There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
Meta/Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday told highly popular podcaster Joe Rogan that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for 7 days on a request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation.
Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell was authentic.
But social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook jumped into action to protect Joe Biden after the New York Post dropped an ‘October surprise’ on the Biden campaign.
The New York Post published damning contents from Hunter Biden’s laptop right before the 2020 election but Twitter and Facebook blocked to story from going viral.
Rogan asked Zuckerberg how Facebook handles controversial stories.
“The FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team and was like, ‘hey, just so you know, like you should be on high alert. There was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s going to be similar to that,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg said Facebook used algorithms to decrease the distribution of the story.
VIDEO:
BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for 7 days based on a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation. pic.twitter.com/llTA7IqGa1
The FBI not only helped protect the Biden campaign leading up to the 2020 election, the bureau leadership also told employees not to look at Hunter Biden’s laptop.
A whistleblower told Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) that FBI leadership told bureau employees not to look at Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell.
The FBI whistleblower also said the FBI purposely slow-walked the Hunter Biden investigation.
The FBI took possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop nearly 3 years ago and the Justice Department still has not charged Hunter with any crimes despite countless emails revealing an intricate web involving the Biden Crime family’s ties to the Ukraine, Russia and the Chinese Communist Party.
Senator Johnson sent a letter to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on Tuesday about the new whistleblower allegations.
“Whistleblowers have recently contacted my office to share serious concerns about the FBI’s handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop,” Johnson told Horowitz, telling the watchdog that after the FBI obtained the laptop from a Delaware computer shop in late 2019, local FBI leadership told bureau employees that “you will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop” and that the FBI is “not going to change the outcome of the election again,” the whistleblowers said.
Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook restricted the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story because of a warning from the FBI against the spread of election disinformation.
Zuckerberg made the comments while appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast released Thursday. Rogan asked him specifically about the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“Basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us,” Zuckerberg explained, “some folks on our team, and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert, there was, we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump of that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.'”
He went on to add that Facebook allowed the story to be shared, unlike Twitter that completely shut down the sharing of the story on its platform. Zuckerberg said that for about a week the distribution of the story on Facebook was decreased by ranking it lower on the platform’s news feed.
“Fewer people saw it than would have otherwise,” Zuckerberg said.
“By what percentage?” Rogan asked.
“I don’t know off the top of my head, but it’s, it’s meaningful,” Zuckerberg replied.
“But we weren’t sort of as black and white about it as Twitter,” he continued. “We just kind of thought hey look, if the FBI, which I still view is a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement- they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something then I want to take that seriously.”
Zuckerberg said he didn’t remember if the FBI specifically targeted that story, but said the laptop story fit the pattern of the warning that was given by the FBI.
Elsewhere in the interview, Zuckerberg said his philosophy was that there was no perfect algorithm to weed out bad actors and stories. He explained that the restrictions have tradeoffs whether they are too tight or too loose.
Here’s the video of Zuckerberg’s comments:
Mark Zuckerberg Answers to Facebook’s Moderation of Controversial Content
And here is the YouTube revised list of rules on COVID disinformation from today.
Back in January Google-YouTube would censor you and ban your account if you questioned masking.
And back in January Google-YouTube would censor you and ban your account if you questioned the efficacy of the COVID vaccines.
That has all changed.
Today even Google-YouTube admits the vaccines didn’t work and masking was ineffective and destructive, especially to children.
Of course, The Gateway Pundit has been censored and fact-checked repeatedly for publishing articles on masking and vaccines that are now regarded as factual.
When will we receive our apology from these ruthless and dishonest hacks?
This is going to be a bitterly cold winter for a whole lot of people. In particular, things are likely to get really uncomfortable in Europe. Soaring energy prices and concern about potential shortages are causing anxiety all over the continent, and widespread protests have already started to take place. The cost of living has become extremely painful for those on the bottom of the economic food chain, and people want their governments to do something. Of course this is what always happens when nations embrace socialism. There is an expectation that those in charge will solve any and every problem, but this time around the limitations of the socialists running Europe will become very clear.
Thanks to the war in Ukraine and a number of other factors, the price of natural gas in Europe is now approximately six times higher than it was last year…
European natural gas prices are taking a breather amid further signs that soaring energy costs are crippling economic output, heaping pressure on politicians to resolve the crisis with winter just a few months away.
Benchmark futures retreated after settling at a record high on Monday. Prices are still about six times higher than they were at this time last year, with the panic spreading across nations ahead of peak winter demand.
Needless to say, many in Europe are being completely stunned by the size of their energy bills, and a massive backlash has been brewing.
British grassroots group “Don’t Pay UK” is calling for people to boycott energy bills from Oct. 1, while the trade union-backed “Enough is Enough” campaign kicked off a series of rallies and actions in mid-August calling for pay rises, rent caps, cheaper energy and food, and taxes on the rich.
A worsening cost-of-living crisis across Europe has already seen workers in France, Spain and Belgium go out on strike in the public transport, health and aviation sectors, pushing for higher wages to help them cope with rocketing inflation.
But this is just the beginning.
As supplies get even tighter this winter, energy costs are only going to go higher.
And a lot of officials in Europe are extremely concerned about the potential for shortages and blackouts.
The list of industries that are curbing output is growing. Poland’s biggest chemicals company, Grupa Azoty SA, has stopped making some of its key products and trimmed production of ammonia because of record gas prices, it said in a statement on Tuesday.
Unless the war in Ukraine comes to a speedy conclusion, this crisis is not going away any time soon.
So the people of Europe are going to be asked to make additional sacrifices in the months ahead. This week, French President Emmanuel Macron actually used the phrase “end of abundance” to describe what citizens of his country would soon be facing…
Emmanuel Macron has warned the French they are facing sacrifices and what he called the “end of abundance”, at his government’s first cabinet meeting after the summer holidays.
The president, speaking before ministers at the Élysée, said the country was at a “tipping point” and faced a difficult winter and a new era of instability caused by climate change and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Based on the anger that we are already witnessing, I don’t think that the people of Europe are going to handle the “end of abundance” too well.
Meanwhile, energy prices in the U.S. continue to skyrocket as well. At this point, the price of natural gas in the U.S. has risen more than 150 percent in 2022…
U.S. natural gas prices briefly hurdled $10 per million British thermal units (BTUs) on Tuesday, the highest since 2008. They are up more than 150% this year.
Approximately half the population uses natural gas to heat their homes.
So this is really troubling news.
Energy bills in this country are going to be absolutely obscene this winter, and we have already reached a point where about one out of every 6 of us are behind on our power bills…
At least 20 million households — or about 1 in 6 American homes — are behind on their power bills as soaring electricity prices spark what is said to be the worst-ever crisis in late utility payments, according to Bloomberg, citing data from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada).
Neada said electricity prices had increased significantly since 2020 after a decade of stagnation. The steep rise has resulted in billions of dollars in overdue power bills.
In state after state, the percentage of customers that are behind on their energy bills just continues to go higher and higher. Here are a couple of examples…
California’s PG&E Corp. has seen a more than 40% jump since February 2020 in the number of residential customers behind on payments. For New Jersey’s Public Service Enterprise Group, the total is up more than 30% for customers at least 90 days late—and that’s just since March.
If things are this bad already, what will the numbers look like if energy bills go up another 50 percent or more this winter?
We are being warned that a “tsunami of shutoffs” is coming, and that is not an exaggeration at all.
In both the United States and Europe, there are going to be millions upon millions of people that cannot afford to heat their homes.
And when there are vast numbers of people that cannot even afford to pay for the essentials, that is a recipe for civil unrest.
According to one professor that tracks these things, we have already seen approximately 10,000 protests of an economic nature around the world since last November…
Whichever route they choose, the coming winter is set to be plagued by social unrest, warned Naomi Hossain, a professor of development politics at the American University in Washington D.C. who is studying energy, fuel and food riots.
At a conservative estimate, 10,000 such protests have taken place worldwide since last November, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation – with more expected in an uncertain future.
For years, I have been relentlessly warning that unprecedented civil unrest would be coming.
Now it is here, and it is only going to get worse.
I would very much encourage you to do what you can to become more independent from the power grid.
Energy bills are headed to heights that would have once been unimaginable, and this is going to cause excruciating pain all over the western world.
For decades, the elites of feminism and academia have undermined fatherhood and manhood through the mainstream media and entertainment industry.
Their attack on men has been so successful that masculinity in many western nations is now deemed toxic. Many psychologists today have endorsed this diagnosis by claiming that the innate characteristics of manhood — risk-taking, stoicism, dominance, aggression and competitiveness — are ‘harmful’.
These are the qualities in men that have defended our nations in war, led rescue missions even in the most dangerous situations, designed and built cities, explored the depths of the earth, ocean and sky, and developed, invented and innovated endlessly.
This attack on manhood has morphed into what I call the “fatherlessness pandemic,” giving the natural affectionbetween boys and fathers a death blow.
Even the natural affection of women has turned against men, so that our relationship has changed from being complementary to competitive.
Feminist Destruction
Via a complicit Hollywood and an unquestioning mainstream media, the feminist movement has led the charge to destroy motherhood and womanhood. Women are increasingly the working backbone of our western societies, and in the US they now outnumber men in the workforce, filling childcare centres with our little ones.
The way that many women in our nation are fighting for the right to kill our unborn children is a sign that the natural affection between mothers and children has been gravely weakened.
In addition, it is astounding how many young women I encounter today who have tense and bitter relationships with their mothers. This should not be the case amongst Christians, but from observation, there appears to be little difference between them and those from outside the faith. There is a clear, and increasingly obvious increase in the lack of natural affection between mothers and daughters.
Thanks to the worldwide pornographic epidemic, natural affection is being broken not only between men and women, but also between sons and their mothers and their sisters — resulting in the objectification of women.
My response to young people when they ask how they can live out their Christian faith in the current culture is that we need to take our faith seriously and live counter-culturally, that is, refuse to emulate the world’s narrative and empty philosophy. Having strong families that display genuine natural affection is the key to leading the way.
Sadly, today’s generation has little respect for their parents’ generation. They see them as developing and sustaining the institutions that are the source of so much perceived ‘oppression’ and ‘racism’. They have embraced the lie that the ‘patriarchy’ is an oppressive structure that must be destroyed. Allegiance to the family is looked on with scorn.
One writer, a former high school teacher, observes of young people, “They dismiss religion, are not interested in marriage and family and are not patriotic.” In fact, today’s generation in general could be described as without natural affection, the natural instinctive love between family members. And this characteristic is listed in 2 Timothy as a last-day phenomenon.
And this brings me to a deep concern that demands Christian awareness.
The Great Reset: Breaking Familial Bonds
The World Economic Forum (WEF) issued a short video in 2020, titled the Great Reset Initiative, which featured a list of statements predicting how life will be in 2030.
The Great Reset Initiative is an economic recovery plan drawn up by the WEC in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project was launched in June 2020, with the video featuring Prince Charles.
There were statements like, “You’ll own nothing, but you’ll be happy,” which is an astounding prediction for our Western materialistic society that can’t produce enough things for our insatiable selfish needs of comfort, enjoyment and entertainment.
In addition, this statement seems to ominously reflect Marxist ideology: if citizens don’t own anything, then who does?
One could write much on the concerns of each WEC statement, but there is one that is quite alarming for Christians, “Western values will have been tested to the breaking point.”
Initially, this sounds innocuous, as it may simply be interpreted as: Up to 2030, our society’s core values will be tested. But it doesn’t mean that. Western values are our Judeo-Christian foundations and the WEF has these values in its sights.
In order to implement the Great Reset endgame, Christian principles and traditions will need to go. There can be no Great Reset without breaking the natural bonds between parents and children.
There has never been a greater effort to break these bonds. In the new narrative, parents are oppressors of their children, and all children belong to the state.
The former Soviet Union under communist rule encouraged children to report their parents for offences against the government, including holding the wrong opinion. I believe this is still happening in communist countries today such as China.
Children are trained through the state schools that their first allegiance is to the state for the greater good. If you don’t think it’s happening today, even in our own country, look closer. Children are now being made aware that they can report their parents for crimes such as gender suppression.
Lessons from History
As Christians, we must not be ignorant of what is happening. In his book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, Rod Dreher writes about the many interviews he conducted with Christians who made it through the totalitarian regime of the former Communist Soviet Union.
One of the key characteristics was the strong family relationship that was cultivated by a strong father and mother with a strong Christian faith that they instilled into their children, and a close-knit group of believers in house churches.
They discipled their children and new believers, not only in the Christian faith, but taught them how to read the world. And this is important, because children today need to discern truth from lies that the world is telling them 24/7.
Dreyer refers to learnings from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was a dissident of the Soviet communist regime. Solzhenitsyn wrote to his fellow countrymen before he was exiled from his home in Russia in 1974 for exposing the inhumane repression of his fellow countrymen, particularly by its repressive Gulag system.
In his open letter, titled “Live Not By Lies”, he urges his countrymen not to accept the lies of the government.
Solzhenitsyn equates “lies” with ideology, the illusion that human nature and society can be reshaped to predetermined specifications. And his last word before leaving his homeland urged Soviet citizens as individuals to refrain from cooperating with the regime’s lies.
“Given our deep-seated cowardice…,” he wrote, “Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin…” He implores his countrymen and women to join together to take these timid steps toward spiritual independence and live by truth.
As more people set out together on this path of passive resistance, the whole inhumane system will totter and collapse. And thus it did.
Resistance is what is needed to the lies of the world; do not cooperate, do not indulge, do not adopt the same attitudes or practices.
As Christians, our allegiance is to God first, and we must align our thoughts and ways to His righteousness. By doing so, we will reverse the trend of marriage breakups, relationship breakdowns, and children abandoning their faith in Christ.
“See to it that there is no one who takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception in accordance with human tradition, in accordance with the elementary principles of the world, rather than in accordance with Christ.” ~ Colossians 2:8 (NASV)
After three weeks of COVID, vacation, more COVID, more vacation and a couple appearances to sign over $1 trillion in new government spending ($700 billion for green new deal and $300 billion for excusing student loans) Joe Biden made a quick stop in Maryland on Thursday night.
Joe Biden held a rally for some reason. They bused in a bunch of idiots to stand behind him and cheer the collapse of the United States.
During the rally, Joe Biden slurred, mumbled, lost his train of thought numerous times, wandered away from the podium, and screamed at the audience.
According to a recent Barna study, roughly 65% of Americans claim to be Christians, and yet only 6% of Americans hold a biblical worldview. This means that over 94% of Americans (many who identify as Christian) no longer view the Bible as their ultimate authority on how they navigate life. With so many rejecting the Bible (and thus the words of Christ) as their guide, they have nowhere to turn but themselves. In this special episode recorded at the CrossExamined Instructor Academy (CIA) 2022 in Cincinnati, OH, Frank teams up with guests (and CIA instructors) Natasha Crain, Alisa Childers, Richard Howe, and Brett Kunkle to discuss the real issues the remnant of Christians need to be addressing today. Hint – it’s not atheism.
Despite the breakdown of the charges against Paul, he was held prisoner in Cæsarea for two years. The wicked governor sought to please the Jews, and hoped to exact a bribe from Paul for his release. After two years Felix was succeeded by Festus, a more honorable man; and when the Jews again accused Paul, Festus listened to his defense. Paul demanded that as a Roman citizen he be tried at Rome; and Festus, much impressed by the teacher’s words, brought the case before King Agrippa, the successor of Herod, and Roman viceroy over all Palestine.
Thus Paul spake before the highest authorities in all the East. So well and vigorously did he defend himself that Festus cried out, “Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad.” And so potently did he expound the Faith that King Agrippa, sitting there beside his queen, Bernice, was well nigh persuaded to believe—though the text of the Biblical verse of his outcry has sometimes been interpreted as being sarcastic rather than hesitant. Both Agrippa and Felix agreed that there was no cause for charging Paul as a criminal.
Our culture says, “you do you” and “follow your heart,” but the Bible paints a much different picture. However, it seems that even those who don’t have high regard for Christianity or God’s Word are beginning to point out that all we need is common sense to see that our culture’s view of issues like family, gender, and sexuality don’t line with up how the world and reality is structured.
In this special episode recorded at CrossExamined Instructors Academy (CIA) 2022 in Cincinnati, OH, Frank teams up with guests (and CIA instructors) J. Warner Wallace and Greg Koukl to discuss our fallen human nature, why defunding the police is a bad idea, the importance of fathers in our communities, and how people who don’t like to deal with truth are just going to use their power to overwhelm you. Greg Koukl also gives us a good reminder that “faithfulness is not theologically difficult,” and just because the culture is confused on many of these important issues doesn’t mean that we need to compromise on defending the truth.
The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. (Psalm 92:12)
These trees are not trained and pruned by man: palms and cedars are “trees of the Lord,” and it is by His care that they flourish. Even so it is with the saints of the Lord: they are His own care. These trees are evergreen and are beautiful objects at all seasons of the year. Believers are not sometimes holy and sometimes ungodly: they stand in the beauty of the Lord under all weathers. Everywhere these trees are noteworthy: no one can gaze upon a landscape in which there are either palms or cedars without his attention being fixed upon these royal growths. The followers of Jesus are the observed of all observers: like a city set on a hill, they cannot be hid.
The child of God flourishes like a palm tree, which pushes all its strength upward in one erect column without a single branch. It is a pillar with a glorious capital. It has no growth to the right or to the left but sends all its force heavenward and bears its fruit as near the sky as possible. Lord, fulfill this type in me.
The cedar braves all storms and grows near the eternal snows, the Lord Himself filling it with a sap which keeps its heart warm and its bough strong. Lord, so let it be with me, I pray Thee. Amen.
Most people agree that we live in a broken world—and there’s plenty of debate about how to fix it. But here’s the real question: Is there even a solution? On Truth For Life, Alistair Begg confirms that there is and explains what that means for us. Listen…
“In whom we have boldness and access with confidence by faith in Him.” Ephesians 3:12
What a friend we have in Jesus! We sang that song in church yesterday. Wow, that song has meaningful words. Have you sung it recently? Just read the last two lines of the second verse:
“Can we find a friend so faithful? Who will all our sorrow bear? Jesus knows our every weakness. Take it to the Lord in prayer.”
What an amazing friend! He is always there for us – caring, listening, loving. He never leaves us. He is always the same and He is always there. Our Stability (the Rock)!
Everyone and everything else around us changes constantly. Our bodies change. Our locations change. The seasons change. Children come and go – friends too. Parents leave. Of course, I don’t have to tell you about changes. You are well aware.
That is why, while we were singing, What a Friend we Have in Jesus, I thought of a very sad time in our lives when our five-month old grandson died suddenly from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It was the hardest time we had ever gone through. Not only were we grieving the loss of our grandson, we watched our children (which was so much worse) go through grief.
During the time I was grieving the death of Spencer, I would often wonder what could be more painful than losing our precious grand baby? But one day the Holy Spirit told me what could be much, much worse. He reminded me that if Jesus would leave me that would be utterly horrible – total darkness. Can you imagine?
Who would I talk to hundreds of times a day if He weren’t there? Who would I send thoughts of praise to many times a day? Where would I go in times of emergency? Where would I receive Life and Light for the day?
How glad I am that He will never leave me – or you. No matter the changes that occur during our lifetime, He does not change. He does not leave us! He is our “forever friend.” What a friend we have in Jesus!
Father, thank You for living in us in the form of the Holy Spirit. Thank You that Your Word is truth – all Your promises are true. You will never leave us or forsake us. Thank You so much. Amen.
“You see, at just the right time, when we were powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.” Romans 5:6
This past weekend another unexpected fire hit our little mountain town. Laughter and joy of celebrating my daughter’s birthday quickly morphed into anxiety, dread and fear. Reflecting on my emotions after seeing the helicopters and planes clean up today, I am left with the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness.
Most fires have an unknown origin. They appear suddenly, with the wind its driving force, leaving terrible destruction.
When the fire came within ¼ mile of our home, the wind changed direction. I know that God controls the wind and am thankful to him that our house was preserved.
Sin is like a consuming fire. It is also insatiable and destroys everything it touches. Without Christ, oddly we felt indestructible and confident, thoroughly enjoying the passing pleasures of sin.
We were comfortable, not realizing we were slaves to the desires that would take us ultimately to our eternal destruction.
When the truth came to our ears, fear gripped our hearts. But we were unable and without strength to change. Then great sorrow and dreadfulness overcame us.
Now let us marvel at the goodness and mercy of God. When we were still powerless, in due time, Christ died for the ungodly.
Then, just like the wind that goes where it wishes, the Spirit came to us granting repentance and we believed.
What about you? Are you comfortable in what you love to do? Don’t quiet your conscience. The flames of sin can bring you quickly to an eternal place you don’t want to go.
May the Lord change the wind in your life, bringing you his Spirit who alone can preserve your soul.
Precious Lord Jesus, we were not only ungodly, but unable to change. Thank you for your great mercy as you brought us great deliverance in such a hopeless state. We praise you for preserving our souls now and forevermore!
When Paul was first arrested, the Romans prepared, according to their usual cruel custom, to scourge him, so as to torture him into confessing what terrible crime he had committed which had thus enraged the Jews. To protect himself, Paul declared his Roman citizenship. After that the soldiers dared not harm him. They summoned the chief priests to accuse Paul; but the great teacher argued so ably with his opponents that many of these were led to believe in him and support him. Thus the court was broken up in disorder.
After this failure, forty men among those who were most embittered against Paul made a solemn vow to slay him wherever they could reach him. To give the murderers opportunity, the priests asked that Paul be again examined in public. His friends, however, warned the Romans of the plot; and the Roman governor of the city, not Pilate now but a stronger man, sent Paul away secretly at night under an ample guard. He was thus brought to Cæsarea, where Felix, the governor of all Judea, lived. Here the Jewish priests were summoned to make their charges against the prisoner; but they could prove no case against his bold defense. Nay, even the Roman governor himself, an evil-minded man. was abashed by Paul’s high words and purity.
Taliban yet to find body of al Qaeda leader killed in US airstrike The Taliban have not found the body of Ayman al-Zawahiri and are continuing investigations, group spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said on Thursday, after the United States said they killed the al Qaeda leader in an airstrike in Kabul last month.
Mayorkas officially cancels DHS disinformation board Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas put the final kibosh on his disinformation governance board on Wednesday, after a review he ordered came back with a firm recommendation that the idea was a stinker.
Bank Will End Loans for New Gas and Diesel Cars, Buyers Will Only Get Loans for Right Decision You may have heard of a company’s “ESG score”: The initials stand for environmental, social and governance — and the scores businesses receive can determine whether they have access to capital and at what interest rate, among other things. Now, Bank Australia wants to export that kind of thinking to an individual’s choice of car. According to Fox Business, the financial institution announced Friday that it will stop providing loans for new gas and diesel cars starting in 2025. Instead, it will only be giving loans to those buying new electric vehicles or used gas and diesel cars.
The FBI’s Gestapo Tactics: Hallmarks Of An Authoritarian Regime With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention. These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme.
Biden White House Directly Facilitated FBI Mar-A-Lago Raid While Biden administration officials have repeatedly denied prior knowledge of the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, journalist John Solomon reveals that the White House was at the ‘ignition point’ of the investigation – working directly with the Department of Justice and National Archives to facilitate the grand jury panel which led to the Aug. 8 raid. Biden had empowered the National Archives to waive any potential executive privilege claims.
UK imports no fuel from Russia for 1st time ever Defense Minister James Heappey warned it would be “catastrophic” to re-establish relations with Russia, which he said was “arguably the most straightforward solution to the cost-of-living crisis.” Doing so would impact Britain’s security within the space of just a few years, he said. “Every single thing that I have seen in the last six months tells me that that would be catastrophic for security in the Euro-Atlantic,” Heappey said.
Macron says France now facing ‘end of abundance’ Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday warned the French people to be ready for “sacrifices” as the country is facing “the end of abundance” amid a series of crises. “What we are going through is a big shift, a big upheaval,” Macron said at a Cabinet meeting at the Elysee Palace after a three-week holiday break. He cited a “series of serious crises” from the instability triggered by the Ukraine war ….
Destructive solar storms are possible as Sun approaches height of its terrifying solar cycle The solar maximum, which occurs in 2023 at the end of the Sun’s 11-year cycle, is soon to arrive. The occurrence of solar storms has become more frequent recently, albeit their power is still relatively low. Because of this, these solar storms have not caused any harm to Earth except for producing auroras in the northern sky and briefly disrupting radio communications. A horrifying development, however, may soon change all that.
‘This is evil’: ‘SWAT’ attack launched on Marjorie Taylor Greene at 1 a.m. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., was the target of a “SWAT” attack early Wednesday morning, but no one was injured in the incident, and she expressed gratitude to local law enforcement officers who responded appropriately. The caller who obviously intended injury then called back, confirming he or she was upset about Green’s politics on transgenderism’s ideology, while using a computer generated voice. Greene’s response? “If this is the war the left wants, this is the war the left will get,” she said on social media. “I will never stop protecting children and defending their innocence. … – this is evil.
Netanyahu: Signing new Iran nuclear deal is madness Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the proposed revival of the Iran nuclear deal as “madness.” Speaking to Fox and Friends Wednesday, Netanyahu said that the agreement in its current form is “a horrible deal, a dangerous deal, that will pave Iran’s path with gold, a golden-paved highway to a nuclear arsenal.” ..this is a threat to the peace of the world, and that’s what this horrible deal facilitates. It’s even worse than the first one,”
Ted Cruz: Nuclear deal is designed to let the Ayatollah cheat his way to a nuclear arsenal Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Wednesday fired back after State Department spokesperson Ned Price claimed the nuclear deal with Iran, that the Biden administration seeks to return to, is predicated “on the most rigorous and intensive verification and monitoring regime ever negotiated. In a lengthy Twitter thread responding to Price, Cruz wrote, “Complete horse manure. The Iran nuclear deal is designed to let the Ayatollah cheat his way to a nuclear arsenal.”
IAF F-35s penetrated Iranian airspace months ago Israeli Air Force F-35 advanced fifth-generation fighter jets penetrated Iranian airspace multiple times over the last two months, according to the Saudi media outlet Elaph. Both Iranian and Russian radars failed to locate them, according to the report.
Lapid close to criticizing Biden on Iran as Netanyahu looms large As such, Bennett, Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz often spoke of the weaknesses of the Iran nuclear deal, which has been negotiated mostly in Vienna over the past 16 months. They repeatedly said Israel would not be obligated to it, but they made sure not to openly criticize US President Joe Biden. On Thursday, however, Lapid came very close to crossing that line.
American Airlines acquires aircraft that will fly from New York to Tel Aviv in 5 hours American Airlines and Boom Supersonic announced a deal on Tuesday whereby the airline will purchase up to 20 Overture aircraft, with an option for an additional 40. The Overture has the capability of flying twice as fast as today’s fastest commercial aircraft. This means that the travel time from New York and Tel Aviv (and back) would go from approximately 10.5 hours to a little over five.
GO WOKE, GO BROKE: Target Hit with 90% Loss as Retailer Pushes Trans Gear on Youth, Chest Binders, Packing Underwear Target, the leader in wokeness took a 90% loss over the same period last year after they overstocked on clothing and accessories for transgenders. For some strange reason, they decided that there are many more transgenders than there actually are. As a result, they had to lower prices in order to lower their inventory that just wasn’t selling. Target had previously shot themselves in the foot after letting people use the bathrooms and changing rooms according to how they identified.
Flood Threat Takes Aim At The Lower Mississippi Valley Drought-suffering Texas was hit with flooding to start the week and now the threat of heavy rainfall has shifted eastward into the lower Mississippi Valley as well. Central Mississippi has been hardest hit
Yangtze tributary runs dry as China faces another month of drought Residents living near a tributary of the Yangtze river in the southwestern region of Chongqing clambered along the dry riverbed on Thursday amid an unprecedented drought across the region that could last another month. Though not completely dried up, dead fish were visible on the exposed flats of the Jialing, a long winding tributary that flows through three provinces before joining the Yangtze
The Layoff Tsunami Has Begun: 50% Of U.S. Companies Plan To Eliminate Jobs Within The Next 12 Months If half of the firms in the entire country really do cut jobs over the next year, what will our economy look like afterwards? All over America, companies are anticipating that a major economic downturn is coming in 2023, and a lot of them are already planning to shed workers in order to cut costs. Of course this sounds so much like what we went through back in 2008 and 2009. Millions of Americans lost their jobs during the “Great Recession”, and it was truly a very dark time in our history. So are we right on the verge of seeing a repeat?
European Corn Yields Expected To Plunge Amid Worst Drought In 500 Years Besides the news of record high electricity prices, a troubling new crop failure report about Europe’s upcoming harvest was published Monday. The bloc’s Monitoring Agricultural Resources forecasted corn yields could drop by nearly a fifth due to a devastating drought, according to Bloomberg.
Stephen Miller: Biden running ‘world’s epicenter’ of child trafficking President Joe Biden’s open-borders agenda, which has so far settled over 250,000 illegal migrant minors in cities around the nation, has turned the country into the “world’s epicenter” of child trafficking, according to former President Donald Trump’s border policy architect.
French President Emmanuel Macron Said Today That It Is The ‘End Of Abundance’ And Warns That A ‘Time Of Sacrifice’ Is Coming, But Did He Mean Just France? I was an actor for 6 years in Hollywood, I spent a fair amount of time in front of and behind the cameras, and I spent a lot of time with casting directors as well. If I was going to cast an end times movie where I needed someone to perfectly portray the biblical man of sin, I would have to look no further than French president Emmanuel Macron. Today he got in front of the cameras. opened his mouth, and spoke great, swelling words that absolutely renewed my belief that he is the guy.
TikTok’s ‘Elections Center’ Is A Massive Threat To National Security TikTok just unveiled an “Elections Center” that will put detailed voter profiles in the hands of a company based in Beijing, stocked with party members and state employees, subject to laws that allow the Chinese government data access. Given the Chinese Communist Party’s influence over ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, China could exercise enormous control over the midterm elections with this data. What’s worse is that American institutions are actively encouraging TikTok to do this.
Covid Injection Aftermath: Study finds 94% of “Vaccine” Recipients have Pre-Blood Clot Formations and Foreign Particles …The study authors noted that the “vaccines” are purported to contain at least the spike protein from SARS-CoV-2, but are known also to contain foreign particles that the many promoters of the experimental injections claimed were not in them at all. “Among those foreign components are metallic objects as demonstrated previously in this journal by Lee et al.
Scientists discover “Strange Crystalline Formations” in the blood of the COVID Vaccinated The German Working Group for Covid Vaccine Analysis has made its ‘Summary of Preliminary Findings’ publicly available. In a wide-ranging report, the Group described the toxic substances found in all Covid “vaccine” samples analysed and the marked changes seen in blood samples taken from vaccinated people.
Scientists conclude COVID Vaccines reprogram the Immune System causing Lymphocytes to attack Vital Organs Even though mass fatalities are associated with the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, the roll-out of this experimental treatment is still ongoing. It doesn’t matter that both Pfizer and the FDA knew there were 1,223 deaths from the Covid vaccine in the first three months of its roll-out, the emergency use authorization still continued.
Record Number of Boat Migrants Enter England in a Single Day A record number of boat migrants totaling 1,295 people, overwhelmingly young men, crossed the English Channel yesterday, beating the previous one day record high by more than 100, according to the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
“The principle of the Constitution is that of a separation of legislative, Executive and Judiciary functions, except in cases specified. If this principle be not expressed in direct terms, it is clearly the spirit of the Constitution, and it ought to be so commented and acted on by every friend of free government.” —Thomas Jefferson (1797)
That’s the net effect of Biden’s unconstitutional and lawless order “forgiving” student loans.
Nate Jackson
As we previewed yesterday, Joe Biden played the role of Santa Claus and — without any constitutional authority for executive law-making whatsoever — announced he’s “forgiving” student loans for more than 40 million Americans. (Translation: He’s transferring the obligation for repaying the loans from those who took them out to those who didn’t.) The only difference between our report and his announcement was that he was even more “generous” with taxpayer money than anticipated, extending $20,000 in forgiveness to Pell Grant recipients instead of a measly $10,000. That means the whole giveaway could cost nearly $600 billion instead of only $300 billion as previously estimated.
To smooth the transition back to repayment and help borrowers at highest risk of delinquencies or default once payments resume, the U.S. Department of Education will provide up to $20,000 in debt cancellation to Pell Grant recipients with loans held by the Department of Education and up to $10,000 in debt cancellation to non-Pell Grant recipients. Borrowers are eligible for this relief if their individual income is less than $125,000 or $250,000 for households.
In addition, borrowers who are employed by non-profits, the military, or federal, state, Tribal, or local government may be eligible to have all of their student loans forgiven through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program [emphasis in original].
According to Biden administration estimates, 27 million Americans will qualify for the full $20,000, and 20 million will be debt free at the stroke of Biden’s pen.
There are other goodies mixed in as well, such as extending the pandemic payment freeze for another four months — resulting in nearly three years of that policy despite an unemployment rate of just 2% for people with at least a bachelor’s degree. On top of that, Biden plans to cover unpaid interest for some borrowers, to “raise the amount of income that is considered non-discretionary income and therefore is protected from repayment,” and to “forgive loan balances after 10 years of payments, instead of 20 years, for borrowers with loan balances of $12,000 or less.”
Peter the high-school graduate plumber was just robbed blind to pay (and win the vote of) Paul the PhD.
Biden ran for president as the supposedly “moderate” alternative to radical socialists like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Yet few Democrats have been more key than those two in the push to institute what they finally bullied Biden into doing. So who really won the 2020 election?
Maybe the answer to that is the White House staffers who stand to benefit from Biden’s gift.
As we noted yesterday, even Nancy Pelosi declared last year that Biden has no authority to do this. Biden himself said in December 2020 that claiming authority for the president to do this is “pretty questionable.”
Well, Barack Obama set the precedent for such “fundamental transformation” when he repeatedly declared he had no authority to grant amnesty to the so-called “dreamers,” only to turn around and issue the DACA declaration anyway. Biden has done the same thing with student loans.
Moreover, for the Party of Fairness™, this is decidedly unfair. “Biden is effectively telling all the people who didn’t go to college, those who went to college but didn’t borrow money, and those who went to college and already paid off their loans that they are suckers,” write the editors of National Review in a blistering editorial. “The lucky few who just so happen to have student debt at this arbitrary moment get a windfall at the expense of everyone else.”
The editors offer this far more accurate framing of what Biden is doing: “Radical progressives violate Constitution and statute to further enrich the well-off at the expense of everyone else.”
It’s not just the predictable opponents who run conservative news publications who object, either. Even Biden’s leftist fanboys at The Washington Post understand the problem: “Widely canceling student loan debt is regressive. It takes money from the broader tax base, mostly made up of workers who did not go to college, to subsidize the education debt of people with valuable degrees.” They hedge on the power question, saying it’s “unclear” whether Biden has legal authority under the 1965 Higher Education Act. That waffling is at least an improvement on the scribes at The New York Times, who nowhere in their news story bother to mention even a hint at a question about Biden’s authority.
Here’s the bottom line: This is a twisted transfer of wealth to highly paid employed people with advanced degrees at the expense of people who either already paid off their own loans or never took them in the first place. It’ll cause more inflation, especially of college tuition as universities scramble to fund their ever-ballooning “diversity, equity, and inclusion” departments with the largesse. It might win some votes from the folks already inclined to vote Democrat, but it will — and should — enrage millions of Americans who understand the gross injustice of it all. And Joe Biden has no legitimate power to do any of it in the first place. Unfortunately, that’s the American Democrats have created in 2022.
Governor Ron DeSantis played an active role in getting hard-left activists booted off school boards across the state.
Douglas Andrews
It’s been a great week for the Free State of Florida — not only for Governor Ron DeSantis, but for concerned parents all around the state who simply want the best education for their children.
But, we think it’s safe to say, it’s been a less-than-great week for the winner of the Democrats’ gubernatorial primary, Chameleon Charlie Crist, and for those pinning their hopes on him to remove DeSantis from the governor’s mansion on November 8. It ain’t gonna happen.
Yesterday, at a time when he should’ve been saying things that appeal to a majority of the Sunshine State’s voters, Crist let loose with this: “Those who support the governor should stay with him, and vote for him, and I don’t want your vote,” he told a gaggle of reporters with microphones and cameras. “If you have that hate in your heart, keep it. I want the vote of the people of Florida who care about our state. Good Democrats, good independents, good Republicans, unify with this ticket.”
Yep, nothing unifies an electorate like telling one’s political opponent and his millions of supporters that they have hate in their hearts. But we’ll say this: It’s a bold approach. Not even doltish Hillary Clinton, with her disastrous “basket of deplorables” gaffe in 2016, went so far as to alienate every person inclined to vote for her opponent.
During an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson last night, DeSantis seemed equal parts bemused by and grateful for Crist’s in-kind contribution to his campaign. “This is his fifth decade running for office,” said DeSantis. “He’s a typical career politician. People support me because I kept the state open and protected their jobs. Charlie Crist wanted it locked down. So that’s not hate in their heart. They’re just appreciative that they had a governor who was standing up for them.”
Elsewhere in Florida, one little-reported but greatly welcomed development from Tuesday’s primaries was the re-taking by concerned parents of several major school boards across the state. We covered this briefly in yesterday’s Executive Summary, but we think it deserves a deeper dive. As The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board reports:
Twenty-five of the 30 school board members endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis won or advanced in their races, campaigning on parental rights, transparency, school choice and safety. GOP-backed candidates won three elections in Sarasota County, creating a new 4-1 majority. They also scored two big wins in Miami-Dade, which now becomes the largest U.S. school district with a conservative majority. Both school boards last year voted to mandate that students keep wearing masks, defying parents and Florida law.
The wins are a coup for Mr. DeSantis, who is turning parental control and educational choice into a GOP advantage. The elections are political vindication for his parental bill of rights bill that became law this spring that was widely criticized in the national press.
“We’ve got to get this education stuff right,” DeSantis told Tucker Carlson. “Part of the problem that we saw with this is you would have red counties, but because the school board races under our constitution are non-partisan, the union would back the leftist, fund the leftist, and you’d have a left-wing school board representing a conservative county. So we have fixed that in many of these places, to where these school boards are now going to be representative of the values of the people that live there.”
This is great news for parents who want their children to focus on learning rather than being locked down, muzzled, or indoctrinated. And that means it’s bad news for the groomers, and bad news for those who want to teach our kids that men can get pregnant. As the Journal’s editors write, “If Republicans want a positive message for the midterms, this is a good and popular one.”
Former DHS secretary makes case for impeaching Mayorkas: “Your job is to enforce the laws as Congress has written,” stated former Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf in his criticism of current DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Wolf, who served as DHS chief under Donald Trump, argued that lawmakers “have a very strong case” for impeaching Mayorkas over his intentional mismanagement of the agency, specifically regarding maintaining border security and stopping illegal immigration. Wolf pointed to Mayorkas’s deliberate ignoring of the law when he said to migrants, “if you come across the border illegally, that alone is not a basis for removal.” Wolf observed, “[Mayorkas] basically just said breaking a federal law means you’re not going to be removed, even though [the law] says you should be removed.” Wolf noted that Mayorkas’s intentional refusal to secure the border has most benefited the drug cartels, who “have more money, more territory, and more power than they have ever had in the history of cartels.” He then pointed to the opioid epidemic now claiming the lives of more than 100,000 Americans via overdose deaths, estimating that “90% of that is coming across the southern border.” Instead, Mayorkas calls white nationalism a greater threat to America. If Republicans retake Congress, Mayorkas should be one of the first heads on the proverbial chopping block.
Accused UN rapist walks free thanks to “diplomatic immunity”: Charles Dickens Imene Oliha, a 46-year-old United Nations diplomat from South Sudan, was immediately released by the New York City Police Department following his being arrested on rape allegations. Why? Investigators concluded he has diplomatic immunity status. The victim, who lives in the same building as Oliha in Upper Manhattan, alleges that he followed her to her apartment after she told him not to, and forced himself inside where he proceeded to sexually assault her. The attack raises the issue of “diplomatic immunity,” which has long been recognized by the U.S. government, but has also seen repeated challenges as to just how much immunity it grants. The notion that it confers absolute and unlimited immunity against legal repercussions for breaking U.S. law should never be the case, and yet the limits of that diplomatic immunity are is still unclear. In a case as serious as this, Oliha should not be allowed to use diplomatic immunity as a means of getting away with committing a crime. It smacks of two-tiered justice.
Dr. Jill gets double COVID: Days after the twice vaccinated and double boosted Jill Biden was cleared from a COVID infection she first tested positive for on August 15, the first lady once again tested positive in what is being termed a “rebound” case. She is currently staying isolated in the Bidens’ Delaware home, and is said to not be experiencing any symptoms. At 71 years old, she is in the demographic group most endangered by the virus that originated in Wuhan, China. Joe Biden himself recently recovered from a rebound COVID infection. The great irony here is that it demonstrates that the COVID vaccine does not work like a traditional vaccine in that it does not prevent infection. At best, it lessens the severity of the infection, as appears to have been the case with the Bidens. It further highlights that Biden’s one-size-fits-all vaccine mandate was never really intended to stop COVID as much as it was an opportunity to use COVID as an excuse for a federal government power-grab. If even the vaccinated get the virus, then why demonize those who refuse? The answer is because it was all about politics.
Headlines
Joe Biden says he “didn’t have any advanced notice” of Trump raid (Daily Wire)
Unredacted Barr memo details DOJ rationale for not charging Trump (The Hill)
FBI brass warned agents off Hunter Biden laptop due to 2020 election: whistleblowers (New York Post)
The Russian invasion of Ukraine hasn’t gone as planned and there’s end in sight.
Thomas Gallatin
Six months ago yesterday, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to invade in a massive attack against Ukraine. The buildup to the war had been coming for some time, with most believing that once the mighty Russian army, the second largest in the world, invaded, Ukraine would quickly crumble and succumb. Well, Wednesday, August 24, Ukraine celebrated its Independence Day marking the day in 1991 when the nation declared its independence from the former Soviet Union. It is indeed ironic to see now 31 years on, Ukraine is again fighting to maintain its independence from what is effectively the same country it broke away from, Russia.
Where stands the war? Well, in many ways the outcome from the conflict is very much up in the air. Russia’s initial rapid push was repelled, as an under-trained army took massive causalities due to overextending itself and poor strategic and logistic planning. Essentially, Ukraine put up a fight that the Russians simply didn’t believe they were capable of.
Thanks to the resolve of the Ukrainian people, led by their determined President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, combined with billions of dollars in weapons and aid from NATO, the Ukrainian military was able to push back the overextended Russian forces, and the war has moved and isolated in the eastern Donbas and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. It has now turned into a war of attrition in which Russian forces unleash massive amounts of artillery, indiscriminately demolishing nearly everything before inching forward.
The war has taken a toll on both sides. The U.S. estimates that the Russian military has taken between 60,000 and 80,000 casualties, which is many times more than the U.S. had in two decades of fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan, while the Ukrainians have suffered an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 casualties. Furthermore, the Russian military machine has been exposed as being far from an elite fighting force.
Meanwhile, more than 5.2 million Ukrainians have fled the country, most seeking refuge in surrounding NATO counties, with Poland accounting for over a million.
Yet so much of this current mess could have been avoided had Joe Biden not ordered the abysmal surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Biden effectively signaled to the rest of the world that they couldn’t count on America. Putin saw this weakness and pounced. What Putin underestimated was the resolve of the Ukrainian people to stand and fight.
Instead, the U.S. has given some $54 billion in aid to Ukraine, with Biden pledging another $3 billion just yesterday. A typical Democrat way of “solving” problems — just throw more taxpayer money at it.
It’s looking like the end of the war is nowhere near as autumn rapidly approaches. Winter is coming and with it more suffering, not just for the soldiers but for the civilians with diminishing supplies and reliable energy sources.
It’s good that America is standing behind Ukraine against Putin’s aggression, though it’s beyond unfortunate that it ever got to this point. It never would have if Donald Trump were in office today.
In the post-COVID era, parents are increasingly taking their kids out of the school systems that damaged them.
Lewis Morris
It will take many years to understand the scope and unwind the damage that COVID wrought on our youngest generation, today’s schoolchildren. No, not the damage caused by the disease itself. Kids have proven remarkably resilient to it — far more so than adults. No, the damage we’re talking about is that which was done to our children by the educational bureaucracy that supposedly has their best interests at heart.
As it turns out, locking children out of public school for more than a year was a disaster of monumental proportions. Children were uprooted from their educational and social development. Parents had to reorganize their days to accommodate a stay-at-home lifestyle that no one was prepared for, and few could manage successfully.
We knew this was coming. Studies and evidence by real experts motivated by children’s welfare and not teacher unions or special interest groups noted throughout the pandemic that the long-term negative effects of school lockdowns would be calamitous. Children stumbled academically, and their incidence of mental and emotional difficulties surged due to long months of isolating and staring into a computer monitor, lack of exercise, and reduced contact with their peers.
Only now does it seem that the government is starting to let loose the collar it kept on the citizenry for nearly 18 months. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has apparently discovered natural immunity and given the much-delayed all-clear for states and communities to ease their onerous public school COVID restrictions. Some will and some won’t, depending largely on where they’re located. Of course, the most attuned states have long since shed their mask mandates, social distancing guidelines, and quarantines.
Even NPR education reporter Anya Kamenetz couldn’t deny that a crime had been committed against our children — a crime that “destroyed individual hopes and dreams” and whose “impact can be measured for a generation.” Kamenetz’s new book, Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now, offers a candid look at life on the front lines as she witnessed the folly of school lockdowns both as a journalist and a mother.
Kamenetz chronicles how the lockdowns pushed by the Democrats were exacerbating the very inequality and marginalization they claim to fight against. The bureaucracy was its own bogeyman. But Kamenetz doesn’t point fingers, or at least point them where they should be pointed. And her path to a fix is to rely on the very same institutions that led us down this awful path in the first place.
Parents have a better idea. All over the country, they’re voting with their feet: They’re taking their children out of public schools and moving them to places where they’ll actually be educated.
More than 1.2 million students have left the public school system since the start of the pandemic. New York City public school enrollment, for example, is down 64,000 and is expected to lose another 30,000 as this new school year kicks off. Michigan is down 56,000. And cities around the country are all following suit.
Parents are fed up with school boards and teachers unions acting in their own benefit or going woke. Meg Kilgannon, senior education fellow at the Family Research Council, put it simply. “There are more and more challenges for public school systems across the country: teacher shortages, medical overreach, falling test scores, disciplinary issues, and even violence. Add to that the fact that parents rightly felt betrayed not only by prolonged closures in some regions, but also by overly political and sexual content in curricula.”
There are other options. Charter school enrollment is up 7%, and Catholic school enrollment is up by the largest amount in 50 years. More families are engaging in homeschooling. Parents now see that their children don’t have to be tied to a public school system that doesn’t seem to have their best interests at heart.
In short, they aren’t settling for less when it comes to their children’s education. And they shouldn’t have to.
The state finally secured convictions in the retrial of two Whitmer “kidnapping” plotters, but the case was rotten from the start.
Douglas Andrews
Want to know why the FBI’s reputation has never been worse, and why more than a dozen whistleblowers have beaten a path to Republican lawmakers’ doors? Look no further than the just-concluded case of the Whitmer plotters — the two (ahem) masterminds behind the (ahem, ahem) deadly serious plan to kidnap Michigan Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Both men, Adam Fox and Barry Croft, were found guilty of federal kidnapping and weapons-of-mass-destruction charges, and Croft was found guilty of unlawful firearms possession. But it took more than a dozen FBI agents and informants, and tens of thousands of dollars in cash, and plenty of coaxing and prodding and leadership by the bureau’s people to bring two knuckleheaded losers along on a kidnapping fantasy ride that may send them to prison for the rest of their lives. Here’s how the state-run scribes at the Associated Press dutifully describe the convictions on Tuesday of these two master criminals:
A jury on Tuesday convicted two men of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, delivering swift verdicts in a plot that was broken up by the FBI and described as a rallying cry for a U.S. civil war by anti-government extremists.
The result was a big victory for the U.S. Justice Department. A different jury just four months ago couldn’t reach unanimous decisions on Adam Fox or Barry Croft Jr. but acquitted two other men, a stunning conclusion that led to a second trial.
Their arrests nearly two years ago came at an extremely tense time: the volatile homestretch of the election between Joe Biden and then-President Donald Trump playing out against a backdrop of armed protests over COVID-19 restrictions, especially in Michigan.
A “big victory”? Not so fast. The bureau’s rotting corpse of a case was dragged across the finish line these past nine days much like Basement Joe Biden’s presidential campaign was dragged across the finish line on November 3, 2020. In the case of the latter, it was Big Tech, Big Media, and bulk-mail balloting. In the case of the former, it was a judge who bent over backward to keep the defense from making its case.
If what we’ve outlined in the paragraph above seems utterly at odds with the Associated Press’s version of events, consider how independent journalist Julie Kelly describes the trial of Fox and Croft:
Legal observers bristled at the one-day jury selection process handled almost exclusively by U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker, who also presided over the first trial. On the first day of testimony, defense attorneys informed the court that one juror was potentially compromised for telling co-workers that he “had already decided the case and intended to ensure a particular result at the conclusion of the trial.” Jonker met privately with the juror and refused to allow either prosecutors or defense counsel from participating in the meeting; he ordered all related filings to remain under seal.
Jonker repeatedly scolded [defense attorneys Christopher] Gibbons and [Joshua] Blanchard for what he viewed as wasting the jury’s time on “crap” lines of questioning. Before the testimony of government witnesses last Wednesday, Jonker took the unprecedented step of limiting the amount of time for cross examination. Blanchard accused Jonker of openly favoring prosecutors while frequently interjecting and interrupting defense counsel. “Limiting us is unfair and it’s unconstitutional, and it doesn’t aid the jury in the search for the truth,” Blanchard told Jonker on August 17 after the jury had been dismissed for the day. “It’s creating a perception of how this case ends.”
Kelly notes that the DOJ sought a narrower definition of entrapment, and that the FBI “accelerated its operation” when, despite months of surveillance and infiltration, it hadn’t surfaced a plot to kidnap Whitmer. How did the bureau “accelerate” things? Kelly continues: “By introducing another undercover FBI agent to act as an explosives expert and convince the group to purchase materials to build a bomb. Agent Timothy Bates, known as ‘Red,’ met with the government’s targets in Michigan on September 12, 2020, where he showed a video of a vehicle blown up by an explosive device. The video was produced by the FBI.”
During testimony, Bates said the FBI’s case team “met the night before to map out plans to drive the targets to Whitmer’s remote vacation cottage on Birch Lake, the purported scene of the crime. Bates brought night vision equipment and two-way radios to hand out as props — all supplied by the FBI.”
There are many reasons to detest this case: the zealous efforts to entrap; the dozen-plus agents involved; the cash thrown around; the timing of the arrests just before the 2020 election so as to damage Whitmer’s harshest critic, Donald Trump; the timing of the retrial to coincide with Whitmer’s reelection campaign; the spousal battery arrest of one of the main agents; the subsequent promotion of the lead FBI agent from Detroit to the Washington, DC, office and thus to oversee the bureau’s involvement in the January 6 Capitol riot; the attempt to set the same exact trap in Virginia for detractors of then-Governor Ralph Northam; the refusal by the judge to remove an admittedly tainted juror; and the judge’s restrictions on the defense’s lines of questioning.
Despite all this, we have a hard time showing sympathy for these Whitmer plotters. Regardless of how vehemently we disagree with our elected officials, we don’t physically threaten them or engage in plots, however far-flung and ridiculous, to kidnap them. Instead, we commit ourselves to beating them at the ballot box. That’s the American system.
Yes, the FBI ultimately got two convictions. But at what continuing cost to its hard-earned reputation for Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity?
Editor’s Note: Each week we receive hundreds of comments and correspondences — and we read every one of them. Click here for a few thought-provoking comments about specific articles. The views expressed therein don’t necessarily reflect those of The Patriot Post.
Flashback: Pelosi on Debt Forgiveness — Nancy Pelosi said Joe Biden “does not” have the power to cancel student loan debt only Congress does, so what changed?
“When our divisions become so deep that civil discourse can no longer mend what has unraveled, we need to tread carefully. … How can a nation remain intact when large parts of the population have absolutely nothing in common with each other regarding how they see the world? Limited government and individual freedom are the classic American answers. Unfortunately, we seem to be going in the opposite direction.” —Star Parker
Biden’s student loan heist
“Today is a day of joy and relief. President Biden is cancelling up to $20,000 of federal student debt for as many as 43 million Americans — a powerful step to help rebuild the middle class. This will be transformative for the lives of working people all across this country.” —Elizabeth Warren, who advocated $50,000 in “relief”
“The average amount of debt forgiveness to businesses receiving PPP loans: $95,700. If we could afford to cancel hundreds of billions in PPP loans to business owners in their time of need, please do not tell me we can’t afford to cancel all student debt for 45 million Americans.” —Bernie Sanders
“Democrats’ student loan socialism is a slap in the face to working Americans who sacrificed to pay their debt or made different career choices to avoid debt. A wildly unfair redistribution of wealth toward higher-earning people.” —Mitch McConnell
“Instead of demanding accountability from an underperforming higher education sector that pushes so many young Americans into massive debt, the Administration’s unilateral plan baptizes a broken system.” —Ben Sasse
“Pay your own damn loans. Ex-college students aren’t the only people with debt. And why should blue collar workers subsidize college graduates. And where’s Biden’s constitutional authority to forgive loans?” —Mark Levin
“The people with the lowest unemployment rate in the country took out the loans, spent them, and received a product for the money. Joe Biden intends to violate his oath of office to transfer the liability for repayment to the people who didn’t do any of that.” —Charles C.W. Cooke
“There is no such thing as student loan forgiveness. There is only student loan transferral, where the debt is transferred from the person who took out the loan to someone else who did not take out the loan.” —Matt Walsh
The BIG Lie
“The Inflation Reduction Act will lower costs for American families, create jobs, and make our tax code fairer. And every single Republican in Congress voted against it.” —Joe Biden (Republicans voted against it because nothing else Biden said is true.)
Expertise about experts
“A genuinely republican society is one in which informed, independent citizens have a duty to do their own learning and inform themselves from the best experts and the best minds in society. But populist rage at experts who misuse their position and authority can easily break loose from its moorings.” —Dan McLaughlin
“True science — using the scientific method — is important. But that’s not what much of ‘science’ is these days. Instead, today government science is misused by progressive politicians. … I’m angry that my tax dollars go to support leftist nonsense. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t care. That’s probably because they don’t know that government throws so much money at ridiculous progressive advocacy.” —John Stossel
Food for thought
“Every piece I read about “banned books” always ends up being a story about how progressives believe they’re the only ones who should be allowed to decide what is read in schools/libraries.“ —David Harsanyi
And Last…
“If you can cancel debt with no costs or repercussions, then let’s just cancel the national debt.” —Carol Roth
Former Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker joined ‘Fox & Friends First’ to discuss the latest on the Mar-a-Lago raid and whistleblowers alleging the FBI was ordered not to investigate the Hunter Biden laptop. #FoxNews
Reactions from both sides on President Biden’s move to forgive some student loans, with some supporters wanting him to do more as critics call it expensive and irresponsible, and a court challenge is expected; Israel warning the US and other countries not to enter a new version of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal; CBN News Middle East Bureau Chief Chris Mitchell talks about Israel’s concerns, the deal’s impact on the Abraham Accords, and the possibility Israel will attack Iran; parents and professionals objecting to gender treatments, including surgery, for minors, which could put the brakes on some of these procedures; and Europe could be moving toward a digital ID program that critics warn might lead to a dictatorship.
On Ukraine’s so-called independence day, and all others under tyrannical rule — while the Nazified regime is at war on Russia — its people have just cause to mourn and fear the worst ahead, clearly no reason to celebrate.
Not according to NYT fake news.
Defying reality, it dubiously claimed that Ukrainians “celebrated” their so-called independence under a US-controlled/Nazified puppet regime perpetually at war at home and abroad when fundamental rights of its people were abolished.
Since hegemon USA’s 2014 coup, MSM reinvented reality on the ground, ignoring the rebirth of Nazi tyranny in Europe’s heartland.
On Wednesday, puppet Zelensky reinvented reality his own way with his customary litany of US-approved bald-faced Big Lies, saying:
“We are the free people of independent Ukraine (sic).”
Ignoring over 8 years of US-orchestrated and directed Kiev aggression on Donbass since April 2014, he defied reality by falsely claiming that “Russia declared war against us (sic).”
And this Zelensky perversion of reality:
Over the last “six months, we changed history (sic), changed the world (sic) and changed ourselves (sic).”
“And we are united (sic).”
“The Ukrainian people and their courage inspired the whole world (sic).”
“What is the end of the war for us? We used to say: peace. Now we say: victory (sic).”
“Donbass is Ukraine (sic). And we will return it (sic).”
“Crimea is Ukraine (sic). And we will return it (sic).”
Psychologist Robert Hare, a criminal psychopathology expert, would likely diagnose Zelensky as exhibiting dissocial personality disorder, coldheartedness, pathological lying, and detachment from reality.
He’s tolerated by the US-dominated West as long as he serves the interests of its ruling regimes.
Yet for how much longer is very much open to question.
There’s no ambiguity about how overwhelmingly superior Russian forces are degrading and defeating the regime’s already hollowed out military.
Throwing more good money after bad in the form of continued military aid hasn’t and won’t change things on the ground.
European regimes already pulled back on aid they’re providing.
Given the dismal state of their economies likely to significantly worsen ahead, they may halt aid altogether to focus on homeland needs.
At the same time, propaganda war on Russia goes on daily.
According to NYT fake news, “(a) Russian missile hit a train station in eastern Ukraine, killing at least 22 people” on August 24 (sic).”
Its source: puppet Zelensky’s bald-faced Big Lie, his speciality in similar fashion to how MSM operate across the board.
And this Times trash, citing Ukraine’s so-called military general staff:
“Russian missile strikes on military and civilian targets (sic) continue unabated” — clearly so on military targets alone, not noncombatants or nonmilitary related infrastructure.
More Times trash:
“Ukraine is using long-range missiles and other newly arriving weapons to try to degrade Moscow’s combat abilities (sic).”
And this:
“Defiance was the mood of the day on Wednesday (sic)” — none displayed on “quiet streets.”
On a time when hundreds of Ukrainian troops are being killed or wounded daily, many others surrendering or deserting, a regime military report falsely claimed “no wounded, no dead” on Wednesday.
And this WaPo fake news on the same day:
Russia’s liberating SMO “thr(ew) the entire world into turmoil (sic) for the sake of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dreams of extinguishing Ukrainian (nonexistent) democracy and restoring Russian power (sic).”
And this WaPo perversion of reality:
The puppet Zelensky regime “inten(ds) to launch a counteroffensive (sic) aimed at retaking the strategic southern city of Kherson (sic).”
“It made progress (sic) toward that objective in the form of daring, successful drone and sabotage attacks deep behind Russian lines in Crimea (sic).”
And this WaPo trash:
Vladimir Putin’s “hold on power (is) bolstered by systematic repression of dissent (sic).”
At a time when there’s no ambiguity about the outcome of Russia’s SMO, WaPo perpetuated the myth of “major advances” by virtually defeated Ukrainian troops after “receiv(ing) further equipment and training (sic).”
And this from the outgoing BoJo regime:
In Kiev on August 24, BoJo pretended that Ukraine’s virtually defeated military “can and will win (sic).”
And he falsely blamed Vladimir Putin for US/UK/Western sanctions responsible for high energy costs.”
They’d plummet if Europe imported Russian oil and gas in whatever amounts its member states need, unhindered by illegally imposed sanctions.
And this BoJo hyperventilating:
“What happens in (Nazified) Ukraine matters to us all (sic), which is why I am here today to deliver the message that the UK is with you and will be with you for the days and months ahead (sic).”
And he called on the incoming UK regime to maintain “laser-like” support for Nazified Ukraine over democratically-governed Russia.
US/Western regimes will continue supporting Ukraine as long as it serves their own interests.
If that changes, what’s most likely at some point, support will end in similar fashion to how the West betrayed other nations throughout the post-WW II period.
Most people agree that we live in a broken world—and there’s plenty of debate about how to fix it. But here’s the real question: Is there even a solution? On Truth For Life, Alistair Begg confirms that there is and explains what that means for us.
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