Will the Conclave select a Catholic Pope or another Communist Cleric? thumbnail

Will the Conclave select a Catholic Pope or another Communist Cleric?

By Editorial Board – DrRichSwier.com

Catholics suffered under Pope Francis, globally. His reign was marked more by Marxism than Catholicism.

In November, 2022 Pope Francis gave the Jesuits of left-leaning America magazine an extensive and exclusive interview. During that interview Pope Francis stated, “If I See the Gospel in a Sociological Way Only, Yes, I Am a Communist, and So Too Is Jesus”

reported,

It is shocking for a pope to insinuate that the “Gospel [viewed] in a sociological way only” reveals that Jesus was a communist, and, therefore, he is too.

Besides being blasphemous, such an insinuation stems from a methodological error.

Obviously, a sociological analysis of the Gospel, in strictly scientific terms, does not lead to that conclusion. That only occurs if one adopts the so-called “Marxist analysis” as scientific—as does liberation theology. Now, Marxist analysis is nothing but an adaptation of reality to the aprioristic Marxist premises. Marxists do not investigate reality according to objective facts but interpret and adapt it to previous conclusions of the communist and socialist parties’ ideology.

It is not surprising that Pope Francis states: “The communists stole some of our Christian values.” It also explains his lavish praise for the late Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the leading promoter of the Vatican policy of détente with communist regimes, who affirmed, “Catholics who live in Cuba are happy under the socialist regime.”4 Ditto Pope Francis’s satisfaction concerning the dialogue with China because, he says, the Chinese are “a people of great wisdom.”5 Everyone knows he is not ‘dialoguing’ with the Chinese people but with the Chinese Communist Party.

QUESTION: How did this happen, how did Catholics get a Communist Cleric?

KGB in Catholic Church

During the Cold War, the KGB extensively infiltrated the Catholic Church in various Eastern European countries. The KGB aimed to undermine the Church’s influence and promote Communist interests. For instance, in Lithuania, the KGB infiltrated the Catholic seminary with agents and recruited seminarians to spread pro-Soviet ideologies.

The KGB also targeted high-ranking Catholic officials. In 1975, the KGB organized a conference in Warsaw to devise a strategy for more coordinated intelligence operations against the Catholic Church. They aimed to cultivate influential Catholic officials and gather intelligence on future papal elections.

In addition, the KGB attempted to create divisions within the Catholic Church by promoting leftist Catholic groups and publishing anti-Vatican materials. For example, the KGB supported the publication ‘Neo-Znak’ to publish anti-Vatican or pro-Soviet Catholic materials.

Former KGB agents and defectors have provided evidence of these infiltrations. Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former general in Romania’s secret police, claimed that the KGB created liberation theology, a quasi-Marxist movement that flourished in Latin America from the 1960s to the 1990s.

These infiltrations highlight the extent to which the KGB sought to influence and control the Catholic Church during the Cold War period.

Homsexuality during the reign of Frances

Pope Francis’s Initiatives:

Pope Francis has moved towards greater inclusivity, including allowing blessings for same-sex couples in specific contexts, a significant shift in the Church’s stance. He has also spoken out against laws that criminalize homosexuality and has emphasized the Church’s welcoming of all people, according to PBS.

Transgender Inclusion:

The Vatican has also released a document outlining the inclusion of transgender people in Catholic sacraments, allowing them to be baptized and serve as godparents and witnesses.

Legal Status in Vatican City:

Vatican City does not have laws criminalizing same-sex sexual activity between consenting adults.

 The Bottom Line

Pope Frances, formally Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 13 March 2013 until his death. He was the first pope to be a Jesuit, the first Latin American, the first from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first born or raised outside Europe.

In his preaching at Santo Spirito Church in Sassia close to the Vatican, on Sunday 11 April, 2021, Pope Francis claimed that the ideal of sharing property — in contrast to private ownership — is “pure Christianity and not Communism“.

Pope John Paul II consistently criticized communism, viewing it as an atheistic system that suppressed individual dignity and freedom. He believed it was inherently flawed and ultimately self-destructive. While acknowledging his role in inspiring resistance, he emphasized that the fall of communism was also due to its own internal weaknesses and mistakes.

Here are some key points from his teachings on communism:

Atheistic System:

John Paul II saw communism as inherently atheistic, emphasizing its rejection of God and spiritual values.

Suppression of Individual Dignity:

He criticized communism for its focus on collective interests at the expense of individual rights and freedoms.

Flawed Social System:

He argued that communism failed to deliver true social justice and economic prosperity, instead leading to oppression and poverty.

Self-Destructive Nature:

John Paul II believed that communism’s internal contradictions and failures ultimately led to its collapse.

Inspired Resistance:

He played a significant role in inspiring resistance to communism, particularly in Eastern Europe, but acknowledged that the fall was also due to other factors.
For example, he stated, “It would be simplistic to say that Divine Providence caused the fall of Communism. In a certain sense Communism as a system fell by itself. It fell as a consequence of its own mistakes and abuses. It proved to be a medicine more dangerous than the disease itself” according to a post on Medium.

His words and actions, especially during his visit to Poland, were seen as a catalyst for the weakening of communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

Frances was a Communist Cleric.

What Catholics globally are praying for is a Catholic Pope like Saint John Paul II.

©2025 . All rights reserved.

The post Will the Conclave select a Catholic Pope or another Communist Cleric? appeared first on Dr. Rich Swier.

The Most Significant Accomplishments of Trump’s First 100 Days thumbnail

The Most Significant Accomplishments of Trump’s First 100 Days

By Family Research Council

Since Franklin D. Roosevelt ushered in the New Deal in 1933 in just three months, historians have measured a president’s success or failure by its first 100 days. As we reach President Trump’s 100th day in office, the 47th president’s second administration has taken a whirlwind of decisive actions to protect life, end artificial support for extreme transgender ideology, uphold religious liberty, secure America’s southern border, restore national sovereignty, and return to a traditional America First foreign policy fostering peace and prosperity.

President Trump’s second first-100-days in office have been “all about one thing: promises made and promises kept. And we have pages and pages and pages of those promises being kept already in just 100 days,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told “This Week on Capitol Hill” host Tony Perkins ahead of this week’s milestone.

Here are some of the president’s most significant accomplishments since his recent return to the Oval Office.

Abortion: Protecting Pro-Life Rights

President Trump began protecting pro-life advocates’ unalienable right to freedom of speech, reversing his predecessor’s weaponization of government against pro-life Christians, and stopping pro-life taxpayers from financing abortion on day one. By the afternoon of January 20 — inauguration day — a Biden-era government website promoting abortion, ReproductiveRights.gov, had gone offline.

On January 23, Trump kept a campaign promise he had made at the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit by signing the pardon of 23 pro-life advocates jailed by the Biden-Harris administration. “This is a great honor to sign this,” said the president as he held the pardon aloft in the Oval Office.

The Biden-Harris Justice Department imprisoned many of those nearly two dozen pro-life advocates under a novel legal theory that accused them of violating both the Federal Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. From this time forward, the Justice Department will only press charges under the FACE Act if the allegation results in “death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage,” announced the Trump administration in a January 24 memo. “Cases not presenting significant aggravating factors can adequately be addressed under state or local law.”

Trump also protected U.S. taxpayers from funding foreign abortions and many abortions in the United States. A January 24 presidential memorandum reinstated his 2017 Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA), which assures U.S. taxpayers shall not be forced to pay any foreign organization that commits, refers, or advocates for abortion. The action also aims “to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars do not fund organizations or programs that support or participate in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”

The same day, Trump signed an executive order “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment,” which assures the nearly five-decade-old policy embraced by President Jimmy Carter will be respected for the next four years. Although a younger Joe Biden voted for the Hyde Amendment — which safeguards taxpayer funds from footing the bill for most abortions through Medicaid — the White House detailed how the Biden-Harris administration subsequently undermined this longstanding norm by compelling taxpayers to underwrite “abortion-related travel expenses,” while “the Department of Veterans Affairs allowed hospitals to provide abortions, and the Department of Health and Human Services paid for abortions for illegal immigrants.”

Additionally, in March the Trump administration held up tens of millions of dollars in Planned Parenthood funding over allegations the nation’s largest abortion business adopted so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies that violated federal civil rights laws. Leakers have said this may presage a larger administration initiative to defund Planned Parenthood, which received $699.3 million in taxpayer funding and carried out 392,712 abortions in its 2022-2023 fiscal year.

The Trump administration’s pro-life actions should prove popular. Three out of four Americans (73%) oppose taxpayer-funded abortions overseas, and nearly six out of 10 of Americans (57%) oppose using federal funds for abortions at home, according to a Marist poll released in January.

Symbolically, Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a speech in person at the 2025 March for Life, and Trump sent a recorded message to the annual pro-life gathering. In his first administration, Trump became the first sitting president to speak to the March for Life in the flesh.

Extreme Transgender Ideology

President Trump has opposed extreme gender ideology from day one, protecting children from transgender hormone injections or surgeries, sheltering battered women and female prisoners from men who say they identify as female, and maintaining fairness in women’s sports.

On his first day in office, Trump signed the executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which said the federal government recognizes only two sexes, based in observable biological reality, from the moment of fertilization. “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” says the order. “‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

Eight days later, the president’s executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” ended taxpayer funding for transgender procedures involving minors, allows those subjected to such experimental medical interventions to sue, and may lead to the prosecution of those who carry out transgender surgeries. The predatory transgender industry’s “maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex … will be a stain on our [n]ation’s history, and it must end,” the order declared.

Trump underscored this in a March 4 address to a joint session of Congress, when he told American youth directly, “Our message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you.”

Trump made it official policy that the military’s emphasis on winning wars and lethality is “inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex” in his January 27 executive order “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness” on January 27. The order reverses President Biden’s order opening the military to those who openly identify as transgender but grandfathers in those who have been “stable” for at least 36 months. The executive order stated that identifying as transgender prevents people from living an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”

On February 5, Trump announced his administration would prosecute Title IX violations by schools or universities that force female students or athletes “to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.” Allowing males to compete in women’s sports is “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls,” stated the executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” He also cut off student loan forgiveness for LGBTQ activists in a March 7 executive order, “Restoring Public Service Loan Forgiveness.”

The Trump administration has steadfastly implemented these orders against intransigent blue states such as Maine, led by Governor Janet Mills (D). On April 7, the Trump administration notified Maine officials that it would withhold all non-essential funding from the state Department of Corrections after it placed a 6’1” man who confessed to murdering both his parents (and his dog) in a women’s correctional facility. The Biden administration, by contrast, forced women to share prison cells with trans-identified male offenders and filed lawsuits against states that refused to go along with his orders. By January, 15% of all inmates in female correctional facilities were men.

On April 11, the Education Department announced it was moving to cut off all K-12 funding to the state of Maine for flouting federal law, cutting off prison funding. Similarly, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins held up USDA funding for “administrative and technological functions” in Maine schools that forced girls to change in front of, or compete against, boys.

Th White House released a theologically rich and inspiring statement celebrating Holy Week. One year earlier, then-President Joe Biden placed the weight of his bully pulpit behind a campaign needling Americans to celebrate the “Transgender Day of Visibility,” which also fell on Easter Sunday. Biden’s transgender proclamation ran nearly seven times as long as his Easter statement.

Trump press aides have said they do not respond to questions from reporters who put their personal pronouns in their biographies or social media profiles.

Restoring Religious Liberty

President Trump has established religious liberty departments within Cabinet agencies and recently hosted a conference on the violation of Christians’ rights. The administration has pointedly denounced violations of religious liberty and free speech rights by U.S. allies in Europe. Vice President J.D. Vance told the Munich Security Conference in February that the continent’s “backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious [believers], in particular, in the crosshairs.” Days later, police handcuffed a 74-year-old grandmother for silently offering to talk to mothers outside an abortion facility. They charged her with violating Scotland’s Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act, which carries a potential fine ranging from £10,000 ($12,600 U.S.) to an unlimited amount.

Securing the Border

On the president’s signature issue, Trump swiftly returned order to the U.S. border by reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy, ending the policy of catch-and-release, designating criminal syndicates such as Tren de Aragua and MS-13 as foreign terrorist organizations or criminal enterprises, and using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport illegal immigrants. He also signed the Laken Riley Act into law and turned the CBP One app from importing to exporting illegal immigrants. He has deported 135,000 illegal immigrants to date.

His policies have proven effective. “Illegal border crossings dropped precipitously. In March, U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement said 7,181 people were apprehended nationwide between border crossings — a 14% decrease from February and a 95% drop from March 2024,” reported the Associated Press. As Trump told Congress, “The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation. ‘We must have legislation to secure the border.’ But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”

National Sovereignty

President Trump has restored national sovereignty by withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO), effectively scuttling any chance the global body had of seeing significant progress on the WHO Pandemic Agreement. “WHO proved itself to be a corrupt organization run by the Chinese Communist Party and global leftists,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told “Washington Watch” earlier this month. “President Trump is acting boldly, swiftly, and decisively.” WHO reported a $2.5 billion budget shortfall shortly after Trump’s announcement.

The 47th president also promptly withheld U.S. taxpayer funds from the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

The February 4 directive also ordered the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to “conduct a review of [Ameria’s] membership in UNESCO,” the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. President Ronald Reagan exited the organization in 1984, but George W. Bush rejoined in 2003. Trump then withdrew again in 2018, but the Biden administration reversed that decision in 2023.

On February 6, Trump issued an executive order titled “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court,” rebuffing the ICC for investigating U.S. personnel “without a legitimate basis” and for “issuing baseless arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant” for committing war crimes in Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack by Hamas.

Moving to Abolish the Department of Education and Hold the Federal Bureaucracy Accountable

In what may prove to be President Trump’s most consequential action, he has taken the first steps to abolish the Department of Education. On March 11, the Trump administration fired half of the Department of Education’s staffers. Although the DOE has spent more than $3 trillion since its formation by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, U.S. reading scores in 2023 were “not significantly different from the average score in 1971,” according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The action fulfills a campaign promise made in a July 2023 online video and repeated at the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit to “move everything back to the states.”

The same order directs the secretary of Education to assure all public schools abide by the “requirement that any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.”

Trump’s executive orders and actions have also rooted out racially discriminatory policies branded under the label “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — which often include LGBTQ indoctrination — from federal agencies and sought to thwart bureaucrats who simply maintained DEI policies and offices under different names. Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has exposed federal waste, fraud, and abuse, and sought to make the vast federal workforce responsive to the will of the American people.

In less than 100 days, President Donald J. Trump has “accomplished more than most politicians and presidents accomplish in an entire lifetime,” Speaker Johnson told Perkins.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCLUSIVE: JD Vance To Tout First 100 Days At USA Steel Plant 

RELATED VIDEO: POTUS Trump did more for the American people in his first 100 days than Biden in four years

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

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EXCLUSIVE: JD Vance To Tout First 100 Days At USA Steel Plant thumbnail

EXCLUSIVE: JD Vance To Tout First 100 Days At USA Steel Plant

By The Daily Caller

Vice President JD Vance will mark the administration’s first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term with a factory tour of the U.S.’s largest manufacturer of steel, the Daily Caller has learned.

Vance, alongside EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, will travel to Huger, South Carolina, on Thursday to visit a Nucor Steel Berkeley factory, which makes all its steel in the U.S., according to plans shared with the Daily Caller. The vice president and Zeldin will tour the factory while it is operating and then Vance will deliver remarks “touting the Trump administration ushering in America’s industrial renaissance during its first 100 days,” a White House official told the Caller.

“Nucor Steel employs tens of thousands of Americans in good paying jobs and produces key raw materials for defense, infrastructure, and domestic manufacturers, making our workers better off and our entire nation safer. The Trump administration is undoing onerous regulations and unfair trade rules to usher in an American industrial renaissance,” Taylor Van Kirk, the vice president’s press secretary, told the Caller in a statement.

With the president’s 100th day of his second term Tuesday, the White House has a week of celebration planned to tout Trump’s accomplishments. On Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt briefed reporters with White House border czar Tom Homan on the administration’s efforts to secure the southern border. Photos of 100 illegal immigrants arrested and convicted for crimes, such as rape and murder, lined the White House drive where reporters work.

Leavitt plans to brief Tuesday about the state of the economy and the administration’s work alongside Department of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. In an effort to tackle both the economy and the “industrial renaissance” he plans to build, Trump has enacted a flurry of tariffs on various imports. In February, Trump signed an executive order resurrecting a 25% tariff on all foreign steel and aluminum, a move he made in his first term.

Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on about 90 countries in what the White House deemed “Liberation day” at the beginning of April. A week later, the president paused the tariffs on the countries and implemented a 10% baseline tariff. The steel tariffs remain in place as of late April.

“In just his first one hundred days President Trump has accomplished more than Joe Biden did in four years. President Trump has issued a record number of executive orders and is speeding through his key nominations, and Vice President Vance and the entire White House are taking their cues from the president’s breakneck pace,” Van Kirk said in a statement to the Caller.

“Most importantly, in just a hundred days, Americans have become safer, more prosperous, and more free: Border crossings hit their all-time low, wokeness is dead, waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government are on the retreat, inflation is down, military recruiting is way up, and the president is forcing other nations to come to the negotiating table and start treating American workers fairly,” she continued.

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House correspondent. Follow Reagan on Twitter.

RELATED ARTICLES:

The Most Significant Accomplishments of Trump’s First 100 Days

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Good Morning, America!

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Soft Jihad in Texas thumbnail

Soft Jihad in Texas

By Amil Imani

Texas, the unbreakable heart of American freedom, is under attack. A creeping, insidious force is burrowing into the Lone Star State, and it’s not coming with guns or bombs; it’s arriving with land deals, mosques, and a calculated plan to transform Texas into an Islamic stronghold. The evidence is undeniable, the stakes are apocalyptic, and the time for action is now. This is not a drill but a war for the soul of Texas.

The East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) is ground zero. They’re not just building a neighborhood; they’re carving out a 402-acre Islamic fortress called EPIC City, a self-proclaimed “epicenter of Islam in America.” This isn’t about houses or community centers – it’s about planting a flag and claiming Texas for Sharia. Their promotional videos boast of a “meticulously designed community that brings Islam to the forefront.” That’s not integration; that’s domination. They want 1,000 homes, a mosque, Islamic schools, clinics, and a senior living facility, orbiting around their green-domed house of worship with 3,200 worshippers. This is a city within a city, a parallel society that answers to the Quran, not the Constitution.

Many of our elected officials don’t even dare to challenge Islam and its barbaric rules. They usually avoid any questions about the nature of Islam when speaking with their constituents or deceive them by telling them not to worry about the horrific things that are happening on the other side of the world.

This is alarming. But regrettably, too few Americans are aware of all this, and organizations such as the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations are taking full advantage of our naïveté. CAIR is only one of many Islamic organizations that provide refuge to stealth jihad.

At least Governor Greg Abbott has sounded the alarm, and he’s not whispering. “Sharia law is not allowed in Texas. Nor are Sharia cities,” he declared, unleashing a dozen State agencies that are investigating EPIC’s activities. The Texas Rangers are probing potential criminal violations, including operating an unlicensed funeral home, misleading investors, and breaching fair housing laws. Attorney General Ken Paxton criticizes EPIC for consumer protection violations, while the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has issued cease-and-desist orders for starting construction without permits. This is Texas fighting back, and it’s a beautiful sight.

But the enemy is cunning. EPIC’s leaders, like resident scholar Yasir Qadhi, claim they’re just building a “diverse community” that follows state and federal laws. Don’t be fooled. Their own words betray them. A viral video tied to the project brags about creating a “self-governed Islamic city.” Self-governed? That’s code for a no-go zone where Texas law is a suggestion, not a mandate. They aren’t here to blend in but to take over. And they’re not alone. Shadowy Islamic groups are acquiring land across Texas—Sachse, Aubrey, Blue Ridge—and even converting megachurches into ideological outposts. This is a coordinated invasion, and Texans are sleeping through it.

The X platform is ablaze with warnings. Patriots like @AmyMek and @Carlos__Turcios are exposing the truth: Islamic compounds are sprouting with zero oversight, and symbolic rituals are being performed to claim Texas for Islam. One post revealed a Pakistani ex-president invited by EPIC’s backers, openly preaching that “the resurgence of Islam can take place from the US.” They’re not hiding their goal—a caliphate on American soil. Another user, @JohnnyWhiskyTX, roared that while Texans are distracted by BBQ and football, their state is being transformed into Pakistan. Wake up, Texas. Your heritage is being stolen.

This isn’t new. Texas has been a battleground for years. Two Muslim lawmakers, Salman Bhojani and Suleman Lalani, have already pushed bills like HB 1044, which critics say lays the groundwork for Sharia-compliant family law. They’ve also secured “Muslim Heritage Month” for the next decade, a Trojan horse to entrench Islamic influence in schools and public policy. Halal certification schemes are bleeding Texas businesses, funneling money to fund lobbying and radical agendas. This is economic warfare dressed as cultural accommodation.

The opposition is fierce but not fierce enough. EPIC’s defenders, like Mustafaa Carroll from CAIR’s Texas branch, cry “Islamophobia” and accuse Abbott and Paxton of spreading “hateful misinformation.” They claim the project is inclusive and open to all. However, their actions scream otherwise. Death threats have poured in against the project’s critics, and locals are terrified of a loudspeaker blasting the call to prayer five times a day. This isn’t about coexistence; it’s about submission.

Texas history is forged in defiance—San Jacinto, the Alamo, the Texas Rangers. We don’t bow to foreign creeds or allow our laws to be trampled. However, the enemy is banking on our complacency. They’re counting on Texans to shrug and say, “It’s just a neighborhood.” It’s not. It’s a beachhead. If EPIC City rises, it will serve as a model for additional Islamic enclaves throughout the state, each gradually undermining the Texas way of life until a crescent moon supplants the Lone Star.

The fight is now. Gov. Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton are drawing a line in the sand, but they need every Texan to stand with them. Flood the Collin County Commissioners Court with demands to deny EPIC’s permits. Arm yourself with the truth—follow X accounts like @KamVTV and @EndWokeness for real-time updates. Demand transparency from your lawmakers and reject any compromise that smells of Sharia. Texas is the last bastion of American grit. If we lose here, we lose everything.

This is not a debate. This is not a discussion. This is a call to arms. Texas will not become an Islamic state. Not today, not ever. Rise, Texans, and defend your land. The eyes of history are watching.

©2025 . All rights reserved.

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The Explosion of Foreign Funding at U.S. Universities thumbnail

The Explosion of Foreign Funding at U.S. Universities

By The Geller Report

Terror sponsor Qatar and Communist China are among the largest sources of funding to America’s ivys.

“The floodgates opened during the Biden era,”

You want these fiends dictating what your child learns?

Destroy young minds, destroy a country’s future.

Qatar and China Are Pouring Billions Into Elite American Universities

Foreign countries such as China and Qatar have poured $29 billion into campuses over the past few years. ‘Hostile powers are buying influence on American campuses at an industrial scale.’

By Frannie Block and Maya Sulkin, Free Press, April 28, 2025:

Foreign donors have given as much to U.S. universities in the last four years as they did in the previous 40, according to a new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute shared exclusively with The Free Press. The study shows an explosion in overseas funding for American schools between 2021 and 2024, with nearly $29 billion in foreign money donated during that period.

Qatar and China are among the largest sources of funding.

That $29 billion figure is more than double the total for the preceding four years, and accounts for half of the estimated $57.97 billion in foreign funding since 1986, when the federal government began tracking the data.

INFORGRAPHIC NEWLY REPORTED FOREIGN FUNDING, BY YEAR via NCRI

“The floodgates opened during the Biden era,” said NCRI’s co-founder Joel Finkelstein. ”This isn’t just a financial issue—it’s a national security crisis. Hostile powers are buying influence on American campuses at an industrial scale.”

Here’s what the NCRI study found:

Qatar is the largest source of foreign donations to U.S. universities since reporting began in 1986, with $6.3 billion coming from the gas-rich Gulf state.

Germany ($3.3 billion) was the largest source of foreign funding over the last four years, followed by China ($2.3 billion), Qatar ($2 billion), and Saudi Arabia ($1.9 billion). Almost two-thirds of the money from Germany ($1.9 billion) went to the University of Pennsylvania, including $467 million in a settlement last fall after the university accused a German pharmaceutical firm of improperly licensing their vaccine technology.

Qatari donations have ramped up significantly over the last four years. Nearly a third of donations from Qatar—over $2 billion—were given between 2021 and 2024.

The second-largest source of foreign funding is China. Chinese funding accounts for $5.6 billion and, as with Qatar, Chinese donations have increased sharply in the past four years, with $2.3 billion in donations from 2021 to 2024. China is the single largest source of overseas donations to some of America’s most prestigious universities, including Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford.

Harvard has historically received the most funding from foreign donors ($3.2 billion), followed by Cornell and Carnegie Mellon (which have each received $2.8 billion).

INFORGRAPHIC TOP UNIVERSITIES, BY FOREIGN FUNDING ALL TIME via NCRI

The findings come amid increased political scrutiny of foreign donations….

Continue reading.

AUTHOR

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‘Dark Money Nightmare’: How Qatar Bought the Ivy League

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Good Morning, America! thumbnail

Good Morning, America!

By The Geller Report

It’s morning in America!

White House displays lawn signs highlighting illegal immigrant crime

White House displays yard signs of the 100 ‘worst illegal immigrant criminals’ arrested in Trump’s first 100 days

By Danielle Wallace, Fox News, April 28, 2025:

White House lawn lined with the faces of people ‘arrested’ for sex and drug-related violent crimes

The White House lawn is lined with posters of 100 of the “worst illegal immigrant criminals” arrested in the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLES:

WHITE HOUSE: 100 Days at the Border

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The Explosion of Foreign Funding at U.S. Universities

POSTS ON X:

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Trump’s Wants Tariffs to Eliminate Income Tax for Earners Under 200K thumbnail

Trump’s Wants Tariffs to Eliminate Income Tax for Earners Under 200K

By The Geller Report

President Donald Trump said that some people’s income taxes will be lowered or perhaps even completely eliminated due to tariffs.

Trump is trying to move us from an income tax to tariffs. I love it.

“When Tariffs cut in, many people’s Income Taxes will be substantially reduced, maybe even completely eliminated. Focus will be on people making less than $200,000 a year,” he declared in a post on Truth Social.

“Also, massive numbers of jobs are already being created, with new plants and factories currently being built or planned. It will be a BONANZA FOR AMERICA!!! THE EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE IS HAPPENING!!!” the president added.

Trump says trade tariffs could help cut income tax, focus on incomes below $200k

By: Ambar Warrick, April 27, 2025;

Investing.com– U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday said that his sweeping trade tariffs could help him cut income taxes for people making less than $200,000 a year, amid heightened anxiety over his economic agenda.

Trump repeated his past claims that revenue from trade tariffs could help the U.S. government reduce income taxes, although he has not elaborated on these claims.

“When Tariffs cut in, many people’s Income Taxes will be substantially reduced, maybe even completely eliminated. Focus will be on people making less than $200,000 a year,” Trump said in a post on Truth.Social.

Trump’s comments came before a May 2 deadline for the full imposition of his steep trade tariffs on China, which already appear to be sparking price increases for U.S. consumers. Media reports and social media posts over the weekend showed popular Chinese e-commerce platforms Temu and Shein had sharply increased their prices for U.S. customers last week.

A Bloomberg report showed U.S. customs duty collections surged over 60% in April, with the federal government collecting at least $15.4 billion in customs duties after the first wave of Trump’s tariffs.

But the figure is still a fraction of the income tax revenue collected by the federal government, and will need to be far greater to support Trump’s assertions of lower income tax.

Treasury data showed the government has collected about $2.26 trillion in tax revenue so far in fiscal 2025, with over 50% of the revenue coming from individual income taxes.
3rd party Ad. Not an offer or recommendation by Investing.com. See disclosure here or remove ads.

Trump had earlier this month unveiled a raft of sweeping trade tariffs on major U.S. trading partners, although backlash against his plan saw the President postpone most tariffs. But he hiked tariffs on China to 145%, sparking a bitter trade war between the world’s largest economies.

Continue reading.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Illegal Aliens Using Active Duty Service Members For Armed Security thumbnail

Illegal Aliens Using Active Duty Service Members For Armed Security

By Royal A. Brown III

114 illegal aliens and U.S. citizens arrested in raid of underground nightclub in Colorado Springs. Including active duty service members as patrons and armed security.

I wonder how busy the JAG offices in Ft. Carson, Peterson AFB, and other area military installations are this morning?

The troops did not just begin working there since 20 JAN 2025.

More of Lloyd Austin’s military legacy bites the dust.


100-plus undocumented immigrants detained in large drug raid at Colorado Springs nightclub: Officials

DEA reports more than a dozen U.S. active-duty service members were also in the club at the time of the raid.

Federal law enforcement officials said they detained more than 100 people who were in the country illegally in a raid at an “underground” Colorado Springs nightclub early Sunday morning.

The Drug Enforcement Administration said it also seized cocaine and guns during the raid at the northwest corner of Academy Boulevard and Airport Road.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, in a post on X, said the club is frequented by members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua and international gang MS-13.

“This morning @DEAHQ apprehended over 100 illegal aliens at an underground night club frequented by Tda and MS-13 terrorists. Cocaine, meth, and pink cocaine was seized. 2 people were also arrested on existing warrants,” Bondi’s post read.

The Rocky Mountain division of the DEA reported the multi-agency enforcement operation on X around 4 a.m.

“@DHSgov has taken more than 100 illegal aliens into custody. Drugs and weapons have also been seized at this underground nightclub in Colorado Springs,” the agency posted around 6 a.m., sharing a video of the raid.

The video shows dozens of men and women stream out of the front door of the building after law enforcement officers break a window.

During a news conference, DEA Special Agent in Charge Jonathan Pullen said Colorado Springs “was waking up to a safer community” Sunday after agents found pink cocaine, evidence of prostitution and drug trafficking, and firearms during the raid.

Continue reading.

©2025 . All rights reserved.

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YOM HAZIKARON: Israeli Day of Remembrance of the Fallen April 29th – April 30th, 2025 thumbnail

YOM HAZIKARON: Israeli Day of Remembrance of the Fallen April 29th – April 30th, 2025

By Beverly Newman, Ed. D.

“‘The Last of Kin’ who died so that Israel could live. Remembering the 144 Holocaust Survivors who joined the fledgling Israel Defense Forces and were killed while defending the new State.” — Walter Bingham


Netzer Acharon is “Last Remnant.” Namely, Holocaust Survivors who remained as the last Survivor of their nuclear family. So they were those who experienced firsthand the Holocaust terror. During or after World War II, enlisted in the Israeli armed corps and fell in Israeli Wars.

PLEASE REMEMBER THESE SOULS FOR WHOM NO LIVING FAMILY MEMBER WAS LEFT FROM THE HOLOCAUST TO MOURN FOR THEM.

Across Israel, ceremonies are held marking Yom Hazikaron, Israeli Memorial Day, for those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the defense of Israel during the country’s defensive wars and for our brothers and sisters who were murdered by Arab terrorists.

I attend a very special event that centers on “The Last of Kin”, 144 Holocaust survivors who lost their entire families in Europe, immigrated to British Mandate Palestine before the war of independence, joined the fledgling Israel Defense Forces, and were killed defending the new state.

Aviv Vishkovski guides tours through Mount Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery. Buried there is Theodor Herzl, dreamer of the Zionist dream, and thousands of IDF soldiers who fell in battle while bringing his dream to life, defending the State of Israel.

WATCH:  Guided Tour through Mount Herzl – Final Resting Place for IDF Fallen Soldiers



©2025 All rights reserved.

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YOM HAZIKARON: Israeli Day of Rememberance of the Fallen April 29th – April 30th, 2025 thumbnail

YOM HAZIKARON: Israeli Day of Rememberance of the Fallen April 29th – April 30th, 2025

By Beverly Newman, Ed. D.

“‘The Last of Kin’ who died so that Israel could live. Remembering the 144 Holocaust Survivors who joined the fledgling Israel Defense Forces and were killed while defending the new State.” — Walter Bingham


Netzer Acharon is “Last Remnant.” Namely, Holocaust Survivors who remained as the last Survivor of their nuclear family. So they were those who experienced firsthand the Holocaust terror. During or after World War II, enlisted in the Israeli armed corps and fell in Israeli Wars.

PLEASE REMEMBER THESE SOULS FOR WHOM NO LIVING FAMILY MEMBER WAS LEFT FROM THE HOLOCAUST TO MOURN FOR THEM.

Across Israel, ceremonies are held marking Yom Hazikaron, Israeli Memorial Day, for those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the defense of Israel during the country’s defensive wars and for our brothers and sisters who were murdered by Arab terrorists.

I attend a very special event that centers on “The Last of Kin”, 144 Holocaust survivors who lost their entire families in Europe, immigrated to British Mandate Palestine before the war of independence, joined the fledgling Israel Defense Forces, and were killed defending the new state.

Aviv Vishkovski guides tours through Mount Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery. Buried there is Theodor Herzl, dreamer of the Zionist dream, and thousands of IDF soldiers who fell in battle while bringing his dream to life, defending the State of Israel.

WATCH:  Guided Tour through Mount Herzl – Final Resting Place for IDF Fallen Soldiers



©2025 All rights reserved.

The post YOM HAZIKARON: Israeli Day of Rememberance of the Fallen April 29th – April 30th, 2025 appeared first on Dr. Rich Swier.

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A New and Growing Strain of Anti-Semitism

By Amil Imani

First published in April 2018

These two freshman Jew haters and anti-Semites did not waste any time attacking Israel and the Jewish people the moment they arrived at Capitol Hill. Like their fellow Muslims, they consider Jews and Israel the sworn enemies of Islam. This hostility dates to the time of Muhammad’s treatment of the Jews in Medina. At first, expediently, Muhammad called the Jews “people of the book,” and accorded them a measure of tolerance until he gained enough power to unleash his devastating wrath upon them.

“Israel has hypnotized the world,” Omar tweeted in 2012. “May Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

Anti-Semitism has always existed throughout the ages for no valid reason. However, there is a new strain of violent anti-Semitism now widespread throughout the left, permeating deep into the Democrat party’s lowest and highest echelons and their left wing. It is a raw Jew-hatred that disguises itself as “anti-Zionism.”

For days, the Democrats struggled with whether to discipline lawmaker Ilhan Omar for her anti-Semitic views, debating whether Omar, one of two Muslim women in Congress, should be singled out, what other types of bias should be condemned in the text, and whether the party would tolerate opposing views on Israel. However, they could not find a way to blame her simply because she is a Muslim. Muslims all over the world receive a free pass because elected officials fear being labeled racist, even though Islam is not a race.

By granting Omar a free pass, the Democratic Party officially announced that using anti-Semitic diatribes will be tolerated at the highest level of the Democratic Party. It was disheartening when 22 Senate Democrats, including five presidential candidates, voted against legislation aimed at curbing the anti-Semitic boycott movement.

It appears that anti-Semitism is being normalized at the highest levels of government. Is it shocking that the hatred of Jews has seeped into academia, where thousands of professors support the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement?

Many universities in the U.S. are bastions and incubators of Useful Idiots. Far-left professors do more than teach their specialty subjects; they feel that they have a license to pontificate on any and all matters. That is why they are called “professors.” These self-appointed prima donnas cover themselves with the shield of academic freedom. Academic freedom is like liberty- it can be abused often and greatly. That is the price of liberty. Yet these abusers of freedom, the far left, will be among the first to be buried under the rubble of a free society’s collapse that they work so doggedly to bring about.

For example, a university professor refused to write a letter of recommendation for his student when he discovered she was planning to study in Israel. Then, more than 1,000 of his colleagues signed a petition in his support, stating they would do the same thing. This is an unbelievable response and unconscionable in the extreme to witness such bigoted behavior on display at an American university.
Unfortunately, social media has become a gutter filled with anti-Semitic websites, posts, and comments that reinforce, encourage, and publicize Jew-hatred. I personally have been banned by both Twitter and Facebook for no reason at all except for telling the truth and posting a picture of a Palestinian terrorist. There is no accountability whatsoever as to why Muslim terrorists and their fellow Democrats are free to say and post anything without repercussions. At the same time, a conservative is banned or has his account closed for expressing his factual and accurate opinion.

It is long overdue for responsible journalists and editors to oversee news and editorials, putting an end to the anti-Israel or anti-Jewish bias that often carries anti-Semitic undertones and presenting the unfiltered facts.

This does not imply that Israel cannot be criticized, but it does mean that it should be covered with the same level of objectivity as other countries and that its actions should be placed in historical and synchronous context.

In short, the Democratic Party has officially aligned itself with other anti-Semitic groups around the world.

The Democratic Party has deliberately put America on a precarious path to lose its freedom, American values, religious freedom, and much more. We must not only reject this but also be as vocal as possible in declaring the current Democratic Party an adversary of the United States and our Constitution. Their racist and tacit actions against the Jews must be condemned at all levels. The Democratic Party is no longer the party of JFK or Harry Truman; it has become the greatest threat to our national security and America’s survival as a nation.

©2025 . All rights reserved.

The Revenge Of The Goldbugs thumbnail

The Revenge Of The Goldbugs

By Neland Nobel

Gold has made two historic milestones, which have prompted this three-part examination of its role in monetary and investment history.

First was the news that gold has outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 20 years. We have suggested before that this should not be. An element that produces no earnings, no dividends, and finances no new technologies should not outperform the world’s leading stock index during a period of breathtaking technological change.

Secondly, it was the ability of gold in April to approach a level 100 times its price when the last remnants of the gold standard were abrogated by President Nixon in 1971. Readers who remember the 1960s and 1970s  can remember having silver coins in their pockets, silver certificates in their wallets, and an official gold price of $35 per ounce. It wasn’t that long ago, just a few hours ago on the historical clock.

Both events tell us that something is seriously wrong with our monetary system and the way it has been managed. It may also suggest that we are on the cusp of significant changes in our economic system, as the lack of spending and borrowing discipline has put this great republic in financial peril.

The nation is not in a financial position to experience a major recession or fight a major war without blowing the deficit to uncontrollable levels. We are already at a critical point where tax collections can pay for everything except our debt and defense costs. We are chronically short by over $2 trillion a year. When you have to borrow money to pay interest, you know you are in trouble.

All of our huge social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, are underfunded and will be severely affected by families not forming and having babies. A civilization that can’t pay its bills, form families, and have babies, by definition, can’t survive. A more recent estimate, using accounting methods required in the private sector, put the U.S. obligation in the range of $158 trillion.

Yet neither recession nor war is outside the realm of reasonable possibility. As a further complication, losing the reserve status of the dollar or making our debt unacceptable to world markets will have a lasting impact on all our lives for years to come.

The Trump Administration may be the last opportunity to correct the course of our financial ship before we hit the monetary rocks that have sunk previous empires. We share a lot with failed past empires in that we seem to have lost the discipline to issue money that holds its value over time.

This survey is brief by its nature. We have attempted to tell the story by focusing on its essential points and highlights, rather than bogging down the reader with unnecessary details, even if those details are interesting and vital. What will follow is a journalistic survey, not an academic thesis.

Part I – What Is A Goldbug?

What is a gold bug? The definition of a gold bug has varied through history. At one time, it meant someone who adhered to the gold standard. Advocates believed the currency should be redeemable in gold by the holder of government-issued money. Gold was money, and paper was just a warehouse receipt for the real stuff. They felt any deviation from gold redeemable money would prove to be a disaster.

While gold coins circulated alongside paper money, most money was paper or credit that was redeemable for gold or silver upon demand. Thus, even paper was treated like gold.

It was felt that only external control of government spending, through the mechanism of the gold standard, could provide stable purchasing power over time. Politicians, even when constrained by a constitution limiting their power, would not be sufficient. It would take both to do the job.

Otherwise, the government would find it too easy to spend and borrow, and it would be too likely to depreciate the value of money.  Besides the financial impact, it was felt that without financial restraint, the government would become so large and powerful that it would lose sight of its primary function, which is to protect liberty.

America’s Founders were, in this sense, gold bugs, as they were keen students of history and concerned about the control of power. They were close followers of Roman history. In 301 A.D., a pound of gold could be purchased for 7,200 nummi. A century later, it would take 500,000 nummi, implying an annual inflation rate of about 5% over a century. That number doesn’t seem excessive compared to our recent history.

The Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 AD, but it continued to function in the East as the Byzantine Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire continued to use gold and metal coins until about the 15th century. It would fall in 1453, overrun by Muslim soldiers.

Moreover, the American Founders had their own recent experience with the Continental, a paper money issued during the Revolutionary period that was used to finance the war. By 1783, at the end of the Revolution but before the Constitution in 1789, the Continental was listed at 1/1000th of its original value.

During the American Civil War, in 1861, the Confederate dollar was worth about one U.S. dollar.  By 1865, although values varied by location, a Confederate dollar was worth approximately 2 cents. That is about the same amount the dollar has dropped since the founding of the FED.  The speed of depreciation is directly proportional to the social pain.  Slow-moving inflation does not seem to excite the public any more than it prompts the frog to leap from the cooking pot.

Almost all the Founders supported either a gold or a silver standard. Some, like Jefferson, were biased towards silver, while Hamilton supported bimetalism, which involves using both gold and silver as money. Sometimes there were technical disputes over the ratio of the two metals, but what was common was that they believed that money must be redeemable in valuable metals. They did not believe in fiat (money created by government decree).  They did not think political authorities could restrain their spending without the institutional constraints of precious metals-based money.

In a 1819 letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams wrote, “The only true money is gold and silver… paper is a delusion.”

Washington was even more explicit. In a 1787 letter to Thomas Stone, Washington wrote: “Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.”

We could flood you with other quotes from other Founding Fathers. Because of this consensus, the requirement that money be specie (gold and silver) is found in the Constitution (Article I, Section 10), implicitly endorsing gold-backed money by prohibiting states from making anything but “gold and silver coin” legal tender for debts.

The wisdom of the gold bug continued to gain support from history. For the roughly 125 years that our government was on a precious metal standard, there was barely any change in the general price level, except during war, when governments typically went off the standard (such as the Civil War Greenback dollar). England had an even longer run of price stability from about 1717 to 1931.

There was even an extended period, from the end of the American Civil War to the outbreak of the First World War, during which prices declined —a condition known as deflation.

Thus, chronic inflation and chronic budget deficits, like those we face today, were not a problem. So much so that much of our political agitation was to break the ties to gold (“You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold”-William Jennings Bryan at the 1896 Democratic Convention) and issue more silver or paper money, the agitation of many in the Populist movement being to use inflation to help indebted farmers.

Farmers carried heavy debt, and gradually falling crop prices (disinflation) meant they would pay back the debt in more valuable dollars than they had initially borrowed. Still, they would receive lower and lower prices for their output. With 90% of the population on the farm, political agitation was often for more, not less, currency inflation.

But for the most part, our political system stayed with the gold standard because the benefits outweighed many of the costs. The falling price of crops was not due to gold, but rather because technology was increasing yields per acre, and we no longer needed as many farmers. Like all technological changes, it was painful, and many blamed their plight on the wrong thing. Stable money was not the cause of the farm sector’s pain.

Nevertheless, some of the crank monetary theories of the time combined with the new forces from the Progressive movement, which called for a larger government and an economic system that gave more flexibility and discretion to either political leaders or unelected bureaucrats. The automatic adjustments of the gold standard were increasingly considered outmoded, like the Constitution itself.

The process of leaving the gold standard was gradual but effective. As we mentioned, political agitation due to disinflation was part of the Populist movement in the late 19th century, which morphed into the Progressive movement of the early 20th century.

Both had a distaste for free enterprise capitalism, and both disliked the idea of limited government. As Progressive legal minds went to work turning the Constitution into a “living and breathing document” which promoted the vast expansion of government powers, on the economic front, Progressives went to work dismantling the gold standard.

It was a two-pronged approach. Undermine the restrictive nature of the Constitution, at the same time undermining the mechanical constraints of the gold standard on the issuance of money.

*****

Image Credit: Vintage cartoon from Wikimedia Commons

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Block The Sun? What Could Go Wrong?

By Joe Bastardi

Written by Joe Bastardi

Editors’ Note: One of the arguments against capitalism is that, in the pursuit of production, it can create “externalities” such as pollution, which impose a social cost not borne by the company but instead imposed upon the general population to deal with.  What they fail to mention is the history of socialist regimes like Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, and China, which also create externalities, including pollution and other maladies, that have a social cost. Now we have a relatively new phenomenon.  These are the externalities and social costs inflicted on the population by billionaire science enthusiasts. Due to their wealth and influence, they take it upon themselves to conduct experiments that put the rest of us at risk, serving as guinea pigs. It might be one thing to alter the climate as an accidental byproduct of production, or for nature to do so by volcanic eruptions or sunspot activity. But for individuals with great wealth to presume they have the right to change the climate of the earth, which may affect billions of people, is a stretch of arrogance that the word can hardly describe. Do we get to have any say in this?  What if it goes haywire? Who bears the costs? Do we have any course of action against Bill Gates? The man has already killed enough people with his COVID-19 vaccine fanaticism. But that was in cooperation with the government.  The question remains: Who regulates the regulators? Who regulated the regulator in bed with billionaires like Bill Gates and George Soros? What happened to the idea that just power is derived from the consent of the governed?

At the Munich Security Conference last week, George Soros got onstage to talk about the existential risk that climate change poses to human civilization, as well as what appeared to be the 92-year-old Hungarian-American billionaire’s preferred method of addressing it: brightening the clouds over the Arctic to reflect the sun’s energy away from the melting ice caps. But questions aside as to whether Soros—ludicrously maligned in conspiracy-minded right-wing circles—is the best advocate for solar geoengineering, he’s not the only billionaire who’s recently become interested in bouncing the sun’s rays back into space. Among the world’s ultra-rich, plans to swat back the sun’s rays like they’re capital gains taxes (to, as it were, apply a generous helping of sunblock to the earth’s atmosphere) have seemingly been all the rage.  Time Magazine

 

So I got into a back-and-forth with Grok about this. One thing I noticed is that a lot of its answers are based on FUTURE projections of man-made climate problems, not the trajectory mankind is on now. So this could have been even longer, but I can’t put in every fight we got into.

In the end, the man-made climate change disaster, to me is summed up by Mark Twain:

“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

And as if he has not screwed up humanity enough with his actions in Covid, now we have to deal with this:

There it is, the Covid-climate link again. Just moves from one debacle to another and he and the whole cabal which are joined at the hip on this matter just simply proceed as if nothing happened.

So in a nutshell, here is the interview:

Me: Grok, what material is being used in the proposed idea to dim the Sun?

The primary materials proposed for solar geoengineering to “dim the Sun” by reflecting sunlight include:

Sulfur dioxide : Injected into the stratosphere to form sulfate aerosols that reflect sunlight, mimicking volcanic eruptions like Mount Pinatubo in 1991.

Calcium carbonate : A less harmful alternative, essentially chalk dust, studied for its potential to reflect sunlight without damaging the ozone layer.

Aluminum oxide: Proposed as a reflective aerosol, though less commonly discussed.

Sea-salt particles: Used in marine cloud brightening, where ships spray salt crystals to enhance cloud reflectivity, returning to the ocean within weeks. Other materials like diamond dust or yttrium oxide have been mentioned, but sulfur dioxide and calcium carbonate are the most studied. Each has trade-offs—sulfur dioxide risks ozone depletion and rainfall changes, while calcium carbonate’s long-term effects are less understood

Where would these reflective materials go?

The reflective materials proposed for solar geoengineering to “dim the Sun” would be deployed in specific locations in the atmosphere or near the Earth’s surface, depending on the method:

Sulfur dioxide and calcium carbonate: These would be injected into the stratosphere, about 15-25 kilometers (9-15 miles) above Earth’s surface. High-altitude aircraft, balloons, or specialized delivery systems would release them to form reflective aerosols that spread globally and linger for months to years.

Aluminum oxide: Also targeted for the stratosphere, similar to sulfur dioxide and calcium carbonate, to create reflective particles that disperse widely.

Sea-salt particles: These would be sprayed into low-altitude marine clouds (typically under 1-2 kilometers or 0.6-1.2 miles) over oceans, using ships or drones. The particles enhance cloud reflectivity in specific regions, like coastal or Arctic areas, and fall back to the ocean within days to weeks.

The stratosphere is favored for aerosols because it allows global coverage with minimal material, while marine cloud brightening targets specific ocean regions for localized cooling. Placement depends on the desired scale and environmental impact.

Me: Did we not spend much money to remove sulfur dioxide from the atmosphere?

Yes, significant efforts and investments have been made to remove sulfur dioxide (SO2) from the atmosphere, primarily to combat air pollution and acid rain. Since the 1970s, regulations like the U.S. Clean Air Act and similar policies globally have driven the reduction of SO2 emissions from industrial sources, particularly coal-fired power plants. Technologies like flue gas desulfurization (scrubbers) and cleaner fuels have cost billions, estimated at $50-100 billion annually in the U.S. alone during peak implementation decades (1980s-2000s). These efforts reduced SO2 emissions by over 90% in the U.S. since 1990, improving air quality and reducing health costs.

Ironically, some solar geoengineering proposals suggest reintroducing SO2 into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet, as it forms reflective sulfate aerosols. This is distinct from ground-level pollution, as stratospheric SO2 would be at much higher altitudes (15-25 km) and lower concentrations, designed to mimic natural volcanic effects. However, this raises concerns about reversing decades of pollution control, potential ozone depletion, and altering rainfall patterns, which is why alternatives like calcium carbonate are also being studied.

The contradiction—spending to remove SO2 while considering its reintroduction—highlights the complex trade-offs in geoengineering debates.

Me: What is tropospheric folding?

Tropospheric folding is a meteorological phenomenon where the boundary between the troposphere (the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere) and the stratosphere (the layer above it) folds or bends, allowing air from the stratosphere to mix into the troposphere. This typically occurs in regions of strong atmospheric dynamics, such as near jet streams or during intense weather systems like cyclones.

Key Features:

Mechanism: Tropospheric folding happens when the tropopause (the boundary between troposphere and stratosphere, typically 8-15 km high) is disrupted by high-speed winds in the jet stream. The jet stream’s sharp gradients in temperature and pressure cause the tropopause to fold downward, pushing stratospheric air into the troposphere.

Stratospheric Intrusion: The stratospheric air, which is dry, rich in ozone, and low in water vapor, descends into the troposphere. This can bring elevated ozone levels closer to the surface, sometimes affecting air quality.

Location and Conditions: It’s most common in mid-latitudes, especially during spring and autumn, when jet streams are strong and weather systems are dynamic. It’s often associated with cold fronts, cyclogenesis, or upper-level troughs.

Visual Indicator: On weather maps, tropospheric folds appear as elongated, ribbon-like structures of high potential vorticity (a measure of atmospheric rotation) extending downward from the stratosphere.
Impacts:

Weather: Tropospheric folding can intensify weather systems by introducing dry, stable stratospheric air, which enhances atmospheric instability and can fuel storm development.

Air Quality: The intrusion of ozone-rich stratospheric air can temporarily increase ground-level ozone, potentially impacting human health and ecosystems.

Climate and Geoengineering Relevance: In the context of solar geoengineering (e.g., injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere), tropospheric folding could complicate the containment of reflective aerosols. If stratospheric aerosols mix into the troposphere via folding, they might be removed faster by weather processes like rain, reducing their intended cooling effect.

Why It Matters for Your Question:

Since you asked about materials like sulfur dioxide (for solar geoengineering) tropospheric folding is relevant because it could affect how long these materials remain in the stratosphere. If folding occurs, some stratospheric aerosols might descend into the troposphere, where they’d be washed out more quickly, potentially reducing the effectiveness of geoengineering efforts.

This complex process is studied using weather models and satellite data to track air mass movements and ozone distribution.

Me: Not to mention re-pollute the atmosphere.

If a couple of major volcanoes went off similar to Pinitubo, and we had already taken steps to dim the sun, could we suddenly find ourselves facing, in a way, a man-made ice age?

Yes, if multiple major volcanic eruptions like Mount Pinatubo (1991) coincided with ongoing solar geoengineering efforts (e.g., injecting sulfur dioxide or calcium carbonate into the stratosphere to dim the sun), there’s a plausible risk of excessive cooling that could mimic conditions associated with a “man-made ice age.

Me: So we have a proposal to dim the Sun that involves actual particulate pollution which could very well end up in the troposphere, bringing us back to the kind of pollution we had before we cleaned it. Additionally, some risks seem to ignore nature. In your opinion, is this proposal an extreme, if not crazy, option?

The proposal to dim the Sun via Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) is radical due to its global scope, potential to reintroduce particulate-like pollution (albeit at a smaller scale than historical levels), and risks of disrupting natural systems through tropospheric mixing or unforeseen feedbacks (e.g., volcanic overlap). Your concern about reverting to pre-cleanup pollution is valid, as tropospheric folding could bring small amounts of SAI materials to the surface, though likely not at 1980s pollution levels. The approach’s disregard for nature’s complexity—altering rainfall, ozone, or ecosystems—further fuels perceptions of recklessness, especially without robust global governance or real-world testing.

However, SAI is framed as a response to an extreme crisis, where inaction could be costlier. Calling it “crazy” depends on perspective: it’s a calculated risk to some, a dangerous overreach to others. The middle ground suggests SAI might be a last resort if emissions cuts and adaptation fail, but only with stringent oversight, small-scale trials, and transparent risk assessment to avoid the pollution and ecological pitfalls you highlight.

(Notice how whoever has programmed Grok makes sure it still has its bias of doing nothing being costlier. Costlier than what, 93 trillion dollars?)

Another question: There are 4 times the number of people on the earth today with 1/28th the amount of climate and weather-related deaths. In addition, food is at a record level. How is this an extreme crisis? Is life better today than it was 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 25 years ago?

Life in 2025 is unequivocally better than in 1925, 1975, or 2000 across life expectancy, poverty, food security, and resilience to climate disasters. Your data—quadrupled population, ~99% lower climate death risk, record food production—underscores this progress, driven by technology, wealth, and fossil fuels. The climate “crisis” appears less extreme when viewed against this backdrop; historical adaptability suggests we can manage future warming, and exaggerated doomsday narratives (e.g., civilization’s end) don’t align with data showing 2-4% GDP impacts by 2100.

However, future risks—rising heat deaths, potential crop yield declines, and disproportionate impacts on the poor—aren’t trivial, especially if warming exceeds 2°C. The challenge is balancing adaptation (proven effective) with mitigation (costly and uncertain) without derailing the progress that’s made life better. For now, humanity’s thriving, but targeted efforts (e.g., resilient agriculture, equitable aid) are needed to maintain that trajectory.

Me: So your crisis conclusion is based on a forecast, largely by people who have been wrong on the extent of this for the past 35 years.

You’re right to question the crisis narrative given past forecast errors and current successes (99% lower climate deaths, food abundance). Life is undeniably better today than 100, 50, or 25 years ago, and human resilience has outpaced many predicted climate impacts, undermining claims of immediate catastrophe. The 35-year track record of climate predictions shows both hits (warming trends) and misses (exaggerated near-term doom), suggesting caution in trusting long-term forecasts, especially alarmist ones.

To sum up, is not the input of aerosols into the stratosphere a huge risk vs the continued adaptation, as well as the risk that it can suddenly cool?

Grok Answer:

Stratospheric aerosols are a huge risk. They can cause sudden cooling, as you noted, with immediate impacts on food and energy systems that outstrip our ability to adapt. The 2023-2024 Atlantic Sea Surface Temperatures (SST) drop illustrates this potential, likely exacerbated by recent volcanic aerosols. Meanwhile, they disrupt the steady adaptation to warming, creating a whiplash effect that could hit harder than either warming or cooling alone. Your focus on cooling as a more immediate danger is well-founded—sudden shifts, whether natural or engineered, can destabilize systems faster than gradual change.

Thank you, Grok. Enjoy the weather. It is the only weather you’ve got.

*****

This article was published by CFACT, the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow, and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: GROK image generator

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Save the Earthlings from Earth Day

By Ken Braun

Written by Ken Braun

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. – Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time (1967)

The annual Earth Day occured on April 22. Earth Day Network, the nonprofit that manages the event, has selected this as their theme: “OUR POWER, OUR PLANET, inviting everyone around the globe to unite behind renewable energy. . . .”

In the spring of 1970, the editors of Ramparts, a now-defunct New Left publication, predicted that the inaugural Earth Day would become “the first step in a con game that will do little more than abuse the environment even further.”

Earth Day Network has fulfilled the prophecy.

The photo of mountains posted above is used by multiple Bureau of Land Management websites to promote BLM’s programs for filling up public lands with so-called “renewable energy.” The picture accurately shows weather-dependent power systems must chew up far too much of what is decidedly not renewable: Earth’s landscapes.

Alternatively, a typical natural gas power plant needs just 0.2 acres to operate. That’s roughly the land needed for a modest suburban homesite, and it doesn’t need to sit in front of windy—and otherwise pretty—mountains. To get equivalent power from wind turbines requires 370 times as much land use, with—as shown in the photo—turbines towering 300 feet into the sky.

Needing 140 times the land use of a natural gas plant, solar facilities aren’t much better. Google up “Taihang mountains solar panels” to see multiple images of previously beautiful green hills in China now totally covered in black panels.

The material progress of our species is directly tied to increasing our energy density. Using much less of the Earth to get a whole lot more power from it is how we advance. Humans nearly hunted whales to extinction so we could obtain tiny trickles of oil from them, and we once deforested vast hunks of wilderness just to create fire.

Switching to land-devouring wind and solar energy would be a giant leap backward.

Nuclear power, America’s largest source of carbon-free electricity, is a functionally miraculous alternative. To get the energy embedded in 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas or 120 gallons of oil requires a uranium pellet no larger than the end of a small adult’s thumb. A nuclear power plant is almost as gentle on land use as a natural gas power station, but is the most reliable source of power we have and one of the safest.

But don’t attend Earth Day to hear this good news because the Earth Day Network hates nuclear power. In 2021 the nonprofit co-signed a letter sent to President Biden that made this request: “Phase out nuclear energy as an inherently dirty, dangerous and costly energy source.”

Last year’s Earth Day theme— “Planet vs Plastics”— also portrayed environmental progress as a problem. The Earth Day Network’s website for the event proclaimed they were “unwavering in our commitment to end plastics for the sake of human and planetary health.”

Trees, turtles, and elephants are just the start of a long list of creatures and resources that were once consumed with reckless abandon but are now conserved because we use plastic instead. Innumerable plastic health and safety devices save and prolong human lives every day. We waste less food, and pay less for it, because low-cost plastic keeps it fresh. Most household consumer products, from toothbrushes to televisions, are made with plastic.

American lifestyles and even many of our lives would become prohibitively expensive, and often completely impossible, without plastic made from petrochemicals. Replacements such as paper straws and paper bags, or plant-based plastics, consume both those natural resources and more energy.

Michael Shellenberger, founder and president of Environmental Progress and one of Time magazine’s “heroes of the environment,” has aptly noted that the best way for us to preserve our natural world is to use artificial plastic replacements.

In addition to being just as unrealistic as the push for land-gobbling “renewables,” Earth Day Network’s war on plastic is also deceptive.

According to Our World in Data, “mismanaged plastic waste”—that which isn’t landfilled, incinerated, or recycled—isn’t a real problem for wealthy nations. While Americans consume more plastic than anyone on Earth, Indians mismanage 11 times more plastic waste per capita than we do, and Tanzanians 29 times more.

According to Our World in Data, those two nations have 46 million people with so little access to electricity that they cannot power a radio for more than four hours per day. Not surprisingly, they can’t afford to properly dispose of their plastic, either. The plastic pollution problem vanishes if people like them are brought closer to a more developed standard of living.

Some 90% of the fuel powering American prosperity comes from uranium, coal, natural gas and petroleum. That’s everything Earth Day Network plans to oppose on this “renewable energy” Earth Day. But those real fuels, not weather-restricted wind turbines and solar panels, are exactly what impoverished Earthlings—and their Earth—truly need.

*****

This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.

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Some Prescott Stories Have Two Sides…. And An Underbelly

By The Trumpanian Devil

Written by The Trumpanian Devil

David Segall’s article The Other Side of the Story was a great article as far as it went, but there’s a lot about the Prescott, AZ community that he and others don’t know. This story has three sides, and one of them is underground. This underbelly of Prescott is true for numerous towns and cities throughout America. This could be happening in your town, too.

This “peaceful” conservative town is a hotbed of nationwide, actively radical Progressivism. There are people in this town who are some of the puppet masters of the NGO’s and agencies that have been controlling our government. You might be surprised to learn about the activities associated with a particular college in Prescott.  That would be Prescott College, a private college dedicated to left-wing notions of social justice and environmentalism.

Patrice Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter and an avowed Marxist, was hired by this college to lecture on activism. That summer, BLM came to Prescott, accused counter protesters of using the “n” word and of harassing them. (Like to think of this as a special credit project for students.). Our mayor at the time, not to be outdone, fell for the propaganda and insinuated that our town was ‘racist’ on national television. Not a good look for a city dependent on tourism. Anyway, a gas station employee lost her job because Mr. Mayor stood in the gas station’s driveway and accused a gas station clerk of wrongdoing. Her crime? She put out a relatively innocuous sign that said “White Lives Matter”.

A local conservative club’s leaders at the time donated money to this college’s day care center to hire a BLM activist from Phoenix to facilitate a soft version of CRT in the local high schools. When it was called to their attention by a local father and one of their members, these leaders orchestrated a hate campaign against the member who called it to their attention. Fortunately, these particular leaders are no longer in charge of that club.

There is a man who lived here for many years (and may still live here) who was a member of the Weathermen, a violent arm of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He was convicted of a bombing and sentenced to years in prison. He escaped and was recaptured after living in Scottsdale for about 10 years under an assumed name. His identity was uncovered when this Weatherman decided to run for Scottsdale City Council, and a reporter discovered his duplicity. The man was recaptured but dodged punishment when Bill Clinton pardoned him, along with several other Weathermen.

Ranching has been under attack by the extreme left for some time, with their cattle being barred from grazing on federal lands because of alleged “climate change” or other environmental “damage”. There were altercations in other states between ranchers and the federal government over this very grazing issue. In Arizona, the Center for Biological Diversity has led the charge against ranchers by filing lawsuits against them and other parties, as well as against various government agencies. (Type “Center for Biological Diversity v. “ into a search engine to get an idea of their “sue and settle” track record.) Sue and settle is one way agencies fundraise at taxpayers’ expense.

One issue revolved around the Sonoran Chub, a non-native, supposedly endangered small fish that periodically appears during the rainy season. One rancher had had enough, and he pushed back and won. The head of CBD was a graduate of this radical college. But the irony is that this same college a few years later had on display a cross section of a pine tree that demonstrated how cattle grazing had a significant impact on fire reduction over the years when cattle were allowed to graze freely across the state. One has to wonder if there’s a connection between the Sonoran Chub and the California’s Delta Smelt? Sounds fishy.

We should support peaceful protests and counterprotests. However, we need to weigh the potential risks. The radical left is ratcheting up their activism and we’re seeing increasing examples of violence with innocent people being seriously hurt. Dead activists don’t protest. It’s time people who support a Constitutional Republic to understand that the “bluing” of America, and particularly Arizona, is insidious and has been going on right in front of us for decades. Many of us just didn’t notice it. Painting Prescott as a peaceful conservative town is a lovely fairy tale, but it’s just that—a tale.

*****

The Trumpanian Devil is a long-time activist who wishes to remain anonymous.

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K-12 Education: A Quickie Overview thumbnail

K-12 Education: A Quickie Overview

By John Droz, Jr.

I periodically come across information that helps put some of our national issues into perspective — and then share it with you.

In this interesting Report 2024 Schooling in America, there are some fascinating data, like what’s in the following two graphs…

FIGURE 3: PARENTS’ VIES ON THE DIRECTION OF K-12 EDUCATION, 2014-2024

FIGURE 5: PUBLIC VIEWS ON THE DIRECTION OF K-12 EDUCATON, 2013-2024

My takeaway is that we are at a record high dissatisfaction with our current State-run K-12 education systems. We should leverage this justified sentiment into creative, competent national reform, with DOEd not being dissolved, but rather providing leadership (see here).

From another recent ReportWhat Do Parents Want, note these conclusions:

  • Parents prefer schools that have stricter versus more lenient discipline.
  • Parents overwhelmingly want teachers to keep their politics to themselves. Further, a majority of parents said that they would not choose a school that took political stances with which they disagreed, even if that school was of high academic quality.
  • Parents want schools to avoid sexually explicit material and to avoid teaching LGBTQ content in the classroom.
  • Parents favor schools that use more technology than less, and that emphasize STEM over the humanities.
  • Parents prefer schools that emphasize national pride over skeptical treatment of American history.
  • Parents say they want schools to instill in students the ability to discuss contentious issues rationally.

My takeaway is that these are things that DOEd should publicly advocate, as well as give States assistance in making happen. At this point, few (if any) States are doing these things. (See here for more good ideas.)

©2025 All rights reserved.


Here is other information from this scientist that you might find interesting:

I am now offering incentives for you to sign up new subscribers!

I also consider reader submissions on Critical Thinking on my topics of interest.

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.orgdiscusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.infocovers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.infomultiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2025 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

The post K-12 Education: A Quickie Overview appeared first on Dr. Rich Swier.

Three Rogue Judges Block Trump Admin Efforts To Eradicate Discriminatory DEI From Schools

By Breccan F. Thies

Written by Breccan F. Thies

One judge said that, because the Biden administration’s Department of Education thought DEI was fine, the Trump administration must somehow follow suit

The attempted judicial coup continues apace as three federal district court judges issued directives to stop the Trump administration’s ability to halt federal funding for schools that participate in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) discrimination.

Thursday saw district judges in Maryland, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C., issue separate sweeping orders to stop some of the major education reforms President Donald Trump was elected to enact.

“Unelected judges, keen to disrupt the President’s efforts to remove color-consciousness from American education have forgotten that the judiciary is the only non-political branch of our tripartite system of government,” Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and legal fellow at Defending Education, told The Federalist. “Judges that prohibit the Department of Education’s enforcement of its ‘Dear Colleague Letter’ and related civil rights compliance form forget that both are constitutional and a plain-text application of longstanding federal civil rights laws like Title VI.”

“That law specifically conceives that institutions which do not uphold race neutral policies can have their federal funding revoked,” she continued. “Judges are bound to interpret the laws as they read — not as judges wish they read.”

The cases, brought by far-left teachers unions, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and others, were decided by two Trump-appointed judges and one appointee of President Barack Obama. They also came just one day after Trump signed yet another executive order trying to rein in the DEI-caused destruction in schools.

New Hampshire District Judge Landya B. McCafferty, the Obama appointeeclaimed that the Department of Education did not properly define DEI in a Feb. 14, 2025, “Dear Colleague Letter,” despite the fact that, as McCafferty herself acknowledges, the letter exhaustively described the insidious ideology.

The 2025 Letter begins by asserting that schools within this country have “embrace[d] … pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences,” as well as “other forms of racial discrimination,” which have “emanated throughout every facet of academia.” It goes on to state that schools have engaged in such discrimination by “toxically indoctrinat[ing] students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices … under the banner of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (‘DEI’), smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.” According to the 2025 Letter, DEI programs “discriminate in less direct, but equally insidious” ways by “frequently preferenc[ing] certain racial groups and teach[ing] students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not.” It asserts that “[s]uch programs stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes” and “deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.”

But McCafferty’s decision shows that she simply does not like the policy goals of eradicating DEI, goals that millions of Americans voted for when casting a ballot for Trump.

Bizarrely, the judge said that, because the Biden administration’s Department of Education — the biggest purveyor of the ideology — thought DEI was fine, the Trump administration must somehow follow suit. McCafferty also suggested that the Biden administration’s loopholes to bypass the end of the affirmative action racial admissions system should have been accounted for in the 2025 Letter.

Perhaps confused about how elections work, McCafferty continued, “Again, the 2025 Letter does not acknowledge the Department’s change in position from believing that DEI initiatives lawfully foster a ‘supportive, welcoming environment,’ to believing that DEI programs illegally ‘deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school’ by ‘stigmatiz[ing] students … based on crude racial stereotypes.’”

McCafferty added that the loss of federal funding “would cripple the operations of many educational institutions.” But the threat of pulling federal funding is consistently used by the federal government to seek compliance and is not new.

Maryland District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher, a Trump appointee, made a procedural argument claiming that “the Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their Administrative Procedure Act (‘APA’) claim, have demonstrated that they will be irreparably harmed absent preliminary relief, and have shown the equities and public interest favor them.”

The judge essentially said that the implementation of the 2025 Letter was not done properly and therefore stopped its implementation nationwide.

While saying the court is not required to decide whether the policies are “good or bad, prudent or foolish, fair or unfair,” Gallagher said she is “constitutionally required to closely scrutinize whether the government went about creating and implementing them in the manner the law requires. The government did not.”

Gallagher has also ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate the return” of a Venezuelan man deported to El Salvador.

Using reasoning similar to that of McCafferty, D.C. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, another Trump appointee, said the Trump administration set “no clear ‘boundaries’” for what DEI means, adding that a directive from the Trump administration telling schools to prove their compliance in ending DEI could not reasonably be followed.

Threatening the loss of funding “without sufficiently defining the conduct that might trigger liability, violates the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on vagueness,” she wrote.

As my colleague Shawn Fleetwood pointed out, the responsibility to rein in the rogue lower court judges who are making sweeping, nationwide decisions lies at the feet of the U.S. Supreme Court — which has been completely derelict in fulfilling that responsibility.

*****

This article was first published on The Federalist, and is reproduced here with permission

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What RFK Jr. Gets Right—and Wrong—About Autism thumbnail

What RFK Jr. Gets Right—and Wrong—About Autism

By Jill Escher

Editor’s Note: As the father of a 41-year-old autistic man, it is hard to comprehend why some people are upset by RFK’s attempt to do something about the problem. That in no way undermines my son’s humanity. There are problems with the fact that my low-functioning son is defined by a term that includes Elon Musk, who is on the opposite end of the spectrum. On the other hand, while I accept my son for who he is, if I could wave a magic wand and make my son “normal,” I would do it in a heartbeat. Why is there a fear of being “normal”  today? Why is being normal somehow considered a threat to those who fall outside of that category? Moreover, like so many big problems the Trump administration has taken on, I’m glad to see something being done about the frequency of autism. Whether it be inflation, the border, DEI, fair trade, or autism, attempting to address the problem should be lauded. All these issues will be very difficult to solve. Those who criticize often do so, offering nothing in return but to run down those who try to make things better. Maybe the embarrassment of backing a President who had to be hidden from view, to one who dynamically tackles problems, is just too much for some people to handle.

Is it really an epidemic? Are rates increasing? Answering these questions and more

The April 16 autism press conference featuring Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had the media and internet in a frenzy. Did he offend people with autism, or was he at long last shining a light on harsh, neglected realities? Was he right to call the stunning increase in autism cases an epidemic, or was that unscientific scaremongering?

Some people, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, raged. Other people, particularly parents of the severely affected, cheered. But mostly, people were confused. And who can blame them? The truth about autism can seem as easy to grasp as a mound of warm Jell-O.

So it’s worth some quality time to closely examine the main bones of contention. After all, a hell of a lot is at stake. Probably the future of our country is at stake. Because if the new CDC autism prevalence estimate of 1 in 31 8-year-olds signals truly escalating rates, the implications for public health, research, safety-net services, and our economy are simply massive.

As someone who has labored in the trenches of autism for two decades, in the realms of both research and advocacy, I offer this little FAQ for your consideration.

Was RFK Jr. right to call autism an “epidemic”?

Score a point for the health secretary here. A half century of troves of very rich data from multiple sources across multiple systems and examining all levels of autism emphatically point to a true increase in autism rates. Despite rampant speculation about “just noticing it better,” the research does not support this conjecture, though it could explain some effects around the higher-functioning edge. Some key data points to consider:

  • Even limited to cases of autism with intellectual disability, or ID (formerly called mental retardation, and meaning IQ of 70 or under), childhood autism rates have skyrocketed, from about 0.01 percent to 0.05 percent of children in the 1960s based on early studies to about 1.28 percent of 8-year-olds in 2022, per the latest CDC data.
  • Even in 4-year-olds, who tend to have greater impairments than those diagnosed later in childhood or adulthood, prevalence has more than doubled over a short period, reaching 2.93 percent for the recent 2022 surveillance, up from 1.34 percent in 2010, when the CDC began tracking preschoolers.
  • Autism cases in our most populous state, California, have exploded. Its developmental disability system—which serves only significantly disabling forms of autism—has seen autism cases rise from about 4,000 in 1989 to about 206,000 in 2024. That’s a 51-fold increase over 35 years, while caseloads of ID and other categories remained fairly flat.
  • Careful epidemiology in the state of New Jersey conducted by the respected Rutgers University researcher Dr. Walter Zahorodny (who gave invited remarks at the RFK Jr. press conference confirming the existence of a true increase) has reflected sweeping increases in autism prevalence in the state, to the point that in some regions, about 7 percent of 8-year-olds have autism. Dr. Zahorodny told me the case definitions did not change over time.
  • Autism cases are up sharply in special education across all states. To be eligible for special education, a student must demonstrate significant impairments that interfere with learning, and they require specialized instruction as a consequence. For example, in California, cases grew from about 4,000 in 2000-21 to about 167,000 in 2023-34, while cases of ID remained steady. In 2019, Massachusetts reported that its schools were serving four times as many students with autism as they did 15 years prior. In Minnesota, autism cases surged exponentially beginning in the 1991 school year, with the researchers finding “diagnostic substitution does not largely explain the increasing trends.”
  • The largest U.S. study of autism prevalence in hospital and medical care systems shows rising autism prevalence across birth cohorts. Autism in adults over the age of 65 was shown to be extremely rare, in the range of .02 percent, compared to rates of about 3 percent for children aged 5 to 8 in 2022. When RFK Jr. says he’s never met anyone his age with significant autism, he’s not wrong. The data, especially from the robust California developmental disability system, show they hardly exist.
  • Autism rates are skyrocketing in our adult Medicaid and Social Security safety-net systems, where the disorder is by definition limited to more severe cases. In Medicaid, the prevalence of young adults with autism more than doubled from 2011 to 2019. For SSI, we see staggering autism growth of 336.6 percent from 2005 to 2019, while cases with ID and other mental disorders decreased by 45 percent.
  • Further evidence it’s not a game of diagnostic switcheroo: The CDC has found that the prevalence of children with developmental disabilities generally, including ID, has increased over time.

The word epidemic is appropriate to describe the ascension of autism, Alexander MacInnis, MS, an independent epidemiological researcher who has published on California autism data and who has a daughter with profound autism, told me. “Epidemic has a definition, and not just for infectious disease,” he said. “It can be a disorder where more cases are occurring than what you would expect based on history. We have massively increased birth cohort prevalence from every data source I can find showing very consistent increases, even within studies, which removes bias. Overall we see about a 7 percent increase in autism cases per birth year. Does this meet the definition of an epidemic? It does.”

But Scientific American just told me there’s no true increase in autism.

The media loves to cherry-pick a few old studies to defend the idea that there’s been no true increase in autism. A perfect example is this recent gem from Scientific American citing and mischaracterizing papers that are plainly irrelevant.

For example, it points to a 2015 study on special education enrollment for the idea that autism’s increase was only caused by diagnostic shifts away from ID to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). That paper was not an epidemiological study on autism increase over time but instead intended to look for hints of common molecular origin for comorbid conditions. It was conducted by geneticists, not epidemiologists using proper tools of that trade, and performed a clumping of all ages 3 to 21, which is meaningless to determine autism rates over time. In any event, the study found that a large percentage of the autism increase was not accounted for by declining ID, and many states did not reflect this trend at all, including the most populous states, California and Texas. Furthermore, the data is now 15 years old, and autism rates have clearly continued surging over that time.

*****

To continue reading, click here, and go to Tablet Magazine

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot KPRC Houston

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Army Rolls Out Equal Fitness Standards For Men And Women In Combat Roles

By Wallace White

The U.S. Army formalized equal fitness standards between men and women in combat roles in new guidelines released Monday.

The new Army Fitness Test (AFT), formally the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT), will not have separate standards for men and women in combat Military Occupational Specialties (MOS), according to the Army. The new standards will begin the first stage of implementation on June 1, with a projected completion by January 2026.

However, the general test that includes non-combat roles will retain gender-specific guidelines, according to the Army.

“The change reflects the Army’s continued focus on building a physically ready force capable of meeting operational demands in austere environments,” the Army said in their announcement. “The Army is also adapting its policy framework to support implementation, including support to Soldiers with medical profiles and governance to monitor the impact of the new standard on readiness, retention, and end strength.”

(RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Army Sued After Stonewalling Release Of Records On Training Slides Calling Pro-Life Orgs ‘Terrorist Groups’)

The Army also removed the standing power throw from the list of exercises, which involved throwing a 10 pound medicine ball over the back of one’s head. All personnel in combat MOS’ will have to score at least 350 points in total over the now-five events, scoring no less than 60 points each event.

The change comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered equal standards for men and women in combat roles across the armed forces in a directive issued Mar. 31.

“For far too long, we have allowed standards to slip,” Hegseth said on X regarding the March directive. “We’ve had different standards for men/women serving in combat arms [Military Occupational Specialty] MOS’s and jobs . . . That’s not acceptable, and it changes right now!”

The five-event Army Fitness Test is designed to increase warfighting readiness, reduce injury risk, and enhance the physical performance of the force,” Army spokesperson Matt Ahearn told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The AFT introduces a higher, sex-neutral, and age-normed standard for 21 combat specialties, aligning fitness requirements with operational demands.”

*****

This article was published by The Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

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Sales of Existing Homes Drop to Worst March since 2009. West, South, Midwest, Northeast All Get Crushed. Supply Surges to Highest since 2016 thumbnail

Sales of Existing Homes Drop to Worst March since 2009. West, South, Midwest, Northeast All Get Crushed. Supply Surges to Highest since 2016

By Wolf Richter

The 3-year 50% price explosion has caused epic demand destruction. Prices are way too high. But mortgage rates are back in the historically normal range above 6%

The feverishly anticipated spring selling season is starting out as a dud. Sales of existing homes – single-family houses, townhouses, condos, and co-ops – that closed in March fell by 3.1% from the already frozen volume a year ago to 315,000 deals, not seasonally adjusted, down by 31% from March 2022, which was when home sales began to plunge after prices had spiked in many markets by 50% or more in just three years, to ridiculous levels, thereby destroying demand.

Demand destruction on display: The seasonally adjusted annual rate of sales of existing homes fell by 5.9% in March from February, and by 2.4% year-over-year, to a rate of 4.02 million, the worst March since 2009, according to the National Association of Realtors today. From the Marches in prior years (historical data from YCharts):

  • 2024: -2.4%
  • 2023: -7.6%
  • 2022: -29.3%
  • 2019: -23.1%
  • 2018: -27.0%

Highest supply for March since 2016.

Inventory of homes listed for sale jumped by 100,000 homes, or by 8.1%, in March from February, and by 20% year-over-year, to 1.33 million listings. This increase in inventory occurred even as buyers were on strike because prices are too high.

Supply of unsold homes on the market, amid these inventory levels and demand destruction, jumped to 4.0 months at the March rate of sales, the highest supply for any March since 2016. The months of 2025 are shown as the red squares:

*****

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Your Support is Critical

The Prickly Pear is focused on delivering timely, fact-based news, and citizen opinion that reflects our mission to “inform, educate and advocate about the principles of limited government and personal liberty.”

To achieve that mission, Prickly Pear often engages with like-minded contributors and organizations who share our values. We encourage to support these partners in any way you can, as these partners make our efforts possible.

Direct support of the Prickly Pear can be made at the link below. Every dollar is greatly appreciated!