Review: Covid Vax Caused Majority of Deaths Post-Jab thumbnail

Review: Covid Vax Caused Majority of Deaths Post-Jab

By Catherine Salgado

“COVID-19 Vaccine is the Culprit in Majority Found Dead after Injection”

Back in February, a paper argued that 13 million people had been killed by Covid-19 vaccines worldwide. That’s one of many dozens of studies and pieces of research showing the devastating effects of the Covid vaccines, which have killed or injured tens of millions.

The latest piece of evidence was just covered on the Substack of renowned cardiologist, internist, epidemiologist, and Covid truth-teller Dr. Peter McCullough:

“[Courageous Discourse] As government and public health officials squirm with more published deaths coming out on a daily basis, the final retort of ‘you cannot prove the vaccine caused the death’ has just been blown out of the water!

Hulscher et al have published the largest accumulation of autopsy result in deaths after COVID-19 vaccination. From a total of 325 cases, independent review found the COVID-19 vaccine was the cause of death in 73.9%. The vast majority had the cardiovascular system as the single fatal organ system injury to the body.”

Don’t expect any apologies or coverage from the mainstream media, though. The Covid vaccines are deadly, but they made Big Pharma billions of dollars and provided the government an excuse for more control. Oh, and the globalists want to reduce the world’s population significantly anyway. This is all part of the plan.

*****

This article was published by Pro Deo et Liberate and is reproduced with permission.

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Here’s What You Need To Know About France’s ‘Summer Of Love’ Riots thumbnail

Here’s What You Need To Know About France’s ‘Summer Of Love’ Riots

By Shawn Fleetwood

The ongoing situation in France bears a striking resemblance to the Black Lives Matter and Antifa violence that engulfed American cities following the May 2020 death of George Floyd.

French authorities have estimated that rioters have burned or looted more than 1,100 public and private buildings over the past week in their violent response to a police shooting involving a 17-year-old French citizen of Algerian descent.

On Wednesday, a French news outlet reported that, according to the country’s Ministry of the Interior, roughly 1,105 buildings including police stations, town halls, and schools have been assaulted since riots began on June 27. French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire told a CNN affiliate that more than 1,000 businesses have been “vandalised, attacked or set on fire.” The damages are estimated to cost over $1 billion.

The impetus for the nationwide violence occurred on June 27, when a French police officer shot and killed 17-year-old “Nahel M.” during a traffic stop. While exact details of the situation remain unclear, early reports indicate the situation unfolded after police pulled the young man over in a Paris suburb for allegedly breaking traffic rules. According to Fox News, police have reportedly claimed Nahel “drove his car at one of the officers, while the video [of the incident] shows one of the officers pointing a weapon at him and saying, ‘You are going to get a bullet in the head.’”

“The officer then appears to shoot Nahel as the car suddenly pulls away, traveling only a short distance before crashing, with Nahel dying at the scene. Police took the offending officer into custody and opened an investigation into charges of voluntary manslaughter, with charges brought against him on Friday,” the Fox report reads. The officer’s lawyers have since claimed their client meant to shoot Nahel in the leg but was bumped into when the car took off and did not intend to kill him.

While Nahel was known to authorities before the incident, he allegedly did not have a criminal record, according to the BBC.

Figures from France’s Ministry of Justice indicate that “3,915 people have been arrested nationwide since Friday — 374 have appeared in court and 120 handed prison sentences,” and the average age of those arrested is 17. Roughly 700 security officials have been injured since the violence began, although “no serious injuries have been reported.”

French President Emmanuel Macron — who was spotted dancing at an Elton John concert while riots engulfed his country — has offered a seemingly mixed response to the riots. While the French president called the shooting of Nahel “inexplicable” and “unforgivable,” he has stopped short of furthering leftist claims there is “systemic racism” within French law enforcement.

Macron also claimed that Big Tech companies such as TikTok and Snapchat have helped fuel the riots. He said his administration will work with social media giants to remove “the most sensitive content” and identify users who “call for disorder or exacerbate the violence.”

On Friday, two unions representing a large swath of French police officers issued a statement condemning Macron for his seemingly lackadaisical response to the riots. The unions additionally called on the president to back French police in their attempts to quell the violence.

“In the face of these savage hordes, calling for calm is not enough, we need to impose it, to re-establish order in the republic and put those arrested beyond where they can act up,” the statement reads.

Marine Le Pen — who ran against Macron in the 2017 and 2022 French presidential elections — also appeared to criticize the president for his handling of the crisis, saying in a June 29 tweet thread that France “is getting worse and worse and the French are paying the terrible price for this cowardice.” The government has since deployed 45,000 officers to handle the riots.

The ongoing situation in France bears a striking resemblance to the violence from the Black Lives Matter and Antifa “summer of love” that engulfed American cities following the May 2020 death of George Floyd. Much like the French incident, leftist anarchists in America used Floyd’s death as a pretext to riot, loot, and burn major cities across the country. And much like the French government’s response to the crisis, many U.S. officials waited until after the damage had been done and lives were lost to deploy effective countermeasures to quell the violence.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

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Can the Military Solve its Recruiting Crisis?

By Rafi Schwartz

The country’s armed services are scrambling to address a significant drop in people signing up to serve Uncle Sam

It’s been fifty years since Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announced the end of the nation’s military draft system, writing in a memo to senior Defense Department officials: “With the signing of the peace agreement in Paris today, and, after receiving a report from the Secretary of the Army that he foresees no need for further inductions, I wish to inform you that the armed forces henceforth will depend exclusively on volunteer soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.” After a quarter century of continuous, mandatory military service, Laird’s announcement marked the close of a major chapter in American conscription practice, and fundamentally altered the public’s perception of what the armed services are, and to whom they belong. 

Now, more than a half-century later, the country’s all-volunteer force has reached a crisis point; 2022 was the Army’s worst recruiting year since the end of the draft in 1973, missing its goal of 60,000 new soldiers by approximately 25 percent. Other military branches have experienced similar shortfalls — a trend that’s fueled the growing question of whether the Pentagon’s recruitment difficulties are a reversible problem or a permanent feature of the 21st century.

“For most Americans,” the country’s all-volunteer force (“AVF”) is “something to be celebrated, but foreign to their daily lives,” said The Atlantic. Eliminating the draft has given the bulk of the population “the freedom to be indifferent to their military, shifting the burden of service to a smaller, self-selected cohort of citizens.” That cohort, frequently comprised of legacy military families, has shifted recently as well, as “disillusioned families steer young people away” from service, The Wall Street Journal reported. “Influencers are not telling them to go into the military,” former Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen told the Journal.

“Moms and dads, uncles, coaches and pastors don’t see it as a good choice”…..

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J.K. Rowling’s Moment of Truth

By Rachel Lu

J. K. Rowling is not a witch. She acquitted herself well in her recent “trial,” by which I mean the podcast series hosted by The Free Press, detailing the explosive controversy between history’s most famous children’s author and liberal progressive activists. It’s cleverly titled The Witch Trials, and it tells the story of Rowling’s rise to fame and her fall into (progressive) infamy. There is extended interview material from Rowling herself, along with some contributions from her detractors and critics. I should warn readers that this is the sort of podcast I had to turn off whenever my kids climbed into the car. Rowling’s battle with transgender ideologues has been exceedingly ugly, and the series makes no effort to sugar-coat this. Nevertheless, the whole story left me oddly hopeful.

That’s not because I am especially sanguine about the transformative power of free speech. The creators of Witch Trials would like us to imbibe that message, in keeping with The Free Press’ wider philosophy. They present this as a cautionary tale about cancel culture, but while I broadly support their principles, Rowling’s travails are in that sense all too familiar, and I wouldn’t have listened to a seven-episode podcast just to remind myself how nutty and intolerant the progressive left has become. What I did enjoy was the eye-opening illustration of how nature perennially reasserts herself, even when people are trying to sprint away from her.

Rowling’s fans feel like she tricked them with a bait-and-switch. A lifelong liberal, she led her readers into what felt to them like a “safe space,” one whose characters grew with them throughout their childhoods. Then, as adults, she shocked them by articulating perennial truths that they preferred not to believe. The hysterical rage was especially fascinating given that the points Rowling was making had always been central to the Harry Potter series. Rowling is a gender complementarian; this has been clear from the earliest Potter books. Further, she very obviously believes that things have natures. Though it is impressive how she personally has been willing to defend her views publicly, instead of cowering before the cancel mobs, there is some level on which this reckoning was bound to happen given the unstable mutations of twenty-first-century gender ideology.

People crave epic stories, meaningful life pursuits, and courageous figures who appear to stand for something. Those goods are only attainable when words mean things, and when we accept certain aspects of the world as fixed, not compliant with our revisionary whims. Progressive activists have for some time been cheerfully torching large portions of American history and Western Civilization more broadly, which is upsetting to some of us, but perhaps just good fun for people who were never taught to value those things in the first place. Eventually, though, iconoclasts find themselves standing, wood bundles and torches in hand, at the foot of something they genuinely love. For this group, Harry Potter turned out to be that thing.

What follows will contain spoilers, if that term still applies to Harry Potter. Perhaps the “Boy Who Lived” has now joined Hamlet, King David, and Gilgamesh as a character whose story the educated reader is simply expected to know. Indeed, I predict that future generations will know him. But I think they will refer to him, to the last, as a “boy.”

The Bait

Millennials worshiped Rowling in childhood. This comes through quite clearly in Witch Trials, as childhood fans gush about the way her books represented a “security blanket” through their childhood and adolescent growing pains. In a way, this is odd, because as children’s books go, Rowling’s are quite dark. Death is a major theme. Political oppression is rampant. Even “good” adults seem to be offering a tutorial in “failure to protect,” as Harry arrives each fall at Hogwarts brimming with eagerness to learn, only to be socially ostracized, plagued with death threats, or both. This is what gives today’s kids warm fuzzies?

My explanation is threefold. First, for all the grimness, Rowling gave her readers a universe that they found morally comfortable. Inclusion was always a major theme. The bad guys, a group of “pureblood” wizards, want to rule the world and ensure that their magical club is restricted to people of noble (magical) birth. They’re one part evil aristocrats protecting their privilege, and one part wand-wielding Nazis crusading under a “dark mark.” Meanwhile, the good guys are crusading for meritocracy, equality, and love, with side plots exploring the ethics of discrimination, especially against house elves (which some wizards regard as natural slaves). Modern readers find themselves right at home in this moral landscape. It is especially clever how the most scorned and discriminated-against group is “Muggles,” or non-magical persons, which is to say, every actual human being on this planet. Look at that! In J. K. Rowling’s universe, we can all be victims.

Dobby is a free elf, and better for it. But he is still happiest and most fulfilled when devoting his energies to the service to others, and Hermione becomes a better house-elf advocate when she accepts this reality.

Rowling’s readers did not only want to be victims, however. They wanted to be heroes as well. This is another major theme of Harry Potter, and the wizarding universe undoubtedly appealed to readers in part because its Millennial audience also hungered to be “seen” and recognized in their personal uniqueness. There is a reason Harry Potter spawned a slew of internet quizzes. Children are initiated into the wondrous world of Hogwarts after discovering that they have an innate capacity for doing magic, and readers then get to follow these elite characters to their posh boarding school, where their unique abilities are further explored and refined. In the very hour of their arrival, their minds are probed by the magical “sorting hat” that assesses their character and places them within the proper House. As they continue at Hogwarts, they may encounter Dumbledore’s Mirror of Erised, which shows each person the deepest desire of his or her heart. Spooky Bogarts bring them face to face with (an illusion of) their greatest fears. The magical Room of Requirement supplies a seeker with whatever he or she happens to need at a given moment, and students eventually learn to cast a magical “patronus charm,” which brings forth a kind of animal-protector in a form that uniquely reflects the caster’s soul.

Why wouldn’t Millennials feel nurtured in this imaginary universe, where exquisitely-individualized magicians battle bigots and bullies? Social conservatives obligingly supplied the final piece of this puzzle by panicking and trying to ban Harry Potter. Alarmed by the references to magic and “witchcraft,” combined with the cultlike character of Harry Potter fanhood, some traditionalists issued their own fatwa against Rowling and tried to get her books removed from school libraries. This was probably silly, but it would be hard to find a more surefire method of convincing the left that Rowling was enlightened, uplifting, and thoroughly “safe.”

The Trap

Harry Potter exploded in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Time passed, and Millennials got older and exulted in their “love wins” moment. Rowling supported this, announcing in 2009 that she saw Albus Dumbledore as gay. But as time passed, and same-sex couples settled into banal normalcy, young adults went searching for new horizons of sexual-identity-based inclusion. Soon growing numbers were identifying as “trans” and demanding hormone blockers and “sex reassignment surgery.” And then, it happened. Their favorite author jumped ship.

Rowling’s objections to the trans movement have mostly been posed in practical terms. She considers it unsafe and unjust to allow physiologically male persons in women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and prisons. She sees it as worrisome, not a sign of progress and liberation when scores of young people are so repulsed by their natural bodies that they consider it unbearable to live in them. But she also objects strongly to terms like “menstruating person” and “chest feeder,” which she clearly sees as degrading to women and mothers. It’s clear from both her books and her public advocacy that Rowling believes in sexual difference, as a real thing that is meaningfully connected to biology. Also, she is clearly interested in natures as such.

First, consider sexual difference. In affairs of the heart, the wizarding world was remarkably conservative. Hogwarts is full of romantic intrigue, all of it heterosexual. Sexual minorities often view Remus Lupin, Rowling’s “high and lonely” outcast, as a kindred spirit, but in the books, he ultimately marries a woman and has a baby with her. Whatever Dumbledore and Grindelwald may have done in their imprudent youth, we see exactly zero settled, same-sex couples in the wizarding world.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Rowling secretly disapproves of same-sex relationships. She says she doesn’t, and she has proven her willingness to stand by unpopular views. I think she feels real sympathy with gays and lesbians, and also with people who experience gender dysphoria. But her interest as an author always followed the interplay of man and woman, considering what brings them together or drives them apart. Meanwhile, for all their detailed personal development, her characters never explore their gender identities; even when they use Polyjuice’s potion to take on the guise of other people, Harry and Ron always seem to be boys or men, while Hermione is always the girl. There is a scene in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (amusing now to revisit) in which we learn that at Hogwarts, female students may enter the boys’ dormitories, while the reverse is prevented by magical charms. It’s quite remarkable that Rowling’s fans managed to obsess over her books for so many years without noticing how traditional her instincts really are in this regard.

Questions about natures are explored in interesting ways in sub-plots involving non-human species. There are several of these: giants, goblins, house elves, and centaurs, along with some sentient-seeming magical beasts such as hippogriffs, unicorns, and thestrals. Obviously, as mythical species, these are available to Rowling to explore and develop imaginatively. Her creative choices here reveal a deep curiosity about natures as such, and about their role in defining us as persons.

Eventually Rowling herself became a kind of truth martyr, publicly pilloried and bombarded with threats of sexual violence, for refusing to say things she understood to be false. Do we all need scar tissue to teach us the real value of the truth?

On the one hand, she is clearly deeply committed to the premise that persons have intrinsic worth that transcends the particularities of their kind. Even sympathetic characters like Sirius Black can be punished for their failure to treat non-human persons with compassion and respect. On the other hand, characters can also make mistakes by failing to recognize the distinctness of each non-human species, as when Hagrid puts himself and others at risk by refusing to recognize the dangers of keeping vicious monsters as pets. We understand of course that as a “redeemed monster” himself (a half-giant with a heart of gold), he has an irrepressible need to see the benevolent potential in other apparently-monstrous creatures. Unfortunately, much of the time it’s just not there. Hermione, likewise, makes a fool of herself with her juvenile attempts to “liberate” house elves from servitude, while Ron (the stodgy wizard-born traditionalist) steadfastly maintains that the elves really do not want the kind of freedom she envisions for them. We might have expected the liberation-minded feminist to win the day, but it turns out that Ron is correct on this point. The character of Dobby proves, in a very moving way, that house elves are capable of their own kind of freedom, and certainly of love. Dobby is a free elf, and better for it. But he is still happiest and most fulfilled when devoting his energies to the service to others, and Hermione becomes a better house-elf advocate when she accepts this reality.

In Rowling’s mythical “natures,” we can see the curious musings of a person trying to figure out how far nature goes in defining a person’s life and horizons. How do “given” characteristics that we share with others of our kind interface with more universal characteristics of personhood (rationality, intrinsic dignity, a capacity for love)? How are they juxtaposed against unique personal characteristics, and individual hopes and dreams? The Harry Potter stories don’t always provide worked-out answers to these questions, but they are exploring them, and the answers they do give are broadly consistent with the Christian natural rights tradition. Persons are unique, and that uniqueness should be recognized and valued. At the same time, all have dignity, want to love and be loved, and desire freedom.

The Lesson

It really is not possible to tell a good story without drawing on themes like this. Good stories draw from tradition and transcend the particulars of a given historical moment. They appeal to a universal human nature, which is what enables people from across history to be fascinated and moved by the dilemma of Antigone, the courtship of Ruth and Boaz, and the loyalty of Huckleberry Finn. Rowling does tell good stories, which is why I read them as a young adult, and then reread them with my own children. Inclusion and privilege are not the only themes. Rowling also explores friendship and selflessness, obligation and sacrifice, loyalty and forgiveness, and the importance of personal integrity. Her reflections on death are sometimes deeply moving, and it is especially impressive how bad magic is distinguished so clearly from the good. The good kind is lawlike, while bad magic subverts nature and warps the human soul, as power-lust will inevitably do when it is unshackled from justice, love, and the natural law.

My least favorite feature of Harry Potter was always the way that her characters lied so frequently, often for trivial reasons and seemingly without remorse. I saw a deep irony in the situation when Harry was subjected by the repressive Dolores Umbridge to a torture-chamber version of a familiar schoolroom punishment, forced to write repeatedly in his own blood that “I must not tell lies,” until the message was literally etched in scar tissue on his hand. At the time, he was being punished for telling the truth. But in fact, he did tell lies on a regular basis. Was it possible, I wondered, that Umbridge unwittingly helped him towards genuine moral improvement? That question took on another dimension when Rowling herself became a kind of truth-martyr, publicly pilloried and bombarded with threats of sexual violence, for refusing to say things she understood to be false. Free societies are certainly better, but scar tissue can be effective in teaching us the value of truth.

The Millennials are an impious and historically ignorant generation. Still, they were children once. They liked stories back then, as children do. Watching the ghost stories of their own childhoods come back to haunt them, we may reflect that every generation, however hostile to tradition, retains something that it likes from the past. Finding that something can be the key to salvation for many wandering souls.

Rowling is the creator of a magical universe. We thought that Deathly Hallows completed her legacy, but it turned out she had a few more tricks up her sleeve. Many of her former fans have decided that she’s a witch, but she’s been more faithful to them than they know. As the witches of old, she has passed through her moment of infamy, but she may be judged more kindly by generations to come.

*****

This article was published by Law&Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

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Weekend Read: Pandemic Leaders Were Biodefense Puppets and Profiteers thumbnail

Weekend Read: Pandemic Leaders Were Biodefense Puppets and Profiteers

By Debbie Lerman

Scandalous incompetence. Profound stupidity. Astounding errors. This is how many analysts – including Dr. Vinay Prasad, Dr. Scott Atlas, and popular Substack commentator eugyppius – explain how leading public health experts could prescribe so many terrible pandemic response policies.

And it’s true: the so-called experts certainly have made themselves look foolish over the last three years: Public health leaders like Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Faucimake false claims, or contradict themselves repeatedly, on subjects related to the pandemic response, while leading scientists, like Peter Hotez in the US and Christian Drosten in Germany, are equally susceptible to such flip-flops and lies. Then there are the internationally renowned medical researchers, like Eric Topol, who repeatedly commit obvious errors in interpreting Covid-related research studies. [ref]

All of these figures publicly and aggressively promoted anti-public health policies, including universal masking, social distancing, mass testing and quarantining of healthy people, lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

It seems like an open-and-shut case: Dumb policies, dumb people in charge of those policies.

This might be true in a few individual cases of public health or medical leaders who really are incapable of understanding even high school level science. However, if we look at leading pandemic public health and medical experts as a group – a group consisting of the most powerful, widely published, and well-paid researchers and scientists in the world – that simple explanation sounds much less convincing.

Even if you believe that most medical researchers are shills for pharmaceutical companies and that scientists rarely break new ground anymore, I think you’d be hard-pressed to claim that they lack basic analytical skills or a solid educational background in the areas they’ve studied. Most doctors and scientists with advanced degrees know how to analyze simple scientific documents and understand basic data. 

Additionally, those doctors and public health professionals who were deemed experts during the pandemic were also clever enough to have climbed the academic, scientific, and/or government ladders to the highest levels.

They might be unscrupulous, sycophantic, greedy, or power-mongering. You might think they make bad moral or ethical decisions. But it defies logic to say that every single one of them understands simple scientific data less than, say, someone like me or you. In fact, I find that to be a facile, superficial judgment that does not get to the root cause of their seemingly stupid, incompetent behavior.

Returning to some specific examples, I would argue that it is irrational to conclude, as Dr. Prasad did, that someone like Dr. Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who has published over 1,300 peer-reviewed articles and is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine [ref] cannot read research papers “at a high level.” And it is equally unlikely that Anthony Fauci, who managed to ascend and remain atop the highest scientific perch in the federal government for many decades, controlling billions of dollars in research grants [ref], was too dumb to know that masks don’t stop viruses.

There must, therefore, be a different reason why all the top pro-lockdown scientists and public health experts – in perfect lockstep – suddenly started (and continue to this day) to misread studies and advocate policies that they had claimed in the past were unnecessary, making themselves look like fools.

Public health experts were messengers for the biodefense response

The most crucial single fact to know and remember when trying to understand the craziness of Covid times is this:

The public health experts were not responsible for pandemic response policy. The military-intelligence-biodefense leadership was in charge.

In previous articles, I examined in great detail the government documents that show how standard tenets of public health pandemic management were abruptly and secretly thrown out during Covid. The most startling switch was the replacement of the public health agencies by the National Security Council and Department of Homeland Security at the helm of pandemic policy and planning.

As part of the secret switch, all communications – defined in every previous pandemic planning document as the responsibility of the CDC – were taken over by the National Security Council under the auspices of the White House Task Force. The CDC was not even allowed to hold its own press conferences!

As a Senate report from December 2022 notes:

From March through June 2020, CDC was not permitted to conduct public briefings, despite multiple requests by the agency and CDC media requests were “rarely cleared.” HHS stated that by early April 2020, “after several attempts to get approvals,” its Office of Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs “stopped asking” the White House “for a while.” (p. 8)

When public health and medical experts blanketed the airwaves and Internet with “recommendations” urging universal masking, mass testing and quarantining of asymptomatic people, vaccine mandates, and other anti-public health policies – or when they promoted obviously flawed studies that supported the quarantine-until-vaccine biodefense agendathey were not doing so because they were dumb, incompetent, or misguided.

They were performing the role that the leaders of the national security/biodefense response gave them: to be the trusted public face that made people believe quarantine-until-vaccine was a legitimate public health response. 

Why did public health leaders go along with the biodefense agenda?

We have to imagine ourselves in the position of public health and medical experts at top government positions when the intelligence-military-biodefense network took over the pandemic response.

What would you do if you were a government employee, or a scientist dependent on government grants, and you were told that the quarantine-until-vaccine policy was actually the only way to deal with this particular engineered potential bioweapon?

How would you behave if an unprecedented event in human history happened on your watch: an engineered virus designed as a potential bioweapon was spreading around the world, and the people who designed it told you that terrifying the entire population into locking down and waiting for a vaccine was the only way to stop it from killing many millions?

More mundanely, if your position and power depended on going along with whatever the powers-that-be in the NSC and DHS told you to do – if your job and livelihood were on the line – would you go against the narrative and risk losing it all?

And, finally, in a more venal vain: what if you stood to gain a lot more money and/or power by advocating for policies that might not be the gold standard of public health, but that you told yourself could bring about major innovations (vaccines/countermeasures) that would save humanity from future pandemics?

We know how the most prominent Covid “experts” answered those questions. Not because they were dumb, but because they had a lot to lose and/or a lot to gain by going along with the biodefense narrative – and they were told millions would die if they failed to do so.

Why understanding the motives of public health leaders during Covid is so important

Paradoxically, deeming public health experts stupid and incompetent actually reinforces the consensus narrative: that lockdowns and vaccines were part of a public health plan. In this reading, the response may have been terrible, or it may have gone awry, but it was still just a stupid public health plan designed by incompetent public health leaders.

Such a conclusion leads to calls for misguided and necessarily ineffectual solutions: Even if we replaced every single HHS employee or defunded the HHS or even the WHO altogether, we would not solve the problem and would be poised to repeat the entire pandemic fiasco all over again.

The only way to avoid such repetition is to recognize the Covid catastrophe for what it was: an international counterterrorism effort focused myopically on lockdowns and vaccines, to the exclusion of all traditional and time-tested public health protocols.

We need to wake up to the fact that, since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (if not earlier), we have ceded control of the agencies that are supposed to be in charge of public health to an international military-intelligence-pharmaceutical cartel.

This “public-private partnership” of bioterrorism experts and vaccine developers is not interested in public health at all, except as a cover for their very secret and very lucrative biowarfare research and countermeasure development.

Public health was shunted aside during the Covid pandemic, and the public health leaders were used as trusted “experts” to convey biowarfare edicts to the population. Their cooperation does not reflect stupidity or incompetence. Making such claims contributes to the coverup of the much more sinister and dangerous transfer of power that their seemingly foolish behavior was meant to hide.

*****

This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

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Hobbs Doubles Down On Executive Orders For LGBTQ Community

By Daniel Stefanski

Unwilling to work with the Arizona State Legislature, Governor Katie Hobbs has again chosen to exercise unilateral power in the pursuit of her progressive plans.

On Tuesday, Governor Katie Hobbs announced that she signed two Executive Orders to “restore rights and protect LGBTQ+ Arizonans.” According to Hobbs’ Office, the Orders “ensure the state employee health care plan covers medically-necessary gender-affirming surgery” and bar “state agencies from funding, promoting, or supporting conversion therapy against LGBTQ+ Arizonans.”

In a press release, the governor said, “Our LGBTQ+ community should never have to face hate and discrimination, and I will do everything in my power to fight for full equality. The State is leading by example on this issue, and we will continue working until Arizona is a place where every individual can participate equally in our economy and our workforce without fear of discrimination or exclusion.”

Legislative Republicans, already working through their options for addressing Hobbs’ recent Executive Order on abortion, were quick to react. Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen did not mince his words in response to the state’s chief executive’s latest action, tweeting, “Instead of helping struggling AZ families plagued by inflation, the governor just issued an order for taxpayers to cover the cost of elective, sex reassignment surgeries. This illegal, out of touch, unprecedented overreach did not receive proper JLBC review as required by law.”

The Arizona Senate Republicans Caucus echoed its leader, writing, “Hobbs continues to show just how tone deaf she is with the majority of hard-working Arizonans. Her weak leadership abilities are on full display with every executive order and ignorant veto she drops.”

The Center for Arizona Policy immediately issued a statement to call Hobbs’ action a “dangerous power grab,” stating, “Governor Katie Hobbs should have run for the Arizona Legislature if she wanted to make law. Arizona lawmakers who represent Arizonans throughout the state are tasked with passing new laws, not the Governor. This power grab is not only partisan, but it is unwise and dangerous. What she calls “conversion therapy” amounts to basic counseling for those struggling with their gender. It is likely unconstitutional to tell therapists what they can say and citizens what therapy they can seek. It is also unconscionable to block coverage for counseling and health services sought by state employees and their dependents.”

The pro-life, pro-family organization added, “Hobbs also appears to be encouraging irreversible and experimental sex-change surgeries and drug therapies at a time when European countries are increasingly pulling back because of the damage done to so many. We also continue to see more and more people detransition after regretting the permanent effects of such drug therapies and surgeries.”

Many Democrats around the state cheered on the governor’s move, including Representative Nancy Gutierrez, who tweeted, “I was happy to be there today and witness these Executive Orders by Governor Hobbs! Our community will get the care they desire and be able to use their health insurance. I’m also grateful that no other child will subjected to harmful conversion therapy.”

Arizona Republicans now find themselves facing a Democrat governor who is growing increasingly bolder about pushing the bounds of her constitutionally stipulated authority. Just two months ago, Hobbs went through what some might consider as the lowest moments of her fledgling administration, vetoing a wildly popular (and overwhelmingly) bipartisan “Tamale Bill,” signing a state budget that allowed Republicans to protect key priorities (such as the ESA program), and losing her chief of staff.

However, the events of the past calendar week have seemed to buoy the governor’s previously diminishing political capital, starting with her Executive Order to “centralize all abortion-related prosecutions under the Attorney General.” On Monday, after taking the weekend to contemplate a plan of response, Senator Jake Hoffman, the Chairman of the Committee on Director Nominations, announced that he was cancelling Tuesday’s hearing and requested a meeting with the Hobbs’ administration “to discuss any additional overreach (her) office intends to take requiring complicity from Executive Directors.”

After a report circulated that this meeting was “not likely” to occur, Senator T.J. Shope tweeted, “Oh…so much for that Open Door Policy we’ve heard about over and over again. I guess Governor Hobbs would rather fight it out in an adversarial court setting as opposed to an adult conversation in an office setting.”

Not to be forgotten – legislative Republicans and Governor Hobbs recently were battling over a Prop 400 solution – a fight that has been pushed to the rear-view mirror with her calculated Executive Orders at the end of this month.

*****

This article was published by AZ Free News and is reproduced with permission.

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As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

China’s Saboteurs Are Coming to America thumbnail

China’s Saboteurs Are Coming to America

By Gordon Chang

How many soldiers of China’s People’s Liberation Army have slipped into the United States across the southern border? Some estimate 5,000, others 10,000. The concern is that, on the first day of war in Asia they will take down America’s power lines, poison water reservoirs, assassinate officials, start wildfires, spread pathogens, and create terror by bombing shopping malls and supermarkets. Pictured: Migrants, headed for the U.S., travel through the jungle in Darien Province, Panama, on October 13, 2022. (Photo by Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images)

There is now a Chinese invasion of the U.S. homeland.

“The jungle is filled with Chinese marching to America,” said war correspondent Michael Yon to Gatestone.

Chinese migrants are entering the United States on foot at the southern border. Almost all are desperate, seeking a better life for themselves and their children. Some, however, are coming to commit acts of sabotage.

China is in a state of distress; gloom pervades Chinese society. Chinese by the hundreds are now patiently waiting for visas in sweltering heat in lines at U.S. consulates in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

Many, however, are short-circuiting the long waits at the consulates. At the southern border, Chinese migrants are entering the United States in unprecedented numbers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports that the number of apprehensions of Chinese migrants in the first five months of the current federal fiscal year was more than double that during all of the last fiscal year. The 8,000 Chinese migrants apprehended this calendar year are more than quadruple the number apprehended in the comparable period a year ago.

Chinese nationals are flying to Ecuador, which permits them to enter visa-free. They then make their way to the southern edge of the Darien Gap, about 66 miles of jungle separating Colombia and Panama. The migrants cross the natural barrier on foot, and once safely on the north side continue the journey to America, often by bus.

Some Chinese migrants are poor. Many, however, are middle-class. They can afford to pay $35,000 each to Mexican cartels to be smuggled into America.

“It’s like an animal stampede before an earthquake,” said “Sam,” a Chinese migrant who crossed into America first in February at Brownsville, Texas, to Axios.

Some migrants are almost certainly members of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Representative Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said at a press conference on the 14th of this month that a Border Patrol sector chief informed him that some of the Chinese migrants at the southern border have “known ties to the PLA.”

“We have no idea who these people are, and it’s very likely, using Russia’s template of sending military personnel into Ukraine, China is doing the same into the United States,” said Green.

These military-linked migrants, despite their affiliations, have been released into America.

There is no question that China’s PLA is inserting saboteurs through Mexico. “At the Darien Gap, I have seen countless packs of Chinese males of military age, unattached to family groups, and pretending not to understand English,” said Yon, the war correspondent. “They were all headed to the American border.”

“Normally in groups of five to fifteen, they typically emerge from the Darien Gap and spend one night in the U.S.-funded San Vicente Camp, or next door in the Tonosi Hotel, before boarding luxury buses for the trip up Highway 1 toward Costa Rica,” Yon reports. “One group of six young men bought a chicken at the Tonosi Hotel, drank its blood from small glasses, then cooked the chicken themselves in the hotel restaurant, according to the hotel manager. Drinking raw chicken blood is a rite among some PLA soldiers.”

Once here, the military fighters can link up with China’s agents already in place or Chinese diplomats.

How many of the PLA fighters have slipped into the United States this way? Some estimate 5,000, others 10,000. Those numbers sound high, but whatever the actual figure, more are coming.

These are China’s shock troops. The concern is that on the first day of war in Asia they will take down America’s power lines, poison water reservoirs, assassinate officials, start wildfires, spread pathogens, and create terror by bombing shopping malls and supermarkets.

The saboteurs will almost certainly attack American military bases. China has already been probing sensitive installations. Chinese agents posing as tourists have, for instance, intruded into bases, including the Army’s Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, Alaska. There, the suspected Chinese agents drove past a base gate and were later apprehended with a drone inside their car.

“Ancient Chinese strategists prized the use of subterfuge and surprise to achieve victory, and the two PLA colonels who wrote Unrestricted Warfare in 1999 were full of praise for the tactics of Osama bin Laden,” Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center told this publication. “When the Chinese Communist Party starts its war against Taiwan and the United States, Americans should expect that Chinese sleeper agents now in America will hit targets like gas stations and military-age Chinese now crossing our border will be mobilized for assassination attacks and assaults on U.S. military bases.”

Therefore, the next war in Asia will almost certainly be fought on U.S. soil, perhaps on its first day. Unsuspecting Americans will be in the fight.

Immigrants make countries strong, and almost all the Chinese migrants crossing the southern border will contribute to American society. Some, however, are coming to wage war on the United States.

*****

This article was published by the Gatestone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

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May 2023 Business Conditions Monthly

By Peter C. Earle

May 2023 was another month indicating mostly neutral economic trends in the American Institute for Economic Research’s Business Conditions Monthly. AIER’s Leading Indicator rose to 67 in May 2023, its highest value since July 2021. The Lagging Indicator rose from 42 in April to 50 in May, shifting from mildly contracting to a neutral bias. At 75, the Roughly Coincident Indicator shows expansion, but at the slowest pace since February 2023.

AIER Business Conditions Monthly (5 years)

AIER Business Conditions Monthly (1985 – present)

Leading Indicators (67)

Among the twelve components of the Leading Indicators, between April 2023 and May 2023 seven rose, three declined, and two were essentially unchanged. Expanding measures included the University of Michigan Consumer Expectations Index (11 percent), the Conference Board US Leading Index Manufacturers New Orders Consumer Goods & Materials (0.14 percent), the Conference Board US Leading Index Stock Prices 500 Common Stocks (0.60 percent), US New Privately Owned Housing Units Started by Structure Totals (16.4 percent), United States Heavy Trucks Sales (3.35 percent), Adjusted Retail & Food Services Sales Totals (0.35 percent), and debit balances in brokerage margin accounts (1.9 percent) all rose.

US Average Weekly Hours All Employees Manufacturing and Inventory/Sales Ratio (Total Business) were essentially unchanged from April to May 2023.

The remainder of the Leading Indicator components showed declines,  in May 2023. Those included US Initial Jobless Claims (-0.87 percent), Conference Board US Manufacturers New Orders Nondefense Capital Good Ex Aircraft (-0.09 percent), and the 1-to-10-year US Treasury spread (-15.53 percent).

Roughly Coincident (75) and Lagging Indicators (50)

Among the Roughly Coincident Indicator constituents, four showed increases, one declined, and one showed a neutral change from April to May 2023. The three coincident Conference Board measures increased: Coincident Manufacturing and Trade Sales (0.27 percent), Conference Board Coincident Personal Income Less Transfer Payments (0.24 percent), and Consumer Confidence Present Situation (4.30 percent). Total US Employees on Nonfarm Payrolls rose as well (0.22 percent). The US Labor Force Participation Rate was unchanged, and US Industrial Production declined (-0.16 percent).

Among Lagging Indicators, in May 2023 three increased while three declined. The US Census Bureau’s Nonresidential Private Construction Spending (2.38 percent), the ISM Manufacturing Report on Business Inventories (0.16 percent), and 30-day average yields (3.82 percent) all rose. Over the same period, the US Consumer Price Index (ex. Food and Energy, year-over-year) fell (-3.64 percent), as did both the Conference Board’s Lagging Average Duration of Unemployment (-1.44 percent) and Lagging Commercial and Industrial Loans (-0.37 percent).

Discussion

The April 2023 to May 2023 increase in the Leading Indicator from 58 to 67, as well as the fall in the Roughly Coincident Indicator from 92 to 75, took place amid more muted changes on a month-to-month basis. Three of the eighteen constituent indices were essentially unchanged, with only four changing by more than 1 percent.

During the last quarter of 2022 and early 2023, predictions of an imminent US recession dominated the forecast landscape. (Our prediction, made in March 2023, was that a recession of unspecified severity would occur within the next twelve to eighteen months.)

Yet the US economy has shown surprising resilience overall, and where weakness has emerged it has done so moderately. In the first quarter 2023 US GDP was recently revised upward from 1.3 percent to 2 percent. Additionally, in the first half of 2023, both the collapse of several large regional banks and an acrimonious debt ceiling stalemate were resolved without major damage to the economy.

The lagged effects of 500 basis points of policy rate tightening, however, are nevertheless dampening growth. In conjunction with the continued decline in the general price level, credit tightening, declining household cash buffers, and rising unemployment–the latter more readily observed on the state rather than the Federal level–are signs that the Federal Reserve’s contractionary policy campaign is becoming operative. Growing delinquencies in auto loans and credit card payments reveal a US consumer weakened by over two years of inflation, wages not keeping pace with price increases, and the dissipation of pandemic era fiscal stimuli. 

In March 2020, eligible Americans saw their student loan payments and interest suspended in anticipation of the detrimental effects upon employment and consumption that lockdowns and stay-at-home orders were anticipated to have. Those measures have been extended nine times over these subsequent three years. With the recent Supreme Court strikedown of the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan, that forbearance will soon expire. Interest on those loans will begin accumulating again on September 1, 2023, and payments will resume in October 2023.

Over 43 million Americans have student loan debt outstanding. The end of the loan payment moratorium is likely to have a substantially negative impact on consumption, which may in turn accelerate the rise of unemployment and serve as a further drag on US economic growth. Access to financing in the wake of the Fed’s hiking campaign and increased credit stringency in the post-Silicon Valley Bank failure has been drying up, and will not support consumption at the level it has over the past few years.

Manufacturing has declined for seven consecutive months. Classic (if periodically unreliable) signs of an impending recession, including yield curve inversions and low employment diffusion, persist. US stock markets have risen throughout the first half of 2023, defying expectations. But although corporate earnings have recovered since the fall of 2022 much of the recent rise in stock indices has taken place amid rapidly decreasing breadth.

Given the Fed’s continuing commitment to interest rates remaining “higher for longer,” in addition to the likelihood of an additional one or more rate hikes before the end of this year, our March 2023 prediction of a US economic recession within the next twelve to eighteen months–by end-of-summer 2024–remains intact.

LEADING INDICATORS

ROUGHLY COINCIDENT INDICATORS

LAGGING INDICATORS

CAPITAL MARKET PERFORMANCE

*****

This article was published by AIER, The American Institute for Economic Research, and is reproduced with permission.

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CISA Was Behind the Attempt to Control Your Thoughts, Speech, and Life thumbnail

CISA Was Behind the Attempt to Control Your Thoughts, Speech, and Life

By Brownstone Institute

Keeping up with the corruption of the Covid regime feels like drinking from a firehose. The volume of the fraud, the pace of new discoveries, and the breadth of the operations are overwhelming. This makes it imperative for groups like Brownstone Institute to digest the onslaught of information and communicate salient themes and dispositive facts, particularly given the dereliction of mainstream media.

On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee released a report on how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “colluded with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans,” adding to the informational firehose we work to imbibe.

The 36-page report raises three familiar issues: first, government actors worked with third parties to overturn the First Amendment; second, censors prioritized political narratives over truthfulness; and third, an unaccountable bureaucracy hijacked American society.

1. CISA’s Collusion to Overturn the First Amendment

The House Report reveals that CISA, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, worked with social media platforms to censor posts it considered dis-, mis-, or malinformation. Brian Scully, the head of CISA’s censorship team, conceded that this process, known as “switchboarding,” would “trigger content moderation.”

Additionally, CISA funded the nonprofit EI-ISAC in 2020 to bolster its censorship operations. EI-ISAC worked to report and track “misinformation across all channels and platforms.” In launching the nonprofit, the government boasted that it “leverage[d] DHS CISA’s relationship with social media organizations to ensure priority treatment of misinformation reports.”

The switchboard programs directly contradict sworn testimony from CISA Director Jen Easterly. “We don’t censor anything… we don’t flag anything to social media organizations at all,” Esterly told Congress in March. “We don’t do any censorship.” Her statement was more than a lie; it omitted the institutionalization of the practice she denied. The agency’s initiatives relied on a collusive apparatus of private-public partnerships designed to suppress unapproved information.

This should sound familiar.

Alex Berenson gained access to thousands of Twitter communications that uncovered concrete evidence that government actors – including White House Covid Advisor Andy Slavitt – worked to censor him for criticizing Biden’s Covid policies.

White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty privately lobbied social media groups to remove a video of Tucker Carlson reporting the link between Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine and blood clots.

Facebook worked with the CDC to censor posts related to the Covid “lab-leak” hypothesis. Company employees later met with the Department of Health and Human Services to de-platform the “disinformation dozen,” a group including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

These were not cherry-picked examples – they were part of an institutional collusion to strip Americans of their First Amendment rights. Journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi exposed the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” a collection of the world’s most powerful government agencies, NGOs, and private corporations that worked together to silence dissent.

The Supreme Court has held that it is “axiomatic” that the government cannot “induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” Yet, CISA has joined the disturbing tendency of public-private partnerships designed to impede Americans’ right to information and freedom of speech.

2. Political Operatives

Second, these programs were not idealistic attempts to promote the truth; they were calculated programs designed to quash inconvenient but truthful narratives.

The report outlines how CISA censored “malinformation – truthful information that, according to the government, may carry the potential to mislead.” Journalist Lee Fang later wrote that the malinformation campaign “highlights not only the broad authority that the federal government has to shape the political content available to the public, but also the toolkit that it relies upon to limit scrutiny in the regulation of speech.”

In this system, uncensored information has a tacit government approval, amounting to a system of widespread propaganda.

“State and local election officials used the CISA-funded EI-ISAC in an effort to silence criticism and political dissent,” the report notes. “For example, in August 2022, a Loudon County, Virginia, government official reported a Tweet featuring an unedited video of a county official ‘because it was posted as part of a larger campaign to discredit the word of’ that official. The Loudon County official’s remark that the account she flagged ‘is connected to Parents Against Critical Race Theory’ reveals that her ‘misinformation report’ was nothing more than a politically motivated censorship attempt.”

The officials supporting the operation remained unrepentant in their aim to advance political agendas. Dr. Kate Starbird, a member of CISA’s “Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee, lamented that many Americans seem to “accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms.”

Of course, the program explicitly violated the Constitution. The First Amendment does not discriminate based on the veracity of a statement. “Some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views in public and private conversation,” the Supreme Court’s controlling opinion held in United States v. Alvarez. But CISA – led by zealots like Dr. Starbird – appointed themselves the arbiters of truth and worked with the most powerful information companies in the world to purge dissent.

This was part of a larger political campaign. 

Hunter Biden’s laptop, natural immunity, the lab-leak theory, and side effects of the vaccine were all censored at the government’s behest. The truth of the reports was not at issue; instead, they presented inconvenient narratives for Washington’s political class, who then used the Orwellian label of “malinformation” to lend cover to eviscerating the First Amendment.

3. The Terror of the Administrative State

Third, the report exposes the increasing power of the administrative state. Federal bureaucrats rely on anonymity and unaccountability. Private industry employees could never oversee a disaster like the Covid response and maintain their jobs. It’d be like if BP’s head of safety for the Gulf of Mexico received a promotion after the oil spill.

But unelected officials like CISA officials enjoy ever-increasing power over Americans’ lives without having to answer for their calamities. Suzanne Spaulding, a member of the Misinformation & Disinformation Subcommittee, warned that it was “only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.”

Spaulding’s comment reflects the power that CISA wields and the benefit it derives from its lack of public exposure. Most Americans have never heard of CISA despite its overwhelming influence over lockdowns.

In March 2020, CISA divided the American workforce into categories of “essential” and “nonessential.” Within hours, California became the first state to issue a “stay at home” edict. This began a previously unimaginable assault on Americans’ civil liberties. 

The House Report indicates that CISA was a central actor in censoring criticism of the Covid regime in the ensuing months and years. The agency is representative of the cabal of censorial and unaccountable officials engaged in public-private partnerships designed to keep us in the dark.

*****

This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

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DEROY MURDOCK: It’s Time For A Big, Fat Gay Divorce From The Alphabet People thumbnail

DEROY MURDOCK: It’s Time For A Big, Fat Gay Divorce From The Alphabet People

By Deroy Murdock

The G in LGBTQIA2S+ stands for “Guilt by association.” Normal gay people should flee the Alphabet People before we get fatally trampled.

The original gay rights movement operated within America’s broadly Jeffersonian ethos: Individuals enjoy the liberty to pursue happiness, if they do not limit the rights of others.

The Stonewall Uprising of 1969 won the right to enjoy drinks in gay bars without enduring police raids. Legal equality increased steadily thereafter.

The death of President Bill Clinton’s sadistic Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in 2011 let gays serve in the military, so long as they, like everyone else, advance national security. Thousands have done so, honorably.

Similarly, gay matrimony is no zero-sum game. Since 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision, same-sex couples have wed nationwide without rendering straight couples any less married. Gay weddings have become, if not routine, then certainly much less remarkable.

Alas, this live-and-let-live detente between gays and straights is being carpet bombed by the TQIA2S+ crowd. Propelled by cultural-Marxist “Queer Theory,” radical transgender activists have zoomed right past adult transgenders who quietly went about their own business.

The Alphabet People cannot keep to themselves. Instead, they are in everyone’s face 24/7/365. They sexualize damn-near everything, jackhammer girls’ sports, penetrate female spaces with male genitalia, erase women (Oops! I mean non-men), and — worst of all — covet America’s children.

Millions of normal gay people are appalled at developments such as these:

  • Most Gs are satisfied drinking beer and Cosmos in gay bars rather than watching a man prance about as the “woman” who wrecked Anheuser-Busch. Kohls tumbled down the T toilet, too. Consumers gagged at Target’s “tuck-friendly” female bathing suits with spare space for penises. Since April, experimenting with transgenderism has cost these three companies $28.7 billion in market capitalization.
  • Bafflingly, the Los Angeles Dodgers on June 16 bestowed the Community Hero Award on the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of drag “nuns” who use the cross as a stripper pole. As the Daily Caller’s Grayson Quay explains, they also lampoon “the Holy Eucharist by drinking from a chalice filled with yogurt as a stand-in for human semen.”

“None of the gay people I know think mocking the sacred is cool. Not one,” U.S. Sen. Mike Lee stated via Twitter. “Shame on the Dodgers—not just for insulting Christians, but also for smearing gay people, very few of whom would ever condone what the Dodgers disgustingly embrace in the name of gay pride.”

  • William “Lia” Thomas is the 6-foot, 1-inch poster boy for typically large female impersonators who trounce smaller female athletes. Thomas won a 1,650-yard freestyle swimming event in 2021 by an astonishing 38 seconds.

To add humiliation to defeat, these young ladies sometimes share locker rooms with “women” who expose their penises and testicles.

How many mothers and fathers watch men masquerade as women and snatch sports trophies, state championships, university scholarships, NCAA titles, and life-long dreams from their daughters and then blame Gs for the Ts’ trespasses against their girls?

  • From Drag Queen Story Hour to tampon dispensers in middle-school boys’ rooms, the transgender radicals target children. They have slid erotic books into elementary school libraries and instituted “transition closets,” where boys can slip into girls’ clothes, and vice versa, during school. They don their original outfits before going home. Parents are none the wiser.
  • Colorado’s Seven Dimensions Behavioral Health encouraged parents of autistic children to bring them to a Drag Story Hour with drag queens named Brennan Sexyback, Jaques Strapp, and JustinN’Out. Don’t autistic children have enough on their plates already?
  • Minnesota and Washington State are now “Transgender Refuges” where minors can travel for “gender-affirming care,” namely hormone injections, permanent breast amputation and irreversible penis removal. Parental permission is optional.
  • Transgender extremism has devolved into violence. Swimmer Riley Gaines was mobbed and assaulted after she spoke at San Francisco State University in April. Radical Ts chased her into a classroom, where she hunkered down for three hours.

Meanwhile, T zealots physically attacked and robbed Stonewall veteran Fred Sargeant, 74, at a Vermont protest last September after seeing his placard. It read: “Gay, not Queer.”

Even worse, the Washington Free Beacon reports, in California, “Women’s prisons installed condom dispensers, a tacit admission that transgender inmates are raping female inmates.”

In a superb essay for Thursday’s Spectator World, Bridget Phetasy encapsulates just how utterly 3D Technicolor McBonkers things have become: “We’ve gone from ‘love is love’ to trans women insisting if a lesbian doesn’t want to suck their lady dick, they’re a fascist.”

All of this is boomeranging against normal gays who have zero desire to turn boys into girls, girls into boys and jiggle bare breasts, as did “transgender influencer” Rose Montoya and others at a June 10 White House Pride cavalcade.

By getting caught in a trap of LGBTQIA2S+ “identity” (without ever being consulted), Gs are getting smeared, much like homeowners whose property values plunge after a troublemaking family occupies their cul-de-sac and goes berserk.

Last year, per Gallup, 71% of Americans considered “gay and lesbian relations” morally acceptable. Last month, among 1,011 adults surveyed, that figure dropped to 64%. Among Republicans, moral acceptance sank from 56% to 41%. Among Democrats: 85% to 79%. Independents: 72% to 73%.

Slowly at first, then all of a sudden, “LGBTQIA2S+” has surrounded millions of us Gs in an increasingly evil place — linguistically, politically and culturally.

“The gay community is not a monolith,” Gays Against Groomers declares. “Those pushing this agenda do not represent or speak for us all, nor do we want to be associated with them in any way.”

June 2023 — Pride Month — is a perfect time for a big, fat Gay divorce from the Alphabet People.

*****

This article was published by the Daily Caller and is reproduced with permission.

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The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America, June Update thumbnail

The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America, June Update

By Wolf Richter

2nd Overall YoY Price Drop since 2012. Biggest in Seattle, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego, Portland, Dallas…

It’s spring selling season, when prices always rise month-to-month, and they did, but it wasn’t enough.

It’s still spring selling season when sales volume and prices nearly always rise on a month-to-month basis, and they did this spring too, but not enough, and compared to a year ago, the 20 cities in the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index, released today, fell by 1.7%, the biggest year-over-year decline since 2012, following the 1.1% decline in the prior month, after the gigantic Fed-money-printer gains during the pandemic. The 20-City Index is now down 3.5% from the peak last June:

Today’s data for “April” is a three-month moving average of home prices whose sales were entered into public records in February, March, and April. That’s the spring selling season, when prices always rise from the prior month, and did so even during Housing Bust 1.

On a month-to-month basis, the 20-City Index rose 1.7% in April from March, but that was a lot less growth than in April 2022 (+2.3%) and in April 2021 (+2.2%), which is why year-over-year, prices fell further:

The list of year-over-year price decliners keeps getting longer. Prices are now down in 10 of the 20 metropolitan areas that the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index covers. Here are the metros with year-over-year price declines:

  1. Seattle: -12.4%
  2. San Francisco Bay Area: -11.1%
  3. Las Vegas: -6.6%
  4. Phoenix: -6.1%
  5. San Diego: -5.6%
  6. Portland: -5.2%
  7. Denver: -4.5%
  8. Los Angeles: -3.2%
  9. Dallas: -2.9%
  10. Washington DC: -0.5%

Prices in 19 of the 20 markets have dropped from their respective peaks (ranging from May to July 2022). The exception is the New York City metro, which squeaked past its prior high of July 2022. From their respective peaks, prices have dropped the most in these metros:

  • Seattle: -12.9%
  • San Francisco Bay Area: -12.0%
  • Las Vegas: -9.9%
  • Phoenix: -9.4%
  • Dallas: -8.5%
  • San Diego: -6.1%
  • Portland: -6.0%
  • Denver: -5.6%
  • Los Angeles: -4.2%
  • Tampa: -3.0

*****

Continue reading this article at Wolf Street.

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Go See ‘Sound of Freedom’ for the Truth on Millions of Trafficked Children thumbnail

Go See ‘Sound of Freedom’ for the Truth on Millions of Trafficked Children

By Catherine Salgado

The movie Sound of Freedom will finally come to theaters the week of July 4, based on the stories of real-life heroes and their work to free children from the hellish and lucrative world of child trafficking.

Toward the end of the trailer above, actor Jim Caviezel (who played Jesus in the magnificent Passion of the Christ) says that “an estimated 2 million children are trafficked” every single year. These children are raped, abused, tortured (and many of them later killed by having their organs harvested). The fact that anyone could do such horrific things to any other human being is unimaginable, but to do it to innocent children is a truly Satanic level of evil.

As Caviezel said, the movie is “heartbreaking” but tremendously important, because these children’s stories need to be known as a first step toward justice and help for them. Caviezel said he hopes for 2 million attendees at the movie’s opening, one for every precious child trafficked annually. It has taken Caviezel and the others behind Sound of Freedom years to bring this movie to the public, because they’ve been canceled and delayed. The powers-that-be don’t want you to know about this trafficking, but you need to know.

Sound of Freedom will be in theaters for the week of July 4, Independence Day. In honor of our Founders who were willing to sacrifice everything to secure freedom to themselves and others, make the small sacrifice to go see Sound of Freedom and learn about the most innocent victims in need of liberty.

Search for locations and buy tickets HERE. You can also pay for someone else’s ticket as a donation to help spread the word and ensure as many people as possible attend. As Caviezel urged, let’s start a movement to ensure that “God’s children are no longer for sale.”

*****

This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

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NYT Confirms DOJ Prosecutor Was Blocked From Bringing Charges Against Hunter Biden thumbnail

NYT Confirms DOJ Prosecutor Was Blocked From Bringing Charges Against Hunter Biden

By James Lynch

The New York Times confirmed on Tuesday the accuracy of IRS whistleblower testimony claiming U.S. Attorney David Weiss was blocked from bringing charges against Hunter Biden in California.

In the 21st paragraph of its story about the testimony from two IRS whistleblowers, the Times independently confirmed that Weiss’ request for California prosecutors to pursue charges against Biden was rejected.

IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley’s testimony released Thursday by the House Ways and Means Committee accused DOJ prosecutors of slow-walking the investigations into Biden. Shapley said Weiss attempted to bring tax charges against Hunter Biden in California for 2016-19, which required support from the Central District of California.

“Around this time, there began to be discussions of the fact that the remaining tax years, 2016, ’17, ’18 and ’19, needed to be brought in the Central District of California,” Shapley stated. “Prosecutors stated that they presented the case to the Central District of California in mid-September. That happened to correspond with the confirmation of the President Biden appointee to the United States attorney, Martin Estrada.”

Weiss said in Oct. 2022 that he would have to request special counsel authority to investigate Biden if charges were not brought in California. His initial request for special counsel authority was denied by the Department of Justice.

“In January of this year, I learned United States Attorney Estrada had declined to bring the charges in the Central District of California. For all intents and purposes, the case was dead, with the exception of one gun charge that could be brought in Delaware,” Shapley said.

Shapley’s testimony confirmed the FBI knew Hunter Biden’s laptop was real in 2019 and showed that Attorney General Merrick Garland appeared to lie under oath about the Hunter Biden investigation. The probe into Biden is still ongoing, Weiss said shortly after Biden was charged on June 20.

The first son was charged with felony gun possession and two misdemeanors for failing to pay taxes. He pleaded guilty to the charges and will not face jail time.

*****

This article was published by the Daily Caller and is reproduced with permission.

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The Continuing Border Catastrophe the Biden Admin Is Hiding thumbnail

The Continuing Border Catastrophe the Biden Admin Is Hiding

By Catherine Salgado

Don’t be fooled by government or media propaganda—the Biden border crisis is as horrendous as ever. In fact, instead of the touted “decrease” in illegal alien crossings, former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan reportedly found “increases in port-of-entry encounters that coincide with the rollout of” the Biden administration program used to hide illegal alien numbers, CBP One.

I reported for PJ Media back in January on the clever trick the Biden administration is pulling with its CBP One app to let in the same number of illegals with the illusion of legitimacy. CBP One doesn’t reduce the number of illegal migrants flooding the southern U.S. border; it simply “pre-approves” those migrants so CBP and Border Patrol can claim the numbers of illegal apprehensions and crossings are down.

Now Center for Immigration Studies’ (CIS) Todd Bensman reports:

“[The Federalist, June 26] America’s beleaguered cities and towns, growing numbers of which are suffering unfunded inundation, do not care how the government let 200,000 aliens cross per month. They only care that they are here.

President Joe Biden and his top deputies are pushing shell-game accounting and the untruthful narrative that ‘non-citizen’ crossings over the U.S. southwest border have plummeted by up to ‘70 percent,’ so there’s nothing to see here, folks. Not so fast…rates of illegal entry through the brush, since a pause that came when the administration replaced Title 42, is now quickly growing.”

Bensman estimated about 215,000 illegals is the actual number for May (you can see his explanation for reaching that number at The Federalist). That’s close to the Biden border crisis high of 221,000 “non-port-of-entry brush apprehensions.” In contrast, the brush apprehension numbers for Donald Trump’s last year in office were an average of about 30,000 monthly. That’s a staggering difference.

Bensman:

“[I]llegal crossings of family units, unaccompanied minors, and foreign nationals from ‘recalcitrant countries’ are on a sharp upswing…I just came back from Mexico and the Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector, which is experiencing a major surge of illegal crossings again…

Biden’s rules do not apply to families, and so their numbers are spiking from the 25,000 monthly range in January and February to 44,900 in May. Expect torrents of them going forward. There is also evidence that unaccompanied minors are flooding in at the pre-Title 42 rate of 11,000-12,000 per month because they too are exempt from the new, supposedly tough rules.”

Illegal aliens are flooding into areas of Arizona and Texas, Bensman explained. Their countries of origin include U.S. enemies or terrorist hotspots like China and Afghanistan. And there’s an unknown number of illegals evading Border Patrol altogether: “a surge of runners and got-aways is underway. Since Biden took office, some 1.7 million foreign nationals have become got-aways in total, smashing historic records. Now that number seems only to be going up.”

In fact, Fiscal Year 2023 is “projected to top 1 million got-aways.” The border crisis is worse than ever.

The number of military-age Chinese migrants is way up, in what some are warning is a covert invasion by America’s enemy the Chinese Communist Party. There are also thousands of criminals among the illegal aliens entering.

The border crisis is a hostile invasion, and the Biden administration is only covering it up as it gets steadily more disastrous.

*****

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Ramaswamy on CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currencies] thumbnail

Ramaswamy on CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currencies]

By Alexander William Salter

Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican candidate for President, has a strong position on central bank digital currencies (CBDC): “Hell no.”

His proposals for reforming the Fed have major problems, but his views on financial freedom and privacy are unimpeachable. A CBDC would give the government unprecedented access to and control over private transactions. Allowing the Fed to create one would take us dangerously far down the road to serfdom.

A CBDC is sometimes described as a digital dollar. This is true but incomplete. We already have trillions of digital dollars in the economy thanks to private banks. For example, checking and savings accounts take the form of electronic balances.

A CBDC is different. It’s a liability of the central bank (in the U.S. case, the Fed) rather than private banks. Transacting with a CBDC also means using the central bank’s attendant payments system: the process for clearing debits and credits.

Financial privacy would be the first major casualty of a CBDC. Uncle Sam would have an incredible amount of information about citizens’ transactions. Do you want to live in a world where the government knows who buys and sells which goods and services, and on what terms? The potential for abuse is obvious to anybody with a modicum of understanding about political power.

But that’s not all. Whether on their own initiative or under the influence of politicians, Fed officials could use a CBDC to micromanage the economy. If central bankers decide the public isn’t spending enough money, they could debit CBDC accounts to stimulate consumption. This is, in essence, a negative interest rate policy. And since the assets in question are a liability of the central bank, not tied to or redeemable for anything, they can do whatever they want with them. Your only recourse would be to exit your position—if the technocrats pulling the strings let you.

Then, of course, we must consider the risks of selective (and likely politically motivated) payment processing. We’ve already seen that central bankers are far too eager to meddle in policy areas like racial justice and climate change, which are beyond their legitimate mandate. It’s no stretch to imagine central bankers denying payments for firearms or fossil fuels. A CBDC would allow Fed officials to pick winners and losers based on ideological factors to an even greater extent.

Alarmingly, the government has already taken important steps towards implementing a CBDC. In cooperation with participating financial institutions, the Fed inaugurated Project Hamilton, which is basically a CBDC pilot program. Congressional Republicans have introduced legislation to prevent the Fed from going any further. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell says no final decision would be made without legislators’ approval. But given decades of Fed mission creep, this promise is not credible. GOP lawmakers absolutely should head CBDC efforts off at the pass, and the party’s presidential candidates should support that rejection.

Ramaswamy’s unequivocal stance sets a good example. He’s stimulating a public conversation about an issue that otherwise would be limited to white-paper wonks and think tank “experts.” Americans cherish their liberty and privacy and rightly will refuse to surrender them unless the stakes for the nation are existential. Let’s be clear: There is no problem, serious or otherwise, that CBDC is well-positioned to solve. It’s just a power grab, and it deserves a “hell no” from each of us.

*****

This article was published by AIER, American Institute for Economic Research and is reproduced with permission.

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Taking Back America’s Colleges and Universities thumbnail

Taking Back America’s Colleges and Universities

By Jim Banks

The Fairness in Higher Education Accreditation Act attacks wokeness at its core.

I started the House Anti-Woke Caucus in January to build a coalition that identifies and roots out wokeness from the federal government and American public life. Our first task has been to identify areas where a small action could have an outsized effect. The university system is a target-rich environment for our caucus, and the higher education accreditation cartel has helped make colleges a source and stronghold of wokeness.

Federal law requires Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) to receive accreditation from an agency or association recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. Congress regulates federal regulators, federal regulators regulate accreditation agencies, accreditation agencies regulate colleges, and colleges teach your children.

Accreditation agencies act as pseudo-governmental entities, creating and enforcing the rules by which a college operates. By itself, regulating higher education isn’t a bad thing, as long as regulators incentivize patriotism and excellence. But under the current arrangement, accreditors are forcing schools into line with the woke revolutionary agenda. Congress must instead push accreditors and universities to inculcate American principles and practices.

In recent years, woke revolutionaries weaponized the accreditation cartel to impose Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and affirmative action mandates on schools. Schools that reject wokeness are rejected by accreditors. Universities that don’t implement DEI and affirmative action policies are being strong-armed by woke revolutionaries into doing so. And there’s no way out—federal regulations make it nearly impossible for schools to switch to a non-woke accreditor.

That’s why Senator Marco Rubio and I introduced the Fairness in Higher Education Accreditation Act. Our bill would reform the standards used to accredit universities. Instead of enforcing wokeism, accreditors would be prohibited from considering schools’ DEI and affirmative action policies and required to consider schools’ adherence to safeguarding First Amendment rights.

My bill would hold colleges accountable when they punish students or faculty for conservative beliefs. Last month, Northwestern University froze the funds of the College Republicans. The group’s alleged crime was publishing a flier for a speaking event that featured a rainbow flag with a skull and crossbones. Similar examples abound, but attacks on political speech should never be tolerated.

But it is not enough just to oppose DEI—we must be positively pro-American.

Institutions critical to forming our national character shouldn’t be allowed to suppress speech. Congress must hold Institutions of Higher Education to the same high speech standard we are all held to by guaranteeing First Amendment protections for students and faculty alike.

Speech suppression is anti-American and contributes to the overwhelmingly leftist tilt of our higher education system. Madera Community College recently suspended Professor David Richardson for passing out chocolate bars that satirize the Left’s pronoun obsession. It shouldn’t be surprising that among college professors, Democrats outnumber Republicans nine to one. Professors like Mr. Richardson are silenced or forced out. To break the leftist monopoly on the university system, we need to reassert our founding principles on campuses. Before universities consider discriminating against right-of-center faculty, they will remember that their accreditation depends on tolerating all political speech.

The Fairness in Higher Education Accreditation Act is just the beginning of what I hope will be a concerted campaign to reform or replace the accreditation cartel. Fixing our broken system of higher education will take ingenuity and work, but it’s a hard job that’s worth doing.

*****

This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

 is a U.S. Congressman representing Indiana’s 3rd district.

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Observations on The Fourth of July thumbnail

Observations on The Fourth of July

By Neland Nobel

We live in a time when our Founding is either taken for granted (it’s a day to picnic) or is degraded altogether.  Now popular is the notion that the Founding was in 1619 and the nation was born in the sin of slavery.  That is all that is important about our history, our failings.  That is not a particularly balanced view of either this country or the failings of the human condition.  It doesn’t matter as our failings are just fodder for the progressives’ attempt to divide our society along racial and sexual lines.

Lost on the latter school is that slavery was a universal institution and it was brought here by European powers and the African leaders involved in the trade.  Maybe one in ten African slaves made it to these shores with the overwhelming bulk going to Brazil and the sugar producing islands.  Funny, you don’t see Spaniards or Portugues consumed in guilt today.  Perhaps that is because the institution of slavery did not contradict their founding principles.

The Founders certainly understood the the contradiction between slavery and the notion of “all men are created equal”, but keeping the South in the War of Independence was a necessary expediency.  You have to win first before you can change the world. After all, you had 13 colonies, not particularly united, taking on the most powerful empire on earth.  Better stick together in the fight and sort out discrepancies and contradictions later.

After the Founding, steps were taken to end slavery but to be sure, it took much too long and should not have required a war.  America was always an experiment and we did not always get it right.  But that does not invalidate the principles themselves, it only demonstrates failure to embrace them.

However, it is interesting that those that complain most loudly about this failure to implement immediately and completely American ideals now attack those ideals more than they attack failures to implement them.  In fact, those most critical of America’s racial failings have long been supportive of racism as a public policy, as long as it is directed against “white people” and to some extent, Asians.

Progressives now embrace a racial spoils system, warmed over failed notions of socialism, and a belief in yielding our nationhood and sovereignty to unelected international organizations.  As a final touch, they believe in a revolutionary social order where Biblical tradition, on any control on the sexual appetites of people must be removed.  Whatever belief system they have, now seems more like a pre-Hebrew worship of the earth and flesh.  And, they wish to impose these beliefs on your children and grandchildren and will actively muzzle or cancel those who don’t agree.  Like elements of the French Revolution, it now appear to be not only a rejection of The Founding but a rejection of rationality itself.

Even after the most recent Supreme Court decision taking us back to the principle of a color blind society, universities are plotting ways to try to circumvent the ruling.  Many public statements by progressives suggest that without special treatment, they themselves are still peddling the noxious notion of the  natural inferiority of Blacks, that will keep them down unless white progressives are present to protect them.  Their only solution seems to be crude racial categorization that makes no logical  sense coupled with reverse discrimination against the majority “white”  and Asian population.

The recent Supreme Court decision, although somewhat limited to institutions of “higher ” learning, marks a welcome return to the principles of the Founding.  All people should be treated equally and there should be equal treatment under the law.

This ruling makes this particular July 4th somewhat special.

Progressives have also been busy attacking other principles of the Founding such as property rights, the right to free speech, the right to be free from warrantless searches, the right to bear arms, the right to assemble and travel, and religious liberties.

Indeed, the hatred of this  country oozing from our media and educational system is about as bad as the propaganda peddled by our external enemies.  This is even more ironic in that those hostile to American ideals are now largely in charge of our culture and politics.

That they have recently lost some major cases before the Supreme Court just enrages them more.  How dare a co-equal branch of government call the President on his unlawful student loan giveaway or tell Harvard their admissions politics are unconstitutional!

If you want to do something truly subversive this July 4th, be sure to put out the flag this year.  In fact, flying the flag all the time is now becoming a sign of resistance to the America haters.

Put the flag out for the 4th and keep it out for the duration of this struggle for the soul of America.  Remember to bring it in during bad weather, and if you leave it out at night it should be lighted. I just bought a solar powered spotlight for the flag, just for that purpose.

Flying the flag on the 4th of July was always a sign of solidarity with the Founding.  Now, due to the relentless culture war that we now find ourselves, this gesture is required every day.  So fly the flag this 4th, and everyday thereafter.

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The Surprising Origins of the ‘No Taxation Without Representation!’ Slogan thumbnail

The Surprising Origins of the ‘No Taxation Without Representation!’ Slogan

By Lawrence Reed

The phrase that was popular during America’s own revolution owes a hat tip to a famous Englishman, who took a stand against King Charles I’s “ship tax”.

Ask most Americans where the slogan “No taxation without representation!” came from and the likely response will be “American colonists protesting against Britain in the 1760s.” But the spirit, if not the precise letter of the phrase, originated more than a century before. Moreover, we can thank the Brits themselves for it. It started with something called the “ship tax.”

Since the early Middle Ages, English custom allowed the monarch to impose a special levy in times of war upon citizens who lived in coastal settlements. They could meet the requirement by providing ships, shipbuilding materials, or money for the Crown to build ships (hence the name, “ship tax”). Kings and Queens levied the “tax” as a royal prerogative, meaning they skipped the annoyance of securing the consent of Parliament as required in the Magna Carta of 1215.

So long as the tax fell upon a small portion of the population and only in a “national emergency,” the monarchy got away with it for centuries.

King James I provoked a fuss in 1619 when he extended the ship tax to London but it was his successor, Charles I, who sparked a far bigger uproar over it just nine years later. Charles shut down Parliament and then, in 1628 and in peacetime no less, he imposed the ship tax on all counties in England. It was a tax on everybody, and nobody could do anything about it. In subsequent years, the King reaffirmed and increased it in the face of fierce and growing opposition.

Enter one John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire landowner first elected to Parliament in 1621. When he refused to pay the full balance of the ship tax the King said he owed, Hampden’s case proceeded to the twelve judges of the Court of Exchequer. The King, Hampden and his lawyers maintained, had no right to levy the tax in the absence of Parliamentary approval.

Though Hampden lost the case by a vote of 7 to 5, Charles was embarrassed that his victory was so narrow. When the English Civil War began in 1642, John Hampden was among the first the King unsuccessfully attempted to arrest. The issue on which he risked challenging the King, taxation without representation, proved to be a major cause of that war.

Hampden died in battle in 1643, six years before Charles himself was beheaded. Almost four centuries later, Hampden is remembered as a martyr for liberty and his name is honored eponymously by numerous towns and institutions. Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia is one of many examples.

James Otis of Massachusetts is usually credited as the first American to employ “no taxation without representation” in the run-up to the Declaration of Independence. He wrote in 1764 that “the very act of taxing, exercised over those who are not represented, appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential rights as freemen; and if continued, seems to be in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil right.”

Liberty-loving patriots like John Hampden and James Otis went to war because their governments dared tax without the consent of elected parliamentarians. As bad as taxation without representation was in their day, I’ll bet at today’s rates with representation they might well raise a fuss again.

For Additional Information, See:

The Compact that Preceded the Magna Carta by Lawrence W. Reed

Edmund Burke’s Little-Known Speech that Eroded the British Monarchy’s Command of Money and Power by Lawrence W. Reed

The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 by Lawrence W. Reed

America’s Republic: How the Great Experiment Came About by Lawrence W. Reed

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This article was published by FEE, The Foundation for Economic Education and is reproduced with permission.

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Martha Washington: Remembering America’s 1st First Lady thumbnail

Martha Washington: Remembering America’s 1st First Lady

By Virginia Allen

On Independence Day, Americans rightly honor our Founding Fathers for their courage and sacrifice. George Washington is arguably the most important figure in U.S. history, and his wife, Martha Washington, was a constant support during his career.

Martha Washington didn’t have an easy life. Her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, died after the couple had been married for just over seven years. They had four children together, all of whom died before Martha Washington did. Her first two children died before age 5. Her third child, John Parke Custis, died in his 20s; her fourth, Martha Parke Custis, died as a teen.

Her marriage to George Washington in 1759 was joyful, since the “attraction was mutual, powerful, and immediate,” according to Mount Vernon’s historical records.

But as was the case with her first marriage, life with the man who would become a new nation’s first president likely wasn’t what Martha expected.

George Washington left Mount Vernon in 1775 to lead the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Though he would not return home to Mount Vernon for six years, Martha traveled to her husband’s encampment each winter to stay with him while fighting was at a standstill.

When her husband was elected president after the Revolutionary War, Mrs. Washington was not pleased to see her husband again leave home and be drawn back to public life. Despite a likely longing for a quiet life with her husband after years of war and extended separation, she set a powerful precedent for the critical role of the nation’s first lady.

Martha Washington played a critical role in forming the schedule for official entertaining. Every Friday, she held a reception, giving the president the opportunity to speak with guests in a more private setting.

A portrait of Martha Washington as first lady. (Photo: Stock Montage/Getty Images)

A grandson “remembered that veterans of the Revolutionary War stopped by the executive mansion on an almost daily basis to pay their respects to the Washingtons,” according to Mount Vernon’s historical accounts. “It was Martha Washington who talked with these, gave them something to eat, and sometimes even a small token of remembrance.”

Mrs. Washington’s faithfulness to her husband, visiting him during the war and supporting him as president, serves as a beautiful reminder of the sacrifices, large and small, that so many men and women made nearly 250 years ago to form a government that would ensure “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all Americans.

In today’s edition of the “Problematic Women” podcast, we discuss the legacy of Martha Washington. Also on today’s show, drag queens say they’re “coming for” your children, but parents have something to say about that. Plus, two major Supreme Court cases will be decided as soon as today. We explain why those decisions will affect young people in particular.

Listen to the podcast below:

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This article was published by Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

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No Quarter For Wrongthink: ASU Shuts Down Free Speech Center, Fires Faculty thumbnail

No Quarter For Wrongthink: ASU Shuts Down Free Speech Center, Fires Faculty

By Corinne Murdock

Arizona State University (ASU) has shut down a prominent free speech center and fired several faculty members following the protest of the faculty who opposed its existence.

The university decided to shut down the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development within the Barrett Honors College following a controversial event featuring conservative speakers hosted earlier this year.

The contested speakers were nationally-acclaimed conservative pundits Charlie Kirk, founder and president of activist group Turning Point USA; Dennis Prager, radio talk show host and founder of PragerU; and Robert Kiyosaki, author of a bestseller personal finance book and PragerU presenter. As AZ Free News reported in February, a group of 37 left-leaning ASU Barrett Honors College faculty led a campaign to prevent the event from happening, which included recruiting students to protest the event.

The two faculty members to lose their jobs following the controversial event were the executive director of the Lewis Center, Ann Atkinson, and the events operator for the Gammage Theater where the event was held, Lin Blake.

AZ Free News spoke with both Atkinson and Blake about their ordeal. Earlier this week, Atkinson came forward in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece criticizing ASU for caving to leftist restrictions on free speech.

“I wasn’t trying to do anything but my job: to do it well, and to keep people safe.”

For ASU’s Gammage Theater, Blake handled the arrangements for events such as calendaring, contracting, and client meetings. Throughout her career, Blake said she always offered the same respect and professionalism to clients, regardless of who or what was behind an event.

“Over the years I have booked and managed many types of events. Every one of them received the same level of professionalism,” said Blake.

Yet, it was Blake’s commitment to equal treatment in a venue designed for free expression that ultimately cost her the job — even though her superiors signed off on the event.

“Basically, I was sacrificed because Gammage executive staff had to do something to satisfy or appease the staff of Barrett Honors College. I was a scapegoat, and was let go at the beginning of April,” said Blake.

Blake recounted that her superior initially praised her for handling the controversial event. A bulk of essential personnel — security officers, backstage crew, and front of house — all called out, and police availability was limited severely due to ongoing staffing shortages and the Super Bowl occurring that same week. It was up to Blake to fill the gaps to provide a safe and successful event. By all accounts, she said she did — even her boss reportedly told her so, using a favorite phrase of his to describe her: “rockstar.”

By the next Monday, however, sentiments shifted. Blake said she walked into work facing a line of questioning. She was reportedly asked by her superior, ASU Gammage executive director Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, why she booked a “white supremacist,” an accusation leveled against the event speakers by opposing faculty. Blake was then required to get pre-approval from both Jennings-Roggensack and management prior to booking any future events.

Blake said the pre-approval amounted to a micromanaging that ultimately served to filter out who could and couldn’t host an event at Gammage.

According to Blake, Jennings-Roggensack had a habit of telling staff that they were aligned in beliefs, that they all had voted for President Joe Biden and Gov. Katie Hobbs — even if they hadn’t.

At a faculty and leadership meeting following the upbraiding from Jennings-Roggensack, Blake said she was singled out to explain Gammage’s core values.

After that, Blake described her remaining months at ASU as a “slow decline.” She was let go in April for “not being a good fit.”

Blake says she’s applied and interviewed for three other ASU positions. Each time, HR has sent her letters that they’re no longer hiring for the position — even though the positions remained posted as available.

“[This is] what happens to those who don’t conform to the prevailing orthodoxy on campus.”

Atkinson retained her position several months longer than Blake did. It was at the end of May that Atkinson learned from Barrett Honors College Dean Tara Williams that her position would end, and that the Lewis Center would be no more.

In an official statement shared widely by the press following Atkinson’s Wall Street Journal piece, an ASU spokesman claimed that the primary donor behind the Lewis Center, the T.W. Lewis Foundation, would no longer be funding the program. ASU also praised the controversial event as a success.

“Ms. Atkinson’s current job at the university will no longer exist after June 30 because the donor who created and funded the Lewis Center decided to terminate his donation. ASU is working to determine how we can support the most impactful elements of the center without that external funding,” stated the spokesman. “Arizona State University remains committed to, in practice, not just rhetoric, all things that support free speech and all of its components. The event in question was held and was a success.”

It appears that demonization by the vast majority of Barrett Honors College faculty over the Lewis Center event was the breaking point for T.W. Lewis Foundation’s founder, T.W. Lewis. He told The Arizona Republic that ASU’s environment is hostile to conservative thinkers.

“The long story short is that conservative viewpoints are not welcome at ASU. Or, at most public universities in America,” said Lewis.

The T.W. Lewis Foundation funds a number of other major conservative organizations and enterprises, such as GreatHearts Academies, Museum of the Bible, The American Conservative, Alliance Defending Freedom, Conservative Partnership Institute, Young America’s Foundation, Foundation for Economic Education, and the Heritage Foundation. They also fund the organizations from which the controversial speakers hailed: Turning Point USA and PragerU.

However, the foundation wasn’t the only funding source possible as ASU implied. Atkinson offered a diversified group of donors to offset the lost funding; she reported that Williams wasn’t interested. Atkinson also collected 18 pages of testimonials from students, families, and past guest speakers. That wasn’t enough to persuade, either.

“What ASU did not say is that the Barrett dean expressed no interest in continuing the Lewis Center,” said Atkinson.

AZ Free News reached out to Williams about the alternative funding. She didn’t respond by press time.

Atkinson believes that, ultimately, ASU policies have allowed this stifling of free speech to take place. Come fall, there will be one less place for free thought on campus.

“I want the right to free speech to our universities to apply to all people. What happened appears to be within the policies of the university,” said Atkinson. “The students lose. I’m devastated for the students. For so many of them, the 7,000 students in Barrett, this has been their home. Now it’s gone.”

As for next steps, Atkinson said she is taking everything one day at a time.

“I’m hoping to show the world what happens to those who don’t conform to the prevailing orthodoxy on campus.”

*****

This article was published by AZ Free News and is reproduced with permission.

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