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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Politics Here’s How You Know Conservatives Are Winning

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/10/heres-how-you-know-conservatives-are-winning/

If you want a good indication that conservatives are, at long last, scoring a few actual victories these days, look at the apoplexy it’s causing those on the left.

A prime example is a piece written by Jill Lawrence, a former editor at USA Today, which posted on July 4 on MSNBC and carried the scary title: “Seeing the erosion of our freedoms makes it hard to celebrate this Fourth of July.” It is a remarkable display of fearmongering, incoherence, and illogic.

“The Supreme Court, conservative governors and gerrymandered state legislatures are racing to shrink fundamental rights and freedoms,” Lawrence writes. “The result is that tens of millions of Americans are being deprived of rights that other Americans have. The scale of the disparity is frightening and growing.”

Ok. So, how about some examples?

Well, the “marquee setback,” according to Lawrence, was the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

But wait, that ruling actually restored a right — the right of the people to decide through democratic means how the lives of unborn children should be treated. It also upheld several of the founding principles Lawrence claims are being attacked, such as the “right to life,” and “equal protection” — unless, of course, you assume that the unborn have no such rights.

Never mind that. To Lawrence, abortion is “a right so significant it was until recently a constitutional right.”

Really? This right is “so significant” that it wasn’t discovered (or, more accurately, invented) until 186 years after the Constitution was ratified?

Lawrence cites other examples of threats to what she describes as “America’s most sacred promises”:

The Supreme Court’s ruling that a web designer can’t be forced to create products that violate the basic tenants of her faith.
The Court’s decision banning the use of race in college admissions.
The fact that some states are restricting puberty blockers and sterilization procedures for gender-confused children, removing pornography from public school libraries, and forbidding teachers from “transitioning” children behind their parents’ backs.

Biden’s Army Secretary Doesn’t Want 2nd Gen Military Recruits for Fear of a “Warrior Caste” There are 7th-generation military families who fought for this country since the Revolution. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-army-secretary-doesnt-want-2nd-gen-military-recruits-for-fear-of-a-warrior-caste/

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, who got her start as a Clinton intern, has a lot of thoughts on the military.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said she expects within weeks to begin drafting a proposal for a recruiting overhaul so sweeping that Congress might need to pass legislation to enact all of it.

Depending too much on military families could create a “warrior caste,” Wormuth said. Her plans seek to draw in people who have no real connection to the military and to broaden the appeal of service.

There are sixth and seventh-generation military families. There is a ‘warrior caste’ insofar as you have families who have fought for this country since the War of Independence. They showed up, they bled, and now they’re to be replaced by drag queens and identity politics quotas.

“The Army is strategically deploying recruiters to communities across the country based on demographics, ethnicity, race, and gender,” Wormuth had claimed in a written statement.

Here’s what that ends up looking like.

In pursuit of REDCAT quotas, a message from the United States Army Special Operations Command urges soldiers to “select the ethnic group code that includes the most accurate description of ethnic background or combination of ethnicities in their ethnic background.”

At the Virginia National Guard, past recruitment was aimed at making the Guard “match the demographics of the state within 1% of the REDCAT” and when that failed, developing a “target for underrepresented groups each FY by comparing census data” and then “if the demographics are not within the 1% target develop three (3) COAs to attain the objective by 28 February of each year.”

Rather than getting the best people or even adequately qualified people, the goal is to match the force to the census data in a completely senseless exercise so that the people they do get are 20% black, 7.2% Asian, and 0.6% American Indian, or develop a plan to get those Asians.

Wormuth claims that, “the Army is also on track to meet its directed level of 5,800 officer commissions while increasing diversity representation within the combat arms branches.”

Who needs a warrior caste when you can pick your fighters by race?

The Politics of Pronouns by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27086/the-politics-of-pronouns

This article is a chapter from my new book, Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier–Reality Is, scheduled for release at the end of 2023.

CHAPTER 25: The Politics of Pronouns

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite themselves. The globalist war on the nation state cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses psychological, informational warfare to destabilize Americans, and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. The primary target of globalist predators is America’s children. 

A child’s ability to test reality is a reference to his ability to identify the world of facts. It is a human psychological survival skill. When little Johnny tells his Mommy he is a bird that can fly, it is his Mommy’s responsibility to keep Johnny in objective reality, and explain to Johnny that he is a child, not a bird, and he cannot fly. If instead of objective reality, Mommy or Daddy encourages Johnny’s subjective reality, and escorts him to the top floor of their apartment building to fly, Johnny will fall to his death. Objective reality always prevails.

 

Objective refers to a reality that is outside of your mind (world of facts), and subjective refers to the inner reality of your mind (world of feelings). Conflict between objective reality and subjective reality generates cognitive dissonance––tension in your mind created by holding inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes. The tension is often so intolerable, it causes people to change their thoughts and behaviors to eliminate the pain. Cognitive dissonance is an important dynamic of psychological warfare.

 

The catastrophic consequences of encouraging children to live in subjective reality, conflicts with parental responsibilities and protections. Children are being intentionally indoctrinated to believe that objective reality does not exist. Hans Christian Anderson’s famous folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” published almost 200 years ago, dramatizes the difference between objective and subjective reality, and exposes why reality is the final frontier. In objective reality the emperor is naked. In subjective reality the emperor is wearing new clothes. Weaponized education tries to persuade children the emperor is wearing new clothes.

Michigan Republican Sets the Record Straight on Hate-Crime Bill That Could Criminalize Using ‘Wrong’ Pronouns By Haley Strack

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/michigan-republican-sets-the-record-straight-on-hate-crime-bill-that-could-criminalize-using-wrong-pronouns/?

Michigan’s hate-crime bill is subjective and illogical and could criminalize the use of biologically accurate gender pronouns, state representative Andrew Beeler told National Review, pushing back against local supporters of the legislation who have dismissed claims that it threatens free speech.

The bill would punish speech that “intimidates another individual” with up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Democrats blamed misinformation last week after several outlets reported that the bill would criminalize the refusal to use preferred pronouns. The bill doesn’t dismiss an individual’s First Amendment right to constitutionally protected activity but does criminalize speech if a “reasonable” person feels “intimidated,” a standard state Republicans say is too vague.

“This entire bill hinges on how you define ‘intimidation,’” Beeler said. “I’ll define it the way that the bill defines it: The full definition is, ‘willful course of conduct involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened,’ etc. If you intimidate by that definition, anyone in the protected classes, you are subject to criminal prosecution and a potential felony.”

Although Michigan’s 1988 hate-crime law already makes it illegal to intimidate based on race, religion, sex, or nationality, the new bill expands protections for gender identity or expression, which it defines as “having or being perceived as having a gender-related self-identity or expression whether or not associated with an individual’s assigned sex at birth.”

A standard of reason, by which juries determine whether or not a person acted with average care and consideration, is difficult to apply when Michiganders can’t agree on basic truths about the nature of gender, Beeler said.

Jason L. Riley The Affirmative Action Illusion Defenders of racial preferences argue that they are essential to black advancement—the facts demonstrate otherwise.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-affirmative-action-illusion

One byproduct of a half-century of affirmative action is that it has given many Americans the impression that blacks can’t advance without special treatment. The response to last week’s Supreme Court decision banning the use of race in college admissions suggests that even some very accomplished black professionals have internalized this belief.

Joy Reid, the MSNBC host, said in response to the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling that racial preferences were the only reason black people like her had access to elite schools such as Harvard. Eddie Glaude, who teaches African American studies at Princeton, said affirmative action was “the only remedy to the legacy of discrimination in admissions in American higher education” and “they’ve taken it away.” Another black academic, Jelani Cobb, wrote in The New Yorker that affirmative action “helped expand the Black middle class” and predicted that one result of the decision will be “fewer students from traditionally underrepresented minorities on college campuses.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in the case is chock-full of similar doomsaying. The nation’s first black female Supreme Court justice presents a lengthy chronicle of racial disparities in outcomes and argues that they can be linked directly to slavery and the legacy of segregation. Ending racial preferences, she writes, ignores “the well-documented ‘intergenerational transmission of inequality’ that still plagues our citizenry” and “will delay the day that every American has an equal opportunity to thrive, regardless of race.”

Thou shalt not (censor) More on the genius of Judge Terry Doughty’s decision yesterday in the Missouri v Biden social media censorship case Alex Berenson

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/thou-shalt-not-censor

Imagine if we learned Biden Administration officials had secretly jawboned the New York Times on trans issues. Or told baseball teams they should fly pride flags – or face antitrust hearings. Or complained to the History Channel over a documentary depicting the discovery of crude oil positively.

The First Amendment concerns would be obvious. We’d all wonder why government officials thought they could tell private companies what opinions and news to carry.

The American government is hugely powerful. Not even the biggest company can ignore a call from the White House. If the executive branch has something to say, it should do so with press conferences and open advertising – not secretly threaten the media to carry its water.

Yet when it comes to social media companies, the left has forgotten this simple fact. Instead it claims a new age of information warfare demands that the Constitution be set aside – as if propaganda campaigns haven’t always been a feature of mass media. It has forgotten the importance of an open marketplace for ideas and debate.

Now, in a lawsuit brought by two states against the federal government over social media censorship, a judge has reminded the left – and all of us – of what the First Amendment means and why it matters.

And he’s done so in the simplest, most profound possible way.

‘Misinformation’ Is The Vocabulary Of A Culture That Has Lost Its Capacity To Discuss ‘Truth’ By: Elle Purnell

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/07/misinformation-is-the-vocabulary-of-a-culture-that-has-lost-its-capacity-to-discuss-truth/

EXCERPTS

The perversion of truth is falsehood; misinformation is just the perversion of information.

In a preliminary injunction issued against the White House and federal agencies on Tuesday in Missouri v. Biden, Judge Terry Doughty eviscerated government actors for colluding with social media companies to censor users’ protected speech in the name of eliminating “misinformation.”

Doughty, as others have done, compares the government censorship to Orwell’s hypothetical “Ministry of Truth.” But Orwell’s satirical title gives the speech police too much credit: It assumes “truth” is still a functional part of their vocabulary. No, our censors speak in terms of “misinformation.”

The perversion of truth is falsehood; misinformation is just the perversion of information. Truth has a moral component; information doesn’t. Years of moral relativism have eroded our cultural understanding of “truth” as a knowable, agreed-upon concept — and in our modern world, all we’re left with is an infinite supply of information.

Truth, Discerned in Nature by Reason

For most of Western history, philosophers and laymen alike have agreed upon the existence of “truth,” as a factual concept but also as a moral one.

Today, we see factual relativism as well as moral. Not only does our prevailing social ethic tolerate individuals’ self-determination of “what’s right for me,” we’ve gone so far as to nod along when a man says he is actually a woman, lacking the philosophical footing to explain why that simply can’t be true.

To “speak your truth,” as distinct from the truth, is a moral victory to be praised according to our prevalent irrational dogma. Our cultural rejection of reason is evident in every field: Look at the deconstructionist sculptures and poetry that pass for art, or the assault on the fixed, rational rules of mathematics.

In this cultural condition, people are no longer equipped to speak in terms of truth, grounded in the divinely appointed laws of nature, discernible by human reason. Those concepts aren’t in our contemporary vocabulary.

Gallup: Faith in American Institutions Hits New Low By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/07/gallup-faith-in-american-institutions-hits-new-low/

Trust in most major American institutions has reached its lowest point in modern history, according to a survey from Gallup.

As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, the poll shows that just 26 percent of Americans say that they have confidence in the country’s institutions. This marks a 10-point decrease from the same question when it was asked in 2020, and is the lowest point ever since 1979, when Gallup first began asking this question.

When broken down along particular institutional lines, Americans report a 26 percent confidence rate in the office of President of the United States, and a mere 8 percent confidence in the U.S. Congress. The most popular institution is small business, at 65 percent support, while the military comes in second with 60 percent.

Institutions that saw their lowest scores yet include the police, big business, public schools, and technology companies. As Gallup notes, there is also a clear partisan divide when it comes to certain institutions; Democrats’ confidence in the presidency is currently 39 points higher than the confidence of Republicans, and 34 points higher than Republicans when it comes to public schools.

By contrast, Republicans are 28 points higher in confidence than Democrats with regards to the Supreme Court, 24 points higher with churches and organized religion, and 20 points higher in supporting the police.

Explosive Video: ‘Missing Witness’ Says He Told DOJ in 2019 About Biden Family’s Corrupt Dealings with China By Victoria Taft

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/07/07/explosive-video-missing-witness-says-he-told-doj-in-2019-about-biden-familys-corrupt-dealings-with-china-n1708908

A mole in the U.S. Department of Justice “shared classified information with Hunter Biden and his Chinese partners” and tipped off the Biden family about an investigation into their corrupt dealings with a Chinese energy company with spy ties, and the feds arrested a whistleblower overseas to stop him from getting to the U.S. to testify to the House Oversight Committee. These are among the explosive allegations the “missing witness” in the Biden family corruption investigation has revealed in a video from a secret location.

The man, Dr. Gal Luft, an Israeli citizen who once headed a Washington and China-tied think tank with former CIA Director James Woolsey, released a video this week explaining all of the above allegations and more. The New York Post’s Miranda Devine broke the story while the country celebrated Independence Day and cocaine was found at the White House.

Luft explains that instead of being on the lam from the Department of Justice that wants to put him away for what he says are bogus arms and Foreign Agent Registration Act charges, he was forced to release a video to tell his side of this extraordinary story. He says his first mistake was “a fatal decision I made in March of 2019 to share with the U.S. Government my knowledge about the Biden family’s relations with CEFC,” the Chinese energy company that had ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence agency.

The CDC Gives Advice for Men Who Want to ‘Breastfeed’ By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/07/07/the-cdc-gives-advice-for-men-who-want-to-breastfeed-n1708925

Humanity is doomed. I’m sorry to say it, but I’m not sure if there’s anything else one can conclude. Individuals and once-reputable organizations are going to absurd lengths to perpetuate the myths that people can be born in the “wrong body” and that plastic surgery and drug injections can actually change one’s sex.

Those who perpetuated this nonsense were once limited to the fringes of society; now, it’s become mainstream. Even though polls show a large majority of Americans reject radical left-wing gender ideology, health organizations and even our government have been bullied into endorsing it lock, stock, and barrel.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did itself no favors during the COVID pandemic, having endorsed universal masking and vaccines for children. Now it has managed to beclown itself once again by giving advice to biological men on how to “breastfeed.”

Of course, it’s no longer to be called “breastfeeding” because that’s not inclusive enough. Now, they’re calling it “chestfeeding.” We can’t risk offending those who don’t have breasts (also known as men) who think they can defy nature and successfully feed a newborn child mother’s milk.

“The CDC advice isn’t just for biological women who have removed their breasts but still want to nurse babies, it’s also for biological men, who through the magic of plastic surgery also have breasts and would now like to use these breasts to feed babies,” reports Karol Markowitz at the New York Post. “As that’s biologically impossible, the CDC suggests getting help with ‘maximizing milk production, supplementing with pasteurized donor human milk or formula, medication to induce lactation.’”