Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit on Tuesday against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, claiming the four states exploited the pandemic to justify ignoring election laws. [Newsmax]

Good for Texas. The ENTIRE 2020 ELECTION is unconstitutional because the Democratic Party, now a totalitarian party, is itself unconstitutional, and the Democratic Party rigged the system in at least four states (and probably many others). If Biden gets the White House, millions of us will consider him and Kamala an unconstitutional regime, and the American republic now officially over. Not just because of the rigged election; also (more importantly) because their party stands for infringements on the Bill of Rights never seen in our nation’s history. And because they will now rule as a one-party cabal, a dictatorship with no checks on its power and a stacked Supreme Court. If Biden “wins”, the American republic is over, and a new battle for individual freedom (similar to 1776) will have to begin.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Of the myriad things our nation needs, reverse racial discrimination isn’t one of them. Yet race has become our de regueur bright shining lie, just as John Paul Vann wrote about the Vietnam War. Race is presently the most-searched Google term, yielding more than 3.8 billion results. The vast majority of universities around the nation advance Critical Race Theory (CRT). They also produce research and training programs on “how to be non-racist.” These must-have training programs go by names like, “Research Task Force on Understanding and Addressing Blackness and Anti-Black Racism in our Local, National and International Communities.” The casual observer would conclude that the only kind of racism that exists is targeted at black people.

Anti-White racist (AWR) training has commenced top-down in our society. For example, all members of the federal government’s Executive Branch have been required to attend anti-racism training. Here they are told that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” or at minimum “benefit from racism.” Hard work and luck are disregarded. The same top-down training approach has enveloped corporate America and the academy. But as Thomas Sowell concludes in The Quest for Cosmic [Social] Justice, “Like so much that is done in the quest for cosmic justice, it makes observers feel better about themselves—and provides no incentives for those observers to scrutinize the consequences of their actions on the ostensible beneficiaries. As in other cases, human beings are sacrificed to the tyranny of visions because those sacrificed are not the same as those exhilarated by the vision.”

One can reasonable ask how this accusatory movement against White racism came about. It is easy to trace the anti-racism movement’s origins back to the theme of “when the servant becomes the master” where the privileged become transposed into serfs and serfs into the privileged. It began ironically around the time America was founded with the birth of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the progenitor of modern communism–Marxism and Leninism. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was known as the slave-master dialectic–when the slave becomes the master. Today’s AWR organizations like BLM, Antifa, Black Visions Collective, Campaign Zero, Justice Collaborative, Justice Coalition and Reclaim the Block are all directed by communist tenets.

What happens if you are not, nor ever have been a racist? Because you’re white it will be treated as a prevarication, and you, as exercising your mistaken white privilege. If you were against President Obama’s policies, this is prima facie proof of your racism. Mr. Obama certainly encouraged today’s AWR movement. In his new book, The Promised Land, Obama says, “Trump promised an elixir for the racial anxiety of millions of Americans spooked by a black man in the White House.” His support of the racism narrative after the Ferguson shooting of an unarmed black man who had stolen $50 worth of cigarillos from a convenience store, and his close association with Al Sharpton, race-baiter extraordinaire, speaks to his role in sparking the anti-White racism movement. Obama even advanced the now debunked narrative that Michael Brown had yelled to the police, “Hands up, don’t shoot” which was awarded one of the most media ‘Pinocchios’ of 2015.

As opinion columnist Michael Brown penned about Obama, “This very eloquent, charismatic, and gifted leader who could have helped unite our nation only divided us further, promoting identity politics and playing the race card…  But that is not why more than 70 million Americans voted to elect (or, reelect) Donald Trump. And that’s why Lawrence Jones, himself Black, was right to say, ‘I feel like President Obama has started to demonize some of the very people that voted for him… I don’t like his demonization…to paint 70 million people as just these cold-blooded racists… when you take the highest office in the land, you’re going to receive criticism and you can’t just say that it is deeply rooted in race.’”

David Horowitz, once a proud American leftist and now the progenitor of the Horowitz Foundation, FrontPage Magazine, and many more conservative projects, recalls, “The ‘social justice’ radicals still have the best slogans. They call themselves progressives but are actually reactionaries. They call themselves liberals but are actually bigots. They say they’re for peace when they are organized for war. It is always the same war: to bring down the United States of America.” Regarding the left’s accusations of systemic racism, white privilege and police oppression, Horowitz says, “Democrats control 100% of every major inner-city in America and have for 50 to 100 years. Every killing field–Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis–is 100% in the hands of the Democrats. Every injustice in these inner cities– real or imagined–that policy can affect, Democrats are 100% responsible for.” And now we have them calling the shots for our country’s racial intersections.

The Anti-Racism Vocation

Robin DiAngelo, a white woman, took the nascent “Only Whites Can Be Racist” movement and brought it crashing into to the mainstream with her book, White Fragility. She began her career as a university professor but has now followed the money, becoming a diversity consultant. Black scholar John McWhorter argues, “White Fragility was published in 2018 but jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller list amid the protests following the death of George Floyd and the ensuing national reckoning about racism. DiAngelo has convinced university administrators, corporate human-resources offices, and no small part of the reading public that white Americans must embark on a self-critical project of looking inward to examine and work against racist biases that many have barely known they had…I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract.” Could this actually be true of the entire Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) industry?

DeAngelo believes the impulse to individualize is in itself White privilege–a method for playing down the societal racism all white people have assimilated. For a price, these authorities are there help you repent for your sins. They offer working documents and experiential resources to facilitate white folks’ emancipation to become allies for anti-racism and belatedly the communist ideology undergirding it. But there are several assumptive problems with these anti-White racism programs.

First, such programs assume the guilt, not innocence, of White people. Americans are all granted, white people included, through a Supreme Court decision in Coffin v. United States, 156 U.S. 432 (1895) the presumption of innocence of persons accused of crimes. Yet you can now lose your job, fail to get promoted, be placed on probation, and uninvited to important social gatherings because of accused racism. Since employees are urged to attend anti-White racism training based solely on the color of their skin, that may also be racist. Persons of color need not participate.

Second, trying to prove a negative is a logical impossibility. It won’t stand up in jurisprudential court and if it is the cornerstone of an ideologically-motivated social program, that program is falsely premised, on fallow land. CoEqual, formerly Center for Talent Innovation released a statement saying, “White cis straight men hold the majority of power in corporate America and in our society. If we want equitable workplaces, we need them to be involved and engaged in DEI action.” Much of corporate America is falling all over itself trying to demonstrate its anti-racism bona fides. Whether it impresses customers or shareholders remains to be seen. Elsewhere I have opined that such behavior bears no real product or service value and is simply corporate virtue-signaling by those in charge.

Third, it is important to distinguish charges of White racism from disparate outcomes. Thomas Sowell has written eloquently on this subject in his Discrimination and Disparities, “No one who looks at the facts of life can look very far without encountering not only extreme disparities in outcomes but also the pervasive reality of luck…wholly fortuitous factors, from the standpoint of the individual, can have a major influence on how one’s life turns out.” The anti-White Racist movement has never been able to identify a societal issue (except anti-White racism) that was not worthy of repute.

Assuming Something Is Really Broken, How Not to Fix It

Perhaps the most lucrative consulting gig is to offer AWR training to employees. An example of the reach and influence of this leftist doctrine can be seen by the depth and breadth of its reach. For example, the Florida Supreme Court established in 2008 a Standing Committee on Fairness and Diversity. This included continuing racial indoctrination programs for attorneys like “Recognizing and Eliminating Bias from Court Operations”; one of its chapters is titled “Institutionalizing Fairness and Diversity.” This example is mirrored nationwide. The unproven assumption for which there is little if any empirical evidence is that there is strong racial bias in our state and federal legal system against, not for, defendants of color. As Kenneth L. Marcus urged in the Wall Street Journal, “The focus should be on invidious discrimination, not statistical disparities and social change…The problem with much of today’s antiracism is that it doesn’t really oppose invidious discrimination and may even foment it.” This is because those researchers allow their passion and/or ideology to create what is termed a “demand characteristic” in the study design—wherever they look AWR will appear. Gary M. Galles analyzes much of this research concluding, “these studies employed sleight of hand to characterize conservatives as condoning inequality while implying that others do not.”

On September 22, 2020 President Trump issued an executive order halting the use of CRT in federal training programs and in one chorus he was condemned by everyone to the left of Mitt Romney.

The origin of AWR is viewed by progressives as white people’s original sin. This argument embeds into White consciousness that most black people are the same, facing impossible barriers, wounded and perpetually oppressed. It is what Peter DeWitt terms the stigma of low expectations. The fact that there is abundant evidence of black success across America, including electing a mixed-race President, either means AWR wasn’t powerful enough to keep these individuals down or it is useful political fiction used to give them moral high ground.

Lloyd Pettegrew is a Professor Emeritus of Marketing Communication at the University of South Florida.

The growing trend of homeschooling continues amid school closures and distance learning, as parents opt for home education models rather than public school enrollment.

The Foundation for Economic Education notes that there were just under two million homeschoolers across the U.S. prior to the pandemic, making up just 3.4 percent of the total population of K-12 students.

However, based on recent polling by Education Week, this percentage has more than doubled since schools began closures this past spring to nine percent, or almost five million homeschoolers.

“State-level data show just how dramatic the surge in homeschooling has been, particularly in areas where many district schools continue to be closed for full-time, in-person learning,” FEE notes.

For example, the Boston Globe reported last week that 7,188 students transferred out of the public school system to be homeschooled this year, compared to just 802 from the previous year.

FEE points to several other localities showing sharp increases in the number of homeschooled students:

• North Carolina: 10,000 homeschool filings over the summer, compared to just 3,500 last year
• New York City: Over 10,000 students withdrew from public school to homeschool, compared to just 2,500 last year
• Vermont: homeschool applications up by 75% compared to last year
• Connecticut: over six times as many students have left public schools for homeschool compared to last year

Contrary to narratives that homeschooling and “pandemic pods” that consolidate learning for a handful of families are just for wealthy, privileged children, lower-income families are more likely to be opting for homeschool during the pandemic.

In July, the New York Times also noted that contrary to the misperception of the “privileged” homeschooler, “the population of home-schoolers — before the pandemic — was less affluent than average.”

I’m sure any homeschool veterans out there would agree it’s hardly a consistent stereotype that homeschool is for the wealthy!

Meanwhile, public schools across the country are also seeing a corresponding plummet in enrollment rates, as families opt for home education and private or parochial models instead.

In Arizona, for example, enrollment is down five percent while in Massachusetts, it’s down by four.

This can easily seem like a great silver lining to a terrible year to proponents of home education, but bear in mind that with a growth in homeschoolers comes a greater interest in regulating the practice.

As we’ve always advocated at Elizabeth Johnston Ministries, no matter where your child is educated, it’s important to inform, educate, and empower yourself to stand up to any expansion of power on the part of the state to mandate how your child learns.

Make sure to pay attention to local laws and voice your concerns.

Elizabeth Johnston, Elizabeth Johnston Ministries

The World Economic Forum (WEF) was founded fifty years ago. It has gained more and more prominence over the decades and has become one of the leading platforms of futuristic thinking and planning. As a meeting place of the global elite, the WEF brings together the leaders in business and politics along with a few selected intellectuals. The main thrust of the forum is global control. Free markets and individual choice do not stand as the top values, but state interventionism and collectivism. Individual liberty and private property are to disappear from this planet until 2030 according to the projections and scenarios coming from the World Economic Forum.

Eight Predictions

Individual liberty is at risk again. What may lie ahead was projected in November 2016 when the WEF published “8 Predictions for the World in 2030.” According to the WEF’s scenario, the world will become quite a different place from now because how people work and live will undergo a profound change. The scenario for the world 2030 is more than just a forecast. It is a plan whose implementation has accelerated drastically since with the announcement of a pandemic and the consequent lockdowns. 

According to the projections of the WEF’s “Global Future Councils,” private property and privacy will be abolished during the next decade. The coming expropriation would go further than even the communist demand to abolish the property of production goods but leave space for private possessions. The WEF projection says that consumer goods, too, would be no longer private property.

If the WEF projection should come true, people would have to rent and borrow their necessities from the state, which would be the sole proprietor of all goods. The supply of goods would be rationed in line with a social credit points system. Shopping in the traditional sense would disappear along with the private purchases of goods. Every personal move would be tracked electronically, and all production would be subject to the requirements of clean energy and a sustainable environment. 

In order to attain “sustainable agriculture,” the food supply will be mainly vegetarian. In the new totalitarian service economy, the government will provide basic accommodation, food, and transport, while the rest must be lent from the state. The use of natural resources will be brought down to its minimum. In cooperation with the few key countries, a global agency would set the price of CO₂ emissions at an extremely high level to disincentivize its use.

In a promotional video, the World Economic Forum summarizes the eight predictions in the following statements:

1. People will own nothing. Goods are either free of charge or must be lent from the state.
2. The United States will no longer be the leading superpower, but a handful of countries will dominate.
3. Organs will not be transplanted but printed.
4. Meat consumption will be minimized.
5. Massive displacement of people will take place with billions of refugees.
6. To limit the emission of carbon dioxide, a global price will be set at an exorbitant level.
7. People can prepare to go to Mars and start a journey to find alien life.
8. Western values will be tested to the breaking point..

Beyond Privacy and Property

In a publication for the World Economic Forum, the Danish ecoactivist Ida Auken who had served as her country’s minister of the environment from 2011 to 2014 and still is a member of the Danish Parliament (the Folketing) as elaborated a scenario of a world without privacy or property. In “Welcome to 2030,” she envisions a world where “I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” By 2030, so says her scenario, shopping and owning have become obsolete, because everything that once was a product is now a service.

In this idyllic new world of hers, people have free access to transportation, accommodation, food, “and all the things we need in our daily lives.” As these things will become free of charge, “it ended up not making sense for us to own much.” There would be no private ownership in houses nor would anyone pay rent, “because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it.” A person’s living room, for example, will be used for business meetings when one is absent. Concerns like “lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment” are things of the past. The author predicts that people will be happy to enjoy such a good life that is so much better “than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth.”

Ecological Paradise

In her 2019 contribution to the Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils of the World Economic Forum, Ida Auken foretells how the world may look in the future “if we win the war on climate change.” By 2030, when CO₂ emissions will be greatly reduced, people will live in a world where meet on the dinner plate “will be a rare sight” while water and the air will be much cleaner than today. Because of the shift from buying goods to using services, the need to have money will vanish, because people will spend less and less on goods. Work time will shrink and leisure time will grow.

For the future, Auken envisions a city where electric cars have substituted conventional combustion vehicles. Most of the roads and parking spaces will have become green parks and walking zones for pedestrians. By 2030, agriculture will offer mainly plant-based alternatives to the food supply instead of meat and dairy products. The use of land to produce animal feed will greatly diminish and nature will be spreading across the globe again.

Fabricating Social Consent

How can people be brought to accept such a system? The bait to entice the masses is the assurances of comprehensive healthcare and a guaranteed basic income. The promoters of the Great Reset promise a world without diseases. Due to biotechnologically produced organs and individualized genetics-based medical treatments, a drastically increased life expectancy and even immortality are said to be possible. Artificial intelligence will eradicate death and eliminate disease and mortality. The race is on among biotechnological companies to find the key to eternal life.

Along with the promise of turning any ordinary person into a godlike superman, the promise of a “universal basic income” is highly attractive, particularly to those who will no longer find a job in the new digital economy. Obtaining a basic income without having to go through the treadmill and disgrace of applying for social assistance is used as a bait to get the support of the poor.

To make it economically viable, the guarantee of a basic income would require the leveling of wage differences. The technical procedures of the money transfer from the state will be used to promote the cashless society. With the digitization of all monetary transactions, each individual purchase will be registered. As a consequence, the governmental authorities would have unrestricted access to supervise in detail how individual persons spend their money. A universal basic income in a cashless society would provide the conditions to impose a social credit system and deliver the mechanism to sanction undesirable behavior and identify the superfluous and unwanted.

Who Will Be the Rulers?

The World Economic Forum is silent about the question of who will rule in this new world.

There is no reason to expect that the new power holders would be benevolent. Yet even if the top decision-makers of the new world government were not mean but just technocrats, what reason would an administrative technocracy have to go on with the undesirables? What sense does it make for a technocratic elite to turn the common man into a superman? Why share the benefits of artificial intelligence with the masses and not keep the wealth for the chosen few?

Not being swayed away by the utopian promises, a sober assessment of the plans must come to the conclusion that in this new world, there would be no place for the average person and that they would be put away along with the “unemployable,” “feeble minded,” and “ill bred.” Behind the preaching of the progressive gospel of social justice by the promoters of the Great Reset and the establishment of a new world order lurks the sinister project of eugenics, which as a technique is now called “genetic engineering” and as a movement is named “transhumanism,” a term was coined by Julian Huxley, the first director of the UNESCO.

The promoters of the project keep silent about who will be the rulers in this new world. The dystopian and collectivist nature of these projections and plans is the result of the rejection of free capitalism. Establishing a better world through a dictatorship is a contradiction in terms. Not less but more economic prosperity is the answer to the current problems. Therefore, we need more free markets and less state planning. The world is getting greener and a fall in the growth rate of the world population is already underway. These trends are the natural consequence of wealth creation through free markets.

Conclusion

The World Economic Forum and its related institutions in combination with a handful of governments and a few high-tech companies want to lead the world into a new era without property or privacy. Values like individualism, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are at stake, to be repudiated in favor of collectivism and the imposition of a “common good” that is defined by the self-proclaimed elite of technocrats. What is sold to the public as the promise of equality and ecological sustainability is in fact a brutal assault on human dignity and liberty. Instead of using the new technologies as an instrument of betterment, the Great Reset seeks to use the technological possibilities as a tool of enslavement. In this new world order, the state is the single owner of everything. It is left to our imagination to figure out who will program the algorithms that manage the distribution of the goods and services. Author:

Antony P. Mueller

Dr. Antony P. Mueller is a German professor of economics who currently teaches in Brazil. Write an email. See his website and blog.

WILLIAM Graham Sumner has been described as “The Gilded Age’s most renowned teacher of social science and indefatigable defender of [classical] liberalism.” A follower of Adam Smith and professor of political and social science at Yale for 37 years, he consistently defended the “organic” social order individuals created by their own actions against the “artificial or mechanical” conception of society held by social engineers. Those works include What Social Classes Owe To Each Other (1883), Protectionism: the -Ism Which Teaches That Waste Makes Wealth (1885), The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays (1914), and his most famous book, The Forgotten Man and Other Essays (1918). Given that America has “progressed” much further along a path Sumner recognized and fought against a century ago, it is worth revisiting his insights. In particular, his condemnation of “any scheme which aims to gain, not by the legitimate fruits of industry and enterprise, but by extorting from somebody a part of his product,” expressed in terms of “the forgotten man,” is as important now as it has ever been.

The characteristic of all social doctors is, that they fix their minds on some man or group of men whose case appeals to the sympathies and the imagination, and they plan remedies addressed to the particular trouble … they ignore all the effects on other members of society than the ones they have in view. Now, we never can annihilate a penalty.

We can only divert it from the head of the man who has incurred it to the heads of others who have not incurred it. A vast amount of “social reform” consists in just this operation. Government produces nothing at all … the State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man. The government gives a license to certain interests to go out and encroach on others. To lift one man up we push another down.

… The beneficiaries are selected by favoritism.… Those who suffer a corresponding depression … are forgotten or passed over; and the friends of humanity once more appear, in their zeal to help somebody, to be trampling on those who are trying to help themselves. The industrious and sober workman, who is mulcted of a percentage of his day’s wages … is the one who bears the penalty. But he is the Forgotten Man … never noticed, because he has behaved himself, fulfilled his contracts, and asked for nothing. There always are two parties. The second one is always the Forgotten Man … he minds his own business, and makes no complaint. Consequently the philanthropists never think of him, and trample on him … the working man needs no improvement in his condition except to be freed from the parasites who are living on him.

The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes … is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C’s interests, are entirely overlooked. The first instinct of modern man is to get a law passed to forbid or prevent what, in his wisdom, he disapproves.

The agents who are to direct the State action are, of course, the reformers and philanthropists. Their schemes, therefore, are always reduced to this type—that A and B decide what C shall do for D. Immense mischief … has been done by sentimental economists and social philosophers who have thought it their professional duty, not to investigate and teach the truth, but to dabble in philanthropy … in pursuit of whims and dreams and impossible desires.

The evils of society are to a great extent the result of the dogmatism and self-interest of statesmen, philosophers, and ecclesiastics who … assumed that they could organize society as they chose.

It is the greatest folly of which a man can be capable, to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world.

Last Thursday night, I watched President Trump deliver an astonishing speech concerning the 2020 election and the fraudulent activities of the Democrats in the key swing states.  After the speech ended, I had the thought to download the  YouTube video  of Trump’s speech onto a thumb drive so it would be preserved for my four-month-old grandchild.

Yes, preserved.

If Biden prevails, all pre–January 20, 2021 downloadable internet videos and news broadcasts about the Trump administration successes will not so slowly disappear, or worse, they will be edited by the new Ministry of Truth.

No socialist nation has ever allowed the free flow of information, history, and national culture.  A Harris/Biden administration will surely be no exception.

So, thinking forward a bit more, I’d like to suggest to all those reading this article that we begin to preserve our internet history, in fact our entire cultural history for future generations.  Each one of us should immediately start creating a secure digital ark that cannot be accessed by the internet.  And we all have a deadline of January 19, 2021 if Biden prevails.

Start by archiving historical, political, and how-to videos, plus internet articles to portable hard drives and thumb drives.  Store these in a safe location that is not connected to the internet via the Cloud, cable, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth.  I would also suggest you digitally save and print out hard copies of your favorite political authors and columnists.

We should also purchase and preserve additional digital (and paper) copies of our most cherished political documents, books, magazines, family histories, Bibles, art, movies, TV shows, and music onto portable hard drives and thumb drives.  This digital ark will require access to a non-networked computer — again, one that is not connected to the internet via the Cloud, cable, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth — to read and watch these preserved records.

Noah was ridiculed and scorned for his warning, but he preserved the land animals and his family from the Flood.  Each of us must become a Noah and build our families’ own unique digital arks.  We must prepare to preserve our American heritage, American history, and American culture, and that of Western civilization in general.  Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Confucius, Descartes, Maimonides, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, John Madison, Henry David Thoreau, and Milton Friedman have no place in Marxist- Leninist controlled country.

From Howard Zinn to the New York Times’ infamous “1619” propaganda project, the Marxists have slavishly followed Orwell’s 1984 as a how-to manual of rewriting history to secure their political power.

To successfully resist the Marxists, “We, the People,” will require more than civil disobedience, guns, and freeze dried food.  We must also preserve why we will fight: our rich 244-year-old history of America’s pursuit for life, liberty, and the ideals we cherish.

Hebrews 11:7: “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house…”

Michael Devon, American Thinker

Moral cowardice is fear of upholding the good because it is good, and fear of opposing the evil because it is evil.

Moral cowardice is the necessary consequence of discarding morality as inconsequential. It is the common symptom of all intellectual appeasers. The image of the brute is the symbol of an appeaser’s belief in the supremacy of evil, which means—not in conscious terms, but in terms of his quaking, cringing, blinding panic—that when his mind judges a thing to be evil, his emotions proclaim its power, and the more evil, the more powerful.

For too long, mayors and governors and health officials across the country have overstepped their authority. Time to ignore them.By John Daniel Davidson

By now it should be obvious that elected state and local officials issuing COVID-19 lockdown and stay-at-home orders are just making things up as they go along.

Too often, their edicts aren’t based on science or data, but on a grotesque understanding of their own authority and infallibility. In the face of a worsening pandemic, they want to be seen doing something, taking bold action to stop the spread of the virus—that is, so long as it doesn’t hurt certain favored special interests.

That’s why Americans living under arbitrary and unconstitutional lockdown orders should simply ignore them, en masse, as an act of civil disobedience.

How else are ordinary people to push back against the capricious rules of politicians like Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti? On November 25, the day before Thanksgiving, Garcetti and county health officials banned outdoor dining at bars and restaurants for three weeks. Because of the spread of the virus, they said, it’s just too dangerous, so we all have to do our part and make sacrifices.

But then they gave a carve-out for certain kinds of outdoor dining, like film and television crew’s catering sites. In Garcetti’s town, a massive film crew eating outside is safe but a small restaurant or bar with outdoor, socially distanced seating is too dangerous to remain open. Got it?

Then last week, L.A. County Superior Court Judge James Chalfant called out the mayor and county health officials on this arbitrary exercise of power, ordering them to produce scientific evidence to justify the outdoor dining ban. “You have to do a risk-benefit analysis for public health. You don’t just talk about the risk of spreading disease. You have to talk about the benefit of keeping restaurants open,” Chalfant said.null

Exactly right. Chalfant is also requiring the county to provide data on hospital and ICU capacity to justify the claim that the health-care system would be overwhelmed without the outdoor dining ban. County health officials are scheduled to appear in Chalfant’s courtroom Tuesday to give whatever evidence they were able to cobble together since last week.

The lawsuit, brought by an attorney who also owns a downtown L.A. restaurant, captures the dynamic of pandemic governance in a microcosm. Health officials, based on nothing but their opinions about what might be safe or not, have put tens of thousands of people in America’s second-largest city out of work right before the holiday season.

This pattern has played out all across the country this year. Elected officials, often Democratic mayors or governors, promulgate rules, curfews, capacity limits, and outright shutdowns that betray either animosity or indifference toward certain groups while protecting other, favored groups.

That’s how we got a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s order singling out churches and other houses of worship for special restrictions was unconstitutional, a ruling that was affirmed a week later when the Supreme Court sent a similar case back to a federal district court in California for reconsideration in light of its ruling in the New York case.null

At issue in both cases was the arbitrariness of the restrictions on places of worship. As Justice Neil Gorsuch noted in the New York case, “It is time—past time—to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques.”

It shouldn’t take an appeal to the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion to stay the hand of would-be municipal and county tyrants across the country. While perhaps laughably cartoonish in its bald-faced cronyism and sheer cruelty, the outdoor dining ban in L.A. is nothing to take lightly. It’s taking a terrible toll on real people, most of them people who can’t go weeks or months without working.

Last week, a viral video of a distraught L.A. restaurant owner brought home not just the arbitrariness and unfairness of the outdoor dining ban, but the cost in livelihoods and jobs destroyed. The woman was Angela Marsden, owner of the Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill in Sherman Oaks, a Los Angeles neighborhood. Marsden issued a tearful plea for help and a call to protest after her restaurant’s outdoor dining area, which she had spent tens of thousands of dollars carefully adapting to comply with county pandemic rules, was shut down along with every other outdoor dining area in the city.

Her video went viral because not 50 feet away from her restaurant was a much larger outdoor dining area that was allowed to stay open because it was for a comedy television show on NBC. The entertainment industry, you see, had been deemed essential by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, which meant actors and film crews were exempt from the governor’s stay-at-home order issued last month, which applied to nearly the entire state.

Later, Marsden said in a Fox News interview that people in her city are suffering from pandemic restrictions and that small business owners and employees are “going to die” from poverty, depression, and suicide.

It’s hard to watch Marsden point out the hypocrisy and unfairness of L.A.’s outdoor dining ban without feeling a kind of rage. A terrible injustice is being perpetrated against ordinary working people by elected officials who believe they can shutter entire industries and destroy people’s livelihoods with the stroke of a pen.

These often are the same leaders who don’t follow their own pandemic rules and guidelines, who believe that lockdowns and curfews and restrictions are for poor people and the working class, not elites like them. These are the same leaders who tacitly or openly approved of massive Black Lives Matter protests over the summer and fall, in some cases participating themselves in violation of Centers for Disease Control guidelines about gathering sizes. Such protests were okay, in their view, because they agreed with the politics at issue. But we all know what would happen if crowds gathered to protest, say, draconian lockdown orders.

Fortunately for us, because we are Americans and we live in a free country—a place governed by laws and not by men—we have a constructive way to express our rage and outrage: we can simply stop obeying these lawless edicts.

We can safely open our businesses and places of worship, and in so doing dare the tiny despots in the local health department or the mayor’s office to stop us. If enough of us take a stand, as a free people should do, the Garcettis and Newsoms and Cuomos will back down—and if they don’t, they can face mass protests, public outrage, and eventually the rebuke of the Supreme Court.

If ever there were a time for mass civil disobedience, it’s now.John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

It happened with mail-in voting. For years, Democrats wanted voting without an ID. It makes cheating easier. With mail-in voting, they got way more than they demanded in the past. Witness the results.

More is coming. Much more.

Because of COVID, we now need to eliminate student loan debts, and make college “free”. Those who work will pay for it. Those same former college students — the ones who work, at least — will pay for it through taxes. Nothing is free.

Because of COVID, we’ll need higher tax rates.

Because of COVID, we’ll need a permanent guaranteed national income, paying people to stay home. After all, as small businesses close down in droves (90 percent of restaurants gone in New York City; one-third of small businesses already gone in places like New Jersey), how are people supposed to live?

Because of COVID, we’ll need the Green New Deal. Actually, thanks to lockdowns, we already have it. Who needs to fly or drive a car when you’re locked down for 80 percent of your activity?

Because of COVID, we’ll need slavery reparations. Just because.

Because of COVID, we’ll need welfare spending that makes the Great Society look like pinching pennies. It will seem more plausible, once the standard of living in America becomes akin to Venezuela.

Because of COVID, we’ll need mandatory everything. Lockdowns will be used for other reasons, whenever Governors, mayors or Presidents feel like it. Already there’s talk on the far left of the Democratic Party (the one party now) of having lockdowns for the “environmental crisis” and the “racism crisis.” Nobody can claim a crisis like a leftist. They will dream up crises you or I could never imagine. Now you can be sure that lockdowns will be permanently on the menu, as a means of controlling millions of people. Look how well they’ve been working. We all comply!

Because of COVID, we’ll have to confiscate guns. They’ll call it a “buyback.” Obviously, with all the social unrest created by imprisoning people in their homes, we can’t have them owning guns.

Because of COVID, we’ll have to curb hate speech. Hate speech doesn’t mean “hate”, of course; it means speech critical of the party in power. Since leftists now permanently control the entire government — thanks to election fraud that seems to have worked — we, in effect, have one-party control. They will ensure that criticism of that one party is muted, if not eradicated. Facebook and Twitter are already brazenly doing it. Before long, the policies of those companies will be the policy of the U.S. federal government. Just watch.

I am not being negative. I do not wish to bring anyone down. I am simply being truthful. The truth MIGHT set you free. Lying to yourself that any of this will get better, on our current course … that will never set you free. THIS is what happens when you’re too quiet, too afraid and not angry enough. Voting for Trump wasn’t enough. Even if the President still finds a path to retain the White House, this country is in more trouble than any of us can say. Tyrants and abusers always exploit those qualities of hesitation, fear of what others think, and fear of rocking the boat. (“My neighbors are Democrats. Oh my gosh … they might not like me!”) Rise up, storm the palace gates (figuratively or literally, if it comes to that), resist, resist, resist, 74 million of you (or more) — and maybe you’ll see something different. But not a moment before. You cannot leave it all to Donald Trump. Hasn’t that man and his family suffered enough?

This is no time to be “conservative”. You’ve got to become a radical. A radical for freedom. Anything less and — well, you can see what will happen.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Some Federal Reserve officials are calling for tougher banking regulations in order to prevent the Fed’s low interest rate policy from leading investors to take “excessive” risks that will create asset bubbles. The Fed is understandably worried that these bubbles will burst leading to another market meltdown. However, the boom-and-bust cycle will not end because regulators stop investors from taking “excessive” risks. Almost every bubble and economic downturn America has experienced over the past 107 years was caused by the Federal Reserve’s manipulation of the money supply.

The Federal Reserve’s actions artificially lower interest rates, thus distorting the signals sent by the rates, which are the price of money. Artificially low interest rates cause investments to be made in projects that are not supported by the real underlying market conditions. This results in a boom, inevitably followed by a crash, then by a new round of money creation and government bailouts restarting the cycle.

Increased regulations will not just fail to head off the next crash, they will make the next recession worse. Federal regulators are not capable of determining what is “excessive” risk. Instead, that determination is best left to market participants. Regulators are subject to having the same Fed-induced distorted view of the marketplace as nearly everyone else. Thus, regulators may mistake a growing asset bubble as a thriving sector of the economy that will serve as a long-term source of growth. This is especially the case if, as with the housing bubble, government policies such as the Community Reinvestment Act encourage the malinvestments. Also, regulators may impede the growth of businesses that are actually responding to real economic conditions instead of Fed-created illusions.

Support among the people, if not among the financial and political elites, for auditing and even ending the Fed, as well as for cryptocurrencies and precious metals, suggests we may soon reach what Ludwig von Mises referred to as the “crack-up.” The crack-up occurs when enough people realize that continuous expanding of the money supply, and the accompanying decline in a currency’s purchasing power, is a feature of central banking. Therefore, they spend their money as soon as they get it, accelerating the rise of hyperinflation.

Concerns over the effects of the US government’s debt, the precarious American economic condition, and growing resentment of US foreign policy have led to a decline in the dollar’s international value. Eventually, these factors will lead to a rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status.

Rejection of the dollar’s reserve currency status abroad and the crack-up at home will cause an economic meltdown worse than the Great Depression. Among the problems this will lead to is increased violence as some Americans who believe they are entitled to live off the stolen property of others cut out the government middleman and start stealing from their fellow citizens.

The only way to avoid this fate is to spread the ideas of liberty among the people. A strong liberty movement that can pressure politicians to cut spending, audit and end the Fed, legalize competing currencies, and stop promoting divisive identity politics is the key to peacefully transitioning away from the Keynesian welfare-warfare state to a free society.   

Ron Paul, Ron Paul Institute