Under Pressure Florida School Board Rejects Sex-Ed Textbook thumbnail

Under Pressure Florida School Board Rejects Sex-Ed Textbook

By Royal A. Brown III

Interesting – As you will recall many of us attended PCSD SB meetings and spoke out against the current Reproductive Health Curriculum which is supposed to be under review by a committee this summer.

If Superintendent Heid and his Staff do like they did in choosing a left leaning committee to review the 16 pornographic/age inappropriate books it would not portend well to remove the age inappropriate and/or Florida statute violating material we objected to from this curriculum or perhaps they will take the opt-in/opt-out approach which really still violates the law in my view.

We’ll see.

Florida school board rejects sex ed textbook under pressure

ASSOCIATED PRESS

MIAMI – The school board of Florida’s largest school district reversed its decision to adopt a new sex education book, with some in the majority saying the material is not age appropriate for students in middle and high school.

The 5-4 vote followed an emotionally charged Miami-Dade School Board meeting Wednesday, with some members of the public being escorted from the room, the Miami Herald reported.

It’s not clear how the nation’s fourth-largest public school system, with 334,000 students, will comply with state law requiring students to receive sexual education. Choosing, ordering and distributing a new textbook could take months.

‘Comprehensive Health Skills,’ published by Goodheart-Willcox in Illinois, comes in different versions for middle and high schools, with topics including nutrition, physical activity and sexually transmitted diseases, as required under the district’s units of study for Human Reproduction and Disease Education.

Neither the publisher nor the school district immediately responded to inquiries from The Associated Press regarding content deemed objectionable by the board’s majority.

The board adopted the textbook in April on a 5-3 vote, but then its material was challenged by some parents who cited the parental rights law Gov. Ron DeSantis in March.

Critics call it the ‘don’t say gay’ law because it prohibits instruction related to gender identity or sexual orientation in grades K through 3, ‘or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.’

In adopting the book in April, the board voted to ask the publisher to remove a chapter called ‘Understanding Sexuality,’ which covers gender and sexual orientation among other topics.

Still, critics filed 278 objections. Opponents of vaccines challenged the book’s references to how vaccinations can prevent viral infections. Others objected to content about contraception and abortion.

Miami-Dade Superintendent José Dotres asked a third-party reviewer to conduct a public hearing to review their concerns. That hearing officer ultimately recommended adopting the book, leading to Wednesday’s meeting.

Board member Luisa Santos, who voted in favor of the book, noted that the district enables parents to opt out of material they don’t want their children to learn about sexual health and pregnancy and disease prevention.

‘We will be opting out everyone in the following school year. Including all the people who have come here and told us that they want this,’ Santos said, according to WLRN-TV.

Thirty-eight of the 40 speakers Wednesday asked to keep the textbook, Vice Chair Steve Gallon III said.

©Royal A. Brown, III. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: CHILD ABUSE: Families flee Pennsylvania School After Boys ‘Encouraged To Wear Dresses’

BIDENOMICS: Mortgage Demand Drops to a 22-year Low as Higher Interest Rates and Inflation Crush Homebuyers thumbnail

BIDENOMICS: Mortgage Demand Drops to a 22-year Low as Higher Interest Rates and Inflation Crush Homebuyers

By The Geller Report

With the Biden Administration’s economic policies devastating the purchasing power of American consumers, home ownership has become out of reach for millions of Americans. What a tragedy.

Mortgage demand drops to a 22-year low as higher interest rates and inflation crush homebuyers

By CNBC, July 21, 2022

  • Surging inflation and interest rates are hammering American consumers and weighing on the housing market.
  • Mortgage demand fell last week, hitting the lowest point since 2000, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
  • Buyers have lost considerable purchasing power as rates have almost doubled since earlier this year.

The pain in the mortgage market is only getting worse as higher interest rates and inflation hammer American consumers.

Mortgage demand fell more than 6% last week compared with the previous week, hitting the lowest level since 2000, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s seasonally adjusted index.

Read more.

AUTHOR

Geller Report Staff 

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The More Biden Tanks In The Polls, The More Insane and Radical He Becomes

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

Trump Would GUT the Federal Government if He Runs and Wins in 2024 thumbnail

Trump Would GUT the Federal Government if He Runs and Wins in 2024

By The Geller Report

This has to happen if the Republic is to be saved. “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

  • Donald Trump has plans to purge the so-called ‘deep state’ beyond what any president has done before if he runs for and wins the presidency in 2024
  • As many as 50,000 government workers could be on the chopping block
  • He would clean house of mid-level staffers at the Pentagon, Justice Department, State Department and beyond and bring in ‘America First’ candidates
  • The order would reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants who were deemed to have some influence over policy as ‘Schedule F’ employees
  • This would strip them of their employment protections and make them political appointees

By Morgan Phillips, Politics Reporter For Dailymail.Com, 22 July 2022

Donald Trump has plans to purge the so-called ‘deep state’ beyond what any president has done before if he runs for and wins the presidency in 2024 and as many as 50,000 government workers could find themselves on the chopping block.

The former president, if elected again, would move in with a plan being drawn up now to ‘drain the swamp’ and cut tens of thousands of civil servants from what are typically apolitical roles, according to an Axios report.

He would clean house of mid-level staffers at the Pentagon, Justice Department, State Department and beyond and bring in thoroughly vetted candidates who were found to be more closely aligned with his ‘America First’ agenda.

After interviews with over a dozen Trump-world insiders the outlet’s investigation found that Trump is planning to use an executive order called ‘Schedule F,’ which he issued in October 2020 and Biden later rescinded.

The order would reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants who were deemed to have some influence over policy as ‘Schedule F’ employees, which would strip them of their employment protections.

New presidents typically replace about 4,000 political appointees to align agencies with their new agenda, but below them are a mass of federal workers who have strong employment protections and typically continue in their role from one administration to the next.

The Trump official who came up with the Schedule F order said it could apply to as many as 50,000 of the some-two million federal workers. Other Trump allies say the figure will not be nearly that high because firing a smaller segment of anti-Trump ‘bad apples’ would be enough to trigger ‘behavior change.’

Doing so could strip mid-level government staffers of any sense of job stability and set a new precedent forcing future new presidents to seek out and install their own loyalists throughout the bureaucracy.

Russ Vought, the former head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, is reportedly working on plans to make the security clearance process less onerous so that more government workers could be made political appointees.

‘We are consciously bringing on the toughest and most courageous fighters with the know-how and credibility to crush the deep state,’ Vought told Axios.

Donald Trump has plans to purge the so-called ‘deep state’ beyond what any president has done before if he runs for and wins the presidency in 2024 and as many as 50,000 government workers could find themselves on the chopping block

Donald Trump has plans to purge the so-called ‘deep state’ beyond what any president has done before if he runs for and wins the presidency in 2024 and as many as 50,000 government workers could find themselves on the chopping block

While Trump and many of his former top aides and allies are no longer on speaking terms, the former president is relying on a close cadre of still-trusted former advisors who are working with conservative organizations to line up talent. It’s also thought that for top jobs, Trump will bring in only those who most actively supported his 2020 election fraud claims.

Jeffrey Clark, a controversial lawyer who advocated for a plan to contest the election results and now finds himself in the crosshairs of the Jan. 6 committee and the FBI, is thought to be in line for attorney general.

Sources close to the former president said that Ric Grenell has a decent shot at a secretary of State nomination. As acting director of national intelligence, Grenell was one of Trump’s favorite officials toward the end, as he worked to declassify material from the Trump-Russia investigation. Grenell, who now works on Newsmax, said on the network earlier this year: ‘I’m not going to stop until we prosecute [Trump’s former FBI director] Jim Comey.’

Kash Patel, the chief of staff to Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller at the time of the attack on the Capitol, would likely be in line for a top national security job at the White House. If he could make it through a Senate confirmation, he could even be appointed CIA or FBI director, according to Trump allies.

Patel was a key author behind former Rep. Devin Nunes’ memo accusing the Department of Justice and FBI of abusing surveillance laws in a politically motivated effort to take down Trump.

The former president, if elected again, would move in with a plan being drawn up now to ‘drain the swamp’ and cut tens of thousands of civil servants from what are typically apolitical roles

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

MICHIGAN: Sh*tty Kalamazoo Decriminalizes Public Defecation and Urination thumbnail

MICHIGAN: Sh*tty Kalamazoo Decriminalizes Public Defecation and Urination

By The Geller Report

The Democrats work furiously to be even more themselves disgusting and debased then you thought possible. These primitives are destroying civilization.

Kalamazoo decriminalizes public defecation and urination over ‘equity’ issues, despite uproar from business owners

By: Carlos Garcia, The Blaze, July 22, 2022

The city of Kalamazoo, Michigan, has decriminalized littering, public defecation, and urination, despite various business owners decrying the policy.

On Monday, the Kalamazoo City Commission voted to water down some misdemeanor crimes so that they are merely civil infractions in the code of ordinances. Part of their reasoning was that people convicted of these crimes could have their lives negatively affected.

“One thing a lot of people don’t realize is a misdemeanor is for life as much as a felony. So many things come with a permanent record on somebody’s record,” explained Commissioner Chris Praedel.

The commission voted unanimously to accept the changes.

Praedel defended the decision to WXMI-TV.

“We’re not rolling out the welcome mat for crime in the city of Kalamazoo,” said Praedel. “We’re not rolling out the red carpet. We still want there to be accountability and guardrails, and it is still against the law for many of those things on there, to do those actions.”

Keep reading…..

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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

VIDEO: Shocking New Studies On The Dangers and Serious Side Effects Of Covid Vaccine thumbnail

VIDEO: Shocking New Studies On The Dangers and Serious Side Effects Of Covid Vaccine

By The Geller Report

Disturbing new vaccine data:

TRANSCRIPT:

Good evening and welcome to “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” We’re still shocked. Everyone else seems to have moved on to the next thing, but we still can’t get over what we saw yesterday when Joe Biden stunned the world and announced during a press conference with no warning at all that he has a potentially fatal disease. “I have cancer, “Joe Biden said. “I got it from living in Delaware.”

It turns out that Joe Biden’s home state is so thoroughly polluted, so supernaturally filthy, that even lepers living in public sewers in Calcutta refuse to go there. It’s too unclean. How dirty is Delaware? It is so dirty, Joe Biden said, that when it rains, it rains oil. That’s why everyone in Delaware gets cancer. They get it from the oil rain. Now, Joe Biden has it, too.

Looking back, voters probably should have known a little more about Joe Biden’s Delaware-related risk factors before he became president. It’s too late now and it just got worse. Not only is Biden sick from Delaware oil rain, now he’s got COVID. The White House announced it today. So, it’s been a tough week, overall. Wednesday, it was cancer. Thursday, it was the coronavirus. Tomorrow, you’ve got to think it’s going to be monkeypox. If you or someone you know has recently had unsafe sex with Joe Biden, please seek precautionary medical attention. God knows what you might have picked up.

At the White House, they are genuinely upset by today’s news, not because they’re worried about Joe Biden’s health. Everybody who works at the White House already knows he’s so thoroughly unwell he can barely speak. These are the people who run his teleprompter. They’re the ones who put the little pieces of tape on the floor so he knows where the door is.

These are not people who have any illusions at all about Joe Biden’s condition. What they’re upset about is the fact that Joe Biden just stepped on their message and from day one, that message has been consistent and unrelenting: “Get the vaccine or else.” Get the vaccine or you can’t have a job or an organ transplant or Thanksgiving with your kids. Get the vax or you can’t visit your mom as she dies in the hospital. Get the vax, prole. It’s the most important thing that you can do and you’re a monster if you don’t.

So, people obey. They did it. “Okay,” they said, “We’ll take the vax. It doesn’t look like we have a choice, but are you sure it works? It’s pretty hard to make a successful vaccine against a coronavirus. In fact, nobody’s ever done it. We tried with SARs almost 20 years ago and that failed completely, so you are absolutely positive this stuff works? Are you sure it’s safe and effective?”

“Of course we’re positive,” screamed the mannequin. We’re the U.S. government. We know these things. We don’t make mistakes. Stop asking questions. Questions have no place in science. Just take this shot and you will not get COVID. That’s guaranteed.” Joe Biden said that. He didn’t just say it once. He said it many, many, many times.

BIDEN, OCTOBER 2021: The fact is, this has been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Unvaccinated.

BIDEN, JULY 2021: The Delta virus, which is much more transmissible and more deadly in terms of non-unvaccinated people… The various shots that people are getting now cover that. You’re okay. You’re not going to, you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

BIDEN, JANUARY 2022: If you’re unvaccinated, you have some reason to be alarmed. Many of you will, you know, you’ll experience severe illness in many cases if you get COVID-19, if you’re not vaccinated. Some will die. We have in hand all the vaccines we need to get every American fully vaccinated, including the booster shot. So, there’s no excuse, no excuse for anyone being unvaccinated. This continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

Yeah, there’s no excuse. And if you don’t get the vax, you’re going to die from COVID. You’re going to get COVID if you don’t get the vax. Now, if you’d said that once or maybe like 11 times, you could say he’s got dementia, whatever. He said it pretty much every day, and he’s not the only one. They all did, beginning with Lord Fauci.

So, it turns out once you get vaccinated, you can feel safe. You’re not going to get infected. You’re not like the dirty people who didn’t get the vax, the anti-science people who are all going to die, and when they do, we’re going to laugh at them because they deserve it. And by the way, it wasn’t just Biden who’s just reading the script. It wasn’t just Fauci who will say whatever it takes and is, of course, covering up his own role in creating the virus in the first place. Even actual doctors, even the head of the CDC, even Rochelle Walensky herself, said the same thing.

WALENSKY: Our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick, and that it’s not just in the clinical trials, but it’s also in real world data.

Yeah, it’s not just in the clinical trials. It’s in real world data. Just look around observed reality. You don’t know anyone who’s gotten the vaccine and then got COV– oh, wait, everybody who got the vaccine got COVID. How does that work? Well, they never explained. They stopped telling you it was a pandemic of the vaccine because it was so obviously untrue.

You got the vaccine, you still got COVID, so they stopped saying anything at all, and they hoped you would forget about what they said for a full year and all the thousands of people whose lives they destroyed on the basis of that lie, but what they didn’t do ever was apologize for it. They hope they wouldn’t have to. But then last Friday, Joe Biden, again the president of the United States, became visibly symptomatic with something during a speech in Jerusalem. Watch.

BIDEN: I was making a speech and I had a terrible headache, excuse me, a terrible headache and sorry, but I had a terrible headache six years ago and I did a very stupid thing.

Remember, when you’re a kid, all the public health authorities try to stamp out cigarette smoking, and they printed these huge posters of up a wino dying of cirrhosis, tugging on a Pall Mall. They said smoking is very glamorous. In other words, don’t be this guy. Well, if we ever have another pandemic, let’s hope we don’t, but if we ever do, play that tape. That’s what you don’t do. Remember, the CDC in its guidance, when you develop symptoms, you isolate immediately.

You don’t cough on people at press conferences. Those are the rules that your kids lived by at school. That’s why they wore the little masks. They couldn’t breathe. Your children were also told to scan QR codes for contact tracing purposes if they ever developed COVID a dry cough, but today, Joe Biden gets COVID, and when reporters asked how he got it and why he didn’t isolate after getting symptoms, the response the White House press secretary was and we’re quoting here, and we’re quoting her, “I don’t think that matters.” It just doesn’t matter. Turns out it doesn’t matter. Go ahead and super spread if you want to.

So, if you’re on Air Force One yesterday or you went to a big press conference in Massachusetts or if you were the recipient of a fist bump in Saudi Arabia, you may have the Rona, but nobody cares. I don’t think it matters, says Karine Jean-Pierre, the president’s glass ceiling shattering publicist. So, obviously they’re hypocrites. Did you know that? Had you heard that before? Well, now you can mark that down as confirmed. That’s only part of the story and we don’t want to ignore the fact that the real story is the president of the United States is 79-years-old and has a, how to put it, complicated medical history and now he’s got COVID.

So, what does that mean? Well, sincerely, we hope he’s going to be okay. We do know he’s going to lose his sense of smell, maybe forever. What does that mean? No more sniffing little girls. If you’re Joe Biden and your main source of pleasure at this late stage in your life is sniffing the hair of unsuspecting, defenseless little girls and now you can’t even smell it, imagine that. Let’s say you’re riding your bike and you see a little girl and you think “I’d love to sniff her hair. Oh, man. No sense of smell.”

So, actually the costs of COVID are a little more profound than sometimes we understand. What’s kind of weird from a political perspective is that Biden got infected with COVID at exactly the moment his approval rating has reached its lowest ebb, not just with normal people, with Democrats. He’s 19% among Hispanic voters. Red alert, anyone and this also comes exactly the same moment that his son faces possible felony charges, huh? And also, needless to say, at the moment that his dementia has become so obvious that no one can possibly deny it.

I’m in Israel to honor the Holocaust, he just said. Oh, it’s so awful. So, what does this mean? Well, this incites the blood instincts of others in his party. Gretchen Whitmer, probably sitting in her rec room right now polishing her resume. “I could replace him,” but the real story here is the medical story. Joe Biden and a whole lot other people have gotten pretty sick with COVID after getting multiple shots. What is that about exactly? How did that happen? It’s easy to just mock that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. That’s clearly untrue, but is there a connection between getting most multiple COVID vaccine shots and getting sicker?

Is it possible that the vaccine actually can hurt you, especially if you keep getting boosted? Can it weaken your immune system? Well, that looks possible. Multiple studies have looked into this. Just last month, the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology published the findings of several MRNA researchers and we’re quoting, “In this paper, we present evidence that vaccination induces a profound impairment in type one interferon signaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health.”

Well, that seems like a headline. Did you read that in The New York Times? No, you probably didn’t. Kind of weird since hundreds of millions of people got the shot. The researchers continue that in their studies of the COVID vaccine, “We identify potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance. These disturbances potentially have a causal link to neurodegenerative disease… myocarditis, Bell’s Palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, impaired DNA damage response, etc.”

So, it’s possible. In fact, it’s looking likely that the vaccine might suppress the immune system. This fact, the authors concluded, will “have a wide range of consequences, not the least of which include the reactivation of latent viral infections and the reduced ability to effectively combat future infections.” Now again, we sincerely hope that’s not true, but it’s not just the conclusion of one scientific journal.

The Lancet may be the most famous scientific journal in the world, released similar findings in February. The Lancet’s piece was entitled “Risk of infection, hospitalization and death up to nine months after a second dose of COVID 19 vaccine.” A physician called Kenji Yamamoto made this observation about the data from The Lancet. He wrote this in a letter to the Journal of Virology and we’re quoting “The study showed that immune function among vaccinated individuals eight months after the administration of two doses of COVID 19 vaccine was lower than that among the unvaccinated individuals.”

Now your first response, if you’re a humane person to a line like that, has got to be deep sympathy because people were misled. They were forced. They were forced, medical ethics thrown out the window. People were forced to take medicine they didn’t want and some of them have been hurt by it and you don’t have to take this man’s word for it. Pull up the Lancet study yourself. You won’t find anything of the text of the article saying what Kenji Yamamoto said, which is weird. Why would the Lancet want to hide a major finding like that? We can’t say, but if you look at table three in the piece, here’s what you’ll find buried in the data.

Among people around the age of 80 who have been double vaccinated, that would include people like Joe Biden, the per capita rate of medical incidences, including hospitalizations for death, is nearly twice as high as the rate of serious incidence for the unvaccinated. This is 180 days after vaccination. What is that and why is no one interested? The piece also includes a chart showing negative vaccine efficacy for all ages after eight months for all participants in the study. So again, this is sad news for a lot of Americans, but it’s also a profound indictment, maybe the greatest indictment in our lifetimes of our leaders, their recklessness, their pig headedness, their dishonesty.

Given this, how is the D.C. government, among many others, still requiring schoolchildren, public and private schoolchildren, to get a COVID vaccine? That’s a question that no one asked at today’s White House press briefing. How are members of the U.S. military being dismissed without their pensions because they won’t take this same vaccine, in light of these study results. Is no one paying attention? How is this allowed? But instead, today at the White House briefing, all the questions are about the proof of life video that Joe Biden’s office released today. Here it is.

BIDEN: Hey, folks, guess you heard this morning I tested positive for COVID. But, I’ve been double-vaccinated, double-boosted. Symptoms are mild and I really appreciate your inquiries and concerns. I’m doing well, getting a lot of work done. I’m going to continue to get it done.

Here’s a question. Is there a single public statement Joe Biden has made since Inauguration Day that he did not read off a teleprompter? Is there one? Find it.

So, the question they come up at today’s press briefing was, after seeing that is who shot that footage? Is that person in danger?

placeholder

Well, once again, the president’s glass ceiling shattering publicist, Karine Jean-Pierre, was asked that question and she said it’s totally fine because the video was taken outside and there’s no risk outside that we will arrest you for paddleboarding in California. But then an hour earlier, to make this even messier because it’s inherently messy, because it’s Biden-related, the White House released this picture and it shows Joe Biden, brace yourselves, indoors at his desk, no mask.

So, who shot that picture? Is that person still alive? Does that person have monkeypox? Presumably, the White House photographer is vaccinated. That’s got to be a requirement working there. But as we just saw, that may make the photographer more vulnerable to infection and in fact, and we hate to say this, it might mean the photographer is now more likely to face serious health complications.

So, underlying all of this is a really ominous fact, and that is a lot of people have been hurt by this. You hate to say it. Germany’s Ministry of Health found that 1 in 5,000 Germans have suffered “serious side effects after a COVID 19 vaccine.”

Now, one in 5,000 may seem like a lot or a little, but extrapolate forward to the United States, a country with our population. That would mean that in the U.S., if that number holds constant across countries (and why wouldn’t it?) it would mean more than 100,000 Americans may have been seriously injured by the COVID vaccine.

Why does no one talk about them? Why does nobody care and what happens to them now? If Joe Biden accomplishes a single thing as president, it will be getting more people to ask that question today and it’s a fair question and to end, science is about questions. Science is questioning. So, anyone who tells you, you’re anti-science for asking a question doesn’t understand what science is.

Tucker correctly cites Yamamoto observation after 2 of them, the immune system is less responsive than the pure unjected with an intact and natural immune response. More evidence the products are backfiring and why so many regret taking them in the first place. @TuckerCarlson pic.twitter.com/sp8QuScvt0

— Peter McCullough, MD MPH (@P_McCulloughMD) July 22, 2022

Remember when the rest of us instinctively knew something was wrong with the desperation they were showing to jab us all and got called names for rejecting it? It’s amazing not only to see how inefficient these Vs are, but the rise in health issues and deaths now relating to them

— ShaneLibertyBraden (@TruLiberalShane) July 22, 2022

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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

Yes, Elisjsha Dicken Is a Good Samaritan—and He Deserves a Medal thumbnail

Yes, Elisjsha Dicken Is a Good Samaritan—and He Deserves a Medal

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

On Sunday evening—July 17, 2022—at the Greenwood Park Mall in Indiana, a gunman opened fire in a food court. He killed three people and wounded two others. He might have murdered many more but for the quick work of a man named Elisjsha Dicken, who pulled out his own gun and blew away the assailant.

Dicken, who was legally carrying a firearm under the state’s constitutional carry law, was hailed as a “Good Samaritan” for saving lives. The next day, the Greenwood police chief added, “Many more people would have died last night if not for the responsible armed citizen.”

Gun control advocates immediately condemned the police chief for his “Good Samaritan” reference, drawn from a famous parable told by Jesus Christ. A local reporter exclaimed,

The term, ‘Good Samaritan’ came from a Bible passage of a man from Samaria who stopped on the side of the road to help a man who was injured and ignored. I cannot believe we live in a world where the term can equally apply to someone killing someone.

Who is correct here, the police chief or the reporter? A related question is, Did Jesus support self-defense, or the taking of a guilty life to save the lives of innocents?

In Chapter 10 of the Book of Luke in the New Testament, Jesus tells his parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan is judged “good” because when he came upon a man who was beaten and robbed, he chose of his own free will to help the injured man with his own resources. As I wrote in my 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist?, if the Samaritan had ignored the man or expected the government to help him, we would likely know him today as the “Good-for-Nothing” Samaritan.

The Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable did not commit a violent act himself. The injured man’s assailants were presumably long gone. He stepped in to assist the assailed. So strictly speaking, the Greenwood police chief’s reference was not entirely analogous to Elisjsha Dicken’s action in taking down the shooter at the shopping mall.

For centuries, many people have employed the term “Good Samaritan” to describe anyone who isn’t compelled to come to the aid of the innocent but takes the initiative to do so anyway. A Good Samaritan takes charge of a bad situation, improves it as best he can, and prevents further harm. That is exactly what Elisjsha Dicken did in Greenwood.

Undoubtedly, the critical reporter in this instance is a person of good intent. He can’t imagine Jesus endorsing Dicken’s action because Jesus was a man of peace. He might even cite Matthew, chapter five, in which Jesus urges us to “turn the other cheek” if someone insults us or physically slaps us in the face.

“The question of rendering insult for insult, however, is a far cry from defending oneself against a mugger or a rapist,” writes Lars Larson in Does Jesus Christ Support Self-Defense?. To “turn the other cheek” means to refrain from a needless escalation of a problematic situation. Elisjsha Dicken did not escalate anything; in fact, he dramatically and decisively de-escalated it in the only possible way, given the circumstances.

The reporter likely shares the widely-held, radically pacifist or “namby-pamby” view of Jesus—the view that he would never endorse an act of violence for any purpose, even if it’s necessary to save lives. It implies that Elisjsha Dicken should have run for cover and allowed the Greenwood shooter to kill another dozen or two people. That’s wrong, if not downright blasphemous.

When Jesus dined at The Last Supper, he gave his disciples specific instructions, including this one (Luke 22:36):

He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. 

Note that he did not advise anyone, then or at any other time, to stand idly by and allow wanton slaughter of innocents. And he offered support for the threat of force to prevent the theft of property as well. In Luke 11:21, Jesus said:

When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are safe. But when someone stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted, and divides up his plunder.

This is the same Jesus who, in Luke 12:39, says, “If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.” It’s the same Jesus who never criticized anyone for possessing a lethal weapon such as a sword, though he certainly condemned the initiation of force or the impetuous and unnecessary use of it.

In Jesus, Guns and Self-Defense: What Does the Bible Say?, Gary DeMar maintains that

Being armed and willing to defend ourselves, our family, and our neighbors is not being unchristian or even unloving. Self-defense can go a long way to protect the innocent from people who are intent on murder for whatever reason.

The Greenwood reporter’s errant perspective is not untypical of people who think they know Jesus and Christianity but spend more time criticizing them than learning about them. I see evidence of this all the time, most recently from a speaker at an April 2022 conference in Prague, Czech Republic.

“When it comes to the source of individual rights,” the speaker pontificated with misplaced confidence, “there are only three possibilities.” One, he said, is a Creator (God), which he summarily dismissed as a ridiculous, untenable proposition. The second is government, which he ruled out as equally ridiculous and untenable. The only logical option, he said, was “nature”—something which he suggested evolved out of nothing from nobody. As I listened with the largely student audience, I thought to myself, “This supposed expert hasn’t even considered a fourth option, namely, a combination of the first and third—which is to say that God, as the author of nature, is in fact the author of individual rights as well.”

The speaker added another uninformed dig at Christianity by claiming it was stupid for Jesus to ever suggest you should love your neighbor. “What if your neighbor is an axe-murderer? How much sense would that make?” he asked derisively. If he had known of the passages I cite above, he would have been embarrassed by his own ignorance. As a general principle, Jesus argued, you should love your neighbor but the same Jesus would urge you to arm yourself if your neighbor threatens your life or property.

In The Life and Death Debate: Moral Issues of Our Time, Christian theologians Norman Geisler and J. P. Moreland write:

To permit murder when one could have prevented it is morally wrong. To allow a rape when one could have hindered it is evil. To watch an act of cruelty to children without trying to intervene is morally inexcusable. In brief, not resisting evil is an evil of omission, and an evil of omission can be just as evil as an evil of commission. Any man who refuses to protect his wife and children against a violent intruder fails them morally.

When Elisjsha Dicken pulled out his gun to stop a shooting spree, he had every reason to believe he might attract the shooter’s aim and be killed himself. Fortunately, he was not, and he is among the living whose lives he saved.

If Elisjsha Dicken had been killed, the rest of us could at least take comfort in the words of Jesus as quoted in John 15:13. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

Elisjsha Dicken is not only a Good Samaritan. He’s a very good one. Give him a medal.

Science is Affirming Creation, Not Accident by Lawrence W. Reed

What Does the Bible Say About Self-Defense?

Was Jesus a Socialist? by Lawrence W. Reed

AUTHOR

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is FEE’s President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, having served for nearly 11 years as FEE’s president (2008-2019). He is author of the 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist? as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on LinkedIn and Like his public figure page on Facebook. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com.

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

Hunter Will Skate thumbnail

Hunter Will Skate

By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

The investigation of Hunter Biden has reached a critical stage, with prosecutors weighing whether or not to bring charges.  Their focus has narrowed to tax violations and making a false statement to purchase a firearm.  Apparently, the juicy stuff from Hunter Biden’s laptop and business dealings – money laundering, failure to register as a foreign lobbyist, and such and the like – has been left behind.

Which is too bad, because it leaves a lot of questions unanswered – not only about Hunter but, more importantly, about Joe Biden.  Tenacious investigator Peter Schweizer, author of a book documenting how communist China has captured American elites, asserts it is undisputed Hunter Biden received tens of millions of dollars from Chinese businesses having ties to Chinese intelligence when Joe Biden was in the White House as Vice President and the Obama administration’s point man on China policy.  It is believed Joe Biden—the ‘Big Guy’—gets 10 percent from Hunter Biden’s business dealings. This raises a whole host of major questions, like: Was Joe Biden selling his office when he was Vice President?  Was U.S. China policy affected?  Was national security compromised?  Is Joe Biden in the pocket of Red China today?  Unfortunately, it looks like we’re never going to know because prosecutors can only get interested in whether Hunter Biden lied when he bought a gun.  And they want us to believe we don’t have a two-tiered justice system in this country – one for the high and mighty and another for us little people.

But no matter how you slice it, Hunter’s business dealings and kickbacks to Joe Biden still stink to high heaven.  In recent weeks, it’s been conceded Hunter Biden’s laptop is genuine, not Russian disinformation as ridiculously claimed.  Information from the laptop documents the Biden-Burisma connection and a pay-to-play scheme in Ukraine, how Vice President Joe Biden intervened to get a Ukrainian prosecutor off Hunter’s back, and Hunter’s questionable activities in Moscow, China, and Kazakhstan. The laptop also shows Hunter Biden met with Vice President Joe Biden at the White House or the Vice President’s residence at least 30 times, often just after returning from overseas business trips.  A Hunter Biden business associate attended 21 of those meetings.

Emails on the laptop and now available online show a Mexican billionaire received access to the White House because Hunter Biden requested it.

Joe Biden claims to this day he doesn’t know anything about Hunter’s business dealings, a claim which has been thoroughly debunked.  Recovered files from the laptop show, not only did Joe Biden know about Hunter’s business dealings, but Joe Biden offered to help more than once and even referred more business to Hunter Biden.  The White House won’t answer any questions about the laptop (more here).  Gee, I wonder why.

A recovered text message from Hunter Biden raises questions about why he was working with China’s chief of intelligence, and whether China arrested CIA sources in retaliation for the Justice Department arresting Hunter’s Chinese business partner.  Emails show Joe Biden wrote a college recommendation letter for the son of Hunter Biden’s Chinese business partner.  Bank records released by two U.S. Senators show Hunter Biden has financial ties to companies linked to the Chinese Communist Party or government.  One of the companies wired $1 million dollars to a Hunter Biden company the same month the Chinese company’s lobbyist was arrested by U.S. authorities for bribery and money laundering.  He was later convicted.

Most recently, the Biden administration sold China a million barrels of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve.  This was oil set aside to help Americans but Joe Biden sold it to China, specifically to Sinopec in which Hunter Biden has a financial interest. Our China policy is, what again?

Finally, we’ve been hearing for a long time Hunter would divest himself of a financial stake in a Chinese oil company.  The latest report from two days ago is he still hasn’t done so.

In 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace after a scandal involving a $10,000 bribe. My, how times have changed, and not for the better.



Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

The Semiconductor Industry Is Coming for Your Wallet. As Usual, Congress Is Complicit thumbnail

The Semiconductor Industry Is Coming for Your Wallet. As Usual, Congress Is Complicit

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

The Chips Act is a classic case of the government helping special interest groups at the expense of taxpayers.


Of all the problems in the world right now, the chip shortage probably isn’t the chief concern for most people, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a serious issue. The auto and tech sectors have faced unprecedented delays and rising prices in recent months. Some used cars are even selling for more than their new counterparts because of the delays, a sure sign that production has slowed dramatically.

To address this, Congress is contemplating bipartisan legislation known as the Chips Act, which would provide $52 billion in grants and $24 billion in tax credits to the US semiconductor industry. Thanks to a last-minute bipartisan amendment, the bill will also put tens of billions of dollars toward various federal agencies, bringing the total price tag to $250 billion.

Because why not…

The Senate voted to advance the bill on Tuesday, which means it will likely hold a vote on final passage in the coming days. If passed, the bill will then go to the House for passage, and assuming that is successful it would then go to President Biden for signature into law.

The main arguments for the bill were summarized earlier this week in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed penned by Jim Farley and Pat Gelsinger, the CEOs of Ford and Intel, respectively.

“The pandemic supply-chain shock exposed a problem that had been mounting for years,” they write. “The U.S. share of global chip manufacturing has declined to 12% from 37% in 1990. South Korea and Taiwan, notably, have spent years actively investing in [read: subsidizing] their own chip manufacturing, creating an uneven playing field for U.S. chip makers that harms our economy and global competitiveness.”

They go on to list the disruptions that have occurred in the auto, consumer-electronics, and healthcare industries because of the shortage, and they warn that national defense is also at stake.

“Fortunately, a solution is within reach,” they continue, referring to the Chips Act. “In addition to boosting production of leading-edge and legacy chips, the act would help level the playing field with global competitors…This legislation is vital to many American industries, including ours, that have dealt with significant disruptions.”

“By funding the Chips Act,” they conclude, “Congress will help consumers, protect patients and strengthen the American economy and national security.”

At first glance, that Op-Ed might seem innocuous, even well-intentioned. But it doesn’t take much to realize what’s really going on here. The companies run by these CEOs stand to gain billions of taxpayer dollars—not just tax credits, but government grants—if this legislation passes. Do you really think they wrote that because they care about the American economy and national defense? Give me a break. They wrote it because they want the money, and they will make whatever arguments they think people will buy in order to get it.

So, what’s wrong with their arguments?

For starters, there’s the classic problem of opportunity cost. Fifty-two billion taxpayer dollars being poured into these industries is 52 billion taxpayers dollars that can’t be poured into other industries. The government is not creating resources, it is simply reallocating them, and it’s by no means obvious that this is the best use of these funds. Notably, the free market tends to allocate resources much better than the government because, unlike Congress, it is guided by actual consumer demand.

Additionally, the CEOs conflate strengthening their businesses with strengthening the American economy. In reality, these are two very different things. If it’s cheaper to buy semiconductors from companies in foriegn countries, it would be economically inefficient to produce these products in America. It would be better to let the domestic producers take losses and ultimately fail so their capital could be reallocated to better uses.

Here, of course, the lobbyists have a rejoinder. “The only reason it’s cheaper to buy semiconductors from foreign countries,” they say, “is because foreign governments subsidize their semiconductor producers. We need a level playing field.”

People who are otherwise proponents of free markets are often sympathetic to this line of reasoning. After all, it’s not really the case that American producers are inefficient, right? If only there was a level playing field, they could compete just fine.

Rothbard tackles this thinking head-on in his book Making Economic Sense.

“Whenever someone starts talking about ‘fair competition’ or indeed, about ‘fairness’ in general,” he writes, “it is time to keep a sharp eye on your wallet, for it is about to be picked.”

Sure enough, that’s exactly what’s happening here.

After addressing some other arguments, Rothbard turns to the issue of foreign government subsidies that allow foreign companies to engage in “dumping,” that is, selling products to American consumers “below cost.”

“Another charge claims that Japanese or other foreign firms can afford to engage in dumping because their governments are willing to subsidize their losses,” he writes. “But again, we should still welcome such an absurd policy. If the Japanese government is really willing to waste scarce resources subsidizing American purchases of Sony’s, so much the better! Their policy would be just as self-defeating as if the losses were private.”

Swap out Japanese Sony’s for Taiwanese semiconductors and Rothbard might as well be writing in 2022. The point is, economic well-being is ultimately about consumers, not producers. If foreign governments are willing to subsidize semiconductors, making them cheaper for Americans, then we might as well take the gift. True, it’s not a free market, but it doesn’t help to adopt bad public policy simply because other nations are also doing it.

What’s curious about corporate subsidies like this is that large swaths of both the left and the right are opposed to them. Right-wingers oppose corporate subsidies because they are funded with taxpayer dollars and have the government picking winners and losers in the market. Left-wingers oppose corporate subsidies because they help big corporations at the expense of the little guy.

So if both sides of the political spectrum have good reasons for opposing this measure, it’s worth asking ourselves, who exactly is promoting this?

The answer is: the establishment.

It’s important to understand that the real world of politics is somewhat different from the ideological debates we see online and in the news. Sure, politicians know how to say the right things, but when it comes down to it, most of their job is about appeasing special-interest groups, from semiconductor companies to the military industrial complex to farmers to unions…the list is long.

Ambrose Bierce has a great quote that really captures this idea. Giving a satirical definition of politics in The Devil’s Dictionary, he writes, “POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

We’re told that politics is about competing philosophies of government. In theory, each party has its own vision of what good government looks like, and they are trying to live out those principles as best they can.

But most of the time, that’s not what happens. In practice, it is a strife of special interests. For most politicians, the principles they espouse are merely a pretense, a facade. The real work of politics is about placating donors and lobbyists and voting blocs. This is why we see things like corporate subsidies. They aren’t part of some grand governing philosophy. They are simply the inevitable result of a system that is run by the special interests and for the special interests.

Is that cynical? Sure. But it’s a very justified cynicism, and it gets reinforced every time a story like this comes out.

The good news is that we can do something about it. Once we see the corrupting incentives inherent in politics, we can begin to work towards change. But the key is to not be wooed by the politicians, pundits, and executives when they tell us their schemes are designed for our benefit.

AUTHOR

Patrick Carroll

Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.


This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.


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

PODCAST TOPICS: GODLESS ENCLAVES — FABRICATING REALITY — SURVEY OF WOMEN VOTERS 50+ thumbnail

PODCAST TOPICS: GODLESS ENCLAVES — FABRICATING REALITY — SURVEY OF WOMEN VOTERS 50+

By Conservative Commandos Radio Show

GUESTS AND TOPICS

DR. RICH SWIER, LTC, U.S. ARMY (RET.)

Dr. Rich Swier is a “conservative with a conscience.” Rich is a 23 year Army veteran who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his years of service. Additionally, he was awarded two Bronze Stars with “V” for Valor and Heroism in ground combat, the Presidential Unit Citation, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry while serving with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. Dr. Rich now publishes the “drrichswier.com report”. A daily review of news, issues and commentary!

TOPICS: GODLESS ENCLAVES — FABRICATING REALITY — SURVEY: Women Voters 50+

TRISTAN JUSTICE

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism.

TOPIC: Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz blamed woke elected officials in Democrat-run cities for the abrupt closure of 16 stores.

©Conservative Commandoes Radio. All rights reserved.

Black Lives Matter Mob Rallying for Monster Confronted By One of His Victims thumbnail

Black Lives Matter Mob Rallying for Monster Confronted By One of His Victims

By Jihad Watch

Things boiled over during Saturday’s rally and march for Tekle Sundberg, when the 24 year old woman who says he was shooting into her apt. showed up voicing her frustration with those gathering in front of her building on Sundberg’s behalf. @kare11 * video contains profanity * pic.twitter.com/qdi1vbgO7k

— Deevon Rahming (@DeevonRahming) July 16, 2022

This happens all too rarely and it’s a shame because it allows leftists and the media to turn their latest monster into a martyr with soft-focused photos and sketches.

Arabella Yarbrough says she thought she and her 2 kids were going to die Wed. night, after she says Tekle Sundberg fired these shots through her apt. She says she called police. Sundberg was shot and killed by MPD ending a 6hr standoff. More on this, tonight at 10. @kare11 pic.twitter.com/4x0ITgBkoZ— Deevon Rahming (@DeevonRahming) July 17, 2022

Arabella Yarbrough says she thought she and her 2 kids were going to die Wed. night, after she says Tekle Sundberg fired these shots through her apt. She says she called police. Sundberg was shot and killed by MPD ending a 6hr standoff. More on this, tonight at 10. @kare11 pic.twitter.com/4x0ITgBkoZ

— Deevon Rahming (@DeevonRahming) July 17, 2022

What started as a rally for a man shot and killed by Minneapolis Police quickly took a turn after the mother of two nearly hit by bullets while inside her apartment showed up to share her story on Saturday afternoon.

Arabella Yarbrough was cooking food for her children Wednesday night when she says Tekle Sundberg fired bullets into their home, nearly hitting them. Police responded and helped Yarbrough escape when according to police, Sundberg also fired at officers. That led to a six-hour standoff outside the building that lasted until MPD snipers killed the 20-year-old early the next morning.

“I literally had five minutes to live while he had six hours to choose life or death. The police stated they did not want to kill him,” Yarbrough told Fox 9.

Activists are still “demanding answers”.

People gathered Saturday afternoon to honor Andrew ‘Tekle’ Sundberg while demanding more answers after he was shot and killed by law enforcement on Thursday morning.

The answer here is pretty obvious. The only question here is “What the hell is wrong with you people”.

Two Minneapolis police snipers shot Sundberg early Thursday morning, ending a six-hour standoff that began when police were called to the apartment complex at around 9:30 p.m. on a report of shots being fired inside the building. A mother with two young children called 911 and told dispatchers someone was firing shots through their apartment.

Minneapolis police spokesman officer Garrett Parten said the fatal shots were fired around 4:30 a.m. following six hours of negotiating with the man, who had barricaded himself inside an apartment on the 900 block of 21st and East Franklin Avenues in the Seward neighborhood.

According to a search warrant, while officers were attempting to evacuate the building, “officers started taking fire,” prompting them to leave the building and call the Minneapolis SWAT Team.

More answers are clearly needed, as to why this took six hours.

But the idiots who adopted him and their lawyer still insist that Tekle should still be alive and shooting at people.

His parents, Cindy and Mark Sundberg, adopted Tekle from Ethiopia when he was just four years old.

“My heart goes out to that woman (Yarbrough). She went through a very traumatic event with those bullets coming through her house,” said Mark Sundberg.

Along with their attorney, they empathized with the terror Yarbrough felt that night, but say their son should still be here.

“It’s two different incidents. It’s the shots going through her (wall) and what we are here for, when Tekle was shot,” said Mark Sundberg

I’m thinking it’s the same incident. Much like Hitler invading Poland and shooting himself in the Fuhrerbunker.

 “We can do both things. We can feel terribly for this woman, but also remember that Tekle should be here with us and he should be alive and we can ask the Minneapolis Police Department to do better,” said the Sundberg family attorney, Jeff Storms.

The MPD should do better. It shouldn’t take six hours to put down a gunman who’s shooting at people. That’s a worse record than Uvalde. It should take 15 minutes or less.

Do better.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

RELATED VIDEO: Mom shot at by Tekle Sundberg interrupts rally., expresses outrage at protesters

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Peak climate insanity’ — Manchin Rejects $2 Trillion Pork Barrel Climate Spending Bill thumbnail

‘Peak climate insanity’ — Manchin Rejects $2 Trillion Pork Barrel Climate Spending Bill

By Marc Morano

Morano: “I liken it to they compare the climate crisis to having cancer and the green energy transition, the Green New Deal is their version of chemotherapy. Yeah, you’re gonna be sick, you’re gonna be vomiting, you’re gonna be laid up, but just when you get to the other side of that, you’re gonna be cancer free or in this case, climate crisis-free. So in their minds, this is the necessary bitter medicine that we have to go through — that the Netherlands is going through. What Sri Lanka is going through. What Germany and England are going through, as they’re facing blackouts and energy shortages and economic devastation and inflation.”


Morano on Fox & Friends:

‘We’ve reached peak climate insanity’ as Sen. Manchin kills Biden’s bill – ‘Completely unhinged’ activists claim a pork barrel fed spending bill will alter Earth’s geologic history!

Climate activists are ‘completely unhinged’ after Manchin decision: Climate publisher | https://t.co/ARJXEte1L1

— Dr. Rich Swier (@drrichswier) July 19, 2022

Broadcast July 16, 2022 – Fox News Channel

Morano: “The New York Times quoted a University of California professor who said she was ‘sobbing’ at this news.  (Dr. Leah C. Stokes on Twitter: “Manchin says he won’t support the climate bill. I’m holding my children and sobbing.

Morano: Sen. Chuck Schumer is ‘shell-shocked’The House Budget Committee Chairman said ‘we’re all going to die’. We have a climate activist Bill McKibben actually saying that Joe Manchin’s name is going to be a geologic era in the Earth —  that Manchin is altering the geologic history of the earth. They are completely unhinged because one politician is not going to support a pork barrel spending bill, which they somehow think is going to save the planet. Just another pork barrel spending bill in Washington somehow has this power. We’ve reached peak climate insanity.”

[ … ] 

Green energy transition so worth it?!

Morano: “I liken it to they compare the climate crisis to having cancer and the green energy transition, the Green New Deal is their version of chemotherapy. Yeah, you’re gonna be sick, you’re gonna be vomiting, you’re gonna be laid up, but just when you get to the other side of that, you’re gonna be cancer free or in this case, climate crisis-free. So in their minds, this is the necessary bitter medicine that we have to go through — that the Netherlands is going through. What Sri Lanka is going through. What Germany and England are going through, as they’re facing blackouts and energy shortages and economic devastation and inflation.”

By: Marc Morano – Climate Depot – July 17, 2022 8:07 AM

Climate activists are ‘completely unhinged’ after Manchin decision: Climate publisher – Fox News Channel – Broadcast July 16, 2022

Climatedepot.com publisher Marc Morano praises Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., for rejecting a climate spending bill and slams climate activists for pushing ‘necessary bitter medicine’ solutions to the climate.

Rough Transcript:

Will Cain: Climate spending bill potentially doing any major green legislation before the midterms…So does (W.VA) Sen. Manchin make a good case here with reaction is Marc Morano, publisher of ClimateDepot.com. Marc, great to see you this morning. You know, I think it’s unavoidable. It’s interesting what happens overseas what is happening across the world. You know, we’re seeing precursors of it right here back home when not that’s food shortages in Sri Lanka, climate change proposals in the Netherlands. And here’s Joe Manchin, seemingly standing in the way at least in part of some of this stuff, making it back to the United States.

Marc Morano: Yes, I’ve already said Europe is much further ahead with the insanity of their energy policy than the United States. So if you want to know what’s going to happen in the US, look to Europe, and we’re seeing devastating energy news in Europe. And what Joe Manchin did — what he did was phenomenal. It reveals that just insanity of the current climate energy movement, Green New Deal movement if you will, he pulled out of this deal that they were trying to push on him with all sorts of bribes on the climate bill that President Biden is pushing the build back better $2 trillion.

And the New York Times quoted a University of California professor who said she was ‘sobbing’ at this news. (Dr. Leah C. Stokes on Twitter: “Manchin says he won’t support the climate bill. I’m holding my children and sobbing.

Sen. Chuck Schumer is ‘shell-shocked’The House Budget Committee Chairman said ‘we’re all going to die’. We have a climate activist Bill McKibben actually saying that Joe Manchin’s name is going to be a geologic era in the Earth —  that Manchin is altering the geologic history of the earth.

They are completely unhinged because one politician is not going to support a pork barrel spending bill, which they somehow think is going to save the planet. Just another pork barrel spending bill in Washington somehow has this power.

We’ve reached peak climate insanity.

Kudos to Joe Manchin for withstanding the pressure he’s under. He’s had activists and events surrounding him in the street chanting, ‘We want to live’ surrounding him not even letting him walk this video footage. They have targeted him, the climate activists, the Green New Deal activists, and he has stood strong and not given into their demands.

Will Cain: So Marc, how do you explain the insanity? Do you think that the likes of Chuck Schumer and others look across the world and see what’s going on with hyperinflation and food shortages and think it’s disconnected from climate policies or do they think that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet that it’s worth, you know, it’s worth a little human suffering to save the habitat?

Marc Morano: You’re spot on Will. That’s exactly what they think. When you hear everyone from Transporation Sec. Pete Buttigieg to Treasury Sec. Janet Yellen. They believe this is going to be a painful transition, but it’s necessary.

I liken it to they compare the climate crisis to having cancer and the green energy transition, the Green New Deal is their version of chemotherapy. Yeah, you’re gonna be sick, you’re gonna be vomiting, you’re gonna be laid up, but just when you get to the other side of that, you’re gonna be cancer free or in this case, climate crisis-free.

So in their minds, this is the necessary bitter medicine that we have to go through — that the Netherlands is going through what Sri Lanka is going through what Germany and England are going through, as they’re facing blackouts and energy shortages and economic devastation and inflation.

It’s all worth it because we’re going to solve the climate crisis, which is nuts because even John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy said if the US and Europe zeroed out our emissions the Earth wouldn’t even notice in terms of CO2 emissions because China, India, the developing world’s economies are ramping up so fast that global CO2 emissions are going up. So if we were trying to save the planet, just hamstringing our economy and punishing our people has no impact on global emissions.

Will Cain: You know what I would love to see Marc, and we’ll leave it here. But I would love to see their description of the planet post — in your analogy, chemotherapy. What is their description because we have that they have told us piecemeal, it’s fewer humans on this earth? So it’s less population. I’m sure it’s not going to apply to them and their families. You know, it’s less impact on the earth. So whatever that means shorter lifespans, fewer people, less human flourishing. I’d like to know Bill McKibben, his description of a healthy planet because I think we wouldn’t all agree with the picture of health.

Marc Morano great to talk to you this morning.

Marc Morano: Thank you Will.

“We’re all going to die”: Dems irate at Manchin for tanking climate change part of new BBB bill – “We’re all going to die,” House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth, D-Ky., told reporters when asked about the consequences of Congress failing to act… “Unfortunately, we have one Democrat who thinks he knows better than every other Democrat,” he said…

New York Times GUEST ESSAY: What Joe Manchin Cost Us – By Leah C. Stokes – Dr. Stokes is an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. – Excerpt: “Like other young people, Mr. Manchin’s grandchildren will grow up knowing that his legacy is climate destruction.  …  Hold your children close tonight. Leave some water out for the birds. And make a plan to call your elected leaders to demand climate action, to rip out your fossil fuel furnace or to buy an e-bike. The climate crisis is getting worse, and Congress is one vote short of saving us.”

Rolling Stone: ‘Joe Manchin Just Cooked the Planet’ by not supporting Biden’s massive federal spending bill — ‘Condemned virtually every living creature on Earth to a hellish future of suffering, hardship, & death’

JEFF GOODELL of Rolling Stone: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin just cooked the planet. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense. I mean that literally. Unless Manchin changes his negotiating position dramatically in the near future, he will be remembered as the man who, when the moment of decision came, chose to condemn virtually every living creature on Earth to a hellish future of suffering, hardship, and death.”

New York Times: John Podesta, former senior advisor to President Obama: “It seems odd that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-hadedly doomed humanity.”  …

“Privately, Senate Democratic staff members seethed and sobbed on Thursday night, after more than a year of working and weekends to scale back, water down, trim and tailor the climate legislation to Mr. Manchin’s exact specification, only to have it rejected from the finish line.”

Politico Editor On Manchin’s No To Biden’s BBB: ‘Objectively devastating for the planet. The last best chance at climate change legislation is gone’

The Sunrise Movement, a youth movement to stop climate change, said in a post on Twitter that “Joe Manchin and the fossil fuel industry don’t care if we make it out of this climate crisis dead or alive. This is #PeopleVsFossilFuels.”

Michael Mann: “Joe Manchin just launched a hand grenade at [UN climate summit in] Glasgow,” Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, tweeted. “W/out a clean energy standard in the reconciliation package, Biden admin cannot meet pledge of 50% reduction in U.S. carbon emissions by 2030. And international climate negotiations begin to collapse.”

‘Build Bank Bankrupt’: Watch: Morano’s 30 min speech in Glasgow at climate skeptic forum – ‘How many times do we have to save the planet?’

Marc Morano joined the Ezra Levant Show to discuss Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin single-handedly throwing a wrench in Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, halting his climate and tax plans.

U.S. cannot fulfill climate change pledges if Manchin won’t vote for clean energy, experts say

Economic chaos is GOOD for climate?! NYT praises inflation as way ‘to drive welcome change for the planet’ – ‘Adjust what we eat to save both our pocketbooks & our planet’

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano: “The New York Times seems bent on updating Gordon Gekko’s phrase from the 1987 film Wall Street: Chaos, for lack of a better word, is GOOD. Climate activists in academia, the Biden admin. and the media seem to think the more humans suffer, the more the planet will benefit. This is more evidence that economic calamity, debt, inflation, supply chain issues, and skyrocketing meat and energy costs are not the unintended consequences of the climate agenda, but the INTENDED consequences. Chaos conditions the public to accept more centralized control of their lives. Vladimir Lenin reportedly once said, ‘worse is better’ or ‘the worse, the better’ to cheer on chaos and the destruction of the existing order to impose his ideology.”

Also see: Climate Depot News Round-Up: 

Watch: Morano on Tucker Carlson on energy & food chaos: ‘This is a war against modern civilization’ – World Economic Forum & UN seek ‘controlling humans’

Media Matters calls Morano a ‘notorious climate denier’ & ‘a proponent of the Great Reset conspiracy theory’

Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels RIP

https://www.climatedepot.com/2022/07/17/watch-morano-on-fox-friends-weve-reached-peak-climate-insanity-as-sen-manchin-kills-bidens-climate-agenda-completely-unhinged-activists-claim-a-pork-barrel-fed-spendin/

©Marc Morano. All rights reserved.

Marxists Spoke! Sadly, We Listened. thumbnail

Marxists Spoke! Sadly, We Listened.

By Karen Schoen

Marxists spoke: Never talk about politics and religion.  Don’t trust your parents. Be the silent majority.  Sadly, we listened.


A newly released report from Steve Moore, states that there is no one, NOT ONE, ZERO person in the OBiden regime that knows anything about business. think about this: These people are pushing their untried, untested, complete failure policies on We the People because they don’t care about people or results. They only care about power.

It seems as though our SCOTUS believes in the US Constitution. We won great decisions in the Supreme Court but got screwed by the Gutless Outrageous Prostitutes = GOP. (Thank you Sally Baptiste for that great new name for the GOP.)   Are you still going to vote for the same traitors again? Chaney is out begging democrats to vote for her. I hope that even Wyoming Democrats are not that stupid.

To understand what’s going on today we really have to go back and look at the 60s-70s. Most Americans pushing abortion are Boomers from that era. The boomers, myself included were the hippies, the flower children, the rock n  rollers, anti-G-d, Anti-family and Anti-America.  Morality was tossed out the window when G-d was removed from public buildings, due to 1person complaining in Engel v. Vitale . Then we accepted perversion, drugs, liquor,  sex as the new lifestyle. We would do anything our parents didn’t do. We hated the establishment.

In the 60s-70s we were so despondent and in such despair at seeing our great American heroes being assassinated in front of our very eyes. We strongly believed that the assassinations were part of a government coup. Of course we were told we were conspiracy nuts. HA! John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King JR, Robert Kennedy, our hope for a bright future was slowly fading.  We were forced into a war by draft in Vietnam that no one wanted. We were forced to fight a war in Vietnam against communism while promoting communism at home in school. How sick was that?  We were taught to lay our hatred on the heroes that were forced to fight. While those who avoided the draft became teachers in this new education called Social Studies/sustainability aka communism.

And so like all other peoples of the world when we were abused we responded. We were angry .We demonstrated, we marched and we rioted. We destroyed statues, burned buildings and listened to the emotional news about the war even though we knew they were lying.

We were taught to divert our attention into sex and drugs which we learned in school through a variety of “new” SEX Ed courses and we learned fast. After all we learned in school so it had to be OK. We had multiple outlets to express our new found “free love” like Studio 54, Plato’s Retreat and Playboy Club.  We often took out our hostility in our music and art. Bill Ayers (Obama’s mentor and leader of the Weather Underground responsible for multiple bombings of federal buildings, now a professor) asked John Lennon to write a song for the revolution. John wrote “Revolution”. Bill was pissed. (Read the lyrics)

We took massive quantities of drugs and had Love Ins with sex, drugs and  lots of liquor hooking up at any time with anyone. Nothing has changed. Those teens, grew up and are now running America using their never tried utopian/Marxist theories that they write when under the influence of something. If they wanted the drug war over, they would end it instead of participating in it. These insane illogical theories don’t work, can’t work, will never work. They are instead designed to take forever and be way over budget.  If their programs worked, they couldn’t bleed us dry.

What did we learn? Well my group of teenagers were told never talk about politics and religion.  Don’t trust your parents after all anyone over 30 doesn’t know what is going on. Be the silent majority.  Never talk about the war. We were told the government knows best.  We grew up to being so anti-establishment that it didn’t matter what the establishment did or said we figured they were just lying. The GOP and DNC are filled with these globalists who vow to take down America’s greatness and steal everything they can’t get legally. . Check out the “GOP-Gutless Outrageous Prostitutes”  who just voted to take away the only protection we have with our guns while they bring terrorists into America. They hate Americans. They want us to suffer so we will be happy with their government crumbs. We will do more for less while they take everything and we will be happy with drugs and video games. Yuval Noah Harari from World Economic Forum describes their intent:

War makes their problem of too many useless eaters, easy to dispose of. These globalists will protect the border of Ukraine and provide Ukraine guns while disarming Americans. All they want is for us to DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity) so they can steal our property and keep power.

Where did we turn to vent our frustration and agree to transform America? Our educators took care of that. In 1989, Shirley Mc Cune from the McRel Foundation told the Governors Association:

We will change education from fact based to value based (on emotion) learning.

(Emotional people are easier to control using emotional triggers.)

We will stop focusing on the individual, and focus on the collective (we can conform everyone to the group mentality.)

We will train for work, not educate for life. (We need workers not thinkers or experts).

Communists learned that uneducated people are easier to control.

While all eyes looked at colleges, they infiltrated K-12 while convincing the family to “keep up with the Jones” by overspending so both mom and dad had to work ensuring the breakup of the family. The evolution of the family went from Father Knows Best to All in the Family to Married with Children showing how dysfunctional families are really the norm.

Today we suffer the results of those teachings as our government officials and experts are only capable of reading their talking points. I am just following directions, you will hear as their excuse for their third world actions of government against the people. Our police, after being emasculated (the goal of the feminist movement), will stand and watch as children are being slaughtered because they are just following directions.  The hell with the Americans.  They are just useless eaters. Less people is better they have been taught. According to Stalin, “Less people, less problems.”

We turned to a new type of government called socialism. It sounded so social, fun and inviting. It sounded so nice. All people will look after each other. Everyone would share. It will be wonderful. Everyone will all have the same stuff. And so the confused children turned to the communists who were so ready to open their arms for their new flock. The commies changed all the words and definitions to reflect Peace and Love. We followed Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and they offered the people exactly what Khrushchev said. I will feed you little bits of socialism and one day you will be a communist.

Now we have America’s new normal. How does that work?

Kevin Sorbo on  Twitter:

“Can I drive your car? No, you’re 5

Can I have a beer?  No, you’re 5

Can I have a cigarette? No, you’re 5

Can I have a gun? No, you’re 5

Can I take hormones and change my gender? Of Course, you know what’s best.”


My conversation (Italics) with a Greenie:   

Greenie: I am getting an EV. I will save tons of money on fossil fuel since it will soon be outlawed. I can depend on clean green energy from wind or sun. No dirty fuel for me.

That is great but what do you do if there is no wind or sun. 

It won’t matter because I will plug my car in the wall socket.

Where does the electricity in the socket come from?

It comes from the wires.

Where does the electricity in the wires come from?

It comes from the power company.

Where does the electricity in the power company come from? From the grid.  Where does the electricity from the grid come from? 

DUH! OOPS Ok Where?

Fossil fuel.


NO FOSSIL FUEL = NO ELECTRICITY.

We are assisting in our own failure.

CO2 is necessary to produce food not climate change.

America is having a food shortage crisis. CO2 helps plants aka food to grow.

CO2 is about .03% of the atmosphere and is a result of warming, NOT the cause.

Joe said he doesn’t know why or what to do about the food shortages but Joe has a plan. He increased ethanol aka corn aka soy in gas which burns our food for fuel resulting in less food at a higher cost for Americans and more expensive gas.

“Growing ethanol not food wastes: 5Billion tons of N Fertilizer; 68 Trillion BTU of natural gas; 57000sq MILES (not acres) of farmland.” Dr. Sarah Taber.

Joe has opened border for illegals to eat our food giving Americans less food; higher cost.

Then Joe wrote an EO forcing new furnaces to eliminate CO2. No CO2 = No Food.  Since over 20 processing plants were attacked, Joe signed an EO to give $1Billion to farmers to build new plants. Only the EPA regulations make it cost prohibitive.  Is it Joe’s intent to starve Americans so he can trade food for guns?

American government schools teach their students to be mediocre.  Multiple educators, myself included know that Common Core insures America’s children will be 2 years below average. Now we are surprised that they are.

Based on their IQ test results, the woman from the U.S. scored 16 points lower than that of her sibling in Korea.

This is a recent article regarding the low numbers of 3rd Graders who can read at proficiency level of 4 or 5 on the scale of 1-5

These programs DON’T WORK!

We just had LGBTQ month. Where is the Hetero Month? Or the Cisgender Month.  After all we are the majority and in a “Democracy” the majority wins. So why are we not recognized?  These labels are just used to divide the people. Really who cares what anyone does in their bedroom?

My question is: Can you do the job?

It is obvious in this failed regime the answer is No, but not to worry their departments met their DIE quota.

Now the big question:  Is America worth saving? What will you do about it?

©Karen Schoen. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: San Francisco School Returns to Merit-Based Admissions

The U.S. Army Found the Cleverest Idea Ever — Force Women to Shower with Biological Males thumbnail

The U.S. Army Found the Cleverest Idea Ever — Force Women to Shower with Biological Males

By Royal A. Brown III

Below is all true – our Army is totally WOKE thanks to the likes of Obama clones Secretary of Defense Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley and others.

By the way so are the U.S. Navy, USMC and Air Force!

First they fire the warriors.

Next they put women into combat arms.

Then they claim that Climate Change or maybe White Extremism is the biggest threat to the nation.

Following that they bring the mentally deluded into the ranks and offer to pay for reassignment surgery and lifetime follow up care and therapy.

Of course the Army is cracking down on rapes and other sexual assaults.

So, naturally the most recent cleverest idea ever is this?

Report: The Army Will Force Female Soldiers to Shower With Biological Males

By Alex Parker

If your daughter is planning to join the Army, she might find more hanging out in the shower than expected.

As reported by Breitbart beneath the banner of “exclusive,” the branch’s training includes updated instructions for bathing. And the rules are plenty far from what veterans would find familiar.

Official guidance — purportedly delivered via scenarios labeled “vignettes” — prescribes proper responses to issues concerning transgenderism.

Vignette Nine deals with mandated urine specimens: What if an “observer” is uncomfortable having to watch a soldier — who has “not [had] sex reassignment surgery” — pee into a cup?

Comfort-minded measures are on the table:

Commanders may consider alternate observation options… Options could include observation by a different observer or medical personnel of the same gender as the soldier.

But what about washing with a penis-packing peer? According to the eighth vignette, reluctant ladies are out of luck. But maybe at least the person-with-a-prostate won’t pee.

A soldier transitioned from male to female… The soldier did not have sex-reassignment surgery. … [O]ther soldiers have expressed discomfort showering with a female who has male genitalia (in an open-bay shower configuration).

Read more.

Is this Biden’s idea of how to build our military into an effective fighting force?

We report, you decide.

©Royal A. Brown, III. All rights reserved.

A Fresh Theoretical Foundation for Modern Conservatism thumbnail

A Fresh Theoretical Foundation for Modern Conservatism

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

An Israeli-American scholar shows how conservatism went astray after the Reagan-Thatcher era.


The Israeli academic and Biblical scholar Yoram Hazony has acquired a considerable reputation as one of the intellectual leaders of the nascent “National Conservatism” movement.

As chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, he has played a key role in organising NatCon conferences which have attracted various right-leaning figures (including populist nationalists and more traditionalist social conservatives) who are united in their dissatisfaction with the main centre-right parties.

Hazony’s new book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, provides a thorough and thought-provoking overview of what he sees as the failings of the right-of-centre political establishment in the post-war era.

Setting out his stall early on, Hazony claims that in this time period Enlightenment liberalism became the new framework in which political life was conducted.

He further argues that this “liberal democracy” – which went hand-in-hand with a social revolution that weakened national, religious and familial ties — represented a new system divorced from the classic Anglo-American political tradition.

Cultural upheavals and the rise of the “woke” movements (which Hazony views as an updated variant of Marxism) have put the kibosh on talk of an “end of history,” and this means that conservatives must reconsider what they believe in.

Hazony defines political conservatism as “a political standpoint that regards the recovery, restoration, elaboration and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time,” while adding that the crucial distinction between it and either liberalism or Marxism is that conservatisms is not “a universal theory, which claims to prescribe the true politics for every nation, at every time and place in history.”

His key criticisms of political conservatives in recent decades relates to their failure to conserve the ideas and institutions on which modern Britain and America were built, and he also takes aim at their alleged confusion as to the difference between conservatism and Enlightenment (or “classical”) liberalism.

Structurally, the book is divided into four parts: history, philosophy, current affairs and personal – with this final section dealing how Hazony and his wife came out of broken homes to rediscover the religious traditions of Orthodox Judaism.

Having grown up in the United States, Hazony focuses strongly on the historical development of that country’s politics, which owe much to the parliamentary tradition which had developed in Britain centuries before the American colonists declared independence.

Included among what the author sees as the key principles of Anglo-American conservatism are various historical traditions, the nation state, the importance of religion, limitations on executive power and individual freedoms.

Yet there was never uniformity among key historical figures about many of these matters. One of the most interesting elements of Hazony’s account is his examination of the sharp divisions between the Federalists and Jeffersonians in the republic’s early days.

Federalists took a conservative line on a range of issues, including attitudes towards the French Revolution, immigration and the role of religion in society.

While the Federalist Party eventually declined, their insistence on the need for a strong, unified and coherent nation was to have a lasting impact, just as Thomas Jefferson’s animosity towards religion would lead to the creation of a “wall of separation between church and state” which would harden considerably in the 20th century.

Yoram Hazony first came to the attention of many readers after writing The Virtue of Nationalism, and the importance of the national community is a recurring theme here, going back to when the 15th century theorist Sir John Fortescue recognised that though the English constitutional system was a superior model, it would probably not serve other nations so well.

As the father of philosophical conservatism, Edmund Burke’s description of England’s constitution as being born of the nation’s long experience (“It is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time”) is a quote particularly well-chosen.

Less wise is the author’s attempt to portray the brutal and radically unconservative Tudor reformation as “the first modern movement for national independence,” while his description of Elizabeth I “tolerating Catholics … as long as they remained discreet in their practices” suggests that his knowledge of 16th century English history is rather limited.

Hazony is more convincing when he sticks to more familiar ground. One of the key weaknesses which he detects within political liberalism is its blindness to the importance of the nation state, and he sees this limitation as explaining why Western elites cannot recognise why foreign interventionism has failed so miserably in recent times.

In the same way that liberals seek to impose what they see as universalist norms abroad, they are also prone to making needless and often counterproductive changes at home: “[F]oolish rulers are moved by ideology and arrogance, or by an eagerness to make a name for themselves that will be remembered in place of those who came before them, to create everything they touch anew.”

Surveying the recent history of Anglo-American conservatism and the obvious difficulties since the Reagan/Thatcher era, Hazony lays much of the blame on the policy of “fusionism,” whereby American conservatives such as William F. Buckley forged a strong alliance with right liberals and libertarians to combat Communism abroad and economic statism at home. As well as contributing to confusion as to the difference between conservatism and liberalism, Hazony maintains that this led to a “dogmatic rejection of government” while also preventing people from recognising the need for restraints on individual freedoms.

Tradition – which for Hazony is heavily rooted in religion and Scripture – represents the unifying strand which ties together so much of his argument, just as it unifies whole societies. “[T]he enterprise of seeking truth is not one that the individual pursues by his own powers alone. Tradition is the instrument by means of which human societies pursue truth over time,” he observes.

A religious reader (Hazony is consistent in his attitude towards church-state relations, endorsing a strong role for Christianity in the public life of majority Christian societies) will likely agree with his denunciation of key US Supreme Court decisions in the mid-20th century which banned organised prayer and Bible reading in America’s public schools, and eased access to abortion and pornography.

Though he is surely correct about the importance of a religious underpinning in ensuring a stable society, at times he appears to overstate the importance of government action in driving a process of secularisation. After all, the de-Christianisation of the public square has tended to occur as a result of society’s widespread secularisation, not as a prelude to it.

Israel is that rare example of a country which has grown more religious recently, but the unique circumstances of its difficult existence foster this closer link between the spiritual and national identities of Jewish Israelis, just as the fecundity of the devout minority tilts the scale in their favour.

It is doubtful that many lessons from Hazony’s homeland can be applied to other societies, but he does a good job in laying out a basic and workable manifesto for “conservative democracy,” including: a clearer emphasis on national identity; greater openness to religion in public life; a stronger role for parents in education; more scepticism about the concentration of power among big business; immigration policies focused on national cohesion; and a non-interventionist foreign policy.

Countries such as Poland and Hungary already have democratically-elected governments who more or less subscribe to this, and nations like Italy have popular parties of a similar mindset.

Britain’s Tory Party remains more socially liberal, but it has increasingly emphasised the importance of sovereignty and secure borders; while in the United States, large sections of the Republican Party (like Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis or the Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance) would happily identify with Hazony’s vision.

Clearly, his fellow travellers are growing in strength. For those pondering where this process may lead, Conservatism: A Rediscovery would be an excellent place to begin.

AUTHOR

James Bradshaw

James Bradshaw works for an international consulting firm based in Dublin, and has a background in journalism and public policy. Outside of work, he writes for a number of publications, on topics including… More by James Bradshaw

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

New York Demands All Concealed Carry Permit Holders Surrender Their Social Media Account to the State thumbnail

New York Demands All Concealed Carry Permit Holders Surrender Their Social Media Account to the State

By Dr. Rich Swier

The Concealed Coalition reports that,

New York is one of America’s most densely populated states, with over 19 million people, yet only 1% of them are licensed to concealed carry (CC). This equates to around 196,000 licenses issued as of August 2021.

[ … ]

NY has a stricter stance on dispensing licenses than other states. It’s a “may issue” state, which means there’s no guarantee that applicants will receive a CC license even if they meet all the necessary criteria. It’s up to local law enforcement or the courts to apply their discretion to every request.

Applicants must prove that there’s proper cause for them to CC, defined under NY state law as: “a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession.”

According to Sandy Hook Promise,

Guns used in about 68% of gun-related incidents at schools were taken from the home, a friend or a relative.

93% of school shooters planned the attack in advance.

The Violence Protection Center reports that people have been killed by 37 mass shooters who had a concealed carry permit from May 2007 and May 2022, citing media reports. As of 2021 there have been 21.52 million concealed weapon permits issued in the United States. The likelihood of a concealed carry permit holder carrying out a mass shooting is .00000017209.

A reader sent us an article from BillWittle.com stating:

Starting in September [2022], New York conceal-carry permit applicants must surrender their social media accounts to the state.

If hindsight reviews of Facebook or TikTok lets us see what a crazed mass-shooter said before his atrocity, will the state be able to intercept these killers in advance?

WATCH: Background Check: Want to Conceal Carry a Firearm? Cough Up Your Social Media to the State

The Bottom Line

What New York is doing is create a law that allows them to either deny or revoke a person’s concealed carry permit if that person doesn’t agree with them politically.

Some examples of issues you might be putting on your social media that could get your concealed carry permit cancelled or revoked:

  • You’re a Republican or worse a supporter of Donald J. Trump.
  • Pro-Second Amendment.
  • Pro-Life.
  • Posts that calls the J6 Committee a “show trial.”
  • Posts that label those harass Supreme Court Justices as criminals for violating 18 U.S. Code § 1503. And because they are violating the law that they should be investigated, arrested and tried by a jury of their peers.
  • Disagree with New York City or State policies on any number of topics.
  • Disagree with getting the Covid-19 vaccines.
  • Disagree that Islam is the religion of peace.
  • Disagree with some of the policies of the Build Back Better agenda.
  • Won’t buy an all electric car because your love your vintage Ford mustang or Chevrolet Corvette.
  • Read and share articles from the DrRichSwier.com eMagazine.

This is just another way to put law abiding citizens into harms way by not allowing them to carry their weapons, i.e. disarming them. We have contributors and members of our staff who have concealed carry permits. On person was notified by the FBI that they are on an international ISIS hit list. To disarm this person is a travesty. Luckily this person lives in a state where concealed carry and even open carry are codified is state laws.

We can’t help but wonder if New York will now look at all those individuals providing private security and have concealed carry permits. You know those who protect wealthy individuals, actors and actresses, politician and companies.

One example is Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez paid thousands for personal security to a former Blackwater contractor. Will AOC’s security detail have to turn over their social media accounts to the state?

Time will tell.

To learn about your states concealed carry laws and how many fellow gun owners are in you state click here.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES:

Concealed Coalition database.

Number of Mass Shootings Committed By Concealed Carry Killers

Constitutional Sheriffs to Hold Summit to Encourage Elected Officials to Fight Ballot Fraud Ahead of 2022 Midterms thumbnail

Constitutional Sheriffs to Hold Summit to Encourage Elected Officials to Fight Ballot Fraud Ahead of 2022 Midterms

By The Geller Report

In order to avoid civil war, we must have free and fair elections. It is incumbent upon every American to ensure we the people choose our leaders. There are no casual observers or fence-sitters in the war against Americanism. You are either with us or against us.

Constitutional sheriffs to hold summit to encourage elected officials to fight ballot fraud ahead of 2022 midterms

By JD Heyes, Newstarget, July 11, 2022:

For decades we suspected that Democrats’ far-left agenda wasn’t really all that popular with the vast majority of our country, and the party proved that during the 2020 election cycle.

When it became apparent that President Donald Trump would cruise to reelection, noted by the massive rallies and spontaneous vehicle and boat parades that sprang up all over the country (including deep-blue California), the Democratic voter fraud machine kicked into high gear and the party, working with the allied deep state, literally stole the election.

Patriots years from now will question why there wasn’t a mass uprising over the blatant theft, but that is a discussion for another day. In the meantime, patriots — including constitutional sheriffs — are working to ensure that the Democrats can’t steal the upcoming 2022 midterm elections amid one of the dismal points in our country’s history.

Joe Biden’s approval rating has hit a low not seen for a president since the days of Jimmy Carter, and he’s taking his party down in flames with him. That leaves only one option for Democrats to cling to power: Vote theft. And the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) knows that which is why some of its members are having a press conference outside of Freedom Fest in Las Vegas this week — to expose voter fraud and press elected officials to take action to protect the integrity of the process.

Big League Politics reports:

The press conference will feature legendary Sheriff Richard Mack, and True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht and Greg Phillips to expose the immense voter fraud that occurred during the 2020 presidential election.

The itinerary for the press conference includes detailing the history of election fraud in America, showcasing current Investigations in progress from elected sheriffs, Sheriff Mack sharing his opening thoughts, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips addressing the audience, and then a question-and-answer session for the media.

to determine the veracity of all elections. If allegations are incorrect, we want them exposed. If correct, we want proper investigations fully undertaken and the criminals responsible prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said Mack, who serves as the CSPOA president.

“We ask for all Americans and public officials to demonstrate civility and cooperation as we pursue the truth. What we want is the truth; let the consequences fall where they may,” he noted further.

“We aren’t just here to say that election fraud is a problem but to begin to really try to enact proper solutions. Whether the winner of any race is a Republican or a Democrat makes no difference to us, we simply ask for the truth,” said Engelbrecht, whose research was used in Dinesh D’Souza’s “2000 Mules” smash-hit documentary, providing the evidence and proof Democrats and their garbage media allies had been demanding since Trump told them his victory was taken from him.

“We have the utmost faith in our country and feel strongly that when voters are educated, more will be done to support fair voting. Together, we are always stronger,” she added.

The press conference will take place at Ahern hotel on July 12 at 10am PST.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED VIDEO: Selection Code – Premier Trailer on July 16, 2022

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

Uvalde Footage Underscores the Myth of Police Protection: ‘Just Call 9-1-1’ thumbnail

Uvalde Footage Underscores the Myth of Police Protection: ‘Just Call 9-1-1’

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

The gunman walked into Robb Elementary School almost casually.

Minutes earlier he had crashed a vehicle near the school, spraying three bullets at a pair of men who approached the scene to see if he was okay. After walking into the school, AR-15 in hand, the gunman takes a right turn down a hallway. From a different hallway, a child sees the gunman. The child pauses, watches, and then jumps at a roar of gunfire. He darts away.

Less than three minutes later, police officers begin to fill the corridor, weapons drawn.

The scene described comes from new video footage obtained by The Statesman and KVUE News on the May 24 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 22 people dead and 18 injured. (Editor’s note: the footage, which is embedded below, does NOT show anyone being shot.)

NEW

The @statesman and @KVUE have obtained body cam footage and security camera footage from the shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary.

Pay close attention to the time stamp in the upper left hand corner.

You don’t see anyone get shot in this video. https://t.co/HsytsOa0tR pic.twitter.com/L9JSse9SeD

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) July 12, 2022

The 77-minute video shows that police were on the scene minutes after the shooter entered the school, but they quickly retreated after receiving a burst of gunfire. As KVUE notes, over the next hour little is done, even as more and more police arrive.

In the video, 13 rifles can be seen arriving in the hallway in the first 30 minutes of the incident. The first shield arrives in under 20 minutes. Dozens of law enforcement officers can be seen in the hallway, along with equipment. No officers make entry into the classroom for more than 70 minutes.

The tragic events in Uvalde have naturally sparked both outcry and discussion. On good and evil. On mental health. On courage and cowardice.

A Uvalde mother was PLACED IN HANDCUFFS by Federal Marshalls on scene for attempting to enter the school to get her child. Another man was tased for trying to get his kid off a bus. All while Salvador Ramos was alive inside killing kids https://t.co/LqqhuIMGlP pic.twitter.com/CNIUZ2GYhk

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) May 26, 2022

Above all else, however, Uvalde has reignited the debate over gun control.

Following the shooting, and heated demands for new gun control laws, lawmakers in DC passed federal gun legislation for the first time in nearly 30 years, imposing tougher background checks on younger buyers and encouraging states to impose “red flag” laws.

This is peculiar, because the events at Robb Elementary School actually undermined one of the key arguments used to argue for gun control.

As Richard W. Stevens pointed out in a FEE article more than two decades ago, a common—and false—belief underpins gun control ideology.

“Private citizens don’t need firearms because the police will protect them from crime,” wrote Stevens, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and author of Dial 911 and Die.

This belief, Stevens noted, is false for two reasons. The first reason is the most obvious one, which was on full display in Uvalde. Police can’t protect everyone from crime, and rarely do. The primary purpose of police is to respond to crimes after they occur, and data suggests even this they do not do very well.

“In reality, about 11% of all serious crimes result in an arrest, and about 2% end in a conviction,” writes Shima Baughman, professor of criminal law at the University of Utah, in The Conversation.

Second, Stevens notes, the government generally and the police specifically have no legal obligation to protect people from criminal attacks in most localities. In fact, they don’t even have to show up, Stevens explains.

It’s not just that the police cannot protect you. They don’t even have to come when you call. In most states the government and police owe no legal duty to protect individual citizens from criminal attack. The District of Columbia’s highest court spelled out plainly the ‘fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.’

The “no duty” rule was established in a particularly gruesome landmark case.

Just before dawn on March 16, 1975, two men broke down the back door of a three-story home in Washington, D.C., shared by three women and a child. On the second floor one woman was sexually attacked. Her housemates on the third floor heard her screams and called the police. The women’s first call to D.C. police got assigned a low priority, so the responding officers arrived at the house, got no answer to their knocks on the door, did a quick check around, and left. When the women frantically called the police a second time, the dispatcher promised help would come—but no officers were even dispatched. The attackers kidnapped, robbed, raped, and beat all three women over 14 hours.

The horrifying events were made more horrifying in the legal aftermath. The victims sued the city and the police department for negligence to protect them (or even respond to the second call).

“The court held that government had no duty to respond to their call or to protect them,” Stevens writes. “Case dismissed.”

The court’s response was not unique. Most states have similar laws, Stevens notes, and some are quite explicit. A statute in Kansas precludes citizens from suing the government for negligence in police protection, while a California law states “neither a public entity nor a public employee is liable for failure to establish a police department or otherwise provide police protection service.”

While police may not be obligated to help people in need, it’s fair to assume that most want to help people. Unfortunately, by its very nature, bureaucracy tends to frustrate the ability of police departments to effectively do so.

An example of this can also be seen in Uvalde. A New York Times description of Uvalde Police Chief Pedro Arredondo’s decision making process reveals how bureaucratic processes and red tape appear to have cost lives.

[Arredondo] ordered the assembled officers to hold off on storming the two adjoining classrooms where the gunman had already fired more than 100 rounds at the walls, the door and the terrified fourth-graders locked inside with him, the state police said. (…)

Officers were told, under Chief Arredondo’s direction, that the situation had evolved from one with an active shooter — which would call for immediately attacking the gunman, even before rescuing other children — to one with a barricaded subject, which would call for a slower approach, officials said.

That appeared to be an incorrect assessment, according to the state police director, Steven McCraw: Gunfire could sporadically be heard inside the rooms, including on continuing 911 calls by the children.”

Police officers standing around debating protocols while a gunman in a nearby room executes children is both horrifying and mind-boggling to most people, but it perfectly illustrates the very real problems inherent in bureaucracies noted by economist Ludwig von Mises, who wrote about the inherent “slowness and slackness” pervasive in bureaucratic institutions.

On Tuesday, the Uvalde City Council accepted the resignation of Uvalde school district police chief Pedro Arredondo, who rightly stepped away from his position under pressure. But make no mistake: the lack of response by the Uvalde Police Department is a characteristic of bureaucracy itself, a problem that goes far beyond Arredondo’s leadership shortcomings.

Uvalde school district police chief Pedro Arredondo finally resigned from the City Council yesterday:

49 days after the massacre, when he was guilty of the most egregious dereliction of duty imaginable.

That’s how insulated government bureaucrats are from accountability.

— Dan Sanchez (@DanSanchezV) July 13, 2022

The bottom line is that police usually have no obligation to protect individuals from crimes, and even if they do they lack the ability to effectively do so. The idea that Americans can protect themselves just by calling 9-1-1 is simply not true, and the tragic events in Uvalde and countless other examples show this.

When they say you don’t need a firearm because the police will protect you, don’t believe it.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Was the Uvalde Massacre a Drug Cartel Warning to Border Agents to Back Off?

The Key to the Uvalde Massacre is: The Critical Importance of One Brave Good Guy with a Gun

PODCAST: What the Uvalde Cops Were Probably Thinking

How Bureaucracy May Have Cost Lives in Uvalde

The Devil Went Down to Texas: The Utter Evil of the Uvalde Massacre

For 77 Minutes, Cops Never Even Tried to Enter Classroom, Police Could Have Stopped Uvalde Shooter ‘3 Minutes’ After Entering School

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

Two and 3-Year-Old Vaxxed Kids With Seizures Is ‘The New Normal’ thumbnail

Two and 3-Year-Old Vaxxed Kids With Seizures Is ‘The New Normal’

By The Geller Report

ONLY vaxxed kids. The only thing these kids have in common is that they were given the COVID vaccine just days earlier (two to five days earlier).

This is the new normal. Like the new ‘Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.’

Two and 3-year-old kids with seizures is “the new normal”

I’m getting multiple reports from my nurse friends about kids 2 and 3 years old having seizures. It is ONLY happening on vaccinated kids, and symptoms start 2 to 5 days after the COVID vaccine.

By: Steve Kirsch, July 5, 2022:

Doctors are mystified by a rash of seizures, rashes, etc. happening to 2 and 3-year-old kids.

The only thing these kids have in common is that they were given the COVID vaccine just days earlier (two to five days earlier).

The doctors cannot figure out what is causing the seizures (since it couldn’t be the vaccine since those are safe and effective). The medical staff is not permitted to talk about the cases to the press or on social media or they will be fired.

One nurse posted something to the effect of “how is this legal????” I had to paraphrase to protect the poster.

This is why you are hearing these reports from me. They can’t fire me.

There is nothing on the mainstream media about this since the nurses and doctors aren’t allowed to talk about it.

This will all come out some day, but for now, everyone is keeping quiet about it and the doctors are instructed to convince the parents that it isn’t vaccine related and that they are the only ones having the problem.

Because that’s how science works.

Keep reading…..

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED TWEET:

Cruise ships full of only the vaccinated are experiencing large outbreaks of Covid.

What does that tell you?

— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) July 14, 2022

RELATED ARTICLES:

Data Proves ‘Sudden Adult Death Syndrome’ Fiction Is Death by Covid Vaccination

Vaxxed Young Adults are 92% More Likely to Die than Unvaccinated

Are We Now in the Era of the ‘COVID Matrix’ with the Mandated Vaxxed Passports?

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

Inflation Hits Yet Another Record High As Americans Feel The Squeeze thumbnail

Inflation Hits Yet Another Record High As Americans Feel The Squeeze

By The Daily Caller

Inflation climbed 9.1% over the past 12 months, the highest year-over-year percentage increase since December 1981, the Department of Labor (DOL) announced Wednesday.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 1.3% between May and June, according to the DOL report released Wednesday. Economists had predicted that CPI would increase by 1.1% last month and 8.8% over the 12-month period ending in June.

“The energy index rose 7.5 percent over the month and contributed nearly half of the all items increase, with the gasoline index rising 11.2 percent and the other major component indexes also rising,” the DOL said in their report. “The food index rose 1.0 percent in June, as did the food at home index.”

The White House preemptively downplayed the inflation data, saying the metric was already outdated as prices have begun to supposedly decrease.

“June CPI data is already out of date because energy prices have come down substantially this month and are expected to fall further,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday.

BREAKING: Inflation just hit 9.1% in the United States.

Unreal.

— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) July 13, 2022

“I don’t think that number peaks until September and I think at that point it will be in double digits,” E.J. Antoni, research fellow for Regional Economics at The Heritage Foundation told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Wednesday’s report follows a steady stream of negative polling for President Joe Biden, including one New York Times survey that found a majority of Democrats would prefer the 79-year-old not run in 2024. Voters have cited the economy and inflation as major issues ahead of the midterms.

The gasoline index rose 11.2%, while the food at home index increased 10.4%,  year over year, BLS reported. Almost all aspects of American purchases increased in June, including shelter, airline fares, new and used cars and trucks, medical care, household furnishings and operations, recreation and clothing, according to BLS.

CPI surpassed the Federal Reserve’s 2% target in May 2021 and has continuously climbed higher and higher since, according to federal data.

AUTHOR

MAX KEATING

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: The DeSantis Boom: Florida Economy Soars As State Records Highest Budget Surplus Ever

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Why We Should Take the ‘Socialism’ Part of Democratic Socialism Seriously thumbnail

Why We Should Take the ‘Socialism’ Part of Democratic Socialism Seriously

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Democratic socialism isn’t the same as autocratic communism, but there are problems with socialism that democracy can’t solve.


In the wake of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent primary victory, many writers have made the cases for and against democratic socialism. Both its defenders and its critics have tried to insist, quite rightly, that those who support democratic socialism are serious about the “democratic” part.

And it is important that critics take this point seriously: arguing that someone like Ocasio-Cortez is just a Stalinist wannabe is not an effective counter-argument. Those making the case for democratic socialism really do wish to avoid the totalitarianism of the 20th-century history of socialism. Whether they can avoid that outcome, despite their good intentions, is an issue I will return to in what follows.

Critics and supporters should also take the “socialism” part of democratic socialism seriously.

The website of the Democratic Socialists of America is clear about their desire to eliminate the profit motive, or the very least to subordinate it to “the public interest” in a large number of sectors of the economy. A good number of democratic socialists would expand public ownership and control into many of those same sectors. And all of them seem to agree that democratic control is needed for major decisions about “social investment” as well as trade, monetary, and fiscal policy.

The question is whether—even if we assume that the process is as democratic as the democratic socialists desire—they can actually create a world of peace and prosperity given the degree to which they wish to abolish markets and profits. I will argue that the answer is no.

As is often the case with these sorts of proposals, the details of how more democratic control over economic decision-making would work are left vague, but if they are serious about the “democratic” part, it will necessarily involve the participation of as many people as possible, presumably through some sort of voting mechanism. If instead, such decisions were left in the hands of a small group, even if they were elected by people in general, it would risk reproducing the same alienation and exploitation of the masses supposedly committed by capitalists and their bought-off politicians today.

In a recent piece for The AtlanticConor Friedersdorf raised the important critical point that leaving economic decision-making to majority voting imperils the ability of those with minority tastes to acquire the things they desire. For example, if we let Americans vote on whether resources should be devoted to the medical needs of transgender people, would it happen? Would residents of Utah vote to make sure that those who wished to consume alcohol and caffeine could do so?

That we aren’t sure that the answers to both questions are “yes” is a matter of much concern about the democratic-socialist vision. How a democratic and participatory process would ensure that the needs of minority consumers were met without over-riding the will of the people is not clear.

As important as Friedersdorf’s point is, there is an even deeper problem at the heart of the socialist part of the democratic socialist vision. If public ownership is expanded and the profit motive removed, this implies the elimination of markets as the way in which resources in those industries are allocated. It certainly eliminates markets for ownership of capital resources by eliminating private and tradeable ownership claims to firms.

The question facing democratic socialists is this: how, in the absence of market prices, profit and loss signals, and private ownership of the means of production will even the most purely motivated actors in a deeply democratic process know what their fellow citizens want and need and, what’s more important, how best to produce those goods and services?

Even if “the people” want to ensure that minority tastes and needs are accommodated, how will they know what those are? In a market economy, the exchange of private property generates prices that work to signal producers about what is wanted and how urgently. The ability of owners of private resources to risk those resources on their best guesses about what is wanted, and to have the feedback of profits and losses to inform them whether they judged correctly, is what enables us to figure out what people want.  And that’s true whether it’s the masses or more specialized tastes. Markets are processes of discovery by which we learn things we otherwise would not, and could not, know.

Those same prices and profits of the market help us figure out how best to make the things that people want. This part of what markets do is often overlooked by socialists of all stripes. They might be able to offer mechanisms by which consumers could communicate their desires so that “the people” could know what needs to be produced. Even then, however, socialists over-estimate how much of what we know can be effectively communicated in words and statistics.

A good deal of human knowledge, including the knowledge relevant to economic decision-making, is tacit. There are things we know yet are unable to articulate. Think about how you keep your balance on a bicycle. You know how to do it, but you cannot explain to someone else exactly how it’s done.

Acts of buying and selling in the market enable us to make tacit knowledge usable by others in the form of prices and profits. This is the sense in which prices are knowledge surrogates that enable our fields of economic vision to overlap such that we can coordinate our actions and use resources wisely. Market exchange is a process of communication that enables us to go beyond the articulate knowledge of words and numbers.

Given this role of prices, what socialists don’t have an answer to is how democratically controlled industries—in which there are no market prices, profits, or private property in the means of production—will know which inputs to use to make the outputs they believe people want. If you want to socialize health care, how do you know how many nurses, NPs, doctors, and lab techs you will need in each state, city, or hospital?  You want people to get medical care without paying a monetary price for it?  How will you decide who should provide that care?  And with what machines?  Made out of what materials?

We completely take for granted the way in which markets smoothly enable producers to make these decisions using the signals of prices and profits.  Prices and profit calculations enable resources-owners to determine what combination of inputs appears to be the least wasteful in order to make what people want before they start producing, thereby not wasting valuable resources. Prices work as knowledge surrogates to help producers know how valuable people think those resources are so that producers make decisions that are the least wasteful possible.

Prices are the ways we make our private assessments of value publicly available for others to use to make their decisions before they produce. Profits and losses tell entrepreneurs after the fact just how well they decided. Those profits or losses inform the next round of decisions by entrepreneurs, all the time helping them figure out how to best provide what we want using the least valuable resources possible. Without prices or profits, what will perform this task under socialism, even the most widely democratic socialism one can imagine? How will this dispersed, contextual, and tacit knowledge be mobilized and made available for others to use?

Notice that this is not a matter of people’s motivation or psychology. Socialists sometimes like to invoke a version of “New Socialist Man” to escape these problems. They argue that people will just be different under socialism and that they will be motivated to serve the public interest. But motivation isn’t the problem here—knowledge is. How even New Socialist Man will acquire knowledge from others that they cannot express in words or numbers is a question most socialists have never faced.

Furthermore, consider what happens to firms in markets when they consistently fail in this task. Firms whose profits are negative period after period must either change their behavior or find themselves out of business. Firms with publicly traded private ownership shares will find the value of those shares (their stock) falling, reducing the firm’s value and making it more likely that other people might buy up those shares and take over the firm.

The opportunity to purchase the means of production and use them more wisely than the current owners is a key advantage of markets. In the absence of private ownership of the means of production, what will be the comparable corrective process? The long history of wasted resources and unwillingness to change that describes so many government programs would be spread to additional sectors of the economy. There is a reason that the stock market is the very heart of a market economy: it is where those who think they can do things better are free to take their shot. Even the most democratic version of socialism lacks that feature.

If what one supports, however, is something like worker-owned or worker-managed firms who still compete with each other in a genuine market, the argument above does not apply nearly as strongly. Such a system might well be immune to the problems associated with eliminating prices, profits, and private property. Whether such firms would face significant collective action problems associated with worker ownership or management is a separate issue for another time.

Without prices, profits, and a market for the means of production, the areas that democratic socialism would socialize would fail consumers and waste resources, impoverishing societies that adopted such policies. Those failures would force democratic socialists into an unresolvable dilemma.

Critics might argue that specialized experts were needed to run these industries better than the people at large, undermining the democratic part of democratic socialism. Other critics might argue that it was necessary to re-introduce prices and profits, undermining the socialism part. Either way, the democratic socialist vision collapses. Down the first path lies the very totalitarianism they wanted to avoid, and down the second lies the market economy they are committed to rejecting.

This process also demonstrates how even the best-intentioned democratic socialism can end up with 20th-century style totalitarian socialism. As the socialism part of democratic socialism fails to reduce poverty and ensure that people get the goods and services they want and need, and as it becomes clearer that public ownership cannot provide anything close to responsible use of resources, the democratic planning process will become increasingly dominated by those with a comparative advantage in using the levers of power it has created.

As Friedersdorf points out, putting economic control in the hands of the people actually centralizes control over resources in comparison to the decentralized ownership we see in the market. Such centralized control, even in the hands of “the people,” requires institutions of power and domination. Democratic socialists might be confident in their belief that “the people” would handle such power responsibly, but because they overlook the inevitable failure of an economic system lacking prices, profits, and private ownership, they have not thoroughly considered what might happen when the socialism half fails. When public ownership fails at allocating resources in any rational fashion, it is ripe to be taken over by those who care much less about meeting the needs of humans and much more about exercising power over them.

Marx never intended Stalin, but the latter is an unintended consequence of the Bolsheviks trying to put Marxism into practice in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Democratic socialists can emphasize the adjective as much as they want, but the realities of socialism’s flaws will ultimately undermine both its democracy and its socialism.

Until socialists of all stripes come to grips with the role that prices, profits, and private ownership play in helping us to figure out both what people want and how best to produce it, they will continue to be mystified by socialism’s continued failure. Increased democratic control will not solve the structural problems that arise whenever people attempt to abolish the institutions of the market. In the end, the problem with democratic socialism is that it’s socialist.

Reprinted from Libertarianism.org

AUTHOR

Steven Horwitz

Steven Horwitz is the Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics at Ball State University, where he also is Director of the Institute for the Study of Political Economy. He is the author of Austrian Economics: An Introduction.

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