Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

-Ephesians 5:11-13

Category Archives: History

Australia’s Gun-buyback Program Is a Bust

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, January 24, 2023:  

Australia’s Attorney General (AG) tried to put the best face possible on the disastrous result of its latest gun-buyback program that began in February of 2022:

The first year of the National Permanent Firearms Amnesty was a successful event.… With just under 18,000 firearms and weapons surrendered in its first year, the permanent amnesty has provided an ongoing and robust framework for a reduction in the overall number of firearms … and has promoted public safety.

To put things in perspective, there are reportedly between 260,000 and 600,000 “illegal” (i.e., unregistered) firearms in Australia, and 18,000 of them were “surrendered” in the 12 months ending last July. That’s either seven percent or three percent of the targeted firearms privately owned.

Second, half of them were useless, non-working, or just simply relics inherited from a previous generation. Slightly more than one percent were given up by persons seeking amnesty for their possession.

The AG put lipstick on that pig:

The report released today found Australians who surrendered their firearms … were primarily motivated to do so out of a sense of responsibility or because they did not require them. [Emphasis added.]

Thirdly, private gun ownership in Australia actually increased since Australia’s experiment with gun control began. As guns.com noted, more than 1.16 million firearms have been imported into the island nation since the first buyback in 1996, resulting in some 816,000 Aussies currently owning nearly three million registered firearms.

And that number only counts those “above ground.” The black market (i.e., free market) in firearms continues to thrive. In a study released last June by Deakin University in Melbourne, criminology professor David Bright said that there is a “large pool” of illegal firearms that criminals can easily access. But police are able to “recover” only tiny fractions of them through buybacks in any given year.

Wrote Bright:

Our research found that the black market for illegal firearms is closed to the general population, but if you are well connected … it is surprisingly easy to get your hands on a gun….

 

Many [prison inmates who were interviewed] told us they could get a gun within a matter of hours after leaving jail — it was just that quick and easy for those who are well connected.

But Australia’s AG ignored these inconvenient facts, adding the “permanent amnesty … protect[s] the public from harm.”

However, there is no proof that such gun buybacks have any statistically significant impact on gun violence, despite many efforts to find it. A study done for the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia concluded that the country’s buyback program “did not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates.”

Data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, going back to 1980, shows a steady decline in both of those rates. A study of that data resulted in authors concluding that there is “little evidence to suggest that [the buyback program] had any significant effects on firearm homicides or suicides.”

This conclusion was confirmed by another study done in the U.S. by the National Bureau of Economic Research out of Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Our estimates provide compelling evidence that GBPs (gun buyback programs) have done little to reduce gun-related crime or mortality in the United States….

 

GPB’s have no observable effect on gun-related crime.

Still another study, this one published in the Annals of Surgery, summed up the results from 19 different studies in both Australia and the United States, and concluded that “evidence suggests that there may be a small, improved impact on suicide prevention in older, white males, but no effect on interpersonal gun violence or homicides.” (Emphasis added.)

But governments, in Australia and in the United States, continue their quest to disarm their citizens. All they do, however, is prove that it’s “show business” for politicians trying to claim they’re doing something about gun violence.

Dozens of Illinois Sheriffs Won’t Enforce New Gun Law

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, January 13, 2023:  

More than 80 Illinois county sheriffs are refusing to enforce the state’s new gun law banning the sale, purchase, or possession of so-called assault weapons. The new law also bans magazines with capacities exceeding 10 rounds for rifles and 15 founds for pistols. In addition, the new law, while grandfathering firearms owned prior to passage of the law, requires owners of the now-offending firearms to register them with the state police.

Whiteside County Sheriff John Booker says that the law “goes after the law-abiding citizen … [that’s] what we’re upset about.” Sheriffs in Greene, Macoupin, Monroe, and Madison counties won’t be enforcing the law either.

McHenry County Sheriff Robb Tadelman announced that “neither myself nor my office will be checking to ensure that lawful gun owners register their weapons with the state, nor will we be arresting … law-abiding individuals who have been charged solely with non-compliance with this act.”

Sheriffs in Kankakee, Boone, and Winnebago counties aren’t going to enforce it.

McDonough County Sheriff Nick Petitgout called the new law “a clear violation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

Knox County Sheriff Jack Harlan issued a news release:

Part of my duties that I accepted upon being sworn into office was to protect the rights provided to all of us, in the Constitution. One of those enumerated rights is the right of the people to keep and bear arms, provided under the Second Amendment.

 

I, among many others, believe that [the new law] is a clear violation of the Second Amendment.

Edwards County Sheriff Darby Boewe posted a lengthy statement on Facebook:

Part of my duties that I accepted upon being sworn into office was to protect the rights provided to all of us, in the Constitution. One of those rights enumerated is the right of the people to KEEP and BEAR ARMS provided under the 2nd Amendment. The right to keep and bear arms for defense of life, liberty and property is regarded as an inalienable right by the people…

 

Therefore, as custodian of the jail and chief law enforcement officer for Edwards County, that neither myself or my office will be checking to ensure that lawful gun owners register their weapons with the state, nor will we be arresting or housing individuals that have been charged solely with non-compliance of this act.

Madison County Sheriff Jeff Conner went even further. In a joint statement with the county’s State Attorney Tom Haine, they wrote:

We feel the duty to clarify for our citizens the policy their Madison County law enforcement leaders will adopt with regard to this new situation….

 

As with any statute passed by the legislature and signed by the governor, it is presumed constitutional.

 

But we are acutely aware that this statute touches on fundamental constitutional issues and is in obvious tension with recent and binding Supreme Court precedent on the Second Amendment [i.e., New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen]. Among other things, it bans many of the most popular firearms in America, firearms that are currently in common use for lawful purposes and which law-abiding citizens have legally owned for many years.

 

Whatever the policy justification, such a ban is hard to square with the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Bruen, which stated simply: “the Second Amendment protects the possession and use of weapons that are ‘in common use at the time.’” Based on the analysis above, we expect a strong court challenge to HB 5471 in short order….

 

Therefore, pending further direction by the courts, the Madison County Sheriff’s Office will not expend its limited resources to check whether otherwise law-abiding gun owners have registered their weapons with the state, nor will the Madison County Sheriff’s Office be arresting or housing otherwise law-abiding individuals solely due to non-compliance with [the law].…

 

The citizens of Madison County can remain confident that their local law enforcement will not turn the criminal justice system against those acting within their clearly defined constitutional rights.

Without saying so directly, these Illinois county sheriffs are taking their roles as constitutional sheriffs seriously. Former Graham County, Arizona, Sheriff Richard Mack defined those roles:

“To keep the peace and to secure, defend and protect the people of this jurisdiction from threats to their liberties, their livelihoods, and the peaceable enjoyment of their property.

 

The nature of that solemn oath requires that the actions of the sheriff in the performance of his duty must conform to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of this State.

The State of Illinois, represented by Governor J.B. Pritzker, rejects the whole idea of constitutional sheriffs defending the rights of those who elected them. A Pritzker spokesman declared that, contrary to the opinions expressed by those 80-some sheriffs, “the assault weapons ban is the law of Illinois. The General Assembly passed the bill, and the governor signed it into law.… Sheriffs have a constitutional duty to uphold the laws of the state [and] not pick and choose which laws they support.”

Harold Krent, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, agrees with Pritzker:

The General Assembly has decided [that the gun law] is constitutional. The [state’s] attorney general has decided it’s constitutional. I think it’s an incredible risk for sheriffs to say: “We’re not going to enforce a law” because that’s encouraging a lack of respect for the law.

Various pro-Second Amendment groups, including the Second Amendment Foundation, are filing suits against the law. They have not only the Bruen decision on their side, they also have the Supreme Court’s decision in Norton v. Shelby County, decided in 1886, on their side. In that case the high court ruled:

An unconstitutional statute is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is, in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed.

64 Years Later, What Has The John Birch Society Done?

This article, written by the Communications Director of the John Birch Society, Paul Dragu, deserves widespread circulation. It appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, December 26, 2022:  

 

Modern man is simply being played for a sucker by an immoral gang of sophisticated criminals. These cunning megalomaniacs seek to make themselves the absolute rulers of the human race…. Although they now occupy most of the positions of great prestige and influence in Washington, London, and Paris, as well as in the educational, financial, and publishing circles of the whole world, their power rests entirely on bluff, pretense, and deception. Their success and their purposes are contrary to the whole current of human history. They are sitting precariously on the gigantic powder keg of all honest human emotions. Despite their arrogant assurance on the contemporary scene, they are well aware that sooner or later, the whole flamework of their cruel power will be blown pieces by a mighty uprising of the incalculable forces of man’s moral principles, love for freedom, and common sense. How soon that day of delivery comes will depend on you.

— Robert Welch, December 1958

On December 9, 1958, Robert Welch of Belmont, Massachusetts, gathered eleven successful and patriotic men in a quiet Indianapolis home to announce that he would forego retiring and dedicate the rest of his life to fighting the tyrannical forces trying to destroy America and establish a one-world totalitarian government. To do this, he was going to create an organization unlike any other. He wanted to know if they’d join him.

That was the birth of The John Birch Society.

Welch, who had worked many years as a successful executive for his brother’s lucrative candy company, James O. Welch Company, was a wordy man, attributes tragically considered liabilities in today’s distraction-filled, fast-paced society that is in dire need of truth and understanding. He spent two days explaining the gravity of the communist conspiracy, part of a larger “Master Conspiracy,” he would explain. The transcript of that two-day presentation was published as The Blue Book, now in its 25th printing.

Communism had by that point officially blanketed with equal misery, tyranny, and poverty at least half the planet. Furthermore, Welch warned, communism had subversively infected the U.S. government. His insistence on the large degree of communist influence within the government would over the years serve as a lightning rod for smears and ridicule from corporate media journalists with their heads in the clouds. However, time — which made possible the declassification of documents such as the Venona cables — have unfortunately further vindicated Welch. The Venona operation was a U.S. Army intelligence program set up in 1943 to decrypt messages sent by Soviet spy agencies. According to historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr who read and analyzed the cables, by 1948 the “Soviets had recruited spies in virtually every major American government agency of military or diplomatic importance.”

Little has changed in the news business. Today’s regime propagandists by and large continue to deny our nation’s tyrannical march, yet they’re different because they do so while being trampled over by it.

After the Indianapolis meeting, Welch and his co-founders wasted little time getting to work. JBS began creating chapters the following month and in two years’ time the organization would explode in membership and influence. By 1961, chapters had formed from sea to shining sea, as patriotic Americans of all walks of life joined to reverse the fast-spreading disease of collectivism. JBS established its own book publishing house and set up bookstores all over the country to circumvent the publishing gatekeepers. This was in addition to the magazine Welch had started before JBS, American Opinion. Members worked to create understanding of the collectivist threat and an influence that would steer the nation toward freedom. Birchers passed out magazines, informational pamphlets, and books. They met regularly and recruited others and launched letter-writing campaigns. Many would even run for local office and win.

And all these book-reading, pamphlet-distributing, letter-writing patriots were getting things done. Americans were learning about the statist threat, they were joining in the fight against collectivism and government centralization, and they became part of a group who understood that behind the attempt to destroy our successful Republic stood a conspiratorial push for an oppressive New World Order, one that would crush the human spirit with the boot of tyrannical oligarchical rule.

It didn’t take long for JBS’s meteoric rise to incite a response from the forces it threatened. Beginning in 1961, corporate media — the propaganda arm of the Insiders — launched a nonstop, merciless, mostly fact-free onslaught at the JBS. Interestingly, corporate media attacks resembled to a tee the exact strategies the communist hierarchy in Moscow created to be used against the growing anti-communist grassroots movement in the United States. Psy-op expert and former OSS agent Edward Hunter revealed this in 1961 to the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws. In the coming years, media mouthpieces would smear Birchers as right-wing extremists, Nazis, fascists, antisemites, bigots, and racists, all despite blatant evidence to the contrary but all according to communist-devised strategies. The JBS has always opposed government centralization and all collectivism, which includes fascism; and JBS members, leaders, and sponsored speakers have included people of various colors, races, and religions, including Jews. The media painted a profoundly false picture of the JBS, a distortion each subsequent generation of reporters has largely perpetuated.

The attacks against the JBS became so intense that Welch asked the government to investigate his organization, confident it would vindicate it. In 1963, the California Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities released the results of an investigatory report on the JBS. It concluded that the organization comprised patriots of various colors and religions and nothing subversive or bigoted existed about the JBS. It also documented that JBS had chapters that were racially integrated. This was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law.

But the fact-finding report did not curb the attacks. Even so-called conservatives got in on the act, including William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine. The neocons at National Review — the magazine included members with at one point had ties to communist organizations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the CIA — peddled the narrative that America’s decline was the result of bumbling liberalism and gross stupidity as opposed to an intentional, orchestrated dismantling. Welch and JBS members, however, knew better.

National Review went after Welch in 1962 with infelicitous articles about him. Then in 1965 NR went after JBS members because they followed Welch, whose great sin was believing in conspiracies. NR especially took issue, like the rest of media, with Welch’s belief that General Dwight Eisenhower had wittingly or unwittingly served the goals of the communists. Welch was inclined toward the former, that Eisenhower consciously served the communist agenda. Welch’s unpopular, hard-to-swallow thesis, which remains controversial to this today and is still being used as a cudgel against the JBS, was eventually printed as the book The Politician.

Sixty-four years have passed since Robert Welch launched the JBS. The organization, typical of one that has endured so long, has gone through changes, trials, and triumphs. But through it all, we have remained consistent in our mission, “Less Government, More Responsibility and – with God’s Help – A Better World.”

Decades after that fateful meeting in Indianapolis, Welch was asked to name one of JBS’s most significant accomplishments. “Surviving,” he replied. While this may seem a flat and inapplicable answer, JBS survival, we believe, is the difference between complete global tyranny and the world in which we live today. JBS members have foiled plans for regional alliances such as the North American Union. They have fought tooth and nail to prevent the destruction of the Constitution via an Article V Convention. They’ve worked since the ’60s to stop the nationalization of local police. JBS has also been credited by its enemies as the most effective organization to besmirch the angelic goals of the Agenda 21/2030 plan and derail it from burrowing into American communities.

But our greatest contribution has been education. Sixty-four years later, we’ve arrived at point in time in which we are on the brink of majority knowledge of the maniacal conspiratorial elite class. During all our years, from 1959 to 2022, Birchers continued living up to Mr. Welch’s mantra — “education is our total strategy, and truth is out only weapon.” They have distributed millions of magazines, books, pamphlets, and videos. We’ve even met visitors from the other side of the planet whose eyes were open after reading our materials. We’ve published and distributed some of the most important books on the Conspiracy, including None Dare Call It Treason by John Stormer, The Invisible Government by Dan Smoot, None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen, The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, and Deep State: The Invisible Government Behind the Scenes by Alex Newman. Our affiliate magazine, The New American, and its predecessors, Review of the News and American Opinion, have influenced more people than today’s efficient surveillance apparatus could track. We’ve also started a K-12 school, FreedomProject Academy, to raise up the next generation of patriots. And we recently revived a tool that can revolutionize the political makeup of the United States – the Congressional ScorecardThe Scorecard uses seven key votes to measure how well – or badly – every U.S. congressman, Republican or Democrat, adheres to the U.S. Constitution. This tool is now being expanded to include state legislatures. The Scorecard omits the need to decode politicians’ political rhetoric and goes straight to the fruit they bear via their legislative votes.

In short, JBS has prevented the destruction of America. If it weren’t for the JBS, we believe the world the globalists seek to install — one in which you will own nothing and they everything — would already be reality. If, however, we would’ve had more “pullers at the oars,” as we’ve always sought to recruit, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now in, either. Inflation is robbing us, our elections are a mess, government is collaborating with corporations to silence and manipulate us, and our rogue intelligence agencies run illegal operations against its own citizens.

However.

It is not unreasonable to argue that we are in better position than we were in 1958, if for no other reason than that more people know what’s going on than ever. You cannot address a problem you don’t believe exists. Birch education has converged with reality. Covid tyranny revealed that there indeed exists a totalitarian-minded managerial class seeking to render us subservient cattle citizens of their global oligarchical government. It showed that despite endless talk of “democracy,” the West is not only not immune to tyranny, but plans to weaponize its exclusively advanced technology to injure, control and enslave all humanity.

A giant is awakening. There are plenty of signs. An overwhelming majority of Americans now reject the experimental concoctions they tried to jab into all of us. The propaganda and censorship collaboration between government and Big Tech is coming to light faster than we can keep up with. Corporate media trust (and subscriptions) is plummeting while that of “alternative” media is skyrocketing. Government school indoctrination continues to lose its influence as parents are pulling their children out by the droves. Election chicanery has been exposed and Americans won’t rest until our elections are restored.  This is why the Biden regime has tried to nationalize elections. And patriotic Americans are working in a plethora of ways to raise awareness and change their communities, the key to national restoration.   And politically speaking, the America First takeover of the GOP is within sight.

In an August 1815 letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams ruminated on the War of Independence. “What do we mean by the Revolution? The War?” Adams asked rhetorically. “That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People….”

Why is there such an intense effort to propagandize and censor us?

Because they are afraid of you. They know that when enough Americans wake up, the jig is up. During that fateful meeting in 1958, Robert Welch said this to his future co-founding members:

“Truth, reality, human instinct, and the overwhelming weight of human desire are on our side. We have these points in our favor against a Conspiracy that must depend on falsehood, cunning terror, utilized by less than 5% of the population.”

Voters Dismiss January 6 Committee

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, November 10, 2022:  

With voters effectively dismissing the January 6 “select” committee, former President Donald Trump now holds all the cards: He may choose to ignore the committee’s demands for his records and his presence before the committee, or comply. He could challenge the committee’s last-ditch effort to embarrass him by going to court.

History is likely to record that the year-long effort by the “insurrection” committee was not only an enormous waste of taxpayer funds, but a waste of time as well.

After that investigation, during which it interviewed hundreds of individuals and reviewed millions of documents, the committee has failed in its efforts to pin responsibility of the so-called insurrection on the former president.

Voters decimated the committee on Tuesday, leaving just five of the nine-member committee in office after January. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) was voted out on Tuesday, while Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), and Adam Kinzinger (D-Ill.) were either voted out in a primary or decided not to run for reelection.

That it was a “show” committee from the start was proved when the committee, in subpoenaing the former president, stated its foregone conclusion: “You were at the center of the first and only effort by any U.S. President to overturn an election and obstruct the peaceful transition of power, ultimately culminating in a bloody attack on our own Capitol and on the Congress itself.” It spent millions trying to prove this, and failed.

That the committee was a sham was further confirmed when Trump offered to appear in person, but only if the proceedings were televised. This was anathema to co-chair Liz Cheney, who told The New York Times that “this [would be] a situation where the committee is going to put itself at the mercy of Donald Trump in terms of his efforts to create a circus.”

Of course, the committee has assured that history will record its success in turning its own efforts into that circus without any help from Trump. As Trump himself said upon learning of the subpoena, “Why did they wait until the very end, the final moments of their last meeting?” He answered, “Because the Committee is a total ‘BUST’ that has only served to further divide our country.”

Voters have reduced the committee to a shell, about to be dismissed altogether in January as current results from Tuesday’s midterm elections appear to put Republicans back in control of the House. At the moment, RealClear Politics reports that eight House seats have already flipped from Democrat to Republican, with 31 races still to be decided. Republicans need only seven of them to regain control.

Until then, it must be a delicious moment for the former president, who holds all the cards. The temptation to take on the committee in person, in full view of the public, must be overwhelming. It’s likely that he will just let the committee disappear into history, with nary a whimper or a tear.

After Eight Years of Litigation, Coach Joe Kennedy Will Get His Job Back

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, October 28, 2022:  

In a “stipulation agreement” supported by attorneys on both sides, Bremerton (Washington) High School assistant football coach Joe Kennedy will have his old job back at the end of the current season:

[Joseph Kennedy] is to be reinstated to his previous position as assistant coach of the Bremerton High School football team on or before March 15, 2023.

Kennedy was fired for one reason and one reason only: Bremerton was following the notion that the Founders somehow had built a “wall of separation” between religion and the state, and that the state was thus free to quash any seeping over from the spiritual world into the secular.

Writing for the majority (6-3) decision in June exonerating Kennedy, Justice Neal Gorsuch touched briefly on that falsehood:

Kennedy’s private religious exercise did not come close to crossing any line one might imagine separating protected private expression from impermissible government coercion. [Emphasis added.]

Tyrants, seizing the quote from Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists more than a decade after the Constitution was put in place as sufficient proof that government must protect itself from spiritual influence, have sold the canard across the land.

At issue was Kennedy’s kneeling and praying in public view after each game. This was, in the district’s view, a violation of separation of church and state. This view as been pushed for decades, using Jefferson’s remarks in his private letter to the Danbury Baptists as a hammer to remove all religious expression from the public square.

Gorsuch expanded slightly on the myth in his opinion in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District:

Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a personal religious observance, based on a mistaken view that it has a duty to suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. [Emphasis added.]

 

The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination. Mr. Kennedy is entitled to summary judgment on his religious exercise and free speech claims.

The attack on Kennedy’s religious freedom was intentional and deliberate, wrote Gorsuch:

The contested exercise here does not involve leading prayers with the team; the District disciplined Mr. Kennedy only for his decision to persist in praying quietly without his students after three games in October 2015….

 

Prohibiting a religious practice was thus the District’s unquestioned “object”….

 

A government entity’s concerns about phantom constitutional violations do not justify actual violations of an individuals’ Frist Amendment rights. [Emphasis added.]

Tim Greenwood of Tim Greenwood Ministries provided one of the clearest definitions of the Founders’ original intent on the matter more than 10 years ago:

The “wall” was understood as one-directional; its purpose was to protect the church from the state.

 

The world was not to corrupt the church; yet the church was free to teach the people Biblical values [without interference].

The Pilgrims left England over exactly that type of interference. Wrote Greenwood:

The American people knew what would happen if the State established the Church like in England. Even though it was not recent history to them, they knew that England went so far as forbidding worship in private homes and sponsoring all church activities and keeping people under strict dictates.

 

They were forced to go to the state established church and do things that were contrary to their conscience. No other churches were allowed, and mandatory attendance of the established church was compelled under the Conventicle Act of 1665.

 

Failure to comply would result in imprisonment and torture.

 

The people did not want freedom FROM religion, but freedom OF religion.

Coach Kennedy’s restoration to his position at Bremerton is a small victory in the larger war against religion being waged secular and anti-Christian forces in America, using the myth of separation as justification.

New York Judge Strikes Down Rule Allowing “No Excuse” Absentee Balloting

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, October 25, 2022:  

Democrats’ ever-growing lust for power in New York State was considerably dampened last Friday by a ruling by a state supreme court judge declaring its rule allowing absentee voting for any reason unconstitutional.

In other words, in one of the most liberal (i.e., power hungry) states in the union, the state’s constitution still reigns supreme.

The New York State Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to vote. It has been amended so that voters unable “because of illness or physical disability” to vote in person may request and receive a mail-in ballot.

But the heavily Democrat-laden state legislature (Democrats control 106 of the 150 Assembly seats and 43 of the 63 Senate seats) decided to “clarify” the meaning of “illness” so that it would include anyone suffering from, or who might possibly think they might be suffering from, Covid-19.

As Supreme Court Justice Dianne Freestone wrote:

“Because of illness” shall be expanded to include, but not be limited to, “instances where a voter is unable to appear personally at the polling place of the election district in which they are a qualified voter because there is a risk of contracting or spreading a disease that may cause illness to the voter or to other members of the public.”

This proviso, which became effective in August 2020, was set to expire on January 1, 2022. But the power-grabbing ruse worked so well that the Democrat-controlled legislature decided to extend the period for the full year 2022.

Judge Freestone also noted that when voters had an opportunity actually to amend the constitution directly to reflect what the Democratic legislature wanted, it was soundly defeated. Wrote Freestone, “New York voters overwhelmingly rejected this broad-sweeping ballot proposal that would have amended the [state’s] Constitution to authorize all voters to vote absentee in any election for any reason.”

But that didn’t deter the Democrats. This little ruse all but guaranteed that Democrats would rule in perpetuity in The Empire State.

Judge Freestone saw through the ruse and declared the legislature’s efforts to expand mail-in balloting unconstitutional because they “conflict with and violate various provisions of the Election Law and the New York State Constitution [and] interfere with various constitutionally-protected rights of citizens.”

She wasn’t done. She called out the defendants’ attempts to justify the extension using “alarmist” statistics:

Indeed, the Respondents’ [the defendants’] respective papers are replete with alarmist statistics of rising incidences of COVID-19 infections and the collective phantom menaces of Monkey Pox and Polio looming.

 

The Respondents suggest throughout their respective papers and arguments that this consternation about constitutionality is the Shakespearean “much ado about nothing”.… This Court is skeptical of such a pollyannish notion.

She added that if the overreach was not nipped in the bud now, then the expiration date will continue to be renewed on into infinity:

There is nothing before this Court to suggest that the continued overreach of the Legislature into the purview of the New York State Constitution shall sunset or that this authority once taken shall be so returned.

 

Despite the express will of the People against universal absentee voting … the Legislature appears poised to continue the expanded absentee voting provisions … into an Orwellian perpetual state of health emergency … cloaked in the veneer of “voter enfranchisement.”

Latest America’s Values Survey: Good News and Bad News

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, October 21, 2022:  

The good news from the latest America’s Values Study undertaken by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University is that nearly all of the nearly 4,000 citizens polled not only think that inflation is going to influence greatly how they vote on November 8, but that their vote will likely reflect their belief that the Democrats are primarily responsible for it.

The bad news is that more and more of those 4,000 are looking to government and not to God for help.

Six in ten of those polled say that inflation, the rising cost of living, food prices and shortages, and oil and gasoline prices will influence how they vote in the midterm elections by “a lot.”

George Barna, the lead pollster, wrote:

Many of the most influential issues in this election are those that highlight publicly perceived failures by the Democrats. The highest-impact issues — specifically, inflation, the cost of food and related shortages, and policies and prices related to gas and oil — all highlight turns for the worse over the past two years, when Democrats have held the White House and both chambers of Congress.

 

If historical patterns hold true, voters will hold Democrats responsible for those failures. Some four out of five incumbents in the U.S. House and Senate are typically re-elected.

 

However, there may yet be substantial change in the two federal legislative bodies given the confluence of anger with the condition of America, the historical tendency to replace the prevailing party in mid-term elections, the unusually large number of incumbents not seeking re-election, and the fact that the issues of greatest importance to voters underscore public dissatisfaction with Democrat rule.

But when it comes to issues like morality, the right to life, and the threats to religious liberty by the government, those polled scarcely mentioned them at all. As Barna noted,

Even among the most deeply religious Americans, regardless of their faith of choice, a greater emphasis was placed upon the personal impact of governance choices and public policies. That focus on self, to the exclusion of the community, is a reflection of their syncretistic worldview and the decline of spiritual commitment in America.

Barna holds that that “syncretistic” view held by most Americans — including those who call themselves Christians — is made up from a vast buffet-like array of religious positions rather than the singular Christian faith that informed the Founders of the nation.

Len Munsil, president of Arizona Christian University, noted the resultant decline in morality exposed by the survey:

Religious segments such as born-again Christians and people who regularly attend evangelical churches did not include issues such as abortion, national morals and values, [or] religious freedom in their top-five lists [of influences].

Lindsey Jensen, a brand ambassador for Turning Point USA, noted the trend away from traditional Christianity two years ago:

Without the belief in God or the natural rights given to us by God, the Constitution wouldn’t exist nor could it be upheld….

 

As Christianity declines, we see that more people in our nation look favorably on the idea of more government involvement. Instead of turning to God or the church, they want the government to solve their problems.

She notes the primary problem — people who call themselves Christians don’t act like it:

Our nation is feeling the repercussions of Christians who “check the box” and attend church but don’t actually want the Word of God to inform their daily life and change the way they live.

 

Our nation needs the kind of people that reflect Christ in all they do.

This is precisely the point made by America’s 30th president, Calvin Coolidge:

The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country.

The good news is that there is likely to be substantial change in Washington following the midterm elections. The bad news is that the necessary cultural shift away from secularism and the “weak Gospel” toward rebuilding a culture based upon historical Biblical Christianity, self-reliance, and individual responsibility remains elusive.

Another Court Fails to Abolish the Odious and Unconstitutional Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, October 21, 2022:  

When Freddy Eynsford-Hill attempted to court Eliza Doolittle (played by Julie Andrews) in the play My Fair Lady, she expressed her exasperation:

Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!

 

I get words all day through;

 

First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do?

One reading through the latest court decision on whether Elizabeth Warren’s illegitimate brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), is unconstitutional or not, and one gets sick of the words: It’s unconstitutional, all right, but we’re just going to clip its wings and not abolish the monstrosity altogether.

Three Federalist Society-approved, Trump-appointed, so-called conservative judges (Cory T. Wilson, Don R. Willett, and Kurt Engelhardt) ruled that the CFPB is unconstitutional, but kept it in place anyway.

They used smooth-sounding words, quoting from The Federalist, No. 48:

An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced . . . that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.

But that is exactly what the CFPB is: deliberately and intentionally designed by an enemy of the Constitution (Sen. Elizabeth Warren, with The New American’s Freedom Index rating of just 15 out of 100, lower even than that of another enemy, Nancy Pelosi, with 23) to protect the runaway and rogue agency from any constraints whatsoever and thus allow it to expand its power over the financial sector of the nation without limit.

Two financial service groups, the Community Financial Services Association of America and the Consumer Service Alliance of Texas, brought four charges against the rogue agency:

(1) the [2017 Payday Lending Rule’s] promulgation violated the APA [i.e., exceeded its authority];

 

(2) the rule was promulgated by a Director [who is] unconstitutionally insulated from presidential removal;

 

(3) the Bureau’s rulemaking authority violates the nondelegation [of powers] doctrine; and

 

(4) the Bureau’s funding mechanism violates the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution.

Wrote Judge Wilson, for the three’s unanimous decision:

We agree that, for the most part, the Plaintiffs’ claims miss their mark.

 

But one arrow has found its target: Congress’s decision to abdicate its appropriations power under the Constitution, i.e., to cede its power of the purse to the Bureau, violates the Constitution’s structural separation of powers.

 

We thus reverse the judgment of the district court, render judgment in favor of the Plaintiffs, and vacate the Bureau’s 2017 Payday Lending Rule.

This leaves in place the rogue agency, created by Congress in 2010, and its license to pursue hapless financial institutions that happen to stumble over the agency’s ever-changing and ever-expanding power to make the rules, interpret the rules, and then enforce the rules — precisely what the Founders intended to prohibit.

The three blind and weak-kneed mice admit the agency is unconstitutional. On page 32, deep into its 39-page screed, Wilson admits that their decision will allow the agency to act “as a mini legislature, prosecutor, and court, responsible for creating substantive rules for a wide swath of industries, prosecuting violations, and levying knee-buckling penalties against private citizens.”

They add that

An expansive executive agency insulated (no, double-insulated) from Congress’s purse strings, expressly exempt from budgetary review, and headed by a single Director removable at the President’s pleasure is the epitome of the unification of the purse and the sword in the executive — an abomination the Framers warned “would destroy that division of powers on which political liberty is founded.” [A quote from The Works of Alexander Hamilton]

And so, through temerity or threats or unknown pressure from unknown places, the three “constitutional” “conservative” judges abdicated their responsibility to protect the citizenry from such combinations and threats to their liberties.

Polls, History, Big-name Democrats, and the Media All Predict a Red Wave in November

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, October 20, 2022: 

When Tim Swarens, the deputy opinion editor for USA Todaygives it up and says “Democrats are failing across the board. All signs point to a red wave on Election Day,” it’s time to examine the evidence.

He cites seven reasons behind the wave expected less than three weeks from now:

  • History: the party in power loses ground in the midterms
  • The current resident of the White House is notoriously unpopular
  • Inflation is high and likely to remain so
  • Rising interest rates are killing the housing market and will likely cause a recession
  • Crime is increasing, especially in Democrat-controlled cities
  • Economic issues are more important to voters than abortion
  • Pollsters show Republicans leading in most key races, and they may in fact be undercounting Republican voters

There are numerous other indicators, all of which signal the coming red wave. For instance, big-name Democrats are coming to the rescue of Democratic contenders. Former President Obama is conducting a whirlwind tour of Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin in an attempt to shore up Democrats who are fighting the wave.

Socialist Bernie Sanders, who just turned 81, has been called on to perform resuscitation in Oregon, California, Nevada, Texas, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. His plan is to make 19 stops in the next two weeks, promoting the socialism that is bringing America to its knees.

Understandably, some of those Democratic candidates aren’t appreciative. Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a progressive leftist group, noted that “the Mandela Barnes [who is running against Republican Senate incumbent Ron Johnson in Wisconsin] campaign is planning to bring in Sen. Bernie Sanders. I desperately want Barnes to win, so I ask again of his campaign: Why would you do this? Why????”

Online betting site PredictIt shows that bettors (real people with real money making real financial bets) are moving away from Democrats and toward Republicans running for the U.S. Senate. PredictIt uses a “continuous double auction” to sell shares for each race. For every person who makes a bet on one side, there must be a taker of that bet on the other side.

In the race “Which party will control the Senate after 2022 election?,” Republicans are buying shares at $.62 while Democrats are buying the other side of the bet at just $.41.

For the House, the race isn’t even close: Republicans are buying the meme that their party will control the House after the midterms, paying $.86 compared to Democrats taking the other side, who are paying just $.17 per share.

Traditional pollster Trafalgar Group found that, in a generic race for Congress, Republicans lead Democrats by more than five percentage points, while Rasmussen shows a seven-point advantage for Republicans.

Poll aggregator RealClearPolitics predicts that Republicans are set to gain at least two seats in the U.S. Senate, two governorships will flip Republican, and, at present, Republicans will gain at least 16 seats in the House, with 38 seats still undecided.

The real question remains, though: What will those Republicans do after their coming takeover? Will they hew to their oaths of office? Or will they, as Salon writer Heather Digby “Digs” Parton put it, squander their advantage by doing “almost nothing” except “investigate” and “impeach”?

Will they follow the lead of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert (who enjoy The New American’s Freedom Index ratings of 97 and 93, respectively), or will they continue to follow the lead of the likes of Kevin McCarthy, who sports a paltry FI rating of just 60 out of 100 in his voting following the Constitution?

Barna Polls Reveal Many of America’s Foundations Remain in Place

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, September 29, 2022:  

The results of two polls conducted under the auspices of pollster George Barna reveal that, despite decades of withering and deliberate attacks, many if not most of America’s most cherished values remain in place.

Barna, who heads up the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University (ACU), wrote:

Recent national surveys have reported that Americans no longer trust most politicians or either of the major political parties, and believe the media are fanning the flames of division.

 

Americans also believe the country is moving in the wrong direction and fear for the future of the nation’s democracy [sic].

 

Add the ravages of inflation and the threat of a recession to the political chaos, and what’s left is a nation wondering if we will find our way back to solidarity and unity.

The two polls, conducted online in July and involving nearly 4,000 respondents, offered four dozen different value statements and learned that topping the list of values Americans cherish the most is family. The study ranked just how strongly respondents felt about each category, including “fight to/die for,” “sacrifice resources for,” “argue in support of,” “do not feel strongly about,” and “would not defend.”

Eighty percent of those quizzed said that family was worth fighting or dying for, or sacrificing resources to preserve and strengthen. Other values respondents strongly supported were justice, integrity, character, and the ownership of private property.

The values offered by the Left through movies, TV, talk shows, and mainstream media — such as unconstrained sex, unrestrained entertainment, public recognition of fame, and strong government — were among the least appealing to the respondents.

As Barna noted:

Despite the nation’s progressive elites constantly pushing for permissiveness, tolerance, indulgence, and pervasive equality, a minority of Americans place significant value on the likes of universal empowerment, cultural diversity, economic equality, and tolerance.

He added:

When we consider the values on which America was built, it is encouraging to find that a handful of the values embraced by early Americans remains intact: family, financial cautiousness, hard work, humility, and moderation.

 

That speaks to the foundational nature of those attributes in the continuity of our republic.

Those “foundational” values have been under attack by communists and their sympathizers ever since the publication of The Communist Manifesto in 1848. In Chapter Two of that book, for instance, one finds this:

Abolition of the family!…

 

The bourgeois [middle-class] family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of [the private ownership of] capital.

The communists won’t be satisfied until they have destroyed everything of value, including Truth itself.

Cid Lazarou, writing for The Epoch Times, notes just how important those traditional American values are to the survival of the Republic:

It’s no accident that communists vehemently oppose family and parenting.

 

The importance of these social institutions can’t be overstated, serving as an essential foundation for the nurturing and protection of children that foments a stable, healthy society. Such values are a direct threat to communist hegemony.

 

As a parent, I can attest to the unconditional love one feels for one’s children. It’s something most parents can relate to. It creates unsurpassed altruism and loyalty within the family unit—a powerful bond that further threatens the collective obedience demanded by totalitarian ideologies such as communism.

 

It’s for this reason that communists oppose the family, seeking to not only destroy it, but to also usurp the role that parents play in raising children. By doing this, they can then build their new society from the old, as a new order is created out of their chaos.

One of the communist front groups most exalted and hailed as righteous by the pro-communist mainstream media is Black Lives Matter. BLM founder Patrisse Cullors has publicly and proudly announced that she and co-founder Alicia Garza are “trained Marxists.” On BLM’s website (until it was “scrubbed”) appeared this:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another….

One of those directly involved in conducting the surveys in July is Marc Nuttle, who noted: “The authority of the family as the essential foundational element that secures the stability of society in the United States is the essence of what defines us as Americans.”

That “authority” is found in the Holy Scriptures, the foundational document upon which the Founders relied in creating the American constitutional Republic:

  • Genesis 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”
  • Exodus 20:12: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD God is giving you.”
  • Psalm 127:3-5: “Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!”

Barna concluded his review of the polls with these words of encouragement to those actively involved in the fight against tyranny and for the restoration of the Republic: “Rather than deny the existence of those long-cherished, proven core values, wise leaders will seize those as foundation stones for the future of the nation that connects us with our history.”

Sovereign citizens of the American Republic have the opportunity next month to select and put in place “wise leaders,” whose commitment is to their oath of office and to the amazing country that sprang out of the wilderness with these foundational truths as part of its nascent culture.

Review of “Letter to the American Church” by Eric Metaxas

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, September 20, 2022:  

Author Eric Metaxas, used his #1 best-selling book Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy as the basis for his latest one, Letter to the American Church. Released Tuesday, September 20, Metaxas’ book reveals parallel after parallel between events in the 1930s and events now. He warns that unless the American church awakens from its slumber and its focus on just the Gospel and nothing else, the destruction of America is imminent.

His target: pastors who offer “cheap grace,” i.e., the mental assent that Jesus Christ died for their sins, but leaving out the part about following Him through a totally changed life. He wrote:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer … called the German church to be the church in their time, and as I hope to make clear, his voice to them is his voice to us today, calling the American Church to actually be God’s church, with all that entails, so that we might avoid the mistakes of the German church in in the 1930s, and those direst consequences we know to have been their result….

 

I have written this book because I am convinced the American Church is at an impossibly — and almost unbearably — important inflection point.

 

The parallels to where the German Church was in the 1930s are unavoidable and grim.

 

So the only question … is whether we might understand those parallels, and thereby avoid the fatal mistakes the German Church made during that time, and their superlatively catastrophic results.

 

If we do not, I am convinced we will reap a whirlwind greater even than the one they did.

Example:

The church folded like an accordion in 1954 when then-Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, angered that local Texas churches called him out for his egregious sins, offered a bill granting tax exemptions to churches provided they don’t get political. It was passed into law and is now called the “Johnson Amendment.”

The parallel:

Pastors in the eighteenth century spoke boldly from their pulpits against the tyranny of King George III, and opposed him by name….

 

[But in the 1950s] it is astonishing that pastors in America allowed this wild idea to go uncontested. In this they behaved rather like many of the submissive pastors in Germany two decades earlier.

Example:

When we think of the death camps and the murder of so many millions … we need to understand that in the beginning [German citizens and their pastors] had no idea where it was leading, and had no idea there were facing nothing less than the forces of anti-Christ.

Parallel:

We are now facing those same forces [but] in different guises … those forces … have an agenda … that is globalist.

Example:

Part of this may be traced back to the 1960s, when the U.S. Supreme Court took prayer out of the public schools … part of a general trend down a path that was fundamentally mistaken in its views of [Thomas] Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation” between church and state.

 

Rather than protecting people of faith from government intrusion, as the Founders intended … the judiciary began to interpret it to mean that the public square should be stripped of faith entirely….

 

Because the American people did not see the dangers … and because Christian leaders did not speak out boldly, the drift toward an unconstitutional and secular view began to be enshrined in our laws and in our culture.

The Covid parallel:

What the Nazis did first, a mere four weeks into Hitler’s [takeover], was to use the incident of the Reichstag Fire — in which a Dutch madman set fire to the German Parliament building — to enact sweeping emergency decrees….

 

It was a stunning erasure of [legitimate] German government, with blitzkrieg swiftness….

 

[The Nazis used the incident] to demonize their enemies … and to crush dissent by instilling fear in anyone who wished to object.

Wayne Grudem, professor of theology at Phoenix Seminary and author of the massive and highly regarded Systematic Theology, was moved to say this about Metaxas’ effort:

[It is] bold and insightful.… Metaxas calls for pastors (and other Christian leaders) who … will be courageous enough to speak unambiguously against the massive anti-Christian forces that now threaten to permanently transform American society and bring to an end America’s role as a beacon of freedom for the world.

Stacey Abrams Looking to Lose to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, Again

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, September 8, 2022:  

Stacey Abrams, the far-left Democrat who lost to Brian Kemp in the race for Georgia governor in 2018 by 55,000 votes, is poised to lose again. Only this time, the margin is likely to be vastly larger, perhaps by 200,000 votes or more.

She claimed in 2018 that she lost due to voter fraud, and to this date has refused to concede that race.

In every poll since January, however, she has trailed her Republican rival by anywhere between one and seven points (with the exception of a single “tie” by Quinnipiac in June). Even FiveThirtyEight, a licensed pollster with The New York Times, shows Abrams trailing Kemp by five percentage points.

This late in the game, that amounts to an insurmountable gap for Abrams to overcome in the next two months.

Funded mostly with out-of-state money, Abrams (who has raised $18 million more than her Republican opponent) has tried everything, including the get-out-the-vote campaign that narrowed the gap in 2018. But the black vote is going against her. She has played the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision card, hoping that the high court’s decision in Dobbs would galvanize her liberal pro-abortion base.

But nothing has worked, and now the national media has virtually surrendered to the political reality. The New York Times and other mainstream media are seriously questioning whether she can pull off a political miracle (or fraud sufficient to overcome the gap). Newsweek, for example, complained that “the New York Times and others are questioning whether Abrams risks falling flat in a second matchup against Brian Kemp in a race many observers believed winnable for Democrats.”

In trying to explain away the reason for Abrams’ impending second defeat in November, the media is blaming “sexism” — the fact that she is a female, and — if by some miracle she pulled out a victory in November — would be the first woman governor in Georgia history. As the Times suggested, “She is running in the Deep South for an office that has long been elusive to women and candidates of color.”

The real reason likely has nothing to do with color (she is black) or sex (she is female). It’s much more likely that her far-left political positions on issues voters care about are increasingly making her candidacy less and less attractive.

According to Discover the Networks and other sources, Abrams’ positions include:

  • Disparaging the free market private capitalist system that created the highest standard of living of any country in history;
  • Opposing the Second Amendment that continues to be the main bulwark against tyranny in the United States;
  • Supporting, through her board membership in the Marguerite Casey Foundation, efforts to defund the police;
  • Supporting red flag laws that would disarm law-abiding gun owners;
  • Supporting noncitizen voting;
  • Supporting reparations for slavery;
  • Supporting lowering the voting age to 16;
  • Abolishing the Electoral College;
  • Condemning America for its alleged “systemic racism”; and
  • Declaring that Donald Trump is a racist.

With a record like that, one wonders why the five-to-seven-point gap is so small.

Wyoming Voters to “Fire” Liz Cheney Today

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, August 16, 1022:  

When former President Donald Trump came to Casper, Wyoming, to campaign for Liz Cheney’s opponent in today’s Republican primary, he called out: “Liz, you’re fired!”

The crowd responded with raucous cheers. They will be part of those who vote today to end Cheney’s attempt to keep her seat in the House of Representatives.

Harry Enten, CNN’s political analyst, predicts she will go down in flames by more than 20 points. The latest poll is predicting closer to 30 points.

In a state that went for Trump by more than a 40-percent margin in 2020, Cheney has only herself to blame for her political banishment today. She was the state’s fair-haired girl, riding on strong name recognition (her father, Dick Cheney, was a Wyomingite who served as George W. Bush’s vice president) and a perceived conservative voting record. She first won election to the state’s only seat in the House in 2016 by 60 percent. She easily won reelection in 2018 and in 2020.

But then she voted to impeach President Trump. And then she accepted Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s invitation to co-chair the committee “investigating” the riot that took place during mostly peaceful protest on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol.

The tide turned against her to the point where she was removed from the third-highest position in the House and voted out of the Wyoming Republican party.

The final nail in the coffin was her latest ad, featuring her father, that excoriated Trump, calling him a “coward” and not “a real man,” angering Wyoming Republicans.

Still, she continued to receive millions of dollars from out-of-state supporters who see today’s catastrophe at the polls as merely the first battle in the long war against Trump. A Cheney ally who was given anonymity by Yahoo News called today’s loss “the first battle in a much larger and longer war.”

How would that work, exactly? Jon Ward, writing for Yahoo, explained: In 2024 she would first run in the Republican presidential primary, attracting anti-Trump votes. She would then run as a “conservative” independent hoping to carry with her those disaffected voters in sufficient numbers to keep Trump from winning.

It would be a “spoiler” campaign, said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant, “designed to prevent Trump from becoming President. It [would be] designed to take from the GOP base and make it mathematically impossible for Trump to win.”

Cheney has a big hill to climb, but the presidential election is more than two years away. A Morning Consult poll released last week showed that 56 percent of Republican registered voters would choose Donald Trump in 2024, with Florida Governor Don DeSantis coming in a distant second, with 18 percent. Cheney came in tied for last place, at two percent.

Of the $15 million she has received, most of it from out of state, she has barely spent half in the losing campaign, possibly hoarding the balance for a run in 2024. In the meantime, she will work hard to burnish her image as a “staunch conservative,” probably with the help of the mainstream media.

Newsweek opened the first salvo in that coming battle, noting that “questions have begun to arise concerning whether she will run as the Republican’s Primary 2024 Presidential election candidate.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper said last week that there is no question: Cheney is going to run for the presidency in 2024. Following an interview with her last week, he concluded,

When you hear a politician talking about the country “standing on the edge of an abyss” and the need to elect “serious candidates,” well, it doesn’t take an astrophysicist to figure out what’s going on there.

Cheney will have some work to do to sell herself as that “staunch conservative.” The Epoch Times points out that “among the 211 Republicans in the House of Representatives, only 13 have a lower score this term … Cheney is easily among the 10 percent most liberal Republicans … [and] is easily among the five percent most liberal Republicans. You don’t get much more RINO than that.”

The Freedom Index, published by The New American and based upon how closely members of Congress follow the Constitution (to which they swear an oath to support and defend), shows Cheney at 60 percent. Put another way, when given the opportunity to vote in line with the Constitution, Cheney’s history shows she fails 40 percent of the time.

She voted for the $250 billion corporate welfare package for Big Tech known as the CHIPS Act, she voted for the gun-control bill, and she voted for Biden’s $1.5 trillion spending monstrosity in March.

Starting tomorrow, anyone thinking that Wyoming has offloaded Cheney into the dumpster of electoral history will be sorely disappointed. The RINO from Wyoming is just getting started.

Liz Cheney Giving Up, but Not Going Away

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, August 12, 2022: 

U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is not going “gentle into that good night,” as the poet Dylan Thomas wrote:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

 

Old age should burn and rave at the close of day;

 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

At age 56 Liz Cheney is far from going quietly from the political stage. Her loss next Tuesday could be historic, with the most current poll showing her nearly 30 points behind her nearest rival.

Instead, her campaign issued a video on Thursday where Tuesday’s Wyoming Republican primary loser said:

America cannot remain free if we abandon the truth. The lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is insidious. It preys on those who love their country.

 

It is a door Donald Trump opened to manipulate Americans to abandon their principles, to sacrifice their freedom, to justify violence, to ignore the rulings of our courts and the rule of law.

She lumped her opponent and likely winner of Tuesday’s primary, Harriet Hageman, in with Trump and his many supporters in Wyoming and across the country:

Like many candidates across this country, my opponents in Wyoming have said that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.

 

No one who understands our nation’s laws, no one with an honest, honorable, genuine commitment to our Constitution would say that. It is a cancer that threatens our great Republic … nothing in our public life is more important than the preservation of the miracle given to us by God and our Founding Fathers.

She previewed her coming concession speech late last month at Fox News:

I am working hard to earn every single vote.

 

Given the choice between maintaining my seat in the House of Representatives on the one hand or ensuring the survival of our constitutional republic and ensuring the American people know the truth about Donald Trump, I will choose the Constitution and the truth every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

She is making sure that she offends every Wyoming Republican on her way out the door. Her campaign is running a last-minute series of ads by her father, Dick Cheney, who calls Donald Trump “a coward … a real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters.”

On Thursday she followed up her campaign’s last pre-primary video by chastising Republicans who questioned the legality and necessity of Monday’s raid by the FBI on Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida home. She tweeted:

I have been ashamed to hear members of my party attacking the integrity of the FBI agents involved with the recent Mar-a-Lago search. These are sickening comments that put the lives of patriotic public servants at risk.

She is, as The New American and other reliable media outlets have claimed, running for president in 2024. Jake Tapper of CNN picked up on this after her interview on Sunday. Cheney, when asked about her presidential aspirations, responded: “Our nation stands on the edge of an abyss … we have to elect serious candidates [in 2024].”

Concluded Tapper:

When you hear a politician talking about the country “standing on the edge of an abyss” and the need to elect “serious candidates,” well, it doesn’t take an astrophysicist to figure out what’s going on there.

Helping Cheney along with her concession speech on Tuesday evening is John Harris of POLITICO. He offered unsolicited excerpts for her consideration, at no charge:

“First of all, to all my friends in Wyoming and around the country, let me assure you I made peace with this moment long ago. This is not the result we wanted, but it is a victory — for everyone who believes that standing up for what’s right, for the Constitution, for the future of our democracy is more important than clinging to power or holding some fancy title.

 

This fight is not over — it may take many years. For anyone wondering about my own future, let me say this: I will do everything in my power to make sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office.”

Harris also without charge offered a translation of what she really means:

I still can’t believe that people in Wyoming — tough, stoical no-BS people — would turn their back on a Cheney in favor of such an obvious fraud. So, no, I’m not exactly at peace.

 

But, yes, I saw this coming 17 months ago and once I started down the path of confronting Trump there was no turning back.

 

Why do you think I left so much of the money gushing to me from Dems and Never Trumpers unspent in this primary — it’s the war chest that will keep me relevant on the national stage.

 

No, I won’t ever be Speaker of the House. But no need to be too coy about it: I do plan to run for president. I’ve already dropped plenty of breadcrumbs, like that ABC interview last month when I hardly denied my interest, and I’ll soon be dropping more.

 

Does that mean a “kamikaze run” against Trump in 2024? Or a declaration that the Republican Party for now is beyond saving, and therefore I’m leading a third-party movement?

 

Standby — I’m still working on my options.

Politicians’ Canards Promoting Passage of Assault Weapons Ban

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, August 8, 2022:  

Hoping to ride the momentum from passage of the first major anti-gun legislation in 30 years — the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — Joe Biden and various anti-gun politicians are pushing the Senate to pass another anti-gun House bill, this one banning all “assault” weapons.

And they’re using the same lies and exaggerations.

Said Biden in July:

Assault weapons need to be banned.

 

They were banned. I led the fight in 1994.

 

And then, under pressure from the NRA [National Rifle Association] and the gun manufacturers and others, that ban was lifted in 2004.

We won’t waste readers’ time correcting the errors in this statement, but instead will focus on what he said next:

In the 10 years it was law, mass shootings went down.

 

But after Republicans let the law expire in 2004 and those weapons were allowed to be sold again, mass shootings tripled.

 

Those are the facts.

This was echoed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “We know that an assault weapons ban can work because it has worked before.… we witnessed gun crime with assault weapons drop by up to 40 percent.”

Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Federation, told The Epoch Times:

Supporters of the bans are calling their assertions “facts,” in an effort to mislead the public. Many of the Democratic Members of Congress were purposefully misleading in their assertions that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban reduced crime.

 

This level of willful ignorance would be comical if … what they are trying to do wasn’t so blatantly unconstitutional.

John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, agreed: “The number of murders with rifles actually increased slightly when the ban went into effect.” He pointed out that the percentage of all firearm-related murders with any type of rifle was 4.8 percent prior to the ban, and remained essentially constant during the ban. After the ban expired in 2004, rifle homicides dropped to 3.6 percent of all gun-related homicides.

Reuters reported that Biden, Pelosi, and other opponents of the Second Amendment used a 2021 study from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine to promote the bill. When this writer attempted to obtain a copy of that study, however, he found that it was not readily available to the public.

However, in its summary review of the study the university provided this highly revealing disclaimer about the study’s results:

In conclusion, with a few exceptions, there is a surprisingly limited base of rigorous scientific evidence concerning the effects of many commonly discussed gun policies. This does not mean that these policies are ineffective; they might well be quite effective. Instead, it reflects shortcomings in the contributions that scientific study can currently offer to policy debates in these areas….

 

[N]one of the policies we examined would dramatically increase or decrease the stock of guns or gun ownership rates in ways that would produce more readily detectable effects on public safety, health, and industry outcomes.

 

The United States has a large stock of privately owned guns in circulation—estimated in 2014 to be somewhere between 200 million and 300 million firearms (Cook and Goss, 2014).

 

Laws designed to change who may buy new weapons, what weapons they may buy, or how gun sales occur will predictably have only a small effect on … homicides … which are affected much more by the existing stock of firearms.

Let’s recap: this study is one that House Speaker Pelosi and others used to promote the bill that is now headed to the Senate. But other studies are much clearer: The 10-year ban on semi-automatic rifles didn’t reduce gun violence by any scientifically measurable amount.

In fact, in 2013, after reviewing all the available data, FactCheck (funded by the left-wing Annenberg Foundation) noted that it is “premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun crime.”

Research done by Criminology & Public Policy in 2019 found that the ban “didn’t appear to have much of an effect on the number of mass shootings.” The group reported a year later, in January 2020, that such bans “do not seem associated with the incidence of fatal mass shootings.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said its own studies on the issue were “inconsistent” and concluded that “evidence was insufficient to determine the effectiveness of the 1994 ban.”

The Congressional Research Service concurred: “Public mass shootings account for few of the murders … related to firearms that occur annually in the United States.”

And so, when someone like Biden or Pelosi, or even hard-left Democratic Representative Lloyd Doggett representing Austin, Texas (who sports an “F” rating from the NRA), spouts off with something like this:

[Assault weapons are] easier for a teenager to get than to buy a beer. We’ve turned our churches, our schools, our shopping centers, our entertainment venues, almost any place into a battleground with one massacre after another…

then we know he’s making it up out of whole cloth, and he likely knows it. Such fabrications hide the true intent: these bills have nothing to do with gun control, but everything to do with people control.

Forbes notes that the most recent bill has little chance in the Senate, where Democrats would need 10 Republican defectors to gain the 60 votes needed for passage.

Christian Flag Will Fly Tomorrow in Boston

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, August 2, 2022:  

Following the unanimous Supreme Court ruling in Shurtleff v. City of Boston, Camp Constitution will fly its Christian flag on one of the three flagpoles outside Boston City Hall on Wednesday morning.

It will be the last time any such flag will fly there, as Boston has changed its rules, thanks to the Supreme Court decision.

The implications are immense, and reach further than many expected. The city declined Camp Constitution’s initial request five years ago for fear that it would somehow violate the faux “separation of church and state” mantra adopted by anti-Christian forces.

Simply put, the faux reasoning is based on a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to a religious group. There was no other basis for thinking that the Founders meant to keep Christianity from having an influence in American culture. There is no phrase “separation of church and state” in the Constitution, nor can it be found elsewhere in America’s founding documents.

The Supreme Court, however, ruled that Boston’s defense was faulty, and that the city violated Camp Constitution’s right to free speech when it denied its request to fly the Christian flag from that flagpole five years ago.

The ruling forced Boston to change its rules. It is also forcing numerous towns, cities, and municipalities to reconsider their own rules, in favor of free speech, and away from concerns over violating the nebulous but dangerous “separation of church and state” thought to be part of the Constitution.

Since 1971, the Supreme Court used something called the “Lemon Test” to handle the cases that came their way: the government (local, state, or federal) violated the Constitution unless it met the Lemon Test criteria:

  1. Did it have a secular, or non-religious, purpose?;
  2. Did it advance or inhibit a religion?;
  3. Did it promote an “extreme entanglement” with religion on the government’s part?

As Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his concurrence in Shurtleff:

This dispute arose only because of a government official’s mistaken understanding of the Establishment Clause.

 

A Boston official believed that the City would violate the Establishment Clause if it allowed a religious flag to briefly fly outside of City Hall as part of the flag-raising program that the City had opened to the public.

 

So Boston granted requests to fly a variety of secular flags, but denied a request to fly a religious flag.

 

As this Court has repeatedly made clear, however, a government does not violate the Establishment Clause merely because it treats religious persons, organizations, and speech equally with secular persons, organizations, and speech in public programs, benefits, facilities, and the like.

 

On the contrary, a government violates the Constitution when (as here) it excludes religious persons, organizations, or speech because of religion from public programs, benefits, facilities, and the like.

 

Under the Constitution, a government may not treat religious persons, religious organizations, or religious speech as second-class.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, in his concurring opinion, made it even clearer:

Lemon sought to devise a one-size-fits-all test for resolving Establishment Clause disputes. That project bypassed any inquiry into the Clause’s original meaning. It ignored longstanding precedents. And instead of bringing clarity to the area, Lemon produced only chaos.

 

In time, this Court came to recognize these problems, abandoned Lemon, and returned to a more humble jurisprudence centered on the Constitution’s original meaning.

 

Yet in this case, the city chose to follow Lemon anyway. It proved a costly decision, and Boston’s travails supply a cautionary tale for other localities and lower courts.

The attack on Christianity continues, despite the high court’s shift to originalism. Wrote Gorsuch:

This is why some still invoke Lemon today. It reflects poorly on us all.

 

Through history, the suppression of unpopular religious speech and exercise has been among the favorite tools of petty tyrants.

 

Our forebears resolved that this Nation would be different. Here, they resolved, each individual would enjoy the right to make sense of his relationship with the divine, speak freely about man’s place in creation, and have his religious practices treated with respect.

The day governments in this country forage for ways to abandon these foundational promises is a dark day for the cause of individual freedom.

The high court has abandoned the Lemon test, to the benefit of all who cherish religious freedom. In recent cases it ruled that a football coach shouldn’t have lost his job merely because he prayed on the football field after a game. It also ruled that religious schools in Maine must be allowed to participate in the state’s voucher system.

The “separation of church and state” canard, promoted for so long by so many opposed to the impact Christianity has on American culture, is now on the wane at the highest court in the land.

And all because of its return to “originalism” — restoring the understanding of the Constitution as its writers originally intended. That’s what makes tomorrow’s flag raising in Boston so important.

Constitutionalist Judge Stands Up to Unconstitutional Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, July 14, 2022:  

A federal judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan wrote in a recent opinion that the illegitimate brainchild of far-left Senator Elizabeth Warren has been operating unconstitutionally since it was created back in 2009.

Called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the rogue agency created in response to the 2008 financial crisis has been writing its own rules, interpreting them, and then prosecuting any miscreants they can find based on those rules — all without executive or legislative oversight and just as Warren originally proposed back in 2007.

Federal Judge Edith H. Jones, circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, wrote an opinion in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. All American Check Cashing, Inc. intending to stop it in its tracks.

The CFPB charged All American with trying “to keep consumers from learning how much they would be charged to cash a check” along with other alleged violations of its self-written rules. Instead of folding and paying a fine, All American sued.

All American claimed that the CFPB is unconstitutional because it has no accountability. It claimed that it is, in effect, a rogue agency, violating the separation of powers doctrine intrinsic to the Constitution.

When a district court sided with the CFPB, All American appealed to the Fifth Circuit. Jones put the matter well:

[The] separation of powers [doctrine] is at the heart of our constitutional government in order to preserve the people’s liberty and the federal government’s accountability to the people….

 

Created in 2009, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is an administrative agency that was expressly designed to answer to neither of the politically accountable branches.

 

Unlike other agencies, Congress put the CFPB’s staggering amalgam of legislative, judicial, and executive power in the hands of a single Director serving a five-year term and removable by the President only for cause; and Congress insulated the agency from the ordinary congressional appropriations process….

 

I write to show that the CFPB’s budgetary independence is antithetical to the constitutional origins of the Appropriations Clause; contrary to the Constitution’s structural allocation of powers; unsupported by the funding structure of any previous federal agency; and indefensible by the CFPB.

It’s all about the money. The Founders deliberately and intentionally placed the “power of the purse” in the hands of the legislative branch of the federal government. If the executive branch wanted to spend some money it had to get permission from the legislative branch first.

Explained Jones:

All American argues that the CFPB’s budgetary independence contravenes the Constitution’s separation of powers by violating the principles enshrined in the Appropriations Clause.

 

All American emphasizes that the Framers, drawing from British experience, crafted the Appropriations Clause because they well understood the importance of exclusively vesting the legislative branch with the power of the purse as a check on the executive.

 

Congress ran afoul of that foundational principle “by abdicating its exclusive power of the purse and insulating the CFPB from congressional oversight with an unprecedented two layers of fiscal independence.”

She meant that by following Warren’s design Congress placed the CFPB outside of executive control, making it a part of the Federal Reserve and allowing the CFPB to access funds directly from the Fed whenever it “reasonably” needed them. The bureau with its 1,600 employees lives inside the Federal Reserve’s offices in Washington, D.C.

Jones said the insulation of the CFPB from executive or legislative oversight, constraint, or control, was a violation of the Founders’ intent:

It is not mere happenstance that Congress is the chief guardian of the purse strings. Drawing on the British experience, the Framers placed the national government’s fiscal powers in Congress’s hands to check the propensity for aggrandizement and consequent loss of liberty endemic to a powerful executive branch. The CFPB’s budgetary independence violates this essential maxim of separated powers….

 

Importantly, the CFPB’s funding structure is wholly unprecedented. No executive agency with broad legislative, adjudicative, and law-enforcement powers has ever enjoyed complete funding independence….

 

A feature so subversive to the Constitution’s separation of powers as the CFPB’s budgetary independence cannot withstand scrutiny.

She quoted from James Madison’s The Federalist, No. 51 to buttress her position:

The CFPB’s budgetary independence makes it unaccountable to Congress and the people.

 

An agency that wields vast amounts of executive, legislative, and adjudicatory power and is completely unaccountable to Congress is inimical to the Constitution’s structural checks and balances.

 

The Framers created a federal system and divided the national government’s power among three branches to disperse power and preserve individual liberty.

 

But a mere parchment barrier would not guarantee individual liberty.

 

To prevent the “gradual concentration of the several [governmental] powers in the same” branch, the Framers armed each one with “the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others”; the idea being to let “[a]mbition … counteract ambition.”

That “ambition” Madison warned about has revealed itself in the person presently running the rogue agency, Rohit Chopra. In a recent speech Chopra said his agency, in addition to levying fines, would move to cap the size of growth of firms violating his rules; ban certain types of business product lines; require divestitures of certain product lines; put limitations on their ability to raise equity capital; and even revoke a company’s government-approved patents or registration.

Chopra has so overreached that even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has launched a campaign to rein him in. Said Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s chief policy officer,

Rohit Chopra has an outsized view of the CFPB’s role and the Director’s power. By willfully mischaracterizing the state of competition in the market Chopra is laying the groundwork to force the financial services sector to comport with his personal vision of the appropriate size of companies and what products and services should be offered and under what conditions. No previous CFPB Director has thought they had such power.

Exactly. Removing from sinful man the restraints that the Founders wisely placed has led to such overreach.

If the CFPB appeals to the Supreme Court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh et al. are waiting for them. In the fall of 2016, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the then-current director had overreached, with Judge Brett Kavanaugh, one of the three, writing:

The director of the CFPB possesses more unilateral authority — that is, authority to take action on one’s own, subject to no check — than any single commissioner or board member in any other independent agency in the U.S. government.

 

The CFPB’s concentration of enormous executive power in a single, unaccountable, unchecked director not only departs from settled historical practice, but also poses a far greater risk of arbitrary decision-making and abuse of power, and a far greater threat to individual liberty, than does a multi-member independent agency.

Kavanaugh went further, adding:

The independent agencies collectively constitute, in effect, a headless fourth branch of the U.S. Government…. Because of their massive power and the absence of Presidential supervision and direction, independent agencies pose a significant threat to individual liberty and to the constitutional system of separation of powers and checks and balances.

Now that a majority of justices on the Supreme Court are originalists like Jones, the CFPB would risk extinction if they appeal.

Judge Edith Jones concluded her opinion:

The CFPB’s double insulation from Article I appropriations oversight mocks the Constitution’s separation of powers by enabling an executive agency to live on its own in a kingly fashion.

 

The Framers warned that such an accumulation of powers in a single branch of government would inevitably lead to tyranny.

 

Accordingly, I would reject the CFPB’s novel funding mechanism as contravening the Constitution’s separation of powers.

 

And because the CFPB funds the instant prosecution using unconstitutional self-funding, I would dismiss the lawsuit.

Football Coach Has First Amendment Right to Pray, Rules the Supreme Court

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, June 28, 2022:  

In its ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District released on Monday, the Supreme Court not only upheld the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right to free speech and the exercise of religion, but it also challenged, for the first time, the canard that the Establishment Clause creates the illusion of “separation of church and state.”

Bremerton School District bought the canard and refused to renew football coach Joe Kennedy’s contract when he persisted in praying on the 50-yard line at the conclusion of each game. The district thought it was avoiding a lawsuit.

Instead it brought on an eight-year-long series of lawsuits that could have been avoided if the district had simply issued a statement that Kennedy wasn’t speaking for the school when he prayed.

Supreme Court Justice Neal Gorsuch reamed the district for not only punishing Kennedy by not renewing his contract, but for deliberately and intentionally making his religious expression its target.

Wrote Gorsuch:

The Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment protect an individual engaging in a personal religious observance from government reprisal; the Constitution neither mandates nor permits the government to suppress such religious expression.

At issue was Kennedy’s kneeling and praying in public view after each game. This was, in the district’s view, a violation of the separation of church and state. Such view has been pushed for decades, using Thomas Jefferson’s private letter to the Danbury Baptists as the battering ram to remove all religious expression from the culture.

Gorsuch explained:

The contested exercise here does not involve leading prayers with the team; the District disciplined Mr. Kennedy only for his decision to persist in praying quietly without his students after three games in October 2015.

 

In forbidding Mr. Kennedy’s brief prayer, the District’s challenged policies were neither neutral nor generally applicable.

 

By its own admission, the District sought to restrict Mr. Kennedy’s actions at least in part because of their religious character.

 

Prohibiting a religious practice was thus the District’s unquestioned “object.”

Gorsuch concluded:

Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic.

 

Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a personal religious observance, based on a mistaken view that it has a duty to suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. [Emphasis added]

 

The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination. Mr. Kennedy is entitled to summary judgment on his religious exercise and free speech claims.

Nowhere in the 75-page ruling does the phrase “separation of church and state” appear. But Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which represented Bremerton, saw the threat clearly enough. In anticipation of the ruling Laser said:

[I]f we lose this case, it would be a radical departure from decades of well-established law protecting students’ religious freedom.

 

We think it would open the door that could be kicked in, in particular in this climate where there’s a real escalation in religious extremists across our country, to allow teachers and coaches to be able to pray again and pressure students to pray in school.

Without this writer commenting on her claim of the “real escalation of religious extremists” except to say that it is highly welcome and timely, Gorsuch answered her charge that those former freedoms to pray in school might be in jeopardy in future court rulings: “That the First Amendment doubly protects religious speech is no accident. It is the natural outgrowth of the framers’ distrust of government attempts to regulate religion and suppress dissent.”

As for Coach Kennedy, it has been a long and difficult eight years. But in his letter to Fox News, he wrote:

No one should be fired from their job just because [he or she] can be seen engaged in private prayer….

 

I hope [the ruling] means that our public school teachers and coaches don’t have to hide their faith from view….

 

Win or lose, when the whistle blows and everyone shakes hands, you’ll find me at the 50-yard line on a knee in private prayer.

Supreme Court Rules Maine’s Discrimination Against Religious Schools Unconstitutional

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, June 22, 2022: 

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that Maine’s practice of forbidding parents from choosing religious schooling for their children when paid for with public funds is unconstitutional. Wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the majority:

Maine’s “nonsectarian” requirement for its otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

 

Regardless of how the benefit and restriction are described, the program operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise.

Some 5,000 of Maine’s 180,000 school-age children live in areas where there is no public school. The state has for decades offered tuition assistance to them, allowing their parents to select a nearby school — school choice, in other words — for their kids.

For years, the state has prohibited those parents from selecting a school that teaches religious values. The parents of children discriminated against brought suit — Carson v. Makin — claiming discrimination under the First Amendment.

Having lost their case in lower courts, the parents appealed to the Supreme Court. It took the case, heard the oral arguments in January, and reversed lower courts in their ruling.

While this appears to be a minor skirmish in the war against religion, it is fraught with great significance in the overall battle. For years Thomas Jefferson’s infamous letter to the Danbury Baptists, in which he used the phrase “separation of church and state,” has been used as a hammer by atheists and socialists to discriminate against and ultimately abolish all religious influence in the culture.

In explaining the historic importance of a proper understanding of the Founding Fathers’ intentions, Wallbuilders’ David Barton noted, “The First Amendment was intended to keep government out of regulating religion, but it did not keep religion out of government or the public square.”

In the 6-3 decision Justice Sonia Sotomayor recognized immediately the threat of such high court decisions to remove that hammer from atheists and socialists, falsely claiming, “This Court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers sought to build.”

The Wall Street Journal decried the decision, recognizing that threat, referring to the decision as “the latest … by a conservative majority [who are] skeptical of precedents that draw a bright line between church and state.”

The Journal is referring to two recent high court decisions that reflect the Founders’ original intent, including Trinity Lutheran v. Comer and Espinoza v. Montana Dept. of Revenue.

In Trinity Lutheran, money granted by the state of Missouri for playground resurfacing excluded those owned or controlled by a church. Writing for the majority in that case, Chief Justice Roberts said:

The exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution … and cannot stand.

In Espinoza, Roberts wrote again for the majority:

A State need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.

Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s legal analyst, saw the mounting threat to the Left’s continuous and deliberate misinterpretation of Jefferson’s phrase, claiming on Twitter that “’Separation of church and state’ is a vanishing concept at the Supreme Court.”

The ACLU also recognized the continuing threat to the false narrative by declaring that “The Supreme Court’s decision today undermines our Constitution’s promise of separation between government and religion.”

Of course, as Barton pointed out, “The phrase ‘separation of Church and State’ cannot be found in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. In fact, it is not found in any of our nation’s founding documents.”

The most egregious attempt to reframe yesterday’s decision came from American Atheists’ attorney Geoffrey Blackwell:

With this decision, the Supreme Court has betrayed our nation’s founding principle that the government should not fund religion, including a religion like Christianity.

 

This court is destroying the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, which protects all Americans — especially atheists and members of minority religions.

Other officials with American Atheists expanded on what they perceived as a threat to the Founders’ intentions. Alison Gill, AA vice president, said:

The religious conservative majority on the Supreme Court is intent on placing the interests of Christians above all others, including individuals’ fundamental rights.

 

These justices will keep working at breakneck speed to undermine nondiscrimination protections, replace public education with a discriminatory religious “education,” and force Americans to fund conservative Christianity and other religions. This will harm countless Americans, especially children.

Of course, a proper reading of the Founders’ original intent reveals no such thing. But the rant from AA by its president, Nick Fish, continued the group’s fabrication:

Extremists are weakening our democracy. Calls to reform and expand the Court to limit the impact of its dangerous Christian nationalist wing will only grow louder, as the Supreme Court tries to establish what can only be described as a theocracy.

Fish did get one part correct:

Today’s decision is appalling, but it isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

As the war against the nation’s culture includes an attack on its religious freedom, yesterday’s proper ruling in Carson v. Makin is comforting.

Sports Illustrated: SCOTUS Ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District Will Unleash “White Christian Nationalism”

This article was published by TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, June 14, 2022:  

Days before the Supreme Court is likely to issue its ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton School DistrictSports Illustrated offered its criticism of it in advance. After reviewing “more than 1,000 pages of documents related to the lawsuit and [having] met several times … with [football coach Joseph] Kennedy and his legal team,” author Greg Bishop was ready to make his own ruling in the case: If the high court rules in favor of Kennedy, that ruling will be “a sledgehammer aimed at a bedrock of democracy: the separation of church and state.”

Even worse, such a decision will unleash a wave of “white Christian nationalism” on the nation. Wrote Bishop, “They believe America was created by a preeminence of people like themselves [“white Christian slavers”] and should always have laws in place that reflect America’s origins.”

He quoted Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which represents Bremerton: “That’s what this case is about.… [it’s] a movement that is so determined they are not willing to stop. They are willing to destroy our democracy to achieve their ends.”

She claims that those groups supporting Kennedy through amicus briefs represent a “who’s who of religious extremists in this country.”

It’s all part of a master plan, wrote Bishop, to “redefine church and state.” Previous court rulings prohibiting the teaching of creationism and prayer in schools are likely to be threatened as part of that master plan. Under recent rulings “God,” he complained, “can remain in the Pledge of Allegiance … the federal government can give money to faith-based schools, and … religious groups can discriminate based on their beliefs when hiring.”

“It’s really,” wrote Bishop, “whether church and state should be separated — and where that line of separation should be drawn. Or redrawn. Or removed.”

Kennedy himself is the unlikely “hero” in the drama. For seven years he coached Bremerton High School’s JV football team and helped with the varsity. For years he prayed by himself after each game on the 50-yard-line.

And for seven years, nobody minded. Nobody said anything. Nobody sued. Nobody even threatened to sue.

But when a school administrator paid a public compliment to how the coach was positively impacting the lives of his players, the school board told Kennedy to stop. When he didn’t, the board decided not to renew his contract.

In 2015, he sued to get his job back. That’s when First Liberty entered the fray. Since then, the lawsuit wended its way through the judicial system until it finally was taken on appeal by the Supreme Court in January.

Oral arguments were heard in April and the ruling is expected at any moment.

The ruling is likely to disappoint Bishop. The court has limited itself to answering just two questions:

(1) Whether a public-school employee who says a brief, quiet prayer by himself while at school and visible to students is engaged in government speech that lacks any First Amendment protection; and

(2) Whether, assuming that such religious expression is private and protected by the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses, the Establishment Clause nevertheless compels public schools to prohibit it.

The high court will not visit the issue of the alleged “separation of church and state.” David Barton, founder of Wallbuilders, clarifies that issue:

The early colonists who came to America … made sure that the government, or the State, could not control or limit religious beliefs or activities. This was their understanding of the separation of Church and State….

 

The phrase “separation of Church and State” cannot be found in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. In fact, it is not found in any of our nation’s founding documents. Related to government, the phrase first appeared in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut in 1801….

 

The Danbury Baptists wrote Thomas Jefferson expressing their concern that the government might try to regulate their religious expression. In response, Jefferson wrote his now famous letter, using the phrase “Separation of Church and State” to reassure the Danbury Baptists that the First Amendment prohibited the government from trying to control religious expression.

 

In short, the First Amendment was intended to keep government out of regulating religion, but it did not keep religion out of government or the public square.

That is what frightens Bishop and groups such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Supreme Court originalists may some day restore the original understanding of the relationship between church and state, demanding that tyrants and atheists cease using the government to regulate religion into oblivion via an intentional misreading of Jefferson’s phrase.

Many of the articles on Light from the Right first appeared on either The New American or the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor.
Copyright © 2021 Bob Adelmann