On paper, the United States is a democratic republic. But one could argue that we have become a tyranny of thugs where people are afraid to speak their minds, and media giants shut down voices with which they disagree. In a republic the majority rules while the minority has significant protections. Amazingly, it is now an angry, vocal minority that rules. The majority is, by law, supposed to get its way, but many significant changes are being made in America against the will of the majority, the Constitution, and the laws of the land. We live in perilous times.

Democracies, and especially democratic republics, are by nature slow to change; so, the speed by which changes are now being made in America is evidence that we are not operating as a republic. Violent Leftists are demanding immediate changes and spineless leaders are acquiescing. Radicals flank the Constitution, laws, and majority rule, and institute tyranny behind a façade of doing good for the “oppressed.” While it may be unfortunate that good changes take time, often a long time in a republic, so also do bad changes; therefore, the trade-off is in the protection republics provide against rapid changes which may lead to seriously bad, and sometimes irreparable outcomes. Wise people understand this.

The radical Left has been calling for “fundamental change” to America for a long time. They demand an end to capitalism and the instituting of socialism in its place. They loath the super-rich to the point that some of them have called for the deaths of the economic elite! (This, in spite of the fact that these same super rich fund their programs!) They complain that the few, the “One-Percent” run the country for their own benefit, inferring that such a small minority should not have such power.

But the Leftists who are now calling for radical change make up no more than one percent of the population as well! Apparently, they are not so concerned about the number of people in power, only that it is not themselves! It should be noted that the super wealthy can at least boast that they have produced billions in revenue and millions of jobs. The Left can only boast of having taken wealth others have created to spend as they wished!

The promises tyrants make often sound fine, and sometimes are, in themselves good. But, giving thugs the ability to institute change is to make a deal with the devil. History is filled with despots exploiting fears and problems to gain control over nations. Rome lost its republic to tyranny partially under the pretense of putting down slave revolts. (Note to Senator Kane: The USA did not create slavery). Hitler gained his power under the guise of liberating Germans from the oppressive restrictions placed on them by WW I victors. And so go the histories of China, Cuba, Russia, and a myriad other socialist countries. But make no mistake: no good person is ever a tyrant, period. Anyone willing to use force or brutality to achieve his personal aims must never be allowed a position of power in America.

Fifty years ago, I became aware of the Marxist’s goal to overthrow America. I wondered how free people would ever exchange the blessings that America provides for the bondage of a tyrant. It seemed an impossible mission, yet, in front of our eyes we are witnessing just such a scenario.

How have the Leftists been so successful? The answer is too complicated to address in detail here, but several key facts should be understood by all Americans. I would suggest that even as America was founded with a strong religious and spiritual flavor, much of its internal conflicts today originate in failing to maintain those spiritual convictions.

First: God superintends in human affairs, and either establishes or disestablishes governments according to His infinite wisdom. Whether the United States will survive intact for another century is dependent upon His sovereign will; but if we desire to continue, we must turn to Him in humility, repentance, and trust.

Second: While the Left is exploiting numerous social issues to divide the Nation, racism is probably the most significant one. They are doing so indirectly by playing on Americans’ guilt. That many Americans appear to have a guilt problem is hardly in doubt. However, I would suggest that its source is not rooted in slavery or Jim Crow. American’s “guilt complex,” if I may so call it, will find its explanation through an understanding of Scriptures rather than Leftist propaganda. America must return to its Founders’ perspectives, one point of which was mankind’s sinfulness, a concept nearly lost on Americans today.

Due to our sin, we all have a sense of guilt. This guilt can only be expiated by Christ but is being exploited by wicked people who, instead of pointing the guilty ones to Christ, attach it to the color of their skin. Multitudes across the nation have been misled into believing that their guilt is due to racism or an “unconscious bias” against minorities, and they are being led to believe they must make atonement through contrition and bowing before the idols of “Wokeism” or CRT.

But no matter how much a person bends the knee before the altars of BLM or any other man-made cause, the guilt will remain. Christ alone, by His work on the cross, can eliminate this guilt for all who trust in Him.

Third: While institutional racism is no longer tolerated in America, there are and will always be some individuals who are prejudiced against others, which, unfortunately, feeds the Leftists’ narrative that the country is racist. The headlines that the rare but real racist acts receive adds fuel to the fire, amplifies the demands for change, and gives more power to those who exploit the racism that does remain for their own personal objectives and power. It is illuminating that while some racist acts have occurred in recent years, they must be rare, or the propogandists would not feel compelled to create fake events.

Fourth: America faces a tremendous character shortage among our leadership class. Courage was once an essential virtue and was a prerequisite for leadership in a great republic like America. It is now seriously lacking. And worse, would-be tyrants among our leaders are seeking ways to insinuate themselves into positions of even greater power. Such are manifesting themselves before our very eyes!

There was a time when no one with character would allow “liar” or “coward” to be attached to their name. Today, such flaws have become a hallmark of leadership! Therefore, at a time when the nation desperately needs leaders of integrity, strength, and courage, few can be found. Do our leaders expect to be killed if they stand against the Leftist tyrants? Not likely, but they apparently fear something else even more than death: to be called names such as “bigot” or “hater!”  Oh my! Thus, while real American heroes, like those in the military and police, are willing to die for the nation they love, our political leaders capitulate at the mere threat of being called names! What a sorry lot they are!  Most Americans expect leaders to stand for what is good and right. Apparently, we expect too much!

So, what is to be done? Ultimately, substantial change will come only by God’s grace. People of good will can be reasoned with, and some change may happen. But the many who benefit from the present conflict will not only not help, they will actively resist. Thus, it is an up-hill battle.

That being said, however, the consequences of doing nothing are unacceptable. And, God demands faithfulness to His will, not necessarily success in it.

Therefore:

1.) Pray, repent as appropriate, and obey God’s word.

2.) Expose and resist evil as you are able. Be courageous!

3.) Turn a deaf ear to all who would, through name calling or even violence, force your submission. Yield not an inch to terrorists!

4.) Listen carefully and thoughtfully to all who ask your attention to their pain. Do what you can within the parameters of God’s word to relieve the suffering of others.

5.) Demand the same of your leaders and pray for them. They, too, must turn deaf ears to thugs and terrorists, but hear and respond to all who appear to have a legitimate grievance.  When leaders bow before the violent there is no end to their demands, and all will fall under their heels.

Illinois Democrats are hell-bent on passing a new law—the REACH Act (HB 1736 and SB 647)—that will require every school-age child in Illinois public schools to be introduced to homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation through mandatory “comprehensive sex ed.” To be clear, that’s every child from kindergarten on up and the indoctrination will take place every school year, increasing in detail each year. This will be in addition to all the other pro-“LGBTQ” material in which leftists are drowning children via the proposed “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards”; the existing “LGBT” school indoctrination law; the homosexuality- affirming “anti-bullying” law passed in 2010; and the novels, plays, movies, essays, and articles teachers are already choosing to teach.

Every year the amount of time and number of contexts in which positive images of and ideas about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation—topics that no adult other than parents should introduce to children or teens—grows. Leftists have been planting a dark, impenetrable forest while self-neutering conservatives fret about the trash tree they just bumped into and left standing. Can conservatives not yet see the forest?

Leftists have their gimlet eyes always focused on the big picture as they play the long game to rule the country. And they know the big picture depends on shaping the hearts and minds of children. While conservatives dismiss the “little” offenses and fume briefly about the big offenses against decency, morality, and truth, leftists continue their march through every institution that shapes culture, including our schools which create our future culture-makers—or as we learned in 2020, our culture-destroyers.

Illinois made the national press recently for the youth mind-grab called the “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” that require teacher-training/professional licensure programs, all in-house professional development, and all classrooms to be infused with leftist beliefs about race, homosexuality, and cross-sex impersonation. That amendment will be decided in just a few days by a rules committee in Springfield composed of twelve lawmakers and controlled by leftists.

Meanwhile, here comes the REACH Act, which will enable leftists to reach deeper into the hearts and minds of impressionable children to shape their feelings and beliefs about sexuality under the viperish guise of protecting children.

IFI warned parents about this bill when it was first introduced last year. If passed, this legislation will require leftist-created “comprehensive” sexuality indoctrination to start in kindergarten. Currently, sex education is not required in Illinois, but if it is offered, the only type of curriculum that can be used is leftist “comprehensive” sex ed. That’s thanks to a 2013 law. More on that shortly.

Here are some morsels from the REACH Act (highlighted in yellow):

• “It is the intent of the General Assembly that comprehensive sex ed shall [must]… promote awareness and healthy attitudes about gender identity, gender expression” and “sexual orientation … and must be available to students in kindergarten through 12th grade.”

Since when did it become the job of public school teachers to promote “awareness” of homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation? When did it become their job to promote “healthy attitudes” about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation? Who decides what constitutes a “healthy attitude” toward these phenomena, and on what criteria are such judgments made?

• “Comprehensive sex ed in kindergarten through second grade shall [must] include … instruction on the following topics: human anatomy … gender roles … [and] varying family structures.”

Discussing human sexual anatomy in co-ed K-12 classes is yet one more way for our leftists to dissolve feelings of modesty in young children just as those feelings are beginning to develop. Leftists view that as a good thing. Discussions of “gender roles” and of “varying family structures” are ways of introducing little ones to “trans”-cultic beliefs and homosexuality.

• “Comprehensive sex ed in the third through 5th grades shall [must] include information about diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions. … and an examination of the harm caused by gender-role stereotypes.”

No requirement that all competing views of “sexual orientation” be included or that criticism of “gender theory” be included.

No requirement that materials be presented that challenge the idea that all “gender-role stereotypes” are socially constructed and imposed.

No requirement that materials be presented that espouse the idea that “gender-role stereotypes” emerge organically from a recognition of sexual differentiation.

No requirement that materials be presented that discuss the possible ways “gender-role stereotypes” may serve a healthy cultural function.

No requirement that materials be included that argue that leftist gender theory is socially constructed and is being imposed on children with little to no public debate.

No requirement that materials be included that explain the serious health risks of chemical and surgical “treatments” to facilitate cross-sex impersonation.

No requirement that materials be presented on the social contagion that afflicts mostly adolescent girls called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.

No requirement that materials on desistance and detransitioning be presented.

• “[C]omprehensive sex ed must include … Discussion about … sexting” with 8-10-year-olds.

Leftists may be unaware of the many 8-10-year-olds who have never heard of sexting, never heard of porn, and don’t have cell phones. In those many cases, the passage of this law would mean the government would be introducing these young children to sexting. The innocence of their children that, at great effort and vigilance, parents have been able to preserve in the midst of this sex-saturated and defiling culture, the government would steal.

• Comprehensive sex ed “may not use stigmatizing or shame-based instructional tools or stigmatize parenting or sexually active youth,” “may not employ gender stereotypes” [you know, like saying only girls menstruate or only boys have penises], and “may not teach or promote any religious doctrine.”

In other words, schools must express only one judgment on homosexual behavior, cross-sex identification, and same-sex parenting: approval. So, what happens when the next sexual lobby gets their sexual identity added to the lawbooks? What happens when polyamorists are successful in having “polyamory” included in law as a “sexual orientation” as they already seek to do?

Enquiring minds wonder why this bill does not include these words: “Comprehensive sex ed shall not use stigmatizing or shame-based instructional tools to stigmatize religiously based parenting and shall not implicitly or explicitly teach or promote views critical of religiously based beliefs on the nature and morality of homosexuality or cross-sex identification.”

This bill follows the aforementioned comprehensive sex ed law passed in 2013. That bill required that any school that has a sex ed curricula in any grade must use only comprehensive sex ed—no abstinence-based sex ed. The bill’s sponsors argued at the time that the law was needed to reduce the number of STIs and unintended pregnancies among minors but then provided zero research proving that comprehensive sex ed achieves those goals better than abstinence-based curricula. And no Republican demanded such research.

The one good thing in the 2013 comprehensive sex ed law was that schools were left free not to offer any sex ed at all. That was then. This is now. The wolves waited for seven years, and then they pounced. Those little ones are so tender and tasty.

Last week, a video went viral of a justifiably enraged father taking a school board to task for the way his district was mishandling the education of children during the pandemic. Why haven’t there been an army of enraged fathers and mothers in Illinois taking school boards, administrations, and lawmakers to task for promoting evil ideas to their children? Why haven’t pastors and priests told parents that training their children up in the way they should go must never include even one positive teaching about homosexuality or cross-sex impersonation? Why haven’t churches made it possible for their members to remove their children from the ideological cesspools that self-identify as schools? Why are Christian teachers calling boys by female pronouns or saying nothing to oppose the sexual integration of children’s private spaces?

This is how leftists work:

Slowly they come, step by step, prepared for the wailing of conservatives, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Leftists bide their time, knowing the annoying sound and fury will shortly abate. Exhausted, conservatives will go home, abandoning all that messy, unpleasant opposition to the culture-unmaking of leftists. Conservatives won’t organize, won’t persevere, and won’t sacrifice. And the ones who do fight the evil-doers are alone and isolated because the masses of conservatives don’t want to do the hard work of culture-making.

They don’t want to say or do anything too public–anything that may affect their reputation in the neighborhood, their careers, or their children’s GPA. Even if they have the time and money to educate their children outside of government schools, they don’t want the hassle or expense. They don’t want to sacrifice those fantastic athletic and arts opportunities public schools offer. And they certainly don’t want to turn down a Big Ten or Ivy education for their children even if they—the parents—are feeding the very beasts who are destroying their children and freedom for people of faith in America.

There is no tiny sliver of the hearts, souls, and minds of Illinois school children that presumptuous Illinois lawmakers will allow to remain untouched by corrosive leftist beliefs on sexuality. And there is no child that presumptuous Illinois lawmakers view as too young to be exposed to those corrosive beliefs. Wail all you want, my conservative friends. Big Brother’s minions are patient. They’ll wait for the wailing to cease. They see in the distance a glorious time when wailing will be illegal.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your state lawmakers to ask them to vote against the REACH Act (HB 1736 and SB 647). This radical sex education bill is heartily endorsed by Planned Parenthood of Illinois and by Illinois’ premiere “LBGT” activist organization, Equality Illinois, which should tell you everything you need to know about it.

Impressionable students in public schools should not be exposed to body- and soul-destroying messages that promote leftist beliefs about sexuality.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/audio_Another-K-12-School-Indoctrination-Bill-Coming-Through-the-Illinois-Sewage-Pipeline.mp3

Please consider supporting the good work of Illinois Family Institute.

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

All those Anti-Trump Christians who either did not vote for the oft-unpleasant Trump or, worse, voted for Befuddled Biden and his puppeteers now bear some culpability for ceding more control to those whose lust for power far exceeds their compassion for the weak or love of freedom. After leftists’ Russian-collusion disinformation ruse failed, they floundered about until the Chinese Communists came to their rescue. An ocean of blood has been and will be spilled at the hands of leftists, and all who played a part in facilitating their acquisition of more power bear a measure of guilt.

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In the article describing “hate speech” tactics,[i] we saw how people are called haters if they oppose the homosexual or transgender agenda. The intent is to shame the opponents into silence, that the activists’ march through American culture can continue unopposed. In this article, we’ll see how the activists try to punish those who actually do stand against them. It touches on these points:

• When people are brave and unfazed by accusations, the activists turn to the personal destruction tactics of cancel culture.

• The effects of cancel culture can be expensive and physically dangerous. The idea is to eliminate the target’s opposition and discourage others.

• Even businesses and politicians are using these tactics.

• Defenses against political cancel culture involve forcing politicians to treat all of us fairly, and to honor our Constitutional rights.

• Defenses against business and social media cancelling involves diversification, greatly multiplying our communications choices.

No compromise is possible for attackers of America’s culture

America started with a strong Christian identity. But thanks, in part, to Christians saying that culture isn’t important,[ii] we no longer have a solid consensus about what our culture should be. Because “the Supreme Court follows the election returns,”[iii] we now have legalized “gay marriage,” even though our society is still fighting about it.[iv] Then there is the matter of transgender behavior, which its proponents expect all of us to unconsciously accept, not merely tolerate. We’re supposed to mindlessly support these things:

• Accept that a man or woman is whatever sex they choose to dress up as.

• Let those individuals use whatever sex-segregated public facility they choose to, just because they say so.

• Address them by whatever pronoun they’re pleased to use, whether it be “Mr,” “Miss,” “Xi,” “They,” or a great number of other odd pronouns.[v]

Or as Professor Karen Blair says, you shouldn’t care whether your potential mate is a man or woman. If you care then you’re adding to social injustice. She says:

Just as sociologists have tracked acceptance of inter-racial relationships as a metric of overall societal acceptance of racial minorities, future fluctuations in the extent to which trans and non-binary individuals are included within the intimate world of dating may help to illuminate progress (or lack thereof) with respect to fully including trans and non-binary individuals within our society. After all, it is one thing to make space for diverse gender identities within our workplaces, schools, washrooms and public spaces, but it is another to fully include and accept gender diversity within our families and romantic relationships. Ultimately, however, this research underscores the consequences of shared societal prejudices that impact our trans friends, partners, family members, and coworkers on a daily basis.[vi]

God condemns homosexual and transgender behavior. We see this both in the Old Testament (Leviticus 20:13) and New Testament (Romans 1:26-27).[vii] Christians can’t be faithful to God and also accept these behaviors in society. In turn, the promoters of homosexuality and transgenderism can’t back down without admitting that they’re living a lie. The resulting standoff is a culture war, and requires a victor. There is no long-term compromise possible. Soon enough one side gets overwhelmed. Remember when the call was to “please just tolerate gays?” The new call is for no dissent from their dogma, and full participation in their coming culture.

A decade ago, homosexualist activists were arguing that legalizing same-sex “marriage” was all about “acceptance” and “love,” and that it would have absolutely no impact on the daily life of most ordinary citizens. Opponents of same-sex “marriage” were routinely mocked with statements like: “How is it any of your business what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms?”, or, “If you don’t support gay marriage, don’t get one.” In other words: why get yourself worked up about something that has nothing to do with you?

However, just as pro-family advocates warned at the time, things haven’t turned out that way.

There are just too many examples of how same-sex “marriage”, and LGBT ideology in general, have impacted the daily lives of every citizen to cite in a single column. We saw this in a dramatic way throughout June – so-called “pride month.” One could scarcely open a website, or walk down the street, without being confronted by rainbow flags or other overt celebrations of licentious sexual practices. Many schools, libraries, and city and state legislatures flew the flag and held “pride” celebrations, while any effort to question the wisdom of using public buildings in this way was immediately shouted down as “homophobia” and bigotry.

However, this total saturation of the public space with pro-LGBT propaganda is merely one of the milder ways that LGBT extremism has inserted itself into everybody’s lives. Far more troubling is the way that the LGBT movement is propagandizing and recruiting children, often right under the noses of their parents. As a result, many well-meaning parents who decided not to speak out against same-sex “marriage” out of a desire to be more tolerant, are finding that they are losing their very children to belief-systems that they do not, in fact, support.[viii]

Christianity is evangelistic by nature. Through its obedience to God, His church illuminates the world with examples of God’s righteousness and mercy.[ix] It is a faith of action, of doing (James 2:14-26). When the church has freedom of action then God uses it to change the world. The homosexual and transgender activists can’t allow this, so they try to shut us up, with accusations of hate speech.[x] If we don’t voluntarily silence ourselves, and let them win unopposed, then they apply muscle to their demands. Cancel culture is their weapon of choice.

Cancel culture is how they silence our objections

The online Cambridge Dictionary has this definition for “cancel culture:”

a way of behaving in a society or group, especially on social media, in which it is common to completely reject and stop supporting someone because they have said or done something that offends you[xi]

The definition has interesting suggestions for using it in conversations:

Cancel culture has its place – it helps to call out and remove problematic people from mainstream culture.

In a cancel culture, we appoint ourselves the arbiters of right and wrong and also the judge and jury, because thanks to social media, we get to dole out punishment.

People participating in cancel culture mean to deprive their victims of social legitimacy and the privileges of community life. If this also inflicts economic loss or physical harm, so much the better. Since they can do these attacks without personal consequence, we see activity like this:

• Ruin someone by digging up a now unfashionable comment. In 1987 the young Navy pilot Niel Golightly wrote an opinion of why women should be kept out of combat roles. In 2020 this comment was discovered and Golightly got targeted. He lost his job for once having had a now politically incorrect opinion.[xiii]

• Punish someone who criticizes your cause. The professor Harald Uhlig criticized “Black Lives Matter” for being unrealistic about police funding. The cancel culture mob searched for things to use against him. Finding some minor incidents, they claimed that these proved how Uhlig was unfit to head a national academic journal. They demanded his firing.[xiv] The intended lesson is to never criticize “Black Lives Matter”.

• Change the culture through vandalizing history. Abraham Lincoln is accused of not having believed “black lives matter.” The mob ginned up support to remove his name from buildings, and statues honoring him are being vandalized and torn down.[xv] George Orwell pointed out, in his novel 1984, that if you can control what the public thinks, or can learn, about its past, then you can steer them into a future of your choice.[xvi] The mob has learned how to cancel history.[xvii] They also found that vandalism pays.

Political activists for homosexual and transgender issues have learned how to apply cancel culture tactics against “problematic people.” A small sample:

• Church ostracized from arts community because of sermon. The Crossing Church in Columbia, MO had an arts outreach ministry, giving money to local artists. But because of a sermon on God vs. transgender behavior, the church is now persona non grata in the arts. Galleries and theaters are pressured to stay away from the church’s assistance, or they themselves will get cancelled.[xviii]

• Feminist-supporting author cancelled for defending biology against transgenderism. Robert Jensen writes books and gives lectures. But his audience dried up once he asserted that biological sex is immutable. Bookstores won’t accept his books, he’s disinvited from speaking engagements, and he’s shouted down at other events. His views are inconvenient to the transgender behavior community.[xix]

• Pizza parlor forced to close after statements about not catering to “gay weddings.” The Memories Pizza parlor was reported to be unwilling to cater to a “gay wedding.” What followed was criticism, threats of vandalism against the business, and death threats against the owners.[xx] They never were actually asked to do that catering, but a reporter decided to create a news story. Despite the First Amendment, and Indiana religious freedom laws, apparently even advertising your Christian beliefs is a capital offense deserving of summary death.

These victims of cancel culture didn’t break any laws. In fact, their views and statements are generally mainstream culture. In a real sense, cancel culture is a form of social terrorism. It is effective, too, even if the results are temporary. The actual or imagined costs of being targeted by mob action – money, injury, vandalism – works to deter others from opposition, or even from offering silent support. This definition of cancel culture rings true:

Cancel culture is a call on organizations to terminate the financial sustenance (e.g., fire employees, stop hiring entertainers for gigs) or means of communication (removing from media platforms) of individuals who have done something objectionable. The objectionable thing may be an expressed opinion, or a statement made or action performed in the past. The act may have been unintentional, the person may have been unaware that it was objectionable, or it may be something that was not widely considered objectionable at the time. Since it is a past act, clearly the intention is not to return to favor by stopping the objectionable thing, it is to permanently punish and shun the transgressor.[xxi]

Businesses get into the cancel culture action

Business managers are human, and sometimes seek to make their businesses act as extensions of their own wants and desires. That’s how you end up with snack cracker ads “encouraging people to rethink what it means to be family,”[xxii] or assertions that “years of manufacturing and selling toothpaste make Colgate uniquely qualified to address questions around gender.” [xxiii] These ads show the world their managers’ political and cultural positions.

Running ads doesn’t interfere with the rights of anyone else, but cancel culture does. On the internet, it’s when a company blocks posts, and suspends the posting rights of people, because the company managers disagree with the posts’ cultural or political content. It’s when they block your company from getting any internet hosting at all, for the same reasons. Everyone else can have their say, but not you.

With Twitter and Facebook acting this way, it has become dangerous to our culture. Consider these reasons.

• Presented as being politically and culturally neutral. Since their content is user-generated, Twitter and Facebook supposedly have a fair slice of American opinion, reasonably reflecting the strengths and diversity of our culture. We know now that they aren’t neutral, but people still think that they are.

• Monopoly position. Twitter and Facebook have each gained a monopoly share in their particular specialty. Few people even realize that there are competitors.

• The go-to place for reaching people. The masses flock to Facebook to keep up with their friends and interesting people. They go to Twitter for timely news. Politicians post there because their constituents are already there. And it’s free to use, no subscription fees. These sites have become de-facto public squares, where people congregate to hear what is going on in their communities and the world. And supposedly, if it isn’t being said there then nobody is saying it at all.

• Hard to displace. It is a truism, that if you’re not paying for the product then you are the product. Twitter and Facebook make tremendous amounts of money from our being there. They get money from companies posting ads and from those buying audience information. A potential competitor would have to suffer years of heavy economic losses in hopes of taking back even a small share of the audience.

• Invisible hand in shaping opinions. People who visit Twitter or Facebook see posts, both deep and trivial, and think that this is the entire scope of American political and cultural discourse. These firms shield their viewers from non-approved content. People are propagandized, not through salesmanship but by omission. They’re being misled and haven’t a clue about it.

Through Twitter and Facebook meddling, America gets all the disadvantages of a one-newspaper town, except that the effects are national. It’s been shown many times that Twitter [xxiv] and Facebook [xxv] block conservative posts, and block proscribed people from posting. There are way too many outrage stories to list here. The important point is that they do interfere with American culture, seeking to influence us to accept the “progressive” way by choking opposing speech.

When companies can lever the opinions of its owners and managers into American culture, we become an oligarchy.[xxvi] The masses are ruled not by representatives but by an elite few. The actions of the people running Twitter and Facebook match those you’d expect of those aspiring to the oligarchy. We used to prosecute such companies for being monopolies.

Then there is the curious case of Apple and Google, which recently blocked the Parler application from their app stores.[xxvii] They effectively prevent people from accessing Parler until that service starts censoring posts Twitter-style. Through their actions, Apple and Google claim the right to censor what people say on forums. Although people can access Parler through a laptop computer, but not having a smartphone app cuts out a huge part of Parler’s potential audience.

Apple gave Parler 24 hours to “remove all objectionable content from your app … as well as any content referring to harm to people or attacks on government facilities now or at any future date.” The company also demanded that Parler submit a written plan “to moderate and filter this content” from the app.[xxviii]

These blocking activities come from cancel culture, for they seek to shut down a nexus of conversation because the companies disagree with the content. It is also monopolistic and anti-competitive,[xxix] but the government seems quite selective about what firms it goes after.

Politicians use cancel culture against their cultural opponents

We generally elect politicians because they’re opinionated. Their beliefs and views of our possible futures are important to us. But when they act on their opinions there are at least two ways where they can go wrong and betray their offices:

• Passing unconstitutional laws. A constitution is a charter for government, stating what acts it can try and the limits of its powers. Despite this, constitutions are exceeded quite frequently. For example, the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause is leveraged by Congress to regulate most everything, even when the regulated activity doesn’t involve interstate commerce.[xxx] It is excused by all with a wink and a shrug.

Americans also have the Bill of Rights, amendments to the U.S. Constitution and, because of the Fourteenth Amendment, applying to all state governments.[xxxi]. These amendments don’t grant rights to the citizens. We don’t have religious freedom, etc., because of these amendments. Rather, these are warnings to, and restrictions on, the government. These are assertions that our rights pre-exist the Constitution, and a government that touches them overreaches its bounds. For example, the Ninth Amendment essentially says “if we’ve missed some of the citizens’ rights, then these, too, can’t be restricted by the government.”[xxxii] Note that these rights restrict the government, while modern activists want rights that expand government to provide new goodies.[xxxiii]

If an unconstitutional law is in place it is hard to get it overturned. Fighting off even the most blatantly wrong law takes lots of money and effort. And if you get a justice who favors that law – doesn’t it seem that only they get these cases? – this protracts the repeal efforts. So, passing an even obviously bad law could hurt many people for an awfully long time. When only those with enormous resources can get justice, then justice is generally denied. But that topic is out-of-scope for this article.

• Playing favorites when enforcing the law. “Nobody is above the law” is often said, but lots of people have charges dropped or overlooked because they “know somebody.” God doesn’t condone government favoritism (Leviticus 19:5), and these officials are “servants of God” (Romans 13:6) whether they like it or not. Some politicians are elected even though they’ve goals to overturn our Constitution.[xxxv] When laws are selectively applied then some citizens become more equal than others. When rioters aren’t arrested and prosecuted,[xxxvi] but their victims are,[xxxvii] then officials are participating in cancel culture.

A politician or bureaucrat practices cancel culture through denying some citizens their constitutional rights, and by treating groups differently depending on their political or cultural leanings. Consider these examples:

• Claims that your religious practices are illegal. Cultural activists create conflicts, inviting a District Attorney or Human Rights Commission to claim that you can’t actually practice your religious beliefs (James 2:14-26). Look how the Masterpiece Cakeshop was sued three times because the owner has Christian principles.[xxxviii] When a Commission, or a state’s attorney, works to disregard the accused’s religious rights, despite the First Amendment, it declares that some citizens have fewer rights than others. It also claims that a civil rights law is superior to the Constitution. These officials are trying to cancel the citizens and also our legal system.

• Create laws to ban your religious practices, and even force you to violate them. The Equality Act of 2020 would “prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.”[xxxix] Besides its actual provisions, it forces the changes onto the public and invalidates any religious objections. It’s been called the “Criminalizing Christianity Act.” It amounts to a cultural revolution through legislative fiat. It’s blatantly unconstitutional, but if it gets passed in the future then just try to get justice.

It is good and necessary to defend our Christian-based culture

The Christian basis of our founding is still rather alive in America’s culture. If it weren’t then there wouldn’t be these fierce cultural battles. The people practicing cancel culture want to break resistance to their aims of a political coup. They apparently don’t want to wait for our culture to gradually come over to their views. Perhaps they’re afraid of repentant Christianity.

But before renewing an expensive and exhausting defense of our culture, we should review why we want it. Is it worth fighting for? It is, for these reasons:

• The Christian believes that God created us, and that through Jesus redeemed us to be His children. We’re living for His sake.

• God’s tells us what is right and wrong. No other standard will do. From the Bible we learn how to relate to God, to live in righteousness, and to live peaceably with each other.

• Our faith is acted out in daily life. It isn’t a faith of mere meditation, but also of activities and decisions coming from that faith (James 2:14-26).

• Our resulting society must be righteous and God-honoring, or else. God judges all nations, whether ancient Israel, the rest of the ancient world (Daniel 4:27-37; Jeremiah 18:7-10), or any modern nation (Luke 3:14; Acts 12:21-23). God holds all the world to his standards, and woe to them who spurn His reproof.[xli]

A Christian society will endure if its members maintain their standards, and teach their children to do likewise. But if it slacks off its watchkeeping, then people with other ideas will reach our children, training them instead in the humanist, socialist religion.[xlii]

Make our politicians respect our Constitutional rights

A person taking a seat in the U.S. Congress promises to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”[xliii] A similar oath is taken by members of the various state legislative bodies. But when a politician promises to “take back” guns (Second Amendment), or make the “Equality Act” override religious objections (First Amendment), isn’t that oath breaking? And why isn’t it called “dereliction of duty” when government overreach is shown to them and they won’t set things right? These legislators are trying to sneak through overrides of the Constitution without going through the amendment process, and that is wrong.

The people don’t have the tools to directly remove faithless legislators. For example, only Congress can remove its own members through expulsion. The best the people can do about those seats is to ensure that the offending politicians don’t win reelection. But there are still tools available to us. As former Senator Everett Dickson said, “when I feel the heat, I see the light”.[xliv] Heat costs dedication, time, and money. How hot do you want to make your politician? Even hard line progressives tend to love their perks more than their ideology, and will work to appease you.

Then there are politicians who take sides in the culture war and render unequal civic services. For example, how the mayors tell the police to stand aside during Antifa riots in Portland and Minneapolis, and when the district attorneys won’t charge the rioters. They’re not rendering equal justice, but instead discriminating based on politics. Surely there are any number of laws that these officials are breaking, and there are many suits that can be filed. Justice is expensive, very much so. But the choice seems to be either expensive justice or no justice.

One thing that cancel culture warriors do is to dig up dirt on their targets, and then tell everyone about it. In other words, they do investigative reporting. We can, too. The newspaper and on-air reporters tend to hide bad news about the politicians they like.[xlv] This means that other people are going to have to investigate these faithless politicians. It is likely that, once the news is out, they’ll be destroyed by their own friends.

Every remedy mentioned here involves giving lots of time and money, and learning how to work with like-minded people. But we must do these things, and pay the costs, because our politicians fail us. It’s the price of defending our Christian culture. It’s also a witness to our enemies, and the currently uninvolved, of how we value what we still have.

Beating censorship through diversity and anonymity

The internet has millions of sites, such as the one hosting this article. Out of all of them, Twitter and Facebook are considered the American “go to” places for news and announcements. But since they’ve proven to be unfaithful at that, Americans ought to relearn the habit of seeking out multiple news sources. We can’t literally force people off of these services, but through small efforts can start an exodus, which we hope leads to bigger things.

• Stop posting on Twitter and Facebook. If you post worthwhile content on Twitter, your posts only increase its viewership. Likewise, if your social club is hosted by Facebook, it increases their advertising numbers but doesn’t benefit you any. Go ahead and move your internet home to some other service. Wherever you land, your audience will still seek you out. They might even like the relief from sponsored ads.

• Stop reading Twitter or Facebook. There ought to be other, equivalent sources for your news and entertainment. And every defection from Twitter and Facebook drops their revenue stream. If you have sources which only appear on Twitter, such as a politician or a funny writer, ask them to also post their messages elsewhere. You’re now building your own “not Twitter” network.

• Advertise your own “goodbye” movement. Compared to their total viewership, there aren’t that many people getting cancelled by Twitter or Facebook. But if people get the idea that it’s trendy to leave, and start doing it, you will have started a movement.

But diversity doesn’t mean just visiting more web sites. The internet itself is an information bottleneck, a trap. If your communications are only through the internet, being blocked from it would leave you deaf and dumb. There is little solace in having our First Amendment rights if we’ve no place to practice them. There’s safety in having backup plans (Ecclesiastes 11:2). What sorts of alternative communications can there be?

• Printed newspapers. Newspapers have been dying in the internet era. This is partly because they put content on the internet for free, and partly because so many of the papers have the same progressive slant. They’re just not worth reading. Yet small town local news, such as a village town hall, goes unreported for lack of a printed forum. Wouldn’t locals want to buy a weekly paper if it contained local news? How about a paper whose reporting reflects the community’s values, rather than fighting against them? We can only hope…

• Email lists. Email lists are still used in places. Subscribers periodically get an email with news, articles, or comments from other subscribers. They then submit their responses back to the central service. Because the back-and-forth of an argument depends on sequential posts from the central server, a conversation might take days to resolve. The virtue here is that these communications are available “off the web.”

• FidoNet messaging network. Before the modern internet appeared, people could set up a network of communicating computers, using software called FidoNet. This network operated much like an email list does, but did its work using phone calls. It had great flexibility for routing messages, and could work even with part of the network out-of-service. It required an expert to configure, but it worked. It’s almost forgotten today. Want to set up a secretive network? Why not use a forgotten technology?

• The practice of printing and distributing handbills has always been with us. You see them under windshield wipers, slid onto screen doors, and attached to light poles. The whole neighborhood will know that your group has been there. Although how many flyers you can distribute is limited by your manpower, any number of groups can distribute copies of that flyer, wherever they might be. And when your groups coordinate, they’re gaining networking skills. Consider buying a genuine printing press, because using ordinary computer printers cost way more for the volumes of leaflets you’ll generate.

Once you’re a target, seemingly anything can be accessed if your opponents have clout. Who would have expected to lose their privacy in these circumstances?

• Obama got his opponents’ sealed divorce proceedings revealed. During the 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate, Obama’s campaign people twice got the newspapers to reveal divorce proceedings of his opponents.[xlvi] First came details about his Democratic primary opponent, then those of his Republican general election opponent. Sticking with a winning tactic, President Obama’s reelection campaign of 2012 tried, but failed, to get Mitt Romney’s tax records. Similar attempts are still being made to get President Trump’s tax records. That the courts are willing to reveal sealed records shows that government promises of confidentiality can’t be trusted.

• Donors to Proposition 8 revealed, harassed, and attacked. In 2008, California held an election concerning Proposition 8, which essentially banned “gay marriage.” Many people donated to the campaign trying to pass the measure. After the election, opponents of the measure got the list of campaign donors and published it. This led to donors getting harassed and attacked. [xlvii] Some donors suffered property loss. Others lost their jobs, once news of their donations came out.

• Cell phone tracking identifies rally participants, traces them home. In 2020, people protested at the Michigan state capitol about the coronavirus virus lockdown decrees. After they went home, much cell phone data was harvested by political advocates.[xlviii] This is because many protestors had set their phones to permit location tracking by third parties. Organizations like VoteMap, which works with Democratic political campaigns, got the data and was able to trace these people almost all the way home.

You can sometimes evade becoming a cancel culture target. You’re not required to broadcast your location to everybody. Whether you’re at home or away, if you stay “communications anonymous” then you can’t be singled out for later harassment. Here are ways to reduce, or hide, your own tracks.

• Avoid using your credit card when out and about. When you’re on the road and use your credit card, the company knows where your card has been. By looking at the details, people can make guesses about what you were doing between purchases. There are lots of credit card employees willing to breach their company’s secrecy and spill that data to activists. It’s better if that data doesn’t exist at all. Ask at some gas stations, and you’ll be surprised by how many people are paying with cash.

• Stifle your cell phone. When you let your phone’s location data be collected by others, as in the Michigan rally story, you’re asking that your activities get spied on. You can disable that yourself. Even so, all cell phones constantly seek out the nearest cell phone tower. They’re calling home, and leaving an auditable trail of where they’ve been, whether it is to a rally, to church, or to a restaurant. This tower seeking occurs even when the phone is supposedly turned off. Only removing the battery truly turns the phone off, but many phones don’t have removable batteries. You could leave the phone at home, or you could put the phone in a Faraday bag. This envelope-like wallet blocks all signals into or out of the pouch, preventing the phone from snitching on you. Be aware that if you take the phone out of the pouch it will resume announcing its position until it is put away again. These pouches are cheap ($20 or so) and readily available online – look them up.

• Avoid using a car having GPS or satellite radio. A car with GPS map navigation, or satellite radio, knows where you are. The location is presumably recorded, as with a cell phone. If you want to travel without being tracked, you’ll have to find ways to disable this communication. If you’re carrying a portable device, such as that from Garmin, then disconnect its battery. If the GPS or satellite radio is built in, perhaps you can disconnect the antennas (which might also disable your radio). You could also try adding a GPS jammer to your car, to overwhelm the car’s own GPS antennas.

When you centralize your communications you get easy, one-stop shopping for news, etc. You are also easily controlled. Pay the costs of diversification to preserve your own uncensored communications. By doing this you might even play a part in monopoly busting.

Continue transforming the world for Christ

Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like yeast, affecting every corner of society (Matthew 13:33). Through our obedience to God, how we live, our relationships, and the standards we insist on, God’s church spreads throughout society and transforms it. We’re not in a lifeboat awaiting salvation, we’re of the Great Commission, making disciples of all the nations (Matthew 28:19-20). In the face of all trials, continue being the transforming yeast God wants us to be.[xlix]

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Regardless of what black Americans think, the police departments that protect and serve their communities should be defunded immediately. At least that is the latest propaganda being peddled in a bizarre new campaign by the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a radical organization literally founded by members of the Communist Party USA.

According to the ACLU’s new campaign, American police are and always have been racist yahoos brutally oppressing minority communities. Reforms, investigations, firings, and other policy changes will not suffice. Instead, America’s thousands of local police departments must be defunded as soon as possible, with the “savings” being “invested” into priorities established by the ACLU.

In a series of videos purporting to document the last “100 years of history” surrounding policing in America, the far-left group argues that “policing still acts as an occupying force in communities of color.” And so, instead of public funding for police to investigate, punish, and prevent crime, that money should go to “black and brown communities,” the organization said.

A petition that goes with the campaign, which has been signed by almost 150,000 people as of this writing, displays hatred and dishonesty toward America’s police officers — many of whom put their lives on the line to protect their communities. And yet, from the ACLU’s rhetoric, American cops might as well be a pack of wild invaders led by Genghis Khan.

“The policing institutions in our country are deeply entrenched in racism and brutality, and we cannot allow it to continue,” the petition reads. “These inherently systemic issues require immediate and permanent solutions. That requires a bold reimagining of the role police play in our society: It is time to divest from law enforcement and reinvest in the Black and Brown communities [sic] they unjustly target.”

As usual, “defunding police” hysteria by guilt-ridden white liberals and agenda-driven hate-mongers such as those running the ACLU is portrayed as merely a benevolent effort to “help” black people who supposedly cannot help themselves. The narrative is very much akin to liberal campaigns to “save the whales” or “save the baby seals.”

Ironically, though, polling data show that black Americans are overwhelming against defunding the police departments that protect their communities from violent criminals. In fact, according to a Gallup survey released in August 2020 — right at the height of the media and “Black Lives Matter” demonization campaign against supposedly “racist” police — more than eight in ten black Americans wanted the same or a greater police presence.

In short, despite its supposed devotion to “democracy,” the ACLU’s radical agenda to defund police would require ignoring the wishes of the very black Americans it pretends to be concerned about. In fact, the scheme would require that a tiny, fringe minority of radicals be allowed to impose unpopular policy on the rest of the community using undemocratic means.

The ACLU’s “sweeping three-part formula” includes, among other elements, handcuffing the police, “prohibiting” them from enforcing laws against crimes that the ACLU determines are “non-dangerous” using fines or arrest. The money saved by eviscerating police will be “reinvested” into unspecified “alternatives to policing” that will supposedly help communities “thrive.”

Finally, for those “rare instances in which police officers do interact with community members” under the new policing regime, the ACLU proposes to implement “common-sense, iron-clad legal constraints” against police and “protections” for those law-enforcement interacts with. Of course, the U.S. Constitution and all 50 state constitutions already contain such protections.

To advance its dangerous anti-police narrative, the ACLU uses deception, lies, and half-truths. The very first video is based on a fraudulent narrative, painting Rodney King — a wife beater who pleaded guilty to armed robbery — as an innocent victim of racist cops. The fact that he charged at police while intoxicated after a dangerous high-speed chase reaching almost 120 mph is never mentioned.

Even the quote from the official LA commission report about the incident is used in a deceptive manner. When the narrator cited the commission’s mention of “racism and bias within the Los Angeles Police Department,” he failed mention that it was based on a survey that found just one fourth of officers in the department thought racism or bias existed at all in the department. In other words, more than 75 percent of officers did not believe racism existed.

But this was never about racism. The communist movement in the United States — backed for generations by the mass-murdering regime enslaving the Soviet Union — has been waging war on American police for almost a century now. In fact, in an official 1961 report headlined “Communist Plot Against the Free World Police,” the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate outlined the nature of the threat.

Among other concerns, it was revealed that communist agents across the West were working to undermine local police so that law-enforcement could be nationalized and federalized. Communists directed by Soviet intelligence had a special focus on the United States. The Judiciary Committee also detailed some of the methods, including formation of mobs to attack police and then demonizing the officers.

Considering the history of the ACLU, its latest salvo in its war on America’s police should come as no surprise. Among the charter members of the ACLU at its founding were numerous senior Communist Party officials including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Louis Budenz, and even eventual Communist Party USA General-Secretary William Z. Foster.

ACLU Executive Director Roger Baldwin, who led the group from 1920 to 1950 and visited the USSR twice, was proud of his communist leanings. “I am for socialism,” he famously wrote. “I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal…. I don’t regret being part of the communist tactic. I knew what I was doing. I was not an innocent liberal.”

American officials have known this for decades. In 1948, the California Senate Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities released a report on it. “The ACLU may be definitely classified as a Communist front or transmission belt organization,” the committee said on page 107 of its 1948 report. “At least 90 percent of its efforts are on behalf of Communists who come in conflict with the law.”

Stripping American communities of their police forces would be a recipe for chaos, especially in minority communities. But the American people, including black Americans, have made it abundantly clear that they are vehemently opposed to such an idiotic plan.

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No matter what you think of Trump’s character or rhetoric (I’ve never been a fan of either), his presidency accomplished many great things for America, perhaps chief among them getting the left—especially Big Tech—to expose its purulent underbelly. The real power today rests in the delicate fingers of the tech Oligarchs sitting behind their screens moving walls to trap Americans in their prison-like mazes equipped with virtual solitary confinement cells and freedom-crushing language rules euphemistically called “community standards” and “policies.” Trump was the immovable force that stood for a brief moment in their way.

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Before you read this, you might want to have a fire extinguisher at the ready, because this news just may light your hair on fire.

State Representative La Shawn K. Ford (D-Chicago) held a press conference on Sunday in which he called for all Illinois schools to cease teaching history because he’s “Concerned that current school history teaching leads to white privilege and a racist society.”

In a press release titled a “Call for the Abolishment of History Classes in Illinois Schools,” Ford proclaimed from his high horse,

When it comes to teaching history in Illinois, we need to end the miseducation of Illinoisans. I’m calling on the Illinois State Board of Education and local school districts to take immediate action by removing current history books and curriculum practices that unfairly communicate our history. Until a suitable alternative is developed, we should instead devote greater attention toward civics and ensuring students understand our democratic processes and how they can be involved. 

Has Ford created and made public the criteria that would be used to evaluate the fairness of “history books and curriculum practices,” or does he just presume that all current history books and curriculum practices communicate history “unfairly”?

The press release announced that speakers would discuss “how current history teaching practices overlook the contributions by Women and members of the Black, Jewish, LGBTQ communities and other groups.” Take note of the implicitly racist bias in Ford’s press release that capitalized “Black” while not capitalizing “white.” Yes, persons of Color can be as racist as Colorless people.

Here’s a translation of Ford’s rhetoric: Ford wants schools to cancel all history classes until all textbooks can be reviewed by Big Brother to determine if they are sufficiently woke (i.e., leftist/revisionist) in their treatment of properly melanated persons, women (i.e., persons with DNA-determined vaginas), homosexuals, and opposite-sex impersonators. In the meantime, Ford proposes teaching “civics,” focusing on presenting BLM and Antifa riots as constitutionally protected intensely peaceful assemblies.

In the early stages of the pandemic, when most Americans were fretting about the Chinese Communist virus, leftists were hatching plans on how to weasel the widely criticized New York Times revisionist 1619 Project into Illinois public schools.

To achieve that goal, Ford first proposed the silly partisan bill HB 4954 to add yet more “commemorative holidays” to the school calendar and mandate the teaching of the Civil Rights Movement, which is already taught in schools everywhere.

Then just two weeks later, Ford, who in 2012 was charged “with eight counts of bank fraud and nine counts of submitting false information to the bank in a 17-count indictment,” filed an even more partisan and dangerous amendment that would require the following:

“The study of the pre-enslavement history of Black people from 3,000 BCE to AD 1619, including instruction about ancient civilizations, kingdoms, kings, queens, and warriors; their contributions to medicine, literature, technology, architecture, and economics; and their achievements,” and “The study of the reasons why Black people came to be enslaved.”

The amendment was the brainchild of community activist Meleika Gardner who also wrote the amendment.

According to Scene Chicago, Gardner attributes the murders of “her father, a stepfather, her nephew, and several friends to gun violence due to systemic racism,” which she seeks to eradicate through school indoctrination. I’m unable to find, however, any identification by Gardner of the systemically racist acts that allegedly killed her loved ones or explaining exactly how these racist acts killed them. It seems, for example, that her nephew, Xavier Joy, was the tragic victim of robbery in Woodlawn, a neighborhood on the South Side that is 98 percent black. Maybe some intrepid reporter will ask Gardner for some specific details on how systemic racism killed her friends and relatives.

Ford and Gardner were joined at the press conference by their collaborator, Evanston alderman Robin Rue Simmons, who tied the amendment that would mandate yet more leftist propaganda in government schools to both slave reparations and the riots destroying America:

Simmons, who has spearheaded the push for reparations in Evanston, called education “a key piece of what repair looks like.” Acknowledging the recent Black Lives Matter protests and nationwide “awakening” to the oppression black people face, she said “now is the time” to fight for this bill.

The collaborators know that it would be infinitely easier to get brown, yellow, red, and white Americans who have never owned slaves to support paying reparations to blacks who never were slaves if these Americans have been propagandized.

Ford, a former history teacher in Chicago Public Schools, made this jaw-dropping statement to Fox News:

We know that the history books that we have were written years ago, decades ago, centuries ago by pretty much one group of people, and that’s white men.

Does Ford think teachers are today using textbooks written centuries ago? Is he so racist that he thinks white people can’t write about historical events involving black people? Does he believe black people are similarly incapable of writing about historical events involving white people? I guess we should be glad Ford is no longer in the classroom.

Ford’s policies are likely shaped more by his desire for political power in a leftist city than by principle. When running for mayor in 2019, Ford was asked by the homosexual newspaper Windy City Times if he has any “experience working in LGBTQ-related issues.” Ford, who pretends to be Catholic while supporting abortion and issues related to homosexuality, acknowledged that his lesbian sister is a “strong adviser on issues.”

If this Trojan horse filled with 1619 Project swamp gas looks like it’s going to pass in the Springfield swamp, some good conservatives should file an amendment that would require a complete history of slavery throughout the world to be taught and would require that all resources used in history classes be ideologically balanced between conservative and leftist. So, if resources by 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones are used, then equal time must be spent studying resources by Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and John McWhorter.

Let’s make sure Illinois children know that between 1501-1866, more enslaved Africans went to Brazil/Portugal (5,848,266), Great Britain (3,259,441), France (1,381,404), Spain/Uruguay (1,061,524), and the Netherlands (554,336) than the United States (305,326), and that “Less than one-quarter of white Southerners held slaves,” and that it is estimated that “3,776 free Negroes” owned slaves.

And let’s make sure they study the work of prolific black scholar Thomas Sowell who writes that,

Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18^th century. People of every race and color were enslaved—and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed. Everyone hated the idea of being a slave but few had any qualms about enslaving others.

Sowell further points out the hypocrisy of leftists on slavery:

The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves picking cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to Roots, and our schools and colleges don’t pound it into the heads of students.

Sowell offers a corrective to the myopic perspective offered by America-hating leftists—a corrective of which students should be made aware:

The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of “our society” or the sins of a particular race.

If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilization, it is that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery, including in some cases armed resistance. Only the fact that the West had more firepower than others put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. …

Every American should be troubled by the goals of leftist demagogues and censors in government schools. Sowell makes clear that they are not interested in ascertaining truth but, rather, they seek to distort children’s understanding of America for power and money:

It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.

Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.

Why did Ford collude with other leftists to concoct this amendment? Leftists understand that it’s easier to forge 15-year-olds into good leftist foot soldiers than it is to forge 25-year-olds and easier still to squeeze malleable 5-year-olds into desired shapes by plunking them into government Play-Doh molds. Leftists want to prevent freethinkers who may later become incorrigibly resistant to leftist dogma and then have to be cancelled.

Conservatives best get their kids out of government indoctrination centers and re-education camps pronto. Leftists are not winning the culture war by the persuasive force and rationality of their ideas but by indoctrination and intimidation.

The Orwellian anti-freedom sharks smell and taste the blood of conservatives in the water. Every day that conservatives choose fear over courage, capitulation over resistance, and silence over bold dissent, they sacrifice the future freedom of their children for one more hour of uneasy peace.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to contact your state lawmakers and urge them to vote no on both HB 4954 and Rep. La Shawn Ford’s amendment, which would politicize the teaching of history in Illinois schools and foment more division.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Leftist-Lawmakers-and-Activists-Call-for-the-Cancellation-of-All-History-Classes_audio.mp3

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On July 10 at Walled Lake Western High School in Michigan, popular teacher Justin Kucera who taught AP World History and coached varsity baseball and basketball and who by all accounts never brought his politics into his teaching or coaching was fired for tweeting, “I’m done being silent. Donald Trump is our president.” Meanwhile,

Paulette Loe, a now-retired Walled Lake Western teacher, encouraged students to read an article from the Atlantic about “how to beat Trump” while still employed. Nicole Estes, a kindergarten teacher in the district, called Trump a “sociopath” and a “narcissist” on Facebook in 2016 and is still employed at Keith Elementary School [also in Walled Lake Consolidated school district].

It should be unbelievable that a teacher could be fired from a government school for expressing his support for a sitting president while indoctrinators are free to bring their politics into the classroom regularly with no fear of retribution. Sadly, this is now the new normal.

Twelve years ago when I was a member of the English Department at Deerfield High School on Chicago’s North Shore working full-time in the writing center, teachers Elliott Hurtig and Jeff Berger-White were teaching the repugnant play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and Hurtig was also teaching the historically inaccurate Laramie Project, both plays of which espoused politically “progressive,” morally regressive views of homosexuality.

Setting aside the egregious obscenity in Angels in America, I discussed with a purportedly Catholic writing center colleague the ethical problem of teachers presenting resources from only one side of the debate on this most controversial cultural issue. I made the case that in an educational environment, teachers have an obligation to present resources from opposing voices as well. She responded that because she was absolutely sure opposing voices—that is, conservative voices—were wrong, they shouldn’t be allowed to be presented to students.

This is the kind of presumptuousness that has long poisoned education in America from elementary schools through colleges and universities, and has created a dissolute and destructive culture. Leftists demand absolute autonomy and arrogate to themselves the right to indoctrinate other people’s children because they have unilaterally concluded that their political and moral beliefs are objectively true, and opposing views are false. From kindergarten on up, leftists are indoctrinating other people’s children with their arguable leftist beliefs on homosexuality, opposite-sex impersonation, race, sex, American history, and presidential politics with no negative repercussions.

In his essay “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mills presciently warns about the very arrogance infecting today’s “educators” hell-bent on imposing their beliefs on vulnerable, ideologically malleable students:

The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. … People are accustomed to believe, and have been encouraged in the belief …  that their feelings … are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary. The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct, is the feeling in each person’s mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathises, would like them to act. No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person’s preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people’s liking instead of one. … his own preference … is not only a perfectly satisfactory reason, but the only one he generally has for any of his notions of morality, taste, or propriety.

In a recent appearance on Mark Levin’s program Life, Liberty & Levin, Dr. John Ellis, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, chairman of the California Association of Scholars, and author of Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities and The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done discussed the root cause of the cultural “shout downs” and riots:

The real problem is way behind the scenes in the classrooms, which the public never sees. … you’ve had a very long campaign of converting the universities into one party campuses. If you go back 50 years … there were 3 left-of-center professors to 2 right-of-center professors. … that’s consistent with a very healthy debate between the left and the right on campus. But by … 1999, a study shows 5 to 1. … By another five to six years later, it’s gone to 8 to 1, and the current studies … coming out now, it’s something like 13 to 1. There’s every reason to believe that that’s getting more extreme all the time because one of these studies looks to the junior ranks—assistant professors, associate professors—and found that the ratio there, left to right, is 48 to 1.  … The hiring being done now is at the rate of about 50 to 1. … So, you’re going to wind up with a complete monoculture within a short period of time. And a one-party campus is a campus that’s dysfunctional. …

The campus is so far left and so irrational now, and it’s leftism that is poisoning the culture. One profession after another is being essentially corrupted. … It’s totally poisoned journalism. It’s poisoned the teaching in the high schools because the high school teachers are all trained on college campuses

Ellis also suggests that parents who continue to send their children to colleges and universities that are in the business of poisoning culture are part of the problem:

Parents have a very fixed attitude, derived from the past, that sending their kids to college is a first rate way to launch them into a life and a career, and then there’s the fact that those great names of the institutions of higher learning of Harvard, Yale, Columbia … are very, very impressive. It casts a kind of spell over the public. They really cannot believe … that what was so glorious is now in fact no longer there.

Conservatives often ask what they can do to help restore health to our ailing culture. Here’s one thing they can do: Don’t send their children to colleges and universities that have “monocultures,” and through those monocultures, poison culture.

Stop being impressed by the worldly accolades poured on the polluted Ivies that now oppose their original mission statements, mottos, logos, and seals. Harvard long ago rejected its original mission statement:

Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.

The Princeton University shield once depicted an open Bible inscribed with “VET NOV TESTAMENTUM,” that signified the Old and New Testaments; a ribbon above the Bible that said, “VITAM MORTUIS REDDO,” which means, “I restore life to the dead”; and a ribbon below the shield with the words “DEI SUB NUMINE VIGET,” which mean, “Under God’s power she flourishes.” Such expressions today would be an embarrassment to the faculty and a trigger to most students.

Dartmouth College’s original motto was “VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO,” which is translated as “A voice crying out in the wilderness,” an allusion to Scripture about preparing the world for Christ. Ironically, Dartmouth is now a cacophonous voice creating wilderness out of the semi-tamed culture Christianity created.

When teachers and college professors preach their leftist sermons in schools, not only do they indoctrinate, but they also leave dissenters at the mercy of social tyrants. In other words, government school preachers and college professors fuel bullying. In “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mills writes,

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first … chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

You know there’s a problem when a left-leaning site like the satirical website the Onion skewers the close-minded propaganda that leftists identify as “education” as it did in a post titled “College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea”:

As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion. … Whether it’s a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.(emphasis added for fun).

Leftists are fond of saying that free speech does not guarantee freedom from consequences. They fail to acknowledge that if those consequences are loss of employment, First Amendment speech protections are, in effect, nullified. And we all know, leftists couldn’t care less.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Education-in-a-Pro-Propaganda-Culture_podcast_01.mp3

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Written by Ryan P. Burge, Eastern Illinois University

It’s become almost a trope at this point among people who study and write about American religion and politics – evangelicals punch way above their weight. Their voter turnout has stayed relatively steady despite their drop in population share. But, I was working through some data today and noticed something that I don’t think that I’ve seen reported on much – atheists are incredibly politically active – more so than any other religious group.

The Cooperative Congressional Election Survey asks a series of questions about political activity in the last 12 months. Respondents simply answer yes or no to each of the six. Here are the results from the 2018 data.

In all six scenarios, atheists are right near the top in likelihood to participate. A quarter attended a march or protest compared to just 4.4% of white evangelicals. Four in ten atheists have contacted a public official or donated money to a candidate. That’s tied with Jews, but is much higher than most Christian groups in the sample. Agnostics are not far behind, either. They usually trail atheists but just a few percentage points for each of the political actions.

I know that atheists have high levels of income and about 45% have a four-year college degree, so SES might explain one of the reasons that they are so politically active. So I put together a simple model with a few controls for race, gender, and age.

At every level on the education spectrum, atheists and agnostics are more politically active than Protestants or Catholics. More education leads to higher levels of political activity among all religious groups, but the relationship is even stronger for atheists than other groups. An atheist with a graduate degree participated in 2.1 political activities in the last year. It was 1.8 activities for agnostics. For Catholics and Protestants it’s between 1.3 and 1.4 activities. That’s not a small difference.

But, are atheists just generally more politically engaged – or is it a function of the fact that many of them align with the Democratic Party? To test that I ran another model that divided each of the four religious groups up into Democrats and Republicans. Clearly partisanship accelerates political activity much more for Democrats than those who affiliate with the GOP. This conjures a bevy of questions: has the Republican Party become anathema to educated voters? Have the GOP failed to target educated voters in a meaningful way? Is this a function of the geographic polarization that is happening across the country? These questions are of tremendous importance to electoral politics.

If you look at just those with high school diplomas in each of the four traditions, Democrats are more likely to engage in political acts than Republicans. Sometimes, much more so. For instance, an atheist with a graduate degree who is a Democrat engages in twice as many political activities in a year compared to a Republican atheist. For Protestants, it’s just half a political activity. However, an atheist who affiliates with the Republican Party is no more likely to engage in politicking than any other religious tradition. So, while being a Democrat does prove as a spur for political activity, having high levels of education has a multiplicative effect.

So, why did Democrats engage in politics at much higher rates than Republicans in 2018? Well, when your party is in the minority in both the House and the Senate and does not hold the White House, that can serve as good motivation to get out there and try to win one chamber back. And, you can see that in the data, too. I calculated the total number of political activities for the four religious groups going back to 2010 – and something fascinating happened in 2018.

In 2016, an atheist engaged in 1.45 activities compared to 1.4 for an agnostic. Christians were slightly lower at 1.28. But, by 2018 the landscape had changed. Both Protestants and Catholics saw a tremendous decline down to .90 or .95 actions. For agnostics, there was no statistically significant change. But for atheists, there was a noticeable uptick to 1.58. The gap between Christians and atheists is huge now, with atheists about ten percent more politically engaged in 2018.

This could be one of the reasons that the Blue Wave happened in 2018 – a very agitated base of atheists who got politically involved. But, here’s a bit of caution I would urge – while atheists are often identified with the Democratic party, they have a fair amount of political homogeneity. In 2018, 77.3% identified as Democrats, 11.7% were independents, and 10.9% were Republicans. That’s a solid core, but there is some diversity there. For comparison, 73% of white evangelicals are Republicans. White evangelicals make up 15.6% of the population, atheists and agnostics combined are 11.4%. With that level of political activity, it’s fair to say that these nones might be a bigger political force in the next presidential election than we give them credit for – they just have to stay angry and stay engaged.

Ryan P. Burge teaches at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. He can be contacted via Twitter or his personal website. The syntax for this post can be found here.

This article originally posted at ReligionInPublic.blog

Despite the clever marketing and the dishonest media propaganda surrounding the group, Black Lives Matter is not actually about black lives or racism. Instead, it is a dangerous organization founded by self-proclaimed Marxists that seeks to dismantle the nuclear family and the market system. If BLM gets its way, black Americans and everyone else will suffer enormously.

One does not need to dig deep to learn the truth about Black Lives Matter. In fact, BLM leaders brag about it. “We are trained Marxists,” boasted BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors speaking about the group’s “ideological frame” in an interview with The Real News Network. “We are super, uh, versed, um, on, sort of, ideological theories.”

Another BLM co-founder, self-proclaimed “queer” feminist Alicia Garza, cited convicted cop-killing terrorist Assata Shakur as the inspiration for the group. “When I use Assata’s powerful demand in my organizing work, I always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing about Assata’s significance to the Black Liberation Movement,” Garza explained in a piece about the origins of BLM.

The organization itself also openly promotes Marxism in its public statements. For instance, while BLM routinely paints Trump as a racist dictator, it has a bizarre affinity for the late mass-murdering Communist dictator who enslaved Cuba, Fidel Castro. When he died, BLM expressed an “overwhelming sense of loss,” praising “El Commandante” for protecting Shakur, “who continues to inspire us.”

On its website, under the headline “What We Believe,” BLM hits all the Marxist talking points — especially the modern gender-bending LGBT extremism that seeks to smash the family. “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” the statement of beliefs explains, calling for “villages” to take charge of child rearing. The group also boasts of fostering a “queer-affirming network” that will “dismantle cisgender privilege.”

Despite the unhinged extremism, or perhaps because of it, Black Lives Matter now has an incredible array of corporate sponsors that includes some of America’s biggest businesses. Even before BLM came together as a formal organization, powerful financiers including billionaire atheist George Soros, who has a bizarre affinity for the murderous regime ruling Communist China, were pouring money into the movement.

In a 2015 report from Open Society Foundation U.S. Programs Board, the Soros machine boasts of spending $650,000 to “invest in technical assistance and support for the groups at the core of the burgeoning #BlackLivesMatter movement.” The goals included the “dismantling of structural inequality” supposedly caused by “local law enforcement,” and also to “create a national movement.”

According to an investigation by the Washington Times that relied on Soros foundations’ tax filings and interviews with key players, the far-left billionaire poured some $33 million in one year into organizations fomenting the unrest surrounding the killing of Michael Brown. The Marxist co-founders of BLM were also working closely with Soros-funded groups before founding BLM.

In addition to Big Business and major foundations such as the Ford Foundation and Borealis, even the Russian regime appears to have had a hand in backing BLM. According to CNN, which admittedly is not a reliable source, a Kremlin-controlled “troll farm” bought BLM ads aimed at Baltimore and Ferguson. The goal was to sow discord and chaos in the United States, CNN “intelligence” sources said.

In short, despite being funded by America’s premier “capitalist” corporations and money men, the BLM is a Marxist organization hostile to all that is good about America, and it does not even bother to hide that fact. Incredibly, due primarily to ignorance among leaders, even many churches and pastors have jumped on the bandwagon, discrediting their witness and supporting an organization that is anti-Christian to the core.

Indeed, Marxism is not just incompatible with Christianity — it is basically its antithesis. Where God commands respect for private property rights with “thou shalt not steal,” Marxism claims private property should be abolished. Where God established the nuclear family with a father, mother, and children, Marxism calls for women to be held in common. Marxism turns biblical principles upside-down.

In the book Marx and Satan, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who was tortured for almost a decade by Marxist barbarians in a Romanian prison, uses Marx’s own poetry and writings to make a powerful case that the ideologue was not an atheist, as is commonly believed. Rather, according to Wurmbrand, Marx hated God and was on a demonic mission to destroy mankind and all that God has ordained.

If Black Lives Matter were truly interested in dismantling anything with a “legacy” of racism and white supremacy, it might start by targeting the Democratic Party. As documented at Illinois Family Action last month, the party has a long and grotesque history of supporting slavery and racial terrorism in the face of America’s constant efforts to better itself — efforts that were unprecedented in human history to advance the biblical ideal that “all men are created equal.”

Another natural target, if BLM was really hoping to stop racism, would be Planned Parenthood, the tax-funded abortion behemoth founded by Margaret Sanger, a vile racist and eugenicist who sought to remove “undesirables” from the gene pool. Still today, Planned Parenthood sets up shop in minority neighborhoods and slaughters unborn black babies by the millions, far out of proportion to the number of black Americans in the population.

Instead of focusing on those legitimate targets, or on the destroyers of the black family, the BLM focuses on undermining the family, the free-market, and the United States itself. That should tell everyone everything they need to know about what is happening. Worse, the establishment media knows everything contained in this article. And yet they choose to conceal these facts from Americans.

This is a war on America and Christianity, and most Americans and Christians still don’t have a clue.

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The President of the United States and America’s most popular talk-show host both blasted the public-school system for indoctrinating U.S. children with anti-American propaganda. The mayhem and destruction being seen in the streets right now, they explained, is a direct result of this subversive indoctrination masquerading as education.

Both leaders agreed: The deadly lies being taught to children in government schools across America must end if the nation is to be salvaged. And Trump, at least, seemed confident that the days of “far-left fascism” running rampant in America’s schools an culture were numbered. Limbaugh also said the brainwashing would have to be reversed.

By speaking out, the dynamic duo — two of the most influential men not just in America, but in the world — just gave a major boost to the American public’s understanding about the root of so many of the nation’s problems. As doctors understand well, having an accurate diagnosis is key to finding a cure.

However, even though both men have called for Americans to save their own children from government schools (or at least “failing government schools,” as Trump put it earlier this year), neither leader spent much time on actual mechanics for a solution. Still, just talking about it at the national level is a crucial start to eventually getting a solution.

Speaking at Mount Rushmore on July 3 in honor of America’s Independence Day, Trump put it this way: “The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions.”

He was right, of course, as FreedomProject Media has been documenting for years. Trump also delved into the nature of that brainwashing. “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that they were villains,” he said, adding that the goal was to destroy America.

Responding to the fact that there are still a significant number of Americans who believe the fake-media narrative, talk-radio titan Limbaugh, who reaches an estimated 15 million listeners per day, was even bolder. He said on air after Trump’s speech that the reason for the ignorance and anti-American hatred was simple: Government-school indoctrination by radical leftists.

“We’ve lost teachers. We have lost public education, not to mention academe. We have lost higher education,” Limbaugh said. “We have a bunch of left-wing activists disguised as teachers who have literally been, for almost two generations now, poisoning with hatred and vile racism the innocent, young-skulls-full-of-mush students who show up in their classrooms — and that’s what we’re gonna have to reverse ultimately.”

Limbaugh spoke out again on July 8, saying the nation’s problems could be traced back to the indoctrination of children (and future journalists) in government schools. And last year, he declared that one of the answers to the crisis was homeschooling and removing children from public schools. Numerous other top leaders have made similar pleas.

In his 2020 State of the Union speech, Trump called for saving children from what he described as “failing government schools.” And on the campaign trail in 2016, he blasted the “indoctrination” of America’s youth by “progressive” bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Education. This is major progress in exposing the crucial problem facing America.

When some of the most powerful men in the world speak the truth clearly and passionately about the threat of government-school indoctrination to children and the nation, millions of people listen. A mass exodus from the public schools has begun. Already, the North Carolina state website to register for homeschooling has crashed due to exploding demand amid coronavirus.

Perhaps it is not too late to save America after all.

This article originally posted at FreedomProject.com

In a cowardly effort to lick the jackboots of Black Lives Matter, the NFL is reportedly going to have every NFL game during Week 1 open with the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” long known as the “black national anthem,” followed by the American national anthem, the “Star-Spangled Banner.” According to the Associated Press, the NFL is also “considering putting names of victims of police brutality on helmet decals or jersey patches.” (Maybe the NFL wants to tackle another serious societal problem and allow players to put the names of victims of domestic abuse committed by professional athletes on their helmets or jerseys. #LogInTheirEye)

African American James Weldon Johnson wrote the lyrics to “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” in 1899, and his brother John Rosamund Johnson composed the music. It was first performed by 500 black students at a segregated school on the occasion of Abraham Lincoln‘s birthday. In 1919, the NAACP adopted it as their official song. It is a moving and inspiring hymn to God, deeply meaningful to the black community. But is it an appropriate song for sporting events that bring together diverse peoples from all over the world for some diversionary entertainment?

Is a song that emerged from and reminds listeners of the most grievous historical sin of this great country a fitting song to start an event that is intended to entertain? And why now? Why when racial discrimination is at historic lows should we use sporting events for this purpose? When slavery and Jim Crow laws are long gone; when we have had a black president; when we have black congressmen and congresswomen; when we have blacks serving and performing at the highest levels of every institution and profession in the country; and when we have interracial children, families, churches, and friend groups, why begin a diversionary bit of entertainment with a song about the “blood of the slaughtered” blacks killed by whites?

Of what other historical sins or political causes should we use sporting events to remind attendees? How about a Chinese anthem reminding Americans of their treatment when they built the transcontinental railway? How about a song at the start of entertainment events reminding Americans about the internment of the Japanese during WWII? How about reminding Americans at sporting events of the anti-Semitism that has percolated throughout American history? How about a song reminding Americans about the ongoing slaughter of the unborn? How about a song about the grievous and systemic/institutional injustice done to children by divorce and/or their fathers’ abandonment?

Sin and injustice mar the story of every country and institution that has ever existed because sin is the state of man. But America has been a marvel in the annals of history as a place in which racial, ethnic, and religious diversity can flourish. That’s why emigrants from around the world continue to come.

Our national anthem should be one like the third verse of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” (a verse that leftists likely detest) that places God first in leading us to a better place—a place in which we judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It should express the foundational principle that we are all created by God and endowed by Him with unalienable rights and that out of many, we become one as American citizens. I’d say this does the job quite nicely:

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
…
O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto – “In God is our trust,”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

If the NFL pursues this controversial political act—an act which will result in yet more lost revenue—let’s pray the third verse of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” is sung to Lord:

God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee
Shadowed beneath Thy hand
May we forever stand
True to our God
True to our native land

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/The-NFL-and-the-Black-National-Anthem_audio.mp3

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It’s easy to look around at everything taking place in our nation today and get discouraged.

The coronavirus and related economic impact are lingering into the summer. Some states are experiencing record numbers of new cases, suggesting the fight could continue for some time.

The George Floyd killing and its aftermath have brought racial issues in America to the foreground once again. Although America has done a lot to move beyond the problems of our past in relation to race, there’s undoubtedly more that can be done. But we’ve also seen the unfortunate truth that some elements in our society will exploit such tragedies for their own purposes.

On top of that, we’re in the middle of an election year in which some of us see no good choices, at least at the top of the ticket. I know that’s a controversial statement to make, but for those who are concerned about both policies and personal character, both choices leave much to be desired.

As I said, paying attention to the news these days can be a recipe for discouragement if we’re not careful.

Where does all of this leave us as God’s people living in troubled and changing times?

First, I think it’s important to remember what hasn’t changed. Amidst all the upheaval, God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The word of God still stands. The promises of God are still as reliable as ever. The blood of Jesus still saves.

No matter what happens around us, it’s good to know that our God is still faithful and we can still turn to Him as our ever present help in times of trouble.

Our calling also hasn’t changed. As God’s people, we have two fundamental responsibilities that are true for every child of God.

First, we’re all called to walk faithfully with God in an ever-deepening relationship with Him. That stays the same regardless of our external circumstances.

Second, we’re called to be fruitful in good works. This can include anything from sharing the gospel with the lost, to delivering a meal to a shut-in, to mowing an elderly neighbor’s lawn, to volunteering at a soup kitchen, to raising our own children for Christ, to a thousand other possibilities. Times change, but God’s people are always called to love and serve others.

Putting these two callings another way, we’re to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Those are the universal commands that apply to all of us at all points in history, good or bad.

There’s no doubt that we live in complicated times with some complicated issues to examine. How God’s people interact with those issues and how we work to solve problems within our culture are questions we’ll most likely all need to wrestle with at one level or another.

But I’d like to draw our attention (mine included) to one more truth that is unchanging: this earth is not our ultimate home. For those of us who have believed on Christ, we look forward to a better home. We look forward to a time when all the hurts and sufferings and injustices of this world will be put aside and we’ll live forever in a perfect place called heaven.

That doesn’t mean we don’t work to solve problems now. It doesn’t mean we don’t try to alleviate suffering, fight against injustice, and stand up for what’s right while we’re still inhabitants of this earth. Indeed, those things are part of loving God and our neighbor. But when the darkness seems more powerful than the light, when wrong seems to triumph over right, it’s good to be reminded that there is something beyond what we see and experience in this world cursed by sin. One day the curse will be removed and we’ll rejoice with Him forever.

For those of us who are interested in politics, it’s easy to look for political solutions to the problems of our times. And lest I be misunderstood, let me say that I think it’s appropriate for God’s people to be involved in government with a view toward enacting policies that honor God and allow His people to lead the quiet, peaceable lives Paul speaks of.

But if there’s one drawback to our representative form of government, it’s that once every four years, many of God’s people seem to forget Who is really in control and instead look to man for the answers. We think that if only such-and-such a candidate is elected, victory will be ours. The curse will be lifted and God’s kingdom will advance.

But let’s not forget where our true hope lies: not in the halls of governmental power, but in Jesus Christ.

I know it’s easier said than done when the headlines are filled with gloom, but let’s focus on loving God and loving our neighbor. Do the work God has called you to do, whatever that might be. Walk with God each day and be fruitful in good works.

And remember that Christ has won the victory.

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The ideology of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other “social justice” organizations teaches that all whites are racist oppressors, thereby justifying verbal attacks on people who are deemed inveterate racists and justifying riots to destroy everything that has emerged from an allegedly irremediable racist system. In promoting an explicitly racist ideology, BLM and other “social justice” organizations institutionalize racism, and we are suffering the fruits of that poisonous ideology.

In the hell-bent quest by America-hating revolutionaries to destroy America by destroying its institutions and history, 60 monuments have been removed, ordered removed, defaced, or torn down. In addition, according to Reinsurance News,

While no estimates of the costs of the damage is available yet, a look back at the costliest U.S. civil disorders shows that there’s potential for claims from the current riots, which are in multiple cities, to have easily run into the billions of dollars already.

Worse still, this BLM-led revolution has resulted in 25 deaths, hundreds of injuries—including injuries to 700 law enforcement officers—and the establishment of a rogue nation in the midst of downtown Seattle with the blessing of the incompetent mayor who called the squalid, uninhabitable, and dangerous encampment a free-love street festival.

The culture-destroyers are not done yet. Well-known racist activist Shaun King, whose purported racial identity and numerous fundraising projects are questioned by even leftists, recently tweeted,

Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.

and

All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. They are a gross form white supremacy. Created as tools of oppression. Racist propaganda. They should all come down.

BLM, with whom King was previously associated, is a destructive revolutionary group leading a Maoist-like cultural revolution, and many conservatives don’t seem to understand that. Those who support BLM and its skin-pigment-obsessed divisive, separatist, elitist ideology are de facto racists, no matter their skin color.

In National Review, Kyle Smith describes the white liberal BLM disciples as “the White-Guilt Cult”:

Amidst nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, a black man and woman are seated on a park bench while a white woman … takes to her megaphone. “We repent on behalf of, uh, Caucasian people,” she says. A small crowd of white people comes to kneel before the two seated black folks, who are co-pastors of a local church. Some of the kneelers wash the feet of the black people. … Several people start audibly weeping, or keening, as the speaker continues. Roughly a dozen people join in the gesture and kneel before the black couple. “We have put our necks, put our hands, our knees, upon the necks of our African-American brothers and sisters, people of color, indigenous people.” …

The original sin in the White Guilt Cult, the New Church of Anti-Racism, is to be, “uh, Caucasian people.” … If anything, the Great Awokening’s response to the George Floyd killing seems to be bolstering racial barriers rather than eradicating them. By making a religion of anti-racism, white people carry on with the longstanding project of “othering” black folks. … Take the principles of Woke in vain and you invite instantaneous ritual chastisement—the most thrilling, ecstatic element of the woke religion. The techno-narcissistic innovation of the Wokesters is that they have made themselves, as a collective, their own godhead, equipped with the authority to wield and unleash the thunderbolt of righteousness on blasphemers here and now, on their own authority. …

“White silence equals violence” is one new precept gaining currency. …  How exciting it must be to upend the meanings of words in service of the greater cause of smiting one’s perceived enemies, or even whatever suspected counterrevolutionaries there may be among one’s sworn allies. No one dared to be the first to stop applauding a Stalin speech. 

Even Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy has joined the anti-biblical white-guilt Cult, last week calling for white people to pay penance for sinful acts of racism that they never committed by shining the shoes of black people.

The ideology of BLM grows out of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is essentially repackaged socialism with its focus on economic redistribution. CRT like that espoused by BLM and scores of other organizations and ideologues emphasizes redistribution of wealth and values uniformity of economic and social position over liberty. Those whose worldview has been shaped by CRT–also known deceptively as “social justice warriors,” seek to use the force of government to establish economic uniformity.

CRT focuses on race, sex, class, “sexual orientation,” and “gender identity.” It encourages people to view the world through the divisive lens of identity politics, dividing groups into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Those who are identified as “oppressors” need not have committed any acts of actual persecution or oppression, nor feel any sense of superiority toward or dislike of the supposed “oppressed” class. CRT promotes the idea that “institutional racism,” as opposed to actual acts of mistreatment of individuals by other individuals, is the cause of differing lots in life.

“Social justice” activists cultivate the racist, sexist, heterophobic belief that whites (especially males and heterosexuals) are oppressors—a belief that robs minorities of a sense of agency in and responsibility for their own lives, telling them that their lots in life cannot improve through their own efforts but only through endless confessions of guilt on the parts of the purported oppressors. CRT cultivates a sense of perpetual victimization and powerlessness on the parts of minorities and an irrational and illegitimate sense of guilt on the parts of whites (or men or heterosexuals).

Finally, social justice theory is distinctly anti-American and hyper-focuses on America’s mistakes and failings. CRT diminishes or ignores the remarkable success America has achieved in integrating virtually every ethnic and racial group in the world and in enabling people to improve their lots in life through economic opportunity and American principles of liberty and equality.

Racism peddlers—including colorless racism-peddlers and profiteers like Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility—disseminate their cancerous ideology everywhere. Many Americans view our colleges and universities as the primary indoctrination centers, but they should look at government middle and high schools, because indoctrinating the next generation begins long before college.

Through “professional development”—which are the teacher training workshops, seminars, and conferences that take place during summer breaks, institute days, and late-arrival days—teachers are being coached and pressured by administrators and colleagues to adopt the beliefs of “anti-racism” and diversity trainers whose hefty fees are paid for by the public.

Teachers are forced to attend these indoctrination workshops, which never include resources or experts that challenge the assumptions of “anti-racism” trainers. Teachers are then expected to incorporate these revolutionary, leftist, and dubious beliefs into their classroom instruction. Our taxes are being used in government schools to teach children to hate America.

The predatory “anti-racism” scammers profit from peddling guilt to whites, shaming them into falsely believing—or pretending to believe—they are racists. The snake-oil salesmen and women do that in two ways. First, they redefine racism. Racism no longer refers to the belief that people with brown or black skin are by nature inferior. Nor does it refer to individual acts of incivility, unkindness, oppression, or violence. It refers to being white in a culture whose power structures used to be controlled by whites. Whites are guilty of racism and oppression based on nothing more than the color of their skin. This repugnant redefinition is the antithesis of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream for America. It is also unbiblical.

The second way snake-oil salespersons peddle their ugly wares is equally sneaky. They recast all criticism of or opposition to their ideology as something negative, thereby making those who disagree reluctant to express their opposition. Robin DiAngelo insultingly describes the denials of white-skinned people that they are racists as “white fragility.” Those whites who  aren’t racists don’t want to deny being racists because if they do, they’ll then be charged with non-existent white fragility on top of their non-existent racism.

When I worked at Deerfield High School, the district hired expensive racism huckster from California, Glenn Singleton, to teach District 113 employees about their racism. At his first lecture to the entire district, Singleton pre-classified his audience as falling into three categories according to their potential responses to his theories: The first group were those who would agree with him immediately. The second group were those who would be on the fence and need to be convinced. And the third group were those “who are gifted at subverting reform.” Singleton cunningly attempted to prevent criticism by pre-labeling pejoratively those who disagreed with him. This dishonest labeling tactic works because conservatives let it.

Organizations, resources, and profiteers that provide “anti-racism” propaganda to government schools are numerous, but here are some that taxpayers should watch out for:

• The 1619 Project—a much criticized revision of American history by the New York Times and racism-peddler/activist Nikole Hannah-Jones

• Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center

• Deep Equity

• White Privilege Conference

• Pacific Education Group/Courageous Conversation About Race—founder Glenn Singleton

• National SEED Project (Seeking Education Equity and Diversity)

• “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”—essay written by Peggy McIntosh

• The People’s History of the United States, a revisionist history written by Howard Zinn

It is not racist to criticize the loathsome and radical BLM that is explicitly committed to “disrupting ” the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure led by a father and mother, and to normalizing homosexuality and “trans”-cultic beliefs and practices. Such justifiable criticism does not become racist just because leftists shriek over and over and over that it is. Their epithet-hurling is not a magical incantation that turns truth into ugliness. It is a means of intimidation that leftists use all the time because conservatives quake and crumble in its wake.

Snap out of it, conservatives or you feed and strengthen the belching behemoth.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Fomenting-Racism-in-the-21st-Century_audio_01.mp3

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David Shestokas explains why our founding documents should pull America together, not separate us further.