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It’s Looting, Not Reparations

In the early morning hours of August 9th, looters ransacked stores along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Known for its high-end retail shops, the 13-block stretch along North Michigan Avenue filled with people, quickly descending into chaos and overwhelming the Chicago Police Department (CPD).

Early reports claimed the rioting and protests were in response to police shooting and killing a child Sunday afternoon in the Englewood neighborhood. That was quickly proven false when police reported the actual incident involved a shootout with a 20-year-old man who was wounded, but not fatally, and had fired first at officers in an hours-long standoff.

But that did not matter to leaders of the group Black Lives Matter Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times reported the group warned the City’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot in a statement that the unrest would not end until “the safety and well-being of our communities is finally prioritized.”

The statement continued, “The mayor clearly has not learned anything since May, and she would be wise to understand that the people will keep rising up until the [Chicago Police Department] is abolished and our Black communities are fully invested in.” True to their word, the group has continued to hold protests around the city.

CPD Superintendent David Brown said that police have arrested over 100 people, two were shot that night, and 13 officers were injured. Brown described the looting as “pure criminality.” BLM Chicago countered that people were just “protesting.”

According to the BLM Chicago statement, “Over the past few months, too many people — disproportionately Black and Brown — have lost their jobs, lost their income, lost their homes, and lost their lives as the city has done nothing and the Chicago elite have profited. When protesters attack high-end retail stores that are owned by the wealthy and service the wealthy, that is not ‘our’ city and has never been meant for us.”

The next morning, Superintendent Brown said the shooting led to a wave of overnight looting downtown and on the Near North Side that resulted in two people being shot, over 100 arrests, and 13 injuries to officers. Though Brown characterized the looting as “pure criminality,” Black Lives Matter Chicago again claimed that those involved were protesting.

Ariel Atkins

That same day at a demonstration in the city, Ariel Atkins, a Chicago BLM organizer, encouraged looters to take “anything they want to take” as “reparations.”

“I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci, or a Macy’s, or a Nike,” Atkins said, “because that makes sure that that person eats. That makes sure that that person has clothes. That’s a reparation. Anything they want to take, take it, because these businesses have insurance.”

Atkins doubled down on her previous statement the following day, telling WBEZ radio that BLM supports the looters 100% and they should take “anything they want” as “reparations.”

When questioned about the looters who tried to break into a nearby Ronald McDonald House where frightened sick children and their parents were staying, Atkins defended them, stating, “I will support the looters ’til the end of the day. If that’s what they need to do in order to eat, then that’s what you’ve got to do to eat.”

It’s not just Atkins and BLM Chicago who feel that way. In June, CNN’s Christine Amanpour interviewed Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead writer for the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Amanpour asked Hannah-Jones about a statement she had made about the act of taking being symbolic for restitution. Hannah-Jones replied,

When we see someone killed by the police, that is the worse manifestation of police violence,”  “but it doesn’t get to the daily violence that doesn’t end in death, or the daily degradation that black Americans face. The fact that these communities have been preyed upon by predatory lenders, it goes on and on. When we think about someone taking something from some big-box name store, it is symbolic. That one pair of shoes that you stole from Footlocker is not going to change your life, but it is a symbolic taking.

Columnist decries looters

Liberal Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell came out against the looters in her August 10th column. “Sunday night’s assault on downtown businesses was a brazen display of criminal behavior, pure and simple,” she wrote.

Countering the BLM organizer’s statement, Mitchell wrote,

The people who smashed their way into luxe boutiques didn’t do it because they were fed up with police shootings, or because they are out of work and desperate.

They did it because they saw an opportunity to steal stuff they couldn’t afford to buy and because they have no respect for the rule of law.

More than a week has passed since BLM Chicago made its demands. CPD has bolstered efforts to track down looters through social media. Officers are working 12-hour shifts and days off are canceled. Businesses downtown are boarded up and some retailers have announced plans to leave the city. And the protests continue.

Will the mayor acquiesce to their demands? What exactly will it take for BLM Chicago to feel “the safety and well-being of our communities is finally prioritized?” Could the city see the violence get even worse as the November elections approach? Will President Donald Trump send federal intervention? Could the religious community unite and stand as one to push back the evil that’s overtaken Chicago? So many questions… no clear answers.



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Are Today’s Leftists Truly Marxists?

Written by Walter E. Williams

Most people who call themselves Marxists know very little of Karl Marx‘s life and have never read his three-volume “Das Kapital.” Volume I was published in 1867, the only volume published before Marx’s death in 1883. Volumes II and III were later edited and published in his name by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. Most people who call themselves Marxists have only read his 1848 pamphlet “The Communist Manifesto,” which was written with Engels.

Marx is a hero to many labor union leaders and civil rights organizations, including leftist groups like Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and some Democratic Party leaders. It is easy to be a Marxist if you know little of his life. Marx’s predictions about capitalism and the “withering away of the state” turned out to be grossly wrong. What most people do not know is that Marx was a racist and an anti-Semite.

When the U.S. annexed California after the Mexican-American War, Marx wrote: “Without violence nothing is ever accomplished in history.” Then he asked, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?” Friedrich Engels added: “In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.” Many of Marx’s racist ideas were reported in “Karl Marx, Racist,” a book written by Nathaniel Weyl, a former member of the U.S. Communist Party.

In a July 1862 letter to Engels, in reference to his socialist political competitor Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx wrote:

It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother had not interbred with a nigger. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product. The obtrusiveness of the fellow is also nigger-like.

In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx’s son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Paul had “one eighth or one twelfth nigger blood.” In an April 1887 letter to Paul’s wife, Engels wrote, “Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.”

Marx’s anti-Semitic views were no secret. In 1844, he published an essay titled “On the Jewish Question.” He wrote that the worldly religion of Jews was “huckstering” and that the Jews’ god was “money.” Marx’s view of Jews was that they could only become an emancipated ethnicity or culture when they no longer exist. Just one step short of calling for genocide, Marx said, “The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.”

Marx’s philosophical successors shared ugly thoughts on blacks and other minorities. Che Guevara, a hero of the left, was a horrific racist. In his 1952 memoir, “The Motorcycle Diaries,” Guevara wrote,

The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.

British socialist Beatrice Webb griped in The New Statesmen about declining birthrates among so-called higher races, which would lead to “a new social order” that would be created “by one or other of the colored races, the Negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese.” The Soviets espoused the same “Jewish world conspiracy” as the Nazis. Joseph Stalin embarked upon a campaign that led to the deaths of Jewish intellectuals for their apparent lack of patriotism. By the way, the Soviet public was not told that Karl Marx was Jewish. Academics who preach Marxism to their classes fail to tell their students that his ideology has led to the slaughter of tens of millions of people. What’s worse, they fail to even feign concern over this fact.

White liberals are useful idiots. BLM, Antifa, and other progressive groups use the plight of poor blacks to organize left-leaning, middle-class, college-educated, guilt-ridden suburbanite whites. These people who topple statues and destroy public and private property care about minorities as much as their racist predecessors. Their goal is the acquisition and concentration of power and Americans have fallen hook, line, and sinker for their phony virtue signaling.


Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.




Leftist Lawmakers and Activists Call for Cancellation of All History Classes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sowell further points out the hypocrisy of leftists on slavery:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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


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Long Arm of Hamas Extends to Dallas-Fort Worth Black Extremist Groups

Written by Anne-Christine Hoff

As the four-year anniversary of the mass shooting of Dallas police officers passes, a lawsuit has been reopened which alleges that social media outlets allowed the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas to radicalize Micah Johnson, leading the former U.S. Army reservist to take the lives of five police officers while injuring nine others.

Plaintiffs in Retana v. Twitter, Inc. allege that about two years before the attack, Johnson – a black nationalist – began sympathizing with Hamas. According to court documents, Johnson told a woman that he had just returned from Afghanistan and that “he was very much pro-Gaza,” leading her “to believe that he had been radicalized to the Palestinian cause supporting violence against Israel.”

Although three separate lawsuits have yet to present conclusive evidence of connections between Hamas and the Dallas shooting, black identity extremists from Dallas have expressed appreciation for the terrorist group’s violent revolutionary tactics, while Hamas’s local Islamist proxies have co-opted black civil rights causes to bring attention to their own radical agenda.

Plaintiffs in these cases discuss the long-standing connections between Hamas and national black separatist organizations. They point to Hamas sympathizers who furnished advice and support in 2014 to police protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, and they refer to “black separatist hate groups” which took a 10-day trip  in 2015 to the Palestinian Territories and Israel. Led by a guide from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, activists from the black civil rights group Dream Defenders participated in a riot against Israeli soldiers and law enforcement.

In Dallas, black identity extremists continue to sympathize with Hamas while lauding its violent tactics.

Founded in 1989 in Dallas, the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) advocates an anti-white, anti-Semitic message of “black unity, collective action and cooperative economics.” Its leaders openly sympathize with the Palestinian resistance while demonizing the “crackers over in Israel” who oversee a “Synagogue of Satan.”

In 2014, NBPP Chief of Staff Chawn Kweli praised the insurgent tactics employed by Hamas and said that African Americans should “learn to fight for [their] land” from the Palestinians. “They don’t have all them tanks … but they got heart. They got will. They got guerilla tactics,” he said.

The Huey P. Newton Gun Club is a black nationalist militia that made headlines in 2014 for carrying out armed community patrols in predominantly African American neighborhoods of South Dallas. Johnson was reportedly affiliated with this racist hate group, and after his death HPNGC co-founder Yafeuh Balogun praised the cop killer and predicted that, “He will be celebrated one day.”

In 2018, Michael Thervil of Voda Consulting trained HPNGC members in marksmanship, community patrolling, and counter protests.  As with NBPP members, Thervil praised Hamas as a model for African American insurrectionists to emulate “in terms of combat,” professing his “deepest love for Hamas and those fearless fighters in Hezbollah.”

Just one month after HPNGC members were drilled in “counter protesting,” the black militia put its training to the test when it appeared alongside NBPP members at the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston. Armed with assault rifles, the black nationalists provided security for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) during its annual conference.

As recently as the early 1990s, ISNA sent checks to the “Palestinian Mujahideen,” the former name for Hamas’s military wing, and in 2009 a federal judge ruled that there is “ample evidence” tying ISNA to Hamas.

Hamas also has deep roots in the non-black Dallas Islamic community. The most well-known and earliest connection is documented in USA v. Holy Land Foundation (HLF), the largest terrorism finance case in U.S. history  In 2008, the founders of the Richardson, Texas, charity were convicted of numerous charges related to financing Hamas, including conspiracy, money laundering, providing material support for terrorism, and tax evasion.

Ghassan Elashi, a founding board member of the Dallas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was sentenced to 65 years in prison for his role in funneling $12 million to Hamas after 1995, when the U.S. Department designated it as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. CAIR is listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the same Hamas financing trial, a label that was subsequently upheld in federal appellate court.

Does Hamas now depend on its U.S. proxies to influence black nationalists?

As with CAIR and ISNA, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) is an outgrowth of the now-defunct Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), a Hamas propaganda front group that was dissolved in 2004 for funding terrorism, and several AMP board members were members of IAP before its dissolution.

On June 12, AMP-Texas organized a Black Lives Matter rally with local mosques, including Dallas’s Nation of Islam chapter, a black separatist, quasi-Sunni religious movement commonly rejected by mainstream Muslims. During a similar protest one week earlier, AMP-Dallas Director Fadya Risheq repeated an anti-Semitic smear that effectively holds Israeli Jews responsible for police violence against African Americans.

Risheq was merely parroting views expressed on Hamas’s English-language website, which dismissed racial animosity as the primary cause of police brutality, pointing out that the “militarization of the U.S. police and its use of deadly violence … is a relatively new phenomenon that has been largely imported from Israel.”

Celebrity Imam Omar Suleiman, the founder and president of the Irving-based Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, is perhaps the most celebrated Muslim cleric in Texas – if not the U.S. Suleiman has been a vocal advocate of Hamas proxies such as AMP, and he is featured on its website soliciting donations. He headlined a 2017 AMP rally in Washington D.C., before appearing one year later as a guest speaker at AMP’s annual conference.

Suleiman is also a vocal supporter of Black Lives Matter, and he has tweeted his support for violent Palestinian resistance. On July 14, 2014, he gave this prayer on Twitter:

“God willing on this blessed night as the 3rd Intifada begins, the beginning of the end of Zionism is here. May Allah help us overcome this monster, protect the innocent of the world, and accept the murdered as martyrs. ameen.”

On May 14, 2018, Suleiman posted a Facebook post in support of the Hamas-led Hamas-endorsed March of Return riots, claiming that Israel wanted to “kill off” Palestinians and encouraging resistance “by any means necessary.”

Historically, Dallas has been an incubator for both Islamic extremism and black supremacism. These two movements may not share the same aspirations, but they certainly share many of the same hatreds. Their alliance is an abstract one, drawn together through the demonization of both the Israeli military and American law enforcement, under whose jackboots Palestinians and African-Americans are, ostensibly, jointly oppressed. This conspiracy would link Gaza and Minneapolis as two battlefields in a single war.

And yet black supremacists are largely not Islamist; and Islamists are certainly not truly committed to the idea of black supremacism. One is exploiting the other, using African American grievances to deflect criticism of radical Islam. And Micah Johnson may not be the last radical to be drawn in.


Anne-Christine Hoff is the Dallas Counter-Islamist Grid Research Fellow of Middle East Forum. This article was originally published at JihadWatch.org.




Saul Alinsky and the BLM Movement

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 ModelDavid 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.”

Ah, but black lives are not the primary issue. Instead, the issue is revolution.

Thus, over time, the concern about blacks being killed by the police will be drowned out by the larger call to overthrow America as we know it.

After all, America is depicted as the world’s hotbed of racism and oppression, the evil empire that must be brought down, especially when compared to . . . Well, especially when compared to a utopian Marxism.

BLM is playing by the book. Alinsky’s book.

For good reason Gregory A. wrote on Medium.com,

“It’s time to stop supporting this anti-American organization that is working to sow division, spread lies, and destroying the country. Their playbook comes straight from Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky who dedicated his book to Lucifer. They aren’t looking for unity, but to destroy anyone who doesn’t agree with their radical Marxist philosophy. Black Lives Matter leaders know how to cause chaos and to turn us against each other. Individuals and corporations must stop pandering to this organization that is working to tear the country apart.”

Precisely so.


This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org.




America Burns While Our Schools Hold The Match

Written by Dr. Everett Piper

I have said it a thousand times.

Ideas matter.

What is taught today in our classrooms will be practiced tomorrow in our culture. Teach self-actualization rather than self-restraint in your schools, and you are going to get a bunch of self-obsessed, perpetual children throwing tantrums in your streets.

Garbage in. Garbage out.

Teach narcissism, and you get a bunch of narcissists.

Spend more time showing young boys how to use a condom than teaching them how to be men of character and don’t be surprised with Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein.

Teach lechery, and you get lechers.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will become the philosophy of the government in the next.” Hitler agreed, “Let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state.”

Why do you see a gaggle of arrogant adolescents strutting the halls of Washington, D.C.? We produced them. We taught them to behave this way. We created this monster. This situation is of our own making. These people are our fault. They are the product of our local schools, our colleges and our universities.

Some of you might be tempted to dismiss this. You might be inclined to say that you don’t care that much about this topic because you’re not in college any longer, or you don’t have children or grandchildren headed off to the ivory tower this fall. This is the next generation’s problem.

Well, you’re wrong.

This is your problem, and it’s your problem in spades.

Just turn on the news.

Just read the paper.

Just pick up your smartphone or open your laptop.

If the burning cars, destroyed monuments and broken windows in Minneapolis, Seattle and New York haven’t caught your attention, what will? If tearing down statues of Frederick Douglass isn’t a bridge too far, what is?

Our culture is collapsing right before our eyes, and it is clear where the responsibility lies. Our nation’s educational establishment is to blame.

If we don’t admit this and admit it now, our country and culture are lost.

John Adams once wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He knew that for any nation to survive, it must have a moral and religious glue to bind it together, or it will die for lack of definition.

It will suffer the fate of the Bolshevik, French or Cultural Revolutions. It will fall for the lies of the likes of Robespierre, Lenin or Mao.

The American experiment was and is the singular exception to the guillotine and the gulag.

Why?

Because ours was a revolution driven by the Creator rather than the created. It was a revolution grounded in self-evident truths rather than self-righteousness arrogance. It was a fight for liberty rather than license. It was a battle for freedom rather than safety, for principles rather than power.

And where do these principles, these moral and religious truths, come from? They are passed from one generation to another through our schools. Our Founding Fathers knew this. This is why they founded Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and Yale — all chartered expressly in the principles of biblical Christianity.

All these colleges were created to educate a free people, a moral people, a people who could and would control themselves, a people of personal restraint, a people of private and public virtue. These schools were founded to create a nation of biblical character and individual integrity.

Remove this cornerstone from our culture, and the house crumbles. When our schools rot, the fish stinks from the head down.

Our nation stands on the very precipice of hell, and your local school district thinks fomenting victimization, anger, balkanization and division is the solution.

Your neighborhoods are burning, and your schools rush to throw the gasoline of resentment, recompense and revenge on the fire.

Your teacher unions and many of their members march in solidarity with Marxists while they malign capitalism. They defend the destruction of Antifa. They applaud the divisiveness of BLM. They wave their rainbow banners while disparaging our country’s flag. They deny the science of X and Y chromosomes while calling you a science denier. They extol socialism while condemning free enterprise. They teach the racism of critical race theory. They tout the intolerance of intersectionality. They demand the privilege of denouncing your privilege. They use your sons and daughters as pawns in their ugly game of power and politics. They proudly boast of judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.

And they teach your children to do the same.

Yeah, that’ll solve the problem, won’t it?

The house is aflame, and your schools hold the match.


Dr. Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). This article was originally published at The Washington Times.




Black Lives Matter is a Marxist anti-Family Group

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Chicago Christian Activist Says “Get ’em Out!”

A recent broadcast on Chicago’s Morning Answer (AM 560 The Answer) featured Latasha Fields, well-known to IFI and IFA supporters as an ardent proponent of home education and parental rights. At the outset, Ms. Fields responds to Bryant Gumbel’s statement about the “Black Tax” and she calls out the hypocrisy of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Ms. Fields also addresses the absolute importance of strong nuclear families, the possibility of a Blacks-only political party, liberal policies that encourage government dependency (modern enslavement), and the need for parents and churches to reclaim their rights and responsibility to properly educate their children.

Latasha Fields is Co-Founder and Overseer of Our Report Ministries & Publications, Director of Christian Home Educators Support System (C.H.E.S.S.), and State Coordinator of Illinois for Parental Rights.




This Is Why the Official BLM Statement Is So Disturbing

Dating back to 2016, I have been urging Christian conservatives and other people of conscience to distinguish between the important affirmation that black lives do matter and the BLM movement.

The statement that “black lives matter” should be shouted loudly and clearly, since through much of our history, black Americans have felt that their lives did not matter to white Americans.

As for the BLM movement, it should be exposed for what it is. As I tweeted on July 6:

Here’s what we know about the BLM movement, especially when we dig a little deeper into their “What We Believe” statement.

When you start to connect the dots, you’ll understand why I described BLM as “dangerous” and “anti-Christian.” In fact, at the end of this article, I’ll connect the BLM movement with the J word – as in Jezebel. (Do I have your attention?)

BLM was founded by three black women: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi.

The first two identify as queer and the third as “a transnational feminist.”

Speaking of Cullors, a website celebrating “lesbians who tech” states that, “When Patrisse was 16-years-old she came out as queer and moved out of her home in the Valley.”

The official BLM site describes Garza as a “queer Black woman” who states that “we must view this epidemic through a lens of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

That’s why a June 21, 2020 article on ABC news declared that, “From the start, the founders of Black Lives Matter have always put LGBTQ voices at the center of the conversation. The movement was founded by three Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of whom identify as queer.”

On a certain level, reading through the official BLM statement, being queer is as much of an issue for the movement as being black.

Accordingly, there are multiple references to “trans,” as highlighted here: “We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.

“We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.”

Even more forthrightly, the statement reads, “We foster a queer-affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).”

Thus, the only references to heterosexuality are negative, as in “cisgender privilege” and “heteronormative thinking,” meaning the assumption that heterosexuality is the norm.

So, BLM is not just fighting against white privilege but also heterosexual privilege. Make no mistake about it.

That’s why the statement also goes out of its way to include people of “actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression.” The leaders have made themselves abundantly clear.

But there’s more, and this has often been missed in commentary on BLM beliefs.

While there are references to “mothers” and “parents” in their statement, there is not one single reference to fathers. Not one. (Contrast this with the multiple references to queer and trans and gender identity, etc).

As for mention of “men” or the idea of a male-led household, these are only found in totally negative contexts.

Specifically, “We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered” (my emphasis). Oh, those terrible, evil men.

And this: “We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work ‘double shifts’ so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work” (again, my emphasis).

Yes, that oppressive, husband-wife, male-female union, that outdated, outmoded patriarchal dinosaur. It must be dismantled. (And note the assumption that if something is “patriarchal” it is unfair to women. A truly fair relationship would have the husband home with the kids while the wife is out doing “public justice work”).

This is the language of radical feminism in unabashed, undisguised form. This too is part of the queer, trans-affirming spirit.

As for the third founder, Opal Tometi, she is also described as “a student of liberation theology.” And there is now the widely circulated quote from Cullors that she and Garza “are trained Marxists.”

As for the connection between liberation theology and Marxism, especially in this context, Prof. Anthony Bradley, himself black, has pointed out that, “Black Liberation Is Marxist Liberation.”

So, without question, the official BLM movement is Marxist-based, queer-affirming, trans-activist, traditional-marriage degrading, radical-feminist promoting and more. In a certain sense, it is fatherless as well.

That’s why I said that “the BLM organization is dangerous, anti-Christian, and should be avoided.”

Now, let’s also remember that Cullors is on record saying that their goal is to remove Trump from office: “Trump not only needs to not be in office in November, but he should resign now. Trump needs to be out of office. He is not fit for office. And so, what we are going to push for is a move to get Trump out.”

And this leads me to one last important point. When you connect all the dots, the spirit of the official BLM movement is downright Jezebelic, thus in direct conflict with the Alpha Male Trump.


This article originally posted at Townhall.com

 




Imagining a Vain Thing

During the Vietnam War, former Beatle John Lennon penned an ode to atheism that is annoyingly catchy and still ubiquitous.You can hear “Imagine” while walking down a grocery aisle, over the radio, or, as has been the custom since 2005, in New York City just before the ball drops in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

One leftwing activist, Kevin Powell, wants to replace the “Star-Spangled Banner” with “Imagine” as our national anthem.  He made the suggestion after rioters in San Francisco toppled a statue of Francis Scott Key.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too

ImagineWe don’t have to imagine what life would be without hope in Heaven, a nation of laws to secure life, civil rights and property, or faith in God to keep people from worshiping the state, themselves or other idols.

It would be Hell.  Psalm 2 begins by asking, “Why do the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing?”

It’s been in front of us ever since protests of George Floyd‘s killing on May 25 morphed into a violent revolution and societal cleansing worthy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

In Seattle’s downtown, we saw a government-supported experiment in madness, triggered by the “Imagine” mentality and exploited by ruthless Marxists.

On June 8, they created an “autonomous” zone eventually called CHOP (Capitol Hill Organized Protest), and expelled the police.  The hapless residents had none of the safeguards we take for granted in a free republic, such as courts of law, rules of evidence, trial by jury of one’s peers, sanctions for intimidating witnesses, or the freedoms of speech, religion and press. Anyone not toeing the Black Lives Matter line was assaulted and silenced.

This was an urban version of “Lord of the Flies,” with rapes, robberies, looting, businesses destroyed, beatings and shootings. The police were ordered to stay out as Democrat Mayor Jenny Durkan joked about this being the “Summer of Love.” Two black teen-agers were slain, one of whom was only 16.

It was only after her own house was spray painted and the 16-year-old was gunned down that she “woke” to the cost of anarchy and ordered police back to secure the area this past Wednesday. By then, crime had soared 525 percent over the same period last year.

Likewise, in progressive Minneapolis, where mobs burned a police station and rioted for weeks after Mr. Floyd’s death, the city council voted unanimously to dissolve the police department. Three council members obtained private security at a cost of $4,500 to the taxpayers whom they had left to the mob’s mercies.

So it goes in Democrat-run cities, where police are maligned and defunded, crime is skyrocketing, and Black Lives Matter (BLM) has become a quasi-religion.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, an outspoken Marxist and ally of communist ingenue U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), disbanded the plainclothes division and cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget.

Gotham used to be one of the safest big cities following the Giuliani administration’s adoption of “broken windows” policing of even minor offenses. Not anymore, with 500 shootings since the New Year, including 55 last week alone.

In Chicago, more than a dozen people, nearly all black, were murdered every weekend in June. At least 541 people were shot, more than double the number in June 2019.

Imagine all the people
Livin’ for today
Aaa haa
Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace

To Black Lives Matter and Antifa, we can live in peace all right – so long as we genuflect to them, acquiesce in our history being torn down, and watch as countless public figures and institutions parrot their libel of a uniquely evil America.

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
and the world will live as one

In his later years, even John Lennon may have reassessed the foolish sentiments in “Imagine.”

In his last interview, published in 1981, he said, “I’m a most religious fellow. I was brought up a Christian and I only now understand some of the things that Christ was saying in those parables. Because people got hooked on the teacher and missed the message.”

Close, but no cigar. Jesus IS the message. He said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

Still, it’s intriguing to consider an older, wiser Lennon.  His personal assistant, Fred Seaman, recalled that Lennon “was a very different person back in 1979 and 80 than he’d been when he wrote ‘Imagine.’ By 1979 he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy’s naivete.”

Mr. Seaman told filmmaker Seth Swirsky in “Beatles Stories” (2011), that, “John basically made it very clear that if he were an American, he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on Jimmy Carter.”

If he were alive today, would Mr. Lennon be appalled by the violence and communist kleptocrats and vote to Keep America Great?

We can only imagine.


Robert Knight’s latest book is “The Coming Communist Wave:  What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government”

This article was originally published at WashingtonTimes.com.




The NFL and the Black National Anthem

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

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

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

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

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

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

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto – “In God is our trust,”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
 

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

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

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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


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Cancel Culture is Upon Us

Democrats in California have passed a resolution to tear down a statue of John Wayne and to remove his name from the airport where it stands. The reason they say that they are doing this stems from a 1971 interview Wayne gave in which he was asked about white supremacy. (I believe they dislike John Wayne because he truly loved America.) His answer was unclear. It seemed to me he was trying to say if differing groups want to be supreme, they need to act that way. It was not a good answer, but it was just words.

No one condemning Wayne has seemed to notice that his actions betray what he may, or may not, have meant to say 50 years ago. John Wayne had three wives during his life. All three were of Mexican descent. His family adamantly insists that he never mistreated anyone due to race. The Duke wasn’t much of a white supremacist in his daily life, but having said the right politically correct words is all that matters today. . . Just ask Mike Pence.

Over the weekend the Vice President stood strong in refusing to repeat the slogan “Black Lives Matter” during an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation.  When pressed to say what the left wants, instead Pence said:

“All my life, I’ve been inspired by the example of the reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. . .  I cherish the progress that we have made towards a more perfect union for African-Americans throughout our history. . .  And as a pro-life American, I also believe that all life matters, born and unborn.  

“But what I see in the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement is a political agenda of the radical left that would defund the police, that would tear down monuments, that would press a radical left agenda. . .

“I really believe that all lives matter, and that’s where the heart of the American people lies.”

I would caution people not to post the Black Lives Matter slogan. Everyone knows and supports the words, but not the connotations it carries. It is the same reason why I would not encourage people to say, “every child a wanted child.” Should all children be loved and wanted?  Yes, of course! But that is a slogan of the abortion industry which has worked to kill millions of babies under the banner of that compassionate sounding slogan.

While black lives certainly matter, the organization supports the disproportionate killing of black unborn babies, the destruction of the traditional family, and the radical LGBT agenda, and it holds racist views toward Jews and Israel.

Regarding what to say, a recent Rasmussen Poll found that by a two-to-one margin Americans support the phrase “All lives matter” more than “Black Lives Matter.” Even among black voters, 47 percent prefer “All Lives Matter” compared to 44 percent who prefer “Black Lives Matter.”

Read more: Exposing Black Lives Matter


This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.




Race Is Not What Is Dividing Us

My fellow-Americans, we are being sold a bill of goods. Race is not what is dividing us. Rather, we are being divided by competing ideologies. Let us put our focus where it belongs.

Listening to the news, you would think that racism is deeply entrenched in every neighborhood in our country. That racial hatred is the norm. That judging people by the color of their skin is what the average American does.

But I do not believe that for a second – and I say that while fully acknowledging the very real racial issues we continue to face.

A caller to my radio show on Monday said he was born in Hong Kong. Then he lived in Ghana, in West Africa. Then in Ireland. And now in America.

He said that America was by far the least racist place he lived. (The call starts here.)

One week earlier, I had interviewed Prof. Craig Keener, a dear friend and one of the world’s foremost New Testament scholars.

He is white but was ordained into the ministry in a black church in America, and he is married to an African woman and they have a son. Craig has also co-authored two books on race relations, together with a black co-author.

He is acutely aware of racial issues and does not downplay them for a minute.

But he said that his wife, a highly educated woman who speaks fluent French, suffered real discrimination while living in France. She would arrive for a job interview, for which she was well qualified. But when they met her, they would say, “We don’t hire blacks.”

She never experienced that here in America.

Not only so, but Craig told me that the worst racism she ever faced was within her home country in Africa, where the racism had nothing to do with skin color, since everyone was black. It had to do with where you came from or what strata of society you lived in.

Racism no knows no bounds.

That being said, I do not believe racism is the norm in America.

On June 11, I polled my Twitter followers, asking, “Would you be completely at home having a neighbor of a different race?”

Now remember, even though my Twitter followers (a little over 41,000, so not particularly large) are roughly equivalent to the national averages when it comes to demographics, they are quite conservative. The strong majority are probably Trump supporters as well.

How did they respond to the poll?

Just under 97 percent said, “Absolutely.” (The exact number was 96.8 percent.) Yes, almost 97 percent said they would absolutely “be completely at home having a neighbor of a different race.”

Only 2 percent answered with, “Depends on which race.” Only 1.2 percent said, “Absolutely not.”

And remember: this is an anonymous poll, so people can vote freely.

As for the results, they didn’t surprise me in the least, especially in Christian circles. (The vast majority of my social media followers identify as Christian.)

Many of our churches are multi-racial, especially if they are in multi-racial locations. And when they are not, joining together for multi-racial gatherings is often considered a highlight. And in cities across America, pastors work together in multi-racial coalitions.

And just ask yourself about your own circle of friends or co-workers. How common is racism in your midst?

Getting back to the poll, I was inspired to do the “neighbor” poll by a 2013 article by Max Fisher in the Washington Post. It was titled, “A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries.”

Fisher reported the results of a major study by two Swedish economists who felt the number one way to determine racial attitudes was this: “The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors.”

What were their findings?

Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America.”

Conversely, “India and Jordan by far the least tolerant. In only two of 81 surveyed countries, more than 40 percent of respondents said they would not want a neighbor of a different race. This included 43.5 percent of Indians and 51.4 percent of Jordanian.”

So, America is one of the least racist countries on the planet?

To repeat. This does not mean that we do not have problems to address. And, as I have stated before, to the chagrin of some of my conservative friends, I have no problem asking if there is still systemic racism in America. (If not systemic racism, then system inequity.)

My point in this article is to stress that our biggest issues in America are not race-based. They are ideologically based. And right now, those pushing a radical leftist agenda are the most divisive among us, by far.

Of course, if the radical right (which includes the “alt-right”) had a bigger platform today, they would be just as divisive. But they do not. They have been largely marginalized, and for that I am glad.

Instead, it is the radical left (which includes the BLM movement and its Marxist-fueled agenda) which has become dominant, championed by a complicit (or foolishly naïve) media. They are the ones dividing us.

On a personal level, I will continue to listen to people of color as they their share perspectives with me (like a caller on Monday who told me he started picking cotton at the age of 5 and that I had no idea what his life experience was like; he is correct). And I will continue to ask God to show me my blind spots.

But I will not allow cultural radicals to paint a false picture of our nation.

We are far from perfect. But we are hardly a country that is deeply divided by race.

Let us join together then and stand as one for what is right.

I truly believe that is what the great majority of Americans want to do.

Do you agree?


This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org.




Federal Legislation Would Allow Americans to Sue Big Tech Companies

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has introduced a bill that would allow Americans to sue companies such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook for censoring political speech. The bill comes as an activist NBC journalist contacted Google to demonetize The Federalist and then reported on it.

The Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act, which was introduced June 17 would amend Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, is co-sponsored by U.S. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Braun (R-IN), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA).

“Big Tech companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook,” Hawley said, “have used their power to silence political speech from conservatives without any recourse for users. Section 230 has been stretched and rewritten by courts to give these companies outlandish power over speech without accountability. Congress should act to ensure bad actors are not given a free pass to censor and silence their opponents.”

Under the terms of the bill, companies would be prohibited from receiving Section 230 immunity unless they “update their terms of service to promise to operate in good faith and pay a $5,000 fine (or actual damages, if higher) plus attorney’s fees if they violate that promise.”

It would also let users sue companies for breaching the terms of good faith and prohibit companies from discriminating when enforcing terms of service and failing to honor their promises.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is also preparing legislation that would remove legal protections from companies “when they facilitate or solicit content or activity from third parties that violate federal law.” According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the DOJ’s proposals will not only address the question of censorship, but also tackle social media’s facilitation of child exploitation, terrorism, cyberstalking, and other crimes:

The department’s proposal, for instance, would remove legal protections when platforms facilitate or solicit third-party content or activity that violates federal criminal law, such as online scams and trafficking in illicit drugs. The department also wouldn’t confer immunity to platforms in instances involving online child exploitation and sexual abuse, terrorism or cyberstalking. Those carve-outs are needed to curtail immunity for internet companies to allow victims to seek redress, the official said.

The Justice Department also will seek to make clear that tech platforms don’t have immunity in civil-enforcement actions brought by the federal government, and can’t use immunity as a defense against antitrust claims that they removed content for anticompetitive reasons.

Regarding the situation with NBC, Google, and the Federalist, the journalist from NBC made a complaint to Google about criticism of Black Lives Matter that appeared on The Federalist’s website. She then bragged about her “co-investigation” with Google getting the site demonetized. Everything was quickly sorted out, with Google claiming it never demonetized the Federalist.

This censorship issue will most likely continue to come up as the election season goes on. Twitter has been in the spotlight for slapping warning labels on tweets by President Donald Trump saying they violate the company’s policies forbidding abusive behavior. The president has responded that the company is trying to silence conservative voices and hurt his re-election campaign. An executive order he tried to put in place to ease social media restrictions on speech has been blocked in court.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to contact Illinois’ U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth to ask them to support and/or co-sponsor S. 3983. The “big tech” social media giants should be held accountable facilitating federal crimes, including terrorism and child exploitation as well as for their anti-conservative bias (censorship) in moderating content.


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Fomenting Racism in the 21st Century

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

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The 1619 Project—a much criticized revision of American history by the New York Times and racism-peddler/activist Nikole Hannah-Jones
  • Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center
  • Deep Equity
  • White Privilege Conference
  • Pacific Education Group/Courageous Conversation About Race—founder Glenn Singleton
  • National SEED Project (Seeking Education Equity and Diversity)
  • “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”—essay written by Peggy McIntosh
  • The People’s History of the United States, a revisionist history written by Howard Zinn

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

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

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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


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