Written by Megan Basham

In September, Wheaton College dean Ed Stetzer interviewed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on his podcast, “Church Leadership” about why Christians who want to obey Christ’s command to love their neighbors should get the Covid vaccine and avoid indulging in misinformation.

For those not familiar with Stetzer, he’s not just a religious liberal arts professor and this wasn’t just another dime-a-dozen pastorly podcast. To name just a few of his past and present titles in the evangelical world, Stetzer is also the executive director of the Billy Graham Center and the editor-in-chief of Outreach media group. He was previously an editor at Christianity Today and an executive director at LifeWay, one of the largest religious publishers in the world. That’s to say nothing of the dozen-plus books on missions and church planting he’s authored.

Which is why, when Stetzer joined a line of renowned pastors and ministry leaders lending their platforms to Obama-appointee Collins, the collaboration was noteworthy.

During their discussion, Collins and Stetzer were hardly shy about the fact that they were asking ministers to act as the administration’s go-between with their congregants. “I want to exhort pastors once again to try to use your credibility with your flock to put forward the public health measures that we know can work,” Collins said. Stetzer replied that he sometimes hears from ministers who don’t feel comfortable preaching about Covid vaccines, and he advises them, in those cases, to simply promote the jab through social media.

“I just tell them, when you get vaccinated, post a picture and say, ‘So thankful I was able to get vaccinated,’” Stetzer said. “People need to see that it is the reasonable view.”

Their conversation also turned to the subject of masking children at school, with Collins noting that Christians, in particular, have been resistant to it. His view was firm—kids should be masked if they want to be in the classroom. To do anything else is to turn schools into super spreaders. Stetzer offered no pushback or follow-up questions based on views from other medical experts. He simply agreed.

The most crucial question Stetzer never asked Collins however, was why convincing church members to get vaccinated or disseminating certain administration talking points should be the business of pastors at all.

Christians and Conspiracy Theories

Stetzer’s efforts to help further the NIH’s preferred coronavirus narratives went beyond simply giving Collins a softball venue to rally pastors to his cause. He ended the podcast by announcing that the Billy Graham Center would be formally partnering with the Biden administration. Together with the NIH and the CDC it would launch a website, coronavirusandthechurch.com, to provide clergy Covid resources they could then convey to their congregations.

Much earlier in the pandemic, as an editor at evangelicalism’s flagship publication, Christianity Today (CT), Stetzer had also penned essays parroting Collins’ arguments on conspiracy theories. Among those he lambasted other believers for entertaining, the hypothesis that the coronavirus had leaked from a Wuhan lab. In a now deleted essay, preserved by Web Archive, Stetzer chided, “If you want to believe that some secret lab created this as a biological weapon, and now everyone is covering that up, I can’t stop you.”

It may seem strange, given the evidence now emerging of NIH-funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, to hear a church leader instruct Christians to “repent” for the sin of discussing the plausible supposition that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory. This is especially true as it doesn’t take any great level of spiritual discernment — just plain common sense — to look at the fact that Covid first emerged in a city with a virology institute that specializes in novel coronaviruses and realize it wasn’t an explanation that should be set aside too easily. But it appears Stetzer was simply following Collins’ lead.

Only two days before Stetzer published his essay, Collins participated in a livestream event, co-hosted by CT. The outlet introduced him as a “follower of Jesus, who affirms the sanctity of human life” despite the fact that Collins is on record stating he does not definitively believe, as most pro-lifers do, that life begins at conception, and his tenure at NIH has been marked by extreme anti-life, pro-LGBT policies. (More on this later).

But the pro-life Christian framing was sure to win Collins a hearing among an audience with deep religious convictions about the evil of abortion. Many likely felt reassured to hear that a likeminded medical expert was representing them in the administration.

During the panel interview, Collins continued to insist that the lab leak theory wasn’t just unlikely but qualified for the dreaded misinformation label. “If you were trying to design a more dangerous coronavirus,” he said, “you would never have designed this one … So I think one can say with great confidence that in this case the bioterrorist was nature … Humans did not make this one. Nature did.”

It was the same message his subordinate, Dr. Anthony Fauci, had been giving to secular news outlets, but Collins was specifically tapped to carry the message to the faithful. As Time Magazine reported in Feb. 2021, “While Fauci has been medicine’s public face, Collins has been hitting the faith-based circuit…and preaching science to believers.”

The editors, writers, and reporters at Christian organizations didn’t question Collins any more than their mainstream counterparts questioned Fauci.

Certainly The Gospel Coalition, a publication largely written for and by pastors, didn’t probe beyond the “facts” Collins’ offered or consider any conflicts of interest the NIH director might have had before publishing several essays that cited him as almost their lone source of information. As with CT, one article by Gospel Coalition editor Joe Carter linked the reasonable hypothesis that the virus might have been human-made with wilder QAnon fantasies. It then lectured readers that spreading such ideas would damage the church’s witness in the world.

Of course, Stetzer and The Gospel Coalition had no way of knowing at that point that Collins and Fauci had already heard from leading U.S. and British scientists who believed the virus had indeed escaped from a Chinese lab. Or that they believed it might be the product of gain-of-function engineering, possibly with funding from the NIH itself. Nor could they have predicted that emails between Collins and Fauci would later show the pair had a habit of turning to friendly media contacts (including, it seems, Christian media contacts) to discredit and suppress opinions they didn’t like, such as questioning Covid’s origins and the wisdom of masks and lockdowns.

What Stetzer and others did know was that one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the world was calling on evangelical leaders to be “ambassadors for truth.” And they were happy to answer that call.

The question was, just how truthful was Collins’ truth?

Evangelicals of a Feather

Stetzer, CT, and The Gospel Coalition were hardly alone in uncritically lending their sway over rank-and-file evangelicals to Collins. The list of Christian leaders who passed the NIH director their mics to preach messages about getting jabs, wearing masks, and accepting the official line on Covid is as long as it is esteemed.

One of the most noteworthy was the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), an organization funded by churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.

While a webinar featuring Collins and then-ERLC-head Russell Moore largely centered, again, on the importance of pastors convincing church members to get vaccinated, the discussion also moved on to the topic of masks. With Moore nodding along, Collins held up a basic, over-the-counter cloth square, “This is not a political statement,” he asserted. “This is not an invasion of your personal freedom…This is a life-saving medical device.”

Even in late 2020, the claim was highly debatable among medical experts. As hematologist-oncologist Vinay Prasad wrote in City Journal this month, public health officials like Collins have had a truth problem over the entire course of Covid, but especially when it comes to masks. “The only published cluster randomized trial of community cloth masking during Covid-19,” Prasad reported, “found that…cloth masks were no better than no masks at all.” [emphasis mine].

At this point, even the CDC is backing away from claims that cloth masks are worth much of anything.

Yet none of the Christian leaders platforming Collins evidently felt it was worth exploring a second opinion. And the list of pastors who were willing to take a bureaucrat’s word that matters that could have been left to Christian liberty were instead tests of one’s love for Jesus goes on.

Former megachurch pastor Tim Keller’s joint interview with Collins included a digression where the pair agreed that churches like John MacArthur’s, which continued to meet in-person despite Covid lockdowns, represented the “bad and ugly” of good, bad, and ugly Christian responses to the virus.

During Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren’s special broadcast with Collins on behalf of Health and Human Services, he mentioned that he and Collins first met when both were speakers for the billionaires and heads of state who gather annually in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. They reconnected recently, Warren revealed, at an “off-the-record” meeting between Collins and “key faith leaders.” Warren did not say, but one can make an educated guess as to who convened that meeting and for what purpose, given the striking similarity of Collins’ appearances alongside all these leading Christian lights.

Once again, Warren and Collins spent their interview jointly lamenting the unlovingness of Christians who question the efficacy of masks, specifically framing it as a matter of obedience to Jesus. “Wearing a mask is the great commandment: love your neighbor as yourself,” the best-selling author of “The Purpose-Driven Life” declared, before going on to specifically argue that religious leaders have an obligation to convince religious people to accept the government’s narratives about Covid.

“Let me just say a word to the priests and pastors and rabbis and other faith leaders,” he said. “This is our job, to deal with these conspiracy issues and things like that…One of the responsibilities of faith leaders is to tell people to…trust the science. They’re not going to put out a vaccine that’s going to hurt people.”

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that government does have a record of putting out vaccines that “hurt people,” is it truly the pastor’s job to tell church members to “trust the science?” Is it a pastor’s job to slyly insult other pastors who chose to handle shutdowns differently, as Warren did when he quipped that his “ego doesn’t require” him to “have a live audience to speak to.”

And still the list goes on.

The same week MacArthur’s church was in the news for resisting California Governor Gavin Newsom orders to keep houses of worship closed, Collins participated in an interview with celebrated theologian N.T. Wright.

During a discussion where the NIH director once again trumpeted the efficacy of cloth masks, the pair warned against conspiracies, mocking “disturbing examples” of churches that continued meeting because they thought “the devil can’t get into my church” or “Jesus is my vaccine.” Lest anyone wonder whether Wright experienced some pause over lending his reputation as a deep Christian thinker to Caesar’s agent, the friends finished with a guitar duet.

Even hipster Christian publications like Relevant, whose readers have likely never heard of Collins, still looked to him as the foundation of their Covid reporting.

Throughout all of it, Collins brought the message to the faithful through their preachers and leaders: “God is calling [Christians] to do the right thing.”

And none of those leaders thought to question whether Collins’ “right thing” and God’s “right thing” must necessarily be the same thing.

Why not? As Warren said of Collins during their interview: “He’s a man you can trust.”

A Man You Can Trust

Perhaps the evangelical elites’ willingness to unhesitatingly credit Collins with unimpeachable honesty has something to do with his rather Mr. Rogers-like appearance and gentle demeanor. The establishment media has compared him to “The Simpson’s” character Ned Flanders, noting that he has a tendency to punctuate his soft speech with exclamations of “oh boy!” and “by golly!”

Going by his concrete record, however, he seems like a strange ambassador to spread the government’s Covid messaging to theologically conservative congregations. Other than his proclamations that he is, himself, a believer, the NIH director espouses nearly no public positions that would mark him out as any different from any extreme Left-wing bureaucrat.

He has not only defended experimentation on fetuses obtained by abortion, he has also directed record-level spending toward it. Among the priorities the NIH has funded under Collins — a University of Pittsburgh experiment that involved grafting infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the harvested organs of aborted, full-term babies. Some doctors have even charged Collins with giving money to research that required extracting kidneys, ureters, and bladders from living infants.

He further has endorsed unrestricted funding of embryonic stem cell research, personally attending President Obama’s signing of an Executive Order to reverse a previous ban on such expenditures. When Nature magazine asked him about the Trump administration’s decision to shut down fetal cell research, Collins made it clear he disagreed, saying, “I think it’s widely known that the NIH tried to protect the continued use of human fetal tissue. But ultimately, the White House decided otherwise. And we had no choice but to stand down.”

Even when directly asked about how genetic testing has led to the increased killing of Down Syndrome babies in the womb, Collins deflected, telling Beliefnet, “I’m troubled [by] the applications of genetics that are currently possible are oftentimes in the prenatal arena…But, of course, in our current society, people are in a circumstance of being able to take advantage of those technologies.”

When it comes to pushing an agenda of racial quotas and partiality based on skin color, Collins is a member of the Left in good standing, speaking fluently of “structural racism” and “equity” rather than equality. He’s put his money (or, rather, taxpayer money) where his mouth is, implementing new policies that require scientists seeking NIH grants to pass diversity, equity, and inclusion tests in order to qualify.

To the most holy of progressive sacred cows — LGBTQ orthodoxy — Collins has been happy to genuflect. Having declared himself an “ally” of the gay and trans movements, he went on to say he “[applauds] the courage and resilience it takes for [LGBTQ] individuals to live openly and authentically” and is “committed to listening, respecting, and supporting [them]” as an “advocate.”

These are not just the empty words of a hapless Christian official saying what he must to survive in a hostile political atmosphere. Collins’ declaration of allyship is deeply reflected in his leadership.

Under his watch, the NIH launched a new initiative to specifically direct funding to “sexual and gender minorities.” On the ground, this has translated to awarding millions in grants to experimental transgender research on minors, like giving opposite-sex hormones to children as young as eight and mastectomies to girls as young as 13. Another project, awarded $8 million in grants, included recruiting teen boys to track their homosexual activities like “condomless anal sex” on an app without their parents’ consent.

Other than his assertions of his personal Christian faith, there is almost no public stance Collins has taken that would mark him out as someone of like mind with the everyday believers to whom he was appealing.

How did Collins overcome all this baggage to become the go-to expert for millions of Christians? With a little help from his friends, who were happy to stand as his character witnesses.

Keller, Warren, Wright, and Stetzer all publicly lauded him as a godly brother.  When presenting Collins to Southern Baptists, Moore gushed over him as the smartest man in a book club he attends that also includes, according to Time Magazine, such luminaries of the “Christiantelligentsia” as The Atlantic’s Pete Wehner and The New York Times’ David Brooks.

In October, even after Collins’ funding of the University of Pittsburgh research had become widely known, Moore continued to burnish his friend’s reputation, saying, “I admire greatly the wisdom, expertise, and, most of all, the Christian humility and grace of Francis Collins.” That same month, influential evangelical pundit David French deemed Collins a “national treasure” and his service in the NIH “faithful.” Former George W. Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson struck the most poetic tone in his effusive praise, claiming that Collins possesses a “restless genius [that] is other-centered” and is a “truth-seeker in the best sense.”

Except, apparently, when those others are aborted infants or gender-confused children and when that truth pertains to lab leaks or gain-of-function funding.

Since news began breaking months ago that Collins and Fauci intentionally used their media connections to conspire to suppress the lab-leak theory, none of the individuals or organizations in this story has corrected their records or asked Collins publicly about his previous statements. Nor have they circled back with him to inquire on record about revelations the NIH funded gain-of-function coronavirus research in Wuhan. They also haven’t questioned him on the increasing scientific consensus that cloth masks were never very useful.

The Daily Wire reached out to Stetzer, Keller, Wright, Warren, Moore, and French to ask if they have changed their views on Collins given recent revelations. None responded.

Francis Collins has been an especially successful envoy for the Biden administration, delivering messages to a mostly-Republican Christian populace who would otherwise be reluctant to hear them. In their presentation of Collins’ expertise, these pastors and leaders suggested that questioning his explanations as to the origins of the virus or the efficacy of masks was not simply a point of disagreement but sinful. This was a charge likely to have a great deal of impact on churchgoers who strive to live lives in accordance with godly standards. Perhaps no other argument could’ve been more persuasive to this demographic.

This does not mean these leaders necessarily knew that the information they were conveying to the broader Christian public could be false, but it does highlight the danger religious leaders face when they’re willing to become mouth organs of the government.

What we do know about Collins and his work with Fauci is that they have shown themselves willing to compromise transparency and truth for PR considerations. Thus, everything they have told the public about the vaccines may be accurate and their message a worthy one for Christians. But their credibility no longer carries much weight. It would’ve been better had the evangelical establishment never platformed Collins at all and shipwrecked their own reputations to showcase their lofty connections to him.

While these evangelical leaders were warning about conspiracy theories, Collins was waging a misinformation campaign himself — one these Christian megaphones helped further.

Why they did it is a question only they can answer. Perhaps in their eagerness to promote vaccines, they weren’t willing to offer any pushback to Collins’ other claims. Certainly, the lure of respect in the halls of power has proved too great a siren call for many a man. Or perhaps it was simply that their friend, the NIH director, called on them for a favor. If so, a friend like Collins deserved much, much more scrutiny.

There’s an instructive moment at the end of Warren‘s interview with Collins. The pastor misquotes Proverbs 4, saying, “Get the facts at any price.”

That, of course, is not what the verse says. It says get wisdom at any price. And it was wisdom that was severely lacking when so many pastors and ministry heads recklessly turned over their platforms, influence, and credibility to a government official who had done little to demonstrate he deserved them.

This article was originally published by The Daily Wire, which is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. 

Written by Patience Griswold

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation offered a glimpse into the world that a minor when scrolling through Tik Tok, the most popular social media platform among America’s teenagers. It wasn’t pretty. The journalists set up 31 fake Tik Tok accounts posing as 13–15-year-old users and discovered that the algorithm very quickly started showing them sexually explicit content, sexual violence, and links to OnlyFans. The fact that the age set on each of the 31 accounts was set at 15 or younger made no difference as pornographic content and links made their way into each account’s feed.

It’s not just Tick Tock — in their book Treading Boldly Through a Pornographic World, Daniel Weiss and Joshua Glaser report that, while 18 percent of 13–17-year-olds report that they seek out pornographic content on a weekly basis, over 20 percent say that they come across it unintentionally on a weekly basis. We live in a pornified culture, and parents today are presented with the challenge of navigating a world in which most children will have been exposed to pornography by the time they turn 13 and a growing number of children are addicted to pornography. In light of this sobering reality, it is imperative that families and churches gain a clear understanding of this issue and respond wisely as we embrace beauty of God’s design for sexuality and reject the distortions that our culture offers.

Pornography use is increasingly common among Generation Z, with 57 percent of young adults and 37 percent of teens regularly using pornography, and this problem increasingly affects girls as well as boys. Although pornography has traditionally been treated as a male problem, it is regularly used by one in three young women between the ages of 13–24. As Shane Morris recently noted on Twitter,

“The received wisdom is that girls aren’t visual creatures like guys. Porn doesn’t care about the received wisdom.”

Parents need to equip themselves to guide their daughters as well as their sons through a pornified culture by directing them toward the goodness and beauty of God’s design for sexuality, and both men and women need to flee temptation, seek out accountability, and put sin to death. Nowhere does Scripture teach that only men are capable of lust or that women’s lust is less sinful.

Not only is pornography use rampant among Generation Z, an alarming number of young people do not believe there is anything wrong with using pornography. Citing research from Barna Research Group, Glaser and Weiss report that only 32 percent of teens believe that using pornography is sometimes or always immoral. By contrast, 56 percent believe that not recycling is usually or always morally wrong. “Our culture has declared ‘wars’ on obesity and environmental exploitation, and our children have naturally absorbed and internalized those messages,” they write. “In a similar way, they have absorbed and internalized the availability of pornography and our culturally blasé attitude toward it.”

From the flippancy with which it is treated in the entertainment industry and by the media, to the lack of urgency toward the fact that children are frequently exposed to pornography, to the prevailing attitude that “everyone does it,” children and teens are being taught that pornography is no big deal.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When The New York Times published an exposé on how Pornhub, one of the largest adult entertainment platforms in the U.S., was profiting off of trafficking and abuse, major credit card companies quickly cut ties with the platform, cutting off their means of revenue and demonstrating the power of companies to take a stand against pornography. Additionally, there are multiple policy solutions that could be pursued, including implementing an age-verification system similar to what the U.K. considered two years ago, requiring internet-service providers to create an opt-in system so that the default setting excludes pornography, and stripping sites that distribute obscene content such as pornography of Section 230 immunity.

Individuals can and must also take a stand. Our culture is actively communicating to an entire generation that pornography is harmless fun. What they need instead is for the adults in their lives to communicate loud and clear that pornography is never harmless — it is destructive, exploitative, and addictive, and it takes sex, something that God created to be good and beautiful as an expression of intimacy between a husband and wife, and reduces it to voyeurism.

The church cannot be silent on this issue, and parents must equip themselves to raise their children in a world that is hostile to God’s design for sexuality. The rise in young people accidentally accessing pornographic content points to the need for families to set wise boundaries around technology and to avoid giving children unsupervised screen time, and as they get older, to help them grow in practicing wisdom and self-control in their internet usage and to have open and honest conversations with them about pornography and sexuality, consistently pointing them to the goodness of God’s design.

This article was originally published by the Minnesota Family Council.

Americans educated by government today are, for the most part, hopelessly ignorant of their own nation’s history—and that’s no accident. They’re beyond ignorant when it comes to civics, too. On the history of the rest of the world, or the history of communism, Americans are generally clueless as well. This was all by design, of course.

After generations of flying under the radar, the ongoing corruption of history education in public schools is now suddenly the topic du jour. With the spread of The New York Times’ discredited 1619 Project aiming to “reframe” history through the lens of slavery, which even The New York Times’ own fact-checker called out, Americans everywhere are suddenly paying attention to what’s being taught to impressionable children at taxpayer expense.

Last year, President Donald Trump blamed the escalating mayhem in the streets on indoctrination by schools and the media. In September, he blasted the “toxic propaganda” being peddled as “history” in American classrooms. To deal with it, the president signed an executive order to “promote patriotic education.”

The reason why history is being rewritten is hardly a mystery. In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the totalitarian ruling Party’s motto explaining its strategy is “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” And it’s very true—whoever controls the historical narrative will be able to shape the future. Liberty-minded Americans and truth are currently losing the battle—big time.

Totalitarians have long understood the power of historical narratives. Consider Chairman Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” in communist China. Under the guise of purging remnants of the old ways of capitalism and tradition, Mao’s communist storm troopers did their best to destroy the records and evidences of thousands of years of Chinese history. Books were burned and monuments destroyed in an orgy of destruction.

After true history was erased and disfigured, the Chinese Communist Party was able to rewrite history on a blank slate to suit its own agenda. Especially important to that effort was the indoctrination of children in government schools. Everything ancient and traditional was portrayed as primitive or even evil, while the new party line surrounding the supposed glories and progress of communism was force-fed to China’s youth.

America’s ongoing cultural revolution hasn’t been quite as dramatic, violent, or thorough—so far. But if left unchecked, the results of this long-term operation may turn out to be just as deadly. And there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind about the effectiveness of the effort to rewrite the history of the United States, Western civilization, and even the world.

Consider the data. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the “nation’s report card,” just 15 percent of American students were at or above the “proficient” level in history. When it comes to civics, less than 1 in 4 U.S. eighth-grade students performed at or above “proficient” in 2018 on the NAEP, the latest year for which scores are available.

Keeping in mind the wild bias of the Education Department (some 99.7 percent of the bureaucrats’ contributions to a presidential candidate in the 2016 election went to Hillary Clinton), even those numbers probably drastically overstate the true level of historical and civic understanding of U.S. students.

Contrast the dismal scores with previous generations. There was a time when Americans were the best-educated people on the planet—especially when it came to history and civics. According to prominent French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in the early-to-mid 1800s and recorded his observations in two volumes before government hijacked education, “every citizen … is … taught the doctrines and evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of the Constitution.”

Some areas on the Western frontier and the deep South weren’t quite as advanced educationally. However, in the more populous and developed areas, “it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon,” de Tocqueville continued.

Today, it’s just the opposite: Finding a person who understands the history of America or the leading features of its Constitution is a sort of phenomenon.

The Rewriting of History in America

The process of rewriting history was a long one. Unlike Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which took about a decade, those seeking to erase and distort America’s incredible and unique history were forced to proceed slowly, working over decades and generations rather than accomplishing it all in one fell swoop. But concrete evidence of this deliberate plot has surfaced periodically since at least the 1940s.

In the early 1950s, Congress became suspicious about the scheming of the major tax-exempt foundations, a subject covered extensively in part 7 of this series on education. To deal with the issue, lawmakers formed the Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, sometimes referred to as the “Reece Committee” after its chairman.

What investigators found should have shocked America to the core. In its final report, the select committee reported that the major foundations of the day, which still exist, had “supported a conscious distortion of history.” The foundations also sought to hijack education for the purpose of undermining American constitutional principles and liberty, investigators found.

One of the expert witnesses who testified during the select committee’s investigation, attorney and investigator Aaron Sargent, an expert in subversion through education, put it clearly. “They sought to create a blackout of history by slanting and distorting historical facts,” Sargent testified about the goals of the major tax-exempt foundations in the education field. “They introduced a new and revolutionary philosophy—one based on the teachings of John Dewey.”

By the time of the congressional probe, the situation was so serious that Norman Dodd, the chief investigator for the committee, said the foundations had orchestrated a “revolution” in the United States. The revolution “could not have occurred peacefully or with the consent of the majority unless education in the United States had prepared in advance to endorse it,” Dodd told lawmakers in his sworn testimony. The attack on real history in school was a crucial element of that.

Of course, the situation only got worse from there. By 1980, pseudo-historian Howard Zinn, a radical exposed in declassified FBI documents as a Communist Party member, had published his book “A People’s History of the United States.” It’s a favorite in public schools. More than 3 million copies have been sold so far, shaping the minds and attitudes of countless millions of Americans while turning them against their own nation and their own political institutions that guaranteed individual liberty for so long.

The propaganda “history” book was full of obvious lies, as exposed most recently by scholar Mary Grabar in her book “Debunking Howard Zinn.” The deception was strategic, too, and powerful. The lies begin right at the start of the book, portraying Columbus as a genocidal monster, and continue onward from there.

“We were really no better than the Nazis in the way Zinn presents it,” she said.

It was carefully calculated. “Rewriting history is what communists do,” continued Grabar, who also serves as a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. “They don’t want people to know about any other form of government or to remember a time when there was freedom and abundance. Like Zinn, the Marxists of today want young people to be so disgusted with their own country that they become inspired to overthrow it.”

While demonizing the United States and Western civilization more broadly, Zinn and other communists work hard to conceal the history of communism—“the horrors of starvation, gulags, repression, and mass murder,” Grabar said. Interestingly, there were clear parallels between Zinn’s fake history and a history written by Communist Party USA chief William Z. Foster published in 1951 dubbed “Outline Political History of the Americas.” Foster wrote openly about how crucial hijacking education would be for the Soviet-style communist regime he envisioned for America.

When starting the project, Grabar said she already knew Zinn’s book was biased. “But even I was surprised by how blatantly and deliberately Zinn lied,” she said, urging students, parents, and community members to use her book to refute the propaganda with facts.

More recently, The New York Times released its 1619 Project, the brainchild of Nikole Hannah-Jones. Like Zinn’s book, it’s essentially fake history, as historians from across the political spectrum—and even The New York Times’ own fact-checker—publicly confirmed. Like Zinn’s book, it seeks to “reframe” America’s history as one based on oppression, slavery, and racism rather than liberty. And like Zinn’s fake history, the 1619 Project is now being used in public schools across America.

Perhaps most alarming about Hannah-Jones’s false narrative is the notion that racism and evil are embedded “in the very DNA” of America. In other words, there’s nothing short of the complete annihilation of the United States’ very foundations and essence that could possibly resolve the real and imagined shortcomings. The message of the project was obvious and clear: Death to America!

In reality, the truth about American history is almost exactly the opposite of what the project presents. The principles upon which the nation was founded—“all men are created equal,” for instance, and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”—paved the way for abolishing slavery worldwide while facilitating the greatest expansion of human freedom and prosperity in world history.

Despite the obvious lies and deception, Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project. Ironically, though, New York Times writer Walter Duranty also won a Pulitzer Prize for peddling lies and communist propaganda. In Duranty’s case, he infamously parroted Stalin’s obvious propaganda and covered up the Soviet genocide in Ukraine that killed by some estimates up to 10 million people.

Effects of Fake History

This strategic rewriting of history in public schools across America has led to dramatic shifts in Americans’ attitudes, values, beliefs, and worldview. For example, national pride among Americans, who arguably live in the richest and freest nation in human history, has reached historic lows, according to a Gallup poll released last summer. Among younger Americans, just 1 in 5 are extremely proud to be American, while among those 65 and older, just over half are extremely proud.

But the real dangers are becoming clear, too. A 2019 survey by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 7 in 10 millennials said they are likely to vote for a socialist. Fully 36 percent of millennials support communism, the survey found. And just 57 percent of them believe the Declaration of Independence guarantees freedom and equality better than the Communist Manifesto. A generation ago, these numbers would have been inconceivable.

“When we don’t educate our youngest generations about the historical truth of 100 million victims murdered at the hands of communist regimes over the past century, we shouldn’t be surprised at their willingness to embrace Marxist ideas,” explained Victims of Communism (VOC) Memorial Foundation Executive Director Marion Smith.

“We need to redouble our efforts to educate America’s youth about the history of communist regimes and the dangers of socialism today.”

VOC Director of Academic Programs Murray Bessette explained that American public schools simply don’t teach the true history of communism. Part of the reason for that, he said, is the “ideological character of many involved in developing and delivering curricula for American schools.” Parents must insist on a full account of history, and teachers must seek out programs and materials that teach the whole truth, added Bessette.

The effects of these false narratives pushed on children in government schools are becoming more and more obvious. Just think of the brainwashed armies of young Americans rampaging through the streets rioting, looting, killing, protesting, and destroying. Funded by rich and powerful individuals, companies, and foundations, their goal is to “fundamentally transform” what they view as an evil America. And because they don’t know the truth about their own nation or its history, many genuinely believe in what they’re doing.

Speaking at an Independence Day celebration last summer, the president of the United States hit the nail on the head. “The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions,” Trump explained. “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that they were villains.”

Their goal, the president correctly observed, is not to improve America, but to destroy it.

Fortunately, now that the problem has been identified, steps are being taken to address it. And at the core of that process will be ensuring that young Americans understand the truth about their own nation’s history. During remarks made on Constitution Day, Trump blasted the left’s distortion of American history with lies and deception.

“There is no better example than The New York Times’ totally discredited 1619 Project,” said Trump, calling it “toxic” propaganda that would “destroy” America. “This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”

In reality, as Trump correctly pointed out, “nothing could be further from the truth.”

“America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history,” the president declared.

Trump also promised action to reverse the progress of the history destroyers and rewriters. “We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country,” he said. “We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

To accomplish that, grants are being awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to help develop a pro-American curriculum that “celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history,” Trump said. He also said he would soon sign an executive order to create a national “1776 Commission” that will promote patriotic education that will “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history.”

Whether the rot and corruption that has taken over the teaching of history and civics in America’s government schools can be reversed remains to be seen. But diagnosing an illness is the first step to treating and curing it. Now that Americans are starting to understand what’s killing their nation, serious efforts can be made to stop the bleeding. Teaching children the truth about U.S. history will be a good first step.

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

Written by Kay C. James

As a Black woman who grew up in the segregated South, I’m shocked and appalled with the race-baiting from mostly White left-wing politicians who are throwing around the “Jim Crow” label to score political points in the debate over strengthening our voting laws.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen’s line from the 1988 vice presidential debate with Dan Quayle: I knew Jim Crow. Jim Crow was no friend of mine. And these common-sense voting laws that states are adopting are no Jim Crow.

Frankly, it’s insulting that politicians are trying to manipulate Black folks like me into thinking that voting reforms that actually protect our right to vote are somehow racist. It’s insulting to be lied to, and — yes, I’m going to say it — it seems awfully racist to be thought of as so ignorant and gullible.

These state election reforms are about one thing—making it easier for American citizens to vote, while making it harder for cheaters to cheat.

Yet everyone from President Joe Biden to The New York Times to Coca-Cola and those in Hollywood are labeling voting reforms adopted in Georgia and other states as voter suppression and the new Jim Crow. There’s even a U.S. Senate hearing this week being held around this lie called, “Jim Crow 2021: The Latest Assault on the Right to Vote.”

Growing up as a Black teenager during the 1960s, I knew the tremendous sacrifices and the dangers that my friends and relatives endured to secure the right to vote for Black Americans. I myself was part of the Civil Rights Movement when I was thrust into an effort to desegregate my middle school in Richmond, Va.

So let me be perfectly clear: I have zero interest in disenfranchising or suppressing the vote of any portion of the population.

But that’s not what’s happening in Georgia or other states pursuing election reforms. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

As we’ve heard from the few truth tellers there are in the media, the new Georgia election reform doesn’t discourage voting or suppress votes. In fact, the availability of absentee ballots and early voting is a lot more robust than what it is in most “blue” states.

And Georgia provides a free voter ID to people without ID and has exceptions that mirror federal law. Turnout in the state as well as studies also show that ID requirements don’t suppress votes; and polling shows that voters, including Black voters, agree that voter ID is a common-sense reform. Claims that Black people are somehow unable or unwilling to obtain identification are insulting and have no basis in fact.

“You know what’s racist? Assuming because I’m black that ‘I just don’t have the capability of getting an I-D,’” Rep. Burgess Owens recently tweeted. I couldn’t agree more.

So why is the left calling these reforms racist? It’s a scare tactic and an attempt to rally support for a voting bill currently in Congress ironically called the For the People Act, or H.R. 1.

H.R. 1 would create a federal takeover of elections and force changes to election laws that would actually allow for greater fraud and election tampering. It would diminish the very voting rights that my relatives in the 1960s, the women suffragists of the early 1900s, and the men and women of the armed forces throughout our history fought so hard to gain and protect.

Under H.R. 1, no one has to prove they are who they say they are in order to vote. It’s likely to automatically add ineligible individuals like non-citizens to the voter rolls. And it outlaws or restricts safeguards that help states maintain accurate voter rolls to prevent people from voting twice. In other words, it would allow illegal votes to cancel out our legal ones.

And that’s just scratching the surface of this terrible law.

H.R. 1 isn’t for the people; it’s about creating more power for certain politicians. The people who support this bill expect that most illegal votes will favor left-wing politicians, and they are willing to dilute our legal votes by encouraging more illegal ones.

They are lying and calling common-sense voter protections racist to make people think that there is a groundswell of voter suppression coming from the states so that they can pretend to save us all with H.R. 1. But they aren’t really interested in protecting us; all they are interested in is helping themselves.

The right to vote is one of the most sacred rights that we as free citizens can exercise. That’s why we must protect it and not allow politicians to get away with pushing sinister bills like H.R. 1 that would diminish that right.

Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our republic, and every citizen — no matter their color, ethnicity, background or political persuasion — must be able to trust the voting process and its results.

The very future of a free nation depends on it.

Kay C. James is president of The Heritage Foundation (heritage.org).
This article was originally published by the Washington Times.

With our nation on a razor’s edge, the days are getting shorter — and darker.

In fact, the winter solstice is coming in a couple of weeks on Dec. 21, marking the shortest day on the calendar and thus the darkest time of the year.

More than ever, it’s better to look to the heavenly light of Bethlehem instead of, say, the gaslight emanating from the pixels of a profoundly corrupt media.

A random sampling of news every day can inflict whiplash. Conservative outlets report, in detail, numerous documented allegations of vote fraud that should invalidate Joe Biden’s reported victory in most of the battleground states.

During the same news cycle, the major networks and papers like The Washington Post and The New York Times assure us over and over that there is “no evidence.” Because the evidence is piling up, some have taken to adding an adjective, saying there’s no evidence of “systemic fraud.”

In other words, don’t believe your lying eyes. Their intention is to ensure that even if compelling evidence is revealed, the sheer weight of nonstop propaganda will frighten legislators and judges to head for the tall grass and decline to do their duty — even the U.S. Supreme Court.

More than ever, we need to pray that truth will prevail, that justice will be done and that God will have undeserved mercy upon us and our troubled country.

On the bright side, the dark days of December are a perfect time to celebrate the Lord arriving in the form of a baby 2,000 years ago as the greatest gift to humanity ever given. Jesus brought light, life and love and the promise of eternal salvation to a very dark world.

It’s why we celebrate by putting up Christmas lights, giving gifts and singing carols.

The most significant event in history evokes different feelings depending on one’s heart condition. In 1868, Phillips Brooks wrote the lyrics of a beloved carol that resound to this day.

The last two lines of the first verse indicate that not everyone would be happy that the Lord would engage His creation so personally:

O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by;
Yet in the dark street shineth
The everlasting Light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

Fears? Yes. If Christ is Who He says He is, then those who reject Him are choosing misery over hope, consciously or not. They brush away evidence of God’s love, relegating stories of redemption to delusion, coincidence or even ultimate self-interest.

Theologian A.W. Tozer challenged the idea of God as an absentee creator, a “Blind Watchmaker,” as prominent atheist Richard Dawkins titled his 1986 book:

Be assured that God did not create life and toss it from Him like some petulant artist disappointed with His work. All life is in Him and out of Him, flowing from Him and returning to Him again, a moving indivisible sea of which He is the fountainhead.

It may sound a lot like The Force in “Star Wars,” but the difference is stark. There is no “dark side” in God, Who is indivisible, omnipotent and all loving. We’ll never know this side of eternity why evil exists. Or why God’s love is so deep that He sent His only Son to die on our behalf. But nothing should stop us from being grateful for the gift of life itself and all that sustains it.

For Christ is born of Mary,
And fathered all above,
While mortals sleep, the angels keep
Their watch of wondering love.
O morning stars, together
Proclaim the holy birth
And praises sing to God, the King,
And peace to men on earth.

The reason for the season speaks to all people, even unbelievers. The beauty of Christmas transcends doubts and calms hearts. It’s hard to be callous toward Salvation Army bellringers tending their red kettles or to shut off one’s heart upon hearing the melodies of carols that pierce the soul and offer hope. Timeless, classic movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” can elicit tears from even the crustiest viewers.

How silently, how silently,
The wondrous Gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him still,
The dear Christ enters in.

In our culture, we’re told, over and over, that meekness is weakness; that looking out for No. 1 is the smartest way to live and that only fools bend their knee to an invisible God. But God-inspired goodness and truth are the most disarming forces on Earth.

In 1994, Mother Teresa spoke at a prayer breakfast, flanked by President Bill and Hillary Clinton and Vice President Al and Tipper Gore.  The two couples sat stone-faced as she proposed a “culture of life” and called abortion evil. At one point, Mr. Clinton’s hand was shaking nervously, apparently in reaction to the spiritual strength in this tiny, fearless woman.

Whatever happens with the election, we need to keep our eyes on the God Who promises not only salvation and mercy but courage to face the future and act accordingly.

Robert Knight is a contributor to The Washington Times, where this article was originally published. His website is roberthknight.com. 

Censorship today looks like my three-day stint in the Facebook pokey over Thanksgiving weekend during which my mad keyboarding fingers were (almost) crushed in tiny Facebook thumbscrews engraved with a photo of Lord Zuckerberg. The reason for my imprisonment by Facebook Overlords in one of their many Cells of Iniquity beggars belief.

It all started when I posted about the image Facebook created to advertise their new avatars. As you can see, this image doesn’t include any white male avatars.

I wrote:

I totally get why there are no white, male avatars here. White males are so creepy. In all my old family photos, I’m colorizing my grandpas, dad, husband, brother, uncle, cousins, son, sons-in-law, grandsons, and nephews.

No, that’s not what sent the Overlords to their fainting couches.

A friend commented, “Some inclusion is more equal than others,” an allusion to George Orwell’s Animal Farm (which I now believe may be an allusion that escaped the Overlords’ limited understanding). Here is the sentence from Animal Farm, to which my friend was alluding and which is spoken by pigs who control the government: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

In response to the Animal Farm allusion, I replied sarcastically, “That reminds me, white males are pigs too.”

That was what got me thrown in the clink.

Ironically, by using irony to criticize Facebook’s exclusionary avatar image and the hatred of white males by “progressives,” I was punished for allegedly violating Facebook’s Ministry of Truth standards on hate speech. The Overlords definitely don’t get sarcasm.

I hope everyone sees the danger illustrated in this one Facebook jail sentence—the danger in the brave new world that Big Brother Biden, zillionaire Zuckerberg, and the “progressive” plutocrats who control America hope to create. In that new world, nameless, faceless algorithms that are unable to recognize sarcasm or satire will censor books and cancel articles, posts, and speakers that deviate from the leftist beliefs of their creators.

To make such imprisonments—which are very bad PR for tyrants—less necessary, leftists have taken a few pages from Red China and added “struggle sessions” to their indoctrinating toolbox in which, for example, non-racist whites are humiliated into confessing they’re racists.

Those intransigent few who refuse to capitulate to leftist dogma and diktats will be publicly named and shamed for their allegedly dangerous, unwoke ideas. Currently, those ideas pertain to race and sexuality, but there is no reason to expect the boundaries of banned ideas won’t expand.

First a little necessary history before the surprising news.

“Struggle sessions” were a tactical tool the Chinese Communist Party used during the Communist Revolution to secure compliance from those deemed opponents of Chairman Mao. An article in the Atlantic describes these precursors to today’s ubiquitous naming and shaming sessions:

In such sessions, everyone from politicians to teachers would be dragged before a large audience and forced to humiliate themselves with withering self-criticism, denunciations of their friends and allies, and pleas for forgiveness.

Sounds remarkably like what Critical Race Theorists, diversity trainers, and BLM activists are doing all over the country in schools, corporations, and our increasingly lawless streets.

Struggle sessions emerged from the earlier Chinese Communist practice called “Speaking Bitterness.” From his chapter titled “Speaking Bitterness” in a collection of essays in a 2019 book on Chinese Communism, Jeffery Javed explains how the Chinese Communist Party mobilized workers and peasants to support the revolution:

To relate abstract ideologies to the lived experiences of ordinary people is the great task of all revolutionaries. How do we then explain the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) remarkable success in mobilising workers and peasants, many of whom had little interest in Marxism-Leninism, to join its fervent, violent cause? One of the key foundations of the CCP’s successful mobilisation was its ability to tap into human emotions, which it did most notably and effectively through a practice known as ‘speaking bitterness’ (suku)—the public expression of an individual’s woes with the intent to cultivate sympathy toward the speaker and outrage against those who caused his or her suffering. As one of the foremost strategies the CCP used … its principal purpose was to leverage morality and emotion to inculcate in the populace new mass identities that accorded with the Party-state’s ideology of class struggle. Operating through outrage and sympathy, it sought to build hostility towards an outgroup of class enemies and solidarity among an ingroup of ordinary villagers.

Now here’s where things get really interesting. Jeffrey Javed—someone few Americans have heard of—has a fascinating new job that he describes on his website (emphasis added):

Hello! I am a mixed methods researcher on the Ads Delivery team at Facebook. My research uses survey, interview, and experimental approaches to understand social perceptions of AI and machine learning, particularly in the context of fairness and responsibility. …

 My research on social media built on my research on violent mobilization in Maoist China to understand how false news content harms and divides communities in the US. Combining survey experimental and machine learning approaches, we found that sensational content, rich in moral-emotional language, provokes outrage and fear and amplifies support for violence and aggressive online behavior.

Javed was hired by Facebook in Election year 2020—the year Facebook and other social media platforms with whom Facebook colludes communicates began “fact-checking” for allegedly false news and defending their warnings and punishments by claiming commitments to fairness and social responsibility.

Does Javed oppose the use of public expressions of an individual’s woes with the intent of cultivating sympathy toward the speaker and outrage against those who purportedly caused the speaker’s purported suffering? Does he oppose leveraging morality and emotion to inculcate in the populace new mass identities that accord with “progressive” ideologies? Does he oppose public humiliation or other forms of social oppression to coerce capitulation?

Javed’s Twitter feed reveals his anti-Trump, pro-Biden sentiments as well as his support for reporters trying to influence elections. Javed supported this 2016 tweet from New York Times religion reporter Liam Stack:

The Electoral College was meant to stop men like Trump from taking office.

The Electoral College is important to leftists–until it’s not.

I wonder if Javed is friends with Yoel Roth, head of “Site Integrity” for Twitter, who multiple times tweeted that President Trump and members of his administration—including Kellyanne Conway—were “actual Nazis.”

Leftists have no need to worry about any feeble resistance that may be bubbling up beneath the surface. No need to fret that wrongthink may spread. No sleepless nights fearing that leaders will emerge to oppose the oppressors who control corporate America, the castrated press, and the ideological lemmings in academia and Hollywood who produce soma for the masses.

No need for worry because Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai, the New York Times, and Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post will step into the breach to hide stories and ideas that may interfere with their quest for global domination fairness and responsibility. Power and money, money and power.

Liberty, freedom, tolerance, inclusivity, and justice for those who think just like them.

Submission for the rest of us.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/No_Whites_3.mp3

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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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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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Overt, organized violent riots over the weekend escalated in such a way that the governors in twenty-three states thought it was necessary to activate the National Guard to augment local police efforts. In Illinois, these riots were not limited to downtown Chicago but spilled over into various city neighborhoods and suburbs like Arlington Heights, Richton Park, Calumet City, Tinley Park, Riverside, Orland Park, Blue Island, and Lansing. In Dolton, rioters thought it was a good idea to throw a brick through the window of Christ Oasis Church.

Other large municipalities also saw similar violence, including Aurora, Rockford, Waukegan, Champaign, Joliet, Springfield, and Peoria,

Reports of the peaceful protests, of which there were a few, were overshadowed by wall-to-wall news coverage of violence, vandalism, looting, and arson locally and in cities across the nation. In Washington D.C., “the church of the presidents” was set on fire by godless insurgents. The damage to St. John’s Church (est. 1816) symbolizes our culture’s rejection of God. Perhaps God has lifted His hand of protection in response to our rebellion and indifference to His precepts.

It was encouraging to hear Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Police Superintendent David Brown confirm the suspicions of many that the attacks were coordinated. Listen to their remarks:

Similarly, Minnesota’s attorney general and left-wing “progressive” Keith Ellison told Fox News Sunday that he has “evidence that outsiders have been present and, in some cases, have played a very negative role” in the riots.

There is little doubt who led these attacks. Antifa and Black Lives Matter, both left-wing groups that hate America, were front and center. It is likely that local street gangs composed of fatherless young men who despise law enforcement were also involved.

But questions abound. Were these organized efforts funded? If so, by whom? Were some of these violent agitators paid? Were they given a list of targets to burn, loot, and destroy? I wonder where all those criminals they let out of prison early are right now? If I were a betting man, I’d wager that some were looting, vandalizing, and setting fires.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to President Trump, Vice President Pence, and our federal lawmakers asking that the DOJ begin a criminal investigation to identify and prosecute the domestic enemies behind these organized efforts to destroy our cities. The FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Attorney’s office must use their resources to get to the bottom of this.

Condemning Injustice

Left-wing political operatives want to make the murder of George Floyd and victims like him solely about race. That is a superficial reading of the problem, as it goes much deeper than that. It is an issue of the human condition. 

Let me be unequivocal: Based on the horrific video clip and autopsy report, we condemn the lethal actions of Derek Chauvin and the inaction of the Minneapolis police officers. There is little doubt that their policing authority was abused and the civil rights of Mr. Floyd fatally quashed.

Additionally, we unambiguously support peaceful protests and political actions that demand justice in this case. Using the political tools we have been given to safeguard God’s gift of self-government is the way to address injustices and grievances. We do not and cannot support violence, vandalism, looting, and arson as it only spreads injustice and disunity. (1 Peter 3:8-14)

A Biblical Perspective

Jeremiah 17:9 teaches us that the “heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?” This is the human condition, we were born with a sinful nature (Psalm 51:5). 

In Mark 7:1-23, Jesus tells us that from our unregenerate heart

“proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness.”

There isn’t one of us that is “good” in and of ourselves (Romans 3:10-12; Psalm 14:1-3; Psalm 53:1-3). Our sinful human nature has separated us from God and has us bound for hell — an eternal separation from God (Romans 6:23; Ezekiel 18:20; James 1:15).

Only through Jesus Christ can we find forgiveness (1 John 1:9), be reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:20), and be given a new nature (2 Corinthians 5:14-19; Ephesians 4:17-24; Galatians 6:12-16; Colossians 3:1-11).

As our culture drifts further and further away from God, we see an increase in the acceptance and practice of sin. Roman 1:28-32 tells us what to expect:

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful.

Certain operatives want to use the Floyd tragedy for political purposes, to divide our country along racial and ethnic lines. Intersectionality is all the rage. Divide and conquer is not only a ploy of the “progressive” agenda, but a key tactic of the devil.

In Scripture, the Lord tells us repeatedly how important unity is (John 17:23; 1 Corinthians 1:10; Ephesians 4:11-13; Colossians 3:13-14; Psalm 133:1; Romans 12:16). It should not surprise us that there is unseen spiritual warfare that is manifesting in the physical realm, seeking to divide us.

In addition, in John 8:44 Jesus warns us that Satan is a murderer, a liar, and a deceiver:

He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.

One of Satan’s goals is to divide us. (Matt. 12:25; Mark 3:25; Luke 11:17) Satan wants us to be bitter, ungrateful, angry, discontent, so he lies to us about our condition and God’s goodness. The New York Times‘ 1619 Project is a prime example of this effort to deceive Americans into a sinful attitude. Instead of being grateful to God for every challenge and circumstance (1 Thessalonians 5:18), resentment, bitterness, and suspicion are fostered. Every one of us should be thanking God for the privilege of living in this amazing country at this time in history, where the poorest among have a higher standard of living than royalty did throughout most of history.

Being the Remnant

We no longer live in a culture that has a Christian worldview. The residue of God’s blessings on this nation is wearing thin. We have been living off the cultural capital that came as a result of the faithfulness of previous generations. Nonetheless, we have been called at such a time as this to be ambassadors for His Kingdom (2 Corinthians 5:20).

Faithfulness, no matter the circumstance, is required of us (1 Corinthians 4:2), trusting that He will never leave us or forsake us, trusting that His plan is better than our plan, trusting that He is our strong tower and refuge. We dare not lean on our own understanding.

As this spiritual battle waxes and wanes, our fervent and resolute prayers must intensify. We should redouble our prayers for our family members, our church, our neighbors, our state, and our nation.

Likewise, we need to be wise about how we spend our time, talents, and treasures. Are we investing in temporal goods and goals, or are we working to advance the Kingdom of God, to see His will done on earth as it is in heaven? (Matthew 6:19-20-21)?

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An article written by freelance writer Erin O’Donnell and published in Harvard Magazine has justifiably gone viral among the diverse homeschooling communities operating in the United States—for the moment the freest nation in the world. The article, titled “The Risks of Homeschooling,” is accompanied by a cartoon illustration of half a dozen children romping joyfully outside while one child locked behind the prison bars of her own home looks forlornly and longingly out at them. One of the exterior walls of her home depicts books with the words “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Bible” to ensure readers know that the prison guards are Christians.

O’Donnell’s article is far less important than the work of the woman about whom O’Donnell is writing: Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, a long-time opponent of home-schooling and proponent of feminism, abortion, and the near-absolute autonomy of children. Too few people, it seems, are reading Bartholet’s deeply troubling Arizona Law Review article “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection” on which O’Donnell’s article is based and in which Bartholet lays bare her subversive plan to radically refashion American society according to the philosophical, political, and moral fever dreams of leftists everywhere. Bartholet issues an explicit call for a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling. While Bartholet claims to be concerned about homeschooling in general, it’s clear from her article that she has a particular antipathy for Christian homeschoolers.

While Bartholet belches out some gaseous but tactically useful words of concern about potential abuse of children by fringy parents and cites some fringy anecdotes to becloud the issue, her real goal is not to end physical abuse but, rather, to undermine parental authority, increase the power of the state, and remake the Constitution into a living, breathing leftist phantasm.

Bartholet argues that “Appropriate education. … makes children aware of important cultural values. …  [H]omeschooling parents … are not likely to be capable of satisfying the democratic function.”

Homeschooling parents will likely be not only taken aback by that claim but also confused by it. What, they may wonder, are those “important cultural values” and what renders homeschooling parents incapable of satisfying the democratic function. While Bartholet doesn’t specifically identify the “important cultural values” on which the democratic function relies, it’s not difficult to infer what they are from oblique statements like this:

[T]he current homeschooling regime is based on a dangerous idea about parent rights. … [t]hat parents who are committed to beliefs and values counter to those of the larger society are entitled to bring their children up in isolation. … This legal claim is inconsistent with the child’s right to what has been called an “open future”—the right to exposure to alternative views and experiences essential for children to grow up to exercise meaningful choices about their own future views, religions, lifestyles, and work. … [E]xposure to the values of tolerance … has been seen as a primary goal of public education from its origins.

Since tolerance has been redefined by leftists to mean “affirming leftist sexuality dogma,” has “tolerance” really been the primary goal of public education from its origins?

To be clear that she wants the nation’s children to be indoctrinated with leftist sexuality dogma, Bartholet also criticizes families who want to teach their children “that people with nontraditional sexual orientations or gender identities should be ‘cured’ or condemned.”

Interestingly, here is what one of the studies Bartholet cites—the Cardus Education Survey—says about religious homeschoolers and the value of tolerance in the “democratic function”:

We might expect that the private and familial approach of education would fail to prepare students for effective participation in a democracy. But we don’t find any evidence for this. … [H]omeschoolers are more willing than public schoolers to extend freedom of speech to those who want to speak out against religion. And we don’t find any difference in the extent that homeschoolers favor greater tolerance for non-Christian religions in American society. Relatedly, some might expect that religious homeschoolers would socialize students into more authoritarian orientations to public life. However, on one of the measures often used to capture authoritarian orientations, respect for authority, we don’t find that homeschoolers are any more supportive than public schoolers are of the notion that one of the main problems in the US today is the lack of respect for authority. It seems that one of the strengths of homeschooling, which may be related to the counter-cultural minority status of homeschooling, is robust support for democratic principles of individual freedom and freedom of expression.

When she likes Cardus findings, Bartholet calls them “good social science.” When she dislikes them, Bartholet dismisses them as “advocacy.”

Repeatedly and ironically, Bartholet frets that,

homeschooled children miss out on exposure to others with different experiences and values. … A very large proportion of homeschooling parents are ideologically committed to isolating their children from the majority culture and indoctrinating them in views and values that are in serious conflict with that culture.

Never once does she mention the ideological monopoly on sexuality that perverts public education and results in pervasive censorship of resources that express dissenting views. Nor does she critically examine her assumption that the role of education is to affirm the views and values of “majority culture.” Did she hold that position in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s?

In her section on the “Child Maltreatment Piece of the Homeschooling Picture,” Bartholet writes that the “very isolation of so many homeschooling families puts children at risk. Child maltreatment takes place disproportionately in families cut off from the larger community.” First, Bartholet provides no evidence of the percentage of all homeschooling families or of religious homeschooling families that are “cut off from the larger community.” And then, as evidence for her implicit claim that homeschooling poses a danger to children, she cites in a footnote her own book written over two decades ago on systemic problems with the child welfare system.

While discussing her alleged fears regarding socialization, Bartholet says nothing about the serious socialization problems in public schools that range from drug and alcohol use; sexting; and social contagions related to eating disorders, suicide, cutting, and gender dysphoria.

Bartholet cites a study by the pro-regulation organization Homeschooling’s Invisible Children, which is an affiliate of pro-regulation organization Coalition for Responsible Home Education, as evidence that homeschooled children are at greater risk of death, but the study itself concludes that “This finding does not yet reach the threshold for statistical significance, so at this point we cannot say conclusively that homeschooled students die from child abuse and neglect at a higher rate as other students.”

Would increased regulation increase safety for children? Does regulation and oversight by Big Brother guarantee child safety? How does Bartholet account for the abuse of children in highly regulated government schools by school staff? As a result of that abuse, is she calling for a presumptive ban on public schools?

Bartholet has a game plan that she defends in part by employing the bandwagon fallacy, arguing that “Many countries ban homeschooling altogether, others fail to legally recognize it, and many impose significant requirements, often including required home visits and annual testing.”

Get with the European program, you philistines!

Bartholet believes that,

The homeschooling movement’s claim that the current regime is justified by absolute parent rights is morally wrong and inconsistent with growing recognition worldwide that child human rights have equal status with adult human rights. … The movement relies on adult freedom of religion rights to oppose regulation affecting religious homeschoolers. But such rights should not trump child rights to exposure to alternative views, enabling them to exercise meaningful future choice about their religion.

So, while Bartholet wants to prevent Christian parents from inculcating their own children with their religious worldview, she wants to ensure that government schools are allowed to inculcate other people’s children with only leftist sexual views and, in so doing, prevent those children from being able “to exercise meaningful future choice” about sexual matters.

Bartholet’s proposes a “new regime” for homeschooling that would require permission to homeschool, which would be granted under only very narrow circumstances, and would require that homeschooled students still attend government schools part-time:

The new regime should deny the right to homeschool, subject to carefully delineated exceptions for situations in which homeschooling is needed and appropriate. Parents should have a significant burden of justification for a requested exception. There is no other way to ensure that children receive an education or protection against maltreatment at all comparable to that provided to public school children. … When exceptions are granted, children should still be required to attend some courses and other programs at school.

Bartholet’s fervor for mandating that Christians teach leftist views to their own children extends to Christian private schools as well:

Some private schools pose problems of the same nature as homeschooling. Religious and other groups with views and values far outside the mainstream operate private schools with very little regulation ensuring that children receive … exposure to alternative perspectives.

Bartholet points to three obstacles to her plan to achieve absolute autonomy for children and destroy the family: The Homeschool Legal Defense Association, organized parents, and the U.S. Constitution. She attacks all three and offers a plan for circumventing the U.S. Constitution until such time as it can be changed.

She argues that “state constitutional provisions on education provide a strong basis for challenges to the homeschooling regime,” and that “State court decisions based on state constitutions can eventually provide evidence of the kind of national consensus that often helps the Supreme Court find new meaning in the Federal Constitution.”

In an email to this writer, constitutional attorney Joseph A. Morris, who served as assistant attorney general of the United States under President Ronald Reagan, writes that Bartholet’s screed is “one of [the left’s] most important and most powerful attacks, against the family. … Bartholet’s article is a call to arms to the left to attack parental authority by means of a frontal attack on home-schooling.”

Mr. Morris offered too the larger context from which Bartholet’s “call to arms” emerges and summarizes her dangerous strategic plan:

Since the time Marx published The Communist Manifesto, the left has understood that to prevail against the civilization of the West—made strong by the organic relationships we generally describe under the rubrics of faith and family—it must seize control of the minds of children at the earliest possible time. Parental control of schooling, either by supervising how others educate their children or by doing it themselves, is a major obstacle to this prime tyrannical goal.

Bartholet marshals every argument, including (1) the asserted inferiority of home-schooling against the governmental product; (2)  the asserted roots of the modern home-schooling movement in racism and religious benightedness; (3)  home-schooling as a mask for child abuse, including child sexual abuse; and similar horribles.

She seeks to awaken and mobilize every constituency that would join the battle against parental authority and home-schooling, including public sector (teachers’) unions, which have direct financial stakes in forcing children into government schools; child-protection advocates; opponents of racism, religion, particularity of every stripe, and binary sexual worldviews; and progressives in every category.

She is not content to argue that, in protecting parental authority and the rights of home-schoolers, American courts have lately misinterpreted and misapplied the provisions of the United States Constitution. Her enterprise is far more ambitious than that. She proposes to take on the evil United States Constitution itself, and to use home-schooling as a good battleground on which to launch that war.

The heart of her legal argument will be found on page 59:  “The U.S. Constitution with its negative rights structure is an anomaly, outdated and inadequate by the standards of the rest of the world.” In two or three rather clear paragraphs on that page she makes her case against the American constitutional tradition and sets her gunsights squarely on the Constitution itself, hoping to overturn it by using the case for “affirmative rights” of children to education free of parental domination (and thus, of course, open to domination by someone else!). To this end, then, she marches off to praise foreign constitutional traditions, even of other democracies, that Americans have rejected since founding modern constitutionalism in the 18th century.

This article was meant to be a clarion call to arms, seeking to mobilize her radical confreres in all Marxist domains and the progressive left in general. The article is being widely touted throughout the legal and academic communities.  It is already on the nightstands of teachers’ union presidents, leftist community organizers, mainstream media editorial writers, and crafty plaintiffs’ lawyers from coast to coast. Once the pandemic ends, the 2020 elections are held, and State legislatures convene for their 2021 sessions, leftist think tanks will spoon-feed cookie-cutter legislation to “progressive” State senators and representatives to begin the long project of abolishing home schooling, by overburdening it with regulation to the point that parents collapse of exhaustion, or by outright prohibition, if necessary.

The publication of Bartholet’s article in a law journal, even an obscure one, gives it a veneer of “mainstream” legal scholarship. I have no doubt that she will soon have a publisher for a full-length, less technical version of the article as a book meant for a wide general readership.

The drumbeat of anti-home-schooling editorials will begin in the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post within months, and certainly in time to attempt to set agendas across the land in the 2021 State legislative season.  

We should thank Erin O’Donnell for bringing to wider attention the insidious efforts of Ivory Tower leftist Bartholet to exploit the U.S. Constitution and state constitutions to ban homeschooling or regulate it into submission to leftist assumptions.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Harvard-Law-Professor-Wants-to-Ban-Homeschooling.mp3

Read more:

Public Schools Failing Illinois Children Academically

American Students Are Failing: You Can Thank Public Schools

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The New York Times has embarked on an effort to rewrite the history of the United States as a nation built upon slavery.  Calling it the “1619 Project,” the opening article is a whopping 7,600-word effort to look at 18th Century history through a liberal 21^stcentury lens.  Joshua Lawson has written an excellent rebuttal to this effort in The Federalist.  Because much of the NYT’s ideology is already being inserted into the narrative of schools and universities, I wanted to pass along some portions of this important article for your consideration.

No, America Wasn’t Built On Slavery, But Faith That All Men Are Created Equal

The year 1619 was chosen for the Times’ “re-founding” to mark when the first slaves arrived in the English settlement of Jamestown.

Slavery was a heart-wrenching, obstacle during America’s birth, but by no objective analysis was it the central factor of the founding as the 1619 Project claims.

Slavery was and is an abomination. It is an evil part of America’s past—as well as that of nearly every nation on earth. The fact that slavery has a universal heritage does not absolve American slave owners, but it does provide a necessary historical context.

During the 17th century, slavery was, sadly, an accepted part of life throughout the world. By A.D. 1619, slavery had existed for more than 5000 years, dating back at least to Mesopotamia.

Written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 7,600-word flagship essay of the 1619 Project asserts that “our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.”   Hannah-Jones claims, “white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.” She provides no evidence or examples for this sweeping assertion.

Jefferson’s original final draft of the Declaration explicitly referred to black slaves not as property but as men.  Letters written to John Jay show Alexander Hamilton hoping the Revolutionary War could lead to the emancipation of blacks and appraising them equal to whites in their abilities. Additional examples are plentiful.

The Founders were painfully aware of the cognitive dissonance of forming a nation under the proclamation that all were created equal while maintaining slavery. They also had to face the political reality that the 13 colonies could not be united in a new nation if they immediately abolished slavery.

With no other way to obtain the necessary support for unity and ratification, the Founders spitefully tolerated slavery’s existence, while also placing it on a path to extinction. Once the nation secured independence, American statesman of the Founding Era slashed away at slavery as quickly as prudence and political reality would allow.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the territory that would become the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. In 1794, Congress barred American ships from engaging in the slave trade. Additional legislation in 1780 banned Americans from employment or investment in the international slave trade. Finally, the U.S. Congress officially banned the importation of slaves beginning on January 1, 1808, the earliest date allowed under the deal made to ratify the Constitution.

Far from the bastion of racism, hate and pro-slavery sentiment that the 1619 Project portrays, much of the United States was ahead of the world in ending the horror of slavery.  Shortly after the signing of the Declaration, northern states took the lead. By 1804, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had passed laws that immediately or gradually abolished slavery.

If the American Founding was grounded in slavery, and the Founders didn’t believe a word of the opening of the Declaration, how does one account for these actions?

According to Hannah-Jones, one of the “primary reasons” Americans declared independence was to preserve slavery, fearful of the “growing calls” to abolish the slave trade in London. However, a closer look shows the abolitionist movement didn’t have a truly organized presence in England until 1783 when the first petition was filed by Quakers. It wasn’t until 1787 that the influential Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded.

The 1619 Project is politically driven 2020 posturing dressed in the veneer of a historical “exposé.” By warping history, it hopes that dopamine hits of anger and injustice will prevent readers from engaging in objective analysis. Just in time to paint America as racist for the upcoming presidential election.

Leftists are banking that the outrage caused by the 1619 Project will provide them the political capital required to move to the next stage: a full reconfiguration of America into their image.

America does not need further tribal rhetoric tearing up what little societal cohesion remains. The nation certainly doesn’t benefit from Times writers conducting a growing chorus of anger and grievance.

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

Written by Dennis Prager

There was rare good news this month. On August 4, The New York Times published a front-page article headlined, “College Students Protest, Alumni’s Fondness Fades and Checks Shrink.”

According to The Times, some college alumni are awakening to the fact that their beloved alma maters are nothing like the decent, open, tolerant, committed-to-learning places they remember. Rather, nearly every college and university in America has become the least open, the least tolerant, the most hate-filled and the most anti-American (and, of course, anti-Israel) mainstream institution in America.

As stated in the article: “Alumni from a range of generations say they are baffled by today’s college culture. Among their laments: Students are too wrapped up in racial and identity politics.”

Let’s put it more starkly. Colleges are America’s preeminent racist institutions. They encourage, for example, black dorms and black graduations; and they foment minority hatred of whites (through “white privilege” indoctrination seminars, ethnic studies courses, black studies courses, etc.).

Additionally, college students “are allowed to take too many frivolous courses.”

College students graduate without taking any courses that elevate their intellect or character — which was the original purpose of universities. You can get a bachelor’s degree in English from UCLA without reading a Shakespeare play.

These students have also “repudiated the heroes and traditions of the past by judging them by today’s standards rather than in the context of their times.”

Most college graduates are taught to see the great men who founded America not only as not great but also as bad. After all, they were white, male and affluent. And some were slaveholders.

“University administrations,” The Times says, “have been too meek in addressing protesters whose messages have seemed to fly in the face of free speech.”

Meek? College administrators give new meaning to the word. With precious few exceptions, they have no principle except keeping their job.

That it took these alumni so many years to realize how destructive their beloved colleges have become is as unpleasant a surprise as The New York Times publishing this piece was a pleasant surprise.

The Times quotes Scott MacConnell, an alumnus of Amherst College:

“‘As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,’ Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.”

It also quotes a Yale University graduate named Scott C. Johnston, “who graduated from Yale in 1982 (and) said he was on campus last fall when activists tried to shut down a free speech conference, ‘because apparently they missed irony class that day.'”

Yale now competes with Brown University and similar left-wing institutions in embracing students who employ fascist tactics, such as taking over deans’ offices and shouting down conservative speakers.

But this reduction in giving probably won’t matter much. Yale has an endowment of over 25 billion dollars. It can easily afford to have contempt for alumni like Johnston, for it knows that most alumni would continue to give if the university announced that it would not admit anyone who believes that God created the universe.

Wealthy fools will continue to give money to Yale and all the other left-wing seminaries still known (inaccurately) as universities. There is no group that better embodies the famous statement attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.”

Can you name a more moronic group than wealthy capitalists who give tens of millions of dollars to universities so they can teach students that capitalism is evil?

It is, of course, understandable why leftists give so much money to universities. But why do non-leftists?

Here are two key reasons:

First, and most importantly, it makes them feel good about themselves. Universities are the world’s secular temples. Long ago, wealthy Americans gave to their churches, whereas they now give to universities.

Second, many of the very wealthy are savants — people who are brilliant at making a lot of money, but not at much else. And there is no connection between wealth and wisdom. There are Silicon Valley and Hollywood billionaires who have less wisdom than many seniors at Christian high schools.

So, here’s my advice to wealthy individuals who love America and do not wish to undermine the Judeo-Christian and classical liberal values on which it is built:

Give to medical research. And if you give to a college, give to one that actually venerates America and the life of the mind (Hillsdale College, for example). Or give to causes that are attempting to undo the damage of the universities. Examples include the Young America’s Foundation, YAF, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, ISI, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, and Prager University (which has had over 100 million views just this year, the largest single group of viewers being young people under 35).

But if you love America, among the worst things you can do is contribute to 95 percent of the country’s universities. America would better off if you burned that money.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com.

With the war on Islamic terrorism being portrayed as a righteous cause in “American Sniper,” the Clint Eastwood film breaking box office records, a book which documents the days when Hollywood was a mouthpiece for communist propaganda might seem out of date. But Allan H. Ryskind’s book, Hollywood Traitors, is a reminder that Hollywood can’t always be counted on to take America’s side in a war, even a World War when the United States faced dictators by the names of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

The Ryskind book, published by Regnery, documents how the much-maligned House Committee on Un-American Activities, known as HUAC, uncovered dramatic communist infiltration of Hollywood and forced the studios to clean house.

Ryskind calls HUAC’s investigation of Hollywood in 1947 and 1950 “one of the most effective, albeit controversial, probes ever carried out by any committee of Congress.” He adds, “HUAC had revealed that Hollywood was packed with Communists and fellow travelers, that the guilds and the unions had been heavily penetrated, and that wartime films, at least, had been saturated with Stalinist propaganda. Red writers were an elite and powerful group in Hollywood—many of them working for major studios.”

He writes that, “HUAC, though bruised by elite opinion, had won the support of the American people and a victory over Hollywood Communists, fellow travelers, and the important liberals who supported them.” Members of Congress involved in HUAC did their jobs, in the face of opposition from “the East coast establishment newspapers” like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The book reminds us that the Hollywood agents of Stalin had also been “Allies of Hitler,” a threat symbolized on the book cover by a Hollywood director’s chair featuring a Nazi swastika. The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939-1941 had paved the way for World War II.

As a result of the purging of communists from Hollywood, the so-called “blacklist,” we entered a time, from about 1947 to 1960, when the communists lost control of the major Hollywood unions and “the studios were actually creating anti-Communist pictures,” Ryskind writes. It was a remarkable turnaround.

But while Hollywood did turn anti-communist, at least for a while, the communists scored their own ultimate victory, succeeding in forcing Congress to abolish HUAC. The committee, which had been renamed as the House Internal Security Committee, was the target of what HUAC called the Communist Party’s “Cold War against congressional investigation of subversion.”

For many years, there was a comparable body in the Senate, which went by different names but tackled such matters as “Castro’s Network in the United States,” a 1963 investigation into the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” that we later learned included JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

To those insisting it was somehow inappropriate to ask Hollywood figures about their “political beliefs,” Ryskind counters that “Few questions could have been more important for a congressional committee to ask than whether American citizens were actually serving as agents of a hostile foreign government.” He said HUAC was engaging in hearings designed to accurately disclose membership in the Communist Party, “a subversive organization controlled by an enemy nation and designed to turn America into a Communist country…”

In its battle against communism, HUAC had subpoena power and was not afraid to use it. HUAC also issued contempt citations against those who refused to testify completely and truthfully. All of the members of the so-called “Hollywood Ten,” who refused to testify about their involvement in the Communist Party, eventually went to prison.

Ryskind cites estimates that over 200 Hollywood Communists were named in this process. His book provides the Communist Party card numbers of the Hollywood Ten as well as the names of other “well-known radicals,” many of them overt Communists, who were active in the movie industry.

Bring Back HUAC?

Today, with dozens of leading conservatives now clamoring for congressional action to “Stop the Fundamental Transformation of America,” the Ryskind book may add to the impetus for Congress to reestablish a HUAC-style panel. The George Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP) acted frightened and alarmed in 2010 when Rep. Steve King (R-IA) expressed agreement with my suggestion at that time that re-establishment of such a committee would be a good idea. “I think that is a good process and I would support it,” he said.

The oath of office for members of Congress requires that they support and defend the Constitution of the United States “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” HUAC is a model for how such a problem can be identified and confronted.

Donald I. Sweany, Jr., a research analyst for the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its successor, the House Committee on Internal Security, sees the need for such a committee. He has issued this statement:

“The re-creation of the House Committee on Internal Security will provide the Congress of the United States, Executive Branch agencies and the public with essential and actionable information concerning the dangerous and sovereignty-threatening subversive activities currently plaguing America. This subversion emulates from a host of old and new entities of Marxist/Communist revolutionary organizations and allied militant and radical groups, some of which have foreign connections. A new mandated House Committee on Internal Security is of great importance because it would once again recommend to Congress remedial legislative action to crack down on any un-American forces whose goals are to weaken and destroy the freedoms which America enjoys under the Constitution. In addition, this legislative process will provide public exposure of such subversives.”

Ryskind’s father, Marx Brothers screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, testified before HUAC about communist penetration of Hollywood that he had learned about first-hand through his involvement with the Screen Writers Guild. Morrie Ryskind had attended the Columbia School of Journalism in New York and written for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper World. But he underwent a political transformation, from an anti-war socialist who became disillusioned with FDR to a Republican determined to stop the communist advance. He wrote for conservative publications such as Human Events and National Review, which he helped William F. Buckley Jr. launch.

Morrie Ryskind helped found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals to counteract the work of the communists and educate the American people about what was at stake. The Ryskind book also notes how the American Legion and various Catholic organizations were focusing attention on Hollywood’s far-left elements and making the public aware of this problem.

The book includes Allan Ryskind’s memories of his Hollywood upbringing, including meeting famous people such as top Communist Party leader Benjamin Gitlow. He spent decades as editor of Human Events, which was President Ronald Reagan’s favorite paper. It also became known for its aggressive reporting on the communist and socialist threats. Reagan so appreciated the weekly paper that he had arranged for copies to be sent to him personally at the White House residence.

Ryskind, who still serves as Human Events editor-at-large, documents the development of Reagan’s anti-communism in Hollywood Traitors. Reagan began his acting career as a liberal who got involved in Communist-front activities, later realizing that the “nice-sounding” groups he was supporting were secretly controlled by members of the Communist Party. He carried this understanding and analysis of the communist threat into his presidency and talked openly about the growing Marxist influence in Congress as he battled with congressional liberals and tried to stop the Soviet advance in Latin America.

In fact, as President, he told journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave in a 1987 interviewthat “I’ve been a student of the communist movement for a long time, having been a victim of it some years ago in Hollywood.” He said that he regarded some two dozen Marxists in Congress as “a problem we have to face.”

The problem is far worse today. Analyst Trevor Loudon now counts the number of Marxists in Congress at more than 60, a fact that would seem to make it more of a controversy to re-establish HUAC, but even more of a reason to do so. All it would take is more courageous members like Rep. King, backed by the House Leadership. Such a committee would be able to seriously analyze an area that remains off-limits to the House Homeland Security Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, and the Select Committee on Benghazi—subversive infiltration of the highest levels of the U.S. government, including the White House and Congress.

One key to HUAC’s success was finding those in Hollywood, including in the unions, willing to name names and identify the subversives. Reagan testified before HUAC and took a leadership role in defeating communist influence in the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), later becoming the union’s president. Labor leader Roy Brewer was another effective anti-communist in Hollywood highlighted in Ryskind’s book.

Although the 506-page book is based on HUAC hearings, Ryskind conducted independent research that adds to his case against the Hollywood traitors. For example, he combed through the historical papers of one major Hollywood-Ten figure, the Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who refused to cooperate with HUAC and expose his comrades. Ryskind reports on an unpublished script Trumbo wrote that treated the invasion of South Korea as a “fight for independence” for the communist north.

Trumbo wrote many excellent film scripts, including Roman Holiday, but was “a hard-core Party member, a fervent supporter of Stalinist Russia and Kim Il-sung’s North Korea, and an apologist for Nazi Germany until Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded the Soviet union,” Ryskind notes. “Yet to this day he is regarded as a hero in Hollywood.”

Almost on cue, as Ryskind’s book was being published, it was reported that Hollywood is planning a new film which glorifies Trumbo, starring Bryan Cranston of “Breaking Bad” fame as the screenwriter. The battle over communist influence is slated to return for another act.

Love for Cuban Communism

The book’s chapter, “Hollywood Today,” tries to bring the communism problem up to date by examining Hollywood’s love affair with the longtime Stalinist ruler of Cuba, Fidel Castro. He writes that much of Hollywood “is still lured by the romance of Marxism, and its films are still filled with heavy doses of anti-American propaganda.”

More details are provided in Humberto Fontova’s excellent books, Fidel: Hollywood ‘s Favorite Tyrant and The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro.

I recently asked Fontova why a Stalinist like Castro gets fawning treatment, while the Stalinist North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, is ridiculed in the movie The Interview. “My best guess is that it’s a generational thing, nostalgia mostly,” he told this writer. The Castros and Che Guevara, he said, are perceived as “the first hippies” or beatniks.

Indeed, The Longest Romance quotes The New York Times reporter who helped bring Castro to power, Herbert Matthews, as saying, “Castro’s is a revolution of youth.” Fontova adds, “The notion of Castro’s Cuba as a stiflingly Stalinist nation never quite caught on among the enlightened. Instead the island often inspires hazy visions of a vast commune, rock-fest or Occupy encampment, studded with free health care clinics and with [the hippie icon] Wavy Gravy handing out love-beads at the entrance.”

Perhaps the pro-Castro influence in Hollywood is something that a new HUAC might want to tackle.

Another issue worth investigating is how Hollywood has also come under the influence of radical Islam. For example, the 2002 film, “The Sum of All Fears,” which was the movie version of the Tom Clancy book of the same name, replaced the Arab terrorist villains with neo-Nazis so as not to offend the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate. The Fox network responded to complaints about its popular series “24” depicting Muslims in America secretly plotting terrorism by running public service announcements from CAIR portraying American Muslims as moderate and peaceful.

The book, Council on American-Islamic Relations: Its Use of Lawfare and Intimidation, has an entire chapter on how CAIR attempts to silence its critics in radio, television, and the film industry.

There will be those in Congress and the media who will argue against the return of anything resembling the old HUAC, contending that “McCarthyism,” or the anti-communist “witchhunt,” is the greater danger. The truth about McCarthy’s investigations is provided in the M. Stanton Evans book, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight against America’s Enemies.

It bears repeating that Senator McCarthy never had anything to do with the House committee or its investigation of Hollywood.

This book is a valuable contribution to understanding a dangerous time in American history when America’s elected representatives and the people themselves rallied to the defense of their homeland against these foreign and domestic enemies.

While it is worth noting that the veteran Hollywood actor and director Clint Eastwood has bypassed the censors at CAIR with “American Sniper,” this kind of film is the exception and not the rule. The film portrays the great sacrifices being made by U.S. military personnel in the Middle East as they combat an enemy that is depicted as savage and barbaric. It is based on the life of Chris Kyle, an Iraq War veteran and Navy SEAL who joined the Armed Forces to defend his country from Islamic terrorism.

Zaid Jilani, a “progressive” writer who left the Center for American Progress after being charged with anti-Semitism, has emerged as one of the film’s most vocal critics. A regular on the Kremlin channel Russia Today (RT) and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Al Jazeera, he insists the film about the “remorseless” sharpshooter has sparked “anti-Muslim bigotry,” and he complains about it becoming “a rallying point for the political right.”

However, he admits that Eastwood’s skill as a filmmaker could result in a “Best Picture” award for “American Sniper” and “Best Actor in a Leading Role” award for Bradley Cooper, who plays Kyle. He just can’t bring himself to admit that the pro-military and anti-terrorist message is also a major factor in its success. TheAcademy Awards take place on February 22.

Indeed, this is the fear from the modern-day “progressives”—that Hollywood will rediscover the box office appeal of American patriotism.

But according to the annual Reuters/Ipsos Oscars poll, if ordinary Americans voted for the Academy Awards, “American Sniper” would be the Best Picture winner. Those who wonder why we don’t get more pro-military and pro-American movies out of Hollywood should read Ryskind’s new book.

This article was originally posted at the Accuracy in Media website.