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The False Gospel of the Progressive Church

Franklin Graham, president of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, recently had a warning for the Christian church: be cautious of the infiltration of the false doctrine of the progressive Christian movement. “Progressive Christianity denies the divinely inspired, authoritative truth of the Bible as it intersects every facet of living,” Graham states in his article, “The Eternal Peril of Christianity.” Graham says that the distortion of the gospel is potentially causing confusion and ultimately sending people to Hell.

Some may wonder what comprises progressive Christianity. The teaching of progressive Christianity encompasses a few different ideas that are in complete opposition to the Bible’s teaching. According to Progressive Christianity.org, there are eight main tenets held by the group. They are:

1.) Belief that following the path and teachings of Jesus can lead to an awareness and experience of the Sacred and the Oneness and Unity of all life;

2.) Affirm that the teachings of Jesus provide but one of many ways to experience the Sacredness and Oneness of life, and that we can draw from diverse sources of wisdom in our spiritual journey;

3.) Seek community that is inclusive of ALL people, including but not limited to:

    1. Conventional Christians and questioning skeptics,
    2. Believers and agnostics,
    3. Women and men,
    4. Those of all sexual orientations and gender identities,
    5. Those of all classes and abilities

4.) Know that the way we behave towards one another is the fullest expression of what we believe;

5.) Find grace in the search for understanding and believe there is more value in questioning than in absolutes;

6.) Strive for peace and justice among all people;

7.) Strive to protect and restore the integrity of our Earth; and

8.) Commit to a path of life-long learning, compassion, and selfless love.

Although progressives attempt to make these tenets their “gospel,” Graham notes that “progressive Christianity is not a Gospel at all.” He is correct in his assertion. The eight tenets are an unequivocal rejection of the true Gospel of Jesus Christ.

When examining the tenets against the true Word of God, it is easy to see their errors. In the first point, the progressives state the willingness to explore the teaching of Jesus, but they believe that knowing the Word is enough to create the New Age idea of sacredness and unity. However, Jesus said in the book of John 5:38-40:

“But you do not have His word abiding in you, because whom He sent, Him you do not believe. You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life.”

In other words, they willingly search out the scripture, thinking it is enough to connect to God, but they are unwilling to give their lives to Jesus.

We are told in John 3:3, “‘Jesus answered and said to him, Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Progressives believe they can connect to God without giving their lives to Christ.

The group goes on in the second tenet to argue that Jesus isn’t the only way to God and that a person can use other sources of knowledge. Of course, this is in direct opposition to the Word of God and is a fallacy. In John 14:6, “Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” As noted by Franklin Graham, many in this movement have what is described as having “itching ears.” (2 Timothy 4:3)

In their third tenet, progressives claim to be “inclusive.” Indeed, we are all sinners, and as such, all are invited to be included in the Church. But it is so we can accept Christ’s forgiveness of our sins and get help to stop sinning, never in having our sin affirmed. In calling for the acceptance of skeptics, agnostics, and those who identify as LGBTQ, progressives affirm the sins from which the sinners need Christ’s divine help.

Progressive Churches have started gay choirs and fly the LGBT rainbow flag, announcing that they are inclusive. It is the antithesis of Christianity to celebrate the sexual immorality and unbelief that the Bible clearly condemns. “But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.” (Revelation 21:8) Progressives’ weak theology is sending people to Hell!

The rest of the points continue to use the language of social justice and equity but deny that true justice comes from God. Only through the redemptive blood of Jesus can we ever have the hope of redemption and peace.

The scariest part of this false gospel is that it is beginning to infiltrate the mainstream church at an alarming pace. Many churches have adopted one or several of these points in their attempt to have an inclusive church. They water down the true gospel and fail to call their congregation to repentance. The congregants are not called to repent and accept Christ’s substitutionary punishment for their sins, but rather are rocked into a false sense of security by the lies of inclusion and a twisted form of grace.

It is true that every church should welcome anyone through its doors, and no church should reject someone who is trapped in sexual immorality, unbelief, or any other sin. However, the church’s mission is to share the true Gospel with the goal of leading the person to repentance. The true gospel must be preached from the pulpit boldly.

Take ACTION: We should heed the warning from Franklin Graham and use extreme caution in correctly handling the Word. Twisting it to suit your lifestyle has eternal consequences. Pray for your pastor and the leaders in your church – that they would remain steadfast in preaching the true Gospel and not compromise. Pray that these false teachers that Jesus warned about would not deceive your family and friends. Without a doubt, the best thing we can all do is read the Bible for ourselves and make sure we know the Word of God. That way we can easily recognize falsehood and expose it.

“Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all long-suffering and teaching.
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine,
but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers;
and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.
But you be watchful in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.”
~2 Timothy 4:2-5


Watch More:

[VIDEO] Dr. Rob Rienow: The Sufficiency of Scripture

[VIDEO] Dr. Voddie Baucham: Why You Can Believe the Bible

[VIDEO] Dr. Jorrdan Peterson: The Bible is True





The Path to Medical Freedom

Information is power” and the Medical Freedom vs. Medical Tyranny Forum hosted by Illinois Family Institute was clearly an evening of empowerment! Attended by an estimated 500 people–young and old alike–the audience, rapt with attention, benefitted from the insights of Dr. Mark Zumhagen, MD and Dr. Simone Gold, MD,FD, founder of America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS).

Dr. Zumhagen started off the forum with an analysis of the war between science that acknowledges God and science that denies God. Illustrating this fact were the two chairs on the stage–one containing a Bible and one empty–a poignant example of the degradation that has ensued since God was removed from science dating back to 1859. Previous to this, scientists operated in an open system, a system where not only the natural realm but also the spiritual realm was taken into consideration. According to Zumhagen’s sources, Isaac Newton spent half his life studying the scriptures! His scientific study was conducted through the lens of the Creator’s truth–”in the beginning were the particles” (Gen. 1:1).

Watch his presentation here:

Dr. Zumhagen explains that without Scriptural truth, scientists are viewing science through the limited lens of Darwinian “truth” are left unable to answer these essential questions.

  • How do we get something from nothing?
  • How do we get life from non-life?
  • How do we get consciousness from non-consciousness ?
  • Why is there information in every cell and more importantly – where did it come from?

Having clearly and succinctly taken his audience through the process of “digging down to the roots,” Dr. Zumhagen left the audience with these points for action as one pursues a medical treatment plan and provider:

  • Which chair is the provider you are considering sitting in?
  • Always hang on tightly to the truth “you are made in the image of God”
  • Remember: science is corrupt because it has no moral framework

And finally and most pertinent to the forum, truth is the ONLY thing that will keep us safe and free!

Dr. Simone Gold

Carrying on the idea of “information is power,” Dr. Gold provided energy-packed insight around this idea penned by Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, ironically on January 6, 1816:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Watch her amazing presentation here:

Dr. Gold is dedicating her time and energy to ensure Americans are not ignorant so they can remain free. Likening the current situation to the year 1777 in the War for Independence, Dr. Gold noted the battles ahead will most effectively be fought and won as we as individuals increase our understanding and effectively use our limited time and resources. One of the points that needs to be won is to get judges to rule in favor of the Constitutional right to body autonomy. Thanks to the efforts of AFLDS, this was accomplished in part through the victory of keeping vaccine mandates from becoming law.

This is key because one of the most effective ways for a government to take over a people is through medical tyranny– a weapon of government warned against as far back as 1961 by Ronald Reagan:

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism has been by way of medicine….If you don’t do this, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.

Clearly, the next threat we will face to our liberty will be a “public safety issue;” and with the Biden administration on the brink of turning over our medical sovereignty as a nation to the World Health Organization (WHO), according to Gold, an organization controlled by China. This control dates back to 2003 when China was humiliated by the WHO. China vowed to never face that humiliation again, and they apparently have succeeded. As it stands at present, they are being praised by WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus for their “containment” of the virus. This containment includes welding apartment building doors shut to keep people inside.

Also horrific to the concept of the United States’ handing over its sovereignty when the WHO deems there to be a “health emergency” is the WHO’s own definition of what constitutes a crisis. The WHO sees health as the mental, physical, or social well-being of a community. Under this definition, everything belongs to public health.

Having laid a foundation for removing some of our ignorance about the battle we are up against, Dr. Gold went on to assure the audience there IS a way forward. That way is for each individual to stop looking for a politician to come in and rescue us. That way is for each individual to become an ambassador for truth. AFLDS is providing the following resources to equip truth ambassadors:

  • Gold Care Health and Wellness Centers
    -Mission – to bring ethical doctors to communities.
    -awareness that we can’t feed the beast (medical insurance)
  • Breaking news – a 120-second news clip every day
  • Citizen Corps – local leadership bringing like-minded people together
  • League of Lions – youth organization dedicated to (counter the current culture that is against healthy masculinity)

Dr. Gold left the audience with these admonitions:

  • Become a subscriber to aflds.org
  • Examine how you are spending your money and who you are supporting with it.

Choose places to spend your money with those that are protecting your interests.

  • Be mindful of the truth God is preeminent
  • As you seek to win others with truth, do not make individual issues the focus (experimental shots, masks, etc.). Rather, make Constitutionally protected liberties the focus.

Her final charge:

“I call you to action. I call you to truth. I call you to joy and the love of life, liberty, God, and Country. This is a revolution of love as much as a revolution of science. The facts are on our side. We just need you to stand up and fight for what is right.”





Seeing Red at The Gas Pump

Although few think their family is the only one struggling to keep afloat under the Biden administration’s economic war on Americans, there is comfort in seeing it confirmed by hard, cold facts.

According to Americans for Prosperity’s (AFP) Public Opinion Strategies, a whopping  75 percent of Americans reported that the increase in costs has impacted their spending over the past year. Of that 75 percent, more than 60 percent surveyed blame President Joe Biden and his leftwing policies for the inflation.  Americans are being pinched, and it is high time to speak out.

What is even more interesting about this poll is the strong sentiment about what should be done. Eighty-eight percent agree that the government needs to make it easier to produce energy domestically. A return to energy independence is not only logical but also is achievable. We are all keenly aware of its possibility thanks to the work of the Trump administration. Just days into his administration, in true Make America Great fashion, he issued an executive order allowing TC Energy to reapply for a presidential permit that would lead to reopening the Keystone XL pipeline and promising a speedy process. As a result, markets reacted favorably so Americans benefited when paying at the pump.

For reasons too baffling to be logical (Russia? Really?) and being touted under the banner of “going green,” the Obama and now Biden Administrations have both consistently used their executive power to kill not only the domestic production of oil from Keystone, but other domestic oil as well. The result is where we are at today—AAA’s National Average as of May 23 at $4.60/gallon with prices over $6.00 in many areas. Illinois, not surprisingly, is one of the most costly states, appearing red (for warning) on their national chart right alongside California and New York.

In a creative move to generate grass-roots awareness of this, AFP-Illinois hosted a “roll back the prices at the pump” event where for 2 hours on May 25 at Bleacher’s Gas station in Peoria, prices were a mere $2.38 a gallon–the cost of gas the day Biden took office. A staggering reminder of the true cost of Washington. Are you ready to take action yet?

Illinois residents’ additional burden under Democrat leadership:

In addition, a good deal of the blame for the high gas prices in Illinois should be laid squarely on Governor J.B. Pritzker’s shoulders. It was his policies that doubled motor fuel taxes from 19 cents to 38 cents per gallon in 2019. This measure not only means Illinois has the highest gas prices in the Midwest, we also have the second-highest gas tax in the nation. What’s worse is his automatic annual gas tax increases, with the tax increasing to over 45 cents a gallon in a year. But due to the upcoming election, Pritzker brazenly paused this year’s tax hike for 6 months so there will be two hikes in 2023. Are you seeing red yet?

Fox Nation has started taking action. With these new government regulations putting a stranglehold on America’s oil and gas industry, they are visiting oil-rich areas looking for solutions to drilling our way back to energy independence. Their research is making it clear that long before Biden had Russia to blame, his administration had slowed the flow of oil. And through the work of Jackie DeAngelis (and others), they are doing things such as hosting the Energy Independence Live Summit. They are taking action.

Now it is your turn:

Take ACTION: Speak up now! Click HERE to send a message to your state and federal lawmakers, letting them know that these gasoline prices are unacceptable. Urge them to enact policies that will minimize the cost of energy in general and gasoline in particular. Energy independence should be a top priority. There are no good reasons why we shouldn’t approve pipelines, drill on federal land and reduce taxes on this vitally important commodity.

Watch/listen to this Special Report segment from Fox News Channel:





Leftists Socially Constructing a Pagan World

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) under Biden’s incompetent rule has decided that in order for schools to access federal money to provide lunch to needy children, schools will have to sexually integrate bathrooms and locker rooms. The USDA defended its decision with this bizarre comment:

[A]ccording to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, more than 13% of LGBTQ respondents lived in a household that experienced food insecurity, compared to 7.2% of non-LGBTQ adult respondents. This survey also found food insufficiency – not always having enough food to eat – to be three times as common among transgender individuals (nearly 24% of respondents) as compared to cisgender individuals (8.3% of respondents).

The USDA didn’t say how the sexual integration of bathrooms and locker rooms is related to the problem of “food insecurity” in “LGBT” households or “food insufficiency” among “transgender” individuals. Nor did Biden’s USDA explain why any children who suffer from food insecurity and food insufficiency should be denied school lunches just because schools honor sexual differences in private spaces. This sounds remarkably like extortion. The federal government will make impoverished children suffer more in order to promote the unscientific beliefs of the “trans”-cult.

And it’s not just America’s federal bureaucrats who are abusing their power to socially construct a new mixed up, muddled up, shook up world unfit for anyone other than Lola. (Actually, this socially constructed new world is unfit for Lola too.)

Canada will be using public funds to build a shrine to the false gods of homoeroticism and “trans”-cultism (a phenomenon closer to Haitian Vodou than to science). The shrine features a cylindrical structure with a glitzy, gaping opening representing the imprint of a cloud festooned with disco ball walls. The shrine titled Thunderhead is intended to convey the message that homosexuals and cross-sex impersonators have “risen up” to say, “‘We demand change.’”

Emphasizing the pagan religious nature of the worship of narcissistic desire is a “healing circle ringed with stones hand-picked by Two-Spirit Elders.” Imagine the uproar that would ensue today if a public monument were being built on federal land using federal money that included symbols of Christianity.

The term “two-spirit” was invented—that is to say, socially constructed—in 1990 at the “Third Annual Inter-tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference.” Although there is debate about the precise meaning of “two-spirit,” it generally “refers to a person who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit and is used by some Indigenous people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity.” As such, it is a pagan or quasi-religious term.

The belief that there can be a female spirit trapped in a male body is a faith-based metaphysical claim that has seized the malleable imaginations of post-Christian cultures in search of meaning. “Trans”-cultism is either a form of mysticism or a mental illness. It has no basis in hard science. There is no scientific proof that a human spirit can be born in the wrong body. There is no scientific proof that a person’s subjective, “internal” feelings about one’s maleness, femaleness, both, or neither have any objective material reality.

Religion is defined as, among other things, “Belief in a spiritual or metaphysical reality, accompanied by practices or rituals pertaining to the belief.”  “Trans”-cultic beliefs about “gendered” spirits inhabiting opposite-sexed bodies are accompanied by cultic practices masquerading as science, like using chemicals to artificially stop normal, healthy puberty or to artificially produce unnatural opposite-sex puberty.

Other practices are even more barbaric and can include slicing off the healthy breasts of young, mesmerized women or castrating young men and turning their penises inside out to create “neo-vaginas” that their bodies will always recognize as wounds and try to close them up.

Like all the beliefs of the “LGBTQ+” communities, the term “two-spirit” embodies debatable, socially constructed ontological and moral beliefs—not objective, inarguable science-based facts. These arguable, faith-based, socially constructed beliefs are being imposed by government, big business, and academia throughout the Western world.

Leftists, those normalizers of all things sexually perverse and opponents of all sexual taboos, have binary hissy fits when conservatives accuse them of “grooming” children. The same leftists who defend drag queen story hours for preschoolers, openly admit to using their publicly funded teaching positions to promote their sexual peccadillos, and who pass laws requiring that all boys’ bathrooms in public schools be retrofitted with tampon machines, are rising up in unrighteous indignation at the suggestion they’re grooming children.

Merriam-Webster defines the verb “groom” as “to get into readiness for a specific objective.” The online Free Dictionary defines it as “to prepare, as for a specific … purpose.” As such, leftists who teach children either implicitly or explicitly that homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation are good, healthy, or moral are grooming children. Leftists who seek to use government schools as sexual re-education camps are grooming children. Leftist re-educators who teach children that opposition to single sex “marriage” and carving up girls’ bodies are “homophobic” and “transphobic” are grooming children.

Another leftist gripe is that all social conventions related to sex that they hate are “socially constructed” and imposed by society. By that they mean social conventions related to biological sex are arbitrary conventions that are forced on society. “Trans”-activists and their “progressive” collaborators believe that society “conditions” children into believing that biological sex exists and matters. “Trans”-activists maintain the peculiar belief that stereotypes precede and shape male and female differences rather than the other way around.

Oddly, they don’t see their assumptions about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation as socially constructed. They don’t see their efforts to use the government, public schools, and big business to promote their views as “imposing.”

So, Fisher-Price’s recently introduced drag queen dolls for preschoolers have nothing to do with leftist socially constructed beliefs about cross-sex impersonation and nothing to do with imposing those beliefs on children.

Producing Barbie dolls in sparkly pink evening gowns has everything to do with socially constructed and imposed beliefs and conventions but producing drag queen dolls has nothing to do with the socially constructed and imposed beliefs and conventions of the “trans”-cult. Got it.

These collectible Little People dolls for preschoolers are Fisher-Price’s entree into the world of ideological grooming. Fisher-Price can’t let Mattel’s “gender-neutral” dolls corner the market on corporate grooming for profit.

Target may have been the first corporate behemoth to pave the broad path to sexual anarchy at the expense of children. Today Target has de-sexed toy aisles, de-sexed bathrooms, draped the store in rainbows to celebrate deviant sexuality, and now carries breast binders and panty packers to help girls pretend to be boys. Breast binders are used to compress girls’ breasts and “packers” are underwear that allow girls to “wear a packer, which gives the appearance of having a penis or bulge.”

Those who worship boundary-free sex-related desires view all morally tethered beliefs as “homophobic” and “transphobic.” They hurl these epithets to silence expressions of moral beliefs they hate. But the socially constructed and imposed Christo-phobic beliefs of the “LGBTQ+” community have no right to a monopoly on the public square.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Leftists-Socially-Constructing-a-Pagan-World.mp3


 




Guns Are Not Root Cause of Mass Killings

On May 24, 2022, Salvadore Ramos tore families, a community, and the nation apart when he slaughtered 19 children and two teachers after shooting his grandmother in the face in Uvalde, Texas. Like so many other mass killers and other violent criminals, Salvadore came from a broken, dysfunctional family. His father, who didn’t see his son often and lives with a woman to whom he is not married, “has a lengthy criminal record which includes at least one conviction for assault and causing bodily injury to a family member.”

Ramos had a troubled relationship with his mother who lives with a man to whom she is not married. Ramos had been living with his grandparents.

With each horrific mass killing, “progressives” preach against guns. Again and again, when a man mows down innocent people, liberals put gun-ownership in their sights, which is like looking at the problem of teens who cut themselves and angrily proclaiming that the problem is easy access to razor blades. Women have access to guns too. If guns were the problem, then why are almost no mass killers women?

Of course, gun control and the left’s obsession with killing the Second Amendment by a thousand regulatory cuts are political issues, but if the Left genuinely cared about protecting society from gun violence, they would look beyond the cheap, superficial, but good-for-rallying the troops issue of gun control. They would look at the deeper issue of family dysfunction that likely contributes in many cases to mass killings and most certainly contributes to gang violence that plagues all large American cities.

Perhaps guns aren’t the central problem. Perhaps the breakdown of the family inflicts incalculable harm on children. Perhaps the breakdown in the family renders boys less capable of responding in healthy ways to other trials in life. If only “progressives” would join conservatives in taking our devotees of easy-peasy divorce, out-of-wedlock sex and births, and fatherless and motherless homes to the woodshed, maybe society could begin the slow process of undoing the damage done by a society hell-bent on sacrificing children on the altar of adult desires.

All children are harmed by family breakdown and dysfunction, but because boys and girls are by nature different, they are affected differently. Some second wave feminists and virtually the entire “trans” cult have contaminated the developed world with the lie that men and women are ontologically identical and interchangeable. They’re not and that’s why mass killers are exclusively male.

Boys are not worse humans than girls. They are different and, therefore, cultural forces affect them differently. Properly raised, men are heroic defenders and protectors of women and children. Improperly raised, some will become the predators against whom our heroes valiantly, heroically, and sacrificially fight.

Here is a list of some American mass killers. Please note that not all of them used guns:

Andrew Kehoe killed 38 elementary school children, 2 teachers, 4 other adults, and wounded 58 in Bath Township, Michigan in 1927. Kehoe used explosives. His mother died when he was 5. His father remarried, and Kehoe had a poor relationship with his stepmother.

Howard Unruh killed 13 in Camden, New Jersey in 1941. His parents separated when he was 9, and he was raised by only his mother.

Richard Speck killed 8 nursing students in Chicago in 1966. He used a knife. Speck was close to his father who died when Speck was 6. His mother remarried a few years later. Speck’s stepfather was an emotionally abusive alcoholic with a criminal record.

Charles Whitman killed 16 people at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966. His father emotionally and physically abused Whitman and his mother.

James Ruppert killed 11 family members in 1975 in Hamilton, Ohio. His mother told him she had wanted a girl. His father had a “violent temper and no affection” for James or his older brother Leonard. His father died when James was 12. His 14-year-old brother assumed the role of patriarch and bullied James.

James Huberty killed 21 and wounded 19 at a McDonald’s in San Diego in 1984. His mother abandoned the family when he was about 10.

George Hennard killed 23 and wounded 27 at a Luby’s restaurant in Killeen, Texas in 1991. Hennard’s childhood was turbulent and unstable as was his parents’ marriage.

James Pough killed 9 and wounded 4 in 1990 in Jacksonville, Florida. His father left Pough and his eight younger siblings when Pough was 11.

Timothy McVeigh killed 168 and injured 600 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1995. He used explosives. His mother walked out on the family when he was 10. He was raised by his father who worked nights. The children rarely saw their mother.

Michael McLendon killed 10 in Alabama in 2009 beginning with his mother. He was reportedly “upset with his family ever since his parents divorced.”

Adam Lanza killed 20 elementary school children, 6 staff members, and his mother in Newton, Connecticut in 2012. His parents separated when he was 16 and divorced when he was 17, after which his father remarried and started a new family.

Wade Michael Page killed 6 and wounded 4 at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in 2012. Page’s parents divorced when he was young. His father remarried when Page was 10. His mother died when he was 13. Reportedly, Page did not get along with his father, and at some point in his school years, his father and stepmother moved out of state, leaving him to split his time between his aunt and his grandmother.

Patrick Crusius slaughtered 22, wounded more than 20, and traumatized countless others at a Walmart in 2019 in El Paso, Texas. His father wrote a memoir in 2014 detailing his 40 years of alcohol and drug abuse that resulted in two divorces, including from his second wife—Patrick’s mother—when Patrick was 12 years-old.

Dylann Roof killed 9 in a Charleston, South Carolina church in 2015. Roof was raised in an unstable family in which his father verbally and physically abused his stepmother.

Chris Harper-Mercer killed 10 and wounded 9 in Roseburg, Oregon in 2015. His parents separated when he was less than 1 year old.

Stephen Paddock killed 58 and injured 851 in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2017. His father Benjamin was a career criminal who was imprisoned from the time of Stephen Paddock’s birth to age 3 and from age 8-13.

Nikolas Cruz killed 17 students and staff and wounded 17 more at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in 2018. He was born to a drug addicted mother and was adopted at birth by an older couple. When he was five, he witnessed his father’s heart attack and death, and then a year before his rampage, his adopted mother died.

Twenty-three years ago, an article in the Washington Post offered a painful image of the future:

Psychologists have warned for years that young people like McVeigh born in the late 1960s, whose families fractured in record numbers, whose economic frustrations far exceed those of their parents, are unusually alienated and vulnerable to fringe movements. In this view, the social and economic upheavals of the last 20 years have planted a virus in American society with still unrealized capacity for damage.

Economic frustrations may be a contributing factor for those whose psychological and emotional needs were not met as children, thus leaving them unable to cope with life’s obstacles. But the ultimate cause is likely something deeper, more profound than fiscal insecurity.

Of course, only a small fraction of children from dysfunctional families become mass killers, just as only a small fraction of mentally ill, bullied, socially rejected, violent video game-playing, or gun-owning people become mass killers. And some mass killers grow up in intact, functioning families as perhaps is the case with Connor Betts, the Dayton, Ohio shooter, who also may have suffered from schizophrenia.

But could family dysfunction lead boys to embrace ugly ideologies? Could family breakdown contribute to their impulse to do violence? Might an intact family structure help prevent such desires in children who have other conditions that put them at risk for anti-social behavior? Is there not sufficient evidence to justify the inclusion of family breakdown as a possible contributing factor in news stories about mass killings? Is there not sufficient evidence that family breakdown may contribute to mass killings to justify studies of its potential causal effect?

Perhaps the short shrift given to the potential effects of family breakdown on children, particularly boys, reflects both our deeply embedded easy-divorce cultural ethic and the selfishness of both Democrats and Republicans—including many Christians—who don’t want to look at the damage done to children through divorce. Mass killings and gang violence should lead us to ask what we are willing to sacrifice as individuals to protect our children from the harm of family breakdown and to protect society from the effects of such harm.

If Americans are too selfish to care about the harm done to boys for boys’ sakes, then they should care about the harm done to boys for selfish reasons. Some of these harmed boys will turn their pain against society.

In 2012, I watched hours of coverage of the horrific Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut. I was dumbfounded that in all the discussions of possible contributing factors, I didn’t hear one “expert” suggest that perhaps Adam Lanza’s parents’ marital discord and subsequent divorce, his father’s remarriage, and the absence of his father may have affected the mind and heart of the deeply disturbed Adam Lanza.

His older brother left for college when Adam was 14, a period during which his parents’ marriage was unraveling. One report said that these experiences were very difficult for Adam, although they were not identified as possible contributing factors to his acts of violence.

Then in 2008 when Adam was 16, his father left, his mother filed for divorce (which became final in 2009), and shortly thereafter, his father remarried. News media reported that Adam had had no contact with either his brother or father since 2010.

How might such losses have affected a boy who struggled with social interaction and had virtually no friends? What message did it send to a troubled child when his father moved out and started a new family in another town? How did it affect this isolated young man to have lost the only two intimate male figures in his life?

And how might things have turned out if his father and mother had been deeply committed to their marriage and his father deeply committed to Adam? Maybe nothing would have turned out differently, but along with discussions of gun laws, mental health services, school security, social media, violent films, and video games, perhaps we should talk about divorce, loss, and the importance of fathers in the lives of their children.  I am not suggesting that divorce always causes violence. Clearly, it doesn’t. Similarly, it’s clear that social media, violent films, and video games don’t always cause violence, and yet we’re including them in discussions of possible contributing factors.

Rather, I’m suggesting that we as a culture should include divorce and all its pernicious consequences in our discussions of factors that may have contributed to the transformation of a troubled young man into a mass murderer. It seems at least possible that marital discord, divorce, loss, and feelings of abandonment could be contributive factors.

I suspect there are myriad disincentives for Americans–including Christians–who have selfishly indulged in unjustifiable divorce for decades to look honestly at the emotional havoc they have wreaked on their own children. But unless we can say with absolute certainty that divorce and absent parents contribute nothing to intense feelings of hopelessness, sorrow, loneliness, and anger that could play a role in triggering violent acts by troubled young men, we must have this conversation.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Guns-Are-Not-Root-Cause-of-Mass-Killings.mp3

 





America Needs a Great Conservative Reset

Americans who care about liberty, equality, justice, safety, and economic prosperity should not vote for any Democrat in upcoming elections, including the 2024 presidential election.

A Democrat-controlled presidency and U.S. Congress (as well as state legislatures) will further empower the arrogant, ignorant, divisive, tyrannical cancel culture that has taken root in every major cultural institution in America. Academia, the mainstream press, Big Tech, corporate America, Hollywood, and professional medical and mental health organizations collude to censor the dissemination of ideas leftists hate and oppress those who disseminate them. The power these institutions already enjoy and employ to destroy speech rights, religious liberty, and careers is not enough to satiate the unquenchable thirst for power of leftists.

Leftists consumed by rage and bloodlust after the leaking of the U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion on Dobbs, will continue their push to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with leftists in order to ensure that the Court becomes the supreme lawmaking body in America. The U.S. Supreme Court, which was intended by America’s founders to be the weakest branch of government, is intended by leftists to become the most powerful.

A Democrat administration with a Democrat-held Congress will continue the economic carnage Biden has begun, destroying our economy through increased business regulation, increased taxes, and the destruction of the oil industry, which in turn decimates the lives and retirement income of Americans.

Assaults on religious liberty and speech rights will intensify, especially via the deceitfully named “Equality Act,” which has nothing to do with equality and everything to do with forcing compliance with policies that the homosexual community and “trans” cult want.

Democrats will continue to fight for federal funding of abortion and for a federal law protecting a non-existent moral or constitutional right of women to kill their offspring.

“Trans” cultism will continue its march through shelters, prisons, bathrooms, and locker rooms where women and girls will be forced to do private things in the presence of men and boys. Let’s remember that with Democrats in charge, male coaches who masquerade as women will be allowed in girls’ locker rooms. Democrats, ignorant of the meaning of “woman,” will continue to insult and erase women by referring to them as “birthing persons.”

Leftists will continue to try to confiscate guns and eviscerate gun rights, even if that means exploiting tragedies.

Federal promotion of toxic ideas derived from Critical Race Theory will continue to corrupt the military.

Hopes for school choice will be obliterated.

They will continue their effort to get rid of the filibuster, thereby clearing the path to easily pass any oppressive piece of legislation their Machiavellian hearts desire.

In their unholy quest to acquire and secure power in perpetuity, leftists will make sure our borders are gaping open and continue their efforts to make Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. states.

They will continue to try to dismantle the Electoral College in order to effectively disenfranchise the Republican heart of America.

A Democrat presidency would mean a great leap forward toward the revolutionary “Great Reset”—a project of a small group of mega-wealthy globalists who seek to reshape the earth and the fulness thereof. That’s not some conspiracy group’s view of the Great Reset. That’s the explicitly stated view of the mega-wealthy globalists who meet every year in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The Great Reset envisions a “stakeholder” form of capitalism:

“Stakeholder capitalism,” … positions private corporations as trustees of society, and is clearly the best response to today’s social and environmental challenges. … The young Swedish climate activist [Greta Thunberg] has reminded us that adherence to the current economic system represents a betrayal of future generations, owing to its environmental unsustainability. Another (related) reason is that millennials and Generation Z no longer want to work for, invest in, or buy from companies that lack values beyond maximizing shareholder value.

[T]o uphold the principles of stakeholder capitalism, companies will need new metrics. For starters, a new measure of “shared value creation” should include “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) goals.

A stakeholder form of capitalism contrasts with the “shareholder” form of capitalism most notably defended by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. Stakeholder capitalism is essentially “woke” socialism that will redistribute wealth to achieve “equitable” results. Sound familiar? “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”? And we thought the demise of the Soviet Union meant the end of Communism.

Integral to the Great Reset are the “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) standards. Sounds innocuous as do all tyrannical leftist projects, but a closer look reveals the dark side cloaked in euphemistic language. Here’s a description of the goals of the Great Reset from the WEF’s website:

COVID-19 lockdowns may be gradually easing, but anxiety about the world’s social and economic prospects is only intensifying. … To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism. … We must build entirely new foundations for our economic and social systems. (emphasis added)

The goals are global and radical:

The Great Reset agenda would have three main components. The first would steer the market toward fairer outcomes. … governments should implement long-overdue reforms that promote more equitable outcomes. … (emphasis added)

Anyone who’s been paying attention understands what is really meant by “fairer” and “more equitable outcomes.” The goal of globalist socialists is not the creation of fairer more equitable opportunities but, rather, the flattening of outcomes to ensure that everyone’s outcome is the same—well, everyone but the mega-wealthy globalists.

Andrew Stuttaford, editor for National Review’s financial and economic coverage, warns against “stakeholder capitalism”:

[S]takeholder capitalism is a betrayal of democracy as well as of shareholders. The power it gives to managers is used to support an agenda influenced by a cabal of activists, NGOs, representatives of the “international community,” and politicians too arrogant to go through the usual legislative channels.

Like the “social and emotional learning” (SEL) standards leftists use to indoctrinate children with leftist views on sexuality in public schools, every company rejiggered in accordance with the wishes of the WEF will be expected to implement ESG standards, that is to say, leftist environmental and social standards:

Environmental criteria may include a company’s energy use, waste, pollution, natural resource conservation, and treatment of animals. … For example, are there issues related to its … compliance with government environmental regulations?

Social criteria look at the company’s business relationships. Does it work with suppliers that hold the same values as it claims to hold? Does the company donate a percentage of its profits to the local community or encourage employees to perform volunteer work there?

In other words, wokesters will control all aspects of the economy to control citizens’ beliefs.

In an opinion piece published by The HillJustin Haskins, editorial director and senior fellow at the Heartland Institute shares Stuttaford’s concerns about the Great Reset:

Instead of traditional capitalism, the high-profile group said the world should adopt more socialistic policies, such as wealth taxes, additional regulations and massive Green New Deal-like government programs. …

[T]he general principles of the plan are clear: The world needs massive new government programs and far-reaching policies comparable to those offered by American socialists such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in their Green New Deal plan. …

Or, put another way, we need a form of socialism — a word the World Economic Forum has deliberately avoided using, all while calling for countless socialist and progressive plans. … For those of us who support free markets, the Great Reset is nothing short of terrifying. … America is the world’s most powerful, prosperous nation precisely because of the very market principles the Great Reset supporters loathe.

Like the mostly violent protests Americans endured in 2020, this massive economic revolution requires an army of revolutionaries:

Of course, these government officials, activists and influencers can’t impose a systemic change of this size on their own. Which is why they have already started to activate vast networks of left-wing activists from around the world, who will … demand changes in line with the Great Reset.

In October 2020, Andrew Stuttaford warned that the pace of the march toward the WEF’s socialism-infused stakeholder capitalism “will only pick up in the U.S. should Joe Biden, who has caricatured shareholder primacy and described it as ‘an absolute farce,’ be elected president.”

The warning about the Great Reset is even more urgent today. The colossal economic reset envisioned by socialists who identify as capitalists, along with dozens of other reasons, should lead Americans to choose a new path: The Great Conservative Reset.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/America-Needs-a-Great-Conservative-Reset.mp3





The Great Reset is a Sneaky Cultural Revolution

The World Economic Forum (WEF)[1] says that now is the time to replace our current economy with “a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being.”[2] According to its leader Klaus Schwab:[3]

To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism….

[T]he pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future.[4]

However, this plea has also been called an agenda for tyranny. The foreign minister of Brazil addressed the United Nations to say:

[T]otalitarian social control is not the remedy for any crisis.

Those who dislike freedom always try to benefit from moments of crisis to preach the curtailing of freedom. Let’s not fall for that trap. Totalitarian social control is not the remedy for any crisis. Let’s not make democracy and freedom one more victim of COVID-19.[5]

What is this Great Reset? We’ll find that it’s yet another attempt to establish socialism. In this scheme businesses will be persuaded to voluntarily accept government control. We’d silently shift into accepting a socialist economy, along with the rest of its agenda, without even realizing it.

This article will approach the Great Reset in this manner:

  • Remind us that the Bible judges socialism and finds it wanting.
  • Describe the main components of the Great Reset.
  • Show how it’s being brought to us by evangelizing the willing, and coercing the unwilling.
  • Discuss approaches for opposing its goals and its evangelism strategies.

Socialism and Christianity don’t mix

The Great Reset has a sneaky idea. “Woke” company managers will convince their shareholders that the government, along with social activists, must be given veto power over what the company does. Even though no law requires this surrender, the shareholders will be pressured to recognize their new masters.

This demand for corporate change amounts to a cultural revolution. Business managers, shareholders, and the general public are being conditioned to accept community control over companies. We’re being led into economic socialism without them even using the ‘S’ word. After all, the dictionary says that socialism means community control:

socialism:  n.  1. a theory or system of social organization in which the means of production and distribution of goods are owned and controlled collectively or by the government.[6]

Before we examine the revolutionary Great Reset, we need to remember what God says about government, property, and ownership. That’s because the Great Reset demands socialist change. And socialism not only steals people’s property, but also their freedoms.

Regarding property and ownership, God’s quite OK with people owning things. And if some of them become billionaires then good for them. Property and ownership are explored in the author’s article Is Capitalism Immoral? Here are some of its highlights:

  • God gave Adam and Eve the right to own things.
  • Mankind practiced capitalism from the very beginning.
  • The New Testament affirms private ownership.
  • It is OK to be wealthy.

Some people claim that Christianity endorses government socialism because the early church in Jerusalem practiced communalism. However, their sharing was strictly voluntary. Again, from the article:

Early in the Jerusalem church its people pooled their goods for the common good, selling property and land for the needs of the saints (Acts 2:43-45; 4:32-35). Yet communal life wasn’t the norm for Christ’s church. For example, Paul encouraged to the Corinthian church to prepare a gift they promised for the benefit of the Jerusalem church (1 Corinthians 16:1-4; 2 Corinthians 8:2, 6-8). If the Corinthians were living communally then Paul could have simply asked the elders about the gift. This means that members of a congregation may choose to act communally, but they aren’t obligated to do so.[7]

People have the right to either keep their stuff or give it away. But when a government insists that we share, especially with itself, that’s called taking or stealing.[8] Socialism, along with its communist endgame, insists that individuals have no property rights, and that everything belongs to the community. When government and activist “stakeholders” claim the right to control a business, they’re using the socialist playbook to steal from the business owners.

Although the Great Reset seems to concentrate on economic matters, its goals also require a cultural reset. Ever since Karl Marx published his books, socialist advocates have waited for an opportunity like this one. The Great Reset implements a socialist culture, having these features:

  • Hatred towards God. Socialist theory says that that there is no God. Serving the community of mankind gives meaning of our lives.
  • Removing the religious. People who believe in God are enemies of socialism. They must be pursued and marginalized, even extinguished.
  • Preventing reactionary thought. Lest people get dissatisfied with socialism, a socialist state must identify possible internal enemies. This means continual spying on its own citizens.

Lots has already been written about how these socialist “features” repress individual freedoms. Rather than repeat those arguments here, look to those articles. For example, the author has these previous articles on socialism and Christianity:

The Great Reset is just repackaged socialism, and it’s dangerous to Christian culture. Even so, we still must learn something about it. We must be familiar enough with it its terms to recognize when it’s being pushed upon us.

The Great Reset in a nutshell

The World Economic Forum conferences, sometimes called the Davos meetings,[9] attract a lot of billionaires, political leaders, and social activists.[10] Having invented the Great Reset, it isn’t surprising that their speeches keep circling back to it. The Great Reset has these basic components:

WEF chief executive officer Klaus Schwab described three core components of the Great Reset: the first involves creating conditions for a “stakeholder economy”; the second component includes building in a more “resilient, equitable, and sustainable” way—based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics which would incorporate more green public infrastructure projects; the third component is to “harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution” for public good.[11]

Through the “stakeholder economy” and “equitable and sustainable” components, businesses are to bind themselves to the overall plan. The technology component describes what governments will do to innovation when, and if, they get control of everything else. We can ignore this component for now.

According to the WEF, countries should put aside national interests and cooperate as one. As Schwab said at the 2022 World Government Summit, “Our futures are intrinsically connected and that requires collaborative responses.”[12] This echoes the United Nations plans of Agenda 21 / Agenda 2030 / Sustainable Development Goals,[13] which also call for refashioning a new society and a new economy.[14] Broadly speaking, both the UN and the WEF want a socialist command economy accompanied by vast social changes.

The Stakeholder Economy steals control of businesses

In the “stakeholder economy” shareholders technically own a business but can’t direct it. Decision making is surrendered to outside parties.

Underpinning the notion of “stakeholder capitalism,” a concept that has taken the C-suites of some of America’s largest companies by storm, is the idea that a company should be run for the benefit of all its “stakeholders,” a conveniently hazy term that can be defined to include (among others) workers, customers, and “the community,” as well as the shareholders who, you know, own the business. It’s a form of expropriation based on the myth that a corporation that puts its shareholders first must necessarily put everyone else last. … Stakeholder capitalism is not only a threat to private property, but also, by not much of a stretch of the imagination, to individual freedom.[15]

Once the company commits to pleasing these outside parties, it’s effectively giving them veto power over company decisions. The community now controls the company. Note that because these stakeholders aren’t shareholders, they’re playing games with other peoples’ money.

Schwab says that stakeholder capitalism “would not change the economic system, but rather improve it to what he considers to be ‘responsible capitalism’.”[16] Responsible capitalism covers the same ground as stakeholder capitalism:

Responsible Capitalism requires a fundamental integration of the needs of the wider community, care for the communities in which the business operates, environmental initiatives and support for the arts and culture, with the business’s goals and processes. Above all, it is about how successful business leaders apply the principles of moral and social responsibility in the running of their business, combining social commitment with business acumen and innovation, and building a coherent philosophy in which the company’s success is judged over the long-term by criteria that include sustainability, equity, and moral justice as well as standard financial benchmarks.[17]

When the community looks to a business to act as its nanny (“care for the communities”), provide it with entertainment (“support for the arts and culture”), and act as a soldier in the culture wars (“sustainability, equity, and moral justice”), then that business has been expropriated from its rightful owners to become a toy, a misused community plaything. That’s a long way from the idea that “the business of America is business.”[18]

Justin Haskins, writing for The Hill, calls these changes global socialism.

At a virtual meeting earlier in June hosted by the World Economic Forum, some of the planet’s most powerful business leaders, government officials and activists announced a proposal to “reset” the global economy. Instead of traditional capitalism, the high-profile group said the world should adopt more socialistic policies, such as wealth taxes, additional regulations and massive Green New Deal-like government programs.

“Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed,” wrote Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, in an article published on WEF’s website. “In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

Or, put another way, we need a form of socialism — a word the World Economic Forum has deliberately avoided using, all while calling for countless socialist and progressive plans.[19]

Through stakeholder capitalism, Schwab and the WEF want businesses to become community-controlled cultural warriors, expending themselves for the sake of a socialist future.

Measuring your wokeness through metrics

Schwab’s second core component is “building in a more ‘resilient, equitable and sustainable way’ – based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.”[20] ESG metrics are presently just a public relations gambit. That is, some advocacy outfit publishes rules that it thinks a targeted company should live by. This campaign works when:

  • Company management already conspires with the advocates.
  • Company management is afraid of losing public opinion support if they do fight.
  • Company management is weary of fighting.

Of course, even when a company gives in it doesn’t win. The metrics will continually be changed, pushing businesses to fulfill new political goals. Says Schwab:

The second component of a Great Reset agenda would ensure that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability.

Rather than using these funds, as well as investments from private entities and pension funds, to fill cracks in the old system, we should use them to create a new one that is more resilient, equitable, and sustainable in the long run. This means, for example, building “green” urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.[21]

These business incentives will be things like “meet these metrics or there’s no more financing, no more approvals for you.” ESG metrics are social and political, not measures of good financial performance. As example, here are some proposed metrics:

  • Measuring your greenhouse gas emissions
  • Monitoring your carbon footprint
  • Does your business act ethically and with integrity?
  • How are you tackling the gender pay gap?
  • Metrics on diversity, equity and inclusion
  • How sustainable are your suppliers?[22]

Note that last point about suppliers. When you’re striving for an ESG score, your suppliers must also be ESG compliant or your own score suffers. If you’ve suppliers not playing the ESG metrics game, you’ll have to drop them to maintain your own scores. Andrew Stuttaford, of the National Review, criticizes how ESG metrics put ideology before profit.

What has changed is the turn by certain large investment groups toward “socially responsible” investing (SRI) — in particular, a variant known as ESG. This means checking how actual or potential portfolio companies measure up against often ill-defined (and sometimes contradictory) environmental (“E”), social (“S”), and governance (“G”) standards, which can look a lot like stakeholder capitalism. If this is a specific selling point of some of their investment products, that is fine: Investors can choose to buy those products or not.

The problem comes when choice is removed. Where ESG-tinged investment is involved, that is ever more frequently the case. Thus, a good number of state-retirement funds, custodians of money designated for their employees’ retirement — money for the most part provided by taxpayers — have now enthusiastically adopted SRI, a decision in which neither pensioners nor (realistically) taxpayers had any say.

The growing acceptance by asset managers that ESG should not be a discrete product but part of their standard investment process will make it tricky for those looking at their 401Ks to find an option in which ESG does not lurk.

A bad situation will be made worse — for those who favor investor choice, shareholder control, or both — as companies knuckle under to the ESG warriors, even without the agreement of their shareholders, either because they fear that not to do so will cut them off from sources of capital, or that it will cost them business, or, worst of all, because it is the “appropriate” thing to do. As was evident long before the wave of companies’ committing to this or that cause during the current unrest, “woke capitalism” is not a figment of the right-wing imagination.[23]

Here is an example of ESG metrics at work. You’d think that the World Wildlife Fund is there to help preserve pandas, or encourage you to “symbolically adopt an elephant today.”[24] Yet it seems that the WWF has designs on throttling the beef industry. From the Fort Morgan Times:

The Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB) has an agenda all too familiar to U.S. ranchers. The environmental group, World Wildlife Fund (WWF aka World Wide Fund for Nature), seeks to fundamentally change the entire beef industry through the GRSB.

Their goal is to transform the beef supply chain by influencing the “companies [which] control twenty- five percent of all fifteen of the most significant commodities that threaten biodiversity”

Like many so-called “locally” and “stakeholder” driven initiatives, the GRSB and national roundtables were not created due to consumer demand, but rather by environmental organizations who seek to control what is not theirs. Clay laid out the plan at TED Global 2010, identifying the target companies, WalMart, McDonalds, JBS, Cargil, and others, then helped found the GRSB and national roundtables.[25]

The WWF is pressuring beef producers into comply with their demands. Some of them already have, and their surrender might convince the others to follow suit. As with war, you may not want the Great Reset but the Great Reset wants you.

Look! The revolution already started!

Most Americans think that socialism will come through bad legislation. But what if it came instead by invitation? Suppose that business leaders become comfortable with government oversight, and are willing to keep meeting third-party performance metrics. Stakeholder capitalism would become second nature to them, while the concept of shareholder capitalism would seem foreign. When socialist laws are proposed these business leaders won’t oppose them, because they’ll already be following socialist practices. Socialism would conquer America because it was desired.

This stealthy revolution isn’t coming upon us by force, but rather through evangelizing our business leaders. These leaders are learning stakeholder capitalism from the activists, with little pushback from anyone else. After constantly hearing only one side of the story, no wonder they’re accepting the stakeholder capitalism story.

Sure, there are leaders with good sense, but they’re being undermined by other businesses that already gave in. The choice appears to be to join the revolution, or get boycotted out of business. Here are examples of such coercion.

We only want ‘gender equality’ business partners. According to Outkick the Coverage, Sports Illustrated has a new political bent to its business relationships:

And starting this year, SI announced it would only work with “brands who are helping drive gender equality forward” and that the iconic swimsuit issue is “changing the cost of doing business from a monetary value to a currency of doing good.”[26]

Banks set their own pollution standards for oil companies. In the future, Wells Fargo bank will only loan to oil companies that meet the bank’s standards – not government standards, but the bank’s standards – for greenhouse emissions. From the Washington Times:

Wells Fargo has become the latest major financial institution to set new greenhouse gas standards requiring borrowers in the energy sector to reduce emissions.

Oil and natural gas companies must reduce their absolute emissions by 26% by 2030, based on 2019 emission levels, Wells Fargo said last week. Other power sector businesses must see a 60% reduction during the same time period.

The new rules from Wells Fargo are part of a trend from financial institutions around the world to implement such climate regulations for its lending programs, joining the likes of Citigroup Inc. and the United Nations-convened Net-Zero Banking Alliance. The alliance is an industry-led coalition of banks from across the globe with the goal to align their lending and investments with net-zero emissions by 2050.[27]

It’s apparent that this revolution is one of information and values. Of information, because at present only the stakeholder capitalism idea is being promoted. And of values, for we need the Bible’s guidance to show that stakeholder capitalism, and the socialism behind it, is evil.

How the Great Reset affects Christians

This article concentrated on stakeholder capitalism because it’s an unguarded back door into corrupting American culture. But the Great Reset isn’t just about economics. It means to change everything – culture, government, even what motivates you.

There isn’t enough space to detail everything that the Great Reset could possibly change. But we’ll touch on a few points that show that the Great Reset closely maps to socialist concepts. It’s well known that socialist theory despises Christian culture. Therefore, we expect to find that the Great Reset will also suppress Christian culture.

The Great Reset doesn’t champion “justice,” but “social justice.” A recent WEF conference highlighted that the Great Reset also means “driving a Great Reset in social justice, inclusion and sustainable development impact.”[28] But what is social justice? One commonly repeated definition is:

Social justice is a concept of fair and just relations between the individual and society. This is measured by the explicit and tacit terms for the distribution of wealth, opportunities for personal activity, and social privileges.[29]

As you see, “social justice” isn’t actually about justice, because it has nothing to do with standards of right and wrong. It means merely whatever the speaker wants it to mean.[30]

So far social justice is largely used to attack Christian society.[31] For its own part, the WEF thinks that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” – central concepts for Critical Race Theory – should be added to each company through ESG metrics.[32] This shows that the Great Reset seeks to replace Christian culture with – well, with whatever “social justice” means tomorrow.

Teaching all children to embrace their sustainable, and “social justice,” plans. The World Economic Forum links itself with the UN’s plans for sustainable development.[33] When the UN Sustainable Development Guidance document says something, the WEF approves. In that document, Goal 4.7 describes what all of our children should be taught.

4.7 By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.[34]

All students must learn the UN’s version of sustainable development, global citizenship, “a culture of peace and non-violence,” etc. They’re imposing their version of culture upon us, including tenets of social justice. And if parents disagree with this, the governor of Virginia once said, “parents shouldn’t have a say in what their kids are taught.”[35] It’s like a parody of Proverbs 22:6 that, “the UN will train up a child in the way they say he should go, and when he is old he won’t depart from social justice.”

Lying about why the massive changes are needed. The WEF’s “Great Narrative Meeting” conference sought to create a story for mass consumption, a supposed reason for accepting their planned social upheaval.

Speaking at the Great Narrative Meeting in Dubai, United Arab Emirates today, Schwab announced his intent to develop a great narrative that public and private entities will use to shape the future of humanity.

“We are here to develop the great narrative, a story for the future,” said Schwab.

“In order to shape the future, you have first to imagine the future, you have to design the future, and then you have to execute it,” he added.

“Here, I think the next two days, we will look [to] how we imagine, how we design, how we execute the great narrative, how we define the story of our world for the future.”[36]

They said “you have first to imagine the future…” Note that they’ve already spent decades refining their plans. That’s clear evidence that the Great Reset isn’t meant to be our salvation from any actual crisis – not the climate, not viruses. But we’re supposed to believe their narrative, that these fine WEF fellows have provided us with a bright, shiny future.

These few examples show that the Great Reset will destroy our present culture (social justice and Critical Race Theory), ensure that our children master the new one (global citizenship skills), and give us a newly-minted myth for us to believe (why the Great Reset will save us all). Yes, the Great Reset is a social, cultural, and religious revolution. It is dangerous to Christians everywhere.

What can a shareholder do about the Great Reset?

Advocates of the Great Reset seek to undermine America. Their tack is to compromise the judgment of company managers, acquire veto power over company decisions, and to assert that the company accept ESG metrics as rules for governing the firm. These advocates are as bold as gangsters, showing up and saying “nice business you’ve got here, shame if something happened to it.”

The only people who have the standing to defend a firm from them are its shareholders. It is their money, and their property, being threatened. And only they have the authority to instruct the behavior of its managers. What sorts of things can shareholders do to save their company? Here are some suggestions.

Be informed about advocates that insist on controlling you. They’re frauds because their agendas are about helping themselves, not you. They’re just looking for scalps.

Realize that ESG metrics are merely suggestions. The environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics are measurements of their own invention. They have no legal or economic basis. In fact, there’s plenty of truth in the statement “go woke and go broke.”[37]

Tell the managers to shape up and fly right. Suppose your company managers are listening to “stakeholders.” Who will they now work for, the shareholders or outside interests? Managers have a lot of leeway in running a company, but running it into the ground amounts to mismanagement, even malfeasance. To preserve their investment, shareholders must rebuke woke management, even form an action to remove such managers from their offices.

Fight back against the activists. These activists threaten to slander your company, relenting only if you give into them. We know that they’re not acting in good faith, and the shareholders need to call them out on it. Since they’re revolutionaries, throw revolutionary rhetoric back at them. Call them out for their extortion. Perhaps you’ll even find that they’re exercising tortuous interference, where their activities mean to force an entire an industry to obey their metrics.[38]

Fight dilution of your vote caused by institutional investors. Some shareholders actually want their company to be woke. Perhaps they’re misinformed, or perhaps they believe in the culture wars. But it’s a special problem when a mutual fund buys shares and then throws its weight around, demanding ESG-related changes.[39] The opinion of a single “culture warrior” fund manager can have outsized influence, because he or she is voting a personal opinion with all of those shares, and not the consensus opinion of the individual investors.

That there is a demand for ESG-related investment shows the ongoing success of this back door Great Reset revolution. These mutual funds are essentially evangelizing, investing with the aim of forcing a company into using ESG metrics.

Perhaps politics has an answer. A recent proposal in Congress, the “Investor Democracy is Expected” Act (the INDEX Act),[40] means to reduce the outsized influence these ESG funds have over companies. Although this is a Republican-sponsored initiative in a Democratic-controlled Congress, the concept is bound to be re-introduced. One of these tries will end up being effective in changing things.

What can a company owner do about the Great Reset?

You’re not one of those woke managers, and your company doesn’t want to become a weapon for the Great Reset. But as I said before, the Great Reset wants you. If you reject the activists they’ll issue a lot of bad press releases about how awful you are. And companies you do business with will drop you as a partner, because you’re not with the program. How can you beat this pressure?

Stay informed about the threats against your firm. This is much like the advice for shareholders. Learn the news about external guidance for your industry. Seek advice from opponents of ESG. And keep track of your management structure, lest woke managers take root under your watch.

Consider if this blacklisting is collusion. If your associates are refusing to deal with you any more because your firm has low ESG metrics, does this amount to colluding to control an industry? Sure, a partner can refuse business with you for many reasons. But a group of partners doing this smells of a coordinated effort to control the market. And if the metrics you’re failing at concern religious issues, then you’ve also got civil rights laws you can lean on.

What can ordinary people do about the Great Reset?

Suppose that you’re among the great majority of people who aren’t either company managers or shareholders. Or you are a shareholder and want to know what else to do. What can you do to influence the attempted Great Reset revolution? I’ve these suggestions.

Educate yourself. You’ve almost finished this article, and thus know what the fighting is all about. Now you ought to pay attention to the companies you work with, invest in, and whose products you buy. Are these firms focusing on business and customer service? Or are they taking stands to push cultural change?

Get your mutual fund investments out of ESG compliant companies. Although your money isn’t directly invested in stocks, your mutual funds probably are. And they might be pushing ESG metrics on companies. Not only should you move your money to better places, but give your former fund managers “a piece of your mind.” More on that below.

Get your bank investments out of ESG compliant companies. Some people still like bank-sponsored investments like certificates of deposit. Your banks might be among those pushing ESG compliance.[41] Don’t fund people or companies who want to crush American Christian culture. Not only move your money, but also give those managers a piece of your mind.

Become loud and insistent. You now know something about ESG and socialism that others need to know. Perhaps some business manager is ill-informed. Before you change your investment, you can call that manager, or send an email. Tell him or her your concerns, and how managing by ESG amounts to “sleeping with the enemy.” Perhaps that manager will see the light and change his or her mind, becoming an ESG foe. Or perhaps the manager will see the light after getting dozens of such calls and letters, all with the same message.

Also tell your legislators of you concerns. Show them how ESG metrics leads to acceptance of socialism, an all-encompassing government, and a multitude of other evils. Perhaps those senators who sponsored the INDEX Act were spurred into action by alarmed constituents.

Do counter-messaging against these activists. Groups who promote stakeholder capitalism, who insist that our firms conform to ESG metrics, are enemies to American culture. They don’t deserve either respect or kind words. They’re quick to ridicule their targets, and deserve ridicule in return. They really dislike being mocked and called names.

For example, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis pushed the Parental Rights in Education bill, he called its opponents “groomers.”[42] It’s so appropriate, and they couldn’t abide that label![43] Can we, with one word, describe the ESG movement and the revolution it seeks?

Pray to God for deliverance. Ask God for forbearance for America, and time for His church to learn to repent. Pray that God confounds our enemies (Psalm 55, especially v.9).


[1]     Kagan, Julia, World Economic Forum (WEF), Investopedia, October 24, 2021, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/world-economic-forum.asp

[2]     Talgo, Chris, Resist the ‘Great Reset’, TownHall, June 9, 2020, https://townhall.com/columnists/christalgo/2020/06/09/resist-the-great-reset-n2570308

[3]     Klaus Schwab, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Schwab

[4]     Schwab, Klaus, Now is the time for a ‘great reset’, World Economic Forum, June 3, 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/

[5]     Hinchliffe, Tim, Brazil says ‘no’ to great reset: ‘Totalitarian social control is not the remedy for any crisis’, The Sociable, December 8, 2020, https://sociable.co/government-and-policy/brazil-says-no-great-reset-totalitarian-social-control-not-remedy-crisis/

[6]     socialism (n.d.), Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, 2010, https://www.thefreedictionary.com/socialism

[7]     Perry, Oliver, Is Capitalism Immoral?, Illinois Family Institute, November 30, 2018, https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/faith/is-capitalism-immoral/

[8]     This isn’t a rant against taxation. Government is instituted to protect us against invaders and criminals, and to provide judges to hear disputes. These legitimate services must be paid for by the public.

[9]     Hope, Katie, 10 things you didn’t know about Davos, BBC News, January 21, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46895332

[10]   Evans, Joss Wynne, Klaus Schwab’s WEF Alumni – A List, Blue Tara, October 6, 2021, https://www.tarableu.com/klaus-scwabs-wef-alumni-a-list/

[11]   Great Reset, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset

[12]   Kent, Simon, Klaus Schwab Tells Global Leaders to Collaborate for World Governance, Breitbart News, March 31, 2022, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/03/31/klaus-schwab-tells-global-leaders-to-collaborate-for-world-governance/

[13]   The 17 Goals, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, https://sdgs.un.org/goals

[14]   Bhattacharya, CB, How the great COVID-19 reset can help firms build a sustainable future, World Economic Forum, May 15, 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/05/the-covid-19-reset-sustainability/

This article amounts to a manual for making your company ESG-aware.

[15]   Stuttaford, Andrew, Stakeholder Capitalism: Corporatism by Another Name, Andrew Stuttaford Collected Articles, originally published in National Review Online, June 25, 2021, https://www.andrewstuttaford.com/archive/2022/1/2/stakeholder-capitalism-corporatism-by-another-name

[16]   Great Reset, Wikipedia

[17]   What is Responsible Capitalism?, FIRST Responsible Capitalism, 2022, https://responsible-capitalism.org/what-is-responsible-capitalism/

[18]   Coolidge, Calvin, Calvin Coolidge > Quotes > Quotable Quotes, GoodReads, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/187369-the-business-of-america-is-business

[19]   Haskins, Justin, Introducing the ‘Great Reset,’ world leaders’ radical plan to transform the economy, The Hill, June 25, 2020, https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/504499-introducing-the-great-reset-world-leaders-radical-plan-to/?rl=1

[20]   Great Reset, Wikipedia

[21]   Schwab, Klaus, Now is the time for a ‘great reset’, World Economic Forum

[22]   Farnham, Kezia, ESG Metrics: What Matters, and What Should You Measure?, Diligent, April 6, 2022, https://www.diligent.com/insights/esg/metrics/

[23]   Stuttaford, Andrew, High Stakes, Andrew Stuttaford Collected Articles, originally published in National Review Online, July 9, 2020, https://www.andrewstuttaford.com/archive/2020/12/13/high-stakes

[24]   The “elephant pitch” comes from a “Donate Now” blurb on the World Wildlife Fund homepage, https://www.worldwildlife.org

[25]   Erickson-Noe, Global roundtable for sustainable beef, Fort Morgan Times, April 24, 2019, https://www.fortmorgantimes.com/2016/12/21/global-roundtable-for-sustainable-beef/

[26]   Kinsey, Joe, WOKE ILLUSTRATED RELEASES WNBA SWIMSUIT MODEL PHOTOS, KEEPS PUMPING INCLUSION ANGLE, Outkick, May 9, 2022, https://www.outkick.com/woke-illustrated-releases-wnba-swimsuit-model-photos-keeps-pumping-inclusion-angle/

[27]   Touchberry, Ramsey, Wells Fargo is latest bank to set emissions reduction rules on lending for oil, gas companies, Washington Times, May 9, 2022, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/may/9/wells-fargo-latest-bank-set-emissions-reduction-ru/

[28]   Sangokoya, David, Social justice, inclusion and sustainable development need a ‘Great Reset’. Here are 3 key steps we can take, World Economic Forum, October 8, 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/social-justice-inclusion-and-sustainable-development-need-a-great-reset-here-are-3-key-steps/

[29]   Britton, Macalia, What is Social Justice?, Macalia Britton blog, January 29, 2018, https://macailabritton.com/what-is-social-justice/

[30]   Plasterer, Rick, Social Justice, Critical Race Theory, and a Christian Response, Juicy Ecumenism, April 12, 2022, https://juicyecumenism.com/2022/04/12/social-justice-critical-race-theory-christian-response/

[31]   Sullivan, B. Nathaniel, Five Ways Social Justice Stands in Opposition to Authentic, Biblical Justice, Word Foundations, 2019, https://www.wordfoundations.com/2019/03/16/five-categories-of-contrast-social-vs-biblical-justice/

[32]   Berg, Angela, 5 ways to drive social justice in the workplace, starting with leadership, World Economic Forum, January 5, 2022, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/social-justice-workplace-leadership/

[33]   Bhattacharya, CB, How the great COVID-19 reset can help firms build a sustainable future, World Economic Forum

[34]   Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, September 25, 2015, https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda

[35]   Schow, Ashe, Democrat Virginia Governor Candidate Says Parents Shouldn’t Have A Say In What Their Children Are Taught In School, The Daily Wire, September 29, 2021, https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrat-virginia-governor-candidate-says-parents-shouldnt-have-a-say-in-what-their-children-are-taught-in-school

[36]   Hinchliffe, Tim, WEF Founder Klaus Schwab calls for a ‘great narrative’ for humankind at meeting in Dubai, The Sociable, November, 2021, https://sociable.co/government-and-policy/wef-klaus-schwab-great-narrative-humankind/

[37]   Sheffield, Carrie, Go woke, go broke? Americans don’t care for corporate activism, New York Post, December 2, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/12/02/americans-dont-care-for-corporate-activism/

[38]   Erickson-Noe, Global roundtable for sustainable beef, Fort Morgan Times

[39]   Jessop, Simon and Kerber, Ross, Analysis-Musk’s ESG attack spotlights $35 trillion industry confusion, Yahoo! Finance, May 20, 2022, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysis-musks-esg-attack-spotlights-090311132.html

[40]   Moran, Sean, Republicans Propose Bill to Fight Back Against Woke Capitalism, Breitbart, May 19, 2022, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/19/republicans-propose-bill-to-fight-back-against-woke-capitalism/

[41]   How US Banks Are Stepping Up Their ESG Activities, Banking Exchange, April 14, 2021, https://www.bankingexchange.com/recent-articles/item/8653-how-us-banks-are-stepping-up-their-esg-activities

[42]   Migdon, Brooke, Gov. DeSantis spokesperson says ‘Don’t Say Gay’ opponents are ‘groomers’, Changing America, March 7, 2022, https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/597215-gov-desantis-spokesperson-says-dont-say-gay-opponents-are/

[43]   Bonchie, Liberals Freak out Over Being Called ‘Groomers’, RedState, April 6, 2022, https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/04/06/liberals-freak-out-over-being-called-groomers-n546263


This article was originally published at the FixThisCulture.com blog.




How Compromised Preaching Is Contributing to Our Cultural Rot

For many years, I have stated that a major reason America is so messed up is that much of the American Church is also messed up. And a major reason that so much of the American Church is messed up is that so many Christian leaders are also messed up. The domino effect is quite real.

Church leaders greatly influence their followers, for better or for worse. And since Christian believers are called to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, if we are not fulfilling our moral and spiritual duties, this will have a deleterious effect on the nation.

And how, exactly, do Church leaders influence their followers? They do it by their message and by their example. If they are preaching rightly and living rightly, they will produce healthy congregants. If their preaching is unbiblical and their lifestyle is compromised, they will produce unhealthy congregants.

To be sure, America is not as influenced by the pulpit as it was in 1873, when Charles Finney preached that, “If the public press lacks moral discrimination… If the church is degenerate and worldly… If the world loses its interest in religion… If Satan rules in our halls of legislation… If our politics become so corrupt that the very foundations of our government are ready to fall away, the pulpit is responsible for it.”

Yet with 70 percent of Americans still professing Christianity and with evangelical Christians alone making up roughly 25 percent of the population, the Christian leaders of the nation remain influential, for better or worse.

In that light, a recent Barna survey gives lots of cause for concern, especially when it comes to the message being preached by Christian leaders.

As reported by Decision magazine, “A new study from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University (ACU), guided by popular pollster George Barna, has found that just 37% of Christian pastors in the United States have a Biblical worldview.”

Seriously? Just thirty-seven percent?

It would be bad enough if less than 4 in 10 believers held to a biblical worldview. But less than 4 in 10 pastors? How can this be?

In the words of Barna, “This is another strong piece of evidence that the culture is influencing the American church more than Christian churches are influencing the culture.”

Or, viewed from another angle, rather than Christian leaders equipping their people to swim against the tide of the culture, they too are being carried by the current of the age. And that, in turn, means that the light is not shining and the salt is not being salty.

It is a vicious cycle of moral and spiritual deterioration.

In short, when the doctors are spreading disease rather than curing disease, the populace is in big trouble.

Decision reports that, “The survey looked at eight different categories of belief and behavior, including family and the value of life; God, creation and history; personal faith practices; and sin, salvation and one’s relationship with God.”

Predictably, the heart of the problem can be traced back to beliefs about the Bible: “The survey found that the category with the lowest percentage of pastors holding a Biblical worldview is the one related to beliefs and behaviors about the Bible, truth and morality.”

No surprise here!

And what do we make of the finding that just 4 percent of executive pastors (this is not a typo) hold to a biblical worldview? Just 4 percent? And how much influence do executive pastors have in the staffing of churches and in many of the practical decisions the church makes?

As for the larger population (not just professing Christians), the survey found that “just 2% of the parents of preteens” held to a biblical worldview, along with “men (2%), women (4%), whites (4%), blacks (2%), Hispanics (less than one-half of one percent), and less than one-half of 1% among those who identify as LGBTQ.”

But this, too, should not surprise us, seeing that, in 2009, Barna reported that, “Even among born again adults, the statistics [concerning Americans with a biblical worldview] have remained flat: 18% in 1995, 22% in 2000, 21% in 2005, and 19% today.”

As I wrote in 2017, “We have believed that we should blend in and not rock the boat, showing the non-believers around us that we’re no different than they are. But while it’s important to be contributing members of the society, and while we’re called to be peacemakers not troublemakers, we are also called to swim against the tide and go against the grain. We are called to show the world a better way

“Sadly, many Christian leaders have put more emphasis on discovering what’s trending in society than learning what’s on God’s heart. In their quest to become relevant, they have become irrelevant.”

To be sure, there are many healthy leaders and healthy congregations in America. And there are always questions about the precise accuracy of polls and the nature of the questions that are asked.

But without a doubt, when we see so much moral and spiritual confusion in the larger society, it reflects the moral and spiritual confusion found in many churches. And that, in turn, reflects the confused and compromised message emanating from “Christian” leaders around America.

May God bring a true revival to His people, starting with Christian leaders across the land. May the awakening begin with us!


This article was originally published by AskDrBrown.org.




Trying to Defrock George Washington

First, they came for the George Washington mural in a school in San Francisco—because our first president had been a slaveowner. Later they came for his name on the same school, and as of last count, the name survived.

Then, they came for the statues of the father of our country during the summer of statue-toppling.

Now, the left wants to strip his name from his eponymous university.

Commentator Nick Nolte (not the actor) notes that The Washington Post, named after you-know-who, has published the opinion of a student at George Washington University, which is in the city of you-know-who, District of Columbia.

Nolte sums up the student’s article thusly: “This university is racist, and George Washington was racist, and while I didn’t find this offensive enough to pass up attending school here, harrumph, harrumph, harrumph, half-truth, half-truth, half-truth, I’m so virtuous, I’m so virtuous, I’m so virtuous…”

That student even wants Winston Churchill’s name removed from the library.

This is just another indication of how the left is at war with Western Civilization. If we continue down this path, there would be virtually nothing left of the great traditions of freedom and flourishing that the West has enjoyed, primarily because of our Judeo-Christian tradition.

Was George Washington a hero or a villain? Well, consider this. William Wilberforce was often called “The George Washington of Humanity.”

Alas, many don’t know who Wilberforce was. But he was a committed Christian statesman who served as a long-time Member of Parliament. With a team of colleagues and friends, he bitterly fought against slavery in the British Empire—and succeeded.

It took him more than half a century to accomplish this. And he did it in two stages. First, he fought against the slave trade itself. This stopped British ships from going to Africa, paying for slaves from Muslim slave-traders, who got them from other conquering African tribes.

Step one stopped the bleeding. Although they get virtually no credit for it, the founding fathers of America beat Britain in passing a law to stop the importation of slaves. As part of the original Constitution, they stipulated that in 20 years (1808) from the document being ratified (1788), there would be no more importation of slaves into the United States.

Step two in Wilberforce’s Christian crusade was to get all the slaves in the British Empire to be freed. He retired from Parliament in 1825, but others kept his crusade going through completion. Wilberforce received the news of the complete abolition of slavery in the British Empire on his deathbed in 1833.

Historian, retired professor, and bestselling author Dr. Paul L. Maier noted in our D. James Kennedy Ministries television special, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? that Wilberforce’s successful crusade helped ultimately lead to the end of slavery in America.

Maier says, “And then we also in our country on the basis of Christian principles, Abraham Lincoln and others, were able to do the same thing.”

William Wilberforce was one of history’s greatest heroes. And, again, this humanitarian leader was called “the George Washington of Humanity.”

What does that say about George Washington? That speaks volumes of our first president. He helped give birth to a nation that stands for freedom, under God. The Constitution he helped create had within it the seeds to one day overthrow the evil of slavery. And it happened.

At the cost of the lives of 700,000 men, but it happened.

Keep in mind a few facts about the father of our country. Washington voluntarily served his country when called on, relying on God to help him throughout.

Dr. Peter Lillback and I wrote a book many years ago about the faith of our first president, George Washington’s Sacred Fire.

 Lillback, the founding president of Providence Forum (for which I now serve as executive director), notes that Washington was a fourth-generation Virginia gentleman farmer. Slavery was built into that system. Washington inherited slaves by birth and later by marriage. When he died, Washington freed his slaves and made provision for them. He broke the cycle.

Both Washington and Wilberforce saw Jesus Christ as the ultimate hero. George Washington said in a famous letter that what America needs most is to imitate Jesus, “the Divine Author of our blessed Religion.” If we don’t, he warned, we can never hope to be a “happy nation.”

The Marxist iconoclasts of today, such as the triggered student at George Washington University, or the editors at The Washington Post, who promulgated such ideas to a wider audience, have no appreciation for the sacrificial contributions of those who went before us, that we might be free.

First, they came to remove Washington murals, then topple his statues. Now they want to rename the university named in his honor. What’s next? A call to rename the capital city?


This article was originally published at JerryNewcombe.com.




‘You Are the Salt of the Earth’

In one of the most famous passages in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said to His disciples (and, by extension, to His followers today), “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” (Matthew 5:13; He followed this by saying that we were the light of the world.)

But what, exactly, does it mean to be the salt of the earth? And what does it mean to lose our saltiness?

Many New Testament scholars explain that one of the main functions of salt in the ancient world, where refrigeration did not exist, was preservation against corruption.

Applying this to the Lord’s words, one commentary explains that, “Jesus’ followers are the saving element of the human race. . . . They have a power of preservation which counteracts corruption and decay . . . . As salt prevents food from spoiling, so the disciples are to prevent the corruption of morals. The presence of the disciples delays the corruption of the world and its consequent judgment.”

Others emphasize that “salt improves the taste of food,” and so “the disciples are to improve the quality of the society in which they live.”

Still others point to “both preservation and flavoring. . . . The disciples make a purer earth and make it a better place to live.” (SIL: An Exegetical Summary of The Sermon on the Mount; I have removed the commentary references from this quote.)

Suffice it to say that our calling to be the salt of the earth is anything but trivial. We are called “to prevent the corruption of morals. . . to improve the quality of the society in which they live . . . [to] make a purer earth and make it a better place to live.” The stakes are very high!

Take us out of the world, and the corruption and rot and decadence and madness will only increase. Take us out of the world, and everything falls apart.

But that only applies if we ourselves really are salt, really are living differently than the world (in moral and spiritual terms), really are functioning as the moral conscience of the society.

As D. A. Carson noted in his EBC Matthew commentary, “The point is that, if Jesus’ disciples are to act as a preservative in the world by conforming to kingdom norms, if they are ‘called to be a moral disinfectant in a world where moral standards are low, constantly changing, or non-existent … they can discharge this function only if they themselves retain their virtue’.” (Citing R. V. Tasker).

And that is really the crux of the matter. We can’t fix something else if we ourselves are broken. We can’t prevent the spread of corruption if we ourselves are corrupt. We can’t function as salt if we ourselves have lost our saltiness.

Ironically, salt still looks the same, whether it is salty or not, which means that we can deceive ourselves by outward appearance. Outwardly, we may look fine. But what is the state of our souls? What is the quality of our lives? What is the health of our marriages and families? Whom do we resemble more, the world or the Lord?

The truth is that, for more than a generation now, rather than us changing the world by shining the light into dark places, by overcoming evil with good, by winning the lost and making disciples, by separating ourselves from the sin and pollution of the society, the world has largely changed us.

Thank God for those who are burning bright and retaining their saltiness. But all too many are not, which helps explains the current state of our nation. And so, just as “politics is downstream from culture,” in a country where the Christian faith is supposed to be dominant, culture is downstream from the church.

That means that, if you trace back the moral and spiritual decline of the society, you will find that much of it began among us, the professing followers of Jesus.

That’s also why we are so often ridiculed, mocked, denigrated, and even ignored. It is not so much because we are being persecuted for our faith as much as we are being “trampled underfoot” (the words of Jesus) because we have lost our saltiness.

Of course, Jesus is simply making a spiritual point here rather than discussing the qualities of salt. (The SIL commentary notes that, “The impure and highly adulterated salt of ancient times could lose its saltiness because the sodium chloride could leach out or dissolve in humid weather and leave only tasteless crystals which no longer tasted like salt.” Otherwise, generally speaking, salt does not lose its taste.)

But if salt can lose its saltiness (certainly this is true spiritually speaking), what do we make of the Lord’s question, “how can it be made salty again?”

In natural terms, there is nothing that can be done. Salt that lost its saltiness has no useful purpose at all.

Thankfully, the whole Bible calls straying believers to turn back to God in repentance, and as we do, the Lord Himself forgives, restores, and renews.

“God, make us salty again!” The fate of America depends on it.


This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org.




Babies’ Formula Threatened by the Supply Chain Failures

The supply chain shortages have caused bare shelves throughout the nation. Most of us remember the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, searching for household cleansers and hand gel. Although low cleaning supplies are aggravating, the new shortage could be serious for the most innocent among us. The U.S. is facing a severe lack of baby formula.

The shortages started in 2021 when the supply chain struggled to deliver supplies to the stores on time. The deficit in 2021 averaged around 2-8%. In November, the shortage rose to 11%, causing concern for suppliers. (Once the formula shortage increases above 10 percent, it is considered problematic.)  The pandemic, trucking problems, staffing problems, and the lack of materials were to blame.

Heading into 2022, things turned for the worse. In February,, Abbott Labs, the manufacturer of several types of formula, issued a recall of formulas under the labels of Similac, Alimentum, and EleCare. The recall was due to bacteria contamination at a Michigan manufacturing plant.. Once the recall was issued, many parents had to change to other brands such as Enfamil. The shortages increased dramatically due to the recall and parents changing their brands. The out-of-stock rate rose to 30 percent. In some states, such as Minnesota, there is a a 54 percent shortage.

Parents have been panicking as they face empty shelves. Many parents say that they are going to multiple stores and searching the internet to find the supplies they need for their babies. The lack of supply is not the only concern. When parents find the formula, it now costs  18 percent more than last year as inflation continues to plague the country.

What does the Biden administration plan to do to alleviate  the supply chain problems? Thus far, no one has adequately answered  this question. The incompetence of this administration has placed our infants’ well-being at risk. Formula manufacturers say they are increasing production to keep up with the demand. Regardless of the increased production, it may be 4 to 6 weeks before the shortage improves.

Parents may be asking what they should do in the face of this crisis. Experts agree the first thing is to avoid panicking. (Parents may be tempted to stockpile formula; however, this would worsen the supply shortage.) Next, call your pediatrician. You may be able to switch brands. Physicians also say that you should not water down formula or use homemade formula. They also suggest not purchasing breastmilk from untrusted sources. There are milk banks for breastmilk that are strictly monitored and tested, which may be a potential source for some parents.

If parents find themselves without formula, experts recommend calling food banks, charities, your local WIC office, or dial 211, which will connect you with various sources.

If you are concerned that you may have some of the formula that was recalled, you can check the list of recalled items at the Illinois Department of Human Services web site:

IDHS: Abbott Formula Recall (state.il.us)

Take ACTION: Please consider calling your US representatives and asking what they intend to do about the supply chain shortages, including the current lack of baby formula. If you are able, consider donating to your local crisis pregnancy center to help them provide necessary supplies to mothers in need.




Musk vs. Leftist Hatred of Free Speech

The ugly truth about leftists is that their desire for freedom extends only to members of the hive. Only worker bees enslaved to the drag Queen should be permitted to speak in the virtual public square. If Americans didn’t realize that before, they sure know it now from the unhinged responses of leftists to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. They don’t fear that Musk will clamp down on speech, or that he’ll create new algorithms that censor “progressive” speech, or that Twitter will ban news stories. No, they fear Musk will allow free speech on Twitter, including speech leftists hate, which leftists call “hate speech.” They unjustifiably fear Musk might treat leftists like Dorsey and Zuckerberg have treated the right.

One of the most eye-popping responses to Musk’s purchase came from MSNBC host Ari Melber who appeared completely ignorant of the irony dripping from his lips:

If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself, you don’t even have to be transparent, you could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of it nominees. Or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find about it till after the election.

Twitter employee and proud illegal “Latinx” Laura i. Gomez shares Melber’s concern that a free Twitter may prevent leftist candidates from being elected:

A M*sk-owned Twitter is one of the greatest threats to the 2022 and 2024 elections. We are f*cked if this happens.

What leftists most hate is the possibility that Americans will now be able to express freely their beliefs about topics like homosexuality, marriage, “trans”-cultism, and racist “anti-racism.” Leftists think conservative beliefs on these topics are offensive, destructive, and dangerous and want them censored, while they—leftists—should remain free to share their beliefs, which half the country finds offensive, destructive, and dangerous. Leftists arrogate to themselves the right to decide for the entire country which beliefs are hateful, dangerous, and should be censored.

Since the lion’s share of banning and shadow-banning by social media platforms pertains to dissent from their views of sexuality, a few words on that topic are in order.

For the umpteenth time, believing homoerotic acts or cross-sex impersonation are immoral and harmful does not constitute hatred of persons. Nor are public expressions of those beliefs calls to violence.

Moral disapproval of homoerotic acts and cross-sex impersonation no more constitute hatred of persons who engage in them than does moral disapproval of consensual adult incest, zoophilia, or polyamory constitute hatred of persons who engage in those acts. Yet, no one is accused of being “haters” for expressing disapproval of sibling “love,” animal “love,” or sexual profligacy. And public expressions of disapproval of these forms of “love” are not banned for violating “community standards” on social media.

(As a relevant aside, no public schools promote “acceptance” of these forms of “love”—not even in the service of diversity, inclusion, and tolerance. And here I thought to leftists “love is love.”)

The so-called “freedom” that Twitter, Facebook, and Ari Melber fancy is not the freedom Americans once cherished and led to the ACLU’s decision in the 1970’s to defend the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois—the home of many Jews and survivors of the Holocaust. The “freedom” leftists love is the tyranny that fascists everywhere love.

If Americans didn’t fear loss of employment over speaking freely, there would be even more free speech in the virtual public square. And if the ability to make a living in America—particularly in an America run by corporate behemoths—depends on censorship of ideas that leftists hate, the First Amendment means nothing.

Elon Musk is right:

Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.

The ACLU once believed that. In 1968, Eleanor Holmes Norton, a young black attorney working for the ACLU, defended the right of the National States’ Rights Party, a white supremacist group, to hold a rally. Looking back on her decision, Norton said,

[T]he reason that we had free speech, continue to have free speech, particularly as African Americans, is because nobody could keep us from speaking. They could keep us from using the same facilities, they could keep us from voting. But the First Amendment said that everybody can talk. It turns out that free speech is most important to those who have the least in our society.

Former ACLU Executive Director Aryeh Neier expanded on the Holmes’ decision:

Eleanor won that case nine nothing in the U.S. Supreme Court. Ultimately anyone can be silenced. It depends who’s in power at a given moment, who they want to silence, whether they want to silence them for political reasons or for corrupt reasons. There can be all kinds of reasons to want to cut off somebody’s speech. And the only way to prevail in free speech cases is to stand for the principle of freedom of speech, to say that freedom of speech cuts across all ideological concerns, all other concerns, and that if anybody is denied the right to speak, it threatens the right to speak of everybody.

While the left blathers on about justice, they mete out injustice at every turn. For example, leftists talk a lot about the wealthy paying their fair share, but they talk little about how much of their money the wealthy voluntarily redistribute to projects that likely do a more efficient job of alleviating suffering than would a bloated, inefficient, corrupt government bureaucracy unaccountable to the public whose money they waste.

I, for one, am very glad that Elon Musk had a few billion dollars lying around to spend on a worthy project that will help preserve First Amendment rights that leftists have their deceitful and desperately sick hearts set on destroying.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Musk-v-Leftist-Hatred-of-Free-Speech.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





Ideologically Grooming Kids in Schools

Here’s some news you might have missed.

On April 7, 2022, Florida preschool teacher, 28-year-old Lois Schwartz, boasted about teaching her students that she is neither a boy nor a girl and that she’s a polyamorous, pagan witch.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1512208604421496832

Eli” Dinh, formerly Molly, a kindergarten teacher at the private Hillbrook School in California, uses a pronoun game to inculcate five-year-olds with her arguable, self-serving gender theories. On Instagram she goes by @okayenby, with “enby,” standing for nonbinary. She expects others to refer to her by the third-person plural pronouns “they” and “them.” Dinh is a woman who gave birth and breastfed two children before she decided that her authentic identity was male. Then she started doping testosterone, hired a quack surgeon to lop off her breasts, and changed her name from Molly to Eli. Dinh’s favorite curricular components are, not surprisingly, social and emotional learning and anti-bias education—for kindergartners. Private schools may teach whatever destructive nonsense they want, but Dinh is the cold, sharp tip of a colossal iceberg that is plowing through government schools as well.

Brooke Charter School first-grade teacher “Ray Skyer,” a bearded woman who pretends to be a man, told K-2 students this hogwash during a zoom class:

Something that’s really cool and unique about me is that I’m transgender. We touched on that earlier this week in the book that Ms. Hammond read, but I’m going to give you my explanation about what it means to be transgender.

So, when babies are born, the doctor looks and makes a guess on whether the baby is a boy or girl based on what that baby looks like. Most of the time, that guess is 100 percent correct. … But sometimes the doctor is wrong. The doctor makes an incorrect guess. When the doctor makes a correct guess, that’s when a person is called cisgender. When a doctor’s guess is wrong, that’s when they are transgender.

So, I’m a man, but when I was baby, the doctors told my parents that I was a girl. … Until I was 18 years old, everyone thought I was a girl. This was super, super uncomfortable for me because I knew that wasn’t right. … So, when I was 18, I told my family and friends that I’m really a boy, and it was like this huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders, and I had the freedom to be who I truly am.

This short video teaches parents everything they need to know about morally and intellectually unmoored activists who self-identify as teachers working in schools. First, they propagandize in many ways, including through literature, direct instruction, and demagoguery.

Second, they propagate highly controversial beliefs without telling young students that the “explanations” are controversial, disputed, faith-based, and devoid of scientific support. Doctors don’t “guess” whether babies are boys or girls. They identify the sex of babies. Skyer was correctly identified as the girl she is and ever more will be. Her mother’s obstetrician did not guess, and he or she was not wrong. At 18, Skyer decided to start masquerading as a man.

Skyer did not merely explain. She manipulated the emotions of young innocent children who would not want anyone—especially a teacher they know and like—to feel “super, super uncomfortable.” So, in addition to feeding them fantastical fiction in the guise of objective truth, Skyer is trying to make children feel predisposed to sex-masquerades.

Indefensible ideological grooming of children by leftists is not limited to the United States. Australian Member of Parliament Bernie Finn shared an assignment given to 10-year-old boys and girls in a school in the district he represents. Children were instructed to discuss their father’s erections and ejaculations with their fathers. It should go without saying that at no age should a child be asked to discuss with their fathers their erections and ejaculations. But we are forced to say such things now because purportedly “civilized” societies no longer experience righteous anger at evil being promoted as good to children in school. How long before “civilized” societies no longer find father-daughter personal orgasm discussions objectionable?

Conservative Americans seem—to borrow a British term—gobsmacked by the trans-volution sweeping our formerly rational society. I am gobsmacked by their astonishment. The trans-volution has been slowly emerging like a parasitic guinea worm from the homo-volution which was birthed by the Boomer’s sexual revolution. I first warned about the emerging trans-volution in late 2008 when I wrote about “bisexual” Anglican priest Laurel Dykstra who has twins via a sperm donor. Dyskstra wrote an article in 2005 on how to make preschools “trans-friendly.” Here were her explanations and recommendations:

  • She said that the “gender binary system. … is harmful to everyone.”
  • She moralized that “It is not enough for classrooms, teachers, and schools to be ‘open’ or ‘non-judgmental’; they need to be actively trans-positive.”
  • Dykstra recommended that when talking to preschoolers, teachers should say things like “‘Well, most men have penises, but some don’t,’” and “‘Some girls grow up to be men.’”
  • She urged teachers to “Encourage kids to question their assumptions. ‘How do you know that that person is a woman? Could a man wear a dress?’”
  • She instructed teachers to “Call children by the name and the pronouns they choose.”
  • She recommended accessorizing classrooms with a “Tranny Teddy. Have a non-gendered toy/doll/puppet…. Do not use pronouns and give this creature a variety of gendered clothing, such as a skirt and tie. If asked, say ‘Oh, Binker isn’t a boy or a girl.’”
  • She suggested having a “Butch/Femme Day. Why not teach kids language like butch/femme, as an alternative to boy/girl or male/female? You could have dress-up days to play deliberately with gender, like ‘Fabulous and Fearless Day’ or ‘Capable and Campy.’”
  • She encouraged teachers to “Invite a drag performer or transsexual person who would be willing to share their story and a photo album.”
  • When reading picture books to preschoolers, Dykstra recommended “switching pronouns, avoiding them altogether, or using alternative pronouns.”
  • Dykstra rationalized using deceit in the face of parental opposition: “For ‘stealth practitioners’ (i.e., teachers in a transphobic setting), these classroom suggestions can be implemented without fanfare to create a more just and welcoming classroom.”

Dykstra offered these suggestions 17 years ago, and I issued warnings 14 years ago. Increasing numbers of warnings have been issued across the nation by men and women who have been paying attention. The ignorance and sloth of conservatives—including church leaders—in addressing the evil in the midst of our schools is inexcusable.

If Americans had been paying attention to warnings about the perverse shape of things to come, maybe the disaster we see unfolding in schools could have been stopped, thereby preventing the incalculable damage being done to children. But confronting socially acceptable evil requires not just awareness but courage, perseverance, and a willingness to suffer for the neighbors we love.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Ideologically-Grooming-Kids-in-Schools.mp3





To Stupidity and Beyond

Written by Dr. Richard D. Kocur

“To infinity and beyond!” In November of 1995, the first of four blockbuster animated films in the Toy Story franchise was released by Walt Disney Pictures to both audience and critical acclaim. With Toy Story, astute businesspeople at the Walt Disney Company created a cash-cow franchise capable of producing revenue for years to come by creating and delivering a product that appealed to their target audience of parents and children. Unfortunately, the Walt Disney Company’s leap from a business focused on producing broadly appealing content to a business exemplifying the latest version of woke corporate activism, redefining the nature and use of a company’s products, has taken the company to the height of stupidity and beyond.

Disney is a long-time part of the landscape, literally and figuratively, in the state of Florida. The company’s 2020 annual report indicates that of Disney’s 203,000 global employees, nearly 40% are in the state of Florida; and a small but vocal minority of those Florida cast-members are not happy.

On March 28, 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill (HB) 1557, Parental Rights in Education. According to the governor’s website, the bill, “reenforces parents’ fundamental rights to make decisions regarding the upbringing of their children.” The bill also, “prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through 3rd grade and prohibits instruction that is not age appropriate for students.” The Walt Disney Company disagrees.

Let that sink in.

Disney, a company whose legacy was built on producing entertainment for parents and their children, disagrees. After a small group of employees threw a tantrum normally akin to an exhausted six-year-old waiting in line for a turn to ride Dumbo the Flying Elephant, Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek surrendered. The company issued a statement on Twitter stating, “Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts.”

While the drift of companies towards activism in social causes is not new, Disney’s stated goal for this piece of legislation not only runs counter to what should be the goal of any publicly traded business—i.e., to create value for its shareholders—but crosses a line into territory that runs counter to rational business thought.

Organizations like Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Meta, and Major League Baseball have all taken public stances on social issues. These stances have alienated wide segments of their customers based solely on differences in political viewpoint. Through it all, the products or services of these companies remained neutral. The ingredients of Coca-Cola were not altered in an effort to promote the company’s social agenda. In Disney’s case, however, its stance on the Florida bill has the potential to alienate many of the organization’s core customers (parents) precisely because the product will no longer be neutral. Vocal Disney employees indicated in leaked internal meeting videos that the portrayal of Disney characters in television and film will be a vehicle for the promotion of LGBTQ+ lifestyles and identities. In other words, Disney’s products will no longer be neutral but will be directed to serve a social agenda.

Disney’s activism is a bridge too far even in the current day of woke corporations. Making donations to activist groups or voicing support for social justice or climate change is one thing, but using platforms designed to provide entertainment for children—children—to promote alternative lifestyles is a new layer of the woke stratosphere.

What are the potential consequences? Maybe nothing. But maybe a substantial number of parents will see Disney’s actions for what they are, an attempt to supplant parental control over what values are taught to their children and by whom. Maybe the forces of the free market will spring into action and new entertainment options will emerge to fill the market void left by Disney. And maybe, like Buzz Lightyear who mistakenly believed his wings would carry him to infinity and beyond, Disney will realize that forcing extremist values and ideals upon its customers simply will not fly.


This article was originally published at The Institute for Faith & Freedom at Grove City College, where Dr. Richard D. Kocur is an assistant professor of business. Dr. Kocur specializes in marketing and business strategy and has over 25 years of experience in the healthcare industry.