Biden Plan Would Sabotage U.S. Economic Competitiveness in One Huge Way, Analysis Finds

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That’s not ‘Building Back Better’—it’s shooting ourselves in the foot.  

President Biden has heralded his $4.5+ trillion spending proposals and accompanying tax hikes as an investment in “leading the world versus letting it pass us by.” Yet, paradoxically, a new analysis exposes one huge way Biden’s plans would make the US less competitive on the global stage.

Key to financing the spending plans is a proposed increase in the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 26.5 percent. When factoring in state corporate taxes, the US’s average corporate tax rate would reach a whopping 30.9 percent. And according to a new Tax Foundation analysis, this punitive level of business taxation would be the third-highest corporate tax rate among developed countries, outstripped only by Colombia and Portugal.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE TAX FOUNDATION INFOGRAPHIC

Why is this a problem?

Well, the US would become a less attractive place for business investment, which is bad news for entrepreneurs, workers, and customers alike. Businesses would understandably be less likely to conduct business in the US when they could go to dozens of other developed countries with lower tax rates. As a result, our economic competitiveness would suffer.

“Returning to near the top of the OECD in corporate tax rates would… disincentivize investment and encourage firms to shift profits and locate elsewhere, resulting in fewer job opportunities for Americans and less tax revenue for the U.S. government,” the analysis explains.

Yikes.

Biden claims his tax-and-spend agenda is meant to reassert America’s dominance. But the costly tax hikes the president seeks would set our economic competitiveness back on the global stage. That’s not “Building Back Better”—it’s shooting ourselves in the foot.

COLUMN BY

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

WATCH: New Biden Vax Mandate Doesn’t Make ANY Sense (Here’s Why)

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France Aghast After a Huge Report on Sexual Abuse in The Catholic Church

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But not everything in the report adds up.

France is reeling after yesterday’s release of a report on child sexual abuse. An estimated 216,000 victims suffered abuse between 1950 and 2020, according to the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE).

“The church failed to see or hear, failed to pick up on the weak signals, failed to take the rigorous measures that were necessary,” Jean-Marc Sauvé, the president of the commission, told the media in Paris. For years, the church showed a “deep, total and even cruel indifference toward victims.”

“The Catholic Church is thus, with the exception of family and friendship circles, the environment in which the prevalence of sexual violence is by far the highest,” the report said.

The report is massive – about 2,500 pages of background, analysis, and testimony from victims – so even the French will have difficulty in assessing it. However, an executive summary – which has also been published in English – makes available the report’s principal conclusions and recommendations.

To the eternal shame of the Catholic Church, there have been a number of reports on sexual abuse around the globe and their findings are always the same: a large number of priests abused children in the decades after World War II. Bishops covered it up, sometimes with the complicity of the police. This has been the story in Australia, Ireland, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.

However, it’s always helpful to look at the fine print and not just the headlines. Is this report fair?

I don’t want to be misunderstood. As I wrote about the report of Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Sexual Abuse, these are “horrifying stories of abuse by men (they are nearly all men) and women consecrated to God. They are deplorable and inexcusable and cry out to the Almighty for redress. The lives of many innocent children have been ruined.”

The only decent response to the testimony of the victims is rage. Perhaps barbaric punishments, like stoning to death, should be revived for these barbaric crimes.

But we live in a civilised society. The guilty must be punished, but they must first be proven guilty. They have a right to an advocate to speak in their defence. And guilt is not proven simply by citing a few headlines.

Unfortunately, media coverage of the French report, in my estimation, has been very poor. Journalists have plucked a few startling figures from the executive summary with very little critical sense. If French Catholics want to reform their Church, they have to work with facts, not emotions.

Here are a few issues that call for further explanation.

(1) The report’s executive summary is headed: “Sexual Violence in the Catholic Church France 1950 – 2020”. One would assume that all the statistics relate to these seven decades. But this is not the case. It appears the statistics also include the years 1940 to 1949 (pages 125 and 151 of the Report). At one point it states that “the period 1941-1969 accounted for 55.9% of the violence committed against minors by clerics and religious — i.e. approximately 121,000 minors.”

It’s not clear how much abuse happened in the 1940s, but including it in the figures for 1950 to 2020 inflates the total abuse significantly.

(2) The horrifying headline figure of 216,000 is an estimate, according to the New York Times, “ a projection based on a general population survey, archival analysis, and other sources”. In short, it is an informed guess. When studying clerical abuse of children, any number greater than zero is infinitely too much. But readers of the report need to understand that the figure of 216,000 is an extrapolation. Like all such figures, it has its limitations – especially considering that many of the perpetrators and victims must have died decades ago. Only an experienced historical statistician is capable of assessing whether they are realistic.

(3) The report says that between 2,900 to 3,000 priests and religious were perpetrators of sexual violence. Since there were 115,000 clergy in France during this period, the rate of offending is roughly 3 percent. This, the Commission noted, is much less than corresponding figures for other countries, which range between 4.4 percent and 7.5 percent. Perhaps it is even less, given that the data includes the 1940s.

(4) The most damning allegation in the report is that the Catholic Church is the most dangerous place for children in France. What evidence is there of this? Not much.

A bar chart on page 233 of the report depicts the incidence of abuse: in the family (3.7%), unknown (2.1%), friends of the family (2.0%), friends (1.8%), clergy (0.82%), lay Catholic employees (0.4%), holiday camps (0.38%), and public schools (0.34%).

However, the figure for public schools excludes public boarding schools, although this is only disclosed in a footnote. If abuse in this setting is included, the percentage for public schools rises to 0.49%. Why was it excluded?

In any case, the figure for public schools is simply not credible. While the public eye is currently on the Catholic Church, France’s public schools have a scandalous record for sexual abuse.

In 2015, the minister for education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, was forced to admit that 16 teachers had been allowed to continue working in schools even though they had convictions for paedophilia on their record. Homayra Sellier, founder of Innocence en Danger, an NGO dedicated to child abuse victims, told the media that this was just the tip of the iceberg. “The ministry of education has covered this up for years. The government has never been inclined to listen to these stories.” She estimated that there were “thousands” of cases in public schools.

As I pointed out above, the figures in the report are rubbery, but in the 50 years from 1970 to 2020, 75,000 children were allegedly abused by clergy – that’s 2,500 a year. Is that more or less than the number in public schools? It is far from clear.

(5) The report states starkly that “The Catholic Church is the place where the prevalence of sexual violence is at its highest, other than in family and friend circles.” This invites two questions. First, how does the Commission know this if Protestant and Muslim communities have not been investigated with the same rigour? How about the French military, whose soldiers were alleged to have been involved in horrific abuse of children in the Central African Republic a few years ago. How about sporting associations?

Second, the report uses the present tense, “is”. It fails to analyse the abuse by decades, but it does indicate that more than half of the abuse (55.9%) happened before 1970 and that it declined up until 1990. Thereafter the picture is murkier. Less than half the abuse (44.1%) happened in the 50 years to 2020. It appears that things did improve. Perhaps in the 1960s the Catholic Church might have been the worst place, but is that still the case? Like many of the startling allegations highlighted by the media, this withers under closer scrutiny.

The report is grim and depressing. If one act of sexual violence on a child is enough for the earth to open beneath a clerical perpetrator – how about 216,000? However, it’s important for the French Church to demand the full truth. The Commission’s analysis is surprisingly imprecise; it’s not necessarily accurate.

And a lot is at stake. The report’s recommendations, for instance, include a revision of how priests observe the seal of confession.

In the United States, a newspaper columnist concluded after a similar report in Pennsylvania that “It is time to face the horrible truth: The Catholic church is a paedophile ring … Like a criminal syndicate, it is time for the Church to be broken apart and cleaned out.” France has a long, long history of anti-clericalism and its enemies could try to use this report to écrasez l’infâme, in the words of Voltaire, to crush the loathsome beast.

It’s absolutely necessary to get the facts right. The victims of clerical sexual abuse deserve justice, but justice must always be based on truth.

COLUMN BY

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet. More by Michael Cook.

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

Panic Has Led to Government “Cures” That Are Worse than the Disease, History Shows

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Let’s take the novel coronavirus seriously, but let’s not throw reason, prudence, or the Constitution out the window.

Anyone who’s seen the John Hughes movie Ferris Beuller’s Day Off probably remembers the scene where Ferris’s economics teacher (Ben Stein) explains the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act to a roomful of bored, sleeping students. The scene is brilliant for many reasons, perhaps most so because it perfectly demonstrated how some of the most boring things in history are also the most important.

Smoot-Hawley was, of course, one of the great blunders in history.

Passed in 1930 over the objection of more than a thousand economists, the legislation increased tariffs (which were already high) on imports to protect US industries and farmers, sparking a trade war that deepened the Great Depression. It’s a perfect example of authorities taking decisive action to alleviate a crisis—and making things much worse.

What many forget is that Smoot-Hawley didn’t cause the Depression. It was a response to the Depression. Indeed, it may never have passed at all without the catalyst—the Stock Market Crash of 1929—that sent the nation into a frenzy. Senate Republicans had defeated the GOP-controlled House bill the previous year, but trade restrictionists found a convenient crisis in Black Tuesday, which triggered widespread hysteria, allowing the law to squeak through. (President Hoover opposed the bill but signed it anyway because of political pressure, which included resignation threats from several Cabinet members.)

Designed to protect Americans during the economic crisis, Smoot-Hawley proved disastrous. Imports fell from $1,334M in 1929 to just $390M in 1932. Global trade fell by roughly 66 percent, government data show. By 1933 unemployment was 25 percent, the highest in US history.

To “correct” things, Americans elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, who launched a series of federal programs—which made the crisis even worse. The rest, as they say, is history.

Smoot-Hawley and the New Deal are hardly the only examples of government actions making a panic worse.

In his book Basic Economics, the economist Thomas Sowell recounts several instances in which governments turned small problems into major ones by using blunt force—often price controls—to respond to public panic about rising costs of a given commodity.

One of the more famous examples of this is the gasoline crisis of the 1970s, which started when the federal government took a small problem (temporary high costs of gasoline) and turned it into a big one (a national shortage).

It began when OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), a newly formed oil cartel, cut oil production, causing fuel prices to rise. To address the rise, the Nixon administration (and later the Ford and Carter administrations) resorted to price controls to keep fuel prices low for consumers.

The result? Mass fuel shortages across the country that led to long lines and many Americans unable to buy fuel. This “energy crisis,” as it was dubbed at the time, in turn wreaked havoc on the automotive industry.

As Sowell explains, however, there was not an actual scarcity of gasoline. There was nearly as much gas sold in 1972 as the previous year (95 percent, to be precise). Similarly, Americans in 1978 consumed more gasoline than in any other previous year in history. The problem was the resources were not being allocated efficiently because of state-imposed price controls.

The energy crisis was entirely predictable, two Soviet economists (who had vast experience in the arena of central planning-induced shortages) later observed.

In an economy with rigidly planned proportions, such situations are not the exception but the rule—an everyday reality, a governing law. The absolute majority of goods is either in short supply or in surplus. Quite often the same product is in both categories—there is a shortage in one region and a surplus in another.

No one likes high gas prices, but the energy crisis of the 1970s wasn’t truly a crisis until the government created it. Nor was the result unique. Similar examples can be found throughout history, from the grain shortages in Ancient Rome brought about by Diocletian’s “Edict on Maximum Prices” to the mortgage crisis in 2007 and the financial crisis that ensued.

This might seem obvious in hindsight, yet similar mistakes are made today during crises, just on a smaller scale. To address alleged crises in housing, California and Oregon recently passed rent control laws that will surely have a devastating impact on residents in those states. Similarly, anti-price gouging laws (and social pressure) regularly lead to mass shortages during national emergencies.

As America endures the most frightening pandemic in a century, the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s important that decisions affecting the lives, liberties, and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people are being reached through reason, not collective fear.

Pandemics are clearly different from economic depressions and fuel shortages, but some of the same lessons apply. Like an economic panic, pandemics incite mass fear, which can lead to flawed and irrational decision making.

We know that human beings by nature are prone to crowd-following, especially during periods of social unrest and panic. This instinct has resulted in some of the greatest tragedies in human history.

COVID-19 may very well prove to be every bit as dangerous as we’ve been led to believe. Epidemiologists, vaccine researchers, and other medical experts agree it’s highly contagious and deadly, especially for certain at-risk demographics (the elderly and people with compromised immune systems and lung damage, for example). Yet many of the same experts disagree on the scope of the COVID-19 threat.

One of the problems medical professionals are encountering is they simply don’t have a lot of reliable data to work with.

“The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable,” John P.A. Ioannidis, an epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Stanford University who co-directs the university’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, recently wrote in Stat.

Let’s face it: pandemics are scary. This is probably doubly true in the age of social media, when the scariest models tend to be the ones most shared, which fuels even more panic. Because of the heightened level of fear, it’s not unreasonable to think public officials could “follow the crowd,” which is a bad idea even when the crowd isn’t totally petrified.

“Crowds do not reason….they tolerate neither discussion nor contradiction, and the suggestions brought to bear on them invade the entire field of their understanding and tend at once to transform themselves into acts,” wrote Gustave Le Bon in his seminal 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.

It’s no secret or coincidence that crises—foreign wars, terrorist attacks, and economic depressions—have often resulted in vast encroachments of freedom and even given rise to tyrants (from Napoleon to Lenin and beyond). In his book Crisis and Leviathan, the historian and economist Robert Higgs explains how throughout history, crises have been used to expand the administrative state, often by allowing “temporary” measures to be left in place after a crisis has abated (think federal tax withholding during World War II).

“When [crises occur] … governments almost certainly will gain new powers over economic and social affairs,” wrote Higgs. “For those who cherish individual liberty and a free society, the prospect is deeply disheartening.”

Let’s take the novel coronavirus deadly seriously, but let’s not throw reason, prudence, or the Constitution out the window while doing so.

If we do, we may find the government’s “cure” for the coronavirus cure is even worse than the disease.

COLUMN BY

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.

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

AG Garland Sics FBI on Parents Opposed to Critical Race Theory

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In a memorandum issued on Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland has directed the FBI to combat purported “threats of violence” against school administrators from so-called “hate groups” — by which he means parents justifiably outraged over the leftist indoctrination that passes for K-12 education in American schools.

Garland expressed concern about a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools… While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views.”

Garland announced his 30-day plan to combat the reported problem, which will include the FBI working with U.S attorneys across the country to discuss “strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”

The memorandum arrived less than a week after leaders of the National School Boards Association wrote President Joe Biden a letter claiming that “many public school officials are also facing physical threats because of propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula. This propaganda continues despite the fact that critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class.”

Fact check: The only propaganda here is Critical Race Theory (CRT), which most assuredly is being taught in K-12 public schools all across the country.

Left-dominated schoolboards across the country, who are responsible for establishing racist indoctrination curricula like CRT, are now demonizing legitimately concerned parents as domestic terrorists, and our Attorney General, who backs such indoctrination, intends to threaten those parents with the coercive power of the FBI.

Merrick Garland

4 Known Connections

On June 15, 2021, Garland announced the unveiling of the Biden administration’s new “First National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” an initiative designed to combat what Garland viewed as one of America’s most serious problems: “domestic terrorism” carried out mostly by conservative adherents to a doctrine of “white supremacism.” Below are some of Garland’s remarks from that day, remarks in which he: (a) cast the Trump supporters who had breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6 as uniquely evil; (b) warned of the allegedly enormous threat posed by violent white supremacists; (c) likened such people to genocidal Islamic terrorists; and (d) gave anecdotal examples of past terrorist incidents that had been perpetrated exclusively by whites:

  • “Our current effort comes on the heels of another large and heinous attack, this time the January 6th assault on our nation’s capital…. Over the 160 days since the attack, we have arrested over 480 individuals and brought hundreds of charges against those who attacked law enforcement officers and obstructed justice and used deadly and dangerous weapons to those ends.”
  • “In March, [America’s intelligence and law-enforcement agencies] concluded that domestic violent extremists posed an elevated threat to the homeland in 2021. Our experience on the ground confirms this; the number of open FBI domestic terrorism investigations this year has increased significantly. According to an unclassified summary of the March Intelligence Assessment, the two most lethal elements of the domestic violence extremist threat are racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists and militia violent extremists. In the FBI’s view, the top domestic violent extremist threat comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.”

To learn more about Merrick Garland, click here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Today is October 5th, 2021 and Joe Biden’s ‘Build Back Better Agenda’ is the worst in U.S. History

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“Biden and his minions are bound and determined to Build Back Bigger Government.” – Dr. Rich Swier

So what does Build Back Better (BBB) mean? Didn’t the last President Make America Great Again? So is Biden’s intent to make America greater than his predecessor?

According to the White House website the intent of Build Back Better is to:

The Build Back Better Agenda is an ambitious plan to create jobs, cut taxes, and lower costs for working families – all paid for by making the tax code fairer and making the wealthiest and large corporations pay their fair share.

Since Biden’s inauguration has he created more jobs? Cut taxes? Lowered costs for working families?

Just look at the economy and you will see higher unemployment, lower wages, workers being fired for not taking the Covid vaccine, higher gasoline prices, shortages of goods and services (particularly in those states that have full or partial lockdowns) and more people looking for a job.

What we are seeing is the false notion that taxing corporations is good for us. Why? Because when any corporation is taxed more they either pass on that cost to their consumers or go out of business.

AOC’s dress with the statement in red to “tax the rich” is a false flag. History tells us that the rich find ways to avoid taxes and the working class gets a greater tax burden or worse workers are laid off because corporations cut staff when faced with more regulation and higher taxes.

Is Build Back Better Really Better, so far?

Biden laid out the following goals for his “Build Back Better” agenda:

  1. “Build a Modern Infrastructure” [More government spending]
  2. “Position the U.S. Auto Industry to Win the 21st Century with technology invented in America” [Mandate the auto industry comply or else]
  3. “Achieve a Carbon Pollution-Free Power Sector by 2035” [Green New Deal]
  4. “Make Dramatic Investments in Energy Efficiency in Buildings, including Completing 4 Million Retrofits and Building 1.5 Million New Affordable Homes” [More Green New Deal mandates]
  5. “Pursue a Historic Investment in Clean Energy Innovation” [Green New Deal on asteroids]
  6. “Advance Sustainable Agriculture and Conservation” [Famers required to be green or else]
  7. “Secure Environmental Justice and Equitable Economy Opportunity” [Equal people are not free and free people are not equal]

The Biden administrations agenda has become very clear.

If the intent of Biden is to make the lives of every American better then as of October 5th, 2021 he is a complete failure.

According to Wikipedia Build Back Better:

The Build Back Better Agenda is a projected $7 trillion COVID-19 relief, future economic, and infrastructure package proposed by President Joe Biden. It will include investments in infrastructure, and is projected to create 10 million clean-energy jobs. Expenditures would also include government funds on housing, education, economic fairness and health care.[1]

The plan is divided into three parts: the American Rescue Plan, a COVID-19 relief package, which passed in March 2021;[2] the American Jobs Plan, a proposal to rebuild America’s infrastructure and create jobs;[3] and the American Families Plan, a proposal to invest in areas related to childcare and education.[4] As of October 1, 2021, the American Rescue Plan is the only plan that has been signed into law, though proposals featured in the American Jobs Plan have been passed in the Senate through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. [Emphasis added]

So Build Back Better is actually a massive government growth coupled with social a massive government spending spree. Not surprisingly it is inextricably tied to Covid.

To pass the Democrat/Biden Build Back Better agenda requires the American people’s cooperation. However, we are seeing more and more Americans taking up arms against this plan via civil disobedience.

Since Biden’s election his poll numbers have dropped dramatically as he and his handlers try to implement his BBB agenda.

Conclusion

Build Back Better is missing one word in its title “government.” Biden and his minions are bound and determined to Build Back Bigger Government.

There’s no better in Biden’s Agenda only worse

Using the office of the president Biden has not waited for Congress to implement his BBB agenda. Rather he and his administration are using federal agencies like the CDC, OSHA, IRS, Justice Department and FBI to suppress any and all opposition to the BBB agenda.

If you are in the medical profession and work in a hospital and you choose not to get the Covid vaccine you can be fired.

If you are in a company with more than 100 workers and you fail to get the Covid vaccine you will be fired.

If you are in the U.S. military and your choose to not take the Covid vaccine you could be dishonorably discharged.

If you don’t have a “vaccine passport” your ability to travel within the United States and overseas can be restricted or even denied.

The backbone of Build Back Better is comply or else.

Freedom of choice. My body, my choice only applies to killing the unborn, not to you if you don’t get jabbed.

We predict as the Build Back Better agenda moves forward more and more American workers and their families will move backwards.

Biden seems to be building backwards, not forward. He wants to empower government not the individual, and many Democrats are fine with this. This goes beyond socialism, this is Communism writ large.

Gird your loins. We have three years and two more months of Biden, unless something dramatic happens.

Can you survive? Can your family survive? Can America’s Constitutional Republic survive.

The midterm elections in 2022 will be a bell weather election. If conservatives, note I did not write Republicans, don’t take control of one or both houses of Congress we are doomed

Get out and vote. Insure your state implements laws that enhance election integrity.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

Can The Government Mint a $1TRILLION Coin to Pay Its Bills?

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Here’s why the fantastical notion of a trillion-dollar coin appearing out of thin air to pay the bills is so appealing—and perilous.

Gridlock in Washington, DC continues amid a fight over raising the debt ceiling, the legal limit on how much the federal government can borrow. Right now, the federal government will be unable to pay its bills on October 18 if the limit isn’t raised, which would prompt a default with disastrous economic ramifications. The most likely outcome is that Congress, in one way or another, comes together to raise the limit. But the deadlock is leading some progressives to push for an extreme and unusual solution.

What if the Treasury Department simply minted a $1 trillion platinum coin, deposited it, and used it to pay its bills without taking out new debt? Yes, seriously. The idea sounds fantastical, but is gaining traction.

“[President] Biden does have an ace in the hole if Congress doesn’t suspend the debt limit,” left-leaning economist Dean Baker wrote for CNN.com. “Due to a technicality in the law, the Treasury Department can print a platinum coin and assign a huge value to it—say, $1 trillion—and sell it to the Federal Reserve Board. This would get around the need to borrow.”

Others share Baker’s view. Writing for the Washington Post, Zachary D. Carter described the solution as “perfectly painless” and “economically meaningless.” New York Times columnist and left-wing economist Paul Krugman has endorsed the idea, as have members of Congress including Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Jerry Nadler.

But if this admittedly novel solution sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.

In fact, there’s an intense debate over whether the federal government actually has the legal authority to pursue such a scheme. Florida Atlantic University economist and monetary policy specialist William J. Luther told FEE in an interview that he believes minting a $1 trillion “token” coin would be unlawful. (For wonky legal reasons explained in this thread.)

More importantly, it’s a bad idea on the policy front. For one, it undermines citizen accountability for the federal government’s spending policies.

“We don’t want bureaucrats at the Treasury circumventing the rules established by Congress,” Luther says. “If Congress wants to spend more without raising taxes, it needs to raise the debt ceiling. If it does that, voters can hold these elected officials accountable. But if you don’t have that vote, it’s hard to hold people accountable.”

Moreover, the economic ramifications of minting a $1 trillion coin are grave.

One of the most glaring concerns people raise with the idea is that minting a $1 trillion coin would lead to inflation by increasing the money supply while the economy otherwise is unchanged. But Luther explains that the Federal Reserve would likely counteract this effect.

“The Fed would neutralize the monetary effects of this coin by selling some of its treasury holdings back to the public and destroying the money it received,” the economist said. “On the one hand you have the Treasury creating a $1 trillion coin, on the other hand you have the Fed contracting the money supply by $1 trillion… so there’s no net monetary effect.”

This means inflation isn’t necessarily a worry—but also reveals why the $1 trillion coin is not actually “painless” or “economically meaningless.”

“Yes, it’s a way around the debt ceiling,” Luther explained. “[But] a trillion dollars that used to be in the private sector is now in the public sector.”

“There is a real resource constraint,” he continued. “Typically, if the government does more, the private sector does less… with some exceptions. [Generally], markets do the best they can with the resources they have. So, if the government bids more of those resources into its own projects, it is necessarily bidding those resources away from the alternative projects they would have been used to pursue. It doesn’t matter how they’re funded… those real resources are in the economy, the question is whether they’re going to be used by the public sector or the private sector.”

“We’re going to spend that $1 trillion on something,” Luther said. “If you spend a portion building a road, you’re going to have to hire employees, which means you’re bidding them away from other pursuits. You’re going to have to acquire machinery, which means you’re bidding away machinery from other projects. Those real resources are not going to be available for other purposes. Whenever the government is using real resources, that necessarily means someone else in the economy—the private sector—is not using those resources.”

Odds are, the bureaucratic and inefficient federal government will make worse investments with these resources than the private sector would have. After all, the free market allocates resources where they’re needed most in accordance with price signals. The government allocates resources based on lobbying and politics. So, it’s not even just a 1-1 trade-off facing us in the coin-minters’ fantasy, but likely even more lost in economic fallout.

Why does this matter? Well, progressives pushing this scheme are desperate to find a way they can fund their endless government spending ambitions and expansions of the welfare state without having to pay the price or deal with any consequences. That’s why the fantastical notion of a trillion-dollar coin appearing out of thin air to pay the bills is so appealing.

But there’s simply no getting around the basic economic reality of trade-offs and scarce resources, no matter how clever the scheme. Ultimately, government spending has costs that cannot be avoided—no matter how many trillion-dollar coins the Treasury mints.

COLUMN BY

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

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Ingoglia on Biden Border Crisis: ‘Florida will not help with your lawlessness’ [Video]

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One Florida House Representative is praising Governor Ron DeSantis’ new executive order preventing Florida agencies from aiding the federal government with relocating illegal immigrants into Florida. One America’s Stefan Kleinhenz has more.

Watch:

©OANN. All rights reserved.

“Raised on Porn” Documentary Exposes Effects of Porn on Children

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A new documentary from Exodus Cry and Magic Lantern Pictures, Raised on Porn, exposes the ways pornography has become the new sex education for children and unpacks the dangerous lifelong implications of this global phenomenon.

SIGN THE PETITION demanding age verification on porn sites.

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EDITORS NOTE: This National Center on Sexual Exploitation video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Vax Mandate Stabs Constitution in the Back

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Three weeks after announcing a vaccine mandate for private companies of 100 or more employees, the Biden administration still doesn’t have a timeline. When asked, Press Secretary Jen Psaki could only promise “more detail in the coming weeks.” Coming from the administration that blew away previous records for the most executive orders in its first 100 days, this foot-dragging indicates there may be a reason for the delay. Law professor John Yoo suggests the biggest obstacles are constitutional. “I don’t think the Biden administration is going to get through court on this one,” he said on “Washington Watch.”

Yoo identified three particular issues with the president’s phantom regulation. First, “does the law that Congress passed give the president this authority at all?” The president has targeted private businesses because he is claiming the power through the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act), which created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). But Yoo pointed out that law is designed to address “unsecured equipment,” situations where “workers are really getting injured by the way employers operate,” and “certain uniform standards.” But the coronavirus “is not really a workplace issue,” said Yoo. It only “happens to occur in the workplace because it happens throughout society.” Biden’s staff has even admitted to “using workplace law as a pretext,” said Yoo, in a way it could never excuse this power grab for other non-workplace-specific problems, like AIDS testing or firearm restrictions.

Second, “does Congress even have the authority to regulate every workplace in the country?” Though Congress can create some general parameters for workplaces (like OSHA provides), “public health and safety are still primarily in the hands of states,” Yoo said. The problem with President Biden’s proposed regulation, Yoo noted, is that it would be implemented as an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) even though the coronavirus “emergency” has “been going on for over a year and a half now.” Now, “we’ve had time to think about how to roll out the vaccine.” One active principle in that rollout is that “our constitution has created a system of federalism where the federal government isn’t responsible for everything.” States and the national government have worked together so far; why stop now?

Third, “what rights do you and I, as employees, have not to be required to have an injection that we don’t want in our bodies?” If an employee is fired for refusing the vaccine, Yoo observed that they should be eligible for unemployment benefits. If the vaccine is forced on an employee as a condition of employment, said Yoo, “I don’t think you’re consenting at all.” Certainly, if such workers suffer harmful side effects, they are eligible for compensation, he said, either from the employer or society. Such worker protections will cushion the impact of the White House’s push to vaccinate all Americans. Doubtless President Biden’s regulators are confronting these realities now, uncertain how to protect his executive overreach against inevitable court challenges, and perhaps afraid of the “disruption in the economy” Yoo predicted would occur from firing all employees who refused to be vaccinated.

Another Supreme Court defeat of Biden’s policy agenda is certainly in the cards. Biden’s coronavirus mandate would be the 10th ETS issued in OSHA’s history. Of the previous nine, six were challenged in court, and five lost. That’s not a great record. Five weeks ago, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s eviction moratorium because it lacked clear congressional authorization, saying “we expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of ‘vast economic and political significance.'” Biden’s authority is far murkier (or non-existent) in compelling private employees to be vaccinated.

EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action video and column are republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Judicial Watch Sues Justice Department for Records of Ashli Babbitt Killing

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January 6 has become a touchstone in the uneven application of justice against those who lean conservative. In particular, the obviously political secrecy and stonewalling in the police killing of Ashli Babbitt is undermining the rule of law.

Undaunted by the obstacles thrown our way, we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for records related to the shooting death of 14-year Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt on January 6, 2021, in the U.S. Capitol Building.

Babbitt was shot and killed as she climbed through a broken interior window in the United State Capitol. She was unarmed. The identity of the shooter was kept secret by Congress as well as federal and local authorities for eight months until U.S. Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd went public to try to defend his killing of Ms. Babbitt.

On April 14, 2021, the Justice Department issued a press release stating: “The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice will not pursue criminal charges against the U.S. Capitol Police officer involved in the fatal shooting of 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, the Office announced today.”

We sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, the Civil Rights Division, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (all components of the Justice Department) failed to provide the records responsive to our April 14, 2021 and May 20, 2021, FOIA requests (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice) (No. 1:21-cv-02462)) for:

  • All records, including but not limited to, investigative reports, photographs, witness statements, dispatch logs, schematics, ballistics, and video footage, concerning the January 6, 2021 death of Ashli Babbitt in the Capitol Building.
  • All draft and final prosecution declination memoranda related to the death of Ashli Babbitt.
  • All Office of the US Attorney for the District of Columbia officials’ electronic communications concerning Ashli Babbitt and the investigation of her death.
  • All DOJ Civil Rights Division officials’ electronic communications concerning Ashli Babbitt and the investigation of her death.
  • All FBI officials’ electronic communications concerning Ashli Babbitt and the investigation of er death. The time frame for the requested records is January 6, 2021 to the present.

This lawsuit is part of our multi-faceted investigation into January 6.

Earlier this month, the District of Columbia asked a court for an additional delay to respond to our FOIA lawsuit for records related to the U.S. Capitol Police shooting Babbitt to death.

We recently filed a motion for discovery in our lawsuit against the United States Capitol Police (USCP) for emails and videos concerning the Capitol disturbance. The Capitol Police are trying to shut down the lawsuit by arguing that the requested records are “not public records.”

On August 3, we announced that we obtained new documents showing the Washington, D.C. Medical Examiner submitted a request to cremate Babbitt two days after gaining custody of her body. The documents also showed that Babbitt’s fingerprints were emailed to a person supposedly working for the D.C. government, which resulted in Microsoft “undeliverable” messages written in Chinese characters being returned.

Also in August, we uncovered records related to the death of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick which show major media representatives pressuring the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) of the District of Columbia over its conclusion that Officer Sicknick had died of natural causes.

In July, we announced a lawsuit against the FBI for records of communication between the FBI and several financial institutions about the reported transfer of financial transactions made by people in DC, Maryland and Virginia on January 5 and January 6, 2021. The FBI has refused to confirm or deny the existence of any such records.

In May, we sued both the Department of the Interior and the Department of Defense for records regarding the deployment of armed forces around the Capitol complex in Washington, D.C., in January and February of 2021.

We also filed a lawsuit for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s communications with the Pentagon in the days after the January 6 incident.

And now that the Deep State leaked that at least one of its (the FBI’s) informants entered the Capitol that day and told them there was no grand conspiracy, it shows that the lies about 1/6 are likely to rival the Russiagate hoax. All the more reason that we’re not going to let this investigation go.

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

How Homosexuality Harms The Church

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David Carlin wishes the pope would re-state Church teaching about homosexuality but doubts it will happen, or that America’s bishops will do so.

One of the most common defenses of homosexual behavior is: “This does no harm to you or any other third parties.”  To which my response is: “No harm?  Well, it has pretty much ruined the Catholic Church in America.”

Homosexuality among priests, and sometimes among bishops; plus an attitude of tolerance towards homosexuals among non-homosexual priests and bishops, as if same-sex intercourse is no big deal; plus the colossal scandal of sexual molestation of teenage boys by homosexual priests; plus episcopal attempts to cover up this molestation; plus the widespread pretense among both lay and clerical Catholics that homosexuality had little or nothing to do with the molestation scandal; plus a pro-gay sentimentality found among many lay Catholics; plus Fr. James Martin, S.J. – all this has done immeasurable damage to the Church in the United States.

Anti-Catholics have been given a cudgel with which to beat the Church that is as good as, or even better than, the classic cudgels: the Spanish Inquisition and the trial of Galileo.  A thousand years from now, late-night TV will still be making jokes about Catholic priests molesting young boys.

Non-Catholics (Protestants and Jews and agnostics and atheists) who in these morally corrupt times might have considered joining a Catholic Church that stands for goodness and truth have been driven away by the thought that the Church is as corrupt as any other of our rotten institutions.

We are told that Cato the Elder used to end all his speeches in the Roman Senate, regardless of the topic under discussion, with the words, “Carthage, it seems to me, must be destroyed.”

If I were a Catholic parish priest, I would end all my homilies, regardless of the Scriptural readings of the day, and regardless of the main topic of my sermon, with words like these: “Allow me to remind you, dear friends, that the Catholic religion – the religion you and I profess to adhere to – has always condemned homosexual practice as a very grave sin.”

If any priest, Cato-like, actually says this, he will upset certain parishioners, not a few of whom will drift away to a parish they perceive as being more tolerant and up-to-date, and they will take their money with them.  And some parishioners will write to the bishop complaining about their “homophobic” priest.  More than a few bishops, I suppose, will recommend that the priest “cool it.”  Such bishops, in a paternal attempt to guide their over-zealous parish priests, will explain: “Look, the people of your parish know perfectly well – without your reminding them – what the Catholic Church teaches about homosexuality. Why irritate them by harping needlessly on this theme?”

But is my hypothetical bishop correct when he says that all Catholics know what the Church teaches about homosexuality?  To answer that we must realize that the average Catholic makes a distinction between two ways in which the Church teaches something.  Sometimes the Church is really serious in its moral teachings, e.g., when it tells us not to rob banks or not to beat our wives.  But at other times (many Catholics believe) the Church is not truly serious, e.g., when it tells us that contraception is a serious sin or that homosexual intercourse is a very grave act.

Given all this, I’m lucky not to be a Catholic priest.  My head would soon be served on an episcopal platter for the delectation of Catholics, both clerical and lay, who are far more humane than myself, far more respectful of the fundamental human right to engage in homosexual sodomy, a right almost universally acknowledged today by all right-thinking people outside of Africa, that “dark” continent where most people still don’t understand how progressive and ultra-modern homosexuality is.

Catholicism is a religion that asks of its adherents – nay, demands of them – that they believe a number of hard-to-believe things.  It tells us we must believe that one God is three Persons, that God has become human, that a virgin has given birth, that a crucified man has come back from the dead, that Jesus has atoned for our sins, that bread and wine routinely become the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

If we can believe all that, why do we find it hard to believe that it’s a great sin for two men or two women to engage in sexual relations with one another?  Once upon a time almost everybody believed that.  And yet we actually do find it hard to believe – or at least many of us do.  For the world believes precisely the opposite.

And by “the world” I mean all the “best people,” that is, the social and cultural elites of North America and western Europe.  In America, the moral wisdom of these best people is communicated to the little people (you and me) by the journalistic mass media, by the entertainment industry, and by our best and most famous colleges and universities.  A little further down the line, our public schools even communicate this wisdom to school children.

In March of 1937, Pope Pius XI wrote two very interesting encyclical letters, one in which he denounced Nazism (Mit brennender Sorge), the other in which he denounced Communism (Divini Redemptoris).

I submit that a papal letter on homosexuality is long overdue.  The theory and practice of homosexuality, not to mention the great tidal wave of pro-homosexuality propaganda that is flooding the world – these things, it seems to me, are almost as grave a threat to the Church today as Communism and Nazism were in the 1930s.

I won’t be holding my breath till Pope Francis writes such a letter.  Nor will I hold my breath in hopes that the Catholic bishops in America will write a collective pastoral letter on the topic.

But is it too much for me to hope that some individual bishops here or there will address such an urgent pastoral letter to his priests and people?

You may also enjoy:

Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky’s Confronting the Gay Priest Problem

Fr. Bevil Bramwell’s Homosexuality in Romans One

COLUMN BY

David Carlin

David Carlin is a retired professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2021 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ Big Lies

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“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” – Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels

Biden’s Big Lies

Watch the White House press secretary repeat the “big lie” that the Democrat $3.5 trillion spending bill “costs zero dollars.”

Biden in a September 25th, 2021 Tweet stated, “My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars.”

The American people are now seeing the political, economic and military consequences of Biden’s big lie.

Let’s go down a short list of Biden’s “Build Back Better” Big Lies:

  1. The Coordinated Attack on Ivermectin is a Crime Against Humanity.
  2. Afghanistan pull out.
  3. Unvetted Afghan immigration crisis.
  4. Southern Border Crisis.
  5. Stagflation in the American economy. Gas is up 43%, Energy costs are up 25%, Rent is up 9%, Bacon is up 28%.
  6. Tyranny in the form of “mandates.” Get vaxxed or else!
  7. Rising gas and oil prices.
  8. The working class’ jobs threatened if they don’t get vaxxed.
  9. The “tax the rich mantra” of Biden and the Democrat Party.
  10. The increase in taxes on every working American.
  11. The attempt at raising the national debt to pay for massive spending bills (i.e. infrastructure).
  12. The continuing efforts to use Covid to shut down the economy.
  13. The continuing efforts to brainwash our public school, college and university students on the goodness of Communism.
  14. The racial hate created using the BLM/Antifa “white privilege” campaign.
  15. The growing scientific data showing that Covid vaccine shots are harming and in some cases killing large numbers of Americans.
  16. The anti-fossil fuels Green New Deal efforts to fundamentally transform American’s use of all forms of energy.
  17. Biden’s support to defund the police, anti-Border Patrol and anti-law enforcement policies.
  18. Biden’s anti-guns anti-self defense and anti-Second Amendment policies.
  19. The radicalization of the Democrat Party and its move toward Communism in the U.S.A.
  20. Biden’s policies to fundamentally transform our public schools into propaganda outlets for big government and centers to force Critical Race Theory on children, without parental concent.
  21. More to be determined…

Biden Has Become a Joke and the Whole World is Laughing

In my column “The Democrats elected a joke and now the world is laughing. But the joke is now on them” I wrote:

Everyone is now laughing at the Biden administration. Biden and his handlers (he has handlers because he is incompetent) are the laughing stock of the whole world.

What is even sadder is that his policies and political positions are now harming working class Americans. Consumer confidence has now reached a 22 year low. It has not been this low since the DotCom implosion under Bill Clinton.

From Biden’s broken national security policies, to his disaster in Afghanistan, to the ongoing border crisis (the border patrol estimated that illegal aliens will top a million for the month of September), to a dangerous immigration policy, to the Democrat controlled Congress’ bills that raise taxes, increase spending and turn one group against another have many Americans of all races crying.

Biden is now openly anti-American in everything that he, and his administration, does. Americans are today paying over $1.00 more per gallon of gasoline at the pump. Oil prices reached $80 per barrel, double the price under Trump prior to the virus from China. And Biden is just getting started on implementing draconian energy policies to “save the planet” from climate change. Go figure!

Here’s striking example of yet another a demented Democrat policy in California: 

Biden’s Mandates

Today the Biden administration’s operative word is “mandate.” Biden is forcing Americans to get Vaxxed. But what about those who get vaxxed and either, get sick, have long term health issues, get Covid and die. Here’s just one example of a pro-vaxx professor in Florida who died after getting her third (booster) shot:

Mandates are not leadership. Mandates are unconstitutional. Mandates are not the law.

Biden wants to mandate Covid vaxxing for every American citizen but will not test illegal aliens for Covid who are surging crossing our Southern border.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll, sponsored by The ANTIFA by Jack Posobiec, for Tuesday shows that 41% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Biden’s job performance. Fifty-eight percent (58%) disapprove. The latest figures include 21% who Strongly Approve of the job Biden is doing and 49% who Strongly Disapprove.

This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -28. (see trends)

Conclusion

Political satire has now become public policy under Biden. But is anyone laughing? We think not. People are waking up and we are seeing civil disobedience protests against Biden and his policies growing, not just in the U.S. but globally.

Biden is just another in a long line of tax and spend big government socialists. From FDR to Carter to Clinton to Obama. They’re all birds of a feather who flock together to tax the rich and every single working American to death. Some have even characterized the Biden administration as Obama 2.0!

Gird your loins. Pray! Our only hope is to retake one or both houses of Congress in 2022.

We have made it a point to contest the uncontested absurdities we see. That is what I, as a citizen journalist, do each and every day. Sadly these absurdities have turned into legislation either pending or passed by the Democrats in Congress and pushed by the Biden administration.

The Biden administration will not be over until 2024. A ray of hope is if conservatives, note I didn’t say Republicans, take back a majority in the House of Representatives and Senate.

Be prepared. It will get worse. We hope and pray that one day we will reestablish our Constitutional Republican form of government where the power lies in the hands of the people not government.

It’s now clear that Biden’s Build Back Better agenda is causing crimes to be committed against humanity both foreign and domestic.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: Biden’s flailing agenda, a defeat of his own making.

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Mayorkas: 1-in-5 Border Crossers Arrive to U.S. Sick with Illnesses

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During remarks at Georgetown University this week, open-borders enthusiast and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that about 1-in-5 border crossers arriving at the United States-Mexico border are sick with various illnesses.

“We are confronted with a population of people that, as a general matter, that have a rate of illness of approximately 20 percent,” Mayorkas said. “When one is speaking of 7,000 or 7,500 people encountered at the border every day, if one takes a look at that the system, it is not built for that in a COVID environment where isolation is required.”

You know what a good solution for that would be? Secure the border.

Days later, Mayorkas conceded that DHS did not test roughly 13,000 Haitian border crossers for the coronavirus before releasing them into the interior of the U.S. In early August, top DHS officials admitted in court briefs that federal immigration officials were seeing “significantly increased rates” of border crossers arriving in the U.S. while carrying coronavirus.

In addition, CDC officials confirmed this month that Afghans brought to the U.S. by the Biden administration have spurred outbreaks of measles, varicella, mumps, tuberculosis, malaria, leishmaniasis, hepatitis A, and coronavirus.

But our children have to stay masked and socially distanced in school.

Alejandro Mayorkas

10 Known Connections

Mayorkas Defends Decision Not to Build Border Wall, Despite the Flood of Illegal Migrants

Between September 9 and 24, 2021, approximately 30,000 mostly Haitian migrants illegally crossed America’s southern border and gathered in Del Rio, Texas, where they hoped to be granted asylum. By September 25, approximately 12,400 of them had been released into the U.S. interior with instructions to report for immigration court hearings sometime in the future, while another 5,000 were being processed by DHS to determine whether they would be sent back to Haiti or permitted to pursue their immigration/asylum cases.

On September 26, 2021, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked Mayorkas: “You say 30,000 people walked across … into Del Rio in the last 17 days. Question: Why didn’t you stop them?” “We encounter them at the border. That’s where we encounter them, Chris,” Mayorkas replied.

Wallace then asked: “Why didn’t you stop them from coming into the country?” “We did,” Mayorkas stated. “We encountered them, they gathered – they assembled in that one location in Del Rio, Texas, and we applied the laws. We applied the public health law under the CDC’s authority, and we applied immigration –”

“My question is why did you allow them in the country in the first place?” Wallace replied. “Why didn’t you build, forgive me, a wall or a fence to stop them from walking – the flood of people coming across the dam, it looks like a highway that allows them to cross the Rio Grande.” “It is the policy of this administration, we do not agree with the building of the wall,” Mayorkas insisted, explaining that permitting individuals to seek humanitarian relief was “one of our proudest traditions.”

To learn more about Alejandro Mayorkas, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Manchin Trashes Democratic Spending Bill: ‘Fiscal insanity’

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The bill is a death sentence for this country. A no vote is the only rational option. Anyone who votes for this devastating attack on the American economy.

Sen. Joe Manchin said there is not enough time to produce the legislative framework for a massive spending bill that House Democrats are demanding in exchange for supporting a critical infrastructure bill on Thursday. “No, it’s not possible,” Manchin told reporters as he walked from the Senate chamber back to his office building.

Manchin trashes Democratic spending bill: ‘Fiscal insanity’

By: Susan Ferrechio, Chief Congressional Correspondent |Washington Examiner | September 29, 2021:

Sen. Joe Manchin, a key centrist Democrat whose approval is required to pass the party’s massive social welfare spending package, firmly rejected the proposal on Wednesday, criticizing the $3.5 trillion cost and the vast new entitlements it would provide.

Manchin issued a scathing statement about the massive spending package, criticizing the cost, tax increases, and social welfare programs that “spend for the sake of spending.”

The West Virginia Democrat’s thorough rejection of the measure follows days of talks with President Joe Biden and top Democrats, who had hoped to strike an accord with Manchin ahead of a House vote on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package.

“What I have made clear to the President and Democratic leaders is that spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity,” Manchin said in a statement Wednesday.

His rejection of the package likely jeopardizes the passage of the infrastructure bill on Thursday. House liberals said they plan to block the bill unless House and Senate Democrats agree to a spending level and framework on the social welfare spending bill. The Senate deal hinges on a few key moderates, including Manchin.

But Manchin signaled he’s in no hurry to help negotiate a deal by Thursday.

“In August, I recommended we take a strategic pause to provide time to develop the right policies and to continue to monitor how the pandemic and economic factors are affecting our nation’s fiscal situation before we spend more,” Manchin said.

In addition to opposing the staggering cost of the legislation, Manchin wants changes to tax hikes Democrats plan to impose to pay for the bill, which he said would weaken the nation’s economic competitiveness and would hurt small businesses.

“Overall, the amount we spend now must be balanced with what we need and can afford — not designed to reengineer the social and economic fabric of this nation or vengefully tax for the sake of wishful spending,” Manchin said.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer planned to huddle with Biden Wednesday to plot what to do next.

Earlier Wednesday, Pelosi would not promise a vote on the infrastructure bill on Thursday, blaming Senate Democrats for failing to strike a deal with Manchin.

“I can’t keep a commitment that the Senate has made impossible to do,” Pelosi said.

After Manchin’s statement made the rounds on Capitol Hill, liberal Democrats were more confident than ever they would block the infrastructure bill if Pelosi brings it up for a vote.

Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal said Manchin’s statement “has created a bunch more votes on the House floor,” against the infrastructure bill.

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

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Major British News Outlet Question Legitimacy of Biden Election Victory, “Election Was Rigged”

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Will the Democrat-criminal-media-entertainment-complex ban The Sunday Times?

Major British News Outlet Appears to Question Legitimacy of Biden Election Victory

By: Conservative Brief, September 30, 2021:

A writer for a major British newspaper appeared to endorse former President Donald Trump’s longstanding allegation that his 2020 election opponent, Joe Biden, did not legitimately win the White House.

“So Trump was right,” Rob Liddle began in his piece for the Sunday Times. “The American public is slowly waking up to the fact that they are being led by an ineffectually devious, senile halfwit.”

“Donald Trump is back in the lead in the opinion polls. Imagine how awful a president must be if people would rather that sack of meat with mittens were back in charge,” he continued.

“Soon the public will wake up to something even more unpleasant and sinister: that the last presidential election was a fraud, rigged by big business, the labor unions and, more than anything, the media and the tech companies,” Liddle noted further.

“If that election had taken place in any other country, it would have been called ‘unfree’. And, as more and more evidence emerges, it terrifies me that the same thing could happen here,” he predicted.

The Sunday Times piece isn’t the first from a major media outlet to suggest that some sort of behind-the-scenes operation took place during the election cycle last year to defeat the incumbent.

Time magazine published a report Feb. 4, roughly two weeks after President Joe Biden was inaugurated, under the headline, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” laying out various details and aspects that certainly indicate a concerted effort to ensure a particular outcome, namely, defeating Trump, that involved giant corporations, big tech giants, and powerful labor unions:

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers, and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.

While aspects of Time’s report have been refuted, such as the claim that Trump was ‘assaulting democracy’ as president, Time’s report makes clear to Liddle that something happened that maybe should not have.
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“What we didn’t know until we were told in February this year, courtesy of Time magazine, was that there actually was a conspiracy — a secret coalition of chief executives, labor unions, left-wing pressure groups, and media companies — to manage what information was available to the voting public,” Liddle went on. “Its aim, as The Wall Street Journal put it, was to ‘suppress unwanted elements of US political conversation’. What a wonderful phrase,” he wrote in the Times.

“Time magazine reported this as if the cabal — it called the arrangement a cabal — had been acting heroically,” he noted further. “To save the US public from making the same mistake again and electing that Brobdingnagian boor — and to do so by suppressing stories favorable to him.”

Liddle also cited Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, who reportedly worked behind the scenes as well to undermine his then-commander-in-chief.

“Now we discover that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was also conspiring against the president,” Liddle wrote. “Twice Milley called Chinese diplomats to let them know that he would countermand any order from Trump to attack China — which seems to a lot of US conservatives to be an act of pure treason. Milley also went behind his president’s back to connive with the Democrat leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi.”

“The reasoning for this was that Trump was ‘unhinged’ — a familiar notion peddled by the media for the four years of his presidency,” the writer continued. “Was he? I don’t know. He didn’t seem terribly hinged to me, but then Americans rarely do. But more unhinged than your average American — or Joe Biden?”

“Whatever the case, that election one year ago was plainly rigged,” he argues. “Not by fraudulent postal votes. But by an affluent elite conspiring, brutally at times, to ensure that the American public heard only one side of the story.”

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

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The Gabby Petito case has been exploited by the media. We need to stop treating human tragedy as entertainment

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The murder of 22-year-old American Gabby Petito, and disappearance of her fiance, 23-year-old Brian Laundrie, have sparked worldwide interest and speculation.

Podcasts have been made covering the case, news outlets worldwide are giving daily updates — it would seem the public’s incessant consumption of true crime is feeding a market need for new material at an increasingly ravenous pace. As of yesterday a Google search of Petito’s name returned over 41,000,000 hits, and between TikTok and Twitter, there are now well over a billion posts with her name as a hashtag.

In June 2021, the couple embarked on a road trip across the US, sharing their trip on social media with her growing fan base. Although the couple were travelling together, on the first of September, Laundrie arrived at his parents’ home in Florida, alone, in their white van. On the 19th of September, Petito’s remains were found, and police have ruled her death as a homicide. An arrest warrant has since been issued for Laundrie, but his whereabouts remain unknown.

In essence, Petito’s life, and death, have been co-opted by the media and public as a form of entertainment. It would seem that the proliferation of true crime — and the constant need to feed that monster, have desensitised many to the human stories behind the deadlines.

But what effect does this have on those intimately caught up in these events, and why do some cases become of such significant public interest, while the families of other victims struggle to raise awareness of their own loved ones’ cases?

Media narratives

There are a number of factors at play here. The first is that there are all the elements present to allow media outlets to create a strong narrative around Petito’s disappearance and death; the endless images and videos she posted to social media of her road trip, the drama of her previous interaction with the police — captured on body camera and showing a very distressed young woman obviously in crisis — the building of the tension with her disappearance, which also acted as a cliffhanger, before the tragic news of her death.

In essence, all of the elements of a popular true crime narrative, with all the mystery, hooks, and tropes of recent shows and podcasts such as Casefile, Bowraville, and Serial.

But this is not a TV show or a movie. This was a young woman’s life, and death, which has now become media fodder, with her final days being treated as entertainment. Theories as to what happened are running rife, current affairs programs are pumping out hastily produced pieces with experts picking apart what we know, and what they predict may have happened.

The media benefit, as it provides high traffic content for the 24-hour news cycle, and clickbait for online stories.

And some individuals are also capitalising on Petito’s case to gain attention. For example one woman co-opted Petito’s murder as her personal brand, posting 70 videos on TikTok in 6 days, rocketing her following from 170,000 people to over 650,000, with many other TikTok users capitalising on the same trend.

Others have created Instagram and Twitter accounts in Petito’s name, in what could be seen as an opportunistic and narcissistic attempt to gain followers.

‘Missing white woman syndrome’

Since Petito’s case went “viral”, a lot of people have pointed out the media’s complicity in creating another case of “missing white woman syndrome”.

Missing white woman syndrome highlights the notion of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims — those who are considered valuable front-page news, and those who aren’t. This refers to the overabundance of coverage of cases of missing white women, and the lack of coverage of people of colour and men.

The argument is not that white women deserve less attention, just that others deserve the same level of interest. This disparity in media coverage has led to calls from Indigenous people, both in the US and Australia, for change.

Consider the case of 20-year-old Ashley Loring Heavyrunner, an Indigenous woman who disappeared in Montana in 2017, whose story was barely given a fraction of the coverage that Petito received by the media. But her story is sadly reflected across Native American communities where there is an epidemic of missing people.

The lack of reporting around Indigenous people’s disappearances highlights the media’s disinterest in helping to raise awareness of missing persons more generally, and that the purpose of news stories is to create a sensationalised narrative for public consumption.

Criminal case as fair media game

My concern, from a criminologist’s perspective, is what happens if this case goes to court, if someone is tried for her murder? Will this saturation of speculation have an impact on the judicial process?

Perhaps we all need to look at how we respond to victims of violent crimes. We can all make a change to the narrative and don’t have to buy into the media feeding frenzy.

This is an important discussion — these women and their lives are not ours to co-opt, to voyeuristically dissect. They are not a form of entertainment.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

COLUMN BY

Xanthe Mallett

Dr Xanthé Mallett is a forensic criminologist (University of Newcastle, Australia), author, television presenter, and social commentator. Xanthé specialises in re-investigating cold cases, often through… More by Xanthe Mallett

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

INSTITUTIONALIZING ELECTION FRAUD: Gov. Newsom Makes Mail-In Ballots Permanent in California

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Mail-in ballots are now permanent and every registered voter in California will now be sent a mail-in ballot.

California will never have a legit election again.

Newsom Makes Mail-In Ballots Permanent in California

California temporarily extended universal vote-by-mail rules through the September recall election

By Hannah Claire Brimelow | Timecast September 28, 2021 |

Every registered voter in California will now be sent a mail-in ballot.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 37, making California the eighth state in the country to adopt this kind of legislation.

The bill, which was authored by Assemblyman Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park), “requires county elections officials to mail a ballot to every active registered voter for all elections, whether they request it or not. Voters can still choose to vote at physical polling locations, if they prefer. The new law will also permanently extend the time mail ballots have to arrive at elections offices from three days to seven days after an election, a practice adopted in 2020,” per The Sacramento Bee.

Newsom, who recently survived a recall election, said in a statement, “As states across our country continue to enact undemocratic voter suppression laws, California is increasing voter access, expanding voting options and bolstering elections integrity and transparency.”

“Last year we took unprecedented steps to ensure all voters had the opportunity to cast a ballot during the pandemic and today we are making those measures permanent after record-breaking participation in the 2020 presidential election,” he said.

Newsom tried to enact universal mail-in voting via executive orders during the pandemic. The Sutter County Superior Court ruled he acted beyond the powers granted to him under the California Emergency Services Act and overruled the order as unconstitutional. A permanent injunction was issued in order to prevent Newsom from repeating his actions.

“It’s no secret that Democrats have and will continue to try to manipulate election regulations for their political advantage,” California GOP Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said in a statement. “Republicans will hold them accountable through our election integrity operations — including litigation, where appropriate — and by recruiting and supporting candidates who will provide solutions to California’s numerous challenges.”

She added, “The California Republican Party is committed to ensuring elections are safe, fair and secure, giving voters the confidence they need to cast a ballot.”

Critics of the vote-by-mail ballots cite concerns of voter fraud, security, and election integrity. Mail-in ballots could be tampered with or illegally filled out and submitted, impacting the results of an election.

Nevada, Vermont, Utah, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Hawaii have all adopted the practice permanently

“Like Utah, California had already begun allowing mail-in voting on a county-by-county basis pre-pandemic but expanded it to all voters in 2020. The practice was extended statewide temporarily through 2021, including the recent gubernatorial recall election,” per the Times of San Diego.

The Secretary of State’s office reported that over 87% of votes in the 2020 General Election were cast through mail-in ballots. Data shows that 2020 had the highest general election turnout rate in California since 1952, with 70% of eligible voters participating in the election.

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

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Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

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FLORIDA: DeSantis Prohibits Florida Agencies From Assisting Biden Admin In Transporting Migrants

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Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order Tuesday barring state agencies from providing assistance to President Joe Biden’s administration in transporting illegal migrants.

Executive Order 21-223 makes it unlawful for Florida’s executive agencies to “provide support or resources to, or in any way assist, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or any other federal department or agency” in their attempt to move illegal migrants apprehended at the Southern Border across the nation.

“This executive order makes it clear that Florida resources will not be used to prop up the failed open border agenda enacted by this administration,” DeSantis said. He also noted that nearly 250,000 illegal migrants have been released in the U.S. in less than a year of Biden’s presidency, according to a press release.

Additionally, the governor announced a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its “catch and release” policy.

He also appointed former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Florida Larry Keefe as the state’s Public Safety Czar on Monday. Keefe is responsible for protecting Floridian taxpayers from “reckless immigration policies,” according to the press release.

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a similar executive order in late July, which outlawed non-government entities from providing transportation to migrants.

The Biden administration sued Texas over Abbott’s order and a federal judge issued a temporary halt on the governor’s ban in early August.

COLUMN BY

Shakhzod Yuldoshboev

Contributor.

RELATED VIDEO: Psaki’s Pathetic Explanations About Illegals and Covid.

RELATED ARTICLE: Migrants Revolt Against Bus Driver, Try To Escape Border Patrol In Texas

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

Reclaiming 11 AZ Electors: One GOP Senator Blocking Election Integrity

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The breathtaking mis-reporting from the mainstream media on the Arizona election audit hides the fact that tens of thousands of votes (ballots) are questionable at best. At worst, they are fraudulent. The evidence is overwhelming that systemic corruption took place in the 2020 election. And the job in not done. The next step is reclaiming the 11 electors (decertifying the results), however, one state senator is standing in the way of the truth.

Graham Ledger speaks with Arizona state senator Sonny Borrelli about the options at this point and who that lone Republican senator is who stands against election integrity.

WATCH:

Please subscribe free to The Ledger Report by clicking here: www.GrahamLedger.com

MIKE PENCE: A History of Treachery and Betrayal

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“Trickery and treachery are the practices of fools that have not the wits enough to be honest.” – Benjamin Franklin

“Sometimes the people you’d take a bullet for are the ones behind the trigger.” – Taylor Swift

“There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honor.” – Benjamin Disraeli

It’s time to take a break from the totalitarian control of citizens via the plandemic and forced jabs.  On December 19, 2020, Mike Pence allegedly received the Moderna COVID-19 jab live on TV.  I have trouble believing any federal politician has actually received the jab because none of them have had adverse effects or died.  But on April 14th, Mike Pence underwent surgery for a pacemaker since his heartbeat had slowed.  In 2016, he had informed candidate Donald Trump that he had a heart diagnosis of an asymptomatic left bundle branch block.  One wonders if Pence actually received the inoculation or if the necessity of a pacemaker was coincidental.

Stalinists v. Trotskyites

Here’s the latest from the comrade in our White House…Joe Biden hates patriotic America so much that he fired Lee Greenwood from the National Council of the Arts.  Greenwood wrote God Bless the USA in 1984 and was appointed to the council by George W. Bush.

Why do I hear no outrage from the Republican Party?  Most folks have figured out that the neo-con Trotskyite republicans aren’t much better than the democrats.  Like Stalin and Lenin, Trotsky was a communist, but he wanted the “slow” acceptance of communism and only murdered three million whereas Stalin and Lenin used iron fists and boots to stomp on any rebellion.  Stalin’s death toll was over 20 million and Lenin claimed the lives of tens of millions of people all over Europe.

The comrades in the Democrat Party are Stalinists, those in the Republican Party are Trotskyites…little difference except for a handful of brave men and women who cling to the truth of our God given rights and the US Constitution.

Back in February of this year, I wrote three successive articles on former VP Mike Pence.  The first article exposed his lifelong congressional friends.  The second article was about his upbringing, his voting record from the time he entered politics, the people he chose for the Trump administration, and his failure of every job President Trump tasked him with, including the hellish nightmare of the Covid Task Force with Fauci and friends.  The third and final article in the series was about the people who funded Pence throughout his political career, big name people who still support him.

Koch Organizations

The Koch brothers have been long time friends and financial supporters of Michael Pence. Accordingly, VP Pence stacked his own office with former Koch brothers’ employees.  Even Kellyanne Conway was affiliated with the Kochs, and she and Pence have been good friends for years and even have family members who have intermarried.  In June of 2017, 16 of 23 senior white house officials had ties to the Koch brothers, including Reince Priebus, Jeff Sessions, Mick Mulvaney, Rob Porter and Don McGahn.  Even Treasury Secretary Mnuchin helped the Kochs out with a change in tax laws.  The Trump administration was packed full of Koch operatives, brought in by their water boy, Mike Pence. Here is a shocking list of the Trump transition team Koch beneficiaries.

The Koch organizations, including Americans for Prosperity, are anathema to Constitutional conservatism.  They prefer open borders with cheap labor, amnesty for illegals, across the board abortion, Agenda 21 sustainability and environmentalism and the financing of American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) who has promoted an Article V Constitutional Convention for decades.

Dick and Betsy DeVos

Financial support from Dick and Betsy DeVos commenced when Pence first entered politics.  Betsy DeVos is known for her support for school choice, school voucher programs, and charter schools.

Betsy and Dick DeVos were impressed by Pence’s support for their pet project of charter schools.  One wonders if Pence and DeVos back American tax-funded charters by Islamic Imam Fethullah Gulen, Rudolph Steiner’s Anthroposophical Waldorf Schools and Communist Chinese charter schools.  Chinese investors are putting millions into Florida Chinese charters.

Pence’s devoted financier, Betsy DeVos was nominated for Education Secretary after Michelle Rhee was dropped. DeVos donated to Bush’s unsuccessful presidential campaign and was lauded by Jeb Bush as she previously sat on the board of his Foundation of Excellence in Education which promoted common core. The two share an education reform policy that supports the transfer of public dollars to privately run schools, such as for-profit charter schools and voucher programs that use taxpayer funds to pay for private schools.

Columnist Diane Kepus researched Betsy DeVos and knew she would be a disaster; her two articles on DeVos are well worth your time, Link and Link, and her fears were well founded.

Mike Pence played an important role in the confirmation of DeVos for Education Secretary. Amid protests from Democratic critics and teachers’ unions that DeVos, a billionaire charter school supporter with no public-school experience, was unqualified for the position, the Senate deadlocked in a 50-50 tie. Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined their Democratic colleagues in voting against DeVos. Normally we wouldn’t laud their votes, but this time they were right.  On February 7, 2017, Vice President Pence cast the historic tie-breaking vote to confirm her, the first-time a vice president has been called on to break a tie in a cabinet nomination.

DeVos announced her resignation on January 8th, 2021 in the wake of the assault on the U.S. Capitol. She said in her resignation letter to President Trump there is “no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.”

On September 25th at a Republican Leadership conference in Mackinac Island, DeVos implicitly criticized the GOP’s ongoing capture by former President Donald Trump insinuating that Trump supporters were like a cult, when it’s Betsy and her ilk who are the real cultists.

Heritage Foundation

Mike Pence joined The Heritage Foundation as a distinguished visiting fellow in February 2021 after serving four years as President Trump’s VP.  They are old friends.  Three decades ago, it was The Heritage Foundation’s influence that inspired Pence to help create a think tank in his home state of Indiana. After coming to Washington as a congressman and later as vice president, Pence frequently collaborated with Heritage.

In 1991, Pence became president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation (IPRF), which is part of the State Policy Network in Indiana. Link  They are satellite affiliates of the Heritage Foundation whose goals and interests are similar to the Koch’s.  The IPRF was a small group back when Pence was their president, but in the years since, it has amassed an enormous budget thanks in great part to the largess of the Koch network of donors and others.

Pence now advises Heritage experts on public policy issues and ensures Heritage remains the leading conservative voice on solutions to America’s biggest challenges. Pence also writes a monthly column for The Daily Signal, Heritage’s multimedia news outlet.

Heritage is well-known controlled opposition.  They are funded by long time pro-aborts and Council on Foreign Relations members.  Heritage fellow Richard Allen (CFR member) wrote NAFTA, and Stuart M. Butler wrote a Heritage monograph mandating all households obtain adequate health insurance.

In early August of 2021, Pence spoke at Young America’s Foundation, an “associate” member of the State Policy Network, and was immediately booed when he told them to get the COVID jab, despite telling the audience that he and his wife Karen and their children had all had the inoculations.

Pence and the Leadership Institute

A few months ago, I received a 12-page letter from Mike Pence extolling the virtues of Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute and pressing me for a large donation.  I saved the 12-pages, and last week I received another letter from David Horowitz asking me to pledge funds to the same organization.  Mr. Horowitz is now promoting an Article V Constitutional Convention.

Morton Blackwell is a long-time member of the rightwing Council for National Policy (CNP), and back in the late 90s he was urging a chaplain friend of mine to join the CNP.  One Sunday, Blackwell took my friend to his Episcopal Church in DC, and the female preacher asked for prayer for her husband as he was an abortion doctor and was doing a particularly difficult abortion that morning.  The chaplain was horrified, got up and left, and refused to join the council.

The Leadership Institute is also an “associate” member of the State Policy Network.  Their past students include:

  • Mitch McConnell (who in 2020 had a Freedom Index score of 20, which means he voted against President Trump and the US Constitution 80% of the time. Don’t forget that he and his wife Elaine Chao are very connected to a Chinese shipping company through Chao’s father and sisters.
  • David McIntosh – head of pro-amnesty Club for Growthwho spent $2 million to defeat Donald Trump in Iowa in 2016.  McIntosh was also a co-founder of the Federalist Society.  Kellyanne Conway and her husband are members and they urged Trump to use the Federalist Society for a list of possible supreme court justices.  (Mike Pence urged Trump to also use the Heritage Foundation for possible justices.)
  • Grover Norquist – head of Americans for Tax Reform and board member of the National Rifle Association is also married to a Palestinian Islamist and has allegedly become one himself. Norquist has a strange alliance with radical Islam and introduced the Muslim Brotherhood to the George W. Bush White House. Frank Gaffney has fully exposed Norquist.
  • Ralph Reed – originally the head of Christian Coalition for Pat Robertson and mailed out voter guides where many true constitutional conservatives were lied about or ignored and neo-con RINOs and Trotskyites were promoted. Reed was also involved with Jack Abramoff who went to prison for the Native American Lobbying scandal.  According to Abramoff’s book, Capitol Punishment, Reed made at least $5 million and should have gone to prison with Jack.  Abramoff also promotes his friend Grover Norquist in his final chapters.
  • Mark Souder – Congressman from Ft. Wayne, Indiana who promised to serve only six terms, but ran for a seventh and resigned when he was exposed for having an affair with a married part-time staffer.

Mike Pence’s good friend, Nikki Haley also endorses and promotes the Leadership Institute.  Many people believe Nikki would make a fine President or Vice President, because she did what her boss, President Trump, asked her to do at the UN.  One of Trump’s business friends in South Carolina called him in early 2017 and asked him to give Haley a position in his administration.  He told Trump that their Lt. Governor was far more conservative and South Carolina needed to be rid of Haley.  After January 6th, 2021, Nikki Haley excoriated her former boss by saying, “We shouldn’t have followed him.”

The old saying, “Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than open it and have it known,” describes Haley to a T.

Advancing American Freedom

Mike Pence joined the advisory board of Advancing American Freedom with several former Trump hands, including his close friend, Kellyanne Conway, Larry Kudlow and David Bernhardt.

The advisory board includes a number of heretical doctrine “Christians” who are confirmed dominionists, several neo-con Trotskyites, and even members of the Council on Foreign Relations.  My friend, JW Bryan has thoroughly exposed the CFR in his articles as a globalist enemy organization within America.  Pence’s old Indiana buddy, David McIntosh is also on the board as are several people who are promoting an Article V Constitutional Convention.

John Guandolo Exposes Pence

In this video starting at 5:10, John Guandolo exposes VP Mike Pence and his actions during his four years as Donald Trump’s VP.

He states that when Pence was Governor of Indiana and John’s organization, Understanding the Threat, was doing work in Indiana, “Pence had no desire to hear or deal with the truth about jihadi threats in Indiana.  The Islamic site of North America’s headquarters is there in Plainfield, Indiana, and Indiana is one of the three states where the Muslim Brotherhood settled in the United States in the early 60s, and he did nothing. Even though we were working with state legislators, who got it, we couldn’t get him to budge, but that’s a different story.”

John states, “On January 5th, there was a massive meeting in the Trump Hotel in Washington DC with every major player, ten US Senators, their staffs, all the key players in the entire voter fraud game.  The president’s staff and the VP had people there and people who I know directly. I have looked at their briefs and looked at the information and been briefed about what was apprised there regarding the evidence of the fraud and it’s undeniable.  It’s factually rock solid.  Mr. Pence agreed that he would go with what the decision was.  He was going to do a number of things, but essentially, for the sake of this discussion, he pushed it back to the states.  There were some other things he agreed to do, investigative stuff, and before the clock struck midnight on the 5th, he recanted and told the president, I’m not going to do it.  We know that somebody met with Mr. Pence and we still haven’t identified who it was who got him to turn, but I think Mike Pence is a turd and I think he’s a traitor.”

“He was the guy in the Trump administration who was leading the Republican establishment turncoats and there’s more evidence than just what I’m saying right now.  Just that one point should be enough to make people realize that guy is not batting for the American people in any way, shape or form.”

The interviewing host is absolutely right when she said that Donald Trump supporters have been labeled domestic terrorists.  “The Revolutionary Movement against the Constitutional Republic all said that the people at the capitol on January 6th were involved in a coup and were insurrectionists, when in fact they were the people the Dems supported for the previous year…the Antifa and BLM communist agitators on the streets of America. They openly supported them and everything that supports that ideology.”

“Mr. Trump’s greatest failure was to rely on the RNC to fill his administration and they filled it, not with Phil Haney, not with Stephen Coughlin, not with Rich Higgins (fired by McMaster), not with people who actually knew the threat.  They intentionally blocked those people.  John Gallagher, one of the two people vetting national security positions, was the CEO of the Institute for Global Engagement, a Muslim Brotherhood political think tank front in Washington DC.  He was the guy the RNC put in there to screen national security positions.  That’s why you got only bad guys in the administration.”

Pence in 2024

Pence and his wife Karen have always wanted the presidency, but what he doesn’t understand is the fact that he followed the advice of his good friends from Congress, Paul Ryan and Jeff Flake, rather than standing with the man who gave him the chance to one day lead the country.  Pence is our 21st Century Benedict Arnold…he stabbed the president in the back and the Republic in the heart.

He’s working on an $18 million war chest.  His group, Advancing American Freedom, is shaping up as a vehicle for testing the waters and building the infrastructure needed for a White House bid.  The group is staffed by some of Pence’s top allies and ex-aides, including former Koch employee and Pence chief of staff Marc Short, political adviser Marty Obst and former senior Trump White House staffer Paul Teller.

Pence is touring states and lecturing on election integrity after previously refusing to address it.  Unlike James Comey who is a guest lecturer at Howard University, the same university exposed in Manning Johnson’s book, Color, Communism and Common Sense, as being loaded with communists, Pence is lecturing on something he knows nothing about.  Not surprisingly, Federal Judge Emmett Sullivan who was in charge of General Michael Flynn’s case and would not dismiss it, received his undergraduate degree and JD from that very university.

Pence has become persona non grata amongst Trump supporters; someone needs to tell him his political career is over and lock both him and his frumpy control-freak wife in a closet.  I’d go further, but this is for public fare.  When Pence allowed the certification of Biden as the winner under very shady circumstances and then elbow bumped with Pelosi, we saw it all.

Pence admits that he is proud Biden was certified on January 6th, but there are over eighty million Americans who know the truth.

Conclusion

Few people know that America’s Front-Line Doctors headed by Dr. Simone Gold who is also an attorney, went to VP Pence in July of 2020 and told him that if President Trump made Hydroxychloroquine and over-the-counter drug as it is in so many other countries, that lives would be saved as well as the President’s second term.

She told Pence, “Once it’s Over-the-Counter, there’s nothing Congress can do, there’s nothing the doctors and pharmacists can do to stop it…They were going to hold this coronavirus thing over him [Trump], so if the death rates went down to zero, it would have been beautiful.”

She said she met obstruction at every turn.

Mike Pence truly is a modern-day Judas.

©Kelleigh Nelson. All rights reserved.

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