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
Domestic terrorism. Intimidation. Fraud. The radical left has used many tactics to ruthlessly achieve its political goals. However, a recent report has revealed a new strategy the left is deploying when elections and legislation fail: woke lawfare.
A new report argues that activist networks and aligned legal organizations are increasingly using the court system to advance left-wing policy goals they cannot win through elections or legislation, bypassing democratic accountability and turning litigation into a tool of ideological governance.
The 19-page Lawfare in America report, published by the Alliance for Consumers, warns that lawsuits once intended to resolve individual disputes now operate as de facto legislation. Courtrooms, the report says, have become “a primary battleground for the Left’s ongoing campaign to reshape American society,” with activists “advancing political and social agendas through strategic litigation, a practice better understood as ‘woke lawfare.’”
Instead of seeking compensation for specific harms, the report argues, many lawsuits now aim to extract sweeping policy concessions through settlements and consent decrees. Those agreements often force corporations to adopt changes that far exceed existing legal requirements.
According to this report, activists are using litigation for force change in corporate governance, employment practices, and DEI and ESG policies. An example of this would be the Obama-era case against Bass Pro Outdoor World, in which the Obama administration, according to the report, “imposed comprehensive DEI recruitment and training policies that go far beyond resolving individual discrimination complaints or enforcing federal civil rights law.”
Traditionally, employment discrimination lawsuits have been used to resolve individual claims. Now, however, they are being weaponized, used to force companies to overhaul their hiring practices and incorporate diversity, among other things.
While this report is troubling, it is, unfortunately, not shocking. As the Daily Wire puts it, the report “merely codifies what many conservative legal analysts have warned for years: litigation is increasingly used not to protect rights or enforce the law, but to impose sweeping social policy without legislative approval.” The left is no stranger to using litigation to force policy changes, just look at Roe v. Wade. Now, however, they are becoming increasingly open in their intentions to corrupt the legal system and use it to advance policy goals.
Let’s pray against the corruption of our judicial system, and let’s pray for an end to this “woke lawfare!”
How are you praying about “woke lawfare?” Share your prayers and scriptures below.
(Excerpt from the Daily Wire. Photo Credit: Felicia Manolache’s Images via Canva Teams)
A lot of really weird things have been happening over the past few days. I don’t know what all of it means, but what has been taking place is so unusual that it should definitely be getting our attention. For example, on New Year’s Eve lightning struck four of the most iconic buildings in the United States. If lightning had hit just one of those buildings, it could have easily been dismissed as a coincidence, but that isn’t what we witnessed. I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about this, because what just occurred in Washington D.C. and New York City is very strange indeed.
On the evening of December 31st, a spectacular bolt of lightning that hit the U.S. Capitol was captured on video…
By itself, such a lightning strike would be truly extraordinary.
What are the odds of three iconic buildings getting hit on the exact same night?
And what are the odds of that happening on New Year’s Eve?
On top of everything else, One World Trade Center was also struck by lightning on New Year’s Eve. I am not able to embed this one, but you can see video of that lightning strike here.
Have you ever heard of anything like this ever happening before?
Four of our most iconic landmarks were all struck by lightning on New Year’s Eve, and hardly anyone is even talking about it.
What is wrong with us?
Of course shortly thereafter we witnessed horrific terror attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas. Americans tend not to pay much attention to terrorism until it happens on our soil, but now everyone is paying attention. Hopefully our law enforcement authorities will have some solid answers for us soon, because there are still so many unanswered questions about those attacks.
Unfortunately, many believe that those attacks were just the beginning.
In fact, one former CIA officer is claiming that there are over a thousand “sleepers” inside the United States right now that are preparing more attacks…
A former CIA officer named Sarah Adams was interviewed on the Shawn Ryan podcast just two weeks ago, and warned that there are more than a thousand al-Qaeda sleepers in the United States right now who are planning major attacks on the homeland.
She clearly implicates Biden’s open southern border as the entry point for these potential terrorists and suggests that they have developed new tactics and bombs that can evade detection through traditional means.
For years, millions of people have been pouring over our wide open borders.
For years, people like me have been warning that this is a very serious threat to our national security.
At this point, the damage has been done, and we have all sorts of nuts inside this country that could potentially do all sorts of damage.
Now Donald Trump’s inauguration is coming up on January 20th, and those that are closely associated with Trump have been getting targeted…
A surge in bomb threats and swatting incidents against lawmakers since the election underscores the deep political divide in the U.S. and has lawmakers from both parties calling for more protection.
Members of Congress and President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration have been on the receiving end of a rash of false alarms about pipe bombs or dangerous swatting stunts, in which a fake emergency call sends heavily armed police to a target’s residence.
A swatting incident against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican, led to a woman dying in a car crash with an officer responding to the incident.
Being a prominent politician in this day and age is a very dangerous job.
We should be praying for their safety.
There is one last thing that I wanted to mention before I end this article.
Northern California residents started off the new year with a rumble, as 4.7-magnitude earthquake struck the region Wednesday night. The tremor came at around 6.34pm Pacific time, with an epicenter about 70 miles north of San Francisco, the United States Geological Survey reported.
Thankfully, the earthquake was not large enough to do much damage, but local residents clearly felt it…
‘I did feel it actually,’ one X user wrote. ‘It was a rolling earthquake, lasted a few seconds.
‘Usually the earthquakes around here are jolts, not rolling, so it was kind of cool to feel the floor roll under my feet.’
Another X user added that it was ‘pretty intense for a 4.7.
‘It was a shallow earthquake too, so that makes [it[ feel stronger, but [is] usually more locally felt.’
Interestingly, this was a magnitude 4.7 earthquake, and Donald Trump is going to be the 47th president of the United States.
But I suppose that most people will also dismiss that fact as just another “coincidence”.
There sure have been a lot of “coincidences” lately, eh?
I am going to keep writing about the stuff that others are not writing about.
The songwriter, actor, country/western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes scholar, Pomona College and University of Oxford degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate, Kris Kristofferson, recently died at 88.
Americans may have known him best for writing smash hits like “Me and Bobby McGee” and “For the Good Times,” his wide-ranging, star-acting roles in A Star is Born and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, his numerous solo albums, especially with then-spouse and singer Rita Coolidge, and the country group super-quartet he formed with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson.Read More
In other words, Kristofferson was a rare Renaissance man who could do it all in an age of increasingly narrow specialization and expertise.
At certain times throughout history at particular locales, we have seen such singular people from all walks of life.
Classical Athens produced polymaths like Aristotle—tutor to Alexander the Great, logician, student of music, art, and literature, educator, think-tank founder, biologist, philosopher, and scientist. Later Greeks like Archimedes and Ptolemy, as men of action, mastered six or seven disciplines and applied their abstract knowledge in ways that made life easier for those around them.
The late Roman Republic was another cauldron of multitalented geniuses. It produced the brilliant stylist, historian, politician, and consummate general Julius Caesar, as well as his republican archrival Cicero—politician, philosopher, orator, master stylist, lawyer, and provincial governor.
Turn-of-the-century Victorian Great Britain produced giants like Winston Churchill—prime minister, statesman, essayist, historian, orator, strategist, and wartime veteran. As Britain’s war leader, between May 10, 1940, and June 22, 1941, he, almost alone, resisted the Axis powers and prevented Adolf Hitler from winning the war.
But we associate the idea of a “Renaissance man” mostly with Florence, Italy, between the 15th and 16thcenturies. In that brief 100 years, the Florentine Republic hosted multi-talented geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci—master painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer, and inventor—best known for the Mona Lisa and Last Supper.
The multifaceted talents of his younger contemporary Michelangelo were as astounding, whether defined by his iconic sculptures David and Pietà, his stunning painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or as the master architect of the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica.
The American Revolution was a similar embryo of Renaissance men. Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the most famous example of unchecked abstract and pragmatic genius displayed in almost every facet of late 18th– and early 19th-century life—main author of the Declaration of Independence, third U.S. President, founder of the University of Virginia, inventor, agronomist, architect, and diplomat.
But Benjamin Franklin may best approximate the model of the Florentine Renaissance holistic brilliance—journalist, publisher, printer, author, politician, diplomat, inventor, scientist, and philosopher.
Franklin’s life was one of perpetual motion and achievement. In one lifetime, he helped to draft the Constitution, invented everything from the lightning rod to bifocals, founded the American postal service, and successfully won over European countries to the nascent American cause. Theodore Roosevelt—president, historian, essayist, conservationist, naturalist combat veteran, battle leader, explorer, and cowboy—exemplified the idea of an American president as the master at almost everything else.
The history of our own contemporary Renaissance people often suggests that they are not fully appreciated until after their deaths—especially in the post-World War II era.
Why?
We have created a sophisticated modern society that is so compartmentalized by “professionals” and the credentialed that those who excel simultaneously in several disciplines are often castigated for “amateurism,” “spreading themselves too thinly,” “not staying in their lanes,” or not being degreed with the proper prerequisite letters—BA, BS, MA, PhD, MD, JD, or MBA—in the various fields that they master.
But specialization is the enemy of genius, as is the tyranny of credentialism.
Because the Renaissance figure is not perfect in every discipline he masters, we damn him for too much breadth and not enough depth—a dabbler rather than an expert—failing to realize that his successes in most genres he masters and redefines is precisely because he brings a vast corpus of unique insights and experience to his work that narrower specialists lack. The Greek poet Archilochus first delineated the contrast between the fox who “knows many things” and the hedgehog who “knows one—one big thing.” We have become a nation of elite hedgehogs, whose narrow expertise is not enriched by awareness of or interest in the wider human experience.
Renaissance people often live controversial lives and receive 360-degree incoming criticism, not surprising given the many fields in which they upstage specialists and question experts—and the sometimes overweening nature of their personalities that feel no reason to place boundaries and lanes on their geniuses and behavior or to temper their exuberances.
The best American example of the current age is the controversial Elon Musk, a truly Renaissance figure who has revolutionized at least half a dozen entire fields.
No one prior had broken the Big Three auto monopoly of GM, Ford, and Chrysler.
Musk did just that. He exploded all three companies’ dominance with his successful creation of the first viable electric vehicle, Tesla, whose comfort, drivability, reliability, safety, and power rivaled or exceeded the models of all his competitors.
His spin-off battery storage and solar panel companies allowed thousands of families to go off the grid and stay self-sufficient in power usage.
Musk’s revolutionary Starlink internet system—a mere five years old—provides global online service to over 100 countries. Through its some 7,000 satellites, Starlink brings internet service to remote residents far more effectively and cheaply than do their own governments. When natural disasters overwhelm utilities or war disrupts the normality of peace, all look to Musk to restore online reconnections to the outside world.
Musk, almost singlehandedly, transformed the U.S. space program from a NASA 60-year-old government monopoly to an arena of fervent private-public competition. His Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) created a rocket and spacecraft program that has kept the U.S. preeminent in space exploration and reliable satellite launches. When NASA and old aerospace companies falter, the government looks to Musk to bail them out.
Musk, at great personal cost, radically transformed the old Twitter—poorly managed, censorious of ideas and expressions not deemed progressive, and mired in scandal for partnering with the FBI to silence news deemed possibly injurious to Democratic candidates and left-wing campaigns.
His new X replacement is an unfettered platform for free expression. And the more the left abhors their loss of the monopolistic old Twitter’s ideological clearing house, and vows to flee X and start their own new left-wing, censorious Twitters, the more they stay on X.
Musk’s newest companies have now entered the convoluted, little-understood, radically competitive, and dangerous field of artificial intelligence (OpenAI) and the emerging discipline of bonding the natural brain to the electronic online world (Neuralink). To the degree Musk is successful, America will lead these areas of intense international rivalry that involve the gravest issues of national security and survival.
Overspecialization has helped make vulnerable and sometimes doomed complex top-down societies from the Mycenaeans to the Aztecs to the Soviets. A tiny credentialed and often incestuous elite manages the lives of a vast underclass whose daily lives are scripted by top-down master planners—as an autonomous and skeptical middle class disappears.
America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass.
The overclass cult lacks sufficient common sense and pragmatic expertise outside their narrow areas of specialization to direct society, and the masses are often without the education, money, and power to challenge them or the esoteric complexity of their modern society. And the result is often disastrous, as we see everywhere, from the trivial to the existential—from our currently paralyzed state space station program and inability to build a floating pier in Gaza, to ineffectual and insensitive state responses to natural disasters like Hurricane Helene and an increasingly dangerously incompetent Secret Service.
Renaissance people provide a link to the proverbial people, as they master almost anything they attempt while keeping themselves attuned to the practical effect of their achievement among the people.
The Renaissance physicist Richard Feynman once explained to the entire nation why the Space Shuttle 1986 Challenger catastrophically imploded shortly after launch. A polymath Albert Einstein explained to America why it had to begin the Manhattan Project and beat Nazi Germany to the acquisition of an atomic bomb. Theodore Roosevelt used his expertise as a politician, conservationist, outdoorsman, explorer, and writer to help establish and preserve 230 million acres of public lands.
So, we should occasionally pause and reflect on the Kristoffersons and Musks in our midst. They play a vital role in enriching culture and civilization for the many without becoming part of the narrow few. And we owe these people, who belong to a rare and hallowed caste of the ages, for making our lives richer, more enjoyable, easier, and safer.
Truth2Freedom's Blog 