healthier and wealthier countries of today now have more than 6,000 products that did not exist a few hundred years ago, all manufactured from fossil fuels, the same fossil fuels that Biden wants to eliminate.

Under Biden’s plan to rid American lifestyles and economies of fossil fuels, such a plan would ground the military, space program, and Air Force 1. It would also mothball the huge energy demands of airlines, cruise ships and merchant ships, as well as eliminate the medical industry, electronics industry, and the communications industry that are totally reliant on the 6,000 products made from petroleum derivatives.

The first use of oil-based fertilizers took place in 1946, and today our food supply is dependent on hydrocarbons. The world’s population of 8 billion souls depends on oil-based fertilizers to grow the crops and feed the animals that are consumed each year. Any cessation of hydrocarbons will immediately result in the annihilation of billions of souls, returning the globe to a 1950 population count of approximately 2.5 billion souls.

How can a pro-humanity President Biden support COVID injections to save thousands of lives, and simultaneously support ridding the world of fossil fuels that would be the greatest threat to civilization resulting in billions dying from starvation, diseases, and weather-related deaths?

*****

This article was published on October 19, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow.

More Radical Than Roe: House Abortion Bill Would Repeal Existing Laws, Prohibit Future Pro-Life Laws

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In response to pro-life policy victories like the Texas Heartbeat Act and an upcoming Supreme Court case asking the justices to provide a constitutional course correction to America’s arbitrary and unworkable abortion jurisprudence, pro-abortion legislators in Congress are advancing a deceptively named piece of legislation called the Women’s Health Protection Act. The radical, far-reaching proposal would entrench unfettered access to abortion in federal law.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her congressional allies—as well as the media —have characterized the Women’s Health Protection Act as simply “codifying Roe v. Wade.”

That’s an egregious mischaracterization that understates just how radical the proposal actually is. The Act goes far beyond the already permissive regime permitted under America’s existing abortion jurisprudence.

If enacted, the Women’s Health Protection Act would endanger essentially all state-level abortion restrictions, existing state and federal conscience protection laws, and various provisions limiting taxpayer funding for abortions. Congress should reject this radical proposal.

More Radical Than Roe

The Women’s Health Protection Act would expressly prohibit existing laws that regulate abortion and the abortion industry. The bill bans informed consent requirements, reflection periods, and provisions that give women the opportunity to view an image of their unborn child or listen to the child’s heartbeat.

The proposed federal policy would also preempt policies like the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which currently protects women and their unborn children in more than a dozen states from inhumane late-term abortions performed after 20 weeks. The scientific evidence suggests that a baby can feel excruciating pain during an abortion procedure performed after 20 weeks.

Bill Ignores Pro-Life Policy Consensus

The Women’s Health Protection Act would imperil policies like the Hyde Amendment, which prevents taxpayer dollars from paying for elective abortion in federal programs like Medicaid. Over the past four decades, the Hyde Amendment has saved more than 2.4 million lives.

It would also jeopardize longstanding policies that protect conscience and religious freedom, ignoring America’s proud tradition of respecting individuals and entities’ right to not participate in abortion.

These pro-life policies enjoy broad support across the political spectrum. A majority of Americans oppose using taxpayer dollars to fund elective abortions, including 65% of independents and 31% of Democrats, according to a January Marist poll commissioned by the Catholic organization Knights of Columbus. Likewise, a majority of Americans support conscience rights for individuals and entities that object to abortion.

States have enacted more than 500 life-protecting policies in the last decade. Congress would do well to remember that such policies are in in place precisely because elected representatives did what their constituents asked them to do: protect unborn human life and women’s health and safety.

Congress Must Reject Pro-Abortion Extremism

Americans broadly support policies that the sweeping Women’s Health Protection Act would disallow. Rather than prohibit pro-life policies where they exist, Congress should pursue policies that protect innocent unborn human lives—including those not yet born—and society should support women who face challenging or unplanned pregnancies.

*****

This article was published on September 19, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

Supreme Court Refuses To Block Texas Heartbeat Law Which Virtually Bans Killing Babies

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The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Texas law that protects babies who have a detectable heartbeat from being aborted in the Lone Star State.

In a 5-4 decision, the highest court in the nation declined to block Texas’ newest abortion law despite protests from Planned Parenthood, other abortion activists, and even journalists.

Radical pro-abortion facilities and activists first brought an emergency petition to the Supreme Court with the hopes that the justices would at least temporarily block the law from going into effect on Sept. 1. The court passed on acting on the petition on Aug. 31, meaning the law, which gives private citizens the power to file civil suits against anyone who performs abortions after six weeks or assists a woman in obtaining an abortion, went into effect on Wednesday. Violators of the law could be forced to pay $10,000 to the plaintiff.

Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three leftist justices, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, each wrote a dissent lamenting the final decision to oppose a block on the law.

“Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand,” Sotomayor wrote. “The Court’s failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortions in Texas.”

In the majority opinion, the rest of the court argued that the request for a temporary stay did not meet the qualifications necessary to get judicial relief.

“The applicants … have raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue. But their application also presents complex and novel antecedent procedural questions on which they have not carried their burden,” the opinion stated. “In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit.”

*****

This article appeared on September 2, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

Mississippi Abortion Law Gives Supreme Court Opening to Overturn Roe v. Wade

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At least one case slated to be heard in the Supreme Court’s next term promises to be very controversial: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.

In Dobbs, the Supreme Court must answer a question it has never addressed; namely, whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional. And Mississippi has just submitted its first arguments to the court on why the answer should be “no.”

At issue is Mississippi’s 2018 Gestational Age Act, which prohibits abortions after 15 weeks with exceptions for a medical emergency or a severe fetal abnormality.

The state’s argument is straightforward. Contrary to the court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, nothing in the Constitution’s text, structure, history, or tradition supports a constitutional right to abortion. As a result, Mississippi has just as much authority to legislate on abortion as other subjects, and the prohibition of abortion after 15 weeks ought to stand.

Here is how this case challenges Roe. In Roe, the Supreme Court established the “viability rule,” that a state may prohibit abortion only after a child can survive outside the womb. In 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey affirmed that this is Roe’s “essential holding,” adding that a state may not impose an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to have an abortion.

Even liberal constitutional scholars who support abortion rights have conceded that Roe has always been on shaky constitutional ground for many reasons. Its defects include choosing viability as the critical line without any analysis or justification. Until now, however, the court has never reexamined the viability rule on its merits.

According to the brief Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch filed with the Supreme Court, that rule is fundamentally unworkable. While often placed at approximately 24 weeks, viability is inherently subjective and depends on many variables. Medical advances have made stories like that of preemie Micah Pickering — born at 22 weeks and thriving today — possible in ways that the justices of 1973 could not have imagined.

By replacing Roe’s three-trimester, strict-scrutiny standard with a new “undue burden” standard, Casey may have appeared to modernize Roe, when in reality, it actually created just another subjective, unworkable standard that ignores important state interests rather than accounting for them. As Fitch points out, there “is no objective way to decide whether a burden is ‘undue’” and in case after case, the court has been deeply divided “not just over what result Casey requires … but also over what Casey even means.”

In Roe, the court emphasized the “detriment” prohibiting abortion would “impose upon the pregnant woman.” Mississippi’s brief shows how this has changed. From the rise of independent and flexible work opportunities, laws preventing pregnancy discrimination, sick and family-leave time, access to child care, accessible and affordable contraception, and “safe haven” laws, modern women can avoid the detriment more than ever. Indeed, as the state reminds the court, women have reached “the highest echelons of economic and social life independent of the right bestowed on them by seven men in Roe.”

Mississippi also reminds the court how the law protects unborn children, women, and the medical profession. By nine weeks, all of a baby’s physiological functions are present. By 10 to 12 weeks, a baby has developed neural circuitry to detect and respond to pain. By 12 weeks, a baby can sense stimuli from outside the womb. A pregnant woman’s risk of death from an abortion procedure at 16 to 20 weeks’ gestation is 35 times higher than at eight weeks. For each additional week of pregnancy, the mortality risk increases by 38%.

Abortions performed after 15 weeks’ gestation are gruesome procedures that demean the medical profession charged with doing no harm. These procedures put women at risk of pelvic infection, blood clots, hemorrhage, injuries to internal organs, depression, anxiety, and other psychological problems.

The United States is out of step with 75% of other nations prohibiting most abortions after 12 weeks. While some polls show that many Americans oppose abandoning Roe v. Wade, others show that more Americans think that abortion should be significantly restricted after the first trimester, suggesting that Americans misunderstand the breadth of the Supreme Court’s decision in that case.

Additionally, most Americans say that abortion should not be permitted in certain circumstances, such as sex selection or a Down syndrome diagnosis. In other words, most Americans don’t support the radically permissive abortion scheme that Roe and its progeny permit.

The Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence has distorted our Constitution, done nothing to settle the abortion debate in our country, and poisoned our laws, courts, and culture. The courts have articulated vague and unworkable standards that do not account for advances in science, public sentiment, and the status and independence of women.

Mississippi’s arguments are compelling. The Supreme Court should avail itself of this opportunity to make a long-overdue course correction on abortion.

*****

This article was published on August 10, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

Medical Professionals And School Districts Are Denying Girls Access To Mental Health Services

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Social media floods our culture with tales of celebrities’ personal struggles. “I suffer from binge-eating disorder, a disease in which I’m not only addicted to food, but I eat it in large quantities,” transgender activist Jazz Jennings shared in June. Singer Demi Lovato, who recently announced a non-binary identity, continues to battle a years-long struggle with bulimia. She wrote about her obsessive thoughts in May, “I still struggle. Daily. There are periods of time where I forget about my food struggles and other times it’s all I think about. Still.”

Unfortunately, Jazz and Demi aren’t alone. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that the isolation, heightened anxiety and school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase in eating disorders among adolescents. Doctors acknowledge that social media, absence of activities, and loneliness exacerbated the growing number of disorders. Stephenie B. Wallace, M.D., observed, “we’re seeing a lot of young people who are facing all kinds of mental health disorders that are on the rise, as our young people have been in the COVID-19 pandemic for over a year, and eating disorders are included.”

Eating disorders and body dysmorphia are fueled by an obsessive preoccupation with body image and an overwhelming feeling of a lack of control. Similarly, the growing number of adolescents, predominantly girls, captivated by gender dysphoria experience anxiety and obsessive thoughts about their bodies. Their body image preoccupation manifests as obsessive ruminations about their gender.

A 2020 study, Gender Dysphoria, Eating Disorders and Body Image: An Overview, found on the National Institute for Health’s (NIH) National Library of Medicine, concluded that, “gender dysphoria and eating disorders are characterized by a serious discomfort to the body and the body suffers in both conditions.” The research found that, “rates of pathological eating behaviors and symptoms related to a disordered diet are high in patients with gender dysphoria.” The NIH website includes numerous additional studies documenting the link between gender dysphoria, body dissatisfaction, and disordered eating.

During the eating disorder recovery process, parents are empowered by medical and mental health professionals to take control of their child’s eating routines. To help the child recover, parents are instructed to oversee how much the child eats and when. School counselors support this parental oversight by having the children, predominantly girls, eat lunch in the counseling office. The counselor emails the parent a daily food consumption report.

And yet, parents with daughters who have historically struggled with anxiety, body image, obsessive thoughts, and eating disorders are being told that any expression of gender dysphoria, commonly known as a transgender identity, must be affirmed and validated. Rather than partner with parents, doctors, mental health professionals, and public school staff ignore the child’s mental health anguish, and focus only on validating their gender confusion.

A growing number of detransitioners—people who have stopped affirming a transgender identity—are sharing how desperately they wish they had received help for their mental health issues. Helena Kerschner, who has detransitioned, explains:

“There’s a lot of comorbid mental health issues. There’s a lot of depression, anxiety, self-harm, OCD, eating disorders. I think that we should treat these young people the same way we would treat any other young person who’s struggling with mental health issues. We should be caring and loving to them. And we should get them help, and we [should] pay attention to the root causes of why they’re feeling the way that they’re feeling.”

In stark contrast to the partnership formed during an eating disorder, Virginia’s state-recommended transgender policies do not require school staff to notify a parent when a child requests affirmation of their gender identity. In situations “when their families are not affirming,” schools are encouraged to report concerns to Child Protective Services. By keeping the child’s gender dysphoria from parents and focusing on gender affirmation, rather than the mental health issues that may be fueling their feelings, schools are blocking the child’s access to vital mental health services.

An alarming number of adolescents, especially girls, are emerging from the pandemic unhappy and unhealthy, with mental health issues that could quickly metastasize into dangerous eating disorders and obsessive gender dysphoria. With activities still restricted due to COVID concerns, girls are not getting the exercise, skill acquisition, and social interaction vital for healthy development. Even before the pandemic, their rates of depression and anxiety had spiked due to social media and the isolating impact of a life spent predominantly on screens.

These vulnerable girls deserve society’s full attention, and the recognition that the mental health issues related to their eating disorders and gender dysphoria must be diagnosed and treated. Doctors, mental health providers, and schools must partner with parents to help these vulnerable girls get stronger and overcome the deceit of their obsessive thoughts—not make them a permanent fixture in their lives.

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This article was published on July 20, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from Independent Women’s Forum.

Senate Candidate Blasts ‘Childless Left’ Who Have ‘No Physical Commitment To The Future Of This Country’

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J.D. Vance, a U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio, called out the “childless left” whom he said have “no physical commitment to the future of this country” in a fiery speech given to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s conference on the Future of American Political Economy.

Senate candidate, former Marine, and author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance specifically named Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, and transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (three of whom are failed presidential candidates), citing them as the childless future leaders of the Democrat Party. “Why is this just a normal fact of … life, for the leaders of our country to be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring?”

“The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds,” Vance noted. “Let’s do this instead. Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of the children.” He continued, asking, “Doesn’t this mean that nonparents don’t have as much of a voice as parents? Doesn’t this mean that parents get a bigger say in how democracy functions?” He answered with a simple “yes” after saying “the Atlantic and the Washington Post and all the usual suspects” would criticize him.

“We should worry that in America, family formation, our birth rates, a ton of indicators of family health have collapsed,” the candidate said, highlighting the severity of America’s ongoing fertility crisis and calling it a “civilizational crisis.”

Vance spoke fondly of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s pro-natal policies, explaining that “they offer loans to newly married couples that are forgiven at some point later if those couples have actually stayed together and had kids.”

“Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

Vance also articulated his vision of the American Dream, saying most Americans simply want to be able to “support a middle-class family on a single wage” if they “work hard and play by the rules.” He contrasted this vision with the version of the American Dream promoted by establishment Republicans that consists of “private jets” and “fancy businesses.”

While Vance’s rhetoric and policy prescriptions are emblematic of the right following Donald Trump’s presidency, some have expressed concern that this groundswell of grassroots, populist energy will be hijacked by entrenched establishment interests.

When asked, “How do we make sure that the populist movement that is emerging right now doesn’t get co-opted by the donor class?” Vance told The Federalist we must “only elect people who have at least some ability to raise money from the non-donor class,” adding that “we actually live in an exciting moment where you can go on Fox News and raise a ton of money from middle-class people.”

“We don’t even need to elect 50 good senators,” Vance said. “If we elect 10 good senators, it will totally transform our movement.”

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This article was published on July 24, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

The Boy Scouts: A Case Study in Compromise

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After 100 years of teaching future presidents, explorers, and civil rights leaders to follow their moral compass, it’s been sobering to watch the Boy Scouts lose their own bearings. And yet, the unhappy ending for one of America’s proudest traditions was easy to predict once the organization started chasing the approval of critics it could never win. Now, eight years into this experiment in moral compromise, the country is watching one of the saddest “I-told-you-so” moments of a generation. Disgraced, bankrupt, unpopular, and on the edge of extinction, the Scouts’ leadership is showing the world where cowardly conformity leads — and it isn’t where the culture promised.

For those who knew the Scouts in their heyday, the demise has been quick and painful. Since 2013, when the organization waved its first white flag on sexual orientation, the group that counted Martin Luther King, Jr., Buzz Aldrin, and George W. Bush as members has become barely recognizable. Ravaged by sexual abuse lawsuits and bleeding members, the road of moral surrender has not been kind to the 1910 institution. After years of successfully fighting to live by its moral code, BSA leaders gave into the lie that compromise would be their salvation. Nearly a decade later, the sad truth is: there’s almost nothing left to save.

“It’s a shell of what it once was,” Regent University professor Rob Schwarzwalder said mournfully. “At its peak, scouting in the United States had more than seven million members. Today, it’s about a tenth of that.” It’s a dramatic decline, the former FRC senior vice president admitted on “Washington Watch,” but a predictable one. Once the scouts walked away from 100 years of values, it was only a matter of time until the capitulation caught up with them. “They no longer are even able to define what they mean by things like honor and morality,” Rob pointed out. Once headquarters opened the tent flap to LGBT members and scout leaders, their fate was sealed. Now, after affirming everything from transgenderism to girl members, they’re having trouble even defining what a man is — let alone what character and honor are. “Scouting has pretty much been reduced to, ‘Let’s have fun outdoors, and let’s all embrace everybody’s philosophies,'” Rob lamented. “It’s moral incoherence.”

Gone is the Judeo-Christian ethic that guided scouts back in Teddy Roosevelt’s day. Now, it’s moral free-for-all that’s been reduced to: believe whatever you want — just be nice to people. Back when the BSA made their first concessions, the organization’s leaders promised to stay true to their mission. But, as Rob pointed out, every scout pledges, “‘On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and to my country.’ What kind of honor is there in an organization that for decades has refused to address pedophilia and sexual abuse in its ranks? And what kind of honor is left when you have compromised your basic mission of defining what good manhood is, what leadership is, does character matter? These are things that have been abandoned.”

When the pressure started coming for the scouts to walk away from their biblical roots, the organization lost the courage it spent a century teaching. If they’d have abided by their own oath, they would have told the bullies in corporations and on the Left, “We’re going to stand for what’s right. And if we lose, we’ll go down fighting because we’re men of principle. And principles don’t change”…..

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Continue reading this article, published July 12, 2021 at FRC, Family Research Council

Modern-Day Martyr: Meet The Self-Made Billionaire Who Is Sacrificing It All For God

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In Western universities and board rooms, souls are cheap. But Jimmy Lai’s is not.

 

In Hong Kong right now, Jimmy Lai is sacrificing all — his fortune and possibly his life — for his God, his fellow man, and for freedom.

Lai is a billionaire, although he wasn’t always one. Born two years before the Communists defeated the nationalists in China’s civil war, his father fled and his mother was sent to a labor camp when he was a young child. Carrying bags for train passengers and getting by as a street vendor, he first tasted freedom when a man from British Hong Kong gave him a bar of chocolate.

Lai is a British citizen, although he wasn’t always one. Having seen a glimpse of prosperity and freedom, he chased it to the then-free British island colony, stowing away aboard a ship when he was just 12 years old and working on the floor of a clothing factory.

Lai is a Catholic, although he wasn’t always one. He met the faith through his wife, a pious woman he accompanied to church, where he heard the homilies of Cardinal Joseph Zen and in 1997 was baptized into the church by the same great man.

Today Lai is in a prison cell in Hong Kong, and the Communist dictatorship has once again seized one of his life’s works, shutting down his newspaper. But of all that has changed since he was a young boy, persecution by the communists has remained a constant. If you stand by your faith, in China there’s no way around it. “I have a soul,” he said in early 2019, and so the truth lives in him.

“No one can say we didn’t fight… Prison life is the pinnacle of my life. I am completely at peace.”

Lai’s path to success in Hong Kong began on the floor of a garment factory. He rose quickly, eventually joining management. He saved his money, invested in the stock market, and used the profits to buy a factory and start making clothing for middle-class consumers.

After the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre, where peaceful pro-democracy protesters were trapped, shrouded in darkness, and run over and gunned down by tanks, Lai sacrificed his stake in his mainland business by printing and selling pro-democracy shirts and starting a tabloid magazine that covered scandal and corruption in the party.

Undeterred by his loss, and still a very wealthy man, Lai channeled his time and fortune toward fighting their evil, enduring arrest, persecution, fire bombings, car attacks, and intimidation for it. Last week he was arrested again, and his and his company’s finances seized under the auspices of China’s new “national security law.”

Stories of his self-made riches and pro-democracy bravery dot corporate media, but unless you dig into the columns of those who’d met him, or read Christian news sources, you might miss what actually drives and fortifies him in the face of a vast and relentless enemy. You’d miss why a serial entrepreneur who has spent his life building and creating is willing to give it all, and you’d miss the truth behind why.

“The Communists,” he told Economic Strategy Institute President Clyde Berkowitz, “think they can buy and or intimidate everyone off, create their own reality, and write their own history. Effectively, they assume the role of God. They are kind of a religion or an anti-religion.”

‘They have initiation into the party as a kind of baptism. They have self-criticism as a kind of confession of sins, re-education as a kind of penance, and elevation to hero of the party as a kind of sainthood. And, of course, at least Mao [Zedong] has a kind of everlasting life as a photo smiling down on Tiananmen Square and as an embalmed corpse in a casket in the square.’

‘But the party and its members do not have souls. In fact, they are dead men walking, because the truth is not in them.’

“Life,” he told the Catholic Napa Institute in an October interview, “is more than just bread; life has a greater meaning.”

He’s right, and a lot of Christians understand this on its face, but what makes Lai different from a lot of us is while it’s easy to nod and to agree, it’s entirely another to act. We read Christ’s command to sell all of our possessions and follow him, and a lot of us give of our time and our money, some very generously, but how many give it all?

We know that the martyrs and saints suffered and for their courage on earth are saved. We might hope and pray to have their courage if ever put to the test, but until we are we never truly know if we will — so many don’t. We know that suffering has a purpose, that it sharpens and tests our characters, and that it should be offered up to God, but have you ever tried? It can be done, but it is very, very difficult to lift up your heart while your body and mind drag you back down to the temporal things torturing them.

“Here is my body, take it!” the Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen preached on Good Friday, 1979. “Here is my soul, my will, my energy, my strength, my poverty, my wealth — all that I have. It is yours, take it! Consecrate it! Offer it! Offer it to the Heavenly Father with yourself, in order that he, looking down on this great sacrifice, may see only you, his beloved Son, in whom he is well pleased. Transmute the poor bread of my life into your life; thrill the wine of my wasted life into your divine Spirit; unite my broken heart with your Heart; change my cross into a crucifix.”

“If you believe in the Lord,” Lai told the Napa Institute, “if you believe that all suffering has a reason, and the Lord is suffering with me, it will definitely define the person I am becoming so I am at peace with it.”

“I am what I am. I am what I believe. I cannot change it. And if I can’t change it, I have to accept my fate with praise.”

But how many actually do? How many American leaders, how many corporate businessmen, do just that? How many executives at Disney and Nike, the NBA and Blizzard Entertainment, in Apple and Hollywood do just that? Maybe no other alive.

Instead, how many of them bow before a thieving, lying, murderous godless slave state in exchange for access to growing markets? How many colleges and universities bow to that state’s every wish and every spy in exchange for paying full tuition into their already bloated coffers? How much do they make? “What is and should be,” Prestowitz asks, “the price of these souls?”

In Western universities and board rooms, souls are cheap. But Lai’s is not. “What separates Jimmy Lai,” a friend in corporate consulting wrote me, “from many of this era’s modern-day princes is that he deeply cares about something beyond his own money, power and status.”

“This is just living my life,” he told the BBC this spring, sitting in his mansion in northern Hong Kong. “But if I’m in jail I’m living my life meaningfully.”

“But you must fear some things,” reporter Danny Vincent asked. “For your family, for Hong Kong, for your loved ones.”

“Yes,” he replied, shuddering, his lip quivering and tears suddenly in his eyes. “You’re right. I do have fear.”

As with courage, sacrifice, and pain, it’s easy to say we have what it will take. Going to church on Sunday or giving what amounts to a rounding error to some social justice cause is fine, but is it enough? Is it remotely enough? How many of our Western elites know in their hearts that if they died in their sleep tonight, no one could say they gave it all for God?

So a lot of media accounts weren’t wrong, they just got it half right. Jimmy Lai, a man born in poverty, who became a billionaire, who became a Christian, who became a Catholic, who became a freedom fighter, might die this time, next time, or the time after that, imprisoned and penniless. But when he is weighed and measured, he will not be found wanting. And for that, when Jimmy Lai dies he will die a very wealthy man indeed.

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This article was published on July 1, 2021 and is reprinted with permission from The Federalist.

Religious Freedom Victory

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Supreme Court Upholds First Amendment Right of Catholic Church To Participate in Children’s Foster Care Program

In a victory for religious freedom, the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed the First Amendment right of a Catholic ministry to participate in a city-run children’s foster care program. In Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a unanimous Supreme Court found the City of Philadelphia’s attempts to forbid the Catholic Church from participating in foster care programs because of the church’s refusal to certify same-sex or unmarried couples as foster families, based on its religious beliefs, to be unconstitutional. In issuing the decision, the justices found that the city did not have a compelling interest in preventing the church from caring for orphaned and abused children. The Rutherford Institute filed an amicus brief in defense of the church’s right to not be penalized for its religious beliefs.

Affiliate attorneys Michael J. Lockerby, Michael A. Donadio, and Adam J. Kleinfeld of Foley & Lardner LLP assisted in advancing the arguments in Fulton.

“Religious freedom and freedom of conscience are among the most basic and fundamental rights guaranteed in the Constitution. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood quite clearly that religious freedom is one of the most fundamental human rights,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Under the First Amendment, the government may not discriminate against religious institutions or individuals on the basis of their religious beliefs or deny them the right to freely exercise their religion.”

For over 200 years, the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia has been providing care for orphans as part of its religious mission. Long before the City of Philadelphia began providing services to orphans and abused children, the Catholic Church worked to care for and find foster homes for orphans and abused and neglected children as part of its Catholic Social Services (CSS). Although state law gave authority to determine the care and custody of orphans and abused children to public entities such as the City of Philadelphia during the 20th century, it also allowed state-licensed foster-care agencies, including CSS, to conduct home studies and certify foster families to receive and care for orphans and abused children. Philadelphia and CSS entered into a contract under which CSS would certify foster families and recommend them for foster child placements. However, CSS does not certify same-sex or unmarried couples as foster families because of its religious beliefs.  In 2018, the city determined that CSS was in violation of a provision of its contract not to engage in sexual orientation discrimination.  As a result, it barred CSS from further participation in the foster care program. CSS sued Philadelphia, alleging that its removal from the foster care program violated its First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. Both the trial and appeals courts ruled that the contract provision barring sexual orientation discrimination is a neutral and generally applicable rule.  On further review, however, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the city’s non-discrimination ordinance did not apply to CSS and the contract provision was not generally applicable because certain city officials were given discretion to make exceptions to it.  Therefore, the city was required to demonstrate a compelling interest in denying CSS an exception to the nondiscrimination provision, which it could not do.

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.

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This article was published on June 18, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from the Rutherford Institute.

Why Every American Should Own a Gun…And Know How to Use It

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The issue seems to perfectly match the discordance of our times. As the media and political elites lecture us about “gun violence” and attempt to take our rights away, average Americans are buying guns and ammunition at a record pace.

Some 40% of first-time buyers are women.

What do average Americans know that the elites do not?

Most Americans know that even before the recent Biden crime wave, police response time for a 911 call in major metropolitan areas averaged around 11 minutes. Now like all averages, some responses were quicker and some were longer. In rural areas, it can be much longer. But since the average armed encounter lasts about three to four seconds, it is a distinction without much of a difference.

The simple fact that is understood by most sensible people, is that when it comes to self-protection, you are the first responder. Police will most likely arrive in time to put you in a plastic bag and issue a report. That is if they have not been defunded or distracted by mass riots that paralyze their ability to respond.

I think people likely know, that competency with a firearm can be obtained through training and that physical size and strength don’t play a large role in the process. Martial arts are great but it takes years, upwards of a decade to be truly competent. And, no matter how good you are, you can’t cheat father time. Your speed, power, and dexterity will decline. Besides, in about 40% of attacks today, you must deal with more than one assailant. To rely on your physical skills is a low probability bet.

Many of my shooting acquaintances are very competent, well into their 70s and 80s. That includes women as well.

In as little as a week, a decent civilian shooter can emerge from training schools like the famed Gunsite Academy in Paulden, Arizona. Good local training can also be found, including shooting clubs at the Ben Avery Shooting Facility just off the I-17 and Carefree Highway. With some 1600 acres of shooting facilities, it is the largest complex like this in the nation.

It is one of the “hidden gems” of Arizona, not likely to make it as a feature by the Arizona Republic, even though it is named for one of their famed journalists.

There is the Scottsdale Gun Club and C2 Tactical, Rio Salado, Shooter’s World, plus a variety of private trainers.

But the need for training and the facilities for training were known before things took a real turn for the worse, with the emergence of Progressive radicalism. Now, there is even greater urgency.

In many cities today, the local district attorneys are choosing not to enforce the law.  Bail has been all but eliminated in some places, and the idea of incarceration itself is now challenged. No one it seems has moral agency and is responsible for their bad behavior.  Crime is caused by poverty, white privilege, and white supremacy.  Social peace can only be had by taking your guns, your means of protection, away from you.

The Progressive idea, now largely adopted by the Democrat Party, of protecting you is to release criminals from prison, allow completely open borders, forcibly move drug-addled strangers into your neighborhood, defund the police, reduce or eliminate prison terms, and not prosecute criminals. And of course, allow people to taunt and humiliate the police, hogtie discipline in the school system, and argue that fathers are not necessary to raise a family.

In some jurisdictions, such as Portland, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, a constant state of rioting is permitted if not outwardly encouraged.

Progressives have also done a good job of breaking down the social control functions of religion and family, and have been responsible for a terrible coarsening of the culture.

While great at tearing down institutions, the Progressive seem unable to come up with better ones.  The result is social vacuum chaos and a high degree of instability. One wonders what the US would look like if we had to re-live a social trauma like the Great Depression.

A stable society is largely one that can control itself, by raising good people who can control themselves and take responsibility for their own actions. Building character is what church, school, and family were supposed to do, and were largely united in the effort. While not always successful, it is not a myth that some years ago, one could really leave the front door unlocked at night.

Now character is considered a “white trait”, and a means to hold people down.

Ever notice that Conservatives largely want individuals to reform themselves, while Progressive Democrats want to reform the world? Conservatives believe the human condition is improved by working moral character from the inside out, while Progressives feel it is improved by working on the outside environment inward.

Today, the media and the schools now seem more a purveyor of social nihilism that demands no personal responsibility. It is all the fault of capitalism, or patriarchy, or white supremacy. Not surprisingly, people who truly believe they are victims, held down by “the system”, tend to be unhappy and casual about violence.

In short, most people know they are being subjected to a cruel, and at times a truly silly social experiment by people who think three-quarters of a degree change in temperature in the next hundred years is the greatest threat to the social order.

Police? We don’t need no stinking police! Let’s just “reimagine” a world without authority. They love that word. They want us to be part of their Jacobin experiment.

People spend a lot of time on social media. They see the video camera footage of elderly Asian women having their heads stomped into the pavement, people being sucker-punched on the street, Amazon delivery people attacking clients, and frequent brawls in airports.

One gets the feeling that the wheels are starting to come off of our civilization. That is only partially true.  It appears more likely the wheels are being purposefully removed.

It is not clear how we will come out of this. A counter-reaction seems to be brewing as parents begin to understand their local school has been taken over by space aliens from Berkeley and that some district attorneys want to impose their Jacobin experiments on your community.

So, it is only logical it would seem, to assume personal responsibility for your own protection.  Or as Charles Barkley put it concerning defunding the police, “who you gonna call, Ghost Busters?

The government is doing too many other things to be concerned with its basic responsibilities. It is too busy attempting to change human nature and control the environment.

Get a gun.  Learn the law.  Get good training.  You are on your own, kiddo.

Don’t Be Fooled: Gender Identity Policies Don’t Follow the Science

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During the past presidential election, you may remember seeing black yard signs with lists of creed-like statements written in rainbow text. The creeds included claims like “science is real.” All Americans should agree with this statement.

And yet, contrary to this pithy creed, any law that classifies gender identity as a protected class under civil rights law denies science. The Equality Act and the Fairness for All Act turn the scientific reality that there are only two sexes into the legal equivalent of racism.

The Equality Act has turned civil rights law from a shield intended to protect racial minorities from discrimination into a sword that compels conformity to subjective viewpoints on sexual orientation and gender identity.

These state- and local-level policies allow male athletes to compete against females in sports, even though studies show biological males retain a competitive advantage over females even after two years of taking estrogen.

The Fairness for All Act drafters touted it as a reasonable compromise meant to mitigate the harms of the Equality Act. It includes religious exemptions and preserves the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which the Equality Act would nullify.

However, this approach did not protect religious freedom in Utah, where legislators passed a similar compromise bill.

Unsatisfied with the compromise, gender identity activists helped pass a ban on counseling that would have helped children struggling with gender dysphoria.

The rule discriminates against counselors who seek to help patients reconcile with their biological sex and allows only gender-affirming counseling that supports chemical and surgical transition.

These methods overlook the fact that 88% to 98% of those struggling with gender dysphoria will accept their biological sex after going through puberty, according to the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

Enshrining the fundamentally flawed and radical idea that a person can change sex—at any age—as a civil right threatens the safety and freedom of all Americans, religious or not.

The notion that a person can change his or her sex rejects science. This was on full display in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the Equality Act. During the hearing, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., asked Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, “Are there more than two sexes, in your opinion?” David replied, “It’s not limited to two.”

While David’s answer sent shockwaves through social media, it should not have come as a surprise. Gender identity advocates regularly insist that those who believe that there are only two sexes—male and female—overlook the science of intersex conditions. But David and other activists’ references to intersex people do not debunk the sexual binary.

“Intersex conditions” or disorders in sexual development are statistical rarities occurring in approximately 1 out of every 5,000 births, according to Ryan Anderson’s research.

Anderson’s Amazon-banned book, “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement,” states the medical community considers these atypical expressions of the sexual binary, not a third sex or the result of a third gonad.

Because gender ideology flatly rejects science, enshrining it into federal law means no amount of religious liberty exemptions will prevent the damage caused by such policies like the Equality Act.

Women and children—religious or not—will lose privacy, safety, and fairness in public and federally funded single-sex facilities and programs, which exist because of biological differences between men and women.

Medical professionals—religious or not—who treat individuals struggling with gender dysphoria will lose the freedom to treat patients according to the best medical and scientific evidence.

Normally, doctors and counselors correct a patient’s disordered perception of her body. Medical professionals also treat other body dysmorphias, like anorexia. Yet, the “gender affirmative” approach requires that they support a patient’s disordered perception of her body and even physically change its appearance to conform to the disorder.

Laws that threaten the freedom of doctors and counselors harm struggling individuals. By reducing their options for care, these laws minimize patients’ chances to flourish in mind and body.

Denying reality in the name of “gender-affirming care” causes harm, not healing. While the Fairness for All Act may protect doctors and counselors inside religious institutions, it will expose those in secular institutions to punishment.

People may be free to adopt radical new ideas about gender for themselves, but if activists have their way and the Senate passes the Equality Act, the federal government will have power to pressure Americans into denying science under threat of punishment.

Even good-faith compromises like the Fairness for All Act suppress the freedoms of all gender identity dissenters outside of religious institutions. That is hardly fair at all.

America is at its best when all citizens can seek and live according to the truth. Disagreements between gender identity advocates and Americans who know there are only two sexes will continue. Congress should allow them to, by rejecting the Equality Act and the Fairness for All Act that shut down any conversation.

Most importantly, Congress should affirm that “science is real.”

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This article was published on June 14, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from Daily Signal.

Armed Teacher Thwarts Kidnapping of 11-Year-Old Student at Utah School: Police

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A Utah teacher is being hailed a hero after police say he pulled his concealed firearm on a man who tried to kidnap an 11-year-old student.

Ogden police said officers were called to Lincoln Elementary School on Tuesday when Ira Cox-Berry, 41, walked up to an 11-year-old girl playing on the playground and tried to grab her.

Lt. Brian Eynon said a teacher who witnessed the situation from inside ran out and confronted the suspect and the girl was able to break free, ABC4 reported. The teacher was then able to get all 20 students off the playground and into the school, police said at that point, Mr. Cox-Berry reportedly approached the school building and was trying to force his way inside when the teacher, a licensed concealed gun carrier who was not named by police, pulled his firearm and held the suspect until police arrived.

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Continue reading this article at Washington Times.

Arizona Lawmakers, Governor Move Toward Harm Reduction

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Arizona’s Governor and lawmakers are displaying an enlightened shift in strategy addressing the overdose crisis. After the state experienced an estimated 48 percent jump in overdose deaths during the first eight months of 2020 (a 32 percent increase in most populous Maricopa County in all of 2020), they decided to embrace harm reduction.

On May 14 the Arizona House voted 48–11 to pass SB 1486, which removed fentanyl test strips from the list of legally prohibited drug paraphernalia, after the Arizona Senate voted unanimously in favor of the bill. On May 19, Governor Ducey (R) signed it into law.

Fentanyl test strips, made by a Canadian biotechnology company, were designed for urine drug screening. The tests strips are not approved for sale in U.S. drugstores or other outlets by the Food and Drug Administration, but harm reduction organizations—including “needle exchange” programs— have been buying them and handing them out to IV drug users who use them “off‐​label” to test heroin, cocaine, and other drugs for the presence of fentanyl. Researchers claim the tests strips are highly accurate and can detect up to 10 analogs of fentanyl. They also find they save lives by causing drug users to use smaller amounts and/​or take a drug more slowly when they detect it contains fentanyl.

When signing the bill into law, Governor Ducey said:

We want everyone who is using drugs to seek professional treatment. But until someone is ready to get help, we need to make sure they have the tools necessary to prevent a lethal overdose.

Speaking of “needle exchange” programs, syringe services programs (SSPs), the term public health professionals use for “needle exchange” programs, are endorsed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and the American Medical Association. In January 2020, then‐​Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams and Professor Ricky D. Bluthenthal of the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine spoke at the Cato Institute on the benefits of syringe services programs. They are proven to reduce the spread of HIV, hepatitis C, and other infectious diseases. They also serve to reduce overdose deaths because one of their services is to distribute the overdose antidote naloxone as well as fentanyl test strips and other drug‐​testing materials. Dr. Adams pointed out SSPs offer the added benefits of screening IV drug users for hepatitis and HIV so they can get treatment, and bringing many of them into rehab programs……

*****

Continue reading this article at Cato Institute.

A Braver, Newer World Of Mail-Order Abortion

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In the U.K. and U.S., COVID-19 has provided an excuse for even more accessible abortion. In America at least, it seems the Catholic Church might fight back.

The reshaping of society by COVID-19 has generated plenty of discussion, but not much of that chatter has included the ushering in of mail-order abortion.

In April last year, the Biden administration waived, on the basis of the unfolding pandemic, the requirement for women wanting an abortion to visit a doctor’s office or clinic, thereby facilitating abortion pills via telemedicine and mail delivery.

In the U.K., a similar thing had already happened in March through the most significant change to abortion legislation since the 1967 Abortion Act. The U.K. Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) published legislation that would allow a woman to have an abortion at home without medical supervision.

With media attention in both countries focused on the start of lockdown measures—not that most mainstream media are particularly keen to engage with abortion beyond fixed narratives of its inalienable rightness and necessity—both changes slipped through under the radar, going largely unnoticed and uncommented on.

In April, the Biden administration also lifted restrictions on federal funding for research involving human fetal tissue and rescinded a Trump administration policy barring organizations such as Planned Parenthood from receiving federal family planning grants if they refer women for abortions.

Biden’s abortion advocacy is striking given he is the first Catholic president in office since John F. Kennedy 60 years ago, and he is not shy about wielding his Catholic credentials, despite being very much at odds with the Catholic Church’s strict anti-abortion stance.

From the very start of his presidency, Biden hasn’t held back, as indicated shortly after his inauguration by one of his first tweets as president on 22 January: “As we mark the 48th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, now is the time to rededicate ourselves to the work ahead. From codifying Roe to eliminating maternal and infant health disparities, our Administration is committed to ensuring everyone has access to the health care they need.”

That urge to codify has not gone unnoticed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Last November, Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, the USCCB’s president, decided to form a working group to address the “complex and difficult situation” posed by Biden’s stances on abortion and other issues—such as marriage, gender and sexual ethics—that clash with official Church teaching.

The group proposed drafting a document—assigning the task to the USCCB’s Committee on Doctrine—to clarify the Church’s stance on whether you can receive Holy Communion if you persist in publicly advocating for abortion. It’s been a conundrum for Church authorities for decades in the face of modern society’s strident pro-abortion stance—there have been an estimated 60 million abortions in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade in 1973—and now has been brought to a head through Biden’s ascension to the land’s highest political office.

“Because President Biden is Catholic, it presents a unique problem for us,” Archbishop Joseph Naumann, chair of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, recently told the Associated Press. A permissive stance on abortion from any public figure constitutes “a grave moral evil,” Naumann explained, hence it is necessary to publicly rebuke Biden on the issue. “It can create confusion,” Naumann added. “How can he say he’s a devout Catholic and he’s doing these things that are contrary to the Church’s teaching?”

Nancy Pelosi, the first woman in U.S. history to serve as speaker of the United States House of Representatives, could also be affected by any injunction on receiving Communion. She is vocal about the importance of her Catholic faith while roundly criticized by many American Catholics for not speaking out against abortion.

While Church teaching clearly maintains that Catholic politicians should not “check their faith at the door,” says David Cloutier, a theology professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., there isn’t a corresponding expectation that they somehow impose Catholic doctrine or teaching in an absolute manner.

Saint Thomas Aquinas accepted that civil laws cannot perfectly be framed to reject all evils, but only the most damaging evils, Cloutier points out. This tradition, he explains, has developed an understanding of acceptable forms of “cooperation with evil” that can be tolerated for proportionately good reasons.

“What the Catholic politician must avoid is what is termed ‘formal cooperation with evil,’ wherein one’s action shares the sinful intent of others, or does not make sufficiently clear that one is tolerating an evil rather than endorsing a good,” Cloutier says. “Moreover, even apart from formal cooperation, one must consider how socially damaging a particular permissive law might be.”

To take on the American president is a bold move by the bishops, to say the least, especially with U.S. Catholic Church authorities being up to their necks in the scandal of historical sex abuse. But it appears U.S. bishops have every intention of doing just that. It’s in stark contrast to religious leaders in the U.K.—both those of the Catholic and Anglican churches—who rolled over during COVID-19 and lockdowns, capitulating to every whim of draconian governmental policy. They didn’t say much about the U.K.’s new abortion policy either.

“It seems to me that many of the church leaders believe that if we, as a Church, be nice and avoid all these areas that go against the cultural or political orthodoxies of the day…somehow people will flock to us and the churches will be full,” Paul Coleman, executive director of free-speech legal advocates ADF International, said in a recent episode of the Spectator magazine’s “Holy Smoke” podcast, which focuses on important and controversial topics in world religion.

This “prevailing view we are getting from the church leadership” that doesn’t appear at all dissuaded by all the evidence that it isn’t working, in turn “makes it harder for the people sitting in the pews,” Coleman explains. “Because if they are not seeing an example, it’s so much harder for them to have the courage to speak out in whatever context they are in, whether it’s business or the school they teach at, or what have you.”

The move to mail-order abortion in the British context feels like something from the mind of Aldous Huxley. In the British writer’s famous 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, Huxley offered a genetically engineered future in which life is pain-free but meaningless. It was a warning of the dangers of giving the state control over new and powerful technologies. One illustration of this theme is the rigid control of reproduction through technological and medical intervention, including the surgical removal of ovaries and use of cloning. But it was all fiction, so what was the worry?

By 1957, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited, in which he compares the modernizing world of the time with his prophetic fantasy and also with that offered in 1949 by George Orwell through his more brutal dystopian depiction in 1984, which can be seen as a reply and an update, as Orwell saw it, to Huxley’s earlier warnings. Coming after the slaughter of World War II, it wasn’t surprising that Orwell saw totalitarianism having a much more violent face. But in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley argues convincingly based on the accompanying evidence that it appears the world is moving more toward his type of soporific scientific dictatorship in which a passive population is subdued through scientific and psychological engineering.

“Pressure had been mounting on the [U.K.] government on this issue for years until March 2020 when the abortion lobby saw the opportunity it had long been waiting for,” Andrea Williams, director of Christian Concern and the Christian Legal Centre, wrote in a recent article for the Critic magazine titled “One year on from home abortions.” She notes how, following the move by the DHSC, her organization immediately began to pursue a judicial review of the U.K. government’s decision and that evidence soon emerged that the new service was “unchecked and women were being put at risk.”

“Disclosed documents in our legal case have revealed the direct access key players in the abortion industry have to senior civil servants at the heart of the DHSC,” Williams says. “They wield significant influence, do not take no for an answer, and have repeatedly applied pressure on the government to allow DIY home abortion telemedicine service.”

The USCCB hold their next national meeting in June, during which bishops will vote on whether the Committee on Doctrine should continue working on the Communion-related document, with a two-thirds majority needed, to facilitate an eventual public release. That looks more than likely, according to the Associated Press, as even bishops critical of the initiative—worried the USCCB’s emphasis on abortion undermines its ability to find common ground with Biden on issues Pope Francis has highlighted such as climate change, immigration, and inequality—are predicted to give overwhelming approval for the move. Whether that then leads to public debate and any form of reckoning over such a dramatic shift in the U.S. abortion landscape remains to be seen. It doesn’t seem to be happening in the U.K. yet.

“From the beginning this has been about exploiting the biggest crisis this country has faced since the Second World War,” Williams says. “It was an opportunity to achieve the abortion industry’s long-term goal of abortion-on-demand.”

*****

This article was published on May 18, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The American Conservative.

 

Life Wins! Governor Signs SB 1457!

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A Statement from Center for Arizona Policy President Cathi Herrod, Esq

Today, Arizonans win. Arizona children diagnosed with disabilities prior to birth will no longer be discriminated against. Arizona women will be ensured commonsense safeguards if they choose the abortion pill. Arizona taxpayers will not be forced to support abortions at public colleges and universities, and the laws of Arizona will be interpreted to value all human life.

Governor Doug Ducey signed one of the most significant pro-life bills in recent history today. Preborn babies will be saved the day SB 1457 goes into effect.

The Governor and Arizona pro-life lawmakers, led by sponsor Senator Nancy Barto, stood up for the lives of the vulnerable in the face of heavy, misleading opposition. Their dedication to the value of life is evident in the tenacity that brought back SB 1457 from what appeared to be the end of the bill on the Senate floor.

You may remember SB 1457 failed to pass a few weeks ago based on minor language concerns. With those concerns addressed last week, every Republican lawmaker voted in favor and every Democrat voted against this life-affirming bill. The slim victory was enough to send SB 1457 to the Governor, who wasted no time signing it into law today.

Arizonans can be proud of a state that leads the way in protecting the preborn and caring for women facing unplanned pregnancies.

Today’s victory serves as a reminder that elections matter. Last November, Arizonans elected a pro-life majority to serve at the State Capitol. Though the margin is a slim, one-vote majority in each chamber, it was enough to make the difference for life!

Please contact Governor Ducey and thank him for his commitment to signing pro-life legislation in Arizona.  Call him at (602) 542-4331 or email him a quick “thank you.”

*****

This statement was published on April 27, 2021 by the Center for Arizona Policy

Swedish Hospital Bans Puberty Blockers, Cross-Sex Hormones for Gender Dysphoric Youths Under 16. We Should, Too.

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Sweden, arguably one of the most politically and socially liberal countries in the world, has nonetheless taken a giant step toward protecting gender dysphoric minors and their mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine reported on Wednesday that the Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Hospital—an arm of the one of the most renowned hospitals in Sweden, the Karolinska University Hospital—recently released a policy statement that included new guidelines for the care of youths with gender dysphoria under the age of 16.

The guidelines, which took effect April 1, are profound: They contradict many of the assertions of the transgender lobby, which encourage parents and children to accept that cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers are normal, healthy treatments for minors with gender dysphoria and should be pursued with little hesitation.

In the unofficial English translation of the original Swedish text provided by the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, the statement from the Children’s Hospital reads in part:

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In December 2019, the [Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services] published an overview of the knowledge base, which showed a lack of evidence for both the long-term consequences of the treatments, and the reasons for the large influx of patients in recent years.

These treatments are potentially fraught with extensive and irreversible adverse consequences, such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, infertility, increased cancer risk, and thrombosis.

This makes it challenging to assess the risk/benefit for the individual patient, and even more challenging for the minors and their guardians to be in a position of an informed stance regarding these treatments.

The guidelines appear to lean on the U.K. High Court’s Dec. 1 ruling in the Keira Bell case, saying it “established overarching problems associated with puberty-blocking treatment,” adding:

Further, the ruling specifically establishes that it is highly unlikely, if at all possible, for an individual under the age of 16 to give informed consent to this treatment.

Influenced by that ruling, the Children’s Hospital said that “it has been decided that hormonal treatments (i.e., puberty-blocking and cross-sex hormones) will not be initiated in gender dysphoric patients under the age of 16.”

Patients between the ages of 16 and 18 may only receive treatment within clinical trial settings approved by the Ethical Review Agency/Swedish Institutional Review Board. The Children’s Hospital said it would be doing a “careful individual assessment” of patients currently receiving puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to determine whether those treatments should continue.

Those new guidelines mean the Children’s Hospital has stopped following what the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine called the “Dutch Protocol,” which it says “allows for administration of puberty blockers at age 12 (and increasingly, as young as 8-9, at the early stage of puberty known as Tanner 2), and cross-sex hormones at the age of 16.”

Even to liberal Sweden, that seemed astoundingly young.

The new protocol also makes Sweden the first country to officially deviate from World Professional Association for Transgender Health guidance, which continues to promote puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on children under age 16.

It’s hard to fathom that left-wing ideology in American culture, dragging the medical community with it, has ceded so much ground to LGBTQ activists that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are even discussed as options—let alone healthy ones—for children.

For years, medical professionals didn’t even know what puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones would do to a child. Little research was available because it had rarely been tried, tested, and evaluated, yet now the medical community—bolstered by leftist ideologues—push them.

The American Academy of Pediatrics endorses a “gender-affirming” approach that includes supporting insurance plans that include coverage for, “when appropriate, surgical interventions.”

Caution seems far more prudent when it comes to a child’s growing body, especially through puberty, but when it comes to transgenderism, prudence, research, and facts have been actively cast aside. Patience, talk therapy, and time are rarely discussed as viable options within the LGBTQ community.

On this issue, much of the medical community, and culture with it, has surrendered to the pressure of the LGBTQ lobby, which usually suggests that the only “cure” to gender dysphoric symptoms a child has is a medical transition via cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.

Unfortunately, often the end result is akin to that of someone like Bell, whose case the Children’s Hospital guidelines alluded to (but without mentioning her name). She began a transition at the behest of medical professionals, and now lives as a biological female without breasts and regrets her decision.

Lawmakers, concerned parents, and medical professionals who seek to err on the side of caution need to come together and push for statewide bans of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children under 18 years of age.

As the new Swedish Children’s Hospital guidelines stated, the medical evidence against utilizing these treatments is compelling. They are drastic treatments that deliver irreversible, life-altering results.

In April, Arkansas became the first state to ban cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for minors. Other states should follow suit. Children’s minds and bodies must be protected before it’s too late.

*****

This article was published on May 7, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

The US Government’s Debt-to-GDP Ratio Is Worse Than Greece’s Before the 2008 Crash (And It’s About to Get Worse)

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The US is in uncharted debt territory. That should worry us.

President Biden on Wednesday pitched a new plan to Americans before a joint session of Congress: more spending.

The just-released $1.8 trillion plan, presented just weeks after Biden signed a $1.9 trillion in COVID relief spending into law, includes “free” community college as well as universal preschool for all three and four-year-olds.

“Mr. Biden could usher in a new era that fundamentally expands the size and role of the federal government,” The New York Times reported.

The announcement comes months after the Congressional Budget Office released a report projecting a $2.3 trillion deficit in 2021.

Biden’s plan will almost certainly make the deficit worse. Though the plan contains various tax increases to fund its programs, the taxes are likely to fall well short of government outlays, economists, say.

“The laws of economics are more rigid than the laws of the federal government, and these tax hikes are unlikely to yield the windfall Biden expects,” Joshua Jahani, the managing director of Jahani and Associates, noted in a recent NBC News article.

As a result, the $28.2 trillion national debt will swell even faster. Worse, when unfunded liabilities are included in the balance sheet, as private companies are legally required to do, the debt exceeds $120 trillion.

How much risk these obligations present is unclear.

There is a school of thought that suggests these debts pose no serious risk. After all, in theory, a government can roll over its debt indefinitely. However, in a recent article for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, economist David Andolfatto noted that ultimately the government doesn’t decide how much debt is bearable. The market does.

“There is presumably a limit to how much the market is willing or able to absorb in the way of Treasury securities, for a given price level (or inflation rate) and a given structure of interest rates,” Andolfatto wrote. “However, no one really knows how high the debt-to-GDP ratio can get. We can only know once we get there.”

A Dangerous Level of Debt?

Andolfatto is right that no one really knows the debt tipping point. But it’s worth noting that the US debt-to-GDP ratio—essentially a country’s debt compared to its annual economic output—was 129 percent at the end of 2020. In other words, the official US debt was nearly a third larger than the entire US economy.

That is considerably higher than Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio in 2010 when it received a bailout from the International Monetary Fund to avoid defaulting on its obligations.

The United States is not Greece, of course. Its economic potential is far greater, and it is operating under a currency it controls. But there’s no denying that the US is in uncharted territory. Today, the federal government debt-to-GDP ratio is higher than it was at the conclusion of World War II, when the nation assembled one of the largest armies the world has ever seen. Perhaps even worse, the government is piling on debt faster than ever.

Eventually, as Andolfatto notes, the market may very well decide enough is enough, and the demand for Treasury securities will dry up. Indeed, this is likely one reason cryptocurrencies are suddenly flourishing.

In seemingly the blink of an eye, cryptos have gone from being discussed in the corners of Reddit rooms and university lounges to a market of more than $2 trillion. It’s no exaggeration to say cryptos are now mainstream; they are being gobbled up by hedge funds and star athletes signing 10-figure contracts.

And it’s not hard to see why. The market is hedging. Like rats on a sinking ship, many are eyeing an exit, sensing that the dollar’s day may finally be coming to an end as its value is eroded by mass pumping.

In a popular 2016 article, author Richard Ebeling explored how central planners in ancient Rome destroyed the economy.

A lot of what Ebeling describes—debt, massive spending, inflation, and price controls destroy—sound eerily familiar to modern ears. And Ebeling naturally explores the age-old riddle: why did Rome fail?

For centuries, as any history buff knows, thinkers from Edward Gibbon to Peter Heather and beyond, have asked this question. The answers vary. Some blame barbarians, others immigration. Some claimed Christianity was at fault, while others point to disease or the weakening of Roman legions.

All of these theories are interesting and worthy of examination, but I’ve found no single better explanation than the one offered by economist Ludwig von Mises who concluded Rome’s decay stemmed from its rejection of individualism and free markets.

“The marvelous civilization of antiquity perished because it did not adjust its moral code and its legal system to the requirements of the market economy,” Mises wrote.

He continued:

“A social order is doomed if the actions which its normal functioning requires are rejected by the standards of morality, are declared illegal by the laws of the country, and are prosecuted as criminal by the courts and the police.

The Roman Empire crumbled to dust because it lacked the spirit of [classical] liberalism and free enterprise. The policy of interventionism and its political corollary, the Fuhrer principle, decomposed the mighty empire as they will by necessity always disintegrate and destroy any social entity.”

The American president and statesman John Adams once reportedly said there are two ways nations are destroyed.

“One is by the sword and the other is by debt,” Adams reputedly said. (Though the quote is widely attributed to Adams, it’s not supported by written documentation.)

There is no question debt is a serious problem. (Just ask the ancient Romans and modern Grecians.) But if Mises is correct, the explosion of debt may merely be a symptom of a much larger problem: a collapse of the spirit of liberty and the growth of a system hostile to free enterprise.

We should learn from one thing we have that the Romans didn’t: their ominous example.

*****

This article was published on May 2, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from FEE, Foundation For Economic Education.

Planned Parenthood’s Denunciation of Founder Rings ‘Hollow’ to These Black Pro-Life Leaders

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Black pro-life leaders condemned Planned Parenthood’s “hollow” denunciation of Margaret Sanger after Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson distanced the organization from Sanger’s “association with white supremacist groups and eugenics.”

Human Coalition vice president Benjamin Watson, a former NFL athlete, said Sunday that Planned Parenthood’s denunciation of its founder rang “hollow” in light of the organization’s current work.

“Whether they personally identify with Sanger’s ideology or not, they continue to carry out her mission, by serving as the leading executioner of our children,” Watson said. “The same Sanger they claim to disavow would applaud their efforts and results, as a disproportionate percentage of black children have been killed in Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics.”

“Acknowledging a racist history does not absolve them of the blood on their hands, as they continue to take full advantage of victims of the racism they decry,” Watson said.

Black pro-life leaders condemned Planned Parenthood’s “hollow” denunciation of Margaret Sanger after Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson distanced the organization from Sanger’s “association with white supremacist groups and eugenics.”

Human Coalition vice president Benjamin Watson, a former NFL athlete, said Sunday that Planned Parenthood’s denunciation of its founder rang “hollow” in light of the organization’s current work.

“Whether they personally identify with Sanger’s ideology or not, they continue to carry out her mission, by serving as the leading executioner of our children,” Watson said. “The same Sanger they claim to disavow would applaud their efforts and results, as a disproportionate percentage of black children have been killed in Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics.”

“Acknowledging a racist history does not absolve them of the blood on their hands, as they continue to take full advantage of victims of the racism they decry,” Watson said.

In the Saturday New York Times op-ed, McGill Johnson touched on Sanger’s support for eugenics as well as the speech Sanger gave to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan. The Planned Parenthood president did not make mention of Sanger’s “Negro Project,” an initiative aimed at giving black women access to birth control.

“We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation,” Sanger wrote in 1939 of the black community.

McGill Johnson wrote that “up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder’s actions,” but noted that whether Sanger was a racist is “not a simple yes or no question.”

“We don’t know what was in Sanger’s heart, and we don’t need to in order to condemn her harmful choices,” the Planned Parenthood president said. “What we have is a history of focusing on white womanhood relentlessly.

“Whether our founder was a racist is not a simple yes or no question,” McGill Johnson said. “Our reckoning is understanding her full legacy, and its impact. Our reckoning is the work that comes next.”

Dr. Deborah Honeycutt, board chair of Human Coalition Action, said that “Planned Parenthood has contributed to the harm of women of color for decades,” saying that McGill Johnson’s “so-called ‘reckoning’ does nothing to change that truth.”

“They have failed to confront the white supremacy within its organization, as they continue to aggressively prey on black and brown communities with abortion,” Honeycutt said. “Destroying human life contributes to a culture of death and injustice, and Planned Parenthood will always be known for killing a generation of minorities, just as Margaret Sanger dreamed that it would.”

In a 1939 letter, Sanger described her plan to reach out to Southern black ministers and leaders in order to quell suspicions about the birth control clinics she was opening. Sanger explained that she thought the “Negro population” would be more amenable to learning about birth control from black leaders.

“While the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors, they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table,” Sanger wrote in 1939. “They do not do this with the white people, and if we can train the Negro doctor at the clinic, he can go among them with enthusiasm and with knowledge, which, I believe, will have far-reaching results.”

Sanger added that the doctor’s work should be only with the “Negro profession and the nurses, hospital, social workers, as well as the County’s white doctors.”

“His success will depend upon his personality and his training by us,” Sanger said.

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members,” she wrote.

Sanger also emphasized a strong interest in furthering eugenics through birth control on many occasions.

“Birth Control, on the other hand, not only opens the way to the eugenist, but it preserves his work,” she wrote in a February 1919 article titled “Birth Control and Racial Betterment.” “Furthermore, it not only prepares the ground in a natural fashion for the development of a higher standard of motherhood and of family life, but enables the child to be better born, better cared for in infancy, and better educated.”

Birth control did not mean “contraception indiscriminately practiced,” but instead the elimination of defective “human weeds,” Sanger wrote in 1923.  She also described eugenics as “the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems,” in a 1921 article.

“I am glad that Alexis McGill Johnson is finally acknowledging what many black leaders have said for decades—Margaret Sanger harbored racist and eugenicist views,” Human Coalition Action Executive Director Rev. Dean Nelson said in a statement. “The problem with Margaret Sanger is more than just her ‘association’ with white supremacist groups and eugenics, it’s the implementation of those views in creating the largest abortion provider in America targeting people of color.”

“You cannot acknowledge the racist person and history without admitting to the racist vision that has resulted in nearly 80% of Planned Parenthood’s abortion facilities being located within walking distance of minority neighborhoods,” Nelson said.

Planned Parenthood did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Caller News Foundation.

*****

This article was published on April 19, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from Daily Signal.

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