Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.
It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him—it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.
The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.
A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.
Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a “tendency” to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.
What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil—he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man.
Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.
They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.
News headlines claim 95% effectiveness for Pfizer RNA COVID-19 vaccine. In hard numbers, there is only a marginal (less than 1%) statistical advantage to vaccination compared to an inactive placebo vaccine. This deception will lead to massive overvaccination of the U.S. population.
Knowledge of Health, Dec. 9, 2020 – Analysis of data released by the FDA reveals mandated vaccination of the entire U.S. population with PFIZER’S COVID-19 RNA vaccine would prevent less than 1% of COVID-19 cases.
On December 10, 2020, the Food & Drug Administration, acting as a front-man for Pfizer drug company, released a seemingly positive report on the safety and effectiveness of a 2-dose RNA COVID-19 vaccine, claiming 95% effectiveness.
The design for this ongoing vaccine study is intended to determine how well an RNA-altering COVID-19 vaccine reduces incidence of COVID-19 infection as determined by a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) nasal swab test and by symptomology over a short-term (sometime 7 days after the 2nd inoculation). The PFIZER Report is available for viewing and analysis.
The 2-inoculation regimen is used to reduce dose-related side effects.
Both vaccinated and placebo groups experienced less than 1-percent infection rates in hard numbers, but on a relative basis vaccinated subjects experienced 95% less risk for infection.
The chance of benefiting from vaccination is less than 1-percent because very few are infected in the first place. This scheme hides the fact massive overvaccination needs to occur to produce a health benefit for very few.
Over all there were 9 cases of COVID-19 among 19,965 vaccinated subjects vs. 169 among 20,172 subjects in the placebo group. (9 divided by 169 = .05 or ~95% relative reduction in new cases of COVID-19). This is how investigators came up with the quoted 95% effectiveness for this vaccine.
It should not be misconstrued that 95% effectiveness means 95 out of 100 benefited from vaccination by reduction of risk for infection.
Over 38,000 subjects had to be inoculated to determine the number of lab-tested cases of COVID-19 were reduced from 169 to 9; (9 in 19,965 vaccinated subjects = 0.00045% or 4.5 cases in 10,000); compared to 162 COVID-19 infections among 20,172 that received an inactive placebo (0.00803% or 8 cases in 1000).
Extrapolated to entire US population (325,000,000)
If the data gleaned from the FDA/PFIZER vaccine report were applied and the entire U.S. population was vaccinated, the following chart reveals the number of infected cases would dramatically drop to 146,250 compared to 2,609,750 cases if an inactive placebo were administered, but 325,000,000 Americans would have to be inoculated to achieve these numbers, with no assurance immunity would last, with no assurance deaths would decline, and with uncertainty whether side effects will exceed benefits.KETER Pacific Cool Bar…Best Price: $69.52Buy New $79.00(as of 07:31 EST – Details)
The RNA vaccine activated dormant viruses that resulted in cases of temporary facial nerve paralysis (Bell’s palsy) and could activate incapacitating Guillain barre syndrome, shingles and hepatitis.
A number of vaccines that have undergone more rigorous study than the current COVID-19 vaccines now being licensed have been recalled due to severe side effects, some years after gaining licensure.
The data reveals 99% of the U.S. population would not benefit from RNA-vaccination against COVID-19. There is the possibility the number of side effects will exceed the number of infections prevented.
Public health authorities report 15.5 million accumulated cases of COVID-19 whereas the extrapolation presented here shows only 2,609,750 cases of COVID-19 infection with an inactive placebo vaccine. For explanation, the 15.5 is an accumulated number of cases while the 2,609,750 cases is tabulated at one point in time.
Guesstimated deaths
286,000 COVID-19-related deaths have been reported since January of 2020, or 53 cases for every death. (15.2 million cases divided by 286,000 deaths = 53)
Therefore, the corrected number of deaths attributed solely to COVID-19 is 6% of 286,000 = 17,160 COVID-only deaths, which is a ratio of ~885 cases for every death without an effective vaccine. (17,160 COVID-19-only related deaths in a population of 325 million would be a 0.000053% death rate or 5.3 in 100,000).
That would mean the number of subjects needed to treat (NNT) to prevent 1 death would be 885. That is the reason why COVID-19 death numbers need to be skewed higher in order to justify vaccination. Hence, older people who have comorbidities + a positive PCR COVID-19 test are considered to have died of COVID-19, not with COVID-19.
Mandatory vaccination with Pfizer’s yet unproven RNA vaccine would be presumed to raise the number of cases required to produce 1 death (now 1 in 885), thus reducing risk, which would be a very challenging task.
In the PFIZER vaccine study, there were 2 deaths in the RNA-vaccine group and 4 in the placebo group. Those deaths were not attributed to vaccination. Regardless of the numbers, there is no data to show Pfizer’s COVID-19 RNA vaccine reduces the COVID-19 death rate whatsoever. Only a long-term study would reveal any survival benefit for vaccination. They study was not designed to determine death rate.
When only 286,000 subjects (w/comorbidities) die in a population of 325 million, that equals 8.8 deaths in 10,000 or 0.00088%. When only 17,160 die with COVID-19 (w/o comorbidities), that is 5.3 deaths per 100,000 or 0.000053%. Either way, whichever mortality numbers are used, a lot of people have to be vaccinated to save 1 life.
Any analyst would conclude, from these numbers, this is not a pandemic. Only a flawed PCR test and re-categorization of deaths produces the above mortality numbers. Even then, the chance of dying of or with COVID-19 is remote and contrived.
Confirmation of infection
Occurrence of COVID-19 was assessed by PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing of a nasal swab sample and also by symptomology. The PCR test is notoriously inaccurate and produces 100% false positives and is known to start pseudo-epidemics.
Prior to the beginning of the Pfizer study, almost no cases of COVID-19 were detected in both vaccine and placebo groups respectively. Again, with all of the fear mongering over this COVID-19 pandemic, only 3 subjects entered the study with a positive PCR test for COVID-19 out of ~38,000 study participants (0.000078% or ~8 in 100,000).
Side Effects and adverse events
A major problem is that vaccination itself often induces symptoms of infection such as fever, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, fatigue, which makes it difficult to distinguish vaccine-related side effects from symptoms of the disease.
Among 18,804 vaccinated subjects, 8 experienced an adverse event.
Among 18,892 patients receiving placebo (inactive agent by injection), 5 experienced an adverse event.
There were very few severe side effects: Just 1 participant experienced a severe side effect in the vaccine group versus 3 in the placebo group.
Obesity is a strong risk factor for COVID-19 infection. Only 3 (37.5%) were obese in the vaccine group and 67 (41.4%) in the placebo group.
Only 14.2% of 19,000 vaccinated subjects reported fever. Fever is necessary to activate antibodies against any infectious disease. It is questionable whether vaccination will produce long-term immunity against COVID-19 coronavirus.
A total of six deaths occurred in the reporting period (2 deaths in the vaccine group, 4 in placebo group).
Suspected cases of COVID-19
There were 3410 total cases of “suspected” but unconfirmed COVID-19 by PCR test in the overall study population; 1594 occurred in the vaccine group (8.2%) among ~19,500+ vaccinated subjects vs. 1816 (~9.3%) among ~19,500 placebo-treated participants. This reveals there was very little relative difference (1.1%) between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups when evaluated by symptomology.
Within 7 days after any vaccination, suspected COVID-19 cases as determined by symptomology were 409 in the vaccine group vs. 287 in the placebo group. There was a small favorable reduction in symptoms in the placebo group compared to the vaccinated group in this immediate post-inoculation period. (409 among 19,500 vaccinated = 2.0% vs. 287 among 19,500 unvaccinated group = 1.5%).
Contents of vaccine and likely method of action
Any resistance to infection may have been temporarily produced by the noxious chemicals in the vaccine. The Pfizer vaccine contains noxious chemicals that will likely activate the immune system and transiently raise the resistance to infection, regardless of the RNA-altering activity of the vaccine. However, this immune system activation would not be expected to last long. Post-vaccination testing was done 7+ days following immunization.
According to the FDA report, the Pfizer RNA vaccine contains the following:
A nucleoside-modified messenger RNA encoding the viral spike glycoprotein (S) of SARS-CoV-2. The vaccine also includes the following ingredients: lipids (4-hydroxybutyl)azanediyl) bis(hexane-6,1-diyl)bis(2- hexyldecanoate), 2-[(polyethylene glycol)-2000]-N,N-ditetradecylacetamide, 1,2-distearoyl-snglycero-3-phosphocholine, and cholesterol), potassium chloride, monobasic potassium phosphate, sodium chloride, dibasic sodium phosphate dihydrate, and sucrose.
Nerve palsy
News headlines point to four cases of temporary facial nerve paralysis (Bell’s Palsy) in the vaccinated group versus none in the unvaccinated group. Certainly, noxious chemicals in the vaccine may have activated dormant herpes viruses in the facial nerve. Bell’s palsy and shingles are more often reported by older adults, especially adults over age 80. The 80+ age group is the most vulnerable to COVID-19 but very few participants in this study were over age 75 to accurately assess this risk. RNA-COVID-19 vaccination may cause dormant viruses to erupt and result in cases of shingles, facial nerve paralysis (Bell’s palsy), Guillain Barre syndrome, and hepatitis.
The 12th edition of Rich States, Poor States, written by White House Advisors Arthur Laffer, Ph.D., Stephen Moore, and Jonathan Williams, chief economist for the American Legislative Exchange Council, pinpoints why some states in the union grow and prosper while others shrink and fail.
Based on the authors’ collective research, appropriate regulations, competitive tax rates, and wise government spending yields greater opportunities for all Americans. In particular, citizens in states where lawmakers are focused on establishing long-term prosperity benefit the most. This is especially true when those citizens trust the judgment of their political leaders and have witnessed the wisdom of their policies.
What’s more, from year to year, rich states in motion tend to maintain and even elevate prosperity, while poor states experience the opposite and issue lame laments about “tax breaks for the rich” and other go-to bromides.
15 Vital Policy Areas
As in each edition, Rich States, Poor States ranks the economic outlook of all 50 states based on 15 policy variables, which are given equal weight. These policy variables include top marginal personal income tax rate, top marginal corporate income tax rate, personal income tax progressivity, property tax burden, sales tax burden, and remaining tax burden.
Also included are estate or inheritance taxes levied, recently legislated tax changes, debt service as a share of tax revenue, public employees per 10,000 of population, state liability system surveys, state minimum wage, average workers’ compensation costs, whether the state is right-to-work, and tax expenditure limits.
The common denominator among states that rank high in economic outlook is that they tax less and spend less, and they promote policies that either stimulate investment or increase employment, or do both.
Examining the list below, one can see that the 15 states of the union with the highest economic outlook ranking voted Republican in the last election presidential election (counting four states withvotes still in question), including Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Indiana, North Carolina, Nevada, Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arizona, North Dakota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Michigan, and Texas.
Economic Outlook Ranking
From the best, Utah, to the worst, New York, here is the complete state roster:
1. Utah
2. Wyoming
3. Idaho
4. Indiana
5. North Carolina
6. Nevada
7. Florida
8. Tennessee
9. Oklahoma
10. Arizona
11. North Dakota
12. Wisconsin
13. South Dakota
14. Michigan
15. Texas
16. Virginia
17. New Hampshire
18. Colorado
19. Missouri
20. Mississippi
21. Georgia
22. Arkansas
23. Alabama
24. Delaware
25. Kansas
26. Alaska
27. Iowa
28. West Virginia
29. Ohio
30. Louisiana
31. Kentucky
32. South Carolina
33. Montana
34. New Mexico
35. Massachusetts
36. Nebraska
37. Maryland
38. Pennsylvania
39. Washington
40. Connecticut
41. Maine
42. Oregon
43. Rhode Island
44. Hawaii
45. Minnesota
46. California
47. Illinois
48. New Jersey
49. Vermont
50. New York
Notice that those states with the lowest economic outlook ranking, starting from the worst, New York, and including Vermont, New Jersey, Illinois, California, Minnesota, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Oregon, and Maine, all voted Democrat in the recent election.
Choose Your Fate
Republican-led states tend to prosper, Democrat-led states tend to suffer. A mere coincidence? With such a wide disparity in the economic outlook rankings and resulting economic prosperity, versus the lack thereof, Americans have had somewhat of a dual experience during President Trump’s time in office.
Those states that voted for Trump and for Republicans, in general, have had a different reality from those states that traditionally vote for Democrats. This economic disparity between different regions of the country has gone on not merely for years, but for decades. Those cities where economic devastation and destruction has occurred, once again, have voted for Democratic regimes, not merely for years, but for decades, and Republican-led cities tend to prosper, while Democrat-led cities tend to suffer.
Why don’t states with poor economic outlook rankings, and cities that have long been in decline, emulate the policies and practices of states and cities that continue to prosper? That is a compelling question that is well worth pursuing and, in particular, a vital question for Democrat politicians and the millions of voters who aimlessly support them.
Prediction: Vaccinations will be mandatory. It may be done indirectly, and subject to enforcement by health clubs, restaurants, grocery stores or even big corporations like banks, mortgage-holders and credit card companies. They will say it’s not mandatory, but it will be, unless you stay confined to your house 24/7 — and some will even advocate for authorities showing up at your door. The Supreme Court could strike it all down, theoretically; but it will take months or years for the case to get there. There’s no doubt the leftist justices and John Roberts (now a leftist) will back it up; and we have no guarantees on conservatives not going wobbly (aside from Justices Thomas and Alito). And, of course, if Biden establishes a regime and the U.S. Senate is stolen for Democrats after anticipated fraud in Georgia Senate runoffs, then the Supreme Court will be stacked with leftists forever, and will no longer be relevant as a check on the tyranny of our government. A sad scenario, but 100 percent of our experience in 2020 suggests it will happen.
A reader wrote me: “Personally, I see a big difference between a private company requiring proof of vaccination versus the state mandating. To be clear, no mandates put on private companies to require proof – that is just an indirect state mandate i.e. fascism.”
My reply: The “private” companies will be required to enforce vaccination proof just as they are now required to enforce masks and distance. There are no private companies any longer.
When the Electoral College meets Monday, it will almost surely certify former Vice President Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. And he will take the oath of office Jan. 20.
There is, nationally, a growing if grudging realization of that reality.
Yet millions of Americans will refuse to accept the legitimacy of that election and its outcome and will continue to believe, with President Donald Trump, that it was “rigged.”
“Was the 2020 election stolen by the establishment to get rid of a president, Donald Trump, whom it loathed?” will be debated decades hence — as are questions such as, “Did FDR have advance knowledge the Japanese were going to attack?” and, “Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone in Dallas?”
That perception that something was afoot first arose in the minds of millions in the hours after the election on Nov. 3, when 83% of Republicans polled by Gallup said they did not believe reports of Trump’s defeat.
Things perceived as real are real in their consequences.
And there was justification for that perception. Who was not stunned to learn that as Trump seemed to be pulling ahead in the voting count on Nov. 3, suddenly, around midnight, the vote counting appeared to stop in the crucial swing states, and we were told it would begin again early the next morning? Why the halt?
Again, things perceived as real are real in their consequences.
The Washington Post reports this week that, midway between Election Day and Inauguration Day, only 27 congressional Republicans would acknowledge Biden’s win. Some 220 GOP members of the House and Senate — 88% of Republicans serving in Congress — would not say who won the election.
And Trump continues to fight on, millions behind him, to persuade public officials in such battleground states as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada to withdraw their certifications.
He is said to be working the phones to get Republicans in Congress to reject the designation of Biden as president.
He has joined a suit by 17 states’ attorneys general to have the Supreme Court accept Texas’ argument that late alterations in the voting processes in four swing states be declared unconstitutional and illegal.
Among the more credible charges is that, due to the pandemic, late changes were made in the voting processes of states, especially with mailed-out and mailed-in ballots. The contention is that votes cast as a consequence of changes done contrary to state laws or constitutions should be thrown out. Most of those votes came from the urban precincts where Biden’s margins were massive.
While some 50 lawsuits filed in Trump’s cause may have been rejected in courts, the hourly allegations of fraud in the collection and counting of ballots have given credence to a generalized belief that Trump was cheated of votes he received and Biden received votes that were illicitly cast.
Where will this leave us Jan. 20?
American politics will be even more poisoned and polarized than it has been for the last four years. Tens of millions of Americans will see themselves as disfranchised and believe that the greatest champion they have had in decades was illegally driven from power by the same deep state-media conspiracy he fought for four years.
Reinforcing this perception is the sudden revelation this week that Biden’s son Hunter is indeed the target of a federal tax investigation.
That is a story the mainstream media not only refused to cover but sought to bury. And it further buttresses a widespread belief that the mainstream media were in the tank for Biden and will use the power they have to fix the outcome of future American elections in favor of the establishment to which they belong.
For scores of millions of Americans, the mainstream media have lost any credibility and moral authority they once had.
The media have spent four years promoting the falsehood that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump conspired to steal the 2016 election, a charge for which the two-year Robert Mueller investigation could not find any substance at all. They championed the cause of impeachment of Trump over a single comment in a phone call to the president of Ukraine.
And all the while, they painted Trump as racist, sexist, homophobic and treasonous, and his followers as torch-carrying deplorables.
The hypocritical calls from the mainstream media today for us all to come together, after the atrocities they perpetrated, boggle the mind.
Amazing. And now that the Democrats appear to have captured the White House, the message is, “Can’t we all just get along?”
What lies ahead?
Some see secession. But though secession is unlikely, a secession of the heart has already taken place in America. We are two nations, two peoples seemingly separated indefinitely. Can a nation so divided as ours, racially, ideologically, religiously, still do great things together, as did the America of days gone by, to the amazement of the world?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
who are not part of the political and corporate elite, who lack the advantages and connections of the Deep State, who are not media, academics, or celebs. President Trump puts ordinary Americans first, and it drives the elite nuts.
The elite have spent so many years enjoying their advantages, including the psychological advantage of despising ordinary people, that they panicked when someone tried to take it all away from them. They can’t go on living without that warm, reassuring sense of superiority.
Contempt for average Americans was palpable in Hillary Clinton, which is why she lost the election of 2016. It was just too obvious. Joe Biden conceals it somewhat better, or perhaps he just cares more for other advantages of office — for both himself and family members. Either way, he is taking advantage of ordinary people.
What really upset the elite was that average Americans were beginning to believe in themselves. Their wages were rising for the first time in decades, and they felt proud to be restoring America to what it could be. If Biden wins, that will be lost. The everyday American can crawl back to his cell and watch the country stagnate for another four or eight years.
What if the deplorables — the guy who delivers the bread to your supermarket, the woman caring for three children at home, the insurance salesman, the Target checkout clerk — were actually smarter than the Washington types, smarter than you in the universities and the media? For the elite, it would mean that the world had been turned upside-down.
That’s exactly what President Trump began to accomplish in four years. For four years, those everyday Americans were treated like something special, listened to, moved to the front of the line. Trump rallies were exciting because they were primarily a celebration of the rise of the real America — of those who get up five mornings a week to an alarm clock, start the car in the cold, drive to work in the dark, put in eight or ten hours, come back to football on TV in a two-bedroom apartment, bathe and sleep, and do it again and again. On weekends, they coach and volunteer and attend church and care for family and neighbors.
This is a way of life that the Washington elite despise. They prefer $300 restaurants, chauffeured limos, escort services funded by lobbyists, drugs and alcohol, junkets to exclusive resorts, secret bank accounts, and the status of high office.
The elite think they are so far above us, but they are not happier for it. It’s the parents in Oklahoma with their newborn child, the kid in Indiana receiving his first promotion, the grandparents in Florida living on not much more than Social Security but still giving of themselves — these are the great Americans who understand what President Trump is talking about, and they are the Americans he understands and respects.
Can you say Obama understood and respected these ordinary Americans? Or the Clintons, or even the Bushes, with their New England heritage and Texas money? Or Nixon, LBJ, or Kennedy with his serial adulteries? Or Carter, with his twisted ideology of “save everyone in the world at the expense of the American middle class”? Only Reagan and Trump put ordinary Americans first.
Now, unless the Supreme Court steps in, it’s back to “normal.” Already the word has come down from Biden appointees — herd the riffraff back to their pens, tape their mouths, steal their votes, and strip them of their rights. It’s high times again in Washington.
What is really important to the elite is the illusion that only they know what’s “smart” and what’s right. “Smart” was the byword of the Obama/Biden administration, and it implied that anyone who questioned their policies — policies designed to enrich the elite — was truly dumb. It was their way of ending the discussion, like saying “the science is settled.” Now, from being “smarter” than we are, the next step is to prosecute those who oppose them, and they’re halfway there with the accusation that those who question anthropogenic climate change are “deniers.”
The elite are evolving from political snobs to something more sinister. It’s not enough to condescend to conservatives. Now the elite want to imprison them. The persecution of Gen. Flynn by a politicized Justice Department should be a warning to the rest of us. Michael Flynn is a hero for standing up to it, but most Americans would probably buckle under the pressure, and we’d be living in a totalitarian state. We’re close to that already.
There are many policies to fear from Biden/Harris, but censorship and persecution of opponents may be the worst thing. Progressives have a history of elevating their goals above the law and established practice — Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act, FDR’s attempt at court-packing, LBJ’s bullying of Congress and the courts, Obama’s pen and a phone. Obama/Biden was the most activist administration since LBJ, intent on promoting universal abortion “rights,” open borders, and globalist policies that weakened the United States, and they used the Justice Department and FBI, along with many other agencies, to persecute those who opposed them. What they especially attacked was the traditional faith of the heartland.
Hobby Lobby found that out, so expect there to be more Hobby Lobbies under Biden. When the CEO and Founder of Hobby Lobby, David Green, stood up for what he believed and refused to fund contraceptive coverage mandated under Obamacare, Obama’s Justice Department sued with the intention of fining and imprisoning him into submission. Green refused to bow to the Deep State and ultimately won in the Supreme Court.
Thanks to President Trump’s appointees, the Court may be the salvation of others like David Green, but it can go only so far. And there is nothing except a Republican Senate to prevent Biden from packing the Court with liberals.
Even the Court can’t defend us against the corruption of the political elite. They believe they have a right to practice graft and influence peddling, and to reap the benefits of drugs, fine liquor, call girls, and the rest. Eliot Spitzer and “Client 9” aren’t the only politicians caught up in prostitution — Hunter Biden may be worse. As progressives see it, this behavior is just something to smirk about and look the other way. They think it’s provincial to think there’s anything wrong with Hunter’s behavior. Will Hunter Biden’s behavior change if his father becomes president?
The one thing progressives will not surrender is their sense of superiority to the American people, and their tactics are becoming more aggressive, shifting from disparagement to criminalization. Should Biden take office, expect the censorship and persecution of conservatives to continue and increase. The only way to stop them is to speak the truth and hope the public will vote them out of office.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
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Eighty-five percent of counties with a Whole Foods store voted for Joe Biden. That factoid, relayed by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, tells you something important about the election — and about today’s Democratic Party.
“The Democracy,” as it was called in the 19th century, long thought of itself as the party of the people, the defender of the little guy, the side that stood up for the folks not able to stand up for themselves.
There was always something to this. From its formation to reelect Andrew Jackson in 1832, the Democratic Party has always been a coalition of groups not considered typical Americans but that together could form a national majority. Naturally, the precise composition of this coalition has changed over time.
Barack Obama’s Democratic Party was a top-and-bottom coalition of those at both ends of the income, education and occupational scales. Obama, who, as an Illinois legislator, gerrymandered a top-and-bottom district for himself, provided substantive and psychological sustenance to both sides.
Joe Biden’s Democratic Party has a different balance. The boy from working-class Scranton, as he is billed, ran best not in factory cities but in university towns.
His highest percentage in Michigan was in the county containing Ann Arbor, not Detroit. He ran stronger in Madison, Wisconsin’s Dane County than in Milwaukee County; stronger in Iowa City than in Des Moines; stronger in Missoula, Montana, with its university than in Butte with its copper mines; just as strong in metro Columbus (Ohio State University) as in metro Cleveland.
Biden’s strongest area in California was the San Francisco Bay (University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University). His strongest county in upstate New York was Tompkins (Cornell University). His strongest counties in North Carolina were Durham and Orange (Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill).
White college grads — Joel Kotkin’s “gentry liberals,” Arnold Kling’s “highly educated elites” — have become the dominant constituency in the Democratic Party. Even as the descendants of the party’s blue-collar constituents have become Donald Trump Republicans, Democratic percentages among white college graduates have ballooned.
Pew Research Center polling showed white college graduates 50% to 42% Republican in 1994 — the breakthrough year when Republicans captured the House after 40 years of Democratic control — and 57% to 37% Democratic in 2019. That’s happened even as they’ve become a larger percentage of the electorate.
To which an old-time Democratic Party boss — Tammany Hall’s Charles F. Murphy or Chicago’s Richard J. Daley — would have asked, “What do these people want?”
In the 1990s, the answers very fairly obvious. Affluent voters wanted tax rates held down, and they wanted their verdant suburban and trendy central city neighborhoods protected from violent crime and welfare dependency.
Led by Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson and New York’s Rudy Giuliani, local Republicans and some Democrats cut violent crime and welfare rolls by more than half. In Washington, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton assisted and encouraged this process and largely froze tax rates.
Today’s college graduates, more numerous than their 1994 predecessors and schooled on increasingly “politically correct” campuses, don’t have such concrete goals. They’re unfazed by marginal Obama-era tax increases and untroubled — so far, anyway — by the vertiginous increases in homicides after the May 25 incident in Minneapolis.
What they want out of politics is not so much anything concrete as it is symbolic: assertions of opposition to what they regard as America’s “systemic racism,” and opposition to assertions of “America first,” whether that means enforcement of immigration laws or “xenophobic” restrictions on travel from China, where COVID-19 originated.
In Democratic primaries, these voters, as I wrote in June, “flitted from one candidate to the next, tilting toward Sen. Kamala Harris after she whacked Joe Biden for opposing busing in the 1970s, then luxuriating in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s stentorian assurances that, on every issue, ‘I have a plan for that,’ then swooning for the assured articulateness of then-South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.”
They seem chemically dependent on denunciations of Donald Trump, to the point that subscription- or ratings-hungry news media feel obliged to lard not just news accounts but even food pages and movie reviews with “Orange Man Bad” sneers. Trump is routinely described as a “racist” with no evidence cited.
White Democratic college graduates’ central faith is that they oppose other Americans’ systemic racism. Nearly a majority of them told pollsters they were bothered that Joe Biden is a white male in his 70s. Only about 30% of black and Hispanic Democrats feel the same, according to Pew. One group has more concern for ethnic origin and personal style than for real-life consequences for actual people.
White Democratic college graduates complain that Trump acts childishly; is impervious to criticism and fixated on symbolic trivia; and refuses to confess error or admit defeat. Fair criticism or self-description? Or both?
Here’s a recent news item that may appear isolated, but which provides a very clear object lesson in the character of those on the left. In a sense, it’s also queerly germane to the holiday season – assuming we’re still allowed to use the word “queerly” in this context.
Based on news reports and a video that began circulating on social media this week, apparently a masked, socially-distanced, politically-correct mall Santa recently brought a little boy to tears when he refused the child’s request for a Nerf® gun for Christmas after being asked for his wish list.
Obviously, Santa’s response was in keeping with the individual’s personal disdain for firearms, and the liberal convention of presuming one’s view is the only righteous one. Leave it to a liberal to impose his views and preferences upon a child who can’t understand the dynamic at hand. I definitely empathize with the child, and I hope the incident doesn’t ruin his Christmas – a holiday the guy in the Santa suit probably cherishes about as much as he does the Second Amendment.
Before we delve into this analysis, let us establish that it really isn’t a mall Santa’s job to vet the wish lists of the children with whom they chat. Even if the kid asked for a 55-gallon drum of hydrochloric acid with which he might dissolve his siblings, it’s Santa’s job to pass on said request to the attending parent – not to judge or engage in activism.
Many will remember the “no war toys” campaigns that began on the left during the 1970s. Here, lobbyists and activists advanced an effort to remove “war toys” (read toy firearms) from every home, game, toy store, commercial and children’s television program in America. Violent cartoons – even such fare as “Tom & Jerry” and “Looney Tunes” – came under attack by liberals as potentially turning little boys into spree killers. The nascent conventional wisdom (read aggressively promoted liberal orthodoxy) held that parents who continued to allow their children to play with toy firearms were knuckle-dragging troglodytes.
Bear in mind that all of this came about despite the admonitions from many prominent psychologists that little boys are naturally aggressive and really need to get those impulses out during childhood, or there was a real danger they actually would wind up as spree killers. This endeavor was also part of leftist efforts toward emasculating males and promoting gender confusion, the early sexualization of children, casual sex, premarital sex, unfettered abortion and other challenges to traditional morality that began during the same period.
In response, cartoons that represented various forms of conflict became “dumbed-down,” bland and barely worth watching. Even the GI Joe® cartoons of that era depicted every single enemy pilot parachuting to safety after the dogfight. While most of the traditional “war toys” (cap guns and such) continued to be sold, toy manufacturers switched gears; instead of promoting overtly militaristic toys, they began to market and sell – guess what? – a whole lot of Nerf® guns.
If I haven’t made my sentiments abundantly clear in recent weeks, let me proffer this in unambiguous terms: Liberals are slime. In order to avoid being accused of engaging in empty, vicious invective, allow me to clarify precisely what I mean by “slime.” Those who are bereft of honor, ethics, scruples or any sense of moral obligation qualify as such – and it has been made painfully evident in recent years that this is the character of the liberal.
Is it “a bit much” to relegate all liberals to slimehood? No, I don’t think it is. As I recently demonstrated in this space, liberalism (or progressivism) is simply the wedge radical leftists insidiously engaged in order to incrementally usher in a socialist state. Well, you can kill someone with a bullet to the head, or by slow poison; they’ll still be just as dead. Thus, there is no reason that liberal policies should have been tolerated in the name of fair play or erroneous interpretations of constitutional law over the last 60 years. None.
As we know, the truly rabid left exist in extremely small numbers; it is only their immoderate vociferousness and the fact that many of these people occupy places of power that give the impression of a wider scope of influence. It is probable that the majority of self-identifying liberals have simply been thoroughly deluded. Regardless, I would say that these people are likely to be faced with a significant decision in the very near future. With factions in our nation so perilously close to being enemy combatants, the committed liberal should be mindful that enemy combatants typically don’t engage in intellectual analysis as to whether or not their enemy may be following an evil doctrine or regime out of ignorance or delusion.
In other words, if you commit treason, those who ultimately wind up judging you won’t be concerned with the fact that you did so out of ignorance or delusion, only with the fact that you committed treason.
For the committed conservative, libertarian, or even the unbiased, non-ideological swing voter, the lines that have been drawn should be unmistakable. In the last year alone, the abysmal character of those on the left and the danger they represent have been made clear, whether we’re talking about the Squad’s cries for free everything, orchestrated mayhem in our cities, Democratic elites skirting COVID-19 restrictions for personal economic benefit or calls for the systematic persecution of our president’s supporters.
All those who self-identify as being left-of-center are enemies of this nation, and there is no middle ground.
What role is Barack Obama playing in America’s election crisis? This is arguably the most underreported aspect of the extraordinary effort to take down Donald Trump and demolish America. The more you research this question, the more you realize: All roads lead to Barack Obama.
In today’s Trumpet Brief, I want to spotlight just one of these roads.
In his new book, A Promised Land, Barack Obama heaps praise on David Plouffe, his former campaign manager. Obama has publicly lauded Plouffe as the unsung hero and supreme architect of his presidential campaigns. Plouffe was the strategic mastermind behind Team Obama’s extraordinary 2008 grassroots campaign and its pioneering digital program.
When Obama took office in January 2009, Plouffe took a sabbatical. But he never left Obama’s orbit; he remained an outside senior adviser to the Obama administration. In 2011, Plouffe returned to the White House and did a two-year stint as an assistant to the president and senior adviser. Reading Obama’s book, it’s obvious that he and Plouffe are kindred spirits and are very close.
In January 2017, at the same time President Obama left the White House, David Plouffe was hired by Facebook ceo Mark Zuckerberg to be the head of policy and advocacy at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (the Zuckerberg’s philanthropic organization). In this role, Plouffe was responsible for leading czi’s effort to support political and policy reform across America. Plouffe retired from his full-time position at czi in October 2019, but remained with the organization in the part-time role of resident “strategist.”
So, here’s what we know so far: Barack Obama and David Plouffe are close, and David Plouffe and Mark Zuckerberg are close. There is also plenty of evidence to show that Obama and Zuckerberg have a strong relationship, so it’s reasonable to conclude that all three know each other well. These men have worked together for years now. And most significantly, these three are political and ideological brothers.
Now, let’s skip ahead to this past September and October. This is when the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative gave $350 million (in two installments) to the Center for Tech and Civil Life (ctcl). Established in 2012 and headquartered in Chicago, the ctcl is a nonprofit organization that works with citizens, community groups and local governments to promote greater participation in federal, state and local elections. Its mission is to “connect Americans with the information they need to become and remain civically engaged, and ensure that our elections are more professional, inclusive and secure.”
Among its various activities, the ctcl helps local governments and community groups implement election legislation, educate voters, equip voting locations with new technology, train poll workers, collect and analyze election data, and tackle cybersecurity concerns. In some states, election workers are paid directly by ctcl grants.
The ctcl claims to be nonpartisan, but as you will see, it doesn’t take much digging to learn that it leans heavily to the left.
Back to Zuckerberg’s money. Prior to receiving his gigantic donation, ctcl received an average of around $1 million per year. Only a pittance of what it received from Facebook’s ceo this fall. How did Zuckerberg learn about this relatively small nonprofit in Chicago? It’s hard to imagine David Plouffe, as former head of policy and advocacy and the resident “strategist” at Zuckerberg’s organization, not being involved in the decision to donate $350 million to ctcl. After all, this was exactly the type of work he was brought on to do.
It’s even plausible that Barack Obama himself put ctcl on Zuckerberg’s radar. ctcl and some of its principal staff have multiple connections to the former president, even going as far back as his 2008 presidential campaign. Tiana Epps-Johnson, ctcl’s founder and executive director, is an Obama Fellow at the Obama Foundation in Chicago.
Here’s what we do know: When ctcl received Zuckerberg’s first donation, it immediately gave at least $75 million to local authorities in heavily Democratic areas in battleground states!
“The vast majority of the money handed out by ctcl—especially in the early days of its largesse—went to counties that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016,” wrote Ken Blackwell in Breitbart.
In Plouffe’s A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump, released earlier this year, he wrote that “the contest for the presidency may come down to block-by-block street fights in Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.” Is it a coincidence, as Blackwell wrote, that “some of the biggest recipients [of ctcl’s money], in fact, were the very locales Plouffe had identified as the linchpins of the Democrat strategy in 2020”?
A recent study by the Amistad Project listed the 20 largest publicly identified recipients of ctcl funds. Remarkably, the counties and cities that received Zuckerberg’s money is virtually the same as the counties and cities where the fraud and corruption occurred! This list includes the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Delaware County, Pennsylvania; Alleghany County, Pennsylvania; Fulton County, Georgia; Cobb County, Georgia; DeKalb County, Georgia; the city of Detroit, Michigan; the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Do these names sound familiar? They’ve been in the news constantly since November 4.
All these are overwhelmingly Democratic counties or cities in four key swing states. And all of these cities and counties received at least $2 million from Mark Zuckberg via ctcl less than two months before the election!
In September, not long after the ctcl began distributing the money, lawsuits were filed against the organization in four states. These suits were filed by the Election Integrity Fund in Michigan, the Wisconsin Voters’ Alliance, the Minnesota Voters’ Alliance and by a group of candidates and office-holders in Pennsylvania. These lawsuits argued that the local governments were prohibited by federal law from accepting private federal election grants.
The plaintiffs in these lawsuits were worried that the money donated by Mark Zuckerberg—who was counseled by David Plouffe, and maybe even Barack Obama—would be used to commit fraud!
And rightly so. Amistad Project director Phillip Kline obtained a court order from the Middle District of Pennsylvania that allowed him to view Philadelphia’s communications with ctcl. “Those communications show that ctcl dictated the way the election would be run in Philadelphia, how many polling places they would have, they paid the election officials, they paid the satellite election officials, they paid the judges, they brought in these drop boxes,” said Kline.
The lawsuit filed in Michigan claimed that Zuckerberg’s money was given to county officials in the battleground state to print and distribute absentee ballots and mail-in ballots, and to add extra drop boxes in Democratic areas. The lawsuit stated that the purpose of the money was to increase ballots cast “in only certain urban and predominantly Democratic precincts” and to “selectively influence the outcome of the 2020 general election.”
Unfortunately, all four lawsuits were dismissed. The reasons for this varied, but the judges across all states generally rejected the notion that the money would be used to manipulate the election. In the end, that’s exactly what happened!
Under the advice of David Plouffe, and perhaps Barak Obama himself, Mark Zuckerberg paid election officials in heavily Democratic counties in Pennsylvania. He paid for extra drop boxes in heavily Democratic counties. He paid for extra polling places in Democratic areas. As Ken Blackwell wrote, “Zuckerberg and ctcl left nothing to chance. … [W]riting detailed conditions into their grants that dictated exactly how elections were to be conducted, down to the number of ballot drop boxes and polling places.”
In this article, we have considered only one of the paths of evidence that suggests Barack Obama lies at the epicenter of this election crisis. There are others. The fact that the media is not seriously investigating evidence like this, nor exposing what figures like Obama, Plouffe, Zuckerberg and the entire radical left are doing, is itself a massive scandal!
In his recent article “Why Donald Trump Will Remain America’s President,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote, “I am also certain that we are about to see some of the biggest frauds exposed perhaps ever!” Over the next few weeks and months, you should expect to see more evidence of Barack Obama’s fingerprints on this election coup.
To understand the prophetic significance of Barack Obama, read America Under Attack. Biblical prophecy reveals that this man is playing a seminal role in America’s downfall, and it’s imperative that we see this.
The precapitalistic system of production was restrictive. Its historical basis was military conquest. The victorious kings had given the land to their paladins. These aristocrats were lords in the literal meaning of the word, as they did not depend on the patronage of consumers buying or abstaining from buying on a market.
On the other hand, they themselves were the main customers of the processing industries, which, under the guild system, were organized on a corporative scheme. This scheme was opposed to innovation. It forbade deviation from the traditional methods of production. The number of people for whom there were jobs even in agriculture or in the arts and crafts was limited. Under these conditions, many a man, to use the words of Malthus, had to discover that “at nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him” and that “she tells him to be gone.”1 But some of these outcasts nevertheless managed to survive, begot children, and made the number of destitute grow hopelessly more and more.
But then came capitalism. It is customary to see the radical innovations that capitalism brought about in the substitution of the mechanical factory for the more primitive and less efficient methods of the artisans’ shops. This is a rather superficial view. The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguished it from precapitalist methods of production was its new principle of marketing.
Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses. The arts and crafts of the good old days had catered almost exclusively to the wants of the well-to-do. But the factories produced cheap goods for the many. All the early factories turned out was designed to serve the masses, the same strata that worked in the factories. They served them either by supplying them directly or indirectly by exporting and thus providing for them foreign food and raw materials. This principle of marketing was the signature of early capitalism as it is of present-day capitalism.
The employees themselves are the customers consuming the much greater part of all goods produced. They are the sovereign customers who are “always right.” Their buying or abstention from buying determines what has to be produced, in what quantity, and of what quality. In buying what suits them best they make some enterprises profit and expand and make other enterprises lose money and shrink. Thereby they are continually shifting control of the factors of production into the hands of those businessmen who are most successful in filling their wants.
Under capitalism private property of the factors of production is a social function. The entrepreneurs, capitalists, and land owners are mandataries, as it were, of the consumers, and their mandate is revocable. In order to be rich, it is not sufficient to have once saved and accumulated capital. It is necessary to invest it again and again in those lines in which it best fills the wants of the consumers. The market process is a daily repeated plebiscite, and it ejects inevitably from the ranks of profitable people those who do not employ their property according to the orders given by the public. But business, the target of fanatical hatred on the part of all contemporary governments and self-styled intellectuals, acquires and preserves bigness only because it works for the masses. The plants that cater to the luxuries of the few never attain big size.
The shortcoming of 19th-century historians and politicians was that they failed to realize that the workers were the main consumers of the products of industry. In their view, the wage earner was a man toiling for the sole benefit of a parasitic leisure class. They labored under the delusion that the factories had impaired the lot of the manual workers. If they had paid any attention to statistics they would easily have discovered the fallaciousness of their opinion. Infant mortality dropped, the average length of life was prolonged, the population multiplied, and the average common man enjoyed amenities of which even the well-to-do of earlier ages did not dream.
However, this unprecedented enrichment of the masses was merely a by-product of the Industrial Revolution. Its main achievement was the transfer of economic supremacy from the owners of land to the totality of the population. The common man was no longer a drudge who had to be satisfied with the crumbs that fell from the tables of the rich. The three pariah castes that were characteristic of the precapitalistic ages — the slaves, the serfs, and those people whom patristic and scholastic authors as well as British legislation from the 16th to the 19th centuries referred to as the poor — disappeared. Their scions became, in this new setting of business, not only free workers, but also customers.
This radical change was reflected in the emphasis laid by business on markets. What business needs first of all is markets and again markets. This was the watchword of capitalistic enterprise. Markets — that means patrons, buyers, consumers. There is under capitalism one way to wealth: to serve the consumers better and cheaper than other people do.
Within the shop and factory the owner — or in the corporations, the representative of the shareholders, the president — is the boss. But this mastership is merely apparent and conditional. It is subject to the supremacy of the consumers. The consumer is king, is the real boss, and the manufacturer is done for if he does not outstrip his competitors in best serving consumers.
It was this great economic transformation that changed the face of the world. It very soon transferred political power from the hands of a privileged minority into the hands of the people. Adult franchise followed in the wake of industrial enfranchisement. The common man, to whom the market process had given the power to choose the entrepreneur and capitalists, acquired the analogous power in the field of government. He became a voter.
It has been observed by eminent economists, I think first by the late Frank A. Fetter, that the market is a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. It would be more correct to say that representative government by the people is an attempt to arrange constitutional affairs according to the model of the market, but this design can never be fully achieved. In the political field it is always the will of the majority that prevails, and the minorities must yield to it. It serves also minorities, provided they are not so insignificant in number as to become negligible. The garment industry produces clothes not only for normal people, but also for the stout, and the publishing trade publishes not only westerns and detective stories for the crowd, but also books for discriminating readers.
There is a second important difference. In the political sphere, there is no means for an individual or a small group of individuals to disobey the will of the majority. But in the intellectual field private property makes rebellion possible. The rebel has to pay a price for his independence; there are in this universe no prizes that can be won without sacrifices. But if a man is willing to pay the price, he is free to deviate from the ruling orthodoxy or neo-orthodoxy.
What would conditions have been in the socialist commonwealth for heretics like Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Veblen, or Freud? For Monet, Courbet, Walt Whitman, Rilke, or Kafka? In all ages, pioneers of new ways of thinking and acting could work only because private property made contempt of the majority’s ways possible. Only a few of these separatists were themselves economically independent enough to defy the government into the opinions of the majority. But they found in the climate of the free economy among the public people prepared to aid and support them. What would Marx have done without his patron, the manufacturer Friedrich Engels?
