The Appeal to Heaven flag flown underneath the American flag. EDUCATION IMAGES
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Yes Virginia, Now we know why white progressive supremacists hate patriotic flags. Now a flag that was flown last year is now being used by known hate groups to try and get a Supreme Court Justice removed. Didn’t work with Thomas and it won’t work with Alito. Below is what this flag represents.
The flag displays a lone pine tree against a white background underneath the line “An Appeal to Heaven” in black bold lettering, a phrase based on the writings of philosopher John Locke, who suggested people must “appeal to heaven” when there is no proper rule of law.
It was originally commissioned by a secretary of George Washington and flew on several military ships dating back to 1775, meant to signify a plea to a higher power for help saving early American colonies from the rule of the King of England, according to the book “The American Flag: An Encyclopedia of the Stars and Stripes in U.S. History, Culture, and Law.”
Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it became a symbol for resistance in New England colonies and was used to rally early American settlers against perceived oppression, “The American Flag” says.
We need more employers like this. A California coffee shop owner in Oakland did what more employers should do. Fire employees who openly threaten folks because they disagree with their views.
They weren’t fired for protesting but fired for blocking a Jewish woman from a bathroom while making anti-Israel comments. This from the coffee shop owner.
“We are committed to working with community leaders and organizations across the Bay Area to make sure we as owners, and our employees, have the resources, education and skills necessary to peacefully exist in this community. We hope to continue to have the privilege of serving our community and to once again being a coffeehouse where everyone feels welcome,” the company posted.
The Biden-Harris reelection campaign shared a “handy guide for responding to crazy MAGA nonsense” for supporters heading into the holidays with Trump supporting family members.
The guide shared talking points to respond to conservative rhetoric about subjects from immigration to the economy. One slide included responses to when someone claims “Trump secured our border!” to reply with a “No he didn’t,” followed by claims that “All he did was separate families, put children in cages, and leave behind a broken immigration system for Joe Biden to clean up.”
Critics across social media shredded the list of talking points, arguing it takes an especially insufferable kind of person to approach the Thanksgiving table looking forward to an argument rather than eating with family.
“Democrats literally publishing a script of how to be the worst person at Thanksgiving,” Republican digital strategist Alec Sears wrote.
“Imagine needing political talking points for a holiday encounter with loved ones,” podcast host Siraj Hashmi wrote.
“Reminder to all political persuasions: Preparing political talking points to use against family members on Thanksgiving is a form of mental illness,” author John Durant wrote. “Show some maturity, speak with the right tone, or change the subject.”
Other commentators accused Biden-Harris campaign of pushing “propaganda.”
“Biden-Harris putting out propaganda scripts to defend their campaign is… gross,” conservative radio host Jason Rantz wrote.
“All this gaslighting would make North Korean state media blush,” Twitchy’s Doug Powers wrote.
Inside the progressive war on the Supreme Court. The longer the spasm of investigative reporting goes on, the more desperate it sounds.
In the basement of a Washington, DC restaurant, 200 ticket-purchasing fans have gathered to witness the live recording of a multifaceted conversation about the villainy and corruption of the Supreme Court, and one justice in particular. It only seems appropriate to order the shrimp and grits: it costs $19.99 and comes with a white-wine tomato sauce. This may seem rather hifalutin, but it also comes in a glass mason jar that references tired hipster kitsch — perfectly suitable for a live podcast hosted by Slate.
Shrimp and grits are the uptown incarnation of staples from the Carolina Lowcountry, where the Gullah Geechee people, who live on the Sea Islands along the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia, would catch small creek shrimp in their bare hands to eat themselves or sell on the streets of the cities and towns. Grits, from ground dried corn, have a more troublesome history: they were distributed by slaveholders as part of slaves’ food allowances. Historical records show Carolina slave children would get one pint of grits a day for most of the year, with salt.
Clarence Thomas’s mother tongue was not English, but Gullah — a lilting language that sounds like music, a mysterious linguistic cocktail of English, Creole and West African. (Experts disagree on its exact origin.) Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, the second child of Leola Williams. His father abandoned them when he was two. When he was six, his younger brother accidentally burned down the shack they lived in, and they were both sent to be raised by his grandfather in Savannah.
This is the origin story of today’s most hated Supreme Court justice, if you poll the Slate audience. It is also the main focus for a well-funded, well-organized Democratic campaign to put the Supreme Court under siege — not just in the press, but in the public too. And many on the left seem to like it that way. If you can’t transform the judiciary through the process of government, transform it by making it a job people are afraid to take.
In March 2020 Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer stood surrounded by protesters and pointed at the Supreme Court Building, bellowing: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Since then, the last of the three branches of government with respect for norms has indeed been at the center of a whirlwind — even as Democrats repeatedly claim to be the stalwart defenders of democracy, norms, the Constitution and the rule of law.
When the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the most significant culture-war decision in a generation — was leaked, the justices’ families and children were mapped and targeted, and their homes picketed illegally without any reaction from Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice. A twenty-six-year-old man even traveled across the country intending to murder Brett Kavanaugh and his family. He showed up on the justice’s suburban street with a Glock-17 and a plethora of tools — zip ties, duct tape, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a crowbar and padded boots for stealth. With last-minute misgivings, he called 911 and told the operator he had traveled from California “to kill a specific United States Supreme Court justice.” His online messages showed he had wanted to kill as many as three; he had conducted internet searches for “most effective place to stab someone,” “assassin skills,” “assassin equipment” and “assassinations.” He was arrested and indicted — he pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. (Authorities still claim to have no idea who leaked the opinion.)
In the opening episode of a podcast series focused on Clarence Thomas, Slate host Joel Anderson begins with his own peaceful version of a home confrontation. In “America’s Blackest Child,” he knocks on the screened-porch door of a modest single-story white house on a Savannah street. The ninety-four-year-old Leola Williams, happy to oblige a visitor, welcomes Anderson inside, where he discovers the shocking scene you would expect from any proud Southern mother: pictures of her family, including her son Clarence, covering the walls.
Anderson sounds awkward in the podcast audio from Mrs. Williams’s home, as if he knows he’s crossed a line. But he showed no such qualms when he appeared on television with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan to promote the episode, instead expressing surprise there was no security to stop him outside the house. “If they had had a chance to tell me to not come, they probably would have, but when you show up it’s hard to turn someone away from your front door,” he said. The MSNBC segment is mostly devoted to accusing Thomas of being a hypocrite for his anticipated ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v. Harvard. (Thomas joined the 6-3 majority in the decision announced on June 29.) Speculating on his likely vote, Hasan described it as an example of a minority “pulling up the drawbridge after themselves.” Asked why Thomas would choose to become a member of the “radical right,” Anderson had the answer: “He wanted to make money.”
Money is central to the story the left wants to tell about Thomas and the Supreme Court more generally. As is this little white house in Savannah. A ProPublica investigation revealed this spring that billionaire conservative Harlan Crow bought the property from Thomas and his family several years ago.
The relationship between Thomas and Crow, a major Republican donor the justice and his wife Virginia say is a close friend they’ve known for years, has been the primary focus of ProPublica’s “Friends of the Court” series, which seeks to pin all manner of ethical lapses and alleged inappropriate and illegal behavior on conservative justices.
ProPublica’s work has been the centerpiece of a flood of reporting across multiple media outlets focusing on what is being framed as a Supreme Court irrevocably compromised by relationships with well-heeled benefactors. The original series is a slog of filings and reports interspersed with vacation photos dug up from corners of the internet and quotes from various ethics experts — who also are of the left — denouncing the dire nature of a corrupt court.
At first glance, many of these stories look pretty bad. They paint a picture of lifetime-appointed justices palling around with powerful billionaires who shepherd them on fishing trips and to hunting lodges, take them on vacations to exotic locales and contribute indirectly or directly to supporting their legacies. It’s not a pretty picture. Yet even slightly closer inspection reveals that there are enormous reasons to take the breathless reporting with a pinch of salt.
The best example yet of the absurdly disproportionate reporting came in an over-the-top piece by Stephanie Kirchgaessner of the Guardian. The article revealed that seven Washington attorneys had used Venmo to send Christmas party money to a top aide of Thomas’s. Noticeably absent from the hair-on-fire “conflict of interest!” piece were the amounts in question, which turned out, according to one of the payers, to be $20 for an annual “lunch buffet consisting of hot dogs, hamburgers and chicken tenders” held for Thomas’s former clerks. Scandalous!
Then there’s the travel. The Judicial Conference, the administrative body which sets the rules for things such as travel disclosures, requires justices to report where they go, when they went and the nature of expenses, but not total costs. They are not required to disclose “any food, lodging or entertainment received as ‘personal hospitality of any individual.’” The rules further define the scope of hospitality: “hospitality extended for a non-business purpose by one, not a corporation or organization… on property or facilities owned by [a] person.”
The argument that the loophole should be smaller might be valid, but the rules are what they are. Demanding justices retroactively report something they weren’t required to report at the time is absurd — ex post facto rulemaking, if you will — and implying they were doing something untoward by following the rules as written is disingenuous. And it’s clear enough that justices of many stripes have long proceeded by the ethics rules as they stand.
The New York Times acknowledged in their editorial on the issue that “Justice Stephen Breyer took at least 225 subsidized trips from 2004 to 2018, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, including trips to Europe, Japan, India and Hawaii… Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg got a private tour of Israel in 2018 that was paid for by an Israeli billionaire, Morris Kahn, who has had business before the court.” And OpenSecrets reported that the top two trip-getters in 2021 and 2022 were tied, with Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan both at eight. So yes, both sides do it.
In fact, the single most overlooked story in recent years may relate to the Notorious RBG. According to the Washington Free Beacon, a $1 million prize given to her by the left-leaning globalist Berggruen Institute raised eyebrows (the Judicial Conference limits honoraria to $2,000), but RBG said she would instead donate the amount to a variety of charities. Only later did it become clear that she had wanted the list of recipients to remain hidden, and Berggruen complied on its requisite Form 990 — preventing the public from knowing if any of the recipients had business before the court.
Republican senator Mike Lee raised the issue in a July Judiciary Committee hearing on a court-targeting bill backed by Democratic senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin. “This might have some very significant ramifications if she was still serving on the court,” Lee said. “We don’t yet know exactly what was done with that, whether she carried out the apparent intention of the stated purpose of intent at the outset to donate it to charity.”
As for that house in Georgia: Crow’s spokesman has said he ultimately wants to turn Thomas’s childhood home into a museum, “telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court justice.” Thomas’s share of the sale was a third of $133,000, and it’s still not entirely clear if he even reported it incorrectly, though he reportedly intends to amend it as necessary.
The longer this spasm of investigative reporting goes on, the more desperate it sounds. The Washington Post devoted a 3,300-word hit piece on the effort spearheaded by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to honor Thomas on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his appointment. The public relations campaign was designed to push back against a fictionalized HBO glorification of Anita Hill, who testified against Thomas during his confirmation hearings, and included the promotion of a documentary, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.
The Post paints this entirely typical PR campaign in dark, secretive terms, even drilling down to investigate a “Justice Thomas Fan Account” which posted clips and quotes from the justice. “The account’s posts about the justice generated nearly 21,000 impressions,” the Post reports — a laughably small amount, no offense to the earnest creator.
The Post has yet to conduct a similar deep dive into the promotional campaign around the 2018 documentary RBG, which was acquired and distributed by Participant Media, a production company with an explicitly leftist activist mission founded by Canadian billionaire and former eBay president Jeff Skoll, who has given millions to leftist causes. Nor have they shown any interest in investigating the promotion and creation of the 2018 dramatic film, On the Basis of Sex, based on a script by Ginsburg’s nephew, and starring Felicity Jones and Armie Hammer (though the Post’s Style section did publish a meet-cute piece titled “That time Ruth Bader Ginsburg checked out Armie Hammer,” doing their part to promote the film’s Washington premiere). Participant Media also produced this laudatory fictionalized biopic for roughly $20 million, though it’s unclear if that amount also paid for the movie’s promotional pop rap “Here Comes the Change” performed by Ke$ha, with official artwork by Shepard Fairey, or the Jonas Åkerlund-directed music video, which as of this writing has 818,000 views on YouTube — tragically, the fewest of any Ke$ha music video.
Stepping back from all of this, what we see is a series of breathless reports designed to inflate perceptions of bias without the facts necessary to establish anything of the sort. At most, justices may have to refile forms or clarify their reporting to the ethics body. Due to a change in policy by the Judicial Conference this spring, they’ll also have to report when they fly on a private jet — something they didn’t have to do before. But if that’s all you think it takes to buy a Supreme Court justice, imagine what Hunter Biden could get you for $5 million.
“All these breathless ‘investigations’ amount to nothingburger concern-trolling of justices whose opinions progressive activists don’t like,” said Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court. “The left simply can’t stand that a majority of the Supreme Court is finally, after decades of hand-waving, interpreting the Constitution based on what it says instead of nebulous conceptions of social justice.”
At the Slate podcast taping, Anderson’s first guest of the night was Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of course — his Democratic colleague, Illinois senator Dick Durbin, was supposed to be there too, but he came down with Covid. Anderson’s first question jumped right to the point: given all the horrible things now established about Clarence Thomas, he asked: “So Senator Whitehouse, do you think he should resign?”
“In all decency, he should,” Whitehouse said, to applause. “But there’s just no world in which that happens that I can foresee. He’s just that determined to stay there and make his points and exercise his resentments.”
“I told my caucus, the Senate caucus, that we have a problem with the Supreme Court: it’s now a political organization, we have to treat it as such. And I basically got booed back into my chair,” Whitehouse said. “I got told ‘oh, no, no, the Supreme Court relies on public confidence, we can’t possibly do that.’ So I realized I had to do my homework. And that’s where… the book and all of that came from. Prove your case, write your prosecution memo.”
In Whitehouse’s frame, an “omertà” of secretive groups funded by malevolent billionaires — whom he tags as fossil-fuel interests bent on preventing bipartisan climate-change policy — are operating the court like shabby robed puppets.
“We don’t know all of that yet,” Whitehouse said. “I think we’re going to find out a lot more.” Invited to make the case for his latest piece of legislation targeting all of this (is this a Slate podcast or a Democratic activism group?), Whitehouse calls it “one of the silver linings of this set of really sickening revelations about the Supreme Court.”
“This is a multi-front battle,” Whitehouse said. “Moving the legislation forward, I think we’ll hit tipping points as the behavior of the Supreme Court justices becomes more well known, as further revelations come. We’re preparing for that moment.”
There’s little subtlety in Whitehouse’s comments to a friendly DC crowd about the degree to which the activity swirling around the Supreme Court is an ideological information operation. Democratic politicians have all the reason in the world to promote the effort to do so: the biggest funders of their partisan priorities are all paying for it.
Of the justices targeted in the recent spate of hit pieces, Samuel Alito has been the most aggressive in pushing back. He wrote a prebuttal op-ed in the Wall Street Journal after ProPublica sent him a series of questions inquiring about a fishing trip he took as a guest of right-leaning billionaire Paul Singer. Alito’s response was thorough and ruthless, detailing the skewed and inaccurate framing of the piece and prompting ProPublica’s story to be redrafted, with an explainer for the “Unprecedented Wall Street Journal Pre-buttal.”
If leaking Alito’s opinion in Dobbs was supposed to have cowed the justice, it clearly hasn’t. “Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” he told the Journal in April. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.” The experience prompted the justice to be more confrontational. If he were a meme, one former clerk joked, Alito would be Michael Jordan in The Last Dance: “And I took that personally.”
Whitehouse and his fellow leftists would do anything to alter the conservative course the court has taken in recent years — even radical steps like court-packing. In the fall of 2019, along with four other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Whitehouse sent a brief to the court on a New York gun rights case. “The Supreme Court is not well, and the people know it,” they warned. “Perhaps the court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured.’”
For Whitehouse and those who would blow up the Supreme Court, dark money spent to this end is the good kind, and the activist groups and the journalists they push to echo their priorities are the noble pursuers of truth. The Judicial Crisis Network is a conspiracy, but progressive organizations like Fix the Court and Demand Justice are pure crusaders. The conservative Federalist Society is evil, but the leftist American Constitution Society is good. What this effort seeks to establish is a mutually justifying feedback loop. Democratic senators level severe allegations, activists parcel fever swamp stories to the press who then report on it, allowing the senators to point to these reports as legitimizing what was claimed in the first place.
Assisting in this effort are multiple billionaire-funded advocacy groups, bent on echoing the case for extreme measures to transform the court. They include Fix the Court, a spinoff from the New Venture Fund, managed by for-profit company Arabella Advisors, the center of the left’s dark money network — it spent over $1 billion in liberal efforts in 2020. Demand Justice, another Soros-backed group, was more explicitly focused on the push to pack the court — its board includes Elie Mystal, an MSNBC commentator who is most famous for calling the Constitution “trash.”
“While Whitehouse is championing supposed ‘ethics reform’ at the Supreme Court, he himself has sponsored environmental legislation pushed by the Ocean Conservancy, a group that has paid his wife as a consultant and policy advisor for years,” JCN president Carrie Severino said. “This isn’t about ethics for Whitehouse, but rather increasing the number of tools the left has at its disposal to intimidate the conservative members of the court.”
The central role of ProPublica should not escape notice. It was founded and continues to be funded by the Sandler family of San Francisco, who sold their bank Golden West to Wachovia right before its ludicrously profitable collection of dubious adjustable-rate mortgages played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis. Their family foundation is a huge backer of leftist causes, including the Center for American Progress, Human Rights Watch and Earthjustice.
Today ProPublica is also backed by a who’s-who of partisan Democratic billionaire donors, including George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Laurene Powell Jobs, Donald Sussman and, until it was compelled to return the first tranche of a $5 million donation, notorious crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried. All this billionaire largesse helps ProPublica pay top dollar for staff — its editor in chief currently makes more than $100,000 more each year than a justice of the Supreme Court.
For some reason, these billionaires don’t raise the hackles of Sheldon Whitehouse or Joel Anderson, or lots of others who are likely to tune into a multipart Slate podcast framing Clarence Thomas as a man who sold out black people for white money. Or, as one of the night’s other guests proclaimed of Thomas’s long ago divorce, “trading the black doll for the white doll.” There are hoots, laughs and murmurs in response.
At the opening of the show, Anderson led off with an odd extended monologue focused on Thomas’s high-school sports prowess, interspersed with audio from interviews with multiple figures from his past, most of whom spoke in praise of his arm strength with a football and gift for quick passing on the basketball court. The audience laughed when they are told he tried out for the Holy Cross football team but that he struggled taking hits; Anderson closes by expressing skepticism that the 5’8” Clarence could ever dunk. The audience claps.
They clap to confirm each other in their viewpoints. To remind each other that anger at the Supreme Court, over abortion or affirmative action or everything else, isn’t a mark of Democratic impotence or foolish mismanagement of the filibuster or RBG’s refusal to retire under Obama, you see — it’s those evil fossil-fuel billionaires like Harlan Crow who are to blame. Because as the good Senator Whitehouse, a son and grandson of ambassadors and bishops, assured them at the podcast party, it’s Thomas who is a creature of “resentments.” It’s the skinny Gullah kid who ran through the Lowcountry scrub, the place where his ancestors ate their pint of grits and the creek shrimp they could catch, boiled in the brackish salt water for flavor. That kid is the one who took the wrong lesson from the American experience, who wants to pull up the drawbridge behind him. You see, you understand. He’s the resentful one. We can all agree about that.
There is no apparent awareness that the persecution of Thomas is rooted in their resentments: not of his rulings as such, but the fact that he survived the full force of their apparatus, that his origin story is his survival. They have to destroy him because he exists: because the force of the counterexample shows them to be impotent, shows there is another path. It is a species of derangement. As a threat, Clarence Thomas is literally existential. Of course Clarence Thomas can dunk. He’s been dunking on these folks for years. All they can do is podcast about it.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2023 World edition.
(Those documents showed the FBI planned to use churches as “new avenues for tripwire and source development.” The federal law enforcement agency also aimed to specifically target “mainline Catholic parishes” as part of its efforts.)
FBI used an undercover ‘employee’ to monitor Catholic clergy and parishioners.
“When a federal bureaucracy becomes this toxic, there’s only one answer left. You shut it down,” Ramaswamy said. “Top-down ‘reform’ becomes impossible.”
(“Anti-Catholic bigotry appears to be festering in the FBI, and the Bureau is treating Catholics as potential terrorists because of their beliefs,” the 20 AGs wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.)
(An internal document from the bureau’s Richmond, Virginia, field office allegedly vowed to spy on “radical traditionalist Catholics and their ideology.” “He or she stated the very simple statement, which is that if they’re going to go after radical, traditional Catholics, then radical traditional Baptists are next and radical, traditional evangelicalism and anybody else that espouses essentially what is radical, which is just a Christian faith and that is dangerous apparently in this country,” )
(Federal prosecutors have offered a no-jail plea deal to a vandal who admitted to defacing a Catholic church with profane graffiti, destroying a Virgin Mary statue, assaulting a church worker, and resisting arrest.)
Huh?
No jail time for a federal felony hate crime??? Interesting.
Whatever you may think of Jack Kennedy, can you imagine these things happening while he was President? Neither can I.
Biden is nominally a Catholic.
Biden is nominally a Catholic, even though his transgressions put Kennedy’s peccadilloes to shame by several orders of magnitude. So why are they going against Christians in general and Catholics in particular? Power, pure and simple.
It would be both easy (and fallacious) to simply blame George Soros and the globalists like WHO and WEF. Or to get all caught up in other “End Times” conspiracy theories. The former should not need an explanation. The latter is explained in the Bible itself.
1.) There will be no “Rapture” prior to the 2nd coming. (that concept was introduced over 1800 years after the Crucifixion.) What people point to as “the Rapture” is in fact a description of the second coming.
2.) What did Jesus Himself say to those seeking to know when the “end times” would be? : Acts 1:6-11 [NIV]6 Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.8But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. 10 They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. 11“Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”
3.) Further 1 Thessalonians 5 states that His return will happen like “a thief in the night” while everyone is saying “peace and safety”. So, the more people are expecting the end at any time the less it is likely to happen — at least IMO. 1 Thessalonians 5:1-5:1Brothers and sisters, we don’t have to write to you about times and dates. 2 You know very well how the day of the Lord will come. It will come like a thief in the night.3 People will be saying that everything is peaceful and safe. Then suddenly they will be destroyed. It will happen like birth pains coming on a pregnant woman. None of the people will escape.
Those last six words seem to eliminate the idea of a Rapture right there. And while not a popular position. many biblical scholars point to passages in both the Old and New Testaments that indicate that the “end days” started with Jesus Christ’s appearance on earth either at His birth or His death/resurrection.
That said, I don’t like how things are going, but how is it any different than what happened throughout the last two millennia? Or more, if you count the Jewish people.
Either way, what is happening is, in fact, evil, and — as a number of men have stated in various forms: Evil only flourishes when good men and women do nothing.
You don’t have to agree with my own religious opinions but don’t attack me rather instead of staying on the topic(s) stated above.
Don’t worry, you won’t miss it. But it’s not what you’re expecting.
Even Robert A. Heinlein — who was not exactly a devout Christian — depicts the Rapture as simply the second coming (See his book JOB.)
An actual scientist. Biologist Defends JK Rowling: ‘Only Two Sexes’
Richard Dawkins, a prominent British evolutionary biologist, defended author J.K. Rowling on Monday amid backlash for her feminist critique of the transgender movement.
Joining “Piers Morgan Uncensored” on TalkTV, Dawkins accused leftists of bullying Rowling, who created Harry Potter, and lesbian philosopher Kathleen Stock for speaking out about gender.
“It’s bullying,” Dawkins said. “We’ve seen the way J.K. Rowling has been bullied, Kathleen Stock has been bullied. They’ve stood up to it, but it’s very upsetting the way this tiny minority of people has managed to capture the discourse to talk errant nonsense.”
Dawkins, a notable atheist activist, also said he was uninterested in talks about an undetermined number of genders.
“As a biologist, there are two sexes, and that’s all there is to it,” he said, while acknowledging that a debate can still be had about sex and gender being different concepts.
Dawkins later commented on the state of Western universities and colleges, saying that “they have bought into the idea that if you don’t like what you think you’re going to hear from someone, you should shut them up.”
“They want to feel safe, and university is the one place you should not feel safe,” Dawkins said. “You want to be physically safe, but intellectually, you should be challenged.”
Dawkins’ comments came amid ongoing public backlash to Rowling, Stock, and other similar feminists who have been skeptical of the LGBTQ movement’s intrusion into women’s spaces.
“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives,” Rowling tweeted in 2020. “It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
The fourth part of the “Twitter Files” series was published Saturday night by journalist Michael Shellenberger, outlining how Twitter executives twisted the platform’s rules with the intention of blacklisting former President Donald Trump on January 7, 2020.
In a recently published thread, journalist Michael Shellenberger outlined the fourth release of the “Twitter Files” series, detailing the internal workings at Twitter and conversations between executives ahead of the banning of former President Donald Trump.
Shellenberger states that following the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Twitter faced immense pressure to ban former President Trump, with many claiming they needed to ban Trump for safety reasons. During this time, then-CEO Jack Dorsey was on vacation and appeared to delegate much of the decision-making to other top executives including Global Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth and Head of Legal, Policy, & Trust Vijaya Gadde, the platform’s censorship queen:
On January 7, Dorsey emailed employees saying that the platform must remain consistent in its policies, including allowing users to return to the platform following temporary bans. Roth reassured an employee that “people who care about this… aren’t happy with where we are.”
Roth later excited DM’d colleagues stating “GUESS WHAT. Jack just approved repeat offender for civic integrity.” This would allow Twiter to create a system where five violations of rules would result in permanent suspension:
Colleagues continued to ask Roth about “incitement to violence,” and on January 8, Twitter announced a permanent ban on Trump’s account due to the “risk of the further incitement of violence.” Twitter said that the ban was based on “specifically how [Trump’s tweets] are being received & interpreted,” but Shellenberger notes that in 2019, Twitter stated that it did “not attempt to determine all potential interpretations of the content or its intent.”
In another discussion, Roth asks a colleague to add “stopthesteal” and “Kraken” to a blacklist of terms to be unamplified. The colleague objects stating that doing so could risk “deamplifying counterspeech” that validated the 2020 election results.
The latest Twitter Files release appears to show a general attempt by Roth and other Twitter employees to justify the banning of Trump and attempts to figure out how current policy could be applied in a way that would explain the permanent suspension.
Shellenberger ends the thread by noting that Facebook’s suspension of former President Trump and its willingness to ignore its own rules put the final nail in the coffin for Trump’s return to Twitter.
Attack on the retired Admiral. Boston 25 news photo.
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Before yesterdays debate, a man took a swing at Republican Don Balduc. We have this from the website Debate Politics.
Prior to the debate, an individual in the crowd gathered outside attempted to punch the General and was quickly apprehended and arrested. We are grateful to the quick response from law enforcement on the scene,” said a Bolduc campaign manager.
We have this from the retired Admiral.
“As the General said on stage tonight, it’s time to lower the temperature of the political discourse in this country.”
The Bolduc campaign spokesperson referred further questions to the Goffstown Police Department. Boston 25 contacted the department but were advised to call back Thursday morning.
Nothing from Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH). Thanks Joe Biden.
SEATTLE, WA - MARCH 16: Washington state Governor Jay Inslee provides details on a temporary statewide shutdown of restaurants, bars, and entertainment and recreational facilities to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak, on March 16, 2020 in Seattle, Washington. Pool/Getty Images)
A Washington State Patrol officer who refused to comply with the state’s vaccine mandate signed out for the last time on Friday and issued a strongly worded message to Gov. Jay Inslee, according to a report.
Robert LaMay, the officer, filmed his final sendoff in a video obtained by Jason Rantz, a host on KTTH 770/94.5FM in Seattle. He thanked his fellow officers but said he was asked to leave “because I am dirty.”
He said that he worked sick and buried a lot of friends over the past 22 years of service. He acknowledged that it was the effort of the entire team that got him home safe every night to be with his family.
“I wish I could say more, but this is it so state 10-34, this is the last time you’ll hear me in a state patrol car. And Jay Inslee can kiss my a–.”
On Monday, Washington will require more than 800,000 workers in the state to either be fully vaccinated or have received an exemption and job accommodation in order to keep their jobs.
“This is the last time you’ll hear me in a patrol car and Jay Inslee can kiss my ass.”
The mandate applies to most state workers, long-term care employees, and teachers and staff at the state’s schools, including the state’s colleges and universities. The only opt-out is a medical or religious exemption, though the exemption only ensures continued employment if a job accommodation can be made.
Inslee’s did not immediately respond to a Fox News inquiry.
EL PASO, TEXAS - NOVEMBER 22: An indoor bar which is open displays a sign reading 'Cocktails and Freedom' amid a COVID-19 surge in the city on November 22, 2020 in El Paso, Texas. Texas surpassed 20,000 confirmed coronavirus deaths November 16, the second highest in the U.S., with active cases in El Paso now over 35,000 and confirmed COVID-19 deaths at 855. In spite of the recent spike in cases and deaths, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently stated to Dallas radio host Mark Davis ’We are not going to have any more lockdowns in the state of Texas’. A recent analysis by the Washington Post of cell phone data reports that states which reopened their bars had a doubling of cases of COVID-19 just three weeks later. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Reprint. The Texas Neanderthals were right. Texas ditched the mask mandate and opened up – and it’s all fine. I’m sure you heard the warnings. Biden, CDC, the fauch, etc. Texans were told that they were inviting death and more sickness. But not one word about the virus infected criminals that were invading our southern border. So enjoy.
In early March, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced he was ending the state’s mandate for people to wear masks, and reopening businesses at full capacity. Media outlets went into overdrive to denounce him and predict catastrophe. CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza called Abbott’s decision ‘head-scratching, anti-science’. ‘Model projections for Texas show worst-case scenario without mask mandate’, warned an ABC TV station in Houston. Abbott’s move was part of a ‘bold plan to kill another 500,000 Americans’, screamedVanity Fair.
Politicians also rushed to criticise Abbott. Former representative and failed presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke called his decision a ‘death warrant for Texans’. California governor Gavin Newsom said Texas was ‘absolutely reckless’ for lifting its Covid rules.
No less than President Joe Biden felt obliged to speak out and condemn Abbott. ‘The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine – take off your mask, forget it. It still matters.’
Well, it appears the Neanderthals in Texas got it right, and Biden is the one whose thinking is caveman-like. Now, three weeks after Abbott’s order to lift the mask mandate went into effect, the Covid situation has improved in Texas. New cases are down, to their lowest level since June. Hospitalisations have fallen to their lowest level since autumn. Death rates have plummeted. Furthermore, the outlook for vaccinations in the state appears bright, with a record daily number of people receiving shots. Adults of all ages are now eligible for a vaccine jab, a faster pace than many other states.
Have Biden and the media apologised for slandering Texas? And have they learned that lifting mandates on mask-wearing and removing other restrictions does not lead to Covid-spreading? Of course not.
As it happens, there is no need for alarm in the US. Yes, new cases are up in some states, but far below the January peak. The levels are much too low to talk about a ‘fourth wave’.
The real issue is that Biden and many other elites don’t trust the mass of people. When the toll of state-mandated restrictions on our wellbeing is so great – in terms of job losses, small businesses going to the wall, a halt in student learning, and the non-treatment of non-Covid health issues – such limitations on us should be kept to a minimum. Today, as we see vaccines being rolled out at a rapid pace, the constraints on us should also be lessening. But as the constant gloom-and-doom from Biden and the CDC shows, the instinct of many in authority is to dismiss any signs of good news, so as to justify controls on a public they do not trust.
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