By now many Americans have learned what slimy, deceitful hypocrites California governor Gavin Newsom and his wealthy, well-connected friends are. In a stunning act of arrogant “do what I say, not what I do, PEONS,” he and his privileged co-scofflaws dined at an exclusive restaurant in Napa Valley—indoors without masks—in violation of his own rules.

His co-scofflaws included Dustin Corcoran, the CEO of the California Medical Association, and Janus Norman, the group’s lobbyist and senior vice president. Apparently, some medical professionals don’t really think dining indoors mask-less with friends puts their lives at risk. Now I’m waiting for all of Hollywood, the Democrat Party, and the faux-journalists at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to explode in paroxysms of sanctimonious rage and primal fear at the prospect of the imminent deaths of all the people these twelve scofflaws will infect.

But don’t worry, Newsom is very very sorry he got caught.

The reality is many—perhaps most—leftists don’t believe the alarmist claims they exploit for political—that is, anti-Trump—purposes. In the midst of the first COVID-19 surge, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot commanded her subjects to forgo haircuts, while she—unmasked—had her hair done because she wanted to look good in front of the cameras and because she cares about her “hygiene”—unlike, presumably, her subjects. After the election, she joined her subjects in the street for a victory celebration and then promptly put the kibosh on their Thanksgiving celebrations saying, “You must cancel the normal Thanksgiving plans, particularly if they include guests that do not live in your immediate household.”

She followed that up with her Thanksgiving “advisory”:

– Stay home unless for essential reasons

– Stop having guests over—including family members you do not live with

– Avoid non-essential travel

– Cancel traditional Thanksgiving plans

Not to be outdone in hypocrisy or authoritarian intrusiveness, Oregon’s “openly bisexual” governor Kate Brown has issued these commands, which, if not followed, can result in  fines up to $1,250 or 30 days in jail:

• Private Social Events—limited to two households or six individuals in a closed group (including Thanksgiving)

• Wear a mask in your own home on Thanksgiving, only removing it when eating

• Don’t leave your home during the two-week shutdown

So much for “our bodies, ourselves.”

While in June Brown said “she believes the use of tear gas against protesters is unacceptable,” she is now working with “state police and local law enforcement” to ensure compliance with her Thanksgiving orders.  Think about that for a minute.

This is the same governor who allowed the creation of the potential super-spreader rebel state of CHAZ/CHOP in six blocks of Portlandia and who allowed mostly violent potential super-spreader protests to ravage the rest of Portlandia. So, does bisexual Brown really believe gatherings of ten are highly likely to be lethal gatherings?

Privileged leftists who dine at uber-swanky, $350 per person ($35-45 per glass of wine) restaurants are utterly cavalier about destroying people’s livelihoods while they do not themselves believe that socializing mask-less puts everyone in mortal danger. Newsom and other privileged Democrats wield their inordinate power recklessly, destroying countless small businesses while sating their gourmet appetites on the finest food the monied can buy.

When I refer to “alarmist claims,” I’m not suggesting that the Wuhan Red Death is not alarming or that the death rate is not tragic. I’m suggesting that the claims of leftists about the virus are alarmist in that they are not balanced by either the inclusion of all relevant statistics or by a modicum of humility about what is known about treatment and prevention.

For example, while leftists blame Wuhan virus spikes on the evil mask-questioners who walk among us purportedly like Grim Reapers, they rarely if ever discuss the worldwide Wuhan spikes in countries with more stringent lockdown and mask mandates.

When areas lock down, virus infections stall. When lockdowns end, virus infections increase. But we can’t afford the social, psychological, physical, and economic consequences of locking down forever.

Rational people understand that a contagion like the Wuhan virus will spread. What is needed are good therapeutics and herd immunity achieved via a combination of infections and vaccines. Social distancing for those most at risk of serious complications and/or death is wise. Social distancing for healthy people under 60, school closures, and business lockdowns are foolhardy at minimum and downright dangerous for many people.

While COVID-infected people should mask if they must go out, evidence that widespread masking of healthy people prevents COVID is scanty. According to the New York Times, a recent, large, randomized study out of Denmark provides evidence for what many have been saying:

The researchers had hoped that masks would cut the infection rate by half among wearers. Instead, 42 people in the mask group, or 1.8 percent, got infected, compared with 53 in the unmasked group, or 2.1 percent. The difference was not statistically significant.

Lead author of the study, Dr. Henning Bundgaard, stated that his study indicated that “not a lot” is gained “from wearing a mask.”

Perhaps it’s past time for political leaders to abandon mask mandates for children and healthy adults under 60. And surely, it’s past time for the mask-obsessed among us to stop verbally attacking those who choose not to mask as irresponsible, ignorant, uncaring, selfish, evil killers.

As the nightmarish 2020 draws to a close, there are reasons for optimism. President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed has  resulted in the development of not one but two highly effective vaccines at warp speed. As of this writing, both Moderna and Pfizer have developed vaccines that are about 95% effective, and evidence suggests that vaccine-induced immunity may last years and be more effective than immunity that develops from contracting COVID-19.

So, we have reasons to believe that in a few months, life will be able to return to normal. In the meantime, school closures must end. There has never been any science suggesting that schools should have closed. If children contract COVID-19, the statistical likelihood that they will survive is 99.99998%.

Annually, about 4,000 children die in car accidents with 630 of those being 12 or younger; 800 children drown; and in the 2019-2020 flu season, 188 children died. So far about 130 children have died from COVID-19. Anytime leftists want to impose a restriction on the freedom of others, they ask, “Isn’t saving the life of even one person worth the sacrifice?” So, are we going to prohibit all children from riding in cars except for essential activities? Are we going to prohibit all children from swimming in pools, ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans? Are we going to close schools every year during flu season? If not, why not?

Those parents whose children live in homes with at-risk family members can choose to keep their children home. Those teachers who are in an at-risk group can stay home. But all schools should open. Even leftist New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof recently and grudgingly admitted that Trump has long been right on school closures:

Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right. Schools, especially elementary schools, do not appear to have been major sources of coronavirus transmission, and remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children. …

Democrats helped preside over school closures that have devastated millions of families and damaged children’s futures. … In both Europe and the United States, schools have not been linked to substantial transmission, and teachers and family members have not been shown to be at extra risk. …  Meanwhile, the evidence has mounted of the human cost of school closures.

Leftists have provided ample evidence of their poor judgment, their Faustian willingness to abandon principles to acquire power, their Machiavellian abuse of power to circumscribe liberty, their hypocrisy, and their elitism. We better hope Americans awaken from their “woke” stupor before it’s too late.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Newsom-and-Lightfoot-and-Brown-Oh-My.mp3

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One of the more grotesque demonstrations of leftist non-sense and hypocrisy was demonstrated a week ago following an episode of the wildly popular Disney show The Mandalorian when “Baby Yoda” eats the unfertilized eggs of a Frog Woman who is transporting her eggs to her husband so he can fertilize them thereby preventing their species’ imminent extinction. Fans of Baby Yoda freaked out, incensed at the lighthearted treatment of what they deemed genocide by the beloved Baby Yoda.

The moral incoherence and hypocrisy should be obvious. In the Upside Down where leftists live, when a human mother hires someone to dismember her own fertilized human egg—aka human fetus/embryo/baby—they demand that society affirm, celebrate, and shout the execution of those tiny humans. In fact, the voluntary dismemberment of fertilized human eggs at any gestational age is so morally innocuous and such an unmitigated public good that leftists think all Americans should pay for the executions of humans in utero.

In the Upside Down, the genocidal killing of all fertilized human eggs with Down Syndrome is at best morally neutral if not morally good, but the fictional devouring of unfertilized Frog Critters’ eggs is morally repugnant. Just wondering, if fertilized human eggs are parasites so devoid of personhood as to render them morally legitimate objects to kill, if it’s okay to dismember them because they’re imperfect non-persons, would there be anything wrong with eating their remains?

Leftists views on the slaughter of fertilized human eggs is just the most grotesque of their many morally incoherent views. Here are a few more:

• According to leftists, concerns of conservatives about possible 2020 election “irregularities”—including via computer malfeasance and malfunction—are evidence of paranoid conspiracy theories, but when leftists express such concerns, they’re sound, reasonable, and legitimate. In 2019, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden proposed an amendment titled “Protecting American Votes and Elections Act” to the “Help America Vote Act of 2002.” His proposed amendment was signed by 14 co-sponsors—all Democrats—including a who’s who of presidential wannabes: Richard Blumenthal, Edward Markey, Jeff Merkley, Tammy Duckworth, Brian Schatz, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tammy Baldwin, Bernie Sanders, Maria Cantwell, Kamala Harris, Sherrod Brown, Michael Bennet, and Patty Murray. Wyden provided a summary of his amendment that includes the following:

Votes cast with paperless voting machines cannot be subjected to a manual recount, and so there is no way to determine the real election results if they are hacked. H.R. 1 …  mandates paper ballots.

In order to detect hacks, this bill requires election bodies to conduct audits of all federal elections, regardless of how close the election, by employing statistically rigorous “risk-limiting audits.”

There are currently no mandatory standards for election cybersecurity, which has resulted in some states operating election infrastructure that is needlessly vulnerable to hacking. The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) sets voluntary standards for voting machines, but states can and do ignore these standards. There are no standards at all for voter registration websites or other parts of our election infrastructure.

• Leftists heartily endorse bodily damage and disfigurement as sound “treatment” protocols for those who experience a mismatch between their internal feelings and their sexual embodiment as male or female, but bodily damage and disfigurement of those who experience a mismatch between their internal feelings and their whole or healthy bodies (i.e., those with Body Integrity Identity Disorder who identify as amputees or paraplegics) are considered barbaric and ethically prohibited.

• Leftists condemn conservatives as “science-deniers” for disagreeing with them on the degree to which climate change is caused by human action or on how to respond to climate change. At the same time, the purported science-worshippers claim that men can menstruate, become pregnant, and “chestfeed,” and they claim that the product of conception between two persons is not a person. Anyone who refuses to concede to such nonsense is mocked, reviled, de-platformed, and fired. Just ask Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling or Wall Street Journal writer and author of Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier.

• Leftists claim that marriage has no connection to either sexual differentiation or reproductive potential. They vociferously claim that marriage is solely constituted by love, and that “love is love.” And yet most leftists don’t think two brothers in a consensual loving relationship should be able to legally marry.

• Leftists claim there’s no story behind or within Hunter Biden’s emails and texts that prove Joe Biden straight up lied to the American public, and yet they claimed there was a story of such magnitude and enormity within Christopher Steele’s imaginative “dossier,” that it necessitated 24-hour coverage for years.

• Leftists claim that eliminating the Electoral College and filibuster and packing the U.S. Supreme Court constitute necessary changes to enhance “democracy,” but implementing legal processes to ensure an election was fair undermines democracy.

• Every gathering of leftists, including mostly violent protests, a takeover of six city blocks, trips to hair salons (Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi), a post-election street celebration (Lori Lightfoot), a holiday boating excursion (attempted by husband of Michigan Governor Christine Whitmer), restaurant dining (California Governor Gavin Newsom, CNN narcissist Chris Cuomo), a funeral/Democrat campaign event (i.e., John Lewis’ faux-funeral) are COVID-immune and justifiable. But an Orthodox Jewish funeral, an entirely peaceful protest of draconian COVID restrictions, and a march in support of a transparent and fair election are denounced as super-spreader events.

• Serial killer of senior citizens, Andrew “Quietus” Cuomo, commands citizens to “admit” their “mistakes” and “shortcomings” with regard to how they responded to the Chinese Communist virus even as he refuses to apologize for his policies that killed scores of elderly.

• To leftists, social science is the god that determines all moral truth, and yet despite social science demonstrating repeatedly that children—especially boys—need fathers, the left refuses to discuss how fatherless families may be contributing to the anti-social behavior that is destroying our cities.

• Leftists claim to value free speech, religious liberty, inclusivity, diversity, tolerance, and unity while condemning not just the beliefs of those with whom they disagree, but also the persons themselves. Many leftists share an uncharitable, presumptuous, ugly, tyrannical, oppressive, and scary desire that those who believe homosexual acts are immoral, who believe marriage has an ontology, who believe biological sex is immutable and meaningful, and who believe bodily damage and disfigurement are improper treatment protocols for gender dysphoria should be unable to work anywhere in America.

To create the illusion that they’re not hypocrites and to defend their intolerance, exclusion, divisiveness, hatred of persons, book banning, speech suppression, demand for ideological uniformity, and efforts to circumscribe the  exercise of religion—which for Christians extends far outside the church walls—leftists resort to fallacious reasoning. The fallacies they employ are too numerous to list, but two of their faves are the ad hominem fallacy and the fallacy of circular reasoning.

Ad hominem is an informal fallacy in which an irrelevant personal attack replaces a logical argument. It proves nothing about the soundness, truth, or falsity of a claim. Instead it appeals to emotion and silences debate through intimidation.

The fallacy of circular reasoning occurs when the conclusion presumes the premise (i.e., the initial claim) is true without proving it true. So, for example, leftists–ignoring their purported commitment to the First Amendment–argue that homosexual acts are moral acts and, therefore, there is no need to tolerate the expression of dissenting views. But the intolerance they are trying to defend is based on the truth of their premise that homosexual acts are moral—a premise they simply assume without proving is true.

Here’s another: Leftists assert that marriage is constituted solely by subjective romantic and erotic feelings, and, therefore, the government has no reason not to recognize unions between two people of the same sex as marriages, because such couples can experience love and erotic desire. But the premise—i.e., that marriage is constituted solely by subjective romantic and erotic feelings—hasn’t been proved.

And here’s yet another claim about marriage based on circular reasoning: Leftists argue that the reason government is involved in marriage is to grant public legitimacy or provide “dignity” to erotic/romantic unions and, therefore, the government has an obligation to recognize homoerotic unions as marriages. The problem is that those who make this argument fail to prove their claim that the reason government is involved in marriage is to recognize, provide, or impart “dignity” to unions. Those who make this argument just assume their premise is true.

After employing fallacious circular reasoning and hurling ad hominem epithets at their opponents, leftists sanctimoniously wipe the dust off their dirty hands and assert that their hypocrisy isn’t really hypocrisy after all.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Ideological-Non-Sense-and-Hypocrisy-of-Leftists.mp3

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We understand that we are accountable before you and God to honor your trust. 

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Written by Peter Heck

In mid-March, Politico ran a series of short essays from “experts” on how coronavirus would change the world permanently. If you’re curious why I designate them as “experts” rather than experts, the authorities they assembled consisted of a cadre of college professors, including commentator Tom Nichols. Predictably, Nichols spent the majority of his time taking hyperbolic hate shots at the president, like this:

The colossal failure of the Trump administration both to keep Americans healthy and to slow the pandemic-driven implosion of the economy might shock the public enough back to insisting on something from government other than emotional satisfaction.

As tempting as it might be, I encourage you not to roll your eyes and ignore those words, because buried inside that little treasure chest of rage is a very revealing assumption. Specifically look how Nichols blames the president and his administration for failing “to keep Americans healthy.” Are we content with accepting that as a reasonable expectation to place on the federal executive branch?

Others in the Politico feature would seem to be. Margaret O’Mara, a professor of history at the University of Washington, predicted,

Not only will America need a massive dose of big government to get out of this crisis…but we will need big, and wise, government more than ever in its aftermath.

And University of Maryland’s associate professor of government and politics could barely contain her glee at the prospect:

The Reagan era is over. The widely accepted idea that government is inherently bad won’t persist after coronavirus … It is no longer “terrifying” to hear the words “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” In fact, that is what most people are desperately hoping to hear right now.

Is it? I guess I’m skeptical. Though polls continue to show the majority of Americans are hesitant about lifting the lock-downs and returning to life as usual, the devil may be in the details. What does “as usual” mean, precisely?

Though hardly a representative sample, the majority of Americans I observe are content with accepting the advice and recommendations from government officials regarding hand-washing, face-touching, social distancing, and even face masks. But that contentment quickly runs out when advice and recommendations turn into lock-downs, stay-at-home orders, and forced business closures.

That’s why I think good sense would stop short of making hope-filled predictions like these left-leaning college professors are wont to do. What actually seems likely is that coronavirus is going to renew the civilization-old debate over the role that government should take in our lives.

Perhaps Americans will be enthralled with the sound wisdom of the CDC and their “don’t wear masks, wait, on second thought do wear masks, and actually, if you don’t wear a mask you’re a public enemy” advice. Maybe they’ll be convinced that our freedoms should be determined month-to-month by task-force-created predictive models. Possibly we will all go for a new cabinet-level executive department that will tell us where we can travel and when.

Or maybe all this big government in people’s faces will backfire on the left-wing planners. After all, it’s one thing to accept these kinds of intrusions and disruptions temporarily, when there’s an immediate, self-evident purpose. It’s quite another to adopt them as permanent changes to our way of life.

In the end, it’s possible that much to the chagrin of Politico’s panel, America will be drawn back to the wisdom of her founding, expressed articulately in a recent tweet from libertarian presidential hopeful, U.S. Congressman Justin Amash: