Written by Dr. E. Calvin Beisner

George Orwell, call your office.

In what Huffington Post‘s Alexander Kaufman called “an Orwellian rhetorical shift away from a scientific reality,” the Department of Defense “scrubbed its latest National Defense Strategy of all references to climate change.”

In all likelihood, Orwell would call the 30-year campaign for climate alarmism—with all its oxymoronic appeals to “scientific consensus,” its sleight-of-hand temperature data homogenizations, its revisions of past data to exaggerate apparent warming, its exaggeration and fabrication and suppression and loss of data, its intimidation of dissent and corruption of peer review—Orwellian.

And he’d lead a standing ovation for the Pentagon’s courageous and sensible leaders.

Sure enough, the 2018 Summary of the National Defense Strategy (NDS) never uses the word “climate” (as this screen shot of search results shows), let alone the phrase “climate change” or “global warming.”

That’s the first time since 2008 that climate change hasn’t played an important role in national defense strategy.

As Michael Bastasch reported in The Daily Caller in December,

The Obama administration listed global warming as a top national security threat, and administration officials even [wrongly] blamed climate changes for sparking the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS.

“Climate change will impact every country on the planet,” former President Barack Obama told U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduates in 2015.

“No nation is immune,” Obama said. “So I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country.”

Secretary of Defense James Mattis, like his boss President Donald Trump, clearly rejects prioritizing climate as a defense issue. Not only does the new NDS never mention climate change or global warming, but also it discusses energy not in terms of climate impacts but of the need to ensure stability in major energy-producing regions of the world, such as the Middle East. Why? Because the Trump Administration believes access to abundant, affordable, reliable energy, especially in the form the Middle East produces most—fossil fuels—is far more important to national and global security than whatever’s going on with climate.

It follows that the Department of Defense no longer thinks fossil fuel use is driving global warming that threatens global security.

Welcome to the new era—when adults are in charge at the Pentagon.

This article originally posted CornwallAlliance.org.

As Congress moves the tax reform legislation into a Conference Committee, the U.S. Senate version of the bill has an amendment that is not in the U.S. House bill.

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (r-TX) explains what this language is at his website. The “Cruz Amendment” (Sen. Amendment #1725) “seeks to expand 529 College Savings Plans to include K-12 elementary and secondary school tuition for public, private, and religious schools, including K-12 educational expenses for homeschool students.”

Sen. Cruz delivered these remarks on the Senate floor:

By expanding choice for parents and opportunities for children, we have prioritized the education of the next generation of Americans, allowing families to save and prepare for their children’s future educational expenses. Expanding 529’s ensures that each child receives an education that meets their individual needs, instead of being forced into a one-size-fits-all approach to education, or limited to their zip code.”

Adding homeschoolers and expanding plans in general will help ensure that each child receives an education that meets their individual needs, instead of being forced into a one-size-fits- all approach to education. The expansion of 529 plans to include K-12 expenses will help working class and middle-income families save and prepare for their children’s educational expenses.

This amendment has the support of the Trump Administration — here is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos:

Expanding 529’s to include any educational option is a common-sense reform that reflects the reality that we must begin to view education as an investment in individual students, not systems.

Will Estrada, the director of federal relations for Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), told Illinois Family Institute this:

HSLDA is grateful to Senator Cruz for introducing this amendment which contained HSLDA’s language ensuring that homeschoolers are able to use their own 529 plans for k-12 homeschool expenses. We support this amendment, and are grateful that it was included in the Senate’s tax bill.

Estrada explained that HSLDA “strongly opposes ANY federal funds” be given to homeschoolers. “We have vigorously opposed past attempts to give federal money to homeschool families, and will continue to do so.”

Clarifying further, Estrada said:

The bottom line is that a 529 plan is your own money, not government money. You put it into your own account after taxes. You decide whether and how to use it, or even whether to create a 529 plan for your children. HSLDA is grateful to Senator Cruz and Congress for ensuring that homeschoolers have another tool in their toolbox as they educate their children at home.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send a message to your U.S. Representative to encourage him/her to keep Sen. Amendment #1725, and allow parents to put money they save for their children’s college costs toward private K-12 education, including expenses to home educate.  Urge him/her to keep the Cruz Amendment and expand educational opportunities for parents and students.

The need for action by Illinois supporters of homeschooling is very important because two Illinois U.S. representatives are on the conference committee. “The senate’s language,” Estrada said, “needs to remain in the final bill that comes out of the conference committee.”

Here is Senator Cruz introducing his amendment on the U.S. Senate floor:

Please don’t delay in communicating with our federal lawmakers in Washington D.C.

PLEASE consider a financial gift to IFI to sustain our work.
We’ve stood firm for 25 years, work diligently to accomplish our mission to
“boldly bring a biblical perspective to public policy” in Illinois.

Written by Walker Wildmon

In John 15:12-13 Jesus says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Whether it is a husband protecting his wife, a mother protecting her children, or a friend protecting another friend, being willing to die for someone because of your love for them is a noble cause. On Veterans Day we have the opportunity to recognize the men and women who put their lives on the line for their family, neighbors, and fellow Americans.

In recent years, something as noble as recognizing those who’ve fought to defend America’s freedom has been exploited. We have seen well-known people disrespect our servicemen and women by refusing to stand for our flag during the playing of the national anthem. These dishonorable actions lead us to question who our society recognizes as “celebrities” and “role models.”

America is not a morally pure country and I know of no one who has claimed such. No nation on Earth is pure. We live in a fallen world where people will undoubtedly sin. In Romans 3:23 Paul says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” There are some detestable things that America has participated in which make me ashamed and embarrassed that they happened in our country. The murder of millions of children in their mother’s womb, slavery and segregation, and the legalization of homosexuality, to name a few. Despite America’s sins, should we dishonor her and the people who defend her?

Don’t forget though, that America has fostered some noble causes, all of which wouldn’t be possible without her Christian heritage. First, America has ensured self-governance for a historic amount of time. We are the oldest constitutional republic in the world. Second, America abolished slavery and segregation. Third, this country has sent millions of Christian missionaries abroad. According to a study cited by Christianity Today, America sent “127,000 in 2010 compared to the 34,000 sent by No. 2-ranked Brazil.” Last but not least, America fought in two World Wars not to seize territory or exploit resources but to defend and advance liberty both here and abroad.

What would America look like without men and women who were willing to lay down their lives for our freedom? If not for our brave men and women in uniform, who would’ve stormed the beaches of Normandy to help defeat Nazi Germany? Who would’ve defended us against Japan after they killed thousands of innocent American troops in Hawaii? Who would’ve taken the fight to Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan after they destroyed the World Trade Center killing thousands of innocent Americans?

America is an exceptional nation. What makes America different from every other nation in the world? She was founded on the truth that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Our men and women in uniform are worthy of honor, dignity, and respect. They are not simply soldiers defending one country out of many. They are soldiers defending the greatest nation on Earth. May we honor them this Veterans Day.

This article was originally published at AFA.net

Is that headline dramatic enough for you?

Since writing the four part series focusing on trade and manufacturing jobs (one, two, three, four), Jim Dicks at American Thinker added some interesting political information to the mix.

Steve Bannon, Jim Dicks wrote, has begun an

epic confrontation between the multinational corporations on one side (and their congressional politicians, to whom they have lavishly contributed) and the newly emerging Republican Party of the Little People on the other — the forgotten working class, championed by Donald Trump in his successful presidential run.

It is a crucial struggle, where, as stated best by Sundance of The Conservative Treehouse, “trillions of dollars are at stake.” It is a battle that will determine who controls the future wealth of the United States, where the manufacturing sector and portions of the service industry sector of the U.S. economy have been eroded, stripped from the United States and moved to cheap-labor countries, leaving behind a massive loss of jobs and wealth.

The goal of the Trump agenda is simply to “generate an economic renaissance with a dramatic infusion of wealth for middle-class workers,” Dicks wrote. President Trump “rejects the notion that the demise of U.S. manufacturing is inevitable and irreversible.”

Bannon believes that if we are to revitalize our moribund Obama economy and safeguard our future against the implications of profound technological advancements coming over the horizon, this economic and political reformation is essential. Corruption through bribery of our political class by multinationals must be stopped. Macro-level decisions concerning our national wealth must include the workers who build it and whose very future is at stake.

Bannon asked what’s more powerful: “the money of the corporatists or the muscle of the people”? His bet is on the people.

In part four, in my article I hyperlinked the words “creative destruction” to a definition of it at the website of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I’ve bolded the text on a key passage:

[Creative destruction] has become the centerpiece for modern thinking on how economies evolve.

[Economists who adopt the summary] of the free market’s ceaseless churning echo capitalism’s critics in acknowledging that lost jobs, ruined companies, and vanishing industries are inherent parts of the growth system. The saving grace comes from recognizing the good that comes from the turmoil. Over time, societies that allow creative destruction to operate grow more productive and richer; their citizens see the benefits of new and better products, shorter work weeks, better jobs, and higher living standards.

Herein lies the paradox of progress. A society cannot reap the rewards of creative destruction without accepting that some individuals might be worse off, not just in the short term, but perhaps forever. At the same time, attempts to soften the harsher aspects of creative destruction by trying to preserve jobs or protect industries will lead to stagnation and decline, short-circuiting the march of progress. … The process of creating new industries does not go forward without sweeping away the preexisting order.

It seems to me that the question of how many people will be permanently worse off is key. The page goes on to give helpful examples of how progress did away with jobs as technology evolved.

In a nutshell, cars wrecked the horse and buggy industry, planes lowered the number of people travelling by train, and “all this creation did not come without destruction.”

“Each new mode of transportation took a toll on existing jobs and industries”:

What occurred in the transportation sector has been repeated in one industry after another—in many cases, several times in the same industry. Creative destruction recognizes change as the one constant in capitalism. Sawyers, masons, and miners were among the top thirty American occupations in 1900. A century later, they no longer rank among the top thirty; they have been replaced by medical technicians, engineers, computer scientists, and others.

Technology roils job markets, as Schumpeter conveyed in coining the phrase “technological unemployment” E-mail, word processors, answering machines, and other modern office technology have cut the number of secretaries but raised the ranks of programmers. The birth of the Internet spawned a need for hundreds of thousands of webmasters, an occupation that did not exist as recently as 1990. LASIK surgery often lets consumers throw away their glasses, reducing visits to optometrists and opticians but increasing the need for ophthalmologists. Digital cameras translate to fewer photo clerks.

Companies show the same pattern of destruction and rebirth. Only five of today’s hundred largest public companies were among the top hundred in 1917. Half of the top hundred of 1970 had been replaced in the rankings by 2000.

That’s all easy to understand. What’s not easy to understand is — what happens if not enough new industries arise to provide the kind of good-paying jobs that are lost with the elimination of the old jobs?

Change is happening faster and faster — technology no longer creeps forward, it leaps, leaving many behind. We all know and live that. But many of those manufacturing jobs lost over the past few decades weren’t lost due to technology or progress. Many were just shipped overseas.

It is a fundamental fact: manufacturing is an important aspect of a nation’s wealth. Equally important is the fact that our nation’s policies should be geared towards benefiting our nation’s people. Like it or not, there is a segment of the population who will never write computer code or start a small business. What do we do about them? I don’t pretend to have the answer. The search for that answer is why the Illinois Family Institute decided to bring attention to John Westberg’s proposal. It is also why IFI provides this list of articles for anyone who wants to learn more on the topic.

As noted, click here for the rest of the articles on Trade and Manufacturing that I easily collected for about two years. Depending upon the value of anything new that I see, I will add links to the list.

Download the IFI App!

We now have an IFI mobile app that enables us to deliver great content based on the “Tracks” you choose, including timely legislative alerts, cultural commentaries, upcoming event notifications, links to our podcasts, video reports, and even daily Bible verses to encourage you. This great app is available for Android and iPhones.

Key Features:

• It’s FREE!
• Specific content for serious Christians
• Performs a spiritual assessment
• Sends you daily Scriptures to encourage and equip you
• You determine when and how much content you get

“Creative destruction” is a common phrase used in economics. One simple example that’s in the news a lot lately, is the phenomenon of Amazon.com. Since it launched in 1994, countless small books stores have been put out of business, and at least one large chain, Borders, has closed. That’s the destruction part. The creative part is the locating of new distribution centers all over the country — Illinois has been trying to land one as this article gets posted. The benefit to consumers is that within minutes, customers can find the book (or whatever) they want online and have it shipped in days.

When the American textile industry was decimated a few decades ago, the jobs were sent overseas due to free trade policies. Clothing prices dropped, but not without many Americans losing good paying jobs.

One common argument from the pro “free” traders is that trade, unrestricted by tariffs, raises the standard of living. For example, the middle, lower middle class, and the poor can afford things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. I have no doubt that’s true. For example, the last time I was in a Walmart I was shocked at just how inexpensive those foreign-made massive flat screen TVs are these days.

Of course, it’s not just clothes and TVs that are less expensive with free trade, but computers, furniture, clothes, and food (though evidently not meat).

Maybe there is someone out there who supports fairer trade who wants Americans to be priced out of necessities of life basics. If there is, I haven’t met them.

But is it just me or is the storage unit business a growing industry? Maybe I didn’t notice many of the Public Storage, Self Storage, and U-Haul Storage facilities when I was younger. I have noticed many new ones being opened, however.

It’s reasonable to surmise that what fills up many of that storage space is furniture and other items that could be afforded because of “free” trade. It’s also not unfair, it seems to me, to wonder about the impact on the average standard of living by having so much affordable stuff that a person winds up paying monthly storage fees.

That said, my assumption over the years has been that “free” trade is to be preferred. Only in recent years have I begun to read articles from serious men and women who are not pro-big government or economic isolationists making the case for a fairer trade.

While “creative destruction” leads to innovation, my concern is that the creative part doesn’t keep up with the destruction part. Factories close, towns die, and a lot of men and women who earned a good living working in manufacturing cannot find work that will allow them to maintain a decent standard of living.

It has been widely noted that Hillary Clinton lost states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan in no smart part due to their concentration on identity politics and their ignoring the economic challenges of the working class.

Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon refers to a lot of what has been taking place concerning working class jobs as “economic hate crimes.” Bannon calls Washington, D.C. a “business model,” in that those on the inside always prosper. The think tank culture is also, no doubt, a “business model,” as big donors that benefit from “free” trade write big checks to defend current policies. There aren’t a lot of big donors in those dying towns across America.

Recently, townhall’s Kurt  Schlichter was tough on the “free” traders in an article:

Conservativism forgot about the real world conservatives we expected to line up behind us. While we were talking about free trade, we were ignoring that GOP voter who fought in Fallujah, came home, got a job building air conditioners, raised a family, and then one day watched the video of the oh-so-sorry CEO. . . sadly informing his beloved employees that their jobs were getting shipped to Oaxaca. And our response to the 58-year old Republican voter who asked us how he was going to keep paying for his mortgage and his kid in college? Pretty much, “Well, that’s how free enterprise works. Read some Milton Freidman and go learn coding.”

That’s not a response, not for a political party that requires people to actually vote for it. That’s an abdication…

Last year, Victor Davis Hanson also weighed in on the topic during an interview with Laura Ingraham: (see here starting at about the 8-minute mark).

I saw a whole generation of people in agriculture completely wiped out by unfair trade with the European Union. And Every time I would write about it I was told that I didn’t understand free market economics. And the same thing with China, and the same thing with outsourcing.

I grew up in a small town where everybody had a good job at a manufacturing plant. Now it’s 16 percent unemployment and I’m supposed to say this is creative destruction.

And I read in [National Review], that I’m affiliated — that this is good. That people lose jobs. They have to move. You just abandon your family your house, everybody, your community, and you just get in the car and follow the job.

And then I think to myself, I get up every morning at the Hoover Institution — I don’t worry that somebody from the Punjab is gonna walk in my office and say I’ll write that column for 40 percent of what you’re doing.

. . .

I know people in Silicon Valley that are being outsourced right now by people coming in on Visas. The elite has never suffered the consequences of their own ideology.

It’s not just conservative commentators who are not experts in economics. Economist Stephen Moore, no Trumpian protectionist, recently wrote about how NAFTA needs to be improved, and cites unfair practices of our trading partners.

Another expert is John Westberg who we mentioned in part two. His solution is innovative and deserving of attention and study — you can read more about it here ADD LINK.

As I noted at the outset of this 4-part series, this is a huge topic worthy of an ongoing debate. The need for a healthy middle class is obvious — and impossible without enough good paying jobs. Just looking at the employment/unemployment numbers isn’t enough. We must look at the actual human impact on the ground — that is how we will measure how well trade is working for working Americans.

This isn’t a matter of feelings and emotions but of dollars and cents. American policy should be aimed at benefiting Americans, even if we wind up paying more for goods, and less on storage units.

Up next: ‘Trillions of dollars are at stake’: It is a battle over ‘the future wealth of the United States.’

Download the IFI App!

We now have an IFI mobile app that enables us to deliver great content based on the “Tracks” you choose, including timely legislative alerts, cultural commentaries, upcoming event notifications, links to our podcasts, video reports, and even daily Bible verses to encourage you. This great app is available for Android and iPhones.

Key Features:

• It’s FREE!
• Specific content for serious Christians
• Performs a spiritual assessment
• Sends you daily Scriptures to encourage and equip you
• You determine when and how much content you get

Last time we heard from Illinoisans John Westberg and Steve Rauschenberger, two knowledgeable voices when it comes to the topic of manufacturing in the United States.

An article earlier this year by American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson titled, “Free Trade, Fair Trade, and Reality,” lays out his perspective on the free v. fair debate: President Donald Trump “has repeatedly stated that he wants ‘free trade’ that is also ‘fair trade,’” Lifson writes, “I am all for free trade, but it’s got to be fair.”

Academic and political critics are quick to point out the oxymoronic nature of this statement. Free trade means no government interference with private entities making the deals they see as beneficial. “Fair” trade means that someone else’s idea of fairness is imposed on deals that the parties find satisfactory to themselves.

Lifson cites examples of how corporations and governments engage in a “give and take” all the time. Governments force companies “to offer concessions for the privilege of doing business unhindered by limitations and harassment.”

President Trump is the first postwar president to acknowledge this reality, and to promise to play the game as well as it is being played against the US. When he blasts the negotiators who have inked trade deals, he is really criticizing the policy of the US playing by the rules while others play hardball, with pressures both formal and informal being used to extort value from American companies and ultimately from the American economy. Those [research & development] jobs overseas won’t generate nearly as many American jobs as they would if located in a US facility.

President Trump is really writing the obituary for the era in which the US kept everyone else happy by conceding to others the ability to play economic blackmail while self-righteously refusing to play that game to protect our own interests. He is a realist, and it is refreshing.

In another article at American Thinker, Steve Feinstein, in a piece titled “Manufacturing a Crisis,” writes:

If there is one thing that Democrats and Republicans always seem to agree on, it’s this: Manufacturing jobs are the key to economic success in this country. We’ve got to “revitalize” the manufacturing sector if the economy is to generate strong job growth and economic expansion.

That’s just such total hogwash, because it’s not true and it’s not reflective of reality.

Cheaper foreign goods, Feinstein writes, enables “American consumers to spread their money around in more areas and it frees up American workers to pursue other — better-paying and more sophisticated — things.”

Have those “better-paying and more sophisticated” “‘things”(!) been keeping pace with the number of jobs lost in the manufacturing sector? A lot of the people in Rust Belt states, whose standard of living has stagnated or fallen over the past 20 years, said “no they haven’t kept pace” when they voted for Trump.

According to some “economic troglodytes,” Feinstein writes, “we’re only in the economic sweet spot if we’re manufacturing cheap Bic pens and Keds.”

Actually, the value of our manufacturing sector’s output is at record levels, even if the absolute number of workers employed in manufacturing is less than the peak. It’s directly analogous to our agricultural output being the highest ever, even though none of you farm.

Take that you economic troglodytes!

Next time you hear an ill-informed politician talk about how we need to “bring our manufacturing jobs back,” you’ll know better. We manufacture exactly what we should in this country. There’s always a plus/minus to how much we make here depending on the specific conditions of the moment, but you should hope you never see a U.S.-made Bic pen again.

There is also an interesting bunch of articles at American Thinker written by Howard, Raymond, and Jesse Richman (here is their personal website). They are big on the topic of “balanced trade,” and they regularly promote their idea of using a “scaled tariff.”

They also remind everyone that the word “trade” is used in the U.S. Constitution. I’ve linked to a few of their articles below.

And if you think economists are mild mannered group, note this opening from one of their articles last year:

In one of National Review’s hit pieces against Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump (“What Trump Doesn’t Understand — It’s a lot about our Trade with China”), correspondent Kevin D. Williamson called Trump a “dangerous buffoon” because he would threaten tariffs upon China’s products and thus risk a trade war with China. But it’s not Trump who is the buffoon on trade; it is National Review!

Trump plans to take on the huge U.S. trade deficit with the world, and especially with China. He threatens to place upon Chinese products a tariff like the 45% tariff that China recently placed upon some U.S. cars. Such a threat could lead to negotiations between the U.S. and China about balancing trade, and Trump wrote the book on negotiations.

When an article tears into a candidate for having his facts wrong, the magazine that prints it probably should check to make sure that the candidate is actually wrong. But, National Review failed to fact-check this piece.

They go on in the article to compare the NR’s “facts” with their own.

Next up, more on the debate about manufacturing jobs and trade.

Three articles by Raymond Richman, Howard Richman and Jesse Richman:

Free Trade vs. Balanced Trade

The People are Right: It’s Time to Balance Trade

How to Restore America’s Manufacturing Innovation

Download the IFI App!

We now have an IFI mobile app that enables us to deliver great content based on the “Tracks” you choose, including timely legislative alerts, cultural commentaries, upcoming event notifications, links to our podcasts, video reports, and even daily Bible verses to encourage you. This great app is available for Android and iPhones.

Key Features:

• It’s FREE!
• Specific content for serious Christians
• Performs a spiritual assessment
• Sends you daily Scriptures to encourage and equip you
• You determine when and how much content you get

In the last article, we outlined John Horvat’s argument that America’s economy cannot be solved merely by bringing back jobs from overseas, but rather, “America faces a grave moral crisis that needs to be addressed.”

Then we introduced former manufacturing company owner John Westberg, who not only understands our county’s moral challenge, but also has some ideas on how we can bolster American manufacturing and improve our country’s trade position to benefit American workers.

On the website of his foundation New Hope for America, Westberg provides both summary and details of what he is proposing:

The Problem

During the last 40 years, living the American dream became almost impossible for the working people of America because of the “outsourcing” of U.S. manufacturing. Observing this loss of good paying “middle class” jobs, Mr. Westberg established the NHFA foundation to find a solution to this problem.

The Solution

Through research he rediscovered the solution that Japan had used to rebuild their manufacturing base after the devastation of WW 2. Using this concept, they went on to become the No. 2 Economic Power in the world. NHFA suggests utilizing this same proven concept to restore U.S. Manufacturing. This, in turn, would create millions of new jobs, raise the wages of American workers, and restore a robust economy to the U.S.

Okay, how, exactly?

NHFA’s website is loaded with detailed policy papers outlining how policy makers can stop companies from importing from low-cost suppliers in China rather than purchasing from high-cost suppliers in America.

If our nation’s trade policy required that U.S. businesses could only import the type of products that they [manufacture], then your customers would no longer be able to import the type of products that you produce.

The Solution:

U.S. businesses can only import the types of products that they actually do manufacture . . .and . . .each manufacturer’s import percentage of their own sales would be limited to the current import penetration of that particular product market.

Got it? Don’t worry if your answer is “not yet.” Economics is called the dismal science for a reason. There is a lot more to Westberg’s pitch — you can find more of his argument on this page of NHFA’s website.

Another Illinois voice on the topic is Steve Rauschenberger, president of the Technology & Manufacturing Association (which is “a Schaumburg-based agency that acts as a comprehensive resource for Midwest manufacturers.”)

Celebrating “National Manufacturing Day,” Rauschenberger wants “to dispel misperceptions of American manufacturing.”

The folks who are involved daily in the industry know that there are three big manufacturing myths — that the U.S. manufacturing industry is in decline; that it is backbreaking work in a dark, dirty building; and that there is little future in a career in manufacturing.

In an article that recently ran in the Daily Herald, Rauschenberger writes that “Manufacturing in Illinois is strong and growing stronger.”

Manufacturing here has experienced a resurgence. As manufacturers have become leaner and more competitive globally, they have experienced tremendous growth.

“Free trade” has been a solid plank in the Republican National Committee’s Party Platform for decades, but candidate and now President Donald Trump has caused that plank to show some signs of weakening.

Without much of an effort over two years, I collected more than a hundred links to op eds, policy articles, and studies focusing on various aspects of the manufacturing/trade issue.

It isn’t as simple as just a debate between free traders and protectionists. Tax rates, regulations, tariffs, globalization, advancing technology, currency manipulation, poorly negotiated trade treaties, countries cheating on trade treaties, trade balance, and theft of intellectual property are all matters of controversy. As we saw last time, cultural issues and skilled labor are also in the mix.

In the next articles, I will only present an overview, linking and excerpting from only a handful of articles. At the conclusion, for anyone interested in drowning themselves in the subject, I’ll provide all the headlines and links I gathered.

To give you a flavor of what I collected, here are just a few that I won’t be quoting from:

Unfair Trade Hurts Ordinary Workers in Both China and the U.S.
By getting tough with Beijing, President Trump can make life better for American and Chinese citizens alike.

Free Trade As a General Rule
When in doubt, free trade is a safe bet.

Despite the Rhetoric, US Trade Deficit With China Is Not a Big Problem. Here’s Why.
In our capital account, the U.S. has a huge surplus with China. That means money is flowing into our country from China.

If anything, globalization increased the cost of meat in America
The two most fundamental needs are food and shelter, and globalization has certainly not reduced the real costs of these.

Dear China: Thank You for Manipulating Your Currency
China’s currency manipulation is a form of foreign aid, and to the direct advantage of millions of U.S. consumers.

Trump Can Succeed On Trade By Ending Global Currency Manipulation
World trade in goods and services has morphed into a gigantic manipulative carnival of currency trading. This needs to change.

PLEASE consider a financial gift to IFI to sustain our work.
We’ve stood firm for 25 years, work diligently to accomplish our mission to
“boldly bring a biblical perspective to public policy” in Illinois.

Both as a candidate, and now as president, Donald Trump knows how to intensify attention on a topic. Since he launched his presidential campaign two years ago, manufacturing jobs and fair trade have been the focus of a massive debate on the political right.

Is this a topic for the Illinois Family Institute? Here are a few excerpts from an article by John Horvat II titled “Work without Men” that suggests it might well be. He writes that negotiating new trade arrangements, and lowering tax and regulatory burdens are all critical to bringing back jobs.

Such measures will indeed create jobs and open up opportunities, but they alone will not make America great.

America faces a grave moral crisis that needs to be addressed. As Charles Murray and so many other scholars have stressed, America is coming apart. A vast underclass has developed that is the result of broken families, shattered communities, a nonexistent work ethic, substance abuse, and godless education. The mantra of “bringing jobs back” is not going to reverse the downward path of a nation without finding ways to rebuild a strong moral foundation.

So much for the claim that economic issues are separate from moral issues.

“Americans have changed over the decades,” Horvat writes, and many “no longer have stable families.”

Here’s a shocking stat from the Manufacturing Institute I’d never seen before:

[N]early two million U.S. manufacturing jobs will remain vacant over the next decade if current trends continue. The crisis is aggravated by growing numbers of retiring baby boomers while the younger generations are not stepping up to the plate.

The reason for the lack of workers is a great talent gap between what is needed and what is available.

. . .

Thus, the problem is not a lack of jobs but a lack of skilled workers. In fact, one labor study found that the average U.S. manufacturer is losing as much as 11 percent of its annual earnings due to a talent shortage. Another survey concluded that almost half of executives would consider reshoring manufacturing operations back to U.S. yet are also concerned about the need for skilled workers.

The root of these economic problems is a moral problem.

“There are indeed many Americans who are out of the workforce to the point that they are not even looking for employment,” Horvat writes, and refers to Nicholas Eberstadt’s “masterful study,” America’s Invisible Crisis: Men Without Work:

The book documents a disturbing fact that “an invisible army” of ten million idle American men of prime working age, some ten percent of the male workforce, now “spend absolutely no time at a job.” Most don’t want to change their nonemployed status.

Horvat outlines how many of these men prefer to live — and it is not a pretty picture (you can read it here).

“[T]hat is why the focus must be expanded from just the jobs and infrastructure projects that are now all the rage. Unless the new administration concentrates on invigorating the moral fiber of the country, strengthening marriage and the family and limiting the power of the state, America will not recover from its present woes.

With Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Michigan voting for Trump because of his “bringing back jobs” promise, Horvat’s close might be a little overstated:

Indeed, when the jobs come back, there is the risk that no one will show up.

The “invigorating the moral fiber of the country, strengthening marriage and the family and limiting the power of the state,” reads a lot like the mission of the Illinois Family Institute and Illinois Family Action.

A few weeks ago, IFI executive director David Smith and I had the pleasure of visiting with John Westberg, a man who helped build the manufacturing powerhouse AutoMeter in Sycamore, Illinois, about sixty miles west of Chicago.

In the meeting, Westberg was vocal about the fact that the moral foundation of the country is the number one challenge facing us all. But he also has an idea of what to do about the problem of jobs being “shipped out of the country.”

John Westberg’s opinions and ideas deserve attention, since he led his family’s business from 25 to 625 employees, filling 3 plants in 2 states. AutoMeter received national honor by being voted “Manufacturer of the Year” in the automotive high-performance aftermarket. “This honor occurred not once but 4 times.”

After he retired and sold the company, Westberg started the New Hope for America foundation (NHFA), and its website has a plethora of materials supporting his proposed solution.

More on that next time.

Download the IFI App!

We now have an IFI mobile app that enables us to deliver great content based on the “Tracks” you choose, including timely legislative alerts, cultural commentaries, upcoming event notifications, links to our podcasts, video reports, and even daily Bible verses to encourage you. This great app is available for Android and iPhones.

Key Features:

• It’s FREE!
• Specific content for serious Christians
• Performs a spiritual assessment
• Sends you daily Scriptures to encourage and equip you
• You determine when and how much content you get

Here is a recent headline from the Independent Journal Review: “Salon: Identity Politics Is ‘Dragging the Progressive Agenda Down.’” IJR’s Pardes Seleha explains that yes, indeed, a “far-left publication” [Salon] is “finally denouncing its long-embraced identity politics…”

Salon isn’t the only place on the political left to find critics of I.D. politics. Last November, Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia wrote an op ed that ran in the New York Times titled, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” Here was his opening:

It is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also a beautiful thing to watch. Visitors from other countries, particularly those having trouble incorporating different ethnic groups and faiths, are amazed that we manage to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but certainly better than any European or Asian nation today. It’s an extraordinary success story.

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

So, Lilla writes, “the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end.”

The “fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups,” he adds. Ouch. Trigger alert!

At the level of electoral politics, Lilla says, “identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about ‘difference,’ it is about commonality.”

Why is this series about identity politics running at the Illinois Family Institute’s website? Because those who have been running up the white flag of surrender in the “culture war” should pull down that flag immediately.

Another name for that culture war is identity politics. Aggrieved groups demand their rights. Women are to be treated to taxpayer funded abortion. The LGBT(etc.) crowd are to be treated as if their sex-centric identity is legitimate. College campus snowflakes are to be treated as if they were grown-ups.

Professor Lilla’s article attracted a good bit of attention on both the left and the right.

Here was Rich Lowry writing at the National Review:

A recent essay in the New York Times elegantly diagnosed the problem and inadvertently illustrated it. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and highly respected intellectual historian, wrote that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.”

His piece itself occasioned a moral panic, focused overwhelmingly on how Lilla is, in fact, himself a white male. His op-ed was denounced from the left as “the whitest thing I’ve ever read,” and part of an “unconscionable” assault on “the very people who just put the most energy into defeating Trumpism, coming from those who will be made least vulnerable by Trump’s ascension.”

Lilla was so undeterred by the criticism from his fellow Leftists that he decided to turn the topic into a 160 page book, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.

Beverly Gage, writing at the New York Times, wasn’t completely happy with the effort.

Still gobsmacked by the 2016 election, many liberals may be yearning for a thoughtful, generous and well-informed book to put it all in perspective, a strategic account of where they’ve been, where they are now and where they ought to go. In “The Once and Future Liberal,” Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, says his aim is to unify today’s fractured liberals around an agenda “emphasizing what we all share and owe one another as citizens, not what differentiates us.” Unfortunately, he does this in a way guaranteed to alienate vast swaths of his audience, and to deepen left-of-center divisions. Rather than engage in good faith with movements like Black Lives Matter, Lilla chooses to mock them, reserving a particularly mean-spirited sneer for today’s campus left. “Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony,” he instructs “identity” activists, urging them to shut up, stop marching and “get real.”

You can see why I included that entire paragraph. It was too much fun not to.

So, it’s clear that not everyone on the political left wants to move past identity politics — and that is very good news for those of us on the political right. Again, here is Beverly Gage:

This is not, of course, a work of historical scholarship. It is a polemic about the dangers of “identity liberalism,” and a critique of the misguided professors and students who seem so enamored of it.

Beverly in not a fan, either:

Despite his lofty calls for solidarity, Lilla can’t seem to get out of his own way — or even to take his own advice. He urges fellow liberals to focus on “the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common effort,” then proceeds to insult his own audience…

“The Once and Future Liberal” is a missed opportunity of the highest order, trolling disguised as erudition.

One note of thanks to Ms. Gage: Since I’m not going to read Lilla’s book, I appreciate her including this quote in her review — again, too much fun:

“Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony,” [Lilla] instructs “identity” activists, urging them to shut up, stop marching and “get real.”

Let me close with Michael Brown, also writing last December partly in response to the Lilla op ed:

[Leftist] radical agendas can only go so far before the people begin to push back, and that it is partly what happened with the recent elections.

Enough with the divisive ways of identity politics. Enough with the attack on traditional American values. Enough with the assault on our religious freedoms. Enough.

So, in that sense, yes, we are witnessing a larger moral and cultural backlash, even if some of these issues were not front and center in the Trump campaign. And to the extent we can make the case for a biblically-based, moral conservatism, one that treats everyone fairly but that recognizes that certain boundaries are healthy and good, we can turn the hearts of the younger generation as well as recapture the hearts of the older generation.

As my close colleagues and I have said for the last 15-plus years, on with the revolution.

Also worth reading on this topic is Kay S. Hymowitz‘s article “Why Identity Politics Are Not All-American,” where she opens with a reference to Mark Lilla’s NYT article.

Read more:  Series: Identity Politics & Paraphilias

PLEASE consider a financial gift to IFI to sustain our work.
We have stood firm for 25 years, working to boldly bring a biblical perspective to public policy.

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity has held only two public meetings so far, but it’s already netted a haul of eye-opening data.

At last Tuesday’s meeting in New Hampshire, Ken Block, a data mining expert and former adjunct professor of technology and business at the University of Rhode Island, presented a summary of a 36-page study, “America the Vulnerable: The Problem of Duplicate Voting.”

Compiled by the Government Accountability Institute partnered with Simpatico Software Systems and Virtual DBS, Inc., the reportconcludes that state election systems are shockingly vulnerable to fraud because of faulty voter roll maintenance.

Sorting data from 21 states comprising 75 million voters in 2016, GAI identified 8,471 “high-confidence” duplicate voting matches. Some 200 couples voted in two different states. Initially, there were 60,000 potential duplicate matches of names and birthdates, but the researchers had to make certain by using additional data from credit reports, Social Security or magazine subscription information.

By the way, voting twice is a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and up to a $5,000 fine.

Scoffers might say that 8,471 is small potatoes in a nation where 130 million people voted in the November election in 2016.  But it’s only one of many ways to make vote fraud easier, and lots of elections are decided by slim margins. George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 by a 537-vote margin in Florida, where 5,825,043 votes were cast.

In the 2016 presidential election in Florida, about 2,200 duplicate voters cast a ballot — four times Bush’s margin of victory in the state in 2000.

Democrat Al Franken unseated incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman in Minnesota in 2008 with a final recount victory of 312 votes, sealing the 60^th vote in the Senate for passage of Obamacare. It was later learned that more than 1,000 ineligible felon voters – an overwhelmingly Democratic constituency – cast ballots in the Minnesota race.

In New Hampshire, Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte lost her seat by 1,017 votes to Democrat Maggie Hassan in November 2016 out of 739,140 cast. More than 5,500 same-day registrant voters with out-of-state driver’s licenses claimed residency but did not bother later to obtain New Hampshire licenses.

In Virginia, Democrat Mark Herring defeated Republican Mark Obenshain in the attorney general’s race by only 165 votes out of more than 2.2 million cast in 2013.

It’s clear that a few votes can swing an election, which is why voter registration rolls around the nation are long overdue for the kind of scrutiny they are finally receiving.

The GAI researchers obtained records from Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and West Virginia.

They tried to get them from other states, but some charge a king’s ransom, and others have sloppy records. For instance, more than 700,000 votes in New York’s dataset are labeled “General Election,” but no year is given.

Massachusetts makes it virtually impossible for anyone other than law enforcement agencies and political parties. You can get the data – if you go individually through all 351 cities and towns, which is prohibitive in time and cost. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 requires every state to maintain a centralized registration database, but, “in effect, Massachusetts and other states withhold this data from the public,” the report says.

One of the more interesting finds was the more than 15,000 clearly prohibited addresses in the 21-state sample. Five thousand people used UPS store addresses. Three thousand more used U.S. Post Office boxes. Others used gas stations, vacant lots, abandoned mills, basketball courts, parks and office buildings.

Some quite elderly voters turned up, with 45,880 votes cast in 2016 by people whose birthdates were more than 115 years ago. The report notes that some states indicate a missing birthdate by using filler dates, such as 01/01/1900.

This might help explain some eye-opening data revealed in July in federal court in Broward County, Florida. The American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) is suing election officials over the county’s inflated rolls, in which 103 percent of eligible citizens are registered. Thousands of voters over 100 years old are listed, some as old as 130.

Last year, an ACRU volunteer researcher turned up 176 active voters 110 or older who voted in 2012 in three Pennsylvania counties. To put this in perspective, the 2010 United States Census found only 330 “supercentenarians,” that is, people 110 or older, in the entire nation.

As progressives howl that the election integrity commission should be disbanded despite already proving its worth, it will be fascinating to see the lengths to which the naysayers will go.

They just might wake Americans up to their real agenda.

This article was originally posted at TownHall.com

There is a great deal of talk about America’s opioid crisis and what can be done about such drugs.  This has led to a focus on narcotic painkillers.  In reality, America has an addiction problem.  “What might be some of the factors leading to such addictions?” is a slightly different twist to a lot of the attention placed upon the types of drugs being abused.  Could certain trends be connected to this dependent behavior?

In 1960, only 3 percent of men in their prime were not in the U.S. labor force.  Today, that number has risen to 11 percent.   What impact might that have on men and the male psyche?  Is there a connection between a loss of work, government assistance, and substance abuse?

Here’s one possible revelation.  Among non-working men ages 24- 54 roughly half are taking a pain pill during the day.  Two-thirds of those are prescription medicines.

And then there is this: two-thirds of nonworking men who take pain pills use government programs, especially Medicaid, to pay for them.

Economist Alan B. Krueger looked into this in a study released through the Brookings Institution.  He writes that, “labor force participation is lower in areas of the U.S. with a high rate of opioid prescriptions, and labor force participation fell more in areas with a high rate of opioid prescriptions.”   (About 40 percent of non-working men say pain keeps them from working.)

If there is a connection, the question seems to be “did losing work increase drug use or abuse?” or “did more drug abuse lead to a less employment?”  One may wonder too, what the secondary effects from the government’s role might be, if any, in paying for such a large chunk of these medicines.  The study shows a trend, but is it not conclusive. Still, it is worthwhile to contemplate possible links to certain social problems.

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

The Illinois Family Institute has been covering the scandal surrounding the Southern Poverty Law Center for years, and now IFI has joined forces with the leaders of over three dozen conservative organizations from coast to coast to raise awareness about the true nature of the SPLC.

Here is the opening of a letter signed by leaders of those conservative organizations:

Dear Members of the Media:

We are writing to you as individuals or as representatives of organizations who are deeply troubled by several recent examples of the media’s use of data from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC is a discredited, left-wing, political activist organization that seeks to silence its political opponents with a “hate group” label of its own invention and application that is not only false and defamatory, but that also endangers the lives of those targeted with it.

The Illinois Family Institute’s David E. Smith was one of the letter’s signatories. Smith was joined by leaders of groups such as the Media Research Center, the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, and Liberty Counsel.

The heavily footnoted 8-page letter also includes this:

The SPLC is an attack dog of the political left. Having evolved from laudable origins battling the Klan in the 1970’s, the SPLC has realized the profitability of defamation, churning out fundraising letters, and publishing “hit pieces” on conservatives to promote its agenda and pad its substantial endowment (of $319 million). Anyone who opposes them, including many Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and traditional conservatives is slandered and slapped with the “extremist” label or even worse, their “hate group” designation. At one point, the SPLC even added Dr. Ben Carson to its “extremist” list because of his biblical views (and only took him off the list after public outcry).

To associate public interest law firms and think tanks with neo-Nazis and the KKK is unconscionable, and represents the height of irresponsible journalism. All reputable news organizations should immediately stop using the SPLC’s descriptions of individuals and organizations based on its obvious political prejudices.

The letter has been released to the media, and is currently circulating to CNN, MSNBC, AP, ABC and others.

A hard-hitting social media post from the Family Research Council opens with this:

The Southern Poverty Law Center was too intolerant for the U.S. Army, too controversial for the FBI, and too inflammatory for the Obama Justice Department. Now, after receiving harsh criticism from conservatives across the country, GuideStar has decided to temporarily remove SPLC’s hate labels from their website. In addition to these prominent entities distancing themselves from the extremist group, two lawsuits involving SPLC are now in place: one from Liberty Counsel and one from former Islamic extremist turned anti-extremist activist, Maajid Nawaz. But despite SPLC’s baggage — which also includes connections to two liberal gunmen – they continue to be cited as a credible source by mainstream media and others. With SPLC in the spotlight, we must expose this organization for what it really is – a leftwing smear group who has become exactly what they set out to fight, spreading hate and putting targets on people’s backs.

The social media campaign is up and running, and IFI supporters are encouraged to help spread the word.

Here are other articles of note about the letter:

Newsbusters broke the story: Conservatives Urge Media: Cut Ties With SPLC Over Dangerous ‘Hate Map’

PJMedia was right behind with their own story: 47 Nonprofit Leaders Denounce the Southern Poverty Law Center’s ‘Hate List’ in Open Letter to the Media

This scandal is also worthy of greater attention: The Southern Poverty Law Center Has $69 Million Parked Overseas

Please share through all your channels — this effort needs to be recognized by as many outlets as possible. Also, please share new content as it comes out today. Here are some of FRC’s tweets with links to stories today:

Conservatives Urge Media: Cut Ties with @splcenter over Dangerous 'Hate Map' @k_yoder @newsbusters https://t.co/upxxzIiYX4 #SPLCexposed

— Family Research Council (@FRCdc) September 6, 2017

JUST IN: Conservative Movement Releases Open Letter to the News Media: Beware of the Southern Poverty Law Center https://t.co/pFikHv7vV0

— Family Research Council (@FRCdc) September 6, 2017

We're joining 47 conservative leaders, orgs to ask the media to stop using data from discredited @splcenter. Letter: https://t.co/ulYk0qmvRF pic.twitter.com/me632tP1Ik

— Family Research Council (@FRCdc) September 6, 2017

All news outlets should immediately stop using SPLC’s descriptions of individuals/orgs based on its obvious prejudices. #SPLCexposed pic.twitter.com/I0BRpDm6kW

— Family Research Council (@FRCdc) September 6, 2017

.@splcenter has realized the profitability of defamation. This is what they're really about. https://t.co/ulYk0q4V07 #SPLCexposed pic.twitter.com/8Isn3lEZcq

— Family Research Council (@FRCdc) September 6, 2017

To associate public interest law firms and think tanks with neo-Nazis and the KKK is unconscionable. https://t.co/pFikHv7vV0 #SPLCexposed pic.twitter.com/H2b0bBuu0r

— Family Research Council (@FRCdc) September 6, 2017

If you appreciate the work and ministry of IFI,
please consider a tax-deductible donation to sustain our endeavors.  

It does make a difference.

They claim creating an election integrity commission is a way to advance voter suppression.

Progressives are in an uproar over the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, and we have to ask why?

Why not look into ways to protect our elections from fraud?

Because to do so would advance “white supremacy,” according to Democratic U.S. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York, who tweeted on Aug. 24, that “If the president wants to truly show that he rejects the discrimination agenda of the white supremacist movement, he will rescind the Executive Order that created this commission.”

Then, he warned, “And if the president does not act, the Congress should prohibit its operation through one of the must-pass legislative vehicles in September.”

Wow. So, the Democrats would shut down Congress in order to keep a blue-ribbon panel from studying the vulnerabilities of our election process? Mr. Schumer must truly fear this commission. He wants it to disband even before its second official meeting on Sept. 12 in New Hampshire.

“The Ku Klux Klan and its sympathizers at all levels of government denied black Americans the right to vote for decades,” Mr. Schumer continued in his tweet without a hint of irony. The Klan was the militant wing of the Democratic Party, which enforced Jim Crow laws against black people for 88 years. More on that later.

“Today, voting rights are once again under assault,” the senator bleated, er, tweeted. “The misguided Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision gutted the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to the same voter suppression tactics that existed before the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.” He means back when Democrats ran the show in the South.

Instead of Jim Crow, the Democrats rely today on the bureaucratic behemoth created under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which shattered the black family and still keeps blacks and other minorities beholden to the Democrats’ federal welfare plantation. They just have to keep promising more and more stuff to the Free Stuff Army. Who needs the Klan when you’ve got Uncle Sugar? But, what does chronic dependence do to people’s souls? Hey, don’t be getting all religious on me.

Mr. Schumer was not the first Democrat to cry that the sky would fall. Former Attorney General Eric Holder called the new commission “another frightening attempt to suppress the votes of certain Americans.” This kind of balderdash is not harmless. Commission members that I have talked to have reported harassment and even death threats.

Mr. Schumer equates any and all election integrity measures such as voter ID laws as brutal instruments designed to “suppress” the votes of minorities, the elderly and the young. In fact, minority voting has increased following passage of voter ID laws. Perhaps folks have more of an incentive to vote when they know their ballots will actually count.

Mr. Schumer contends that vote fraud is a myth cooked up to advance voter suppression.

This is a serious charge, and nobody knows better how to go about suppressing voters than the Democratic Party, which benefited from it for nearly nine decades with its Jim Crow system before congressional Republicans rammed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But back to the original question. Why not have a bipartisan panel of experts make sure that election officials are doing their jobs to ensure fairness and integrity? Indeed, if you think vote fraud poses no threat, why oppose a study that might prove your point? If the panel comes up empty, you get to crow. But if it exposes sloppy practices that enable fraudulent voting, shouldn’t you want to know that and clean up the mess?

Progressives crowed that some liberal state officials initially refused to provide voter data to the commission. But as of now, virtually all states are complying with the request, having been told by their attorneys that it is entirely lawful, especially since the data are already in the public realm and commercially available. What? You hadn’t heard from the media that the states are now cooperating?

Here’s one more thing to consider: All of the allegedly vulnerable identity groups: minorities, elderly, the young — strongly favor voter ID laws, since, like everyone else, they don’t want their votes stolen by someone casting a fraudulent ballot. Survey after survey shows it.

So, I think I know what’s behind the Democrats’ fear of the election integrity commission: They have already lost the argument over voter IDs. In its eventual report, the commission will be making the case for how to ensure accurate voter registration rolls. And, accurate voter rolls prevent vote fraud.

If that isn’t frightening to a liberal, nothing is.

This article was originally posted by The Washington Times.

It is time to return to our Identity Politics and Paraphilias series, and events surrounding Charlottesville serve as the path back.

This focus on identity politics is important because while it’s being written about a lot, in my view it’s still not receiving the serious level of discussion that it deserves.

Leftists want to fundamentally transform the United States. Unfortunately, they do not nearly have the level of support they need to accomplish it. What they would sell—socialism which leads to Venezuela-type poverty and tyranny—they can’t, so they seek to distract and destroy with divisive identity politics.

They need countless aggrieved sects fighting each other. This has always been a big part of the strategy of the cultural Marxists.

The purpose of the other part of this series — our highlighting of paraphilias — is to outline more fully the dangerous agenda of the identity politics champions. Many of these champions ride under the banner of LGBTQIA. What they don’t want you to know is that those letters represent only the beginning of the show.

The country has now been introduced to a growing number of genders — who knew that there could be so many? Silly common sense used to hold that there were only two. Here is one list that runs 13 pages.

The number of paraphilias is far greater than both the number of letters currently listed following LGBT and the count of gender varieties.

Thus, paraphilias deserve attention. According to Leftists, if America is to be truly free, all sexcentric-identified individuals should be treated equally under the law. Therefore, there is no logical answer from them as to why discrimination should be allowed for any other perversions.

So — identity politics and paraphilias fit nicely together. The Leftists know that we can’t remain a county whose motto is “out of many, one.” They want the opposite, “out of one, many.” Did I mention that not all the identities involve sex and gender? There are also “oppressed” minority groups. And a lot of them!

And now Charlottesville has brought into the spotlight a few more labels — such as crazies and anarchists: Neo-Nazis, KKK members, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter.

Commentator Tammy Bruce penned an article with this title and lead:

The deadly impact of identity politics
By conflating white supremacists and Trump supporters, the ‘Resistance’ pours hate on hate

Americans know full well the environment of hate and violence that identity politics has served us.

The concerted effort by the so-called “Resistance” to further divide this nation is disgusting and dangerous. By singularly focusing on such a craven goal of race hatred and suspicion, and conflating white supremacists with all Trump voters, they not only ignore the real issue of the danger of identity politics, they contribute to it.

In the wake of Charlottesville, commentator Michael Brown wrote:

Identity politics can be just as dangerous as outright racism. Both are divisive, both demean the value of others, and both make judgments based on skin color or ethnicity.

Writing at Mercatornet, Jarrett Stepman notes:

In a country of 320 million people of stunningly diverse ethnic backgrounds and philosophies, this is a fire bell in the night for complete cultural disintegration. The end result will be uglier than the already sickening events that took place this past weekend.

Bruce Thornton, one of my favorite writers, notes in an article at Front Page Mag:

Identity politics based on grievance and victimization requires that there always be grievances and victims. Progress cannot be admitted, no more than any of us can be born free from Original Sin. The permanence of racial sin, and the need for whites to act in ways that advantage the “victims,” forbid such reconciliation.

It used to be called the “culture war.” The phase we are moving into will make that war look like the good old days. Now it’s bigger, and on purpose. Fueled by Leftists on a mission, violent radical groups are, in the words of Jarrett Stepman, stepping up “their efforts to plunge the nation into constant social unrest and civil war.”

Up next: Paraphilias of the Day: Pedophilia, Hebephilia, Ephebophilia, and Pederasty

Articles in this series, from oldest to newest:

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Introducing a Series

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Incest

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Body Integrity Identity Disorder

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Impact & Transgenders

Transgenderism a Choice or Disorder?

Why the Term “Sexual Orientation” is Nonsense

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Man’s Search for Meaning

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: LGBT Is Not a Color & Fetishism

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: ‘Public Discourse’ Weighs In & Bisexuality

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: More from ‘Public Discourse’ & Autassassinophilia

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: An Ugly Fight & Bestiality/Zoophilia

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Tribalism & Urolagnia

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Ideas & Voyeurism

If you appreciate the work and ministry of IFI,
please consider a tax-deductible donation to sustain our endeavors.  

It does make a difference.

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:18-19).

In the wake of the Charlottesville melee, the mainstream press is citing the disreputable Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and its “hate” groups list ad nauseum with nary a peep about the repeated criticism of the SPLC as a bastion of anti-Christian bigotry.

The Illinois Family Institute (IFI) is included on the “hate” groups list alongside white supremacist and white separatist groups for no reason other than our biblical view of marriage as a sexually differentiated union and our biblical views of sexual morality—views that are shared by the Roman Catholic Church, many Protestant denominations, many non-denominational churches, Orthodox Judaism, 2,000 years of church history, and the Bible.

It’s not just IFI that finds the SPLC and its leaders unethical. The avaricious founder of the SPLC, Morris Dees, and the dishonest editor-in-chief of the “Intelligence Report” which is responsible for the corrupt “hate” groups list, Mark Potok, have come under sustained criticism from many people for many years. (Click here, here, and here  to read more.)

Several months ago, one such critic, Real Clear Politics writer Carl Cannon, wrote an exposé of the SPLC, to whom Cannon attributes blame for the anti-free-speech assault on political scientist Charles Murray at radical Middlebury College in Vermont.

Civil rights attorney Dees co-founded the lucrative non-profit SPLC in 1971, ostensibly to combat the racism endemic to the South, and on the way, he’s made a boatload of money that has enabled him to live the luxurious lifestyle to which he and his five serial wives had become accustomed. His clients? Well, they didn’t fare quite as well financially.

Cannon explains that when the Ku Klux Klan’s power waned and racism diminished, the SPLC had to find new ways “to frighten people into still donating.” He says that “Scaring the bejesus out of people requires new bogeymen, and lots of them.” Further, Cannon claims that “mainstream conservative groups” are among the bogeymen.

Cannon reports that the “most scathing assessments of Dees and his group have always come from the left” like “Stephen B. Bright, a Yale law professor and president of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights,” who describes Dees as a “con man” and a “fraud.”

Even the far-Left magazine The Nation indicts Dees as “the archsalesman of hatemongering,” accusing him of stuffing “mailbags…with his fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of a hate-sodden America in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC…. Dees and his hate-seekers scour the landscape for hate…it’s their staple.”

While useful idiots in the mainstream press disseminate the SPLC’s propaganda, thus smearing Christian organizations and lining the pockets of Dees, the FBI has stopped using the SPLC as a resource.

The SPLC has perfected the tactics espoused by homosexuals Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen who in 1989 wrote what they deemed a “gay manifesto for the 1990’s” titled After the Ball, in which they urged “progressives” to utilize the mainstream media in a campaign to eradicate conservative moral beliefs—what they call “homohatred”—or “silence” the expression of such beliefs in public:

[L]ink homohating bigotry with all sorts of attributes the bigot would be ashamed to possess and with social consequences he would find unpleasant and scary…. Gays must launch a large-scale campaign…to reach straights through mainstream media. We’re talking about propaganda…. Gays must be portrayed as victims in need of protection…. Make victimizers look bad…. The public should be shown images of ranting homohaters whose associated traits and attitudes appall and anger Middle America. The images might include: Klansmen… Hysterical backwoods preachers… Menacing punks, thugs, and convicts who speak coolly about the “fags” they… would like to bash… [or] A tour of Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and gassed.

The SPLC employs all of these propagandistic tactics to stigmatize and marginalize Christian organizations like the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, Liberty Counsel, and the Illinois Family Institute for our beliefs about sexuality and marriage that derive from Scripture and for our willingness to express them publicly.

These are a few of the organizations that have not fallen prey to ravenous wolves or been taken “captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8).

For their faithfulness, Christ-followers will be hated, but enduring such trials brings blessings:

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:11-12).

The cost of discipleship has been minimal in America for over two hundred years, but the cost is rising due to the unholy efforts of “LGBTQQAP” activists.

While Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me,” many Christians—entire denominations—are choosing instead friendship with the world, ignoring the words of James:

“Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” (James 4:4).

Download the IFI App!

We now have an IFI mobile app that enables us to deliver great content based on the “Tracks” you choose, including timely legislative alerts, cultural commentaries, upcoming event notifications, links to our podcasts, video reports, and even daily Bible verses to encourage you. This great app is available for Android and iPhones.

Key Features:

• It’s FREE!
• Specific content for Christians
• Performs a spiritual assessment
• Sends you daily Scriptures to encourage and equip you
• You determine when and how much content you get