This California Dem Behaves As He Looks!

‘Boy Meets World’ actor to run for Adam Schiff’s seat in Congress

KAREN TOWNSEND 2:01 PM on January 19, 2023

Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool via AP

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has not officially announced that he is running for the U.S. Senate expected to be left vacant by the retirement of Dianne Feinstein. That’s not stopping another Democrat from stepping up and filing paperwork to run for the seat in Congress that Schiff currently holds.

Boy Meets World actor Ben Savage is running for Congress in the 2024 election. According to press reports, Savage filed paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) on Wednesday. He filed a statement of organization with the FEC, registering as a Democrat candidate for California’s 30th House District.

Shifty Schiff has held that seat in Congress since 2001. His name is one being mentioned for the Senate race if Feinstein retires. Speaker McCarthy made the decision to block Schiff from being on the House Intelligence Committee for his consistent spreading of lies in his work in investigating Trump. So, Schiff may figure he isn’t going to get plum committee assignments like he did when Pelosi was in charge so now’s his time to make a move up to the Senate.

Kudos, by the way, to McCarthy for doing what needs to be done with committee assignments. Besides Schiff’s comeuppance, Eric Swalwell, (D-CA) is blocked from sitting on the House Intelligence Committee. And, McCarthy will also remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Savage is not a political newbie. He ran for the West Hollywood City Council in 2022, unsuccessfully. California’s 30th District encompasses West Hollywood, where Savage lives, Burbank, parts of Pasadena and more.

He’s apparently had an interest in politics for years because he studied political science at Stanford. In 2003, he interned for then-Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA). During a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, Savage said he thought the internship would be fun and that Washington, D.C. is all about connections. He was asked if he was thinking about a career in politics. He said, “Acting and politics are almost too similar. I don’t know… You have to be a very specific breed to do that.” It reminds me of that saying that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people. Heh. That is often said during the time of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a.k.a. Nerd Prom.

We’ll see how far Savage gets in this race. He is one of seven candidates running for the seat in 2024. Only one is a Republican. His team has not confirmed or denied his candidacy.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Savage’s team did not confirm or deny the run, stating “He is focused on his upcoming wedding. Ben is still making decisions and always looking for opportunities to give back and serve the community.”

By all indications so far, the primary race for the Senate seat held by Feinstein is going to be one to watch. There are lots of names being floated of possible candidates, with the potential to become a free-for-all. Rep. Katie Porter has formally launched her campaign for the Senate. Feinstein has not officially announced her retirement but she is 89 years old and has held the seat since 1992. She looks frail and there have been questions about her health. Porter says it’s time for a “warrior” in that seat.

California needs a warrior in the Senate — to stand up to special interests, fight the dangerous imbalance in our economy, and hold so-called leaders like Mitch McConnell accountable for rigging our democracy,” two-term Rep. Katie Porter said when announcing her candidacy.

Rep. Barbara Lee, who is 76 years old, is reported to have told colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus she will also run. Rep. Ro Khanna is also eyeing the seat. All of these Democrats, including Schiff, are staunch progressives. The knock against Feinstein is that she too often works with Republicans in the Senate and isn’t strident enough for the far-left in the Democrat Party.

“Grassroots Democrats have been very unhappy with Feinstein for years,” a California House Democrat said. “It’s not fair per se, but California is one of the most liberal states in the nation. As a politician, you have to pay attention to your base.”

The liberal purity of Mrs. Feinstein’s would-be successors is not necessarily a benefit to being elected, even in deep-blue California. That’s because of the state’s size and demographic diversity.

“The more people that get into the race, the more the electorate gets sliced up,” said Mike Madrid, a political strategist who has advised both Democrats and Republicans in California. “If enough people are in the race, you can make it past the primary by a small plurality, but that also makes it more attractive for other candidates to jump in.”

With four liberals, that could make the race more attractive for a moderate Democrat. Geography and race also could play a factor.

Lee and Khanna represent districts in northern California, while Schiff and Lee represent southern California. There are no Hispanic candidates yet.

Dem Minnesota To Go Nutty Again?

Minnesota Poised To Legalize Infanticide, Nuke Protections For Women And Babies In Radical Abortion Bill

BY: JORDAN BOYD at the Federalist:

JANUARY 19, 2023

If passed by both chambers, the legislation will head to Democrat Gov. Tim Walz’s desk, where he is expected to sign it into law.

JORDAN BOYD

Minnesota Democrats are poised to ignore the at least 69 percent of Americans who say they want significant limits on abortion to pass the state’s most radical abortion bill, which would legalize taxpayer-funded on-demand abortion for all.

The Protect Reproductive Options Act (PROA), the first bill Democrats introduced in both the state House and Senate this session, would repeal dozens of the state’s protections for women and babies and expand legal immunity for abortions up until the moment of birth and beyond.

The bill is eagerly supported by Planned Parenthood and its allies in the press and the Biden administration, but legal experts say it goes “far beyond any interpretation of the Minnesota Supreme Court case Doe v. Gomez,” the state’s version of Roe v. Wade.

“Cattle and reptiles will have more legal protections in Minnesota than Minnesota’s vulnerable preborn children. Legal penalties for animal cruelty in Minnesota range from misdemeanor up to a felony while there is no criminal penalty for leaving a preborn child to die on a cold metal table,” Renee Carlson, general counsel at True North Legal, said in remarks to the Senate ahead of the vote.

That doesn’t matter to state legislators, who could vote on the bill in the Minnesota House as soon as Thursday. If passed by both chambers, the legislation will head to Democrat Gov. Tim Walz’s desk, where he is expected to sign it into law.

Ends Protections for Babies Born Alive

Minnesota law recognizes babies who are born alive following a botched abortion as “a human person under the law.” The Born Alive Infants Protection Act reconfirmed these babies deserve and receive life-saving medical care.

The PROA, however, terminates the protections outlined for a baby who “breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut, and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of a natural or induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion.”

Lifts Prohibitions on Taxpayer-Funded Abortions

Current statute bars Minnesota from funneling taxpayer dollars to any nonprofit that offers abortions. It also prohibits grants for “family planning services” targeted at “any unemancipated minor in any elementary or secondary school building.”

The PROA explicitly abolishes provisions that shield taxpayers from funding abortion for all through all nine months of pregnancy.

Nullifies Parental Notification

If a minor requests an abortion, Minnesota law requires that parents or guardians be notified before she goes through with it. Females who do not want to notify their parents of their intent to abort may request a bypass from a judge who can deem the pregnant girl as “mature and capable of giving informed consent to the proposed abortion.”

This legislation nullifies those requirements, however, which opens the door for minors to get abortions whenever they want without permission.

Cancels Protections for ‘Viable’ Preborn Babies

“Viable” as defined in Minnesota law means “able to live outside the womb even though artificial aid may be required,” which could be as early as “the second half of [the] gestation period.” The PROA doesn’t just rid the state of that definition in an attempt to expand abortion for all through birth. It also quashes provisions that abortions performed beyond the first trimester must be done in hospitals and only executed if a mother’s life is at risk.

Reverses Ban on Abortions for Unconscious Women

Any woman receiving abortions in Minnesota, the law currently states, must be conscious and given a “full explanation of the procedure and effect of the abortion” beforehand. Under the PROA, neither of those conditions must be met to move forward with an abortion.

Halts Reporting If Women Die from Abortions

Abortions are not a safe procedure for the mother or baby, which is why Minnesota law requires abortionists to report if a woman dies due to abortion. Before the PROA, abortionists who failed to report the death of a woman “from any cause within 30 days of the abortion or from any cause potentially related to the abortion within 90 days of the abortion,” faced criminal charges and fines. Under the new legislation, abortionists will not be penalized for refusing to report abortion-related deaths.

Stops Reporting Abortion Stats Altogether

Not only will abortionists no longer be required to report deaths under the PROA, but they won’t have to disclose any of the legally mandated information about the number of abortions they performed, what methods they used, the gestational ages of the unborn babies who were dismembered, why the woman sought an abortion, or any other key information.

The state commissioner, also, is released by the PROA from publishing a public report with the state’s abortion data including how many out-of-state abortions were granted each year.

Repeals Felony Charges for Sale of Abortion Pill, Other Abortion-Inducing Devices

The PROA seeks to repeal the threat of criminal charges for anyone who manufactures, sells, or advertises abortion-inducing devices or drugs.

Allows the Unregulated Disposal of Baby Bodies

The PROA would rescind a statute that requires the remains of an aborted or miscarried baby in a medical facility to be properly and carefully handled and disposed of within the state. That means hospitals and abortion facilities would no longer be required to cremate or bury deceased infants as directed by the commissioner of health.

The bill also voids a portion of the statute that previously ordered “complete laboratory tests necessary for the health of the woman or her future offspring or for purposes of a criminal investigation or determination of parentage prior to disposing of the remains.”

Ends Informed Consent for Women

Minnesota statute 145.4242, also known as the “Woman’s Right to Know Act,” says women must be told the “particular medical risks associated with the particular abortion procedure,” the gestational age of the child, and, in the case of a late-term abortion, whether painkillers will be given to the unborn child during the abortion, and “what medical assistance benefits may be available for prenatal care, childbirth, and neonatal care.” Women seeking abortions must also be provided “printed materials” and a website explaining the “services available to assist through pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood,” “fetal development,” and “fetal responsiveness to adverse stimuli.”

Before the PROA, this information had to be relayed by the abortionist at least 24 hours before a woman’s appointment. If the PROA passes, abortionists do not have to explain any abortion risks to the woman.

Expands Who Can Give Abortions

According to Minnesota statute 145.412, only licensed physicians may perform abortions in a designated facility such as a hospital or abortion facility using rules from the state commissioner of health as a guideline.

Before the PROA, violations of these regulations resulted in a felony. If the new legislation passes, violations of these statutes, including letting unlicensed abortionists perform the dangerous and fatal procedure, will no longer be considered criminal.

Childbirth No Longer State Policy

Minnesota’s state policy is that childbirth, as opposed to abortion, “is to be given preference, encouragement and support by law and by state action, it being in the best interests of the well-being and common good of Minnesota citizens.”

Passage of the PROA will change the state’s policy from pro-life to pro-abortion.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News.

Mexico Still A Cultural Mess?

Mexico Is Not Really an American Friend

By Victor Davis Hanson at RealClearPolitics:

January 19, 2023

Left-wing Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador recently praised a visiting President Joe Biden: “Just imagine: There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States — 40 million who were born here in Mexico, [or] who are the children of people who were born in Mexico!”

Why wouldn’t Obrador be delighted? Since Biden took office in January 2021, America has allowed some 5-6 million illegal entries across its southern border.

Obrador further congratulated the malleable Biden, whom he apparently sees as a kindred but complacent left-wing spirit: “You are the first president of the United States in a very long time that has not built even one meter of wall.”

Translated that means Mexico is delighted the United States now cares little about the security of its own border, the disappearance of which apparently is wonderful news for Mexico.

Note that Mexico itself facilitates illegal transits across its own southern border — as long as such Central American and other global migrants keep heading northward into the United States.

But when or if they pause, try to stay in Mexico, commit crimes, or expect Mexican social services, then almost immediately Mexico City sends thousands of troops to close its border with Guatemala, deports the illegal crossers, and revives talk of building a border wall of its own.

Biden has demolished America’s southern border. His illegal nullification of U.S. immigration law is music to Obrador’s ears.

But it is a nightmare to Americans who poll overwhelming disapproval of the subversion of their own border security. They are exhausted by the influx of death-dealing drugs. And they are furious over the hundreds of billions of dollars diverted from their own strapped social services to attend to the needs of foreign nationals who have broken their laws.

Even overwhelmed blue sanctuary cities that once boasted of nullifying federal immigration law are now beginning to object to Biden’s complicity in Mexico’s manipulation of the border.

Obrador clearly is delighted that Biden is the first White House occupant who in matters of the shared southern border grants all of Mexico’s wishes, but almost none of his own citizens’.

That reality raises the question that if Mexico were a declared enemy of the United States, how would it behave any differently than it is now?

Take drugs, for example. American overdoses due to fentanyl and other opioids are nearing 100,000 deaths per year.

Almost all such lethal opiates are manufactured in factories operated by drug cartels in Mexico that enjoy de facto immunity from prosecution. The Mexican opioid industry was designed solely for lucrative export to the United States — with zero concern over the death and destruction its products cause here.

Well aside from human trafficking and smuggling, cartel drugs indirectly earn the Mexican economy somewhere between $35-45 billion each year.

A hostile China profits by selling Mexicans the raw product. Beijing gains satisfaction that at the present death rate, more Americans will perish this decade alone from imported Mexican drugs than all the combat deaths in all the wars since America’s founding.

In that sense Mexico is doing more damage to America than all our prior enemies combined.

Obrador is equally callous in bragging that he exports his own poor. Left unsaid is that a  naturally rich Mexico either will not, or cannot, adequately employ, feed, shelter, and protect its own impoverished citizens.

So instead, it cynically sees its own people as a lucrative export commodity while holding U.S. laws in veritable contempt.

Currently, Mexican nationals are sending nearly $60 billion a year in remittances from the United States to Mexico to aid friends and families who do not find enough succor from their own government in Mexico City. Untaxed remittances far and away constitute the largest source of Mexico’s foreign exchange income.

Much of that gifting is made possible by generous American state and federal subsidies to illegal aliens. Frequent subsidized housing, healthcare, legal assistance, education, and food in the United States are often used to free up cash for illegals, who then send it to Mexico.

Mexico sees this export of its own people as a win-win-win-win proposition.

Illegal immigration to America exempts Mexico from covering the social welfare costs of its poorest.

In safety-valve fashion, it exports the volatility of social inequality rather than spending large sums to address it.

Mexico sees its huge and growing expatriate community as a valuable lobbying lever inside America, given the longer Mexican nationals are absent from Mexico, the more they romanticize the country they fled.

Finally, Mexico is a left-wing nation. The more it sends its poor to the United States, the more it feels Democratic politicians who grant concessions to Mexico will gain valuable new political constituents – ensuring still further concessions.

One sure sign of historic national decline is the collective inability of a government and its people to defend their own borders and national sovereignty.

Mexico would happily agree.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Do Republican Leaders In Washington HAVE A BRAIN, Or Are They Merely Greedy IN THEIR DEM WAY?

anuary 19, 2023

2024: Republicans on Course to Get Blown Out by Phantoms

By Jay Valentine at American Thinker:

Trump or DeSantis?  It doesn’t matter.  Phantom voters will decide 2024.  The phantoms are not voting for either.

Those working deep in swing state voter rolls can tell you with 100% certainty that unless Trump or DeSantis wins with a 5%-to-18% margin in swing states, they will lose every one.

Let’s do some electioneering math.

To win the presidency, about a dozen swing states matter — we all know who they are.  Some will add Georgia, Virginia, and Arizona, some not. 

President Trump won in 2016 because he caught the leftists off guard.  Perhaps even Trump was surprised on Election Night — the surprise was so complete!

In 2020, the Dems took no chances. 

They had everything wired — but our boy Trump surprised them again — so they shut down the election apparatus at 11:00 P.M. and took matters into their own hands.  Nine hours later, problem solved: Joe Biden emerges from a basement, incoherent, to take the oath of office.

That, people, is hardball — professional, take-no-prisoners electioneering.  You may hate that the country is being lost, but you must stand back at the sheer breathtaking gall it reflects.

You would think rational electioneers in the Republican Party would, in 2022, do everything to stop the election jiggering that took place in 2020.  You would be wrong.

Republicans like Speaker Vos in Wisconsin, the election commission in Maricopa County, New Hampshire RINOs, and the Republican leader in the Senate all stood aside and let the leftists do their thing — thus the Red Trickle.

As the parties pick their candidates for 2024, assembling multi-million-dollar consultant-led electioneering teams, not a dollar is spent on cleaning election rolls.

Let’s do an equation.  A bet, perhaps.

You and I bet on anything.  You pick the bet. 

But I have a 5–18% advantage in my pocket. 

No matter what you do, I win. 

Every swing state has between 5% and 18% of its election rolls — people, addresses — that are deliberately wrong, misspelled, incorrect, written without an apartment number — scores of opportunities for inserting fraudulent voters.

If you were in Las Vegas, playing blackjack, and had a 5–18% advantage over the dealer, the casino would be bankrupt by dawn.

Yet this is exactly what Trump and DeSantis face as they launch their campaigns or stealth campaigns — whatever.

We got front-row seats for this phenomenon in Arizona this year. 

Our team was asked to do the expert witness report for the Kari Lake campaign — after they got swamped.  We cannot release the findings, but some of them were later validated with someone else’s data — and we can talk about that.

In Maricopa County alone, between October and the November election — 30 days — there were 22,000 new voters added.  There were 30,000 or more ZIP code changes.  There were 107,000 voter roll changes, from address modifications to name changes to phone changes.

Thirty days!  Immediately before the election!

We can say with certainty that if Kari Lake’s team had monitored voter rolls in one county alone, for a 90-day period before the election, she would have made up the 17,000-vote difference by a factor of more than 2.

Lake’s team could have challenged the thousands of new voters registered after the cutoff date.  They could have monitored the literally hundreds of addresses where ballots collected — and were later voted — by phantoms whose signatures never matched.

In her lawsuit, her quite gifted attorneys showed mountains of ballot signatures that did not even closely match the signature of the supposed voter. 

Every one of those screwy signatures is a phantom — and they could have been identified, challenged, removed before they were brought up from the dead mist to defeat our girl Kari.

Any Election Day interference with screwing around with printers would not have been enough to stop her.

Kari Lake is the model for Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis in 2024. 

Kari Lake was winning by 8–10 points.  They took her out with phantoms’ signatures and misaligned printers.  Neither Trump nor DeSantis is going to come close to winning any swing state by 8–10 points. 

It’s over before it begins.

Kari Lake took no action to clean voter rolls.  Neither Trump nor DeSantis nor the Republican Party nor most state parties are cleaning voter rolls, either.

That thankless task is left to volunteer teams of activists, working from basements, at kitchen tables with antiquated software and few resources.  Even the Republican billionaire class has abandoned any interest in cleaning voter rolls and rather is spending a pittance to determine “what went wrong.”

What went wrong is that your opponents control the election apparatus in every state and county that matters, and the candidate class, the consultant class, and the billionaire class think cleaning voter rolls is just too icky. 

Thus, in 2024, the phantoms will pick the president.

Maybe not.

The overriding lesson in 2022 from the voter integrity team front was that county registrars and judges will not clean voter rolls, even when shown clear evidence that those 25 voters could not live in that apartment building, being framed, with the cement mixer still on the lawn.

These crusty teams are not stopping.  They are doubling down. 

Together, Nevada, Florida, and Wisconsin teams are working with the Fractal Programming team to build the UnDeliverable Ballot Database.  Internally, they call it UDB-1, which does give it kind of a techy ring.

The UnDeliverable Ballot Database has some important subtleties.  There is more there than appears on first glance.

The key to phantoms is their output — a ballot, cast by someone, for a leftist.  The ballot is the ammo.  Each ballot has to be mailed to a phantom.

While the phantom does not live there — at the church, homeless shelter, hotel, apartment building — the ballot will still be delivered there.  It is then collected, voted, signed, and later Kari Lake files a lawsuit because the signatures don’t match.

The UnDeliverable Database tracks every address — not just voters — in America.  Every address is on the property roll and the voter roll.  One address, the 7-11, is able to get mail.  But it had better not get a ballot. 

Every apartment building, multi-family home is under scrutiny.  If it is matched to Bill Jones, and our pal Bill did not list an “APT #” on his registration, this address will get a ballot, but it won’t get to Bill. 

We flag it so it can be challenged before the election.

In 2021, with support from Mike Lindell, our team built a list of 1.7 billion U.S. addresses. 

When one includes misspellings, different ways of showing the same address, addresses changing from one date to another, they get to a billion pretty fast.

Since we have someone’s address from 20 different databases he entered — all public — we know more about his address than he does. 

The UnDeliverable Database, run at scale with Fractal Programming, explained on our site at www.Omega4America.com, is becoming a vital resource for 2024.

We feel bad that we were not allowed to help in Arizona in 2020, but we sure are going to show up in 2024.

While Trump and DeSantis do their thing, which is not cleaning voter rolls, the teams in Wisconsin, Nevada, Florida, and soon a dozen other states will be there when the smoke clears.

We identify every address in America where a ballot can be mailed — yet cannot connect with a voter.  Let’s cut off their ammo.

Jay Valentine led the team that built the eBay fraud engine and the underlying tech for the TSA No-Fly list.  The website is www.Omega4America.  Jay’s new Twitter account is @jayvalentine99.

More Trouble Regarding MN Gangster Thieving, George Floyd!

JANUARY 18, 2023 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN LAW, MEDIA, MINNESOTA, POLICING

THE CHAUVIN APPEAL HEARING

When I read that Derek Chauvin had no lawyer to appeal his murder conviction to the Minnesota Court of Appeals I was incredulous. I put out the call on Power Line for an attorney to step forward to represent him on appeal in the highest tradition of the profession. Minnesota attorney Bill Mohrman answered the call. Bill is a founding partner of Mohrman, Kaardal & Erickson as well as a former colleague and old friend.

If you polled Minnesota lawyers, half might say that were inspired to enter the profession by Atticus Finch and half by Clarence Darrow. In my case, it was Darrow. Darrow famously represented a panoply of unpopular and guilty defendants (including himself). I thought it was a disgrace to the profession that Chavuin might have to represent himself on appeal. Chauvin is beyond the pale of what now passes for the idealism of the profession.

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and the Office of the Minnesota Attorney General have armies of lawyers to represent the state in criminal prosecutions. Yet attorneys in private practice couldn’t wait to attach themselves to the state’s prosecution of Chauvin at trial.

One such attorney is former Solicitor General of the United States Neal Katyal. Katyal has been on board with the prosecution on a pro bono basis from early on in the case at the trial court level and on appeal. Katyal flew in from Washington to represent the state on appeal in the oral argument this morning. I watched the Court’s live stream of the oral argument. Let’s just say that Katyal had easy sledding.

Today Bill argued the case in a hearing before a three-judge panel of the Minnesota Court of Appeals. He has briefed the appeal and argued the case with courage and skill. All court filings in the case are accessible on this page.

Bill’s leading argument on appeal is that pretrial publicity and related riots required a change of venue — that they precluded a fair trial in violation of the Sixth Amendment. As we noted repeatedly during trial, the martial security that protected the courthouse graphically represented the issue. So did the anticipation of riots in the event of an acquittal.

The 24-story Hennepin County Government Center was closed to everything but the trial for reasons of security. Barricades and secure fencing topped with concertina wire surrounded the perimeter. The massive building was off limits to nearly everyone who wasn’t involved in the trial. The building was locked down and everyone — and I do mean everyone — knew why.

At the outset of Bill’s argument Judge Peter Reyes pressed Bill on the trial judge’s failure to hold a a so-called Schwartz hearing on juror 52. Although he omitted any mention of it on his jury questionnaire, juror 52 attended a march in Washington at which the death of George Floyd was a hot issue. This was a secondary issue on appeal and yet the court pressed Bill on it for about half his allotted 15 minutes. Why, I do not know.

As I say, the issue of venue goes to Chauvin’s constitutional right to a fair trial. Think of the Supreme Court case of Dr. Sam Shepard. The Shepard case had nothing on the hang ’em high atmosphere that pervaded Minneapolis from the death of George Floyd through the conviction of Derek Chauvin. More recently. the Supreme Court laid out the law in the Skilling case.

Bill’s last comment in rebuttal pointed out the personal stake of the jurors in a verdict that would keep the peace in our community. He cited Never v. Killinger in support of his argument. The federal district court in that case held: “The Court cannot imagine a more prejudicial extraneous influence than that of a juror discovering that the City he or she resides in is bracing for a riot [if the defendant is acquitted].” That isn’t how it’s supposed to go down, but that is how it went down in Chauvin’s case.

The Disappearance Of God Bless America!?

A nation of Biblical illiterates

A timely wake-up call for Christian parents and pastors

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Stephen Barnes

The Cultural Research Center of Arizona Christian University has released its American Worldview Inventory 2022. The results are disconcerting, to put it mildly. Two-thirds of parents of pre-teens in America identify as “Christian,” yet only 2 percent meet a minimal criteria of possessing a Biblical worldview.

The study exposed serious deficits in both homes and pulpits around America. As for the home, lead researcher George Barna notes that “A parent’s primary responsibility is to prepare a child for the life God intends for that child. A crucial element in that nurturing is helping the child develop a Biblical worldview—the filter that causes a person to make their choices in harmony with Biblical teachings and principles.” Yet Millennials, who now make up a majority of today’s parents, have become the generation least likely to ascribe to a Biblical worldview, with a meager 4 percent meeting the basic criteria.

Roughly one-in-four parents of preteens believe in objective moral truth, the personal agency of the Holy Spirit, and that life is sacred. Parents can hardly pass on to the next generation what they lack themselves. How can we expect rising generations to take the Christian worldview seriously when the overwhelming majority of their parents are clueless, shaped far more by cultural trends than Scripture?

Many parents delegate Biblical instruction to the local church, but there the situation remains bleak. “From a worldview perspective,” Barna states, “a church’s most important ministers are the Children’s Pastor and the Youth Pastor.” Why? Because “a person’s worldview primarily develops before the age of 13.” Yet, the CRC study reports that a meager 12 percent of children’s and youth pastors upheld consistent Biblical beliefs and behaviors. A mere 41 percent of senior pastors, 28 percent of executive pastors, 13 percent of teaching pastors, and a dismal 4 percent of executive pastors adhere to a basic Christian worldview.

According to Barna, the pastorate’s “lack a biblical worldview helps to explain why so few people in the nation’s youngest generations are developing a heart and mind for biblical principles and ways of life, and why our society seems to have run wild over the last decade, in particular.”What the American Worldview Inventory reveals more than anything else is sin.

Other recent studies support Barna’s sobering conclusion. Nearly half of “practicing Christian Millennials” believe that “it is wrong to share one’s personal beliefs with someone of a different faith in hopes that they will one day share the same faith.” It is good for the eternities of millions of people that the Apostles, the Jim and Elizabeth Elliots, the Lottie Moons, Amy Carmichaels, Hudson Taylors, David Brainerds, and William Careys of history did not share this opinion. The same study found that 40 percent of Millennials have bought into the false notion that “If someone says they disagree with you, it means that they’re judging you.”

So what happened? There is likely an amalgam of contributing factors behind the alarming Biblical illiteracy plaguing America’s self-identifying Christians. Pastors are often hired more for on-stage and interpersonal charisma or professional skills rather than Biblical qualifications. Many seminaries have severely compromised their Biblical heritage in favor of trendy ideologies, and enrollments are down.

Parents around the dinner table rarely take it upon themselves to catechize their children with the great historic creeds of the faith. Children’s ministries and youth groups have operated from the presupposition that entertainment rather than robust Biblical instruction is the secret to success. For fear of being labeled bigots, many churches have capitulated to the spirit of the age rather than clung to the spirit of Christ.

Indeed, the list of contributing factors could stretch on and on. But perhaps Charles Spurgeon’s words from over a century ago take us to the root issue, “Your non-searching of the Scriptures, your weariness under Gospel preaching, your want of care to understand the mind of God, is prima facie evidence that there is some enmity in your heart against the Most High.” What the American Worldview Inventory reveals more than anything else is sin. May we bring our failure to love Christ with our whole selves to His cross, where there is a superabundance of grace. In our confused age, may we once again contend for the faith once for all entrusted to the saints (Jude 3).

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Thaddeus Williams

Thaddeus Williams is the author of the best-selling book Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice (Zondervan/HarperCollins, 2020). He serves as associate professor of systematic theology for the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University and resides in Orange County, Calif., with his wife and four kids.

(Article from Mark Waldeland.)

“Wow. A spy was permitted to get on the inside at the FBI and went undetected for 20 years, despite repeated red flags described in the piece.”

January 18, 2023

FBI’s record of policing itself against China’s spies is abysmal, new book SpyFail reveals

By Monica Showalter at American Thinker:

The news is full of tut-tutting about the terribleness of President Trump, and now Joe Biden, supposedly mishandling a few classified documents by having them in their possession, which is usually a matter of them wanting to write their memoirs, so far as we know.

Now a new book came out yesterday by James Bamford, called SpyFail, telling us how little care the FBI has taken with its own classified documents.  Its clumsy maneuvers, bad personnel hiring practices, and misplaced priorities pretty well gave away the store of U.S. secrets targeting China.

According to BusinessInsider, which ran a long and interesting book excerpt by Bamford himself:

The FBI’s website carries a stark warning. “The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China,” it says, “are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States. Confronting this threat is the FBI’s top counterintelligence priority.” But far worse is the threat to the lives of scores of courageous Chinese agents who have volunteered to spy for the U.S. within their own country. Over the past decade, more than a dozen agents recruited by the CIA have been killed or imprisoned.

And it now turns out that it was an alleged Chinese spy within the FBI’s own counterintelligence division who may have been largely responsible. A spy whose activities went undetected for upwards of two decades, until his quiet arrest in 2020. Currently in a Hawaiian jail, his little-known case is wrapped in layers of secrecy as he awaits trail. Now in his new book, “SPYFAIL: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence,” author James Bamford peels back many of those hidden layers.

Wow.  A spy was permitted to get on the inside at the FBI and went undetected for 20 years, despite repeated red flags described in the piece. 

According to Bamford, two brothers, one a sitting CIA officer and the other an ex-CIA officer, both of Chinese extraction, and both of who had spent years spying on behalf of the U.S. against China, managed to cross over to the Beijing side for cash in 2001 after the elder brother ran into post-employment financial problems:  

For three days, beginning on March 24, 2001, Alex and David allegedly met secretly in a hotel room with at least five officials from China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and passed on highly classified information. According to government charges, details included the covers used by CIA officers and CIA activities in China; cryptographic information used in classified and sensitive CIA communications and reports; information concerning CIA officer identities as well as those of CIA human assets in China; the CIA’s use of operational tradecraft; and CIA secure communications practices — that is, covcom details. The brothers were then handed $50,000 in cash.

Afterward, as laid out in the indictment, both Alex and David returned to California, but they kept in touch with their handlers. Alex eventually agreed to become a mole for China’s intelligence service within the FBI, and on the day after Christmas 2002, he applied for the position of special agent. By then, however, he was about forty-nine years old and was informed that he was over the age limit.

But in 2004 he was nevertheless hired as a Chinese translator since he spoke several Chinese dialects. In many ways, this was an even better position for a spy since he would have access to a very broad range of information, including intercepted Chinese conversations. The day before he started his new job, he called a suspected accomplice, possibly David, to give him the good news that he would now be working full-time for “the other side.”

According to Bamford, he now had two agencies to keep the Chicoms apprised of, given his knowledge of the CIA earlier as well as his ongoing insider knowledge of the FBI:

Over at least the next six years and possibly much longer, he took over the role of FBI mole where Robert Hanssen, who spied for Russia for more than two decades, left off, except for a different spymaster. It was as though no lessons had ever been learned by the bureau.

The method was simple. Attracting no suspicion, Ma [Alex] would gather up piles of highly secret materials and simply walk out the door with them, just as Hanssen had done for decades. Some he photographed with a digital camera, others he downloaded from his computer onto a flash drive, while still others he copied onto CD-ROM discs. Some dealt with guided missiles and weapon systems, and others revealed the identity of confidential sources, putting their lives at risk.

In addition to not setting up safeguards in the wake of Hanssen’s betrayal, the warning signs about Alex were all over the place.  Customs caught him carrying $20,000 in cash on a return back from China, but no red flags were raised at the FBI.  He flew back and forth to China with nobody asking questions.  His wife sometimes flew there, too, taking “presents” for the Chicoms.  His older brother David helped Alex identify Chinese and Chinese-American exiles working for the bureau and other U.S. agencies as a wokester identity-politics grievance-group activist in Los Angeles.  A wokester bureau of course, would have no suspicions with how the Chicoms would use that.

A third spy named Lee came onboard the Chicom express indirectly from the CIA as a disgruntled agent.  He left the agency and got a job with Japan Tobacco Incorporated (JTI) in Hong Kong, and right away, the corporate team noticed the spy problems — that he seemed to be tipping off Chinese officials about JTI’s anti-counterfeiting activities — and they reported that to the FBI, which inexplicably took no action. 

All evidence pointed toward Lee, and as a result, executives at JTI alerted the FBI, but apparently no action was ever taken. Lee was finally fired in mid- 2009, and soon afterward a Chinese official warned the company that he was not only continuing to share information with MSS [China spy agency] officers, but was also actively working with them. And once again JTI officials passed the information to the FBI. “I certainly reported it to the appropriate authorities,” said a company supervisor. It was good information, but once again it seemed to go nowhere within the bureau.

How many warnings did they need about these guys?  Quite a few, which is why it took so long to hose them out.

Now we move to the present day, where we learn how the World Economic Forum and the Chicom propaganda machine seem to have a mutual love-fest, China is shoveling cash to NGOs to promote the banning of gas stoves in the states, and the national security establishment is puffing away about the dread awfulness of President Trump having a classified document in his possession — a serious enough offense to trigger a full SWAT team–style FBI raid, complete with overturned furniture, rifled clothing drawers, a jaunt through Melania Trump’s underwear drawer to paw through her panties, and a raid on President Trump’s minor son’s bedroom.

Sound a little funny in light of all the missed signals from these three Chinese spies described by Bamford above?  Where the heck were their priorities? 

It gets worse when we think of how many resources the FBI spent on policing ordinary Americans’ tweets on foreign counterintelligence grounds, as the Twitter Files reported, with the FBI bringing 80 agents into this Lives of Others–style content moderation operation amid “suggestions” to Twitter to ban the thousands of low-traffic accounts on the grounds of foreign “disinformation.” 

The FBI forked over $3 million to Twitter for its “assistance” in the China-style censorship, which included shutting down the New York Post for its Hunter Biden laptop revelations, while it ignored the live presence of Chinese and maybe other spies in its own midst, which may mean they still have plenty of them.  We do know that the bureau hasn’t announced anything on a report from inside Twitter from a whistleblower about Chinese agents at that company.  I wrote about that here.

But they were happy to censor Americans, and happy to raid Trump’s house on the misappropriation (not the actual sale, which happened in its own house) of classified documents since they supposedly care so much about them.

Sound serious?

You’ve never seen so much huffing and puffing, in fact, despite the fact that Trump was explicitly allowed to declassify documents, and the number of documents in Joe Biden’s possession, at least they found ones so far, were few.  So much is overclassified; so many crummy contractors have security clearances that it’s hard to think that the foofaraw is more than just the Deep State puffing itself up as the holder of the keys to the kingdom with power to imprison those who fail to keep the overclassified secrets.

It’s strange stuff, too, given that former CIA director John Deutsche certainly mishandled classified documents, as did former CIA director David Petraeus, while former national security adviser Sandy Berger actually lifted and carried away classified documents stuffed in his clothing.  Let’s not even get into Hillary Clinton’s massive exposure of U.S. secrets stored on a private server in some guy’s bathroom.  None of these miscreants suffered significant consequences.

Yet President Trump was actually raided by the FBI over that supposedly serious issue, while the FBI itself failed to police its own operation and probably still is failing.  How many classified documents got into enemy hands because of that one?

Things like this make one wonder what the FBI is doing with its time, given that it can’t police itself.  Why does the U.S. keep so many secrets?  If they can’t keep the ones they have and they target only the people they don’t like for mishandling them, what is this classified secrets thing really about?

Congress has recently sent up a China threat committee to hold hearings on China’s adversarial activities in the U.S.  Maybe the FBI, which mishandled its own China secrets to the point of giving away the store, should be the first witness to answer those questions. 

Canada: “It is now clear that with God out of the way, human life has little value to most leftists.”

January 18, 2023

Canada’s Euthanasia Law is a Bridge Too Far

By James Stansbury at American Thinker:

Whatever happened to medical ethics in Justin Trudeau’s Canada?  An article from December 7^th in Genocide News reported that “[t]he passage of Bill C-7 in Canada has greatly expanded the country’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law, which was passed in 2021 at the height of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “pandemic.”  “It used to be that just terminally ill adults qualified to legally take their own lives with the help of another, but now poor people and even children are moving into the crosshairs of Canada’s budding euthanasia industry.” 

The above article included comments from Alex Schadenberg, executive director and international chair of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.  He believes “…euthanasia will be expanded in Canada to include “severely ill” infants, an idea floated by the Quebec College of Physicians.  Unlike adults, infants cannot opt to commit suicide. They have no way to consent in the same way as adults with full cognitive functionality, meaning it is more homicide at that point than suicide.”  Whatever the motivation, it appears that Canada’s assisted suicide program is now basically without limits. 

The UK Daily Mail in two companion articles reports that the motivation for expanding eligibility for MAiD appears to be at least partially a result of the financial policies and rising costs driving the failure of Canada’s “free” healthcare system.   Wait times for critical care procedures often take over six months and sometimes several years due to a shortage of doctors caused by MAiD’s mandated price controls.  And when everyone gets free medical care, resources are abused so long wait times and inadequate care must follow.  As a result, the number of people in pain and frustrated by the long delays in getting treatment is rising leading many patients to give up and opt for suicide instead. 

In 2021, only 486 people died using California’s assisted suicide program, but that same year in Canada, 10,064 died used MAID to die that year.  MAID has now grown so popular that Canada has both anti-suicide hotlines to try and stop people killing themselves, as well as pro-suicide hotlines for people wanting to end their lives.

MAID has fallen into further scrutiny over claims that people are now seeking assisted suicide due to poverty and homelessness or mental anguish, as opposed to the traditional method of the terminally-ill seeking a painless death. (snip)

Professor Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, described Canada’s law as ‘probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ programme in Germany in the 1930s’.

The onward march of euthanasia — reportedly approved recently even for both diabetes and homelessness in Canada — poses myriad other dilemmas for the rest of society.

Also reported is the alarming eagerness of some doctors to perform this deadly service.  “Dying With Dignity Canada associates Ellen Wiebe… and Stefanie Green …reportedly euthanized more than 700 people between them and bragged about it in a video.  Therefore, forget thinking that late term and post-birth abortions were the last remaining steps downward into the moral sewer. 

It is now clear that with God out of the way, human life has little value to most leftists so it may not have been a coincidence that I first learned of Canada’s euthanasia law just prior to America’s annual observance of National Sanctity of Human Life Day.  This year it occurs on Sunday January 22.  If this observance is unfamiliar, the date was based on the month and day in 1973 when the Supreme Court ruled in Roe vs. Wade to legalize abortion.  In 1984, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed January 22 as the day to emphasize nationally the need to protect and save lives, born or unborn. Note that Republicans have continuously supported the observance, only to see it curtailed under Bill Clinton.  George W. Bush restored it in 2001 and the observance continues despite opposition from the Dems.  Because the primary emphasis of this annual observance has been on minimizing abortion, perhaps it is past time for the fight against assisted suicide to get more emphasis.

The 6th commandment in Exodus 20:13 (NKJV) is concise; “Do not murder.”  Murder can be legally defined as taking another life without benefit of extenuating circumstances. Do extenuating circumstance excuse either abortion or assisted suicide?  I doubt it, but then my worldview is shaped by a Judeo-Christian definition of morality. 

The next lowest level on the Biblical scale of immorality would be making assisted suicide mandatory for disabled, the elderly or people of any age who may be a financial burden.  However, it’s highly doubtful Canada or any western nation will ever take that step and even if adopted, what government bureaucrat, doctor or anyone else has the moral authority to play God and decide how long a person is permitted to live?  Nevertheless, while not currently a ‘mandate’ in Canada, the ‘financial burden’ justification for assisted suicide appears to be working well enough as a ‘voluntary” program.

What is happening in Canada should be a warning of what may happen in the United States.  History has proven over and over that once a government run healthcare plan like Bernie Sanders’ proposed “Medicare for All” is implemented, it will be harder to end than a bad timeshare contract.