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The Biden Administration’s Even Harder Fascistic Turn

The Biden administration calls it the “Disinformation Governance Board” (DGB—word on the streets is that it was going to be named the “Knowledge Governance Board,” but “KGB” was already taken).

The rest of America calls it the Ministry of Truth, a title derived from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

In a rollout almost as wildly inept as Biden’s exit from Afghanistan, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced its new effort to combat “disinformation.” After the past decade of Democrats spreading misinformation and disinformation, aided and abetted by leftist collaborators at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC, conservatives are justifiably wary about the DGB.

While leftists have sent to their memory hole the mis- and dis- information they spread like manure all across the fruited plains, conservative Americans have not forgotten it.

Conservatives remember the mis- and dis- excrement leftists spread about the cause of the Benghazi attacks, Trumps alleged collusion with Russia (including Adam Schiff’s bald-faced lies), the lurid tall tale about urinating Russian prostitutes, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the origins of the Wuhan virus, and the efficacy of masks. No conservative in American believes this is the kind of misinformation or disinformation targeted by any agency under a Democrat administration.

Leftists in America’s power centers have a habit of spreading lies that they know are lies about conservatives. Leftists in America’s power centers have a habit of deeming stories critical of leftists “misinformation” or “disinformation” without doing any research to confirm their premature conclusions. And leftists in America’s power centers have a habit of justifying their refusal to report stories favorable to conservatives by deeming them misinformation or disinformation.

The timing of this announcement compounds conservative suspicions. The announcement came just before mid-term elections, just after the Biden administration announced it will be stopping Title 42 border expulsions, and just after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, vowing to make it a free speech platform.

Musk raised the hope that there will be no more algorithmic shenanigans that many believe were used by leftist-controlled social media platforms to throw the election to a senile recluse who refused to campaign and yet won by an alleged landslide.

And at the very moment that conservative hopes for the same kind of freedom leftists enjoy were raised, the DGB was born.

If the birth of the DGB weren’t bad enough, just take a look at the unprincipled, flakey head of the DGB: Nina Jankowicz who belts out obscene show tunes like a Broadway wannabe.

U.S. Senator Ron Johnson sent a letter to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas expressing concerns about both the Jankowicz and the DGB that many Americans share:

Ms. Jankowicz herself has been a beacon of misinformation online.  She has published multiple tweets furthering the false media narrative about the Hunter Biden laptop. In one tweet she wrote, “IC has a high degree of confidence that the Kremlin used proxies to push influence narratives, including misleading or unsubstantiated claims about President Biden, to US media, officials, and influencers, some close to President Trump. A clear nod to the alleged Hunter laptop.” In another, she referred to the origins of how the media came into possession of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a “fairy tale about a laptop repair shop.” She has also posted tweets pushing the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and another implying the United States is as corrupt as Ukraine.

Now, DHS is creating a board to counter misinformation focusing on irregular migration and Russia and appointing a purveyor of misinformation to lead that effort. DHS is taking this action just weeks after announcing its plans to stop Title 42 expulsions at the southwest border, which has sparked a surge of illegal migrant crossing at the border, with CBP reporting an average of over 7,000 encounters a day in March 2022 compared with over 5,900 a day in February 2022. DHS even concedes it needs to be prepared to encounter 18,000 migrants a day at the southwest border once Title 42 is lifted.

You claim this Administration’s border policies are humane, but the crises caused by your policies have only added to the many tragedies caused by illegal immigration. I am concerned DHS’s Disinformation Board will only serve to silence or censor those voices critical of your disastrous policies and serve a political cover for your failure to secure the border.

Ironically, Jankowicz was against government oversight of speech  before she was for it:

Imagine that, you know, with President Trump right now calling all of these news organizations that have inconvenient for him stories that … they’re getting out there that he’s calling fake news, and now lashing out at platforms. I would never want to see our executive branch have that sort of power.

Here’s a revolutionary idea for the powerbrokers who want to run other people’s lives: How about finding a principle and then screwing it to a sticking place—like maybe your spine.

Just as leftists have defined conservative moral and ontological claims about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation “hate speech,” so they can ban it, leftists in the Department of Homeland Security will define news stories they hate “misinformation” and “disinformation,” so they can do likewise.

There is one bit of good news peeking out from behind the cloud of oppression that has issued from the penumbras formed by gaseous emanations expelled from the Biden administration. We have learned that the Biden administration has mastered the art of losing an election: Raise gas prices, raise food prices, make America oil-dependent again, make the world a more dangerous place, judge people by the color of their skin and their genitalia, open wide our Southern border, tell parents the government owns their children, and then tell Americans that a powerful, unaccountable government bureaucracy is going to decide which ideas and opinions constitute “misinformation.”

Yep, that should tap the last nail in Joe’s metaphorical coffin. Rational, liberty-loving voters of every color don’t want the government deciding what their children should be taught, which laws can be broken, or whose speech can be banned.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Biden-Administrations-Even-Harder-Fascistic-Turn.mp3





Hatred Animates the Left

As we head into the next presidential campaign season, it would serve us well to remember how leftist hatred and the lies they created to serve their hatred have caused ordinary Americans to suffer.

Leftist hatred of former President Trump resulted in the election of the senile mob boss Joe “Bananas” Biden, who has destroyed virtually every good thing Trump did during his four years in the White House. (Ironically, leftists consumed by hatred hurl the epithet “hater” at anyone who holds different moral views than they do.)

With his ill-conceived COVID and economic policies, Bananas Biden destroyed a once- flourishing economy that helped communities of color. Democrats don’t really care about the welfare of those communities. Rather, they exploit those communities for votes. If they did care, they wouldn’t incentivize fatherlessness, celebrate single-sex family structures, and deny families school choice. If Democrats did care about families of color, they wouldn’t defund the police and release criminals who plunder communities already ravaged by crime and poverty.

While Trump presided over the historic Abraham Accords and foreign policies that kept bad actors in check, the feckless Biden emboldened tyrannical regimes.

Biden’s fear of the hysterical AOC and other climate Chicken Littles rendered the energy-rich United States oil-dependent again, thereby contributing to gas prices that influence-peddlers can afford, but ordinary Americans cannot.

Biden’s enthusiastic support for racist academic theories half-baked in Ivory Towers intensified racial division in America. Judge people by the color of their skin and their genitalia—especially if that genitalia is fake—say Biden and his collaborators. Normalizing racism and “trans” nonsense sits squarely at the top of Biden’s list of unprincipled convictions.

The anti-woman Biden embraced science-denying “trans” cultic beliefs, thereby robbing all citizens of their intrinsic right to privacy in shared private spaces, jeopardizing the safety of girls and women, and destroying women’s sports.

Biden opened wide the Southern border floodgates to law-breakers whom Bananas ships around the country under cover of darkness after giving them smart phones.

While Trump presided over the development and delivery of the COVID vaccine at lightning speed, Biden left his slimy, sluggish mark on the delivery of COVID-testing kits.

Worst of all, Biden the fake Catholic, dismantles every policy that protects preborn humans and supports any law that enables women to order the killing of their living offspring up until birth.

All of this harms ordinary citizens of every color, while the wealthy, powerful, and well-connected remain immune from the consequences of their corrosive decisions.

The achievements during Trump’s brief tenure were all the more remarkable in that he had to contend with Democrats in Congress who were determined to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to promote what they knew to be lies in order to unseat a duly elected president. That, in leftist la-la land is an ethically defensible way to refuse to accept the results of an election. Manufacturing a Russian collusion hoax involving FBI agents, wasting taxpayer money, and lying to judges to unseat a sitting president is the modus operandi of the proudly non-insurrectionist Democrat party

At the same time, Trump had to contend with relentless assaults by a shockingly partisan and hostile press more skilled at licking the muck boots of the DNC than at journalism. They will attack Republicans with a viciousness that only ethics-free bullies would engage in. This was a press so full of hatred and so petty that no women’s magazine invited the most beautiful First Lady in history to appear on its cover. Some might call that micro-aggressive.

Many on the left and a fair number of people on the right argue that Trump is a flawed man. No argument there. Who among us isn’t? Liar extraordinaire Adam Schiff? Nancy let-them-eat-cake- while-I-get-my-hair-done Pelosi? Hillary Clinton, whose list of ethical violations—including attacking the victims of her husband’s sexual predations—is too long to enumerate? Yet no mention of their corruption from the haters and liars on the left who concocted wild conspiracy theories and a web of lies involving powerful government agencies to—dare I say it—rig the election.

There are many ways to rig elections, at least three of which were at play in 2020:

First, the cognitively fading Joe Biden was largely concealed from the public eye, and the bootlicking press found nothing troubling with his cellar dwelling. Had any Republican, let alone Trump, engaged in such obvious campaign avoidance, he or she would have been savaged. Even a woman of color—if Republican—would have been savaged.

Second, social media superhero Meta-Man, aka Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife poured millions—$419 million—of their own money, laundered through two non-profits to ensure Biden’s win. In other words, they surreptitiously plopped down their bars of gold onto the scales of equity.

And third, another social media mogul, the pixilated Jack Dorsey, banned from Twitter a major story about the laptop of the second-in-command of the Biden crime family, Hunter Biden. Other press outlets followed suit, thereby keeping information from voters about a real influence-peddling/collusion scheme involving the Bidens, Ukraine, and China.

So, as we enter the presidential campaign season, let’s not be deceived by lies, nor distracted by a quixotic quest for a perfect candidate. There will be none. Support candidates whose policies will result in conditions that allow free speech, religious liberty, and human life to flourish. Reject candidates whose party seeks to constrain speech; undermine religious liberty; indoctrinate children; kill humans in the womb; foment racism; endanger the safety of girls and women; subordinate human needs to the desires of climate hysterics; facilitate border lawlessness and criminality in our cites; and render America less safe from enemies foreign and domestic.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Hatred-Animates-the-Left.mp3





Gender Pretenders Destroying Authenticity and Liberty

In the past three days, Twitter has suspended the accounts of the well-known satirical website Babylon Bee and of Division I swimmer Reka Gyorgy. What Gyorgy and Babylon Bee share in common is a willingness to criticize the alchemical superstitions of the “trans” cult.

Babylon Bee mocked USA Today for giving the Woman of the Year award to assistant secretary of health at the Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Richard Leland Levine, alias “Rachel” Levine, who is a man. In response to USA Today’s insulting award, Babylon Bee tweeted that it had awarded Levine its Man of the Year award. Twitter suspended Babylon Bee’s account for alleged “hateful conduct,” a suspension that will be lifted only when Babylon Bee deletes the tweet.

And the left claims they hate censorship.

Former Olympic swimmer and current Virginia Tech swimmer, Reka Gyorgy sent a letter to the NCAA and tweeted about the injustice of having to compete against a biological male—also known as a man—which cost Gyorgy a chance to swim the 500 freestyle in the NCAA finals. Gyorgy tweeted,

My finals spot was stolen by Lia Thomas, who is a biological male. Until we all refuse to compete nothing will change. Thanks for all the support retweets and follows. I won’t stop fighting.

Christian obligations

Christians should stand publicly with those who are leading the way on this transgressive nonsense, like Reka Gyorgy, Babylon Bee, and this father and mother of a female NCAA swimmer:

Princeton University law professor Robert P. George recently urged those who reject the assumptions on which the “trans” ideology is built to live with integrity:

When you’re pressed to state or list your pronouns, you’re being asked to sign up for a practice with certain ideological presuppositions. It is not, and cannot be, a simple matter of politesse. If you believe in the ideology, and don’t mind being pressed to express your loyalty to its tenets, then, by all means, be my guest. But if you don’t believe it, or if you believe it but object as a matter of principle to being pressured to make public affirmations of beliefs, then stand by your principles and don’t sign onto the practice. The key things, either way, are to recognize what’s going on and have the integrity—and courage—to stick to your principles.

If theologically orthodox Christians believe their beliefs are true, then they should act like it.

Christian failures

The courage of these parents raises the question, why aren’t all Christian parents of high school and collegiate athletes saying publicly what these parents said?

There are two reasons that account for the refusal of so many Christians to speak truth. First, many Christians refuse to stand for truth in the public square unless they are guaranteed that doing so will be cost-free. But that is not what Christ promises those who follow him. He promises that the Christian walk will be costly. He promises that Christians will be mocked and hated just as he was.

While Christians claim to admire men and women who have stood steadfastly and suffered grievously for the faith even to the point of martyrdom, many Christians teach their children by word and deed to flee from even the mildest form of persecution. Say and do nothing that will tarnish a reputation, cost a job promotion, or lose a friend.

According to the leftist, “whose truth?” crowd, there is no objective truth—oh, except every moral belief they hold. THOSE beliefs—the source of which is their reservoir of deep feelings—are absolute, objective, transcendent, eternal moral truths, disagreement with which leftists believe should cost you your reputation, your ability to earn a living, and friendships.

In a sermon series on Romans and preached over fifty years ago, Pastor Martyn Lloyd-Jones identified the second reason for Christian silence in the face of evil, a problem that has only grown since he preached about it:

Christian people are mistaking natural qualities, niceness, a cultural veneer or politeness, for true Christian grace. … How often today is affability mistaken for saintliness! “What a gracious man he is,” they say. What they really mean is this: he never criticizes, and he agrees with everybody and everything. I know of nothing more dangerous than that. … Affability is not saintliness. … We are now judging only by our own subjective feelings, by our impressions and reactions. Is there anything so dangerous?

Real love, as opposed to some saccharine, ever-affirming substitute—requires first knowing what is true.

The danger of judging only by our own subjective feelings is nowhere more obvious than in the “trans” cult. “Trans”-activists in thrall to the delusional and dangerous idea that authentic identity is constituted solely by each person’s subjective feelings are destroying lives and necessary institutions and conventions.

Will Thomas, alias “Lia,” has likely been convinced by the “trans” cult that what he’s doing is brave and important. He’s likely been convinced that he will go down in history as a much beloved hero—the Rosa Parks of the “trans rights” movement. Someone should tell Thomas that “trans” cultists don’t care about him. They don’t care about anyone or anything other than their narcissistic, solipsistic, perverse desires.

They don’t care that Thomas will lose most of his swimming buddies because men know that he is stealing places and records from women.

“Trans”-cultists don’t care about the sad life Thomas will lead going forward.

They don’t care about the young women who will not want to date a cross-dressing man.

They don’t care about all the young women who after spending a decade swimming four hours a day all year long, had this year of collegiate swimming ruined.

They don’t care about the feelings of all the women whose locker rooms were invaded by a man who openly undressed in front of them this swim season.

And “trans”-cultists certainly don’t care about Will Thomas’ eternal life.

While “authenticity” for Thomas and Levine centers on their disordered subjective desires and their rejection of material reality, for other people authenticity centers on acceptance of biological reality and biblical truth—including the importance of not bearing false witness. For those people, denying God’s creation of males and females and bearing false witness by using false pronouns are acts of rebellion against God. For those people, such dishonorable acts are profoundly harmful and unloving acts.

Those who claim to revere diversity, equity, inclusivity, tolerance, freedom, and authenticity should be first in line to defend the right of conservative Christians to live authentically Christian lives.

The “trans”-gender house is built on a sandy foundation of faulty assumptions, delusions, biased pseudoscience, and bald-faced lies, all of which are propped up by buckets of ducats from the likes of the Pritzker family, the Stryker family, Tim Gill, and “Martine” Rothblatt and by the suppression of speech. It’s an ugly evil project that is destroying bodies, minds, souls, families, churches, schools, the practice of medicine, institutions related to lawmaking, speech rights, and religious liberty. Who could possibly be behind a project of such scope and enormity?

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Gender-Pretenders-Destroying-Authenticity-and-Liberty-94.mp3





Is China Using TikTok to Control the Minds of Our Children?

Alex Marlow, News Editor-in-Chief at the rightwing website Breitbart.com, recently made the claim that “TikTok is Chinese mind control,” pointing to how it has captivated the “increasingly A.D.D. American mind” with its constant scrolling. Is there any truth to this claim? And is TikTok more dangerous than we realize, not just because of the mindless distraction it provides but because of its content?

Ironically, although TikTok was developed by a Chinese company and is owned by a Chinese company, it is banned in China, along with a number of other, major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. How interesting! So, the app is good for kids in America and the world but not good for kids in China?

Still, to say that “TikTok is Chinese mind control,” as if the Chinese developers intentionally built an app that could help destroy the Western mind, could be quite a stretch.

Yet that doesn’t mean that there is not real danger with TikTok, and not simply because it exacerbates our problem with distraction. Rather, there is real danger because of some of its destructive content, appealing especially to children and young people.

To give a shocking case in point, according to a recent video by Matt Walsh, “TikTok Is Making Mental Illness Trendy.”

He noted how destructive ideas and behavior and concepts “can go from fringe to trendy to mainstream quite literally overnight.” He added, “What was unusual one moment might be ubiquitous the next, and people, especially young people, can get caught in the current and drowned before they even notice that their shoes are wet.”

He pointed to the latest TikTok fascination with what is called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), as a result of which large numbers of young people are wrongly diagnosing themselves with this unusual condition.

Walsh played a clip from Good Morning America, where this phenomenon was discussed with real concern, as the host noted that videos with hashtags like #Dissassociativeidentitydisorder and #Borderlinepersonalitydisorder have been viewed hundreds of millions of times. This really has become epidemic.

Walsh then explained that the young person who self-diagnoses with MPD refers to himself or herself as “the system,” with each personality within “the system” being called an “alter.” And what effect does this have on young people?

It was a concerned mother who sent me the Walsh video, wanting to tell me about the latest developments with her 18-year-old daughter, who now identifies as a male. (We’ll call the daughter Rachel to hide her identity.) She wrote,

“Do you know anything about this??? I’m literally livid. This is how it started with us. Rachel went on some social media site, convinced herself she was a system with lots of personalities, like 100. And did this exact same thing!! When I spoke to the psychiatrists about this, they had no clue what I was talking about. No one has been helpful with this. Why is no one talking about this?!?! I’m so angry right now. Part of what the issue is with Rachel, she thinks she has several alters with all different genders. Why would any doctor give her testosterone acting like this???”

So, trained psychiatrists have not heard about this destructive TikTok trend, but millions of impressionable young people are intimately familiar with it. And, here in America, where the daughter now resides, a licensed doctor was willing to give this teenager a testosterone shot to help her “transition” to male, even though her mental instability should have been visible at once.

The mother continued, “She is so wrapped up and so deep in lies. I don’t know how to bring her to truth. . . . Her roommate, also a ‘system’ won’t allow me to talk to my child. She is the gate keeper to any communication. How can a trained therapist even accept this nonsense???”

Nonsense indeed. And some of you can identify with this mother’s pain and anger and frustration.

It’s really as if a foreign entity has invaded the hearts and minds of our kids, what Jordan Peterson recently referred to as a “sociological contagion.”

Peterson also opined that opening the boundaries of “sex categories” would “fatally confuse thousands of young girls,” a claim that the New York Post found to be “unsubstantiated.” Really? Unsubstantiated?

Perhaps this Newsweek headline from October 2021 provides some of the necessary substantiation for Peterson’s claim: “Nearly 40 Percent of U.S. Gen Zs, 30 Percent of Young Christians Identify as LGBTQ, Poll Shows.”

This spike of more than 4,000 percent, from roughly 3 percent of the population to the current 40 percent, did not happen in a vacuum. Instead, this is what takes place when a society loses its boundaries, casts off traditional biblical values, and inundates its young people with a constant flood of pro-LGBTQ messages and propaganda. The latest TikTok trends provide yet another avenue for such mass deception, as kids are self-diagnosing themselves with all kinds of alleged mental disorders.

And this leads me back to the question about “Chinese mind control,” reminding me of the famous speech delivered by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the Harvard commencement ceremony in 1978. He claimed that, “Only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well-planned world strategy. There are no other criteria.” Looking back to the recent past, he observed,

“Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism.” In short, “Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition.”

And this stark warning:

“The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one; I do not believe it will be) may well bury Western civilization forever.”

In fact, in Solzhenitsyn’s mind, in many ways, the West had already lost the war.

What does this have to do with TikTok? I have no evidence that China specifically intended the app to undermine Western morals or downgrade our ability to think and concentrate. But for sure, these are major results of TikTok (along with some other social media apps), and parents need to be incredibly alert to this latest threat. Is this another reason why China bans the app?

A child abuser may not be crawling through your child’s window, but another, very destructive force may be flooding into your child’s mind through social media apps, with TikTok at the top of the list. Be vigilant and beware! And remember that, as Solzhenitsyn warned, if we lose our moral and spiritual grounding, we lose all, and chaos soon ensues.

That very chaos, ready to swarm our land and our families and our hearts, has already arrived on our shores. Only we can push it back with morality, sanity, truth, and persevering love.


This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org.



Pornography is a Problem We Can’t Ignore

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.




Speech Suppression is Habit-Forming

Written by Michael Barone

Speech suppression is a habit that the Biden administration and its liberal supporters can’t seem to break. Many staffers may have picked up the habit in their student years: Colleges and universities have been routinely censoring “politically incorrect” speech for the last 30 years. As Thomas Sowell noted, “There are no institutions in America where free speech is more severely restricted than in our politically correct colleges and universities, dominated by liberals.”

Now, the Biden administration seems to be giving the colleges and universities some serious competition. Like many Democrats during the Trump presidency, they have come to see suppression of “fake news” as the ordinary course of business and indeed a prime responsibility of social media platforms.

For decades, print and broadcast media have been dominated by liberals, but Facebook, Google and Twitter have developed a stranglehold over the delivery of news which exceeds anything that the three major broadcast networks and a few national newspapers every enjoyed. If they suppress a story or a line of argument, it largely disappears from public view. And to the extent that it lingers, it can be stigmatized by these multibillion-dollar companies as “misinformation” or “fake news.”

Speech suppression was exactly what White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had in mind last week when she called on Facebook to suppress 12 accounts that she said were spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19 vaccines. These accounts, she said July 15, were “producing 65% of vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.”

“Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts. Posts that would be within their policy for removal often remain up for days, and that’s too long. The information spreads too quickly.”

And she wasn’t aiming her demand at just Facebook. “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others,” she added a day later. The message was surely not lost on these companies, whose fabulously successful business models are vulnerable to government disruption.

Like most speech suppressors, Psaki protested her good intentions. As did her boss, President Joe Biden, who, when asked about Facebook on Friday, said simply, “They’re killing people.” The implication is that any advice contrary to the current recommendations of public health officials — contrary to “the science” — is bound to increase the death toll.

This is more in line with Cardinal Bellarmine’s view of science than Galileo’s. As Galileo knew, science is not acceptance of holy writ but learning from observation and experiment. Today, in dealing with a novel and deadly virus, current science is a body of hypotheses only partly tested and subject to revision based on emerging evidence.

There’s a long list of things once believed to be “misinformation” about COVID that are now widely accepted. One prime example: the possibility that the coronavirus was accidentally released from the Wuhan lab. For more than a year, this was widely treated as a wacky right-wing conspiracy theory. Facebook slapped “warnings” on it and boasted that it reduced readership — i.e., suppressed speech.

Then, in May, former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, in an article that Facebook let slip through, argued a lab leak was likelier than animal-to-human transmission, and a group of 18 bioscientists called for a deeper investigation. The Biden administration, to its credit, soon reversed itself and opened its own investigation and, reportedly, multiple officials now believe the lab leak theory is likely correct. Some “misinformation!”

That example provides powerful support for Galileo’s view that debate over scientific matters takes place best out in the open. But of course the urge to suppress speech is not limited to science. As conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller wrote, “Removing information on vaccines will translate right over to anything they think is misinformation on gun violence, or climate, or healthcare or what defines a man or woman. Which is why they are doing this.”

If you think that’s extravagant, consider that, as Townhall’s Guy Benson argued, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been stretching its ambit to studying gun violence and climate change even while letting its core mission of advancing public health atrophy, as shown by its inability to produce a COVID test.

It’s easy to imagine this administration pressuring Facebook and other social media to suppress information on other issues. For example, as the New York Post‘s Michael Goodwin noted, his paper’s negative stories about Hunter Biden‘s shady business dealings, which were largely blocked from public view in the weeks before the 2020 election.

Speech suppression is evidently habit-forming. Which is why a constitutional amendment was passed back in the 1790s guaranteeing “freedom of speech, and of the press.” Or is that obsolete in these modern times?


Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.




Gardner: Stop Big Tech and Big Businesses Silencing of Conservative Voices

Following the January 6th lawlessness at the Capitol in Washington D.C., Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account and thousands of other conservative users began reporting their accounts were suspended or they had lost large numbers of followers. The migration that had already begun to an upstart competitor, Parler, gained tremendous speed until Amazon dropped the new platform from its server. The big tech censorship of conservative voices supporting Trump was underway.

Mainstream media went from calling the events on January 6th a riot, to an insurrection. Any person or platform who disagreed with their version of what took place or were too “far right” were removed from the public square. In all, Twitter is reported to have banned more than 70,000 accounts since then.

As the days went on, one of President Trump’s most vocal supporters, My Pillow CEO, Mike Lindell, became the latest target. Wayfair, Kohl’s, and Bed Bath & Beyond announced they would no longer sell his company’s products. Twitter has also banned Lindell’s account for “sharing the misinformation” that President Trump won the 2020 election and other “repeated violations.”

In interviews, Lindell often shares his testimony of being a former cocaine addict before becoming a Christian. Lindell has said the idea for My Pillow came to him in a dream that was given to him by God. He is very vocal about his Christian faith, living it daily. He encourages Bible studies at work and has hired former convicts and drug addicts, giving them a second change like Jesus gave him.

Kohl’s and Bed Bath & Beyond have claimed to numerous media outlets their decisions to drop the brand are based on low sales. But one can’t help but wonder if the timing is more than a coincidence. Wayfair has not commented publicly on its decision.

Day Gardner, president of the National Black Pro-Life Union, is calling for the 74 million people who voted for Trump to stop supporting big tech and the businesses that are attempting to silence the voices of their fellow Americans with whom they disagree.

“It started with big tech’s Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and even Pinterest shutting down the voice of the President of the United States,” she wrote in a recent op-ed. “So of course, namby-pamby, lily-livered, scaredy-cat companies decided to align themselves with big tech.”

Gardner pointed out something that many cancel culture advocates are ignoring, “America has always been the greatest protector of free of speech. We all have a right to our own thoughts and opinions.”

She called the censorship “an attack on the one thing that certainly makes America the greatest and strongest nation in the world.”

A few days before she had purchased a rug from Wayfair that had just arrived. That was when Gardner found out about Wayfair, Kohls, and Bed Bath & Beyond decisions to quit selling Mike Lindell’s products.

Gardner shared the conversation she had with Wayfair:

I called Wayfair and told them COME GET YOUR RUG!!

They asked if I want to exchange.

ME: Nope.

THEM: We could give you a discount.

ME: No thanks!

THEM: Would you like a credit for future purchase, or refund.

ME: Full refund! Come get your rug!

She also added:

“Oh and delete my account, permanently.” I am sick of these companies trying to silence us.

Now she’s boycotting all three companies. “We have to draw a line in the sand somewhere,” she said.

The silencing of conservatives and Christians hasn’t ended with the inauguration of President Joe Biden and it shows no signs of slowing down. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself has said so. According to Gardner, Dorsey stated in a video meeting published by Project Veritas last Thursday:

“We are focused on one account right now, but this is going to be much bigger than just one account, and it’s going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, and the next few weeks, and go on beyond the inauguration.”

Gardner isn’t letting the big tech’s censorship get in her way. They can’t ban her. She’s banning them. “Twitter has suspended me here and there over the years, but I want everyone to know as of today I have BANNED TWITTER from my life,” Gardner defiantly declared. “Buh-bye Twitter! Poof, you’re gone!

“Who’s next, c’mon, step across the line…dare me!”


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Locked Out by Twitter for Telling the Truth

After preaching at my home congregation Sunday morning, I got into my car in the church parking lot to check my voicemails and messages. One of my colleagues had sent me the link to his new article, which I decided to share with my Twitter followers. To my surprise, I discovered I was locked out of my account for 12 hours for violating Twitter Rules.

But what I had done? What was the violation? There was no further information, no link to file an appeal, and no reference to an offending tweet.

Several years ago, something similar happened to me, but Twitter subsequently apologized, explaining that they had misunderstood my tweet.

This time, I was left in the dark, forcing me to search online for a way to appeal the suspension.

Obviously, this was not a serious crisis, and like many other conservatives, I knew my time on Twitter might be limited. Still, I was wondering what offense I had committed.

Minutes later, I had my answer.

I was informed that I had been locked out my account for 12 hours because of this tweet, which had been posted on January 20: “Will I get punished by Twitter for saying that, in God’s sight, ‘Rachel’ Levine (nominated by Biden to be his assistant secretary for HHS) is a man?”

Yes, that was the offending tweet. It looks like Twitter answered my question!

When biological truth conflicts with transgender activism, biological truth is banned.

When biblical truth conflicts with transgender activism, biblical truth is banned.

There was nothing hateful in the tweet.

There was nothing that would incite violence.

I didn’t even “deadname” Levine, referring to him as “Richard.”

I simply stated the truth. In the sight of God, President Biden’s nominee for assistant secretary for Health and Human Services is a man.

Someone might challenge the statement, asking what gives me the right to speak for God.

Someone else might claim to have a different perspective on God’s point of view.

And, of course, an atheist would dispute the whole notion of God.

Fair enough. We can have those debates.

But to block me for this tweet? Really?

I read the Twitter Rules carefully.

Under the category of Safety are listed these sub-categories: Violence; Terrorism/violent extremism; Child sexual exploitation; Abuse/harassment; Hateful conduct; Suicide or self-harm; Sensitive media, including graphic violence and adult content; and Illegal or certain regulated goods or services.

Then I read the categories of Privacy and then Authenticity.

What rule had I violated? Where had I sinned? What was my transgression? (For John Zmirak’s brilliant, satirical self-confession, see here.)

Then I re-read the verbiage under “Hateful conduct,” which stated, “You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

So was that it? Was that my crime?

I dug down deeper into the rules, clicking the link for more information, which included this note (which, for some reason, used British English spelling):

“We recognise that if people experience abuse on Twitter, it can jeopardize their ability to express themselves. Research has shown that some groups of people are disproportionately targeted with abuse online. This includes; women, people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual individuals, marginalized and historically underrepresented communities.”

So that must be it. By simply stating biological and biblical truth, I had “harassed” a transgender person. What else could it possibly be?

This led then to the next question. Why did it take Twitter four days to decide I was guilty?

My only guess is that on Saturday, former governor Mike Huckabee retweeted my article about Biden’s radical, trans-activist executive order, including my twitter handle in his tweet. And given the size of his Twitter following, the tweet got lots of attention. Did this, in turn, draw attention to my account, and then my tweet?

Either way, the end result was yet another example of Twitter’s leftist censorship.

Ironically, the Twitter Rules page states that,

“Twitter’s purpose is to serve the public conversation. Violence, harassment and other similar types of behavior discourage people from expressing themselves, and ultimately diminish the value of global public conversation. Our rules are to ensure all people can participate in the public conversation freely and safely.”

In reality, Twitter is stifling public conversation and harassing people who believe things as basic as this: in God’s sight, a biological male remains a male, even when identifying as a female.

Not only so, but once again, we see how affirmation of radical transgender ideology trumps science, Scripture, and even common sense.

Perhaps I’ll get blocked the next time for saying that someone who identifies as a cat (or dog or dragon or the like) is actually a human? After all, wouldn’t therians (who believe in some way that they have an animal identity) fit in the class of “marginalized and historically underrepresented communities”?

And what about Twitter’s extraordinary double standards, as Bible-believing conservatives like me get bashed and mocked and cursed by the minute on these platforms, specifically for being who we are and believing what we believe, and that is somehow fine and dandy.

Over 15 years ago, when I began to warn that those who came out of the closet wanted to put us in the closet, I was roundly mocked. “That’s ridiculous,” I was told.

Who would have believed me if I said back then, “Social media platforms will block us for saying that a male who identifies as a female is actually a man in God’s sight”? Who would have believed that?

Levine may be a decent human being and a serious professional. But he is not a woman in God’s sight whether Twitter likes it or not.

In the end, Twitter may suspend me or block me (and countless others). But they cannot change the truth.


This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org.




Dealing with Cancel Culture

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

  • When people are brave and unfazed by accusations, the activists turn to the personal destruction tactics of cancel culture.
  • The effects of cancel culture can be expensive and physically dangerous. The idea is to eliminate the target’s opposition and discourage others.
  • Even businesses and politicians are using these tactics.
  • Defenses against political cancel culture involve forcing politicians to treat all of us fairly, and to honor our Constitutional rights.
  • Defenses against business and social media cancelling involves diversification, greatly multiplying our communications choices.

No compromise is possible for attackers of America’s culture

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

  • Accept that a man or woman is whatever sex they choose to dress up as.
  • Let those individuals use whatever sex-segregated public facility they choose to, just because they say so.
  • Address them by whatever pronoun they’re pleased to use, whether it be “Mr,” “Miss,” “Xi,” “They,” or a great number of other odd pronouns.[v]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cancel culture is how they silence our objections

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

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

The definition has interesting suggestions for using it in conversations:

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

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

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

  • Ruin someone by digging up a now unfashionable comment. In 1987 the young Navy pilot Niel Golightly wrote an opinion of why women should be kept out of combat roles. In 2020 this comment was discovered and Golightly got targeted. He lost his job for once having had a now politically incorrect opinion.[xiii]
  • Punish someone who criticizes your cause. The professor Harald Uhlig criticized “Black Lives Matter” for being unrealistic about police funding. The cancel culture mob searched for things to use against him. Finding some minor incidents, they claimed that these proved how Uhlig was unfit to head a national academic journal. They demanded his firing.[xiv] The intended lesson is to never criticize “Black Lives Matter”.
  • Change the culture through vandalizing history. Abraham Lincoln is accused of not having believed “black lives matter.” The mob ginned up support to remove his name from buildings, and statues honoring him are being vandalized and torn down.[xv] George Orwell pointed out, in his novel 1984, that if you can control what the public thinks, or can learn, about its past, then you can steer them into a future of your choice.[xvi] The mob has learned how to cancel history.[xvii] They also found that vandalism pays.

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

  • Church ostracized from arts community because of sermon. The Crossing Church in Columbia, MO had an arts outreach ministry, giving money to local artists. But because of a sermon on God vs. transgender behavior, the church is now persona non grata in the arts. Galleries and theaters are pressured to stay away from the church’s assistance, or they themselves will get cancelled.[xviii]
  • Feminist-supporting author cancelled for defending biology against transgenderism. Robert Jensen writes books and gives lectures. But his audience dried up once he asserted that biological sex is immutable. Bookstores won’t accept his books, he’s disinvited from speaking engagements, and he’s shouted down at other events. His views are inconvenient to the transgender behavior community.[xix]
  • Pizza parlor forced to close after statements about not catering to “gay weddings.” The Memories Pizza parlor was reported to be unwilling to cater to a “gay wedding.” What followed was criticism, threats of vandalism against the business, and death threats against the owners.[xx] They never were actually asked to do that catering, but a reporter decided to create a news story. Despite the First Amendment, and Indiana religious freedom laws, apparently even advertising your Christian beliefs is a capital offense deserving of summary death.

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

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

Businesses get into the cancel culture action

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

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

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

  • Presented as being politically and culturally neutral. Since their content is user-generated, Twitter and Facebook supposedly have a fair slice of American opinion, reasonably reflecting the strengths and diversity of our culture. We know now that they aren’t neutral, but people still think that they are.
  • Monopoly position. Twitter and Facebook have each gained a monopoly share in their particular specialty. Few people even realize that there are competitors.
  • The go-to place for reaching people. The masses flock to Facebook to keep up with their friends and interesting people. They go to Twitter for timely news. Politicians post there because their constituents are already there. And it’s free to use, no subscription fees. These sites have become de-facto public squares, where people congregate to hear what is going on in their communities and the world. And supposedly, if it isn’t being said there then nobody is saying it at all.
  • Hard to displace. It is a truism, that if you’re not paying for the product then you are the product. Twitter and Facebook make tremendous amounts of money from our being there. They get money from companies posting ads and from those buying audience information. A potential competitor would have to suffer years of heavy economic losses in hopes of taking back even a small share of the audience.
  • Invisible hand in shaping opinions. People who visit Twitter or Facebook see posts, both deep and trivial, and think that this is the entire scope of American political and cultural discourse. These firms shield their viewers from non-approved content. People are propagandized, not through salesmanship but by omission. They’re being misled and haven’t a clue about it.

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

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

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

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

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

Politicians use cancel culture against their cultural opponents

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Claims that your religious practices are illegal. Cultural activists create conflicts, inviting a District Attorney or Human Rights Commission to claim that you can’t actually practice your religious beliefs (James 2:14-26). Look how the Masterpiece Cakeshop was sued three times because the owner has Christian principles.[xxxviii] When a Commission, or a state’s attorney, works to disregard the accused’s religious rights, despite the First Amendment, it declares that some citizens have fewer rights than others. It also claims that a civil rights law is superior to the Constitution. These officials are trying to cancel the citizens and also our legal system.
  • Create laws to ban your religious practices, and even force you to violate them. The Equality Act of 2020 would “prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.”[xxxix] Besides its actual provisions, it forces the changes onto the public and invalidates any religious objections. It’s been called the “Criminalizing Christianity Act.” It amounts to a cultural revolution through legislative fiat. It’s blatantly unconstitutional, but if it gets passed in the future then just try to get justice.

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

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

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

  • The Christian believes that God created us, and that through Jesus redeemed us to be His children. We’re living for His sake.
  • God’s tells us what is right and wrong. No other standard will do. From the Bible we learn how to relate to God, to live in righteousness, and to live peaceably with each other.
  • Our faith is acted out in daily life. It isn’t a faith of mere meditation, but also of activities and decisions coming from that faith (James 2:14-26).
  • Our resulting society must be righteous and God-honoring, or else. God judges all nations, whether ancient Israel, the rest of the ancient world (Daniel 4:27-37; Jeremiah 18:7-10), or any modern nation (Luke 3:14; Acts 12:21-23). God holds all the world to his standards, and woe to them who spurn His reproof.[xli]

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

Make our politicians respect our Constitutional rights

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

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

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

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

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

Beating censorship through diversity and anonymity

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

  • Stop posting on Twitter and Facebook. If you post worthwhile content on Twitter, your posts only increase its viewership. Likewise, if your social club is hosted by Facebook, it increases their advertising numbers but doesn’t benefit you any. Go ahead and move your internet home to some other service. Wherever you land, your audience will still seek you out. They might even like the relief from sponsored ads.
  • Stop reading Twitter or Facebook. There ought to be other, equivalent sources for your news and entertainment. And every defection from Twitter and Facebook drops their revenue stream. If you have sources which only appear on Twitter, such as a politician or a funny writer, ask them to also post their messages elsewhere. You’re now building your own “not Twitter” network.
  • Advertise your own “goodbye” movement. Compared to their total viewership, there aren’t that many people getting cancelled by Twitter or Facebook. But if people get the idea that it’s trendy to leave, and start doing it, you will have started a movement.

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

  • Printed newspapers. Newspapers have been dying in the internet era. This is partly because they put content on the internet for free, and partly because so many of the papers have the same progressive slant. They’re just not worth reading. Yet small town local news, such as a village town hall, goes unreported for lack of a printed forum. Wouldn’t locals want to buy a weekly paper if it contained local news? How about a paper whose reporting reflects the community’s values, rather than fighting against them? We can only hope…
  • Email lists. Email lists are still used in places. Subscribers periodically get an email with news, articles, or comments from other subscribers. They then submit their responses back to the central service. Because the back-and-forth of an argument depends on sequential posts from the central server, a conversation might take days to resolve. The virtue here is that these communications are available “off the web.”
  • FidoNet messaging network. Before the modern internet appeared, people could set up a network of communicating computers, using software called FidoNet. This network operated much like an email list does, but did its work using phone calls. It had great flexibility for routing messages, and could work even with part of the network out-of-service. It required an expert to configure, but it worked. It’s almost forgotten today. Want to set up a secretive network? Why not use a forgotten technology?
  • The practice of printing and distributing handbills has always been with us. You see them under windshield wipers, slid onto screen doors, and attached to light poles. The whole neighborhood will know that your group has been there. Although how many flyers you can distribute is limited by your manpower, any number of groups can distribute copies of that flyer, wherever they might be. And when your groups coordinate, they’re gaining networking skills. Consider buying a genuine printing press, because using ordinary computer printers cost way more for the volumes of leaflets you’ll generate.

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

  • Obama got his opponents’ sealed divorce proceedings revealed. During the 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate, Obama’s campaign people twice got the newspapers to reveal divorce proceedings of his opponents.[xlvi] First came details about his Democratic primary opponent, then those of his Republican general election opponent. Sticking with a winning tactic, President Obama’s reelection campaign of 2012 tried, but failed, to get Mitt Romney’s tax records. Similar attempts are still being made to get President Trump’s tax records. That the courts are willing to reveal sealed records shows that government promises of confidentiality can’t be trusted.
  • Donors to Proposition 8 revealed, harassed, and attacked. In 2008, California held an election concerning Proposition 8, which essentially banned “gay marriage.” Many people donated to the campaign trying to pass the measure. After the election, opponents of the measure got the list of campaign donors and published it. This led to donors getting harassed and attacked. [xlvii] Some donors suffered property loss. Others lost their jobs, once news of their donations came out.
  • Cell phone tracking identifies rally participants, traces them home. In 2020, people protested at the Michigan state capitol about the coronavirus virus lockdown decrees. After they went home, much cell phone data was harvested by political advocates.[xlviii] This is because many protestors had set their phones to permit location tracking by third parties. Organizations like VoteMap, which works with Democratic political campaigns, got the data and was able to trace these people almost all the way home.

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

  • Avoid using your credit card when out and about. When you’re on the road and use your credit card, the company knows where your card has been. By looking at the details, people can make guesses about what you were doing between purchases. There are lots of credit card employees willing to breach their company’s secrecy and spill that data to activists. It’s better if that data doesn’t exist at all. Ask at some gas stations, and you’ll be surprised by how many people are paying with cash.
  • Stifle your cell phone. When you let your phone’s location data be collected by others, as in the Michigan rally story, you’re asking that your activities get spied on. You can disable that yourself. Even so, all cell phones constantly seek out the nearest cell phone tower. They’re calling home, and leaving an auditable trail of where they’ve been, whether it is to a rally, to church, or to a restaurant. This tower seeking occurs even when the phone is supposedly turned off. Only removing the battery truly turns the phone off, but many phones don’t have removable batteries. You could leave the phone at home, or you could put the phone in a Faraday bag. This envelope-like wallet blocks all signals into or out of the pouch, preventing the phone from snitching on you. Be aware that if you take the phone out of the pouch it will resume announcing its position until it is put away again. These pouches are cheap ($20 or so) and readily available online – look them up.
  • Avoid using a car having GPS or satellite radio. A car with GPS map navigation, or satellite radio, knows where you are. The location is presumably recorded, as with a cell phone. If you want to travel without being tracked, you’ll have to find ways to disable this communication. If you’re carrying a portable device, such as that from Garmin, then disconnect its battery. If the GPS or satellite radio is built in, perhaps you can disconnect the antennas (which might also disable your radio). You could also try adding a GPS jammer to your car, to overwhelm the car’s own GPS antennas.

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

Continue transforming the world for Christ

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


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Leftists Exploit Violence to Cancel Conservatives

This is how it’s going down, my friends—the eradication of speech rights for conservatives, that is. The stage was set years ago when “hate speech” laws were passed.

The Left argues that any rhetoric that is or may be in any distant way at any time related to acts of violence should be banned. So, if I say that volitional homosexual acts and relationships are abhorrent to God as Scripture teaches, and a lone, crazed, alienated, Godless sociopath or a few hundred alienated fatherless, Godless anarchists—people who may or may not have read my words—commit acts of heinous violence against homosexuals—my words should be banned. Of course, the banning of my words necessarily requires the banning of God’s Word as well as the words of any theologically orthodox Christian since the inception of the church.

If I say that humans born with healthy, normally functioning penises are male and can never be female, and some man deceived into having sex with a man who pretends to be a woman kills the deceiver, my expression of a moral proposition must be banned.

When Lila Rose, founder of the pro-life organization Live Action, tweeted, “Abortion is violence,” abortionist Dr. Leah Torres tweeted back this:

This is violent rhetoric. It is objectively false and meant to incite others to commit crimes against clinics, patients, and health care providers. This is what domestic terrorism looks like.

Note the three arguable claims Torres makes: 1. She says Rose’s claim is false, 2. She says Rose’s claim is meant to incite others to commit violent crimes, 3. She says Rose’s tweet constitutes domestic terrorism. How convenient that those claims are precisely the type of claims leftists now say are not protected by the First Amendment. See how that works?

Torres is also the author of this since-deleted tweet:

You know fetuses can’t scream, right? I transect the cord [first] so there’s really no opportunity, if they’re even far enough along to have a larynx.

She later claimed the “cord” was not referring to babies’ vocal cords but, rather, to their umbilical cords. So much better. So much less violent.

Those with eyes to see recognize that leftists are using their special skill in manipulating language—also known as sophistry—to turn good into evil and protected speech into violence requiring censorship.

Leftists argue that saying the election was “stolen” should be banned because some far-right anarchists who hold similar views engaged in violence. Therefore, a few words about the phrase “stolen election”—the newest bugbear used by dishonest leftists to crush the civil rights of conservatives—are in order.

The claim that “an election was stolen”—you know, like Hillary Clinton has claimed for four years—means that an election lacked integrity. Some may claim it was stolen via, for example, Russian interference, or algorithmic manipulation, or ballot-harvesting, or voting irregularities regarding signatures, or unconstitutional changes in election requirements, or the counting of late ballots, or Big Tech’s censorship of the Biden crime family’s corruption that likely affected votes, or dead people voting, or a combination of shady acts by shady actors. Someone needs to tell the liars and paranoiacs in the Democrat Party that the term “stolen election” is not a code word for “attack the Capitol.”

If, however, “stolen election” is a secret code word used to initiate violent lawlessness, then surely Hillary Clinton should be thrown in the slammer—a lot. Here are two of her many seditionist/insurrectionist statements:

You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.

and,

[T]here was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level. We still don’t know what really happened. … you don’t win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, “Whoa, something’s not right here.

The fact that her alleged attempts to incite insurrection and/or sedition failed shouldn’t matter. The law prohibits even attempts to incite insurrection or sedition.

Trump and many other Americans said the election was “stolen” in the sense that myriad dubious acts took place that cast doubt on the fairness and integrity of the election. Some anarchists—angry about a boatload of corrosive leftist words and deeds, including election malfeasance—breached the Capitol. Therefore, leftists argue, anyone who attended the pro-Trump protest or voted for Trump must be banned from all social media, kicked out of elected office, lose their private sector jobs, or never be hired. Social media newbie Parler must lose all access to the Internet. Americans must lose their medical insurance and recording contracts.

Via a Royal Proclamation, Randall Lane, Forbes Magazine editor, has threatened to harm any company that hires Kayleigh McEnany, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, Stephanie Grisham, or Sean Spicer—Trump’s former press secretaries:

Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.

He actually wrote, “Let it be known.” Can the left get any more arrogant and oppressive? Rhetorical question.

Trump (again, like Hillary before him) and many decent, law-abiding citizens claimed the election was “stolen.” Some far-right anarchists also believe the election was stolen. Those far-right anarchists stormed the Capitol. Ergo, in the mad, mad, mad, mad world of cynical leftists, Trump is responsible for the storming of the Capitol. Anyone who attended the protest is responsible for the violence—including even those grandmas who abhor violence and didn’t know the violence was happening. Anyone who has prepared food for Trump is responsible because they helped sustain the life of a man who caused a 90-minute seditious violent protest. Anyone who sold food to anyone who prepared food is responsible for the violence. And any of Trump’s kids’ college friends who may have met Trump and thought he was not Hitler is responsible for the violence—obviously.

So, why aren’t YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter being tossed off the Internet, since all were used to organize both the Capitol riots and the BLM riots of 2020?

Why isn’t Kamala Harris who didn’t condemn BLM violence until late August, three months after it began, being accused of fomenting violence?

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi waited until three months after the BLM riots began to condemn them, did she facilitate violence and property destruction through her silence?

What about Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the inaccurate, leftist 1619 Project, who said in the middle of the BLM riots that “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” Was she guilty of inciting more property-destruction?

The goal of leftists isn’t really to prevent violence. Appeals to thwarting violence are merely stratagems for preventing the dissemination of ideas leftists hate. They must link ideas they hate to violence in order to undermine foundational American principles. How do I know? Because the linguistic ground is shifting. We are now hearing calls for banning or “reining in” “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and discourse that “harms,” because—the argument goes—such information may lead to violence.

AOC recently said,

We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation.

So, who determines what constitutes “disinformation and misinformation”? Remember Dr. Leah Torres calling Lila Rose’s statement “false”—in other words, disinformation or misinformation? And remember when just before the election CNN asserted—without conducting any investigation—that the New York Post story about Hunter and Joe Biden was “disinformation,” and then conveniently, after the election, declared it a legitimate news story?

If leftist rhetoric about violence, disinformation, misinformation, harm, and hate leads eventually to imprisonment of dissidents—i.e., conservatives—no problem. All conservatives need to do to avoid the inconvenience of imprisonment or “enlightenment camps” is agree with Big Brother, take some Soma, burn some books, and shut up.

At least leftist rhetoric won’t lead to violence—will it?

The arc of the shady leftist universe is long, convoluted, and bends toward injustice, tyranny, and a senile old man who’s shuffling around looking for his moral compass and a milkshake.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/audio_Leftists-Exploit-Violence-to-Cancel-Conservatives-.mp3


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Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon Collude to Crush Conservatives

Chinese Translation – 中文翻译

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

The tyrannical nature of leftists has emerged more fully following the indefensible and shocking 90-minute assault on the Capitol. The fury of those robbed of faith and family by leftist ideologies turned from the theft and arson of businesses and police precincts—targets Dems couldn’t have cared less about—to the Capitol. The monsters who were created and abandoned have turned on some of their Frankensteinian creators, that is Congressmen and women.

Yes, leftist ideologies create lawless anarchists on both the left and right. Violence is the business of fatherless, faithless, anchorless young men. Always has been, always will be.

After five months of lawless leftist anarchy during which CNN, AOC, and scores of other leftists defended and egged on alienated leftist anarchists who attacked symbols of government, law, and order, alienated far-right anarchists decided to attack a symbol of government, law, and order too.

Of course, Congress hasn’t worked alone on the pernicious project to destroy humans from conception to unnatural death. Leftists and RINOs in Congress colluded with among others, leftist academics, Hollywood, Christian apostates and heretics within the church, propagandists who self-identify as “journalists,” and, of course, Big Tech.

Big Techies have been colluding during a long game of 3D chess while Republicans have been in a corner playing tiddlywinks and occasionally wondering where their winkies disappeared to. (They disappeared long ago during the Great Gelding of Republicans in year … oh, I can’t remember. It was so long ago.)

And now we’re on the verge of the Great Purge of conservatives from society.

Those who had eyes to see discerned the oppression goose-stepping toward the center in stocking feet. Those with 20/5 vision tried to warn the flocks. They’re still trying to warn them. But the tyrants are now in our midst, and they’re replacing noise-cancelling socks with speech-cancelling jackboots. The center is not holding.

First Twitter suspended the accounts of President Trump, General Michael Flynn, and Sidney Powell. The collaborators at Google, Apple, and Facebook joined in the Purge.

Next came Amazon banning Parler—the up and coming Twitter competitor—from its web-hosting service. Apparently Jack Dorsey held his breath and stomped his feet at the mere thought of competition. Once servers refuse to host social media platforms like Parler, those platforms are toast. This is Big Brother on steroids.

And then there’s CNN business “reporter” Oliver Darcy who wrote this on Friday:

[I]t is time TV carriers face questions for lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories. After all, it was the very lies that Fox, Newsmax, and OAN spread that helped prime President Trump’s supporters into not believing the truth.

This from the “news” organization that refused to ask Biden any hard questions before the election and that censored news stories in order to shovel Biden, the malleable and dim marionette, into the seat of power.

Even a Democrat lawmaker got into the rollicking censorship fun. New Jersey assemblyman Paul Moriarty (distant relative perhaps of Professor James Moriarty, arch-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes?) texted a Comcast executive with this subtle message:

Fox and Newsmax, both delivered to my home by your company, are complicit. What are you going to do??? You feed this garbage, lies and all.

Some conservatives have drawn a line in the virtual sand, saying they refuse to be forced off Facebook. They don’t see that the Tech Oligarchs—now including Bezos-the-Bezillionaire—are not trying to force them off. Quite the contrary. The Oligarchs and Overlords are trying to keep conservatives trapped in their virtual prisons. They’re trying to prevent conservatives from leaving by cutting off all other means of communicating ideas in the public square or to friends.

If you want to communicate far and wide with friends old and new, you will be able to do it only on platforms created by the Oligarchs and Overlords and only within the speech parameters they create and impose—on their “neutral platforms.” The Tech Oligarchs don’t want us to leave their fiefdoms. They want us to stay and remain under their sclerotic poisoned thumbs.

It’s not just conservatives who are concerned about tech tyranny. Kate Ruane, attorney for the ACLU, issued a statement via Twitter last Friday saying,

[I]t should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions.

And Kevin Roose, technology columnist for the New York Times echoes the worries of many on both sides of the political aisle—but mainly on the right—about the power of social media wielded with no accountability and no transparency:

Above all, Mr. Trump’s muzzling provides a clarifying lesson in where power resides in our digital society — not just in the precedent of law or the checks and balances of government, but in the ability to deny access to the platforms that shape our public discourse. Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg’s names have never appeared on a ballot. But they have a kind of authority that no elected official on earth can claim.

While leftists have spent four years calling Trump a Nazi, tyrant and dictator, did he ever try to do what leftists are doing now? Has Trump or any other Republican ever attempted to compel or censor speech?

And this is what Never-Trumpers and their small-minded obsession with Trump’s pugilistic rhetoric have brought to our doorsteps. Never-Trumpers with their beady little myopic eyes still can’t see that without Trump’s pugilism, leftists would not yet have revealed their game plan, because unlike Trump, leftists, like the unctuous Obama and arrogant Oligarchs in charge of Big Tech—which is to say, our lives—are more practiced at the art of political deception.

Leftists and RINOs scorn the idea that drove thousands of law-abiding non-insurrectionists to Washington D.C., which is that the election was stolen. Curiously, those same scorners keep their gimlet eyes and forked tongues focused on the Kraken, never acknowledging other concerns of non-insurrectionists like, for example, what liberal Democrat and Biden-voter  senior research psychologist at the  American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology Robert Epstein—a Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—said in Senate Judiciary Sub-Committee hearing on the Constitution in July 2019:

Google presents a serious threat to democracy and human autonomy. … Data I’ve collected since 2016 show that Google displays content to the American public that is biased in favor of one political party—a party I happen to like, but that’s irrelevant. No private company should have either the right or the power to manipulate large populations without their knowledge. … [D]emocracy as originally conceived cannot survive Big Tech as currently empowered.

Epstein’s earlier research showed that millions of votes were shifted to Hillary in 2016, and post 2020-election research showed that millions were shifted to Biden by Google’s tricksy algorithms.

They’re also ignoring what liberal Democrat Senator Ron Wyden said in Feb. 2020 and which sounds a lot like what conservative non-insurrectionists are being pilloried by leftists for saying:

I fear the 2020 election will make 2016 look like small potatoes. The list of threats and vulnerabilities is enough to give you a migraine.

There were the ES&S voting machines that for years came with preinstalled remote access software.

There’s the fact that Russia hacked an election vendor called VR Systems in the summer of 2016.

VR systems machines in North Carolina malfunctioned on Election Day that year, and one polling place had to shut down for hours. It took two and a half years before the Department of Homeland Security investigated what happened.

Right now, many election officials across the country are buying election systems they believe are high-tech, but they’re vulnerable to hacking and out-of-date the moment they come out of the box.

There is the spread of mobile voting apps like Voatz that have never been vetted by top security experts.

There’s a reason cybersecurity experts have been sounding the alarm for years, warning that putting computers between a voter and their ballot is a recipe for disaster.

What happens when the “glitch” changes a candidate’s vote totals by just 2 or 5 percent, instead of 50 percent? What happens when a glitch shuts down machines in some precincts and not others, disenfranchising voters and skewing election results?

Five states still exclusively use hackable, paperless voting machines, and nine other states still use paperless machines in some counties.

The problems are daunting … but the solutions are clear.

My bill, the PAVE Act, mandates the three key priorities that experts most universally recommended—paper ballots, routine, post-election risk-limiting audits, and federal cybersecurity standards for election systems.

… Senator Klobuchar introduced the Senate version of the SAFE Act, which I’m proud to co-sponsor. The SAFE Act has all three key elements recommended by our nation’s top cybersecurity experts: paper ballots, security standards and post-election audits, as well as the funding necessary to make sure states can live up to the new standards.

There is another obstacle to the Oligarchs’ domination of infinity and beyond. It is Senator Josh Hawley, virtually the only Congressman to take on Big Tech by calling for social media platforms to lose Section 230 protections from liability. Section 230 protections apply to “neutral platforms” which Twitter and Facebook with all their censoring, de-platforming, and slammer-tossing clearly are not.

So, the whipsmart and courageous Josh Hawley had to be taken out by the delicate-fingered. His effort to demonstrate that Pennsylvania’s illegal and unconstitutional extension of the voting deadline matters provided just the opportunity the slimy Tech Oligarchs, Dems, and RINOs needed to do just that.

The problem for the delicate-fingered and their congressional collaborators was Hawley’s objections alone would not have been sufficient. The Oligarchs, conscience-free Dems, and RINOs needed something more.

And then the anarchists gave them the crisis they needed. Flying to their virtual barns, the Oligarchs and their collaborators hauled out their waiting pitchforks, tar, and feathers. Sparks flying from their fingertips, they demanded Hawley resign, accusing him of contributing to an insurrection. Then more gelded Republicans came creeping out of their dark corners squeaking in their high castrated voices that they would no longer support Hawley’s effort.

Somehow the well-respected and reasonable journalist Byron York didn’t notice how crazy the idea that Pennsylvania violated the Constitution was. In a piece titled “The Election Lawsuit Trump Should Win,” York wrote:

The court fight over Pennsylvania’s election rules … involves a fundamental issue that is important to all 50 states. … putting aside the specifics of the Pennsylvania situation, the matter concerns a hugely important principle, which is the constitutional authority of state legislatures to make election law for their states.

York’s essay is an important read for anyone who may not know the details of the Pennsylvania mess.

Not even Trump is guilty of “incitement to insurrection,” let alone Hawley. In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, attorney Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, known during his years as a D.C. prosecutor as “protestor prosecutor,” writes that “The president didn’t mention violence on Wednesday, much less provoke or incite it.”

All tyrants use crises to expand powers that are never relinquished. They inflame public fears about threats to their safety from disease, from foreign enemies, or from dangers lurking in their midst. They are skilled at fomenting social division, imposing censorship, and disseminating propaganda to acquire more control. What’s next? Facial recognition cameras everywhere? Then a social credit system like China has?

There’s something rotten in the Upside Down ruled by the Oligarchs and administered by their algorithmically determined minions who control the speech by which ideas are disseminated. Somewhere along the life journeys of the Oligarchs, they lost sight of the meaning of the First Amendment, which was intended to protect unpopular speech—not just the speech leftists like. Who knows, maybe one day the only way conservatives will be able to communicate is via underground newspapers. So, hold on to those archaic printing presses, my friends. I think we’re gonna need ‘em.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 


 

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From Gulag to Google

It is true that Google is not imprisoning dissenters in a vast network of prison camps, similar to what Alexander Solzhenitsyn described in The Gulag Archipelago. But there is a good reason that retired NYU professor Michael Rectenwald titled his 2019 book Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom. The reach and power of the social media giants is frightening. It is with little exaggeration that the owners of Google (which includes YouTube) and Facebook and Twitter are called “the masters of the universe.” Their domination must be challenged – while it can be.

The recent elections have provided stark and shocking proof of the power of these internet giants, dwarfing any concerns about voter fraud. The influence that Big Tech had over the elections was far greater, illustrated in the censoring of the Hunter Biden story, with the help of the mainstream media.

According to one survey, had more Americans known about the alleged scandal, some would not have voted for Joe Biden. That alone would have tipped the scales in Trump’s favor. Added to this (again, with the enthusiastic help of the mainstream media) was the failure to report on Trump’s many positive accomplishments. According to this same survey, had more voters been aware of the good Trump had done, some would have changed their vote.

What Big Tech has done, though, is absolutely brazen. “You will report our version of the news,” they are basically saying, “or you will not report at all.”

And for the most part, when we search for news online, we don’t even realize we are being manipulated. Google will show us what it wants us to know, not just the most relevant information.

We are being programmed and indoctrinated and we haven’t a clue that it’s happening.

Is not this like the reach of the Gulag? Is not this more similar to totalitarianism than to our supposedly free and open country?

Just think.

Big Tech (specifically Twitter) shut down the account of The New York Post, one of the nation’s leading and oldest newspapers. That’s right. They shut their account down for daring to report on the Hunter Biden laptop. How can this be?

But it gets worse. Big Tech (again, Twitter) has taken on the president of the United States, censoring (or, at least filtering or commenting on) his own tweets.

Let that sink in for a minute.

If Big Tech is not afraid to take on the most powerful man on the planet – and one of the most fearless and even vindictive as well – what makes you think it will not try to take us on as well, not to mention shut us down?

And now YouTube has announced that it will remove all videos that dispute the results of the elections, even while legal challenges are still being processed in the courts. In the same way, YouTube has removed videos with different takes on COVID-19, even if those videos come from experts in their field. “Thou shalt not dissent!” is the word for the hour.

The purge is on — full steam ahead.

To this moment, every post that my team puts on Facebook that has anything to do with the elections, however remotely, appears with a link to the election results, courtesy of Big Tech.

To this moment, virtually every video we post on YouTube, regardless of content, gets flagged immediately, forcing us to request a manual review. And even though the vast majority of the videos are approved for monetization, why are they flagged in the first place? Based on what?

Other colleagues of mine have not fared so well, having their entire library of videos removed from Vimeo (they dared question the “gays are born that way and cannot change” narrative).

Others have had their Facebook pages shut down for posting verses from the Bible that spoke against homosexual practice or, within the last two weeks, for exposing Facebook’s anti-conservative methodology.

Gulag-like, indeed.

What, then, is the solution?

First, Congress needs to continue to hold the feet of Big Tech leaders to the fire, exposing unequal practices that violate their terms as platforms (rather than publishers). And where there are monopolies that need to be broken up, so be it. (I’m not a legal expert; others will have to parse these details.)

Second, we need to continue to develop viable, alternative platforms and search engines. This is happening already, but it will take some time to catch up to the massive numbers of Big Tech.

Third, rather than simply fleeing the platforms that are seeking to shut us down, we need to flood those platforms with good, godly, truthful content.

Get the word out. Push the envelope. Challenge the system.

I have often pointed to the words of the courageous, German Christian leader Basilea Schlink, penned in the aftermath of the destruction of World War II. She wrote,

“We are personally to blame. We all have to admit that if we, the entire Christian community, had stood up as one man and if, after the burning of the synagogues [on Krystallnacht, November 9, 1938], we had gone out on the streets and voiced our disapproval, rung the church bells, and somehow boycotted the actions of the S.S., the Devil’s vassals would probably not have been at such liberty to pursue their evil schemes” (see her book Israel, My Chosen People).

This is a message to take to heart, a message to move us to action.

Let us, then, do the equivalent of going out on the streets and voicing our disapproval and ringing the church bells. (And again, I recognize that Big Tech is not imprisoning us or, in this example, behaving like violent Nazis. It is our response I am focusing on.)

Let us post gospel truth on every social media outlet we have. Let us stand up for righteousness and get our message out. And let us oppose censorship when it raises its ugly head.

We can have different takes on COVID. We have different views on election fraud. We can love or hate Trump or Biden. That is not the issue.

The issue is one of freedom.

Google and its cohorts can only become more Gulag-like if we let them.

We cannot and we must not. Let us shout together, “Freedom!”


This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org.



Uncensored: Social Media Alternatives for Christian Conservatives

I am finally doing it: creating profiles on social media platforms that are friendlier to conservative points of view and that do not censor speech. This month I also installed Brave as my new web browser, ditching Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and I am very happy with the change.

Why am I motivated to make these changes now? Like so many others, I have had enough of the interference, outright censorship, suppression of conservative views, and suspension of accounts (which some people refer to as “Facebook Jail”). I am fed up with the unwelcome disclaimers by social media giants and partisan search engines that suggest my opinions and news posts are untrustworthy and/or dishonest. For these reasons, I have decided to say “goodbye” to liberal social media platforms.

I am leaving Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to join unbiased platforms such as MeWe, Parler, and Rumble.

Those who work behind the scenes at Facebook have admitted that they use algorithms to push religious–particularly conservative–content to the bottom of the pile, thereby rendering it effectively worthless on their platform.

Not only have the despots at Twitter had the gall to flag the tweets of President Donald J. Trump, we have also seen them suspend the New York Post’s account for posting an alarming story about the contents found on Hunter Biden’s laptop computer just before the election, thereby affecting the election.

On this topic, our friend, Dave Olsson, pointed out in a post on his blog how Google manipulated search results leading up to the presidential election. He quotes The Epoch Times which reported that:

Google shifted a “bare minimum” of six million votes in the Nov. 3 presidential election by pushing its political agenda onto its users, a research psychologist has claimed.

In an interview with Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Dr. Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California, suggested that the big tech company’s search manipulation could have prompted millions of Americans to shift their votes toward Democrats.

There is no doubt that Big Media and Big Tech not only operate from a left-leaning social/political worldview but also that they are activists for Leftist causes, promoting anti-family, anti-freedom narratives while at the same time suppressing conservative news and opinions.

Over the past several years, Big Tech has dispensed with any pretense of neutrality. Those of us who have used social media platforms to get our messages out to a wider audience have seen how these tech giants have become emboldened to counter, flag, suspend, and censor our posts and content.

In the meantime, these same Big Tech Overlords are working hard to persuade and deceive our unsuspecting neighbors. We, the discerning public, have no means to flag or post a “fact check” to the misleading, deceitful, explicit, and disturbing content promulgated by Leftists. Their storylines go unmolested.

You might think that advertising runs the internet, but it is the behemoth of data behind the advertising curtain that generates the real profits. As we use and engage with websites and social media, we are being followed all the time: tracked through our phones, watches, tablets, cars, smart speakers, and a multitude of other gadgets, gizmos, and devices.

This profusion of collected data, public demographics as well as personal preferences, truly has generated billions of dollars for these tech companies, but at what price?

So why are we–socially conservative, Christian citizens–allowing Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to profit from our data?

We shouldn’t. In fact, we must make a plan to migrate away from these exploitative platforms to freer alternatives.

If you have had enough of politically motivated bias and suppression, I encourage you to join me and thousands of other conservative activists in starting accounts at MeWe (instead of Facebook), Parler (instead of Twitter), and Rumble (instead of YouTube).

Instead of using Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge as your web browser, switch to Brave.

Rather than choosing Google, Bing or Yahoo as your Internet search engine, consider Duck, Duck Go, which does not track you, collect your IP address or personal information, or create any kind of personal profile about its users.

Abandoning these tech giants is a simple and practical way for conservatives to take action in the political arena. Information is power–the less you give, the less you empower those who oppose the values you espouse and defend.

To the best of my knowledge, these alternative platforms are safe and guaranteed not to interfere with our exercise of free speech. The following information regarding MeWe and Parler will help you understand the benefits of joining their platforms.

MeWe is a privately owned platform started by Mark Weinstein. You won’t find ads, spyware, algorithms, censorship, facial recognition, or fact checkers on MeWe. Unlike with Facebook, your personal data is not sold.

MeWe is a free platform but does offer an upgrade to MeWe Pro for a small monthly fee.

Parler is a privately owned platform started in 2018 by John Matze and Jared Thomson. They created the platform after becoming “exhausted with a lack of transparency in big tech [and] ideological suppression.”

Parleys are the Parler equivalent to tweets. While they can be longer than tweets, they are limited to 1,000 characters.

As with Twitter, Parler uses hashtags to broaden the reach of your content and ensure that your parleys will be seen.

Parler allows you to comment, echo (share), and vote (like) people’s parleys, and also gives you the ability to moderate comments.

The switchover to these new platforms will take some time, but I hope to have completed the migration and closed all of our Facebook and Twitter accounts by Memorial Day 2021. I encourage you to do the same. We should not allow Big Tech to stifle the dissemination of our conservative beliefs and online influence. Abandoning these large left-wing platforms is one practical way to do so.

Read more:

Farewell Twitter, Goodbye YouTube (The Stream)

YouTube, Twitter Against Trump (The Epoch Times)

REPORT: Zuckerberg Spent Half A Billion Dollars Coercing States To Adopt Pro-Dem Turnout Measures
(The National Pulse)





Censorship of Wrongthink = Loss of Freedom

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 BezosWashington 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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Leftists Canceling and Cannibalizing Their Own

In their pursuit of replacing culture with anti-culture, the spanking new 21st Century culture Reformers are going to be very busy. Rather than nailing 95 theses on a church door, they’re going to tear down 950,000 monuments and place names honoring imperfect and altogether yucky colorless people and replace them I guess with the names of perfect colorful people. This provides yet more evidence of the silliness of Barack Obama’s out-of-context quote, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It also provides evidence of the truth of Dr. Martin Luther King‘s use of the quote, first spoken by 19th Century pastor Theodore Parker:

Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated with [Christ’s] name. Yes, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Neither Theodore Parker nor Dr. King was making the point that history moves always and ineluctably toward justice. They were making the point that ultimately Christ will redeem history. Christ has already won. It’s interesting that leftists have adopted BCE and CE in order to no longer refer to Christ. No matter, Christ still wins.

In the meantime, the devil roams the earth lying and destroying.

Now, after decades of canceling conservatives through a thousand tiny cuts and an occasional deep slash, the Reformers smell all that yummy human blood and are mercilessly cannibalizing their own.

The cannibals at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art forced out their curator, Gary Garrels, “[c]onsidered one of the country’s most prominent curators,” for the sin of saying he “would not stop collecting work by white men lest the institution take part in ‘reverse discrimination.’” The cannibals leapt on him. First, he tried futilely to stop the attack by groveling, saying,

I want to offer my personal and sincere apology to every one of you. I realized almost as soon as I used the term ‘reverse discrimination’ that this is an offensive term and was an extremely poor choice of words on my part.

His groveling delayed their devouring by seconds. The Cannibal Reformers responded, yum yum eat ‘im up. He’s gone, baby, gone.

The Cannibal Reformers have been noshing on Lin-Manuel Miranda, the beloved leftist author of the beloved musical Hamilton, for being insufficiently Reformed.

Homosexual, slightly conservative and now former New York magazine writer Andrew Sullivan was nibbled on for writing in ways about the protests that “triggered” “sensitive junior editors.” He resigned before being eaten alive.

And on social media and in her former place of business, writer Bari Weiss, who describes herself as  “center left on most things … and … socially liberal,” was gnawed on mercilessly. When the Cannibal Reformers, with blood dripping from their ghoulish mouths, paused to catch their breath, Weiss fled and used her best weapon to try to stop the cannibalization. She wrote and posted a resignation letter that exposes the intolerant, bigoted, ideologically non-diverse work environment at the New York Times:

[T]he lessons that ought to have followed the [2016] election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. …

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist. … Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned. …  [S]ome coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are. …

[T]he truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. … Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.

Weiss’s resignation echoes what leftist journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in June:

It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

I worked with such Robespierres and experienced firsthand their bigotry and hypocrisy at Deerfield High School on Chicago’s North Shore. Ironically, some of the most vicious bullies were those who most vigorously claimed to honor all voices and to value diversity even as they promoted only one set of assumptions on how to think about race, sex, and erotic attraction. All views with which district oppressors disagreed were designated “hateful” and  their imperious judgments justified silencing—through bullying if necessary—all dissenting voices. While proclaiming that everyone should “Speak” their “Truth,” they ostracized anyone who expressed truths they hated.

Seeing the cannibals eating their own, ethics (or panic) seized 153 men and women who work in journalism, academia, and the arts—mostly leftists—and penned an open letter in Harpers in which they “raise their voices against” the “new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” The signatories include Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, Todd Gitlin, Garry Kasparov, Damon Linker, Steven Pinker, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Jonathan Rauch, J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, Randi Weingarten, Garry Wills, Matthew Yglesias, and Fareed Zakaria.

After first taking potshots at conservatives, as is their wont to do, they wrote this:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. … [C]ensoriousness is … spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.

But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. … the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.

Some of the most bloodthirsty cancel culture cannibals live and move and have their anti-being in the “trans” cult, and when Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling said men can’t be women, the Cannibal Reformers came for her with bared fangs and unsheathed drag queen talons. Fortunately, Rowling has an impenetrable armor made of gold bricks. Unfortunately, few Americans have such armor. Maybe AOC, Bernie, and Biden can provide some to each and every American—oh, and while they’re providing free stuff, I’d like my fair share: a Martha’s Vineyard mansion just like the Obamas’.

While this letter is a good start in undoing the damage done to the Republic by leftists, seeing the name of the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, undermines trust in the sincerity of the signatories in that teachers’ unions are at the forefront of leftist politicking, including using schools to advance their leftist ideology.

Not surprisingly, when the letter was published, the Cannibal Reformers lost what was left of their minds, beginning with Todd VanDerWerff, whose “trans” alter ego is “Emily VanDerWerff. To be clear in the miasmic ontological fog created by the noxious exhalations of the “trans” cult, “Emily” is a biological man—forever.

He, like Harper’s letter signatory Matthew Yglesias, is a writer at Vox, and VanDerWerff laughably claimed that upon seeing Yglesias’ signature near the signature of J.K. Rowling, he felt “less safe working at Vox.” And the Cannibal Reformers were off and terrorizing.

Leftist stormtroopers unaccustomed to pushback kicked up a Twitter storm, and fearing for their professional lives, a handful of Harper’s letter signatories bailed. Three days later, a racist counter letter appeared, griping that many of the Harper’s letter signatories were “white, wealthy, and endowed with massive platforms.” Of course many were wealthy and endowed with massive platforms because only those with wealth and massive platforms can survive the Cannibal Reformers’ Purges.

What we need now is massive pushback against ideological Robespierres, storm troopers, and Cannibal Reformers. Don’t let their tactics intimidate you. Don’t be manipulated. Don’t be deceived. Don’t hold your fire. And don’t send your kids to their re-education camps.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Leftists-Canceling-and-Cannibalizing-Their-Own_audio.mp3


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