You don’t have to be a climate scientist to know the ringleaders of the “climate change” bandwagon don’t truly believe the narrative they’re selling.

And it’s not just because they jet around the world in private jets to lecture you about your car and your hamburgers.

In fact, if the people at the top bought into the notion that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are really “pollution” producing a “climate crisis,” they would be doing exactly the opposite of what they’re actually doing.

Examining climate policy and communist China proves the point.

Consider the UN Paris Agreement. Negotiated at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in 2015, the global deal calls on national governments to make their own national pledges about what they force on their populations to combat the alleged “climate crisis.”

Under the deal, the Obama administration unilaterally pledged to slash CO2 emissions in the United States by more than 25 percent by 2025. This was to be imposed on Americans through executive orders and federal regulations to avoid involving Congress. Other Western governments made similar promises.

The Chinese communist regime, by contrast, was already emitting far more CO2 than the United States and now spews more than the entire Western world combined by far—and yet it pledged only to keep increasing its emissions for the next 15 years. Seriously.

In its submission to the UN (pdf), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agreed “to achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions around 2030.”

In other words, the regime proudly announced to the world that its CO2 output would continue to grow for at least 15 years, at which point nobody will even remember the Paris pledges.

When I asked members of the Chinese delegation for comment at the UN summit, instead of responding, they sent one of their minions to follow me around the conference and take pictures of me, something I promptly reported to UN security and the French police.

It’s a good thing for the CCP that nobody will remember its promises by 2030, because virtually every analyst who has looked at the regime’s coal-fired power-plant construction binge has acknowledged there’s no way its emissions will “peak” by 2030. Communist promises have never been worth the paper they’re printed on anyway, as history has shown.

The CCP wasn’t kidding about increasing its emissions, though: Beijing is currently bringing more coal-fired power plants online just between now and 2025 than the United States has in total.

According to Global Energy Monitor’s February 2021 briefing (pdf), the CCP built more than three times as much coal-power capacity as the rest of the world combined in 2020. And it already has about half of all the world’s coal power capacity, according to Global Energy Monitor’s “Boom and Bust 2020: Tracking the Global Coal Plant Pipeline.”

Already, China emits more than twice as much CO2 as the United States, according to data from the Global Carbon Project. Its emissions are rising meteorically even as U.S. emissions and emissions from other Western nations continue to plunge.

In 2021, Americans released about 5 billion tons of CO2, while China released about 11.5 billion. If current trends continue, the CCP may release more CO2 than the rest of the world combined in the not-too-distant future.

Think about this. If one was truly concerned about CO2 emissions producing “climate hell,” as world leaders claimed at the latest UN “climate” summit in Egypt that I attended, they would be panicking, not celebrating.

Moving Production

Again, all of the production being moved out of the West and into China will result in vastly more CO2 entering the atmosphere than if that production had remained in the United States, Canada, or Europe.

And yet, Western governments, tax-funded climate activists, UN leaders, and their media allies all celebrated and continue to celebrate the Paris Agreement and subsequent follow-ups as a huge success in saving the climate. Perhaps Donald Trump was on to something when, in 2012, he wrote on Twitter,

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

That’s exactly what happened, of course, as electricity rates got pushed higher and higher over time. In 1975, electricity was averaging around 3 cents per kilowatt hour, helping U.S. industry remain competitive globally. By 2010, thanks in part to Obama’s policies, it had tripled. And by 2021, it was approaching 15 cents.

For perspective, electricity prices in China are about half that.

There are many reasons for the shifting of production from the United States to China—many of them directly related to U.S. policy—but one key factor has been the cost of energy.

Yet higher energy prices were openly touted as a policy objective by Obama. As he made clear in a 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, “under my plan … electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

Later that year, he expressed similar sentiments as gas prices soared to around $4, saying only that he would have “preferred” a “gradual adjustment” instead.

Faced with higher labor costs and a tougher regulatory environment, American companies and entrepreneurs were already struggling to keep production in the United States amid a rigged global trading regime benefiting the CCP at America’s expense.

Soaring energy costs in many cases pushed firms over the edge, forcing them to shift production to China or shut down in the face of Chinese competition.

Again, if you truly believe CO2 is pollution, the worst possible outcome of “climate” negotiations would be to transfer even more production to China, where CO2 emissions per unit of economic production are massively higher.

But this is precisely the result of the much-celebrated UN “climate” process.

The shift into so-called “renewable energy” being engineered by the Biden administration and federal policymakers has been and will continue to be a huge boon to the CCP, too—and not just because it will force prices higher while making the U.S. energy grid more unstable.

Almost 80 percent of solar cells produced in 2019 were made in China, according to Bloomberg data (pdf). The CCP dominates production in the wind sector and battery industries as well. It also controls the supply chain for rare-earth materials needed to produce all of these “green energy” products.

The U.S. government, for its part, is offering massive subsidies to these CCP-dominated industrial sectors while forcing Americans into dependence on them through regulations, mandates, subsidies, and other policies. How this is supposed to help the environment is never made clear.

For some perspective on the economic carnage inflicted on America by Obama’s Paris scheme, which he claimed was an “executive agreement” and thus not subject to Senate ratification as required by the Constitution, the Heritage Foundation crunched the numbers in a 2016 study.

Among other findings, the conservative-leaning think tank said Obama’s Paris pledges would increase electricity costs for a family of four between 13 and 20 percent annually while vaporizing almost half a million jobs, including around 200,000 in manufacturing.

That damage translates to about $20,000 in lost income for American families by 2035 and a reduction in GDP of over $2.5 trillion.

Who Benefits?

Who benefits from all this? Certainly not the “climate.” Again, shipping U.S. industry to China will result in more CO2 in the atmosphere, not less. And in any case, based on the UN’s own debunked “models,” complete elimination of all U.S. CO2 emissions would result in virtually no reduction in global temperatures.

According to a peer-reviewed paper by Dr. Bjorn Lomborg published in the Global Policy Journal, even if all the significant pledges made in Paris were fulfilled, global temperatures would be just 0.05 degrees C (0.086 degrees F) cooler by 2100—a statistically insignificant rounding error.

The big winner, of course, was the CCP, which has been laughing all the way to the bank as it absorbs the factories, jobs, and wealth production that U.S. and other Western authorities are shutting down to “save the climate.”

This appears to be deliberate, as statements by leading officials in the Obama administration and the UN have made clear.

Obama’s “Science Czar” John Holdren openly advocated a de-industrialization of the United States in his 1973 book “Human Ecology.”

“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” Holdren and his co-authors wrote. “De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology.”

Then consider seemingly bizarre comments made by then-UN Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres.

Speaking to Bloomberg a few months after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed his unsettling admiration for the CCP, Figueres claimed that the regime in Beijing—overseeing about one third of global CO2 output—was “doing it right” on climate policy.

In separate comments while pushing for major climate policies, Figueres also suggested the goal of “climate” policy was really economic transformation.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said on Feb. 4, 2015.

Five years before those comments, one of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s top officials, Ottmar Edenhofer, revealed a similar agenda in comments to Germany’s NZZ Online.

“One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” he said. “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

Wealth redistribution? Changing the economic model of the world? De-developing the United States? And here Americans are being told this is about “saving the climate.”

Remember, too, that when Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement, climate alarmists from around the world declared that Beijing was the new global “leader” of the effort to save the climate—the same regime that oversees the most CO2 emissions, is building coal plants faster than they can be counted, and that promised to keep increasing CO2 emissions until 2030.

If this is really about saving the climate from CO2, how can the CCP be the new leader? It’s beyond absurd.

Despite all this, the Biden administration continues to intensify “cooperation” on “climate action” and the Paris Agreement with Beijing, no doubt causing amusement and joy among members of the CCP’s Politburo.

It’s not just China that benefits. In fact, congressional researchers discovered that state-backed Russian energy interests were funding U.S. “green” groups opposed to U.S. energy via a shell company in Bermuda called Klein Ltd.

The regime in Venezuela, too, is laughing all the way to the bank as the Biden administration sabotages U.S. energy and begs the Maduro dictatorship to send oil to America.

To be clear, I don’t begrudge the CO2 emissions of China or anyone else. In fact, many scientists have told me that more of this “gas of life” would be enormously beneficial for the planet and humanity.

Retired Princeton physics professor Dr. William Happer, who served as Trump’s climate adviser, told me years ago at a climate conference we both spoke at that the planet needed more CO2 and that plants were designed to live in an atmosphere with quite a bit more CO2 than the planet currently has.

Plus, human emissions of CO2 make up a fraction of 1 percent of all the so-called “greenhouse gases” present naturally in the atmosphere.

To summarize, if one truly believes that CO2 is bad for the climate, shipping U.S. production and industry to China is the worst possible way to deal with it. Logically, then, the policymakers behind this must have an ulterior motive.

Of course, the CCP loves the Paris deal: They do nothing but build more coal plants to power the industries and factories fleeing America for China as the U.S. government forces the United States to commit economic suicide.

This isn’t just an economic or “climate” issue, either. As the United States is “de-developed,” the economic destruction produces a major threat to national security. A strong military can’t be funded without a strong economy, obviously.

It’s time for lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives to shut down the administration’s “climate” policies that do nothing but expand CCP CO2 emissions and harm the United States.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has identified a true major crisis in America, and then suggested the most absurd solution. In a recent speech, Schumer said:

“Now more than ever we’re short of workers.”

This statement is true. Why is that?

First, we need to consider that Progressives have cultivated in Generation Z (youth born from approximately 1997-2012) an entitlement mentality. Gen Z is more likely than any previous generation to believe it is the responsibility of government to take care of them and meet their needs from cradle to grave. They have had access to many socialist-leaning policies that have de-incentivized them to work. Others have found ways to develop a lifestyle as a perpetual student, thus delaying getting an actual job. Many have found they make more money from the government by not working rather than working.

But there is another problem Schumer also correctly identified:

“We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to.”

Schumer’s Solution? (Imagine All the People)

“The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants—the DREAMers and all of them—because our ultimate goal is to help the DREAMers—but get a path to citizenship for all 11 million, or however many undocumented, there are here.”

Who Are the DREAMers?

Allow me to give a quick definition of “DREAMers.” “The DREAM Act” was a bill presented in 2001 by U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL). It never gained traction, even though it popped up in Congress several times (never being approved). The goal was to create a law that allowed anyone who arrived in America under the age of sixteen (and had been a resident for five years or more as well as a few other criteria), to obtain legal citizenship. The bill went nowhere until Barack Obama created an executive order, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals act (DACA), making the concepts contained in The DREAM Act an informal policy in 2012. Many have argued that this executive order was unconstitutional.

The Crisis of Declining Birth

In a previous article for IFI in 2018, I wrote about the “New Demographic Winter,” coming economically to America. I discussed the history of the over-population myth and the perils that occur when a national fertility rate dips below 2.1 births per (hopefully married!) woman. According to the World Economic Forum in 2021: “The United States has seen a 50% decline in birth rates between 1950 and 2021, from 25 births per 1,000 people to 12.” More specifically, in May of 2021, America reached a record low of 55.8 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

Why Fewer Babies?

There are many reasons for this phenomenon.

First, having children is strongly discouraged in our culture as women are told they are “wasting their education” if they do have children. More women than ever are obtaining college degrees, and they are taught that having children means they are throwing away everything they invested their time and money in achieving.

Second, in 1950 women were having babies at 20 years of age. Today, many women are delaying marriage, and thus childbearing, until their early 30s (shortening their birthing years).

Third, contraceptives have been nearly universally utilized, for even married women, making it easier for them to avoid pregnancy.

Fourth, government-created inflation has created a scenario where many couples feel they simply can’t afford to have children (especially considering the massive college debt many bring into their marriage). Parents are told by the media that a family will spend on average $233,610 per child before they are 18 years old. This scares many off from the idea of having more than one or two children.

Fifth, Progressives have championed the growth of homosexual relationships that, of course, cannot produce children.

There are other factors, of course, but the one that is completely ignored by Schumer and the media is the most troubling.

Mass Genocide of the Unborn

Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, over 60,000,000 babies have been brutally murdered in their mothers’ wombs.  Most of these babies, had they lived, would be working in today’s economy. Whose party has been the champion of this horrendous policy? Schumer’s democratic party of course. They created the very problem they now lament. However, rather than turning to the natural solution of encouraging men and women to marry and have their own children, Schumer has turned to a “solution” that is also fraught with problems that we will experience down the road.

Mass Amnesty

Schumer wants to make 11,000,000 illegal immigrants (or however many there are) naturalized citizens. America has always been a nation that welcomes immigrants. Both Republicans and Democrats want there to be legal pathways for people from other countries to come to America and create a new home.

Even the Trump administration suggested policies that would find a pathway of citizenship for those who were brought to America by their parents as children. No one is advocating for being unsympathetic to the plight of young children, or to those who were moved here through no choice of their own. The Democrats like to highlight undocumented children, because we are all sympathetic to their plight, but they are only a small fraction of the millions Schumer is suggesting we admit to citizenship.

If a child is deported along with his or her parents, the Democrats say we are uncaring. But let’s suppose we allow the DREAMer children to stay in the country, but deport their illegal parents. What kind of life is that for a child? What child wants to be separated from his or her parents? That’s way more cruel than deporting the entire family. Not to mention children left alone in this country will likely be raise by the government, costing tax-payers billions of dollars for their care. So Democrats say we should just let the whole family stay.

The problem is, mass amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, coupled with no strategic border control, will only entice millions more to flood across the border illegally, using resources that should belong to American citizens.

A mass integration of millions of undocumented aliens does not allow for the careful analysis and background checks necessary to ensure that we are not white-listing millions of people with criminal records from other countries who have been hiding here within our borders. We know many have come to America smuggling drugs, contraband or even participating in human trafficking. These are not the kinds of citizens America needs.

At a time when our health care system and many government agencies are already overwhelmed, and when current housing is in short supply, documenting that many illegal immigrants will make the cost of living for current citizens skyrocket, and will make resources scarcer. This isn’t true with babies because they aren’t all born on the same day. For current citizens who have been trying to find work, this will make their search more difficult.

It is generally agreed that the primary goal of Democrats in promoting this kind of legislation is to buy votes from these illegals who will feel obligated to vote for the party who welcomed them in, even though they didn’t go through proper legal channels. This is part of the Democrats’ strategy, along with election redistricting, relaxing voting requirements and other such initiatives to wrest future national elections away from the Republican party for good.

Immigration Reform

In the end, we definitely need a much more efficient immigration process that allows for a faster legal documentation for law-abiding applicants to become a part of our American way of life. Our current bureaucracy is terribly inefficient (as is the process of parents seeking to adopt needy children through foreign and domestic adoption). We can achieve our goals of a safe and diverse population through a balanced, common-sense approach to both reasonable immigration and encouraging domestic birth.

The one thing we should not continue to do is to kill off our own offspring and try to compensate for it by throwing our borders open to any criminal who wants to invade our country without going through proper screening and vetting.

Written by Paula Ryan

In just a few short months, the U.S. Supreme Court will be handing down their decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, determining the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi law prohibiting women from accessing abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. This case is expected to determine the fate of Roe v. Wade, the infamous 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling preventing states from unduly restricting abortions before the point of viability.

It seems likely that the Court will issue a favorable ruling, which would allow for more extensive protections for the unborn at the state level without interference from the federal courts.  This would be good news. However, it would not be the end of the battle to protect all innocent babies from conception until birth. It also would not undo the damage caused over the past 49 years to families, communities, and individuals throughout the nation but particularly in the Black community.

Since 1973, over 63 million babies have been aborted in the United States, 20 million of whom were Black. According to a report published in January 2022 by the Center for Urban Reform and Education (CURE), while Black women made up 15 percent of the childbearing population in 2018, they obtained 33.6 percent of reported abortions. This translates into 335 abortions per 1,000 live births, which was the highest abortion ratio in the United States. In support of these statistics, the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), using abortion reporting data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reported that for more than 30 years Black women have been experiencing abortions at a rate nearly four times that of white women.

And by the way, this is no accident. According to the aforementioned CURE report, 79 percent of the surgical facilities of Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s (PPFA), which is by far the largest abortion provider in the nation, are within walking distance of Black or Hispanic Communities. The Left claims that these facilities are there to provide health care for the members of these communities.  However, the cold hard truth is that they are taking the life of pre-born black babies for money and their own documents prove it.

In their 2016 Annual Report, PPFA claimed to provide “lifesaving care” and to be an irreplaceable component of the nation’s healthcare system. After careful evaluation and study, CLI issued a lengthy report proving that Planned Parenthood centers are primarily focused on contraceptive services, sexually transmitted infection testing, and abortions. Additionally, they noted that there is “little or no demonstrable capability for definitive diagnosis or a range of treatments for any disease or condition at Planned Parenthood centers.” In layman’s terms, this means that if a woman needs a mammogram or biopsy to detect breast cancer, she would NOT be able to receive these tests at any Planned Parenthood facility. In fact, there isn’t a single Planned Parenthood that has the resources to diagnose or treat any type of cancer. Indeed, with the exception of abortion, Planned Parenthood offers no services that cannot be easily found at alternative providers.

This is not surprising. From its founding by Margaret Sanger in the early 1900s, Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) has been using abortion to target the Black community. Sanger was a leading proponent of controlling the birth rate of those individuals she deemed undesirable or unfit. Sanger laid out her extreme form of eugenics in a 1932 book entitled, “My Way to Peace” where she called for the sterilization of those with mental and physical disabilities, including “morons, mental defectives, epileptics.”

In 1939, Sanger put her plan into action by introducing the “Negro Project,” which was designed to help states with eliminating the “dysgenic horror story” of blacks who reproduced “carelessly and disastrously.” To increase the effectiveness of the project, Sanger even had the unmitigated gall to recruit Black leaders and Black pastors to sell the concepts of contraception and sterilization to the minority populations.

It wasn’t until April 2021 that PPFA even acknowledged the racist roots of the organization by admitting that Margaret Sanger had aligned herself with ideologies and organizations that were unequivocally white supremacist and in doing so had caused permanent damage to millions of people, including generations Black people. Of course, PPFA’s mea culpa was pure window dressing. PPFA is still targeting Black babies for extermination by sending out the same tired, old message that access to abortion in minority communities is a necessary form of health care.

According to Right to Life of Michigan statistics:

• On average, 900 black babies are aborted every day in the United States.

•  The abortion rate for Black women in the United States is almost four times that of White women, which according to CLI, exposes Black women to increased exposure to hemorrhage and infection, the two major causes of maternal mortality.

•  Since 1973, abortion has taken more Black American lives than every other cause of death combined.

Sadly, even when numbers like this clearly expose the determination of the abortion industry – and PPFA in particular – to abort Black babies, prominent Black leaders like former President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris continue to support them.

While this whole line of thought is frustrating and sad, the most appalling aspect is that the systematic extermination of 20 million Black babies over the past 49 years has happened in THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA…Land of the free…Home of the brave. We need to be better than this.

Regardless of what the U.S. Supreme Court decides in Dobbs, there’s no way to erase the damage that abortion has done to the Black community. However, we can build a better America by protecting the most vulnerable members of our society. After all, as Nelson Mandela pointed out, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”

This article was originally published by The Family Foundation.

On January 26th, various news outlets reported that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who was appointed in 1994, planned to announce his retirement. This announcement was followed by multiple reports suggesting that Justice Breyer may have been ushered out by political activists/strategists within the Democratic Party. One report by FoxNews.com claimed that “groups such as Black Lives Matter and Women’s March launched an effort calling for the justice’s retirement.”

With the midterm elections just eight months away and a “red wave” predicted, time was of the essence. U.S. Senate Democrats could not afford to wait to fill the seat occupied by the oldest liberal member of the Court, even if that meant ushering Breyer out before he was ready to go.

Last Friday, President Joe Biden nominated federal appeals court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill Breyer’s seat. According to background information provided by the White House, Judge Jackson, who currently serves as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Miami, Florida. She earned a BA from Harvard University in 1993 (magna cum laude), and then attended Harvard Law School, graduating cum laude in 1996. Judge Jackson clerked for a variety of judges after earning her JD, and in 1999 clerked for Justice Breyer. She worked in private practice and then as a public defender.

President Barack Obama nominated Judge Jackson as vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2009. She was confirmed unanimously for that position by the U.S. Senate in 2010 and served there until she was nominated by President Obama for a position on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She was again confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2013. Judge Jackson served on the District Court until 2021, when President Joe Biden nominated her for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The U.S. Senate again confirmed her appointment in 2021 by a 53-44 vote with three Republicans joining all 50 Democrats voting “yea:” Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Judge Jackson is currently visiting Senators as she begins the interview process for the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee will commence confirmation hearings. If she is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Judge Jackson would be the second youngest justice on the court—behind Justice Amy Coney Barrett—and the first Black woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Of course, President Biden publicly and proudly announced to the nation that the race and gender of his nominee were pre-qualifying conditions for his consideration. (White males need not apply.)

So, what about her judicial philosophy about the U.S. Constitution, the sanctity of life and religious freedom? Well, according to an article by law professor Jonathan Turley,

What is most notable of the statements of support for Judge Jackson is how little is said about her judicial philosophy or approach to the law. The fact is that we have a comparably thin record of opinions in comparison to recent nominees. While she obviously has opinions as a district court judge, there are few opinions that shed light on her judicial philosophy. That is not surprising for a trial judge who issues hundreds of insular decisions on trial issues or outcomes. This is not about the years of experience on the bench, which I have repeatedly noted is a great strength in the nomination. It simply means that we have fewer opinions offering substantive insights into her approach to legal interpretation. The question is whether we will learn substantially more in this confirmation.

We can hope that the confirmation hearings for Judge Jackson, which are scheduled for March 21 through 24, will flesh out more about her views on key issues and her judicial philosophy.

Kelly Shackelford, President, CEO, and Chief Counsel for First Liberty Institute has a different perspective. He isn’t waiting to sound the alarm:

In nominating Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden is selecting a judicial activist for the Supreme Court. Her record from the beginning of her career shows hostility to religious liberty, free speech, and other constitutional rights. The American people do not want a liberal extremist on the Supreme Court. If confirmed, Judge Jackson’s judicial activism will place the constitutional rights of all Americans in jeopardy.

Other concerns about Judge Jackson’s positions have been raised by our friends at Family Research Council and Family Policy Alliance.

Many Christians and non-Christians misunderstand the relationship between morality and religion. Many mistakenly believe that morality is the same thing as religion and, therefore, mistakenly believe that they should not advocate for policies that reflect their moral beliefs. But morals and religion are not the same, and basing our decisions on public policies, laws, or elections on beliefs that derive from religious convictions does not constitute an unconstitutional establishment of a state religion.

All laws reflect or embody someone’s morality. The moral beliefs of people who hold theistic worldviews are no less valid in the public square than the moral beliefs of those who hold atheistic worldviews—which, of course, are faith-based also. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was intended to prevent the establishment of a state religion, not to prevent religious beliefs from informing political decisions.

People from diverse faith traditions or no faith could all arrive at the same position on a particular public policy. For example, although Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Baptists, and atheists may all oppose abortion because they value human life, the reasons for that valuation of life differ. If there is a secular purpose for the law (e.g., to protect incipient human life), then voting for it does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The sources of the various parties’ desires to protect incipient life are not the concern of the government. It would be not only absurd but also unethical for the government to try to ascertain the motives and beliefs behind anyone’s opposition to abortion and even more unethical for the government to assert that only those who have no religious faith may vote on abortion laws. Such an assertion would most assuredly violate the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

The religion clauses of the First Amendment were intended to protect religion from the intrusive power of the state, not the reverse. The Establishment Clause states that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.” That does not mean religious convictions are prohibited from informing political values and decisions. To expect or demand that political decisions be divorced from personal religious beliefs is an untenable, unconscionable breach of the intent of the First Amendment which also includes the oft-neglected Free Exercise Clause which states that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.

Legal theorist Michael Perry explains:

“[F]orcing religious arguments to be restated in other terms asks a citizen to ‘bracket’ religious convictions from the rest of her personality, essentially demanding that she split off a part of her self … to bracket [religious convictions] would be to bracket—indeed, to annihilate—herself. And doing that would preclude her—the particular person she is—from engaging in moral discourse with other members of society.”

To paraphrase Richard Neuhaus, that which is political is moral and that which is moral, for religious people, is religious. It is no less legitimate to have political decisions shaped by religion than by psychology, philosophy, scientism, or self-serving personal desire.

If allowing religious beliefs to shape political decisions represents a violation of the Establishment Clause and an inappropriate commingling of religion and government, then American history is rife with egregiously unconstitutional actions, for religious convictions have impelled some of our most significant social, political, and legal changes including the abolition of slavery, antiwar movements, opposition to capital punishment, and the passage of civil rights legislation.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is replete with references to his Christian faith which informed his belief about the inherent dignity, value, and rights of African Americans, a belief which he lost his life to see enshrined in law. He wrote what would now certainly generate howls of opposition:

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.  To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

“Progressives” have no objection to people of faith participating in the democratic process so long as their views comport with “progressive” positions. Liberals never cried foul when Quakers or Catholics opposed the Vietnam war because of their religious convictions, and liberals do not object that Catholic opposition to the death penalty represents a violation of the “separation of church and state”–a phrase not found in the Constitution.

I don’t recall any “progressives” objecting when Senator Rob Portman and former president Barack Obama cited their religious beliefs in defense of their radical shifts in position on homosexual faux-marriage. Portman said,

The overriding message of love and compassion that I take from the Bible, and certainly the Golden Rule, and the fact that I believe we are all created by our maker, that has all influenced me in terms of my change on this issue.

After his flip-flop—er, “evolution” on faux-marriage, Obama, like Portman, cited the Bible as his justification:

When we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know? Treat others the way you’d want to be treated.

In contrast, when conservative people of faith participate in the political process, citing their religion as the source of their judgments, suddenly the Establishment Clause has been violated.

Apparently neither Portman nor Obama think much about what the Bible says about sex, marriage, or repentance. And apparently, neither Portman nor Obama understand the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule does not require Christians to affirm all the desires, beliefs, and actions of all humans. It requires Christians to treat others as they—disciples of Christ—want to be treated as disciples of Christ.

And what should disciples of Christ desire? They should desire to follow God’s teaching more closely every day. They should desire to be willing to die to self and to take up their crosses daily. They should want their brothers and sisters in Christ to hold them accountable for their embrace of sin.

What the government must not do is impose laws exclusively religious in nature like Sharia laws. There should be no laws requiring the observance of any particular religion. No laws governing baptismal practices or Communion. No laws requiring prayer or circumcision. But, for example, people whose faith points to the worth of all people may legitimately work toward enacting laws that oppose capital punishment, euthanasia, or abortion. People whose religious beliefs include pacifism may legitimately work toward preventing or stopping military engagements.

No one is legally, constitutionally, ethically, or morally obligated to divorce their faith from their political decisions.

Richard Neuhaus argues persuasively in his book The Naked Public Square that a polity denuded of religion will be clothed soon enough in some other system that functions as religion by providing “normative ethics.” A democratic republic cannot exist without objective normative ethics that render legitimate the delimitation or circumscription of individual rights.

Historically, the sources of the absolute, transcendent, objective, universal truths that render legitimate our legal system have been “the institutions of religion that make claims of ultimate or transcendent meaning.”

Neuhaus argues that when religion is utterly privatized and eliminated as a “source of transcendence that gives legitimate and juridical direction and form, something else will necessarily fill the void, and that force will be the state.”

If the body politic claims there are no absolutes or delegitimizes religion as an arbiter of right and wrong, or good and evil, then the state will fill the vacuum, relativizing all values, and rendering this relativization absolute.

Lawmaking absent an understanding that there exist moral truths that are objective and universal would represent an illegitimate and hubristic arrogation of power.

What sense does outrage at human rights violations make if we assert there are no universal, transcendent, eternal, objective truths? And if we agree that these truths exist, that they transcend the subjective opinions of any particular individual, then what is their source other than a supernatural, eternal, transcendent being?

There are numerous factors that have resulted in a diminished valuation or recognition of the essential place of a belief in God as the source of transcendent truth in American society and politics, one of which is our remarkable cultural diversity. A healthy respect for the pluralism in America, however, need not and should not degenerate into what retired Campbell University law professor Lynn R. Buzzard describes as a “religion of secularism, excluding religion from participation in the pluralism.”

Princeton University law professor Robert George explains that our cultural degradation has, at least in part, resulted from an “orthodox secularism [that] stands for the strict absolute separation of not only church and state, but also faith and public life.”

Allowing religious institutions and ideas to inform our understanding of right and wrong, which is a necessary precursor to making legislative and juridical decisions, does not represent a violation of the Establishment Clause. Indeed, as Samuel Silver explains, “The government, as defined by the First Amendment and explained by its author James Madison, must remain neutral between various sects of religion, but it is not required to remain neutral between religion and irreligion.”

Prohibiting religiously derived understandings of right and wrong to shape political decisions, would, however, represent a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Buzzard writes that “Free Exercise will not be construed as merely creating a zone of non-governmental interference or the creation of an exemption from conscience-opposed activity, but the opportunity to be full partners in the pluralism of our day.”

To leftists, the idea of a separation of church and state no longer points to the importance of protecting religious freedom from the intrusive power of the state but instead refers to coercively eradicating theologically orthodox religious expression from the public square. Only secular or theologically heterodox worldviews, which are as shaped by myopic, dogmatic, unproved assumptions as secularists claim theologically orthodox religious worldviews are, will be tolerated in our pretend-tolerant society.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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I recently read a very interesting, and brave, editorial from Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. It appeared on AFA’s national news service – One News Now. He points out the contradiction in the efforts to remove statues all across America because of how the culture now views the words or actions of certain individuals which can often cloud how they are remembered today for their larger contributions.

The “woke” liberal culture has now even questioned statues of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and some abolitionists who worked to end slavery because they may have said things in certain ways reflecting their era about race or slaves that are frowned upon today. This cancel culture movement has even questioned Martin Luther King’s teachings and gone after people like Christopher Columbus and George Washington.

Donahue applies this new revisionist view to the homosexual movement. He wonders why corporations went over the top in promoting June as “Pride Month” when so many founders of the Pride movement were child molesters, supportive of child molestation, or other abhorrent behaviors.

For example, Harry Hay who is considered the founder of the modern gay rights movement supported adults having sex with minors stating that “young males would love it.” Hay admitted that he was molested by a 25-year-old adult male when he was 14, referring it as a “most beautiful gift.” He criticized homosexual parade organizers who tried to exclude NAMBLA (the North American Man Boy Love Association which advocates for pedophilia and the repeal of all age of consent laws) stating, “NAMBLA walks with me.” Hay also had connections to the Communist Party including setting up an organization of homosexual communists in the early 1950’s called the Mattachine Society.

Brenda Howard, who organized the first gay pride march in 1970 and was known as the “Mother of Pride” was an open advocate for sadomasochism, bondage, and polyamory.  Larry Kramer, founder of ACT-UP was also an advocate for NAMBLA. Gilbert Baker, the creator of the rainbow flag, was anti-Catholic and also reported to be a member of NAMBLA. Harvey Milk, a San Francisco politician memorialized in a Hollywood movie, and praised by President Barack Obama, was known to have had a live-in relationship with a young, runaway, 16-year-old boy when Milk was in his 30’s.

Donahue opposes the removal of many of our historic figures’ statues but wonders why these morally compromised founders of the gay rights movement are not held to similar standards when their beliefs and actions are far more problematic. “Why is it OK to trash Harry Truman but not Harry Hay?” Donohue asked.

It’s not a pretty subject, but it is a contradiction that our culture does not want to consider as it rushes to embrace an “anything-goes” ethic of sexual behavior.

(Note: In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control reported that homosexual and bisexual males were abused as children at a rate three times higher than heterosexual males. Other studies have found higher rates of childhood abuse among lesbian and bisexual women.)

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

It may seem counterintuitive, but massive tax-exempt foundations funded by some of America’s most prominent capitalists and industrialists helped foment what congressional investigators described as a collectivist “revolution” in the United States.

The goal was to “so alter life in the United States that it could be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” Many tools were used, but the public education system was the most important and effective.

Congress Investigation

In the early 1950s, with growing concerns of subversion and communist penetration surrounding the enormous foundations, the U.S. Congress launched investigations. Investigators for Congress’s Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, sometimes referred to as the “Reece Committee,” after the chairman, found that there was good reason to be concerned.

According to the committee’s chief investigator, some of the foundations were weaponizing the American education system to enable what was described as “oligarchical collectivism,” or collectivist rule by an oligarchy. This was done by financing the promotion of “internationalism and moral relativism,” among other dangerous “isms,” investigators found.

The chief culprits included some of the largest and most important foundations in the United States. These included the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller foundations, and the Carnegie Endowment. According to congressional investigators, they were showering money on Columbia University, Harvard, Chicago University, and the University of California to advance their objectives through education. And it worked.

Norman Dodd, the director of research for Congress’s select committee, reported that the foundations had even orchestrated a “revolution” in the United States. The revolution “could not have occurred peacefully, or with the consent of the majority, unless education in the United States had been prepared in advance to endorse it,” Dodd told lawmakers in his sworn testimony.

The committee’s final report, released in late 1954, found that “some of the larger foundations have directly supported subversion in the true meaning of that term—namely, the process of undermining some of our vitally protective concepts and principles.” Those same entities have also “actively supported attacks upon our social and governmental system and financed the promotion of socialism and collectivist ideas,” investigators concluded.

Globalism and distorting history were also major priorities. In the final report, the committee noted that the foundations had “supported a conscious distortion of history.” As part of that, they also  “propagandized blindly for the United Nations as the hope for the world,” undermining American constitutional principles and liberty.

One of the experts who testified during the hearings was attorney Aaron Sargent, whose background included special investigations, especially into education and subversion. He told lawmakers that many of the big foundations were actively promoting socialism in the United States, in violation of the law and their charters, and that education was among their key tools.

“First of all, in approaching this problem of foundation influence, the subversive-teaching problem is a foundation problem,” he said, noting that the problem began in the 1890s. “This movement is closely related to Fabian socialism.” These subversives tried to infect America, but found it more difficult than in Britain due to Americanism, a written Constitution, and federal courts capable of protecting constitutional rights.

And so, the radicals “relied upon propaganda and brainwashing,” using the school system to attack patriotism, natural law, and even real history, said Sargent, who was asked to serve as counsel to the select committee but had to decline. “They sought to create a blackout of history by slanting and distorting historical facts,” he testified. “They introduced a new and revolutionary philosophy—one based on the teachings of John Dewey.”

On the educational front, he said, the story actually begins with the Rockefeller-funded Dewey Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, a topic that has already been explored in this series. From there, Dewey “expounded a principle which has become destructive of traditions and has created the difficulties and the confusion … that we find today.” As part of that, “Professor Dewey denied that there was any such thing as absolute truth,” a concept that was “revolutionary in practice.”

Foundations’ Role

In previous articles in this series on the history of public education, the Rockefeller dynasty’s role in funding collectivist “education reformer” John Dewey, widely considered to be the “father” of America’s public school system, was documented extensively. The Rockefeller philanthropies—especially the “General Education Board”—provided millions of dollars to advance Dewey’s quackery around the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th.

But that would be just the beginning. Rockefeller money also helped resettle the communists of the Frankfurt School at prestigious U.S. academic institutions, primarily Dewey’s Columbia University. From there, their subversive poison infected all of U.S. society, mostly through the public education system.

The Rockefeller dynasty was key in shaping education policy. In 1902, facing an avalanche of bad publicity over his ruthless business practices, oil baron John D. Rockefeller created the “General Education Board.” This ostensibly “philanthropic” venture was used to help fund and eventually control education in the United States.

Rockefeller put Frederick Gates in charge of his “charitable” schemes. And Gates was honest about the agenda. “In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand,” Gates wrote in “The Country School of To-morrow, Occasional Papers Number 1.”

“The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk.”

He was clear that the goal was not to raise up philosophers, scientists, authors, poets, musicians, artists, lawyers, doctors, preachers, or statesmen. There was already an “ample supply” of those, he said. Instead, the goal was to create docile and largely unthinking workers who could be used and controlled by the elites.

The ultimate goal of all this subversion from the mega-foundations, though, was even more horrifying.

Dodd Interview

In an interview with G. Edward Griffin in 1982, chief investigator Dodd dropped a bombshell that should have, and would have, shocked America to the core—at least if it had been more widely known. The goal of the foundations’ scheming in education and beyond was to crush individualism, promote collectivism, and prepare the way for the United States to be merged with the totalitarian Soviet Union.

While investigating, Dodd was contacted by Ford Foundation President Alan Gaither and asked to come to the foundation’s offices in New York. “On arrival, after a few amenities, Mr. Gaither said, ‘Mr. Dodd, we have asked you to come up here today because we thought that, possibly, off the record, you would tell us why the Congress is interested in the activities of foundations such as ourselves,’” Dodd recalled in the interview.

Dodd continued: “Before I could think of how I would reply to that statement, Mr. Gaither then went on voluntarily and stated: ‘Mr. Dodd, all of us who have a hand in the making of policies here have had experience … operating under directives … the substance of which is, that we shall use our grant-making power so to alter life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.’”

In short, the head of the Ford Foundation, one of the most influential in the world, told the chief congressional investigator of a committee investigating foundations that the foundations were helping to pave the way to a merger of the free world with the slave world. And Americans remained blissfully unaware, as the cancer crept in quietly through the school system over a period of generations.

According to Dodd and the congressional investigation, the Carnegie foundations decided after World War I that gaining control of education would be crucial. The leadership’s goal at that time, Dodd said, was to prevent “a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914.” But the task was so enormous that it would require help. And so, while the Carnegie Endowment would focus on international education matters, the Rockefeller foundations were put in charge of domestic initiatives, according to documents uncovered by investigators in the Carnegie Endowment’s archives.

“The effect was to orient our educational system away from support of the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and implemented in the Constitution, and educate them over to the idea that the task now was, as a result of the orientation of education, away from these briefly stated principles and self-evident truths,” Dodd said in the interview.

“What we had uncovered was the determination of these large endowed foundations, through their trustees, to actually get control over the content of American education.”

Investigations also found that since at least the 1930s, Moscow decided to infiltrate educational and large foundations in the United States. Following their orders from the Soviet Union, American communists even created a commission focused on infiltrating and taking over foundations.

One of the major successes identified by the congressional investigators was Soviet agent Alger Hiss, who became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace after playing a starring role in creating the United Nations. He was later exposed as a spy for Joseph Stalin’s mass-murdering regime.

Current State

This work of the major foundations continues to this day. Consider, for example, Microsoft founder Bill Gates pouring billions of dollars into “education reform” and into supporting the collectivist agenda of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In fact, Gates’s foundation was, aside from U.S. taxpayers, the single largest financier of Common Core, the universally reviled national (and internationally aligned) “standards” imposed on the United States by the Obama administration. More on that in a future piece of this education series.

The Rockefeller foundations also continue to be deeply involved in “education.” And key Rockefeller bigwigs have become increasingly open about their real agenda. In his autobiography, for instance, the late dynasty patriarch David Rockefeller dropped a bombshell.

“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure–one world, if you will,” he wrote on page 405. “If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

When examining these facts, it seems perplexing that the wealth of some of America’s most important super-capitalists would be put to use advancing collectivism, subversion, and even socialism. And yet, it was hardly a new phenomenon. In his important book “Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution,” Stanford historian Anthony Sutton meticulously documented the role of major bankers and financiers from New York City in financing the communist enslavement of the Russian people.

It is time for Americans to completely rethink education or be destroyed. That rethink must involve discarding all of the quackery and subversive influences brought about by collectivists such as Dewey, and the out-of-control foundations that funded and helped them. The future of United States and liberty literally depend on sorting out this mess.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

Jan Schakowsky, the U.S. Representative from Evanston, Illinois, diminutive in intellectual and moral stature, has sponsored a bill to repeal the Helms Act. Her bill, H.R.1670, is titled “Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act,” and if passed, would open the floodgates of American money to fund abortions overseas.

According to the liberal Guttmacher Institute, the repeal of the Helms Act will result in Americans funding the slaughter of 19 million babies every year, mostly black and brown babies. And Schakowsky has the audacity of a lifelong politician whose conscience has shriveled up to call the Helms Amendment “racist.”  Just think about that: a privileged white woman is calling her bill that will fund the slaughter of 19 million black and brown babies every year an anti-racist bill.

Schakowsky and her collaborators emphasize the health risks for mothers in third world countries, which we know is just a sham. We already know the health of humans doesn’t concern them because the sponsors of this bill support abortion through all nine months of pregnancy for any or no reason.

Moreover, the ethical solution to maternal mortality risks, or the general health risks that accompany life in third world countries, or poverty is not a grotesque proposal to fund the slaughter of humans while in the womb. Word to Schakowsky, even poor people are created in the image and likeness of God and have a right to live—including poor black and brown people.

In 2015, Schakowsky exposed her intellectual and moral deficits–again–saying,

There’s nothing very pretty about any kind of medical procedure. Frankly, a conversation about exactly what happened in heart surgery would probably make people squeamish as well.

The reason all decent people recoil from images of aborted humans is not that the photos lack prettiness or even that they’re bloody. The reason tiny, severed human arms and legs make people squeamish is that they’re severed human arms and legs.

Some reminders for Schakowsky and her unwomanly original co-sponsors Diana DeGette (D-CO), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Nita Lowey (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Jackie Speier (D-CA), and Norma Torres (D-CA):

• The product of conception between two humans is inarguably a human.
• Killing innocent humans is not health care.
• Having the slaughter of one’s offspring paid for by others is not a “right.”
• Black and brown babies are no less valuable than white babies.
• Babies born into poverty are no less valuable than babies born into wealth.

Schakowsky is the second wife to her second husband, Robert (Bob) Creamer, a Saul Alinsky-trained community organizer, which should tell you everything you need to know about their ability to create communities conducive to human flourishing.

Creamer served time in prison for tax violations and bank fraud committed when he ran the Illinois Public Action Fund on whose board sat Jan Schakowsky. During his trial, other shady Illinois characters sent letters of support for Creamer, including the morally vacuous Dick Durbin, racism profiteer “Rev.” Jesse Jackson, and Barack Obama’s accomplice David Axelrod.

More recently Creamer was the subject of a Project Veritas exposé that revealed his involvement in Clinton campaign/DNC-coordinated schemes to sabotage the 2016 presidential election by hiring people—including mentally ill and homeless people—to agitate at Trump rallies in order to elicit reactions that the press could use to criticize Trump.

If the wealthy Schakowsky wants to kill black and brown babies in foreign countries, she, her corrupt husband, and their political cronies should use their own filthy lucre to do it.

Using the language of “rights,” feticide-defenders like Schakowsky are appealing to the respect Americans have for “negative rights”—also known as liberties—(e.g., the right to vote, assemble, exercise one’s religion, and speak freely), which are not accompanied by any obligation for others to subsidize them.

What feticide-defenders are really suggesting—without explicitly saying—is that women have a “positive right” (i.e., an entitlement) to abortion, which imposes a duty on others to subsidize it.

Abortion, however, is not an entitlement, and society has no obligation to pay for women to get them. Neither wanting something; nor really, really wanting something; nor experiencing suffering from not obtaining this desperately desired thing means the public has an obligation to provide it.

No matter how many times feticide-defenders call the killing of incipient human life “health care,” it’s not. Killing human fetuses is neither health care nor reproduction. It’s death facilitation and anti-reproduction. If leftists want to help poor women in other countries kill their offspring, leftists have the choice and negative right to do so.

In a 1991 article titled “Abortion and the Discreet Domesticity of Evil,” Father Paul Mankowski wrote,

[T]he language of the “reproductive health center” … is deliberately designed to obscure reality; it allow us to pretend that nothing disruptive is happening inside these sinister, functional buildings. … The language doesn’t really deceive, but it somehow gives permission to those who want to keep up the charade, to make-believe that the incinerators are only burning garage, to make-believe that the people in white coats are in the business of healing, not killing.

Our task, Father Mankowski argued, is to “call a spade a spade”:

To give things their proper names. To replace euphemism with the stark truth. To speak about what goes on inside those brick walls. To call evil evil—no matter how foolish or awkward it makes us appear, no matter how chilly or furious our fellow citizens become. And, above all, to work with every resource at our disposal to hinder, frustrate, and bring to a standstill the engines of human destruction.

Like Planned Parenthood which targets babies of color for profit, Schakowsky and her co-conspirators should rename her bill the “Killing Babies of Color Everywhere Act.” That way at least everyone everywhere will know what the bill is really about.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your U.S. Representative to ask him/her to vote against H.R.1670. Despite what “progressives” claim, abortion is not health care. Abortion is the intentional destruction of an innocent pre-born human being.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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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.

When the escaped Wuhan virus began its deadly circumnavigation of the world, the left mocked Trump for saying hydroxychloroquine was effective, children should be in school, and businesses opened. A nanosecond after Chinese Communist colluder, profiteer, and taradiddler (pun intended) Biden was elected via the mail-in voting allegedly impervious to fraud and the machinations of Big Tech, leftists said hydroxychloroquine was effective, children should be in school, and businesses should open. Can’t have all that Trump-caused misery associated with leftism (nudge nudge wink wink. Ssshhh! Don’t mention the suicides of children.)

In the midst of the Wuhan crisis, the rage of the fatherless and improperly tutored made our streets and businesses abominable infernos unfit for civilized humans for months. The left cheered and paid for the criminals’ freedom, thereby normalizing lawlessness. When, in a far less destructive or deadly riot, the Capitol was besieged by a crowd imitating the lawlessness they saw celebrated for months, the left marshalled a military response that would make Stalin, Chairman Mao, Kim Jung Un, and Xi Jinping proud.

Throughout “campaign” season, the daft old man shuffling between his cellar and the nearest Dairy Queen was left unmolested by the thoroughly corrupt press who would have made mincemeat out of any Republican candidate who so resembles Grampa Simpson. No hard questions about Biden’s plans for America, no inquisitorial questions about his crime syndicate family, no questions at all about his questionable mental agility.

Over the past five years, our thoroughly corrupt press has exposed exactly how committed to inclusivity they are.  The all-inclusive leftist press that licks the sneakers of Kamala Harris because she’s the first semi-black, female (whatever that is) vice president, and continues to drool over the sartorial style of Michelle Obama, shunned Melania Trump, the most beautiful First Lady in America’s history, who is also an immigrant and polyglot with a fashion sense surpassing Michelle Obama’s. The press revealed that leftist inclusivity and love of diversity looks remarkably like mean-spirited, petty, non-inclusive, middle-school-girl bullying.

And now the bloodletting and oppression are really gaining steam—thanks in no small part to anti-Trump Christians.

In a flurry of Executive Orders so furious that even the New York Times said, slow down, old man, Biden has increased funding for Calculated Carnage Planned Parenthood, and released U.S. taxpayer money to fund human slaughter all around the world. Yes, leftists seek the destruction of babies of color everywhere, and they get special pleasure from making you, Americans, fund it.

But remember, anti-Trump Christians insisted self-righteously that ensuring Trump’s loss would enhance the image of Christianity among the God-hating. Sure, sure, Trump’s administration did do more to protect the unborn than any administration since 1973, but getting Biden elected would do far more to make God-hating, baby-killing leftists think Christians aren’t so bad after all—or so anti-Trumpers insist. Never mind, that Jesus told his followers the world would hate them because it hated him first. Anti-Trump tub-thumpers know better.

In the name of unity, creepy Biden wants to unify boys and girls in college dorm room assignments. He wants to unify naked boys and girls in locker rooms. He wants young men with all their male “equipment” intact to be set loose in the showers and barracks of young women who have volunteered to serve our country. And what Biden wants, Biden gets with the stroke of a pen.

An Army training manual created in the wake of Obama’s efforts to unify males and females in military barracks and showers includes this:

[F]ollowing her [sic]transition from male to female (which did not include sex reassignment surgery) …  a transgender Soldier begins using female barracks, bathroom and shower facilities. Because she [sic]did not undergo a surgical change, the Soldier still has male genitalia. [Female] Soldiers must accept living and working conditions that are often austere, primitive, and characterized by little or no privacy.

I guess we should be thankful that leftists still recognize that forcing young women to shower in the presence of male peers is “primitive.”

The Trump administration began unraveling Obama’s obscene, science-denying offenses against women. Biden is reinstating them. Maybe anti-Trumpers can explain how their complicity in the sexual integration of the private spaces of girls and women enhances their Christian witness.

Brassy AOC and brittle Nancy Pelosi have accused Congressional colleagues of attempted murder without being censured. AOC has urged the creation of a blacklist to track Trump-supporters and keep them unemployed. Other Democrats have urged the creation of another spy agency to be used specifically for targeting “domestic terrorists.” Sounds benign, maybe even good, until you remember that Big Brother’s Ministry of Truthiness redefines everything. Division is unity, men are women, war is peace, and Trump voters are domestic terrorists.

Months of lawless riots that included direct brutal attacks on police officers and setting fire to federal buildings, state property, and private businesses are “mostly peaceful protests.” A 90-minute lawless siege on the Capitol during which there were no direct attacks on law enforcement is a seditious insurrection that necessitates an overwhelming show of military force and a lethal razor-enhanced border wall around the area where the elite sequester themselves from the deplorable rabble they rule serve.

Biden has committed to passing the “Equality Act,” which explicitly subordinates religious free exercise protections to sexual perversion. Or perhaps it won’t actually be Biden who will kill the First Amendment. Perhaps it will be an unseen Kamala Harris who in the dark of night like the unsexed Lady Macbeth will drive a knife into the heart of American freedom.

Unifier-in-Chief Biden is restoring federal funding for the dissemination of Critical Race Theory through government agencies. And Democrats under a Biden administration are gearing up with the help of gullible Republicans to usurp local control of education through a tricksy Common Core-type maneuver. Stanley Kurtz warns,

Remember, the Obama-Biden administration imposed Common Core on the country via a Rube Goldberg mechanism designed to circumvent the prohibition on federal curriculum controls. That mechanism was powered by money tucked away in the stimulus package and passed without debate. Obama hadn’t run on Common Core, and there was no national consensus in favor of it. Instead this ill-conceived experiment was imposed by stealth with the help of massive funding from the Gates Foundation, various businesses, and an education bureaucracy decidedly at odds with parents and voters.

There is every indication that this process is about to repeat itself under a Biden administration—this time in the culturally critical area of history and civics standards. The effort to create a civics version of the Common Core will be made by the “bipartisan education reform movement.”

Kurtz draws attention to a proposed “bipartisan” bill—sponsored by a Democrat and co-sponsored by 10 Democrats and one lone Republican, Tom Cole from Oklahoma—that has received too little attention:

Comprehensive proposals to create de facto national history and civics standards on the model of Common Core are in the works as well, and likely to be adopted by a Biden administration.

The text of the bill sounds innocuous enough until you remember who’s in charge of the organizations that will be creating curricula that will enable schools to get their mitts on federal dollars. What the government under a Biden administration will fund will not be curricula that conservatives like.

Totalitarian control requires this kind of indoctrination. Haven’t Americans learned anything from history? Oh, wait … Never mind.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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Elana Schor wrote an unhelpful article titled “Christianity on Display at the Capitol Riot Sparks New Debate” for the Associated Press (AP) on Thursday. It’s an insubstantial dollop of slumgullion ostensibly on “Christian Nationalism” that throws together equally unhelpful quotes from Christian leaders without once defining Christian Nationalism (or nationalism); or making distinctions between patriotism and “Christian Nationalism”; or between those who merely use Christian rhetoric and true Christ-followers; or between the rioters and the thousands of Americans—including many Christians—who were at the protest but had nothing to do with the riot.

Schor cites Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission:

[W]hen [Russell Moore] saw a “Jesus Saves” sign displayed near a gallows built by rioters, “I was enraged to a degree that I haven’t been enraged in memory. This is not only dangerous and unpatriotic but also blasphemous, presenting a picture of the gospel of Jesus Christ that isn’t the gospel and is instead its exact reverse.”

Moore is right, a sign saying “Jesus Saves” displayed near a gallows built by lawless rioters is dangerous and blasphemous. But why does this sign enrage him more than when former constitutional law professor and then-president of the United States Barack Obama cited Scripture as his justification for endorsing the legal recognition of homoerotic unions as marriages? Why does it enrage him more than when self-identifying Christians currently serving in Congress defend the legalized extermination of humans in the womb? Why does the lawless rioters’ signage enrage Moore more than what our elected leaders say and do?

Just calling oneself a Christian no more makes a person a Christian than does a man calling himself a woman make him one.  Scripture teaches that “A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.  Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.”

Moore and others claim that the image of Christianity is now marred in the view of leftists, many of whom already hate Christianity and seek its eradication from public life. But is that true? Or are leftists cynically exploiting the indefensible acts of those who falsely claim to be Christ-followers? Are leftists using the signage and rhetoric of anarchists who bear no resemblance to true Christ-followers to further cow cowardly Christians and to turn them against courageous Christians like Senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton?

Who is doing more damage to the church (small “c”): the Capitol rioters or the heretical wolves in sheep’s clothing who have infiltrated every denomination and are corrupting doctrine and leading flocks astray, including the Southern Baptist Convention? Some will argue that both groups damage the cause of Christ, which is true, but which should enrage Christians more?

Perhaps leftists hate—not the rioters—but those genuine Christians whom they can now slander by associating them with the acts of anarchists. And perhaps there’s another reason leftists hate genuine Christians.

Jesus forewarned Christians about their fate, but American Christians blinded by the freedom we have long enjoyed, can’t see the hatred Christ foretold even as they are cursed and cancelled:

 If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.  If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.

Schor bizarrely writes this in an article ostensibly about Christianity on display at the Capitol riots:

In the video shot by a New Yorker reporter during the siege, the fur-hatted Jacob Chansley—known as the “QAnon shaman” for his alignment with the conspiracy theory as well as his self-described spiritual leanings–delivered a prayer thanking God “for allowing the United States of America to be reborn.” While Chansley spoke, other rioters fell silent in apparent participation.

Jacob Chansley, aka Jake Angeli, was the tattooed, furry-chested, jammy-wearing, buffalo-horn accoutered anarchist who strutted into the Senate chambers with a cocky grin on his face. Why he is included in an article purportedly about Christianity is baffling. If crazy QAnon ideas have infiltrated churches as heretical views of sexuality have, they must be purged. In my experience, however, heretical views of sexuality are far more prevalent in churches than are QAnon ideas and far more dangerous.

Chansley is a “shaman” who follows his own syncretistic religion that includes elements of Eastern mysticism, chakras, auric/planetary frequencies, hallucinogenic drug use, and a weird movement called Ministry of Tomorrow (MOT).

Chansley was first introduced at age 11 to hallucinogenic drugs by his father, which raises an issue few are addressing: the importance of fathers. How many anarchists on the left and right grew up with good fathers in the home?

So, while Chansley may be a Trump-supporter, he is definitely not a typical hardworking conservative Trump supporter or a theologically orthodox Bible-believing Christian. He is, however, definitely a lunatic. The fact that some lunatics support Trump has as little to do with Trump as the fact that there surely are lunatics who support Biden. After all, lunatics and anarchists have to support somebody. Here’s more from Chansley/Angeli, but I don’t recommend wasting your time.

The fact that Chansley “delivered a prayer thanking God” during which “other rioters fell silent” does not mean Chansley is a Christian. Surely Schor knows that Muslims pray, Hindus pray, shamans pray, and Christian heretics pray, and they all think they’re praying to God.

Theologian John Piper offers a helpful explanation of the relationship between the diverse loves of Christians. The first love for Christ-followers must always be for Christ and his kingdom:

[N]ever feel more attached to your fatherland or your tribe or your family or your ethnicity than you do to the people of Christ. Everyone who is in Christ is more closely and permanently united to others in Christ, no matter the other associations, than we are to our nearest fellow citizen or party member or brother or sister or spouse.

But, Piper explains, many of our lesser loves have value too:

God means for us to be enmeshed in this world. We’re “not of the world,” Jesus says, but we are in the world, and we are supposed to be in it. … We may be in a city, a state, a country, and if I ask, “What is patriotism in this enmeshment?” my answer is that patriotism is a kind of love for fatherland — and I mean fatherland in a very general sense. It could be a city (Minneapolis), or a state (Minnesota), or a country (US, Brazil, China, Nigeria), or a tribe (Ojibwe, Navajo, Fulani, Kachin). And that love for these enmeshments, these belongings, is different from the general love that Christians have for everybody or for the whole earth. …

So, it seems to me that this is good, and that the goodness is implied in the Bible, and God created us to be in skin, in languages, in families, in cultures. He doesn’t mean for us to despise our skin or our language or our culture, but rather to be at home in them, and to feel good about them — of course, we have to add — up to a point. They’re all sinful, and so we never give them absolute allegiance. We never cease to be exiles and sojourners, even in our families and tribes and ethnicities — indeed, in our own bodies. …

In the end, Christ has relativized all human allegiances, all human loves. Keeping Christ supreme in our affections makes all our lesser loves better, not worse. Under his flag, it is right to be thankful to God that we have a fatherland, a tribe, a family, an old pair of slippers that just fit right.

The challenge for Christians in this time of turmoil and growing persecution is to hold fast to the whole counsel of God, rooting out heresy of all kinds; to proclaim the whole counsel of God even when the world hates us; and to come alongside those who speak truth in the public square and are mocked for doing so. We have no biblical warrant for speaking truth only when we’re guaranteed doing so will be cost-free.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/audio_Were-the-Capitol-Rioters-Christians.mp3

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Remember when homosexual activists lied with straight faces saying what they do in the privacy of their own bedrooms affects no one and, therefore, is no one’s business? And here we are today with the government recognizing non-marital unions as marriages, shameful parades polluting our streets, drag queens reading stories to toddlers in public libraries, a 4,000 percent increase in adolescent girls suddenly deciding they’re boys, and schools requiring faculty to use incorrect pronouns when referring to students who seek to pass as the sex they aren’t.

An NBC News article titled, “Biden administration on track to be most LGBTQ-inclusive in U.S. history” exults, “President-elect Joe Biden has repeatedly vowed to make LGBTQ rights a priority in his administration.” We now have leaders—grown men and women—who think it’s a noble achievement to pick administration officials based on what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms or because they pretend to be the sex they aren’t. Astonishing.

With that puckish grin, lost occasionally in his mental fog, Biden has cast aside character, knowledge, and experience as central employment criteria for his administration. All that really matters is sexual anatomy, erotic interests, and sex identification (oh, and skin color). Goodbye meritocracy. Hello intersectionality.

In the service of demonstrating his ardent commitment to unbiblical sexual deviance, Biden, the less ardent, self-identifying Catholic has so far picked a number of sexually dubious characters for administrative roles and other assorted functions.

Biden chose Karine Jean-Pierre, an “out lesbian” as his deputy press secretary. She may help speak on behalf of the cognitively impaired Biden or clarify the baffling things he says when his handlers allow him to speak. He chose Pili Tobar, another lesbian, to be the deputy White House communications director.  And he chose homosexual Carlos Elizondo to be the White House social secretary.

Elizondo is only the second man in the history of the United States to be chosen to be a White House social secretary. The first, Jeremy Bernard, was chosen by Barack Obama. Bernard too is homosexual and evidently not selected based on his educational background. Bernard, who didn’t finish college, along with his erotic partner at the time, Rufus Gifford, had been major fundraisers for Obama and were hugely influential in the homosexual community. Forget education, training, wisdom, and integrity. Money and sexual deviance will take you to the core of the Democrat machine.

Lesbian attorney Chai Feldblum and bisexual attorney Pamela S. Karlan, who is “married” to a woman, have been tasked with “reviewing the Department of Justice and related agencies for the Biden transition team … including the Federal Election Commission and the Commission on Civil Rights.”

Karlan’s name may be familiar to some. She is one of the three “progressive” law professors who testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in support of the impeachment of President Trump and was forced to apologize for using Barron Trump’s name to make a point. She is also one of the attorneys in the infamous Bostock U.S. Supreme Court Case that Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch bungled.

Homosexual Dave Noble “was named to two teams, one reviewing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the other the Office of National Drug Control Policy.”

Shawn Skelly, a man who now masquerades as a woman following his 20-year stint as a naval flight officer, “will be part of the team reviewing the Department of Defense.” Biden has vowed to reverse President Trump’s ban on gender-deluded men and women serving in the military. I guess Skelly believes that nothing strengthens the military quite like the presence of cross-dressing soldiers and forcing women to bunk and shower with men who cross-dress.

Axios has reported that 39-year-old failed former mayor of South Bend, Indiana and homosexual, Pete Buttigieg, is being seriously considered for the ambassadorship to China, America’s arch-enemy that unleashed the Wuhan Virus on the world and seeks worldwide economic and military domination.

But the homosexual rag The Washington Blade reports that Buttigieg wants nothing less than a Cabinet post. In the Blade piece titled “Frustration builds as Biden’s Cabinet includes no LGBTQ picks,” Chris Johnson writes,

In talks with the Biden transition team, one Democratic insider said the idea of Buttigieg becoming White House OMB director came up, but he rejected it and said he wanted a “real Cabinet” position, not a “staff-level” job.

Well, you can’t say the diminutive former small-town mayor lacks hutzpah.

Behind the scenes the homosexual community is fuming that Biden hasn’t yet chosen a Cabinet member based on his or her private bedroom activities. Johnson continues,

Some LGBTQ leaders are quietly expressing frustration that the movement hasn’t pushed more aggressively for representation in Biden’s Cabinet. …

Things might be changing in terms of ramping up calls for an openly LGBTQ Cabinet member. On Tuesday, the congressional LGBTQ Equality Caucus made public a letter to the Biden transition team making the case for prominent LGBTQ appointees in his administration. “While your administration is on track to be the most diverse in American history, we ask that you continue your commitment to diversity by ensuring LGBTQ+ professionals are included in your Cabinet and throughout your administration. …”

Biden must discriminate based on erotic desires and sex-identification status to keep the most tyrannical demographic in America—“LGB” and “T” activists—sated and quiet. He also needs to feed their legislative and policy desires—most of which involve stripping conservative people of faith of their First Amendment rights.

For example, the country’s largest, most influential homosexual/“trans” activist organization, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), whose 2019 revenue exceeded $44.5 million, has published a 24-page “Blueprint for Positive Change 2020” with a staggering list of “recommendations” for Biden. I’ll mention just two.

The HRC recommends changing a regulation regarding charitable organizations that partner with the federal government to help those with diverse problems and needs. The HRC wants to make sure that any religious charity that receives federal funds to help the suffering be forced to hire homosexuals and cross-sex impersonators.

The HRC’s blueprint for religious oppression also wants to make it possible for college accreditation boards to deny accreditation to any college that has employment or student conduct criteria that reflect biblical standards on sexuality. Such a radical accreditation change would constitute, in theologian Al Mohler’s words, “an atomic bomb.”

If Christian colleges cannot be accredited, then students who want to pursue masters’ degrees, Ph.D.s, law degrees, or medical degrees that require undergraduate degrees from accredited schools would be forced to go elsewhere.

Leftists want to close all avenues to positions of influence for those who reject their sexuality ideology. So much for diversity and tolerance.

Biden has promised that his first order of business will be to pass the pernicious Equality Act, which will happen if Republicans lose the Senate. The Democrat-sponsored Equality Act—which as everyone knows has nothing to do with equality and everything to do with oppression—will deny conservative people of faith First Amendment speech and religious free exercise protections.

As I wrote 1 ½ years ago when the U.S. House passed it, the Equality Act would require federal law to recognize disordered subjective feelings and deviant behaviors as protected characteristics. Federal law would absurdly recognize homoeroticism and cross-sex masquerading as conditions that must be treated like skin color and biological sex.

It’s a remarkable feat of rhetorical and political legerdemain to use the ugly racial discrimination suffered historically by blacks to normalize discrimination based on race (i.e., against whites), sex (i.e., against men), mental health (i.e., against “cisgenders”), and erotic desire (i.e., against heterosexuals). Now it’s not only acceptable to choose not to hire people because they’re white, male, heterosexual, or who accept their biological sex, it’s de rigueur.

The real goal in the new and socially acceptable form of discrimination is to normalize homoeroticism and cross-sex impersonation by exploiting the instruments and institutions of power to silence public expressions of moral beliefs that leftists don’t like.

The first step is to confuse the issue by treating dissimilar conditions as if they were the same. So, conditions that are not genetically determined, in many cases fluid, and constituted centrally by freely chosen acts (e.g., homoeroticism and opposite-sex identification) are compared to conditions that are 100% heritable, in all cases immutable, and have no behavioral dimensions (e.g., skin color and biological sex). This is called a “category mistake.”

Leftists use this category mistake relentlessly in their effort to make it socially and legally impossible for Christians to exercise their religion and speech rights freely. They want to make it impossible to publicly express moral propositions about homoerotic acts or to conduct one’s business in accordance with religious beliefs. They want to make it impossible, for example, to refuse to hire a man who freely chooses to cross-dress.

Homoeroticism and cross-sex passing are moral issues about which it is entirely fitting to express views even if others disagree with or detest those views. Shouting “identity” and “authenticity” is not a “Get Out of Moral Assessment” free card. It doesn’t seem that leftists feel any shame about condemning my beliefs even if they derive from my authentic identity as a theologically orthodox Christ-follower.

“LGB” and “T” activists are far from done with their unholy work of transforming a once decent place to raise children into a moral sinkhole in which the government will soon appropriate children whose parents don’t toe the line drawn by regressive pagans.

I have long contended that there is no greater threat to First Amendment religious free exercise and speech protections than homosexual and “trans”-cultic activism. If Harris and Biden win the White House, and Democrats win the U.S. Senate, fasten your seatbelts, Christian conservatives, because it will be a bumpy night.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Harris-Biden-Administration-Sexual-Deviance-and-Religious-Oppression.mp3

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I don’t doubt for a moment that we still have race issues to address in America. And I don’t believe that, to date, we have fully overcome the legacy of hundreds of years of slavery and segregation in our history. At the same time, I do not accept former President Obama’s claim that the 2016 election of Donald Trump was, in part, a reaction to having a Black man in the White House.

In a widely reported excerpt from his forthcoming book Promised Land, Obama claims that “millions of Americans” were “spooked by a Black man in the White House.”

To quote him more fully, he argued that Trump “promised an elixir for the racial anxiety” of “millions of Americans spooked by a black man in the White House.”

These same Americans, we are told, were prey to “the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party – xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks.”

Yes, he writes, “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president.”

How should we respond to this?

There are certainly White racists in America, and they must have hated having the Obamas in the White House. (It may surprise you to know that I have never met such a person face to face, heard from them on my radio show, or, to my memory, interacted with them on social media. I’m sure they exist. I just don’t know any of them).

And, while I do not believe Trump is a racist, he surely knows how to push certain buttons to get people from different backgrounds in his camp.

But the fact of the matter is that there were no anti-Black, White supremacist, race riots when Obama was elected, nor were there any protesting his presidency during his eight years in office.

Not only so, but no one was boarding up stores in anticipation of his victory, which would surely have been the case had “millions of Americans” been “spooked” by his election and had his victory “triggered a deep sense of panic.”

Where, pray tell, was that panic? What evidence does the former president provide?

The reality is that in 2008, Obama received 43 percent of the White vote (compared with 55 percent for McCain), which hardly speaks of a racist nation in panic. In fact, going back to 1980, this tied for the highest percentage of White votes for a Democratic candidate.

Bill Clinton also received 43 percent of the White vote in 1996. Other than that, the percentage of White Democratic votes from 1980 to 2008 was: 1980, 36 percent; 1984, 35 percent; 1988, 40 percent; 1992, 39 percent; 2000, 42 percent; 2004, 41 percent.

And in 2012, despite fears that Obama would see a significant drop in White votership, the percentage only dropped from 43 percent to 39 percent.

The Washington Post even carried a November 8, 2012 headline reading, “President Obama and the white vote? No problem.” As the article noted, Obama “won a clear popular vote victory — with a majority of his total vote nationwide coming from white voters.”

Where was the deep sense of panic? Where was the extreme, racist reaction? Where were the many millions who were spooked by a Black man in the White House?

The reality in 2012, as in 2008, is that the majority of Obama’s total vote count came from White voters. That is a simple demographic fact.

But Obama’s claims are nothing new. He was, sadly, a divisive leader, specifically when it came to race.

This very eloquent, charismatic, and gifted leader who could have helped unite our nation only divided us further, promoting identity politics and playing the race card. President Trump simply deepened that divide and poured salt into the wounds (while at the same time increasing the racial and ethnic diversity of his base). That, to me, was a terrible missed opportunity from our first Black president.

Many Americans felt as I did, unable to vote for Obama because of policy but excited to have a Black leader in the White House.

Personally, I was hoping that that this was yet another step towards racial healing, feeling it could also bring great hope to Black Americans. Anything is possible. Dream your dreams. You could be president one day, too.

That’s how my trainer at the gym expressed things. A married Black man with a young son, he told me that he never expected to see a Black president in his lifetime. Now, his own son could see that anything was possible here in America.

Interestingly, earlier in the year, while taking a short flight on my way to California, I sat next to a Black bishop, leading to some wonderful interaction.

I asked him, “In your opinion, what was the aftermath of the Obama presidency?”

He replied, “White Americans said, ‘Never again!’”

I was shocked to hear that perspective from this very learned, spiritually sensitive brother, seeing that I had never in my life heard such a sentiment from a White colleague or friend.

Perhaps such sentiments do exist, and to the extent that they do, they should be exposed and denounced, loudly, clearly, and categorically.

But that is not why more than 70 million Americans voted to elect (or, reelect) Donald Trump. And that’s why Lawrence Jones, himself Black, was right to say, “I feel like President Obama has started to demonize some of the very people that voted for him.”

He added, “I don’t like the demonization … to paint 70 million people as just these cold-blooded racists. I don’t think that’s true.”

Indeed, “When you take the highest office in the land, you’re going to receive criticism and you can’t just say that it is deeply rooted in race.”

Well said, Mr. Jones.

Every survey I have done indicates that a solid, conservative Black candidate would garner far more votes from White conservatives than would a White leftist. No doubt about it. Ideology, not race, is the driving issue when it comes to our vote.

Unfortunately, just when former President Obama could have brought words of healing to a deeply divided, hurting nation, he has pushed identity politics again and insulted millions of well-intentioned Americans.

It looks like healing will not come from either Obama or Trump (or Biden). We’ll have to make it happen on our own (with God’s help).

This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org.

One of the most effective ways that Marxists advance their agenda is to change how we talk about things.   When clever rewordings replace the truth, it’s easier to fool people.

For example, the Washington Post this past week said a transgender plaintiff “was designated female at birth, but identifies as male.”

In the blink of an eye, a biological fact – that someone was born a girl – is brushed aside and replaced with a term that implies that male or female sex is assigned, not a natural phenomenon.

In fact, the idea that your sex is “assigned at birth” is an increasingly common description. It validates the Gnostic-based insanity that one’s sex has nothing to do with physiology, just what goes on in people’s heads.  By this reasoning, birth records can be altered to distort reality, which is a way to lie officially.  And to force others to do so as well.

Gavin Grimm, who is now 21, sued the Gloucester County, Virginia school district in 2015 to force them to allow her to use boys’ facilities.  Two years later, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court but was set aside when President Donald Trump overturned a Barack Obama gender identity school mandate.

But last Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled 2 to 1 that the school board had violated Grimm’s 14th Amendment right against sex discrimination. The high school had offered a gender-neutral bathroom, but the plaintiff’s attorneys rejected that solution, as did the two Obama appointees who sided with Grimm. A George H.W. Bush appointee dissented.

They drew from the bizarre Bostock opinion in June written by, of all people, Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, which expanded the definition of “sex” in the Civil Right Act of 1964 to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”  Just like that, the Court put every institution in America that won’t kneel to the LGBTQ gods in jeopardy of ruinous lawsuits or even governmental sanctions.

Given the Court’s reasoning, how could any sex-based distinctions, predicated on real and important differences between the sexes, be maintained? Sports teams? Locker rooms? Bathrooms at any business of any size? Private schools?

The transgender movement, for all its caring rhetoric, is not really about eliciting compassion for sexually confused people – something we should embrace. It’s part of the Marxist Left’s campaign to overhaul society and force people to lie.

Anyone not toeing the line, which keeps changing, is “canceled.”  That means being censored, fired, shut out of promotions or jobs, and de-platformed on social media.

Over the years, the Left has peppered our discourse with advocacy-filled descriptions. “Choice” long ago replaced abortion, “gay” replaced homosexuality, and “hater” and “racist” became all-purpose descriptors for anyone dissenting from the Left’s worldview. Erasing biology is just more of the same.

Sometimes, the ideologically-driven changes are more subtle. Journalists now capitalize racial terms, as in Black people and White people. The adjectives, which describe merely one important aspect of the human race, instead become the whole. No more thinking about people just as fellow human beings created in the image of God. Race must be first and foremost in everyone’s minds.

Herded into identity groups, we’re more easily divided and manipulated. Regardless of the impressive racial progress that America has achieved since eradicating slavery and Jim Crow, the media are utterly obsessed with race as the only aspect of humanity worth talking about.

But if America’s “systemic racism” is the main driver of the riots that have raged for the last three months, why are mobs beheading or defacing statues of Jesus and Mary and black heroes like Frederick Douglass or Arthur Ashe, burning churches and Bibles, and looting stores in Chicago’s Magnificent Mile?

There’s method to this madness. Racism is an excuse to pour gasoline on a larger cause – that of taking down America as we know it and replacing it with a socialist utopia. The founders of Black Lives Matter, after all, admit to being “trained Marxists.”

During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s (which is still with us), activists began forcing journalists and medical professionals to use the term “living with HIV,” as a way to de-stigmatize the disease. You could get kicked out of a medical conference for talking about “AIDS infections” or the “AIDS disease.” They’d not hesitate to beat the drums for “living with covid” if they thought it would advance their cause.

Language is a formidable instrument for human progress when used properly.  But, all too often it can be abused, destroying souls, families, or even entire societies.

The most profound and positive use of language in history was when Jesus offered Himself to everyone on Earth, saying, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” and when the Gospel writer John referred to Him as simply The Word.

Amid the current chaos, we need to work hard to preserve America. And, we need to pray that the Marxist-inspired madness and abuse of language will crack up, a victim of its own hostility to truth.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com. You can follow Robert Knight on Twitter @RobertKnight17 and his website is roberthknight.com.

Written by Robert Knight

President Trump caused a stir in July when he issued an order terminating some Obama housing policies aimed at killing off the suburbs.

“The [Democrat] plan is to remake the suburbs in their image so they resemble the dysfunctional cities they now govern,” he wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal column jointly authored with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Benjamin Carson. “As usual, anyone who dares tell the truth about what the left is doing is smeared as a racist.”

Outraged Democrats called the president a racist.

The rule he overturned, Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) program, would “abolish single-family zoning, compel the construction of high-density ‘stack and pack’ apartment buildings in residential neighborhoods, and forcibly transform neighborhoods.”

Meanwhile, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are doubling down. Their plan, costing $640 billion over 10 years, would unleash a tsunami of social engineering.

As the Biden website proclaims, “Housing is a right, not a privilege.”

Everybody needs a home, no doubt about it.  The question is how best to ensure liberty and encourage home ownership while still making sure the poorest have a place to live.  America’s “safety net” of welfare and public housing provides minimal needs, but it’s also created a permanent underclass of fatherless families. The Democrats’ war on marriage was tailor-made to create a dependent, Free Stuff Army.

Once-thriving cities have huge areas where it’s not safe to go even in the daytime. Newly elected Democrat district attorneys financed by George Soros have abandoned the “broken windows” method of curbing crime and are reaping the whirlwind.  BLM mobs are still rioting.

It’s no secret why millions of people, including minorities, have moved to the suburbs. They want a safer, better quality of life.  But the Democrats, motivated by extreme environmentalism and political ambitions, want to force urban patterns on the burbs.

Mr. Biden says he is going to ensure that “every American has access to housing that is affordable, stable, safe and healthy, accessible, energy efficient and resilient, and located near good schools and with a reasonable commute to their jobs.”

That’s sweeping. Maybe he should ask the Communist Chinese how to go about achieving this. They move millions of people around to where they want them.

The Biden scheme includes expanding the Community Reinvestment Act.  That was the Bill Clinton/Barney Frank law forcing banks to issue mortgages to people who could not afford them.  It triggered the collapse of the stock market and the Great Recession.

So, now Mr. Biden wants to apply it “to mortgage and insurance companies.”  This would create more ways to pressure lenders to issue toxic mortgages.  If only we had some experience as to how this sort of thing turns out.  Maybe Mr. Biden could get Barney Frank to run it.

The sneakiest part of the Democrat housing plan is to use zoning laws to end suburbia as we know it. “It will be as if America’s suburbs had been swallowed up by the cities they surround,” social anthropologist Stanley Kurtz wrote recently in National Review.

“They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing.”

Are all those suburban moms who supposedly are going to vote Democrat in November listening?

Some jurisdictions are already going down this road.  In January, Minneapolis, where the city council has also decided to disband the police department, became the first major city to ban zoning for single-family homes.

“Our landmark 2040 Comprehensive Plan helps advance those goals by tackling our city’s long history of exclusionary zoning,” Mayor Jacob Frey exulted.

Mr. Frey, if you recall, was shocked that he was shouted down by rioters during his foray into the war zone that BLM and Antifa created in the wake of George Floyd’s death.  He refused to say he would defund the cops, but did bemoan a “systemic racist system.”

This guy is doing his best to turn Minneapolis into a mob-ruled version of Stalingrad. You’d think the mob would show more gratitude.

Minneapolis is not alone.  In 2019, the state of Oregon banned single-family zoning in cities with more than 10,000 residents.

In California, a pending bill would require California cities and counties to permit duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes on residential land zoned for single-family homes.  Take that, Orange County! Wait. Ballot harvesting swept Democrats into power in the formerly conservative bastion. Maybe never mind.

Senate Bill 50, sponsored by San Francisco Democrat Senator Scott Wiener, has been endorsed by the leftist mayors of Oakland, Sacramento, San Jose, and San Francisco.  Wonder if a fourplex will rise someday behind Nancy Pelosi’s mansion?  She could wave to the neighbors while scarfing down some of that $12 a pint ice cream from her giant freezer.

As for the Democrats’ lust for power over housing, letter-to-the-editor writer Roger Ruvolo put it this way in the Wall Street Journal:

In the Democratic vision of the future, antireligious automatons will live in small ‘multifamily’ units stacked sky high next to bus or train stations.

This election is no more about President Trump than it is about Vice President Biden; it’s about freedom, or not.

Robert Knight is a Townhall contributor. You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17 and his website is roberthknight.com.

While Saul Alinsky can be connected directly to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, I’m not aware that such a clear connection exists between the founders of the BLM movement and Alinsky, who died in 1972. But there is no doubt that they share his philosophy of cultural revolution.

In his insightful, 2009 mini-book, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, David Horowitz quoted an SDS radical who wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

As Horowitz explained, “In other words the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution. That was the all consuming focus of Alinsky and his radicals.”

When it comes to BLM, the purported issue, namely, that Black Lives Matter, is not the ultimate issue. Instead, a larger cultural revolution is the ultimate issue. (As many have noted, the founders of BLM are both Marxists and radical feminists, with two of the three women identifying as queer activists.)

And so, the mantra that “Black Lives Matter” specifically means blacks who are victims of white police brutality. Black lives in the womb do not matter. Blacks getting gunned down in gang violence do not matter. Black toddlers killed in random shootings do not matter. Not even blacks killed by black police officers matter – at least not nearly as much as blacks killed by white officers.

Those white officers, in turn, represent the larger system, which, we are told, is fundamentally racist. And it is that system that needs to be overthrown.

Thus, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

If the issue was the issue, then BLM should have been applauding President Trump’s efforts to introduce police reform.

Instead, Trump is vilified as a white supremacist and racist, and BLM wants him removed. In fact, that is one of their stated goals.

As for the police, their very existence is part of the oppressive system. They must be defunded and abolished, and attacks on them are justified.

Of course, it doesn’t take a sociology professor to understand that the BLM movement is not primarily focused on the well-being of the black American community.

After all, what is the connection between police brutality and statues of Christopher Columbus?

There is no connection, other than the revolutionary logic which says: white police brutality is part of America’s racist heritage, which started with slavery. And Christopher Columbus, who discovered America, enslaved native inhabitants of the West Indies. Therefore, in the name of BLM, his statue must be destroyed (along with many other statues).

And what is the connection between police brutality and the vandalizing of synagogues and burning of church buildings?

There is no connection, other than the revolutionary logic which sees church buildings as symbols of an oppressive, discriminatory religious system that also must be overthrown.

And let’s not forget the statues of a white Jesus and a white Mary. They too must be toppled.

As for the synagogues, that’s easy. The Jews are always part of the oppressive system. The Jews are always evil. Everyone hates the Jews.

Terry Crewes was right to say to Don Lemon that, “There are some very militant type forces in Black Lives Matter and what I was issuing was a warning” that “extremes can really go far and go wild.”

Absolutely. We see the wild extremes on the streets of our cities every day. And plenty of the extremists are young whites, some of whom are more into revolution than into justice.

Diamond and Silk were right to tweet,

“If What Don Lemon says is true about BLM being only about police brutality, then why are they still protesting?  We don’t see police killing black lives. It’s black lives killing black lives.”