Cuomo's Animus Against Religion Laid Bare

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

Bill Donohue: Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, who heads the Diocese of Brooklyn, has a lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court that could prove to be historic. 

All reasonable persons understand the right of government to impose limited restrictions on the public during a pandemic, but only unreasonable persons maintain that such powers are boundless. It is more than unreasonable—it is unconstitutional—to target churches and other houses of worship for special treatment.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo acted irresponsibly when he placed greater restrictions on churches than he did on hardware stores. That is what the Brooklyn Diocese’s lawsuit contends. By declaring that pet stores and brokers’ offices should have greater freedom to operate than synagogues, for example, Cuomo is showing his animus against religion.

If anyone has any doubt that Cuomo exhibits a flagrant hostility to religion, let him read what the governor has said. At a press conference, he admitted that his Executive Order is “most impactful on houses of worship.” That is where he crossed the line. Not only are houses of worship not considered “essential” businesses, they are intentionally relegated to a second-class status.

The lawsuit nails this point just right. It argues that Cuomo’s Executive Order “expressly singles out ‘houses of worship’ by that name for adverse treatment relative to secular businesses, and does so in a way that is not narrowly tailored to any compelling government interest, in direct violation of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause.”

Similarly, Cuomo put a cap on the number of people who can go to church in his so-called “red” and “orange” zones—10 and 25, respectively. As the lawsuit says, the “fixed-capacity limits imposed by Governor Cuomo on ‘houses of worship’—and only ‘houses of worship'”—proves once again his bias. When a 7-11 can have more people in its store than a church, it tells us volumes about what is really going on.

Bishop DiMarzio has once again done the right thing. When Covid-19 is behind us, Catholics will remember bishops like him who defended their religious rights, refusing to be treated as pawns of the state.
----------------------------
Bill Donohue (@CatholicLeague) is a sociologist and president of the Catholic League.
---------------------------
Tags: Bill Donohue, Catholic League, Cuomo's Animus, Against Religion, Laid Bare To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

I’ll Give You Money!

by Tom Balek: Ah, America – the land of opportunity, where any entrepreneur with a good idea can get rich. All you have to do is be in the right place at the right time with the right scam.

So here’s the next big opportunity.

Americans no longer have to show up to vote, right? And mail-in ballots do not need to be verified in any way to be considered valid, as many of our states have proven in the 2020 elections, right?

The old-school method for getting stinking rich by being elected to office in Washington, DC has been to collect huge sums of money from lobbyists and rich fatcats and then buy advertising that will make the voters hate your opponent. For example, Democrat Jaime Harrison and incumbent Republican Lindsey Graham collected and spent about $230 million on hate advertising in their recent senate race. But this technique is now obsolete. SC voters already hated both of them before the advertising. Harrison had more money and bought more advertising, but South Carolina loves President Trump, so we plugged our noses and voted for Graham, hoping he would support Trump.

But wait a minute – if that kind of fatcat money is available to candidates, and there is no control over mail-in ballots, why go through all the hassle and risk of advertising? Why not just buy votes directly on the open market?

I think I am going to run for Lindsey Graham’s seat next time around using a combination of old-school and new-school tactics. Like the current group of “corrupticrats” in DC, I will collect a ton of lobbyist/fatcat money by promising legislation that will make them even richer. But instead of spending it on hate advertising, I will create a website where voters can send their mail-in ballots, marked for me, directly to my campaign manager, who will conspire with corrupt postal workers and poll employees to dump them in the ballot boxes. In return for their ballots I will send each voter a Visa gift card for the going rate, which was $130 per vote this year. If you can collect or create 100 ballots I will send you $13,000, and I don’t care how you get them.

It’s the American way – supply and demand, efficiency of production, stuff like that. Oh, but it’s dishonest, you say? Tell that to CNN and Google.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ on the Right Side
---------------------------------
Tom Balek is a fellow conservative activist, blogger, musician and contributes to the ARRA News Service. Tom resides in South Carolina and seeks to educate those too busy with their work and families to notice how close to the precipice our economy has come. He blogs at Rockin' On the Right Side

---

Tags: Tom Balek, Rockin' On The Right Side, New Post, I'll Give You Money! To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

The Left’s Stalinist Purge Attempt Against Trump Supporters

Trump-haters demand a “reckoning."

Democratic-Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

by Joseph Klein: President Trump continues to exercise all the rights he is entitled to under the law to challenge the vote counts in key battleground states. Whatever happens, Trump’s extraordinary record of accomplishments on behalf of the American people deserve to be defended against the mass dissemination of crass anti-Trump propaganda. And the more than 70 million Americans who voted to reelect President Trump to a second term should hold their heads up high against all the disgusting ad hominem attacks aimed their way.

Trump-haters did everything they could for four years to undermine the legitimacy of the Trump presidency. They are now lashing out at President Trump and his supporters for daring to question the legitimacy of the mainstream media’s anointment of Joe Biden as president-elect before all recounts and court challenges play out and the states’ electors make the election results official.

According to the New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief Andrew Higgins, President Trump is acting like a dictator by refusing to concede the election after the press decided he lost. There have been no official certifications of the states’ election results. But for Higgins and his media pals, it’s all over because the media say so. Higgins has been in Russia too long where there is no independent judiciary to resolve election disputes. Whatever Putin wants, Putin gets. To remind Higgins, in the United States we do have an independent judiciary under our Constitution's separation of powers.

We have seen this year an unprecedented widespread use of mail-in ballots across the country that may have resulted in significant fraud affecting vote tallies in key battleground states. Asking for vote recounts, audits and independent judicial review is not, as Higgins believes, akin to using “the time-honored tools of dictators” to reverse elections. It is an inherent part of America's system of the rule of law.

Leftists won’t be satisfied simply with a Biden win. Their thirst for revenge knows no bounds. Leftists who accuse President Trump of sowing hatred against his enemies are planning to make life miserable for patriotic Americans who were affiliated with the Trump campaign and administration. Robert Spencer laid out the leftists’ slash-and-burn tactics in his column entitled “A Biden Presidency and the American Gulag.”

Spencer mentioned, for example, the “Trump Accountability Project,” which demands on its website that “those who took a paycheck from the Trump Administration should not profit from their efforts to tear our democracy apart.” Former Democratic National Committee national press secretary Hari Sevugan, who also served as a campaign spokesman for former President Barack Obama, is behind this crude attempt at a Stalinist purge. Sevugan tweeted that employers thinking of hiring anyone who served in the Trump White House “should know there are consequences for hiring anyone who helped Trump attack American values.”

Spencer also reminded us of Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich’s despicable name and shame tweet on October 17th: “When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.”

And then there is Democratic-Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who tweeted after the election: “Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.”

Journalists like to think of themselves as presenting the “first rough-draft of history.” But real journalists today are few and far between. Instead, we have the Trump-hating media doing their part to paint the Trump era as a dark chapter in American history. For four years, they tried to destroy President Trump with baseless charges and false stories. Trump correctly called out the political bias in much of the mainstream media and exposed their gross hypocrisy for the American people to see. This enraged the holier-than-thou media establishment further. Now, after prematurely anointing Joe Biden as the next president, Trump’s enemies in the media are angling for the last word in describing the Trump presidency as some sort of an evil autocratic regime.

In the words of The New Yorker writer Masha Gessen, for example, we have been through a “trauma” caused by “the most divisive and destructive Presidency in memory.” She demands “a reckoning” for what she claims President Trump has put us through. Gessen wants “congressional hearings, special-counsel investigations, court proceedings, town halls, journalistic projects, truth-and-reconciliation commissions, and some yet-to-be-invented formats” so that we can “talk about what happened and about how we go on living in such a way that it doesn’t happen again.”

Masha Gessen is not the only so-called “journalist” demanding a “reckoning.” Bret Stephens, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times who considers himself a conservative, wrote that the conservative movement needs a “reckoning” because of its support for President Trump. Stephens does not speak for conservatives. He is just another Trump-hater writing for the Trump-hating, left leaning New York Times. Why should conservatives have turned against President Trump when he delivered historic tax cuts, massive deregulation, the appointment of more than 200 conservative judges and three originalist Supreme Court justices, enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws, support for law enforcement, and defense of the Second Amendment? Stephens has no answer other than to charge Trump with being “immoral — manifestly, comprehensively and unrepentantly.” The credible reports of Biden family corruption, from which the “big guy” Joe Biden stood to benefit, did not make it on Stephens’ radar.

Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote that “Trump is a president who never had America’s interests at heart.” Did she have her head in the sand for the last four years? What does Applebaum think that President Trump’s “America First” policies, which he brilliantly executed on behalf of American workers, were all about?

Jennifer Rubin, who writes opinion columns for The Washington Post, went over the edge completely during an appearance on MSNBC. "It's not only that Trump has to lose, but that all his enablers have to lose," Rubin said. "We have to collectively in essence burn down the Republican Party."

Rubin also tweeted, “Any R now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite’ society. We have a list.” This reference to a list sounds eerily like the late Senator Joe McCarthy’s infamous “list” of alleged Communists working for the State Department that McCarthy referred to in a 1950 speech.

Gessen, Stephens, Applebaum, Rubin and their Trump-hating media cohorts are infected with the Trump Derangement Syndrome. They detest President Trump’s combative style, which they falsely claim is racist. They detest his insistence on strictly enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, deliberately obscuring the distinction that Trump has frequently made between immigrants who arrive in the U.S. legally and the gate crashers who are in this country illegally. They detest Trump’s America First policies, even though they confuse what they think is isolationism with smart multilateral relationships that do not rip off the United States. They find Joe Biden’s bland tone, along with his rejection of America First policies while embracing globalist institutions, oh-so reassuring.

The many, many millions of Americans who voted for President Trump are understandably proud of what he has accomplished on behalf of the American people in four short years. Here is a sampling:

• Destroying the ISIS territorial caliphate that Obama regarded as a junior varsity team, and killing its ruthless leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
• Facilitating historic Middle East peace agreements between Israel and three Arab countries
• Confronting China’s destructive behavior towards the United States that previous presidents ignored Keeping the United States out of new overseas wars while lowering tensions with North Korea
• Achieving energy independence
• Creating a pre-pandemic economy with historically low unemployment, including for African-Americans and Hispanics, and reducing the poverty rate to a 17-year low
• Putting America back on the path to economic recovery sooner than many so-called “experts” expected after making the decision to initially shut down the country in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus
• Combating the once-in-a-century coronavirus pandemic by forging unprecedented partnerships between government and the private sector and sharply reducing bureaucratic red tape, in order to produce ventilators, personal protective equipment, and testing capabilities in record time
• Paving the way for rapid development, production and distribution of vaccines that can finally allow us to return to a normal life
• Lowering the price of prescription drugs
• Reaching bipartisan agreement to push through legislation giving individual Americans and small businesses an economic lifeline during the pandemic
• Spearheading and signing the First Step Act, which reforms the criminal justice system and reverses years of mass incarceration of African-American males
• President Trump accomplished all this and more in spite of how the Democrats and their media enablers went after President Trump and his allies with manufactured charges of Russian collusion, followed by the most divisive, partisan, and destructive impeachment farce in American history.

The self-important dunderheads in the media must not be allowed to prevail with their “first draft” of revisionist history that seeks to label President Trump, in the sneering words of the New York Times, as “the worst American president in modern history.” Unless the truth wins out regarding President Trump’s outstanding accomplishments in the face of unrelenting efforts to sabotage his presidency, the leftist media will get away with shaping how history ultimately judges the Trump presidency. We cannot let that happen.
---------------------------
Joseph Klein writes for Frontpage Mag.

---

Tags: Joseph Klein, Frontpage Mag, The Left’s Stalinist, Purge Attempt Against, Trump Supporters To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

A Country Where People Are Afraid to Tell Pollsters What They Think

by Michael Barone: "I like a good contrarian argument as much as the next guy," tweets mild-mannered RealClearPolitics senior elections analyst Sean Trende, "but there's really no getting around the fact that the 2020 polling was a pile of steaming garbage."

"The national polls were even worse than they were four years ago," writes New York Times polling guru Nate Cohn. "(W)hatever steps pollsters took to improve after 2016 were canceled out by a new set of problems."

Trende and Cohn have earned credibility as two of the few political analysts who spotted, before Donald Trump's surprise victory, that white non-college graduates were underrepresented in media and exit polls and their potential for voting more Republican was overlooked. This year, pollsters adjusted their samples to include accurate proportions of that demographic, but the responses didn't match the results.

The result: Polls significantly overstated Joe Biden's popular vote margin nationally and consistently showed President Donald Trump and Republican candidates running worse than they ended up doing in target states. The errors were largest in the states most frequently polled.

Why the error? Left-wing ace analyst David Shor argues that Democrats, locked down in their home offices by COVID-19, were more willing to respond to polls, just as they were more likely than in the past to donate money to Democrats and tweet their loathing of the Republican president. There's probably something to that. The Pew Research Center finds that fewer than 1 out of 10 people contacted will respond to its polls, and if one party's fans do so more often, the results will be skewed.

But that also means some voter categories are less likely to be polled. Who are they? Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini's chart comparing preelection polling and the Associated Press VoteCast exit polls identifies white college graduates, women as well as men, as voting much more Republican than indicated in preelection polling.

National Journal's Josh Kraushaar showed how this produced unexpected results in House races: Public and partisan polls showed Democrats gaining seats, but Republicans have actually gained 6 to 13 seats. As Kraushaar recounts, Democrats failed to capture the high-education districts they targeted and lost several such districts they had captured in 2018. Kraushaar cited two Republican strategists' interviews of suburban voters over six months in which respondents complained about "the excesses of so-called 'cancel culture,' pointing to a stifling environment where employees worry they can be fired or punished for heterodox political views expressed at the workplace." Such voters may not be willing to voice those views to an interviewer who may have their name or address, but they vote against such political correctness at the ballot box.

Rigorous support for this view comes from political scientists Eric Kaufmann, a London-based Canadian of Jewish, Chinese and Latino ancestry whose 2019 book "Whiteshift" puts today's ethnic changes in historic perspective. He notes that ethnic and racial categories change over time and that, as people rise economically and intermarry, grievances and racial identity fade.

"Republican supporters with degrees tend to work in graduate-dominated environments, where organisations and peers are more likely to enforce norms of political correctness," Kaufmann writes in the British online magazine Unherd. "As a result, it is highly-educated Republican supporters who are most shy about revealing their beliefs at work." He cites polling evidence that 45% of Republican college grads versus only 23% of Democratic grads "said they feared that their careers could be at risk if their views became known." This is a case of political speech, in daily life and even in polling interviews, being suppressed out of fear.

Just as it is out of date to lament that big-money Republicans are buying elections, now that Democrats routinely outspend their opponents by a vast margin, so it is out of date to suppose that the greatest threats to free expression come in conservatives trying to stamp out obscenity and silence threats of violence.

The greatest threat to free speech today comes from the left: from college and university campuses with speech codes; from the social media monopolies where recent graduates shut down and stamp out information that, while accurate, may be (as a Biden press aide put it) "misleading"; from the corporate human resources departments that discipline and fire employees whose choice of words make anyone else "uncomfortable."

When I was in the polling business, from 1974 to 1981, I came to think that one measure of a free society is that you could conduct polls there that turned out to be accurate. This year's "steaming garbage" polls suggest that our society is significantly less free than we like to think. Pollsters will keep trying to improve their techniques. But if large numbers of Americans are afraid to speak freely, pollsters won't entirely succeed.
------------------------
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. H/T Rasmussen Reports.

---

Tags: Michael Barone, Rasmussen Reports, A Country, Where People, Are Afraid, to Tell Pollsters, What They Think To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Who Owns the Future? Dems or GOP?

by Patrick Buchanan: If Democrats can kill the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court, if they can add four new senators from Puerto Rico and D.C., and if they can pack the electorate by turning millions of migrants, legal and illegal, into U.S. citizens and regular voters, then you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

For Republicans, the returns were mixed on Nov. 3.

Though he carried burdens unrivaled by a president since Herbert Hoover — a plague that has killed 230,000 Americans in eight months and crashed the economy to depths not seen since the ’30s – Donald J. Trump amassed 72 million votes, the largest total in Republican Party history.

And while he lost the popular vote, Trump held off the predicted “blue wave.” He added seats in the House, a feat rivaling that of Richard Nixon, who added 22 GOP House seats while losing to JFK in 1960. And with Trump at the top of the GOP ticket, the Senate remained Republican.

Even Joe Biden’s 5 million vote margin was a tribute to Trump, who brought out friends and foes in astounding numbers, while Biden sheltered in place in his Wilmington basement reading cliches from his teleprompter.

Democrats, however, had great successes as well, reconstructing their “blue wall,” by winning all 18 states they had won in each of the presidential elections from 1992 through 2012.

Of what does the blue wall consist? All six New England states, save New Hampshire; New York, New Jersey and the mid-Atlantic states of Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland; the Middle America quadrant of Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota; and the Pacific Coast states of California, Oregon and Washington.

Not only did Biden rebuild that blue wall, he also added New Hampshire and Virginia, thereby carrying every state that touches the Atlantic from Maine to North Carolina.

Democrats gained ground in the Republican heartland as well.

Where Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1984 swept all 11 states of the Old Confederacy — as did Woodrow Wilson and FDR in the days of Dixiecrat segregation — the GOP mega-states of Florida and Texas became visibly competitive. North Carolina and Georgia are becoming toss-ups. And Virginia, capital of the Confederacy, where they now tear down statues of Robert E. Lee, is closer to blue.

The existential GOP problem? The party has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. Consistent and growing popular vote majorities for Democrats must one day translate into consistent and permanent electoral vote majorities.

Democrats remain today the minorities’ party and Republicans the party of America’s white majority. White folks are roughly 60% of the U.S. population, though closer to 70% of the electorate. Both those figures, however, are slowly and steadily falling.

Demography is still destiny.

Republicans are going to have to grow their share of the white vote and their share of the Hispanic, Black and Asian vote or their future will begin to look like California today, where the Grand Old Party does not hold a single statewide office.

There are other presently insoluble problems for the GOP.

Democrats are the party of government and Republicans the party of the private sector. But the number of Americans who depend on federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, student loans, housing subsidies, Earned Income Tax Credits, affirmative action — is growing, while the share of the population that contributes most to the programs is shrinking.

The top 1% of the population in income pays more taxes than the bottom 90%. The top 50% of the population pays 97% of the income taxes, while the bottom 50% pays only 3%.

If people who receive a cornucopia of benefits pay no income taxes, then why would they vote against a party that promises them still more benefits, to be paid for by raising the income taxes of someone else?

As John C. Calhoun declaimed on the roots of democratic class warfare,

“The necessary result… of the unequal fiscal action of the government is, to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who… pay the taxes, and… bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds, through disbursements, and who are… supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.”

Who owns the future?

If Democrats can kill the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court, if they can add four new senators from Puerto Rico and D.C., and if they can pack the electorate by turning millions of migrants, legal and illegal, into U.S. citizens and regular voters, then you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

Yet, as seen in California, conservatism is not dead:

On Nov. 3, Californians came out to crush Proposition 16, an attempt by leftists to cut out of the state constitution a provision that forbids racial or gender discrimination in public employment, education and contracting. The margin of defeat for Prop 16 was 56% to 44%.

The left’s appeal to diversity, and affirmative action to achieve it, was rejected by a majority of voters who put first their belief in the idea of race neutrality.
--------------------
Patrick Buchanan (@PatrickBuchanan) is currently a blogger, conservative columnist, political analyst, chairman of The American Cause foundation and an editor of The American Conservative. He has been a senior adviser to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.

---

Tags: Patrick Buchanan, conservative, commentary, Who Owns the Future? Dems or GOP? To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

The Latest Fake Mystery

by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: We Americans want to have our say, speak our piece — we do not wish to be gagged. No mystery to that. No puzzle. No strange, arcane, unexpected turn of our temper.

But that’s how it must seem to Nathan Bomey, author of “Parler, MeWe, Gab gain momentum as conservative social media alternatives in post-Trump age,” gracing the pages of USA Today.

“America’s crisis of political segregation — we increasingly don’t live alongside, associate with or even marry people who think differently from us — is increasingly leading conservatives to congregate together on social media outlets designed specifically for people who think like them.”

This is a passage of surpassing dumbness.

To pick one fundamental ideological divide at random: capitalist twitterers have never had any problem with posting tweets “alongside” socialist twitterers. The problem is the growing censorship of tweets that officials and employees at tech giants like Twitter, Facebook, and Google happened to dislike or disagree with for any reason.

This censorship was revved up during the recent election.

Bomey does mention claims of censorship by the persons being censored, but treats these as the ravings of “the extremist crowd.” He adds: “Experts on political polarization say [the rise of alternative social media] is a natural outgrowth of our divided culture. . . .”

Again: a major reason the alternatives to Twitter etc. are gaining such traction is the censorship. People are leaving the Big-Tech-sponsored discourse because they are being censored.

You don’t kick people out of the room and then scratch your head in wonderment, asking, “Gee willikers, why are you guys going away?”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
------------------------
Paul Jacob (@Common_Sense_PJ) is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

---

Tags: Paul Jacob, Common Sense, The Latest Fake Mystery To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

The 2020 Election has been Terrible for the Jews

by Caroline Glick: No matter who ultimately wins the presidential election, the Jews in America are the big losers. As Professor Ruth Wisse of Harvard has long explained, Jews are the bellwether for the health of democracies.&

Hatred of Jews rises in societies whose democratic institutions and values are in crisis. Jew-hatred is generally low in healthy, working democracies.

If we learned nothing else from the election campaign and its aftermath, we learned American democracy is in crisis.

The media is the first force responsible for this crisis. For the past four years, all major U.S. television networks and national newspapers have dedicated themselves not to reporting news, but to defining the boundaries of acceptable public discourse. Big Tech firms—Facebook, Google and Twitter, in particular, having amassed powers the KGB could only have dreamed of—serve as the enforcers of those boundaries.

The goal of all media corporations has been the same: to overturn the results of the 2016 election. To advance this goal, the media have demonized President Donald Trump and his supporters for four straight years. The shared conviction has been that by subjecting the public to continuous indoctrination to hate Trump and his supporters, Trump would disappear from the White House, whether through a prolonged special counsel probe, impeachment or defeat at the polls.

Nearly all the stories about Trump and his supporters have been negative for the past four years. Consequently, while most Americans never heard that Trump conceived and implemented an entirely new foreign policy doctrine that has met more success than any adopted since the end of the Cold War, all Americans know that the media expect them to believe Trump is a racist. They know that the media expect right-thinking Americans to hate Trump and his supporters, and admire his opponents, from Nancy Pelosi to Black Lives Matter (BLM).

Big Tech, for its part, has made clear that Trump supporters express their support for the Orange Man at their own risk. They may be subjected to doxxing or ostracism, and they may be de-platformed or even fired if they make their views—which deviate from the acceptable boundaries of public discourse, as dictated by the media—known online.

This massive multi-year indoctrination and enforcement campaign has had mixed results. On the one hand, the election results demonstrated that the media moguls and the social media bazillionaires have utterly failed to convince the public to hate Trump and his supporters. Trump won more votes last week than he won in 2016. He dramatically expanded his support among Hispanics and blacks.

On the other hand, the polls show how the media and Big Tech have changed American society. There are probably two reasons that the polls were even further off the mark in 2020 than they were in 2016. First, the pollsters themselves operate inside the media bubble. The likes of Nate Silver know that the likes of Jeff Zucker and Jeff Bezos aren’t interested in what the public thinks. They are intent on telling the public what to think. The pollsters’ questions and polling samples did just that by predicting the desired results.

Secondly, Trump supporters know that the media not only do not want to know what they think. They will punish Trump supporters if they say what they think. So they lie. What Trafalgar Group President Robert Cahaly describes as the “Shy Trump Voter Effect” was clearly expressed in the disparity between the polls and the vote count. Why tell an anonymous person who calls you randomly that you intend to vote for Trump? You don’t know who he is or what he will do with the information. So you hang up on him or tell him you’re voting for Biden.

Since election day, the situation has only grown worse. The progressive social media mobs are calling for boycotts of law firms that represent Donald Trump in his lawsuits alleging massive vote fraud in battleground states. The hope is that without adequate counsel, Trump will lose his legal fight.

Politicians and political operatives, along with CNN’s Jake Tapper and MSNBC’s Jen Rubin, are openly threatening to destroy the livelihoods of Trump administration employees and of Trump supporters who dispute the media’s coronation of Biden. Twitter censorship of Trump and his supporters grows more aggressive every day.

There is every reason to assume that whether or not Biden is inaugurated as anticipated on January 20, this vindictiveness, hatred and censorship will continue to metastasize in the coming months and years.

The consequences of this media and Big Tech tyranny are disastrous for the health of American democracy. Americans know they are expected to act like the citizens of the totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union. The media will tell them what they can say, and social media will enforce the media’s dictates.

And like the denizens of the USSR, Americans haven’t stopped thinking as a result of this tyranny. They have just stopped telling people what they think.

As thinkers, Americans seek out explanations. And since Trump supporters cannot receive explanations in the media for what is becoming of their country, they are naturally drawn to alternative voices. Most of them find the explanations in conservative media outlets. But as the aggressiveness of the media and Big Tech increases, many will be drawn to conspiracy theories. The draw of conspiracy theories is that they claim to explain everything.

This is a problem for Jews.

Anti-Semitism is the mother of all conspiracy theories. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories change over time, but their attraction has remained constant from the days of Pharaonic Egypt to the present. The Jews are a small, distinct group of people. They are relatively weak and non-aggressive, and have no automatic allies. Anti-Semites can attack them with relative impunity. Most importantly, you can develop an entire intellectual thought loop that explains all-natural and unnatural phenomena by saying the Jews are behind them.

During Trump’s four years in office, American Jews were subjected to a massacre and an attempted massacre carried out by white supremacists, who were indoctrinated by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on the Internet. The more Trump voters are pushed out of the discourse and demonized, and the less they trust the news they see on TV and in the newspaper headlines, the more they will turn to conspiracy theorists. And as surely as night follows day, more Americans will become convinced that Jews are responsible for everything that is wrong in America.

This then brings us to the Biden camp. The Biden campaign announced that on Biden’s first day in office, he will cancel Trump’s executive order banning “critical race theory” (CRT)-based training in the federal government. Perhaps more than any single policy announcement, this should send shivers down the spines of American Jews. In 2019, Jews were subjected to a massacre and an attempted massacre carried out by black supremacists, who were steeped in anti-Semitism borne of critical race theory and like-minded claptrap.

CRT ascribes a basic malevolence and inborn racism to all white people. In CRT training, through various indoctrination seminars and rules, whites are coerced to disavow their “white privilege” and thereby make the United States, birthed in the original sin of slavery, less sinful and evil.

Progressives, for whom CRT is an article of faith, view politics as a zero-sum game. And that poses a problem. They know they will not be able to repress all white people. And most progressives are white, anyway. To advance their political goal of reorganizing American society around CRT, progressives need a stand-in for whites. By adopting programs against the avatar, they can advance their larger agenda without being noticed. Just as Obama demonized the “one percenters” to advance his socialist economic programs that harmed all wage earners and savers, progressives today need a white form of “one percenters” to advance their racial governing programs.

Enter the Jews. Since progressives have already determined that Jews are “white,” Jews are the perfect nemesis for progressives. There aren’t very many Jews. Jews are too weak in the Democratic Party to make progressives pay for their behavior. Many Jews want to be part of the progressive movement and can be depended on to serve as fig leaves. And Jews are fairly easy to identify and single out.

BLM’s singling out and vilification of Israel in its original charter, and BLM rioters’ repeated targeting of Jewish businesses and synagogues for looting and vandalization, show precisely where the movement is headed.

CRT dominates the discourse on campuses. And today, from Berkeley to Columbia and everywhere in between, the only acceptable form of discrimination is discrimination against Jewish students who dare to support, or fail to sufficiently condemn, the Jewish state of Israel. This too, shows where the movement is headed.

The media’s abandonment of journalism and their hatred of half of American society, as well as the Democrats’ embrace of a totalitarian theory of race and American secular sin as an organizing principle, are unmooring America from its democratic, pluralistic anchors. American society is moving into a post-democratic reality. And if action isn’t taken to restore those anchors, American society as a whole will suffer. But American Jews will be the first to suffer.
-------------------------------
Caroline Glick is contributes to numerous publications including Newsweek and the Director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Israel Security Project. For more information on Ms. Glick's work, visit carolineglick.com.

---

Tags: Caroline Glick, 2020 Election, Terrible for the Jews, Newsweek To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

TMZ to Elder on ‘Systemic’ Racism: You’re Using Facts; I’m Using Humanity

by Larry Elder: Maybe it was because the presidential election was just a few days away. Or maybe it was because I arrived at the airport a good two hours before my flight and had plenty of time. Or maybe it was because of the combative interview I recently had with the celebrity website TMZ. We will get to that later.

But as I walked through the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, I saw a young white man with long black hair, maybe 20 years old, walking toward me. He was wearing a black T-shirt with white letters: “Protect Black Women.” It was quite early. The airport wasn’t particularly busy, and he and I were alone in a hall corridor.

“Excuse me,” I said, “Do you mind if I ask in what way aren’t Black women protected?”

He wasn’t sure he heard me correctly, as we were both wearing masks, so I repeated the question.

“Oh, they aren’t protected in every way,” he said.

“In every way?”

“Yes.”

“Humor me.” I said. “Just give me one way.”

“Just look at it. It’s everywhere.”

“Could you just give me one example, please?” I repeated.

I was smiling underneath the mask so that he would not feel this was a confrontation, but the conversation got increasingly edgy.

“It’s all over the country,” he said.

“Well, if it’s all over the country, it should be easy for you to give me an example of how Black women aren’t protected. Can you just give me one?”

He finally said, “Black women are not paid the same as white women.”

“For the same work?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Why, then, does any white woman have a job?

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Well, if I am an employer, and I can hire Black women to do the same work as my white female employees have been doing — except I can pay them less money — why wouldn’t I fire the white women and hire only Black women?”

“That would be illegal,” he said.

“It’s been illegal since the 1960s to pay female or Black employees less money for doing the same work as male or white employees. President John F. Kennedy signed the laws. And, according to the Department of Labor, if you compare apples to apples — a woman with the same education and work experience as a male counterpart — there is virtually no difference in their pay.”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” he said. “I’m not interested in carrying on this conversation anymore. And, by the way, I am Black.”

That surprised me. The man looked as Black as Mitt Romney.

“It doesn’t matter what race you are,” I replied as the young man turned to walk away. “Facts don’t stop being facts if you are Black — and you are wrong. Spreading this kind of disinformation makes things worse — not better, worse. And if you’re not interested in having this kind of conversation, perhaps a different choice of T-shirt next time?”

This brings me to TMZ.

Days earlier, I squared off on television against Harvey Levin, the founder and face of the website TMZ. In an interview TMZ later posted on its website, Levin’s Black co-host, Charles Latibeaudiere, criticized President Donald Trump for denying the existence of police “systemic racism.” When I agreed with Trump, things quickly went south.

“There is no evidence whatsoever of systemic racism.” I said to Levin. “I asked you to prove it.” He then named a few high-profile examples of Blacks killed by cops.

I offered research done by Roland Fryer, a Black Harvard professor whose study found the police were more reluctant to pull the trigger against a Black suspect than a white suspect. I noted studies done by Washington State professors who reached similar conclusions. I pointed out that more unarmed whites are killed by the police every year than unarmed Blacks, but the media, Levin included, “couldn’t care less” when the suspect is an unarmed white man.

After more back-and-forth, I said to Levin, a lawyer who graduated from University of Chicago Law School, that “you ought to be ashamed of yourself” for pushing this dangerous lie.

Levin replied, “You are relying on statistics. And you are not looking at humanity.”

“It’s called facts,” I said.

You are relying on statistics … not looking at humanity. Words fail.
---------------------
Larry Elder (@larryelder) is a best-selling author and radio talk-show host, an American lawyer, writer and radio and television personality who is also known as the "Sage From South Central." To find out more about Larry Elder. Visit his website at LarryElder.com for list of other articles.

---

Tags: Larry Elder, TMZ to Elder, ‘Systemic’ Racism, You’re Using Facts; I’m Using Humanity To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Will Trump Ride Off Into the Sunset?

Often, Hollywood epics and even some Sophoclean tragedies have a sequel. And perhaps Donald Trump will too.

Victor Davis Hanson

by Dr. Victor Davis Hanson: I once wrote that whenever Donald Trump exits office, he will likely leave as a “tragic hero.” Over two millennia ago, the Athenian tragedian Sophocles first described the archetype in his portraits of an angry and old but still fearsome Ajax, and heroic but stubborn and self-fixated Antigone.

In the iconic John Ford Western “The Searchers” and in a host of other films from “Shane” to “High Noon,” we have seen stories of these sorts.

The legalistic but impotent town council, the idealistic but outgunned sodbusters or the incompetent posse in desperation turns to unconventional deliverance. They suddenly need a John Wayne as a scary Ethan Edwards, or a mysterious gunslinger like Shane.

But to call in such Manichean outsiders is to admit that the status quo of a sober establishment has failed.

The outsider deliverers are suspiciously seen as self-absorbed. Their methods bother an endangered, polite society, even as they begin to bring it results.

We know such checkered iconoclasts from our own war stories of Gens. William Tecumseh Sherman, George S. Patton and Curtis LeMay. All three shredded pretensions. They reminded Americans that war is hell, and that the only thing worse than fighting so brutally against dangerous enemies is losing. And all three — only after the conflicts ended — were eventually deemed eccentric enough to be expendable

As we learn from the second half of Sophocles’ tragedies and the last 30 minutes of classic Westerns, the nearer the tragic hero comes to ensuring results, the more his benefactors can begin to second-guess his bothersome methods.

They start harping about his uncivilized mannerisms and recalcitrant stubbornness, but only because they now have the luxury of regretting their initial invitation to enlist his aid.

The denouement is as tragic as it is predictable.

A wounded Shane will ride off into the sunset in the snowy Grand Tetons, assured that the danger is past but knowing there is no place in a now-calm range for his six-gun that brought others justice and peace.

In “The Searchers,” Ethan Edwards rescues his kidnapped niece but walks away unnoticed as others self-congratulate for her deliverance.

Gary Cooper in “High Noon” will rid Hadleyville of the outlaws it feared. But he will become so disgusted with the town’s ingratitude that he will throw down his badge in the dirt before leaving.

We remember Sherman for supposedly burning a swath through Georgia, breaking the will of the planation class and freeing thousands of slaves.

Foul-mouthed Patton, with his ivory-handled pistols, is often recalled more as a madman who believed in reincarnation than as a genius who saved thousands of GIs.

A cigar-chomping LeMay, more than anyone, destroyed Imperial Japanese industry and created an effective Cold War deterrent. He ended up caricatured as a nut in the film “Dr. Strangelove.”

So too, perhaps, Donald Trump. Quietly, many Americans knew that unchecked illegal immigration was undermining the melting pot and eroding the idea of legal immigration.

Some feared it was a matter of when, rather than if, communist China would rule the world. Many people were tired of “endless” wars in the Middle East, even as America kept getting sucked into them.

Republicans knew that an originalist court was necessary to save the Constitution, but Republican presidents nonetheless often nominated future liberal justices.

Conservatives hammered away at the principle that late-term abortion was wrong but feared that taking on Planned Parenthood was suicidal.

Republicans rightly suspected that they were being typecast as a party of aristocratic golfers but were scared of the changes needed to appeal to the working classes, both black and white. They found the old Reagan Democrats, Ross Perot voters, blue dogs and tea partiers occasionally useful but felt that addressing their grievances would be worse than losing.

So in 2016 the peasants sought outside deliverance and so it came — orange skin, dyed hair, Queens accent and all.

The more Trump beat back Robert Mueller’s dream team, impeachment efforts and the terrible year 2020, the more his beneficiaries worried about his tweets, his bluster and his self-absorption.

The more the economy boomed, and the more Trump recalibrated foreign policy and changed the status quo with China and the Middle East, the more the public could afford to listen to charges of Trump excess.

So here we are in the wake of the most contested election in memory, and Trump may be officially declared the loser — even after he won his struggle to stop America’s leftward drift.

Often, Hollywood epics and even some Sophoclean tragedies have a sequel. And perhaps Donald Trump will too, even if he is forced to ride off into the 2021 sunset — at least for now.
--------------------------
Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) is a senior fellow, classicist and historian and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where many of his articles are found; his focus is classics and military history. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. The Patriot Post.

---

Tags: Victor Davis Hanson, The Patriot Post, Will Trump, Ride Off, Into the Sunset? To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Trump and Goliath

Trump is fighting against a Goliath giant made up of Big Tech, MS Media complex, Democrat machine, and the deep state.
Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

---

Tags: Editorial Cartoon, AF Branco, Trump and Goliath To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

The 1620 Project

by Mark C. Dillon: This Wednesday, November 11th, in addition to honoring our veterans, America will celebrate a once-in-a lifetime event—the quad-centennial of the Mayflower Compact signed in 1620.

Why celebrate the Mayflower Compact? Four hundred years ago religious freedom seeking Pilgrims had arrived in the New World near Cape Cod, far from their Virginia destination. This and previous misfortunes lead many on board to believe their English charter with the Virginia Company null and void. In order to prevent a mutiny and quickly establish a set of rules for everyone to live by—even before a land settlement was established—Pilgrim leaders signed a new agreement aboard the Mayflower on November 11, 1620.

The Pilgrim leaders drew upon the ancient tradition of social contracts or covenants between parties to guide them. This particular agreement was unique for several reasons: it was the first written example of self-government in the New World, it was a contract between individuals and not the monarchy, and it also ensured a working social structure where none existed. In fact, it worked so well for the new colony, it remained in effect until 1691. The agreement eventually became known as the Mayflower Compact.

Historians and our Founders consider the Mayflower Compact the forerunner to our Declaration of Independence and US Constitution. In 1802 Senator John Quincy Adams wrote, “That is (the Mayflower Compact) perhaps, the only instance in human history of that positive, original social compact, which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate source of government. Here was unanimous and personal assent, by all the individuals of the community, to the association by which they became a nation.”

For all Americans who love our Constitution and especially this Veterans Day, John Quincy Adams gives us ample reason to celebrate the Mayflower Compact signed 400 years earlier on that fateful November 11, 1620. Sir Winston Churchill, two time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, historian, and one of only eight to receive honorary US Citizenship gives us another, “A nation that forgets its past has no future.”

As we dutifully honor our military veterans let us celebrate four centuries of the Mayflower Compact's impact, “that positive, original social compact…as the only legitimate source of government,” that lead directly to the founding of our great Nation. Especially during challenging times Americans need to celebrate their beautiful past as Winston Churchill so wisely reminds us. Doing so we will continue to be this worlds ‘shining city on a hill’…and a timeless model of self government for future Pilgrims seeking other new worlds.
-----------------------
Mark C. Dillon is a retired Maj Gen, USAF and Defense Leadership and Educational Consultant.

---

Tags: Mark C. Dillon, The 1620 Project To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Lockdown Joe: Biden Wants Everyone To Live In Their Basement

by the I&I Editorial Board: Should Joe Biden survive the election legal challenges ahead, he will roll into the Oval Office fully intent on doing what Democrats do – rob Americans of their liberty. We have every expectation he will try to shut down the country, not because the coronavirus makes it necessary but because the oxygen of the political left is controlling other people’s lives.

The Bongino Report tells us that Biden’s coronavirus adviser is proposing a lengthy national shutdown to mitigate the spread as positive test results climb during the early weeks of the North American flu season.

Apparently Biden is listening to the ravings of Dr. Michael Osterholm, who is suggesting “we” – can he please define “we”? – could “pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments,” so the country could “lock down for four to six weeks.”

We’re not reading the Osterholm comments as an endorsement of placing the rest of the country into a California-style lockdown, but rather a complete, almost imprisoning closure in which all but a few are confined to their homes.

This is not a wild leap of speculation. Osterholm co-wrote an August New York Times op-ed in which he insisted that “to be effective,” lockdowns have “to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.” Ezekiel Emanuel, another Biden virus adviser, has demanded we “Shut down now, and start over” though a full surrender to government. And Biden himself has already signaled he wants to establish a national mask mandate, even though there’s ample evidence from the states that it won’t work.

Osterholm, when not plotting to steal Americans’ freedom, directs the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, and is a member of Biden’s coronavirus “advisory board.” According to a CNBC report, he is taking a hard line because he believes a “nationwide lockdown would drive the number of new cases and hospitalizations down to manageable levels while the world awaits a vaccine.”

Before anyone says, “hey, that makes sense, let’s just hunker down for a while until we’re vaccinated,” remember the cost of the lockdowns we’ve already endured – and in some states, continue to suffer through. Not only did they fail to stop the spread of the coronavirus, they made life worse. “They are surely the most risky experiment ever conducted on the public,” mythbusting journalist John Tierney writes in City Journal.From the start, researchers have warned that lockdowns could prove far deadlier than the coronavirus. People who lose their jobs or businesses are more prone to fatal drug overdoses and suicide, and evidence already exists that many more will die from cancer, heart disease, pneumonia, and tuberculosis and other diseases because the lockdown prevented their ailments from being diagnosed early and treated properly.The Great Barrington Declaration, a statement produced last month after a meeting of high-level epidemiologists, economists, and journalists, similarly pointed out that:Lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.But what about the people who’ve been saved by the lockdowns? Didn’t we hear elected officials say that even the most severe restrictions were worth it if they saved just one life? Well, it turns out that it’s possible that closing down the economy and social interactions actually made the spread of the virus worse. Not even the World Health Organization, a group that tends to be pessimistic and overly cautious, seems prepared to go as far as a Biden administration might. The United Nations agency has never advocated lockdowns, and its special envoy on COVID-19 has said officials were wrong to employ lockdowns as the “primary control method” to mitigate the virus.

Much of the public is fed up and not in the mood to take another round of orders from “experts” who have not inspired confidence and politicians who have behaved more like petty tyrants than representatives of the people. In late March/early April, 67% of respondents to a Gallup poll said it was very likely they would shelter in place for a month if public health officials recommended they do so. Now only 49% say it’s very likely they would.

So here we are again with yet another reason to hope that the Trump campaign’s challenges are legally and ethically upheld so that Biden won’t be our next president.
-----------------------------
Written by the I&I Editorial Board.

---

Tags: Lockdown Joe, Biden Wants, Everyone To Live, In Their Basement To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Democrats Have No Intention Of Ever Reopening Churches

by Mario Murillo Ministries: If you believe the day is coming when Democrats will officially allow churches to reopen, you are fooling yourself. That day is never going to come. If your church is in a city or state governed by Democrats, they will never, ever declare that is okay for churches to reopen.

The only way churches will reopen is if they do it on their own. At this moment Democrats are looking for a way to keep churches closed that goes beyond The China Virus.

If you are counting on the day when your Democrat mayor or governor will tell you that you are free to have open church services wake up! That day is never coming.

The lock down had little or nothing to do with the China Virus, it just provided the excuse they have been wanting for a long time. They wanted to see what pastors would do if they were ordered to shut down. They sure found out! Their illegal order worked beyond their fondest dreams. Christian leader after Christian leader rolled over like a puppy who hears a newspaper being rolled up, with extraordinarily little resistance. This was also a way to bankrupt churches—churches that were too weak to survive months of being closed. And they were right again, because many of these churches did not survive. They are gone forever.

The only way that churches will ever reopen is for them to take matters into their own hands and test the criminal behavior of Democrat leaders. Though they were extremely clear about when we needed to close, they will be vague at best and totally silent at worst.

Here are three reasons why the Democrats will never reopen the churches.

1. The closure had more to do with our Christianity than with the virus. The proof is their long history of trying to shut down the church. After the virus, they will try something else.

The most glaring example of their past efforts to persecute Christianity was California Assembly Bill 2943. This is no exaggeration. It is not the overreaction of an overly emotional preacher. I challenge you to come up with a different conclusion than I have concerning this proposed law that would have passed had it not been stopped at the last minute:

This bill would have declared all forms of sexual orientation change efforts, or SOCE (sometimes referred to as “conversion therapy”) to be a form of “consumer fraud” if performed for a fee. Such counseling or therapy is designed to assist people who experience unwanted same-sex attractions to achieve their own self-chosen goal of overcoming those attractions or abstaining from same-sex conduct. In fact, because the “consumer fraud” statute applies to any sale of “goods or services,” AB 2943 could potentially have banned not just therapy but even the sale of books. And because “sexual orientation change” was defined to include changes in “behaviors” (not just attractions), the sale of any book promoting a Christian sexual ethic could have been banned—potentially including the Bible itself.

AB 2943, Therapy Ban that Attacked Freedom of Speech and Religion, Dies in California, Family Research Council Says.

No exchange of money can be allowed for a book that suggests recovery from same sex attraction or gender dysphoria? No conference can do so either? Oh wait, the Bible does that. And oh, yeah, a Bible Conference will do that.

This frontal assault on the Christian faith is a giant step toward outlawing Gospel preaching as hate speech. What will stop them from removing tax exemptions? What will stop them from removing the right to assemble? What will stop them from shutting down any group that does not fall in line with their gender values?

2. They are ignoring the decisions of federal judges who have ordered them to reopen churches. Does that tell you anything? The Justice Department has opened investigations threatening Mayors and Governors. Has that had any impact? Of course not. The Democrats know what they are doing is illegal. If they are already flouting the law to force churches to stay closed, what makes you think they will ever give in and announce our reopening?
3. They are only buying time to come up with the next reason to ban churches. This was a dress rehearsal. Think about how nutty Nancy Pelosi is to suggest a second impeachment of Trump because he nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court? What makes you think they will not invent some absurd reason to close churches again?

Here is the conclusion of this matter. The real enemy is fear. I call it Covid-20. It is the virus that makes people afraid to go back to their church. It is the fear that makes a pastor reluctant to open en masse to force Democrat governors to face the futility of keeping us closed.

If the church in America is ever to reopen, she must do it on her own.

If ever we needed to heed to the example given by Peter in Acts 5:28-29. When the Apostles were ordered by the governing officials in Jerusalem to shut down: “saying, “Did we not strictly command you not to teach in this Name? And look, you have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this Man’s blood on us!” But Peter and the other apostles answered and said: “We ought to obey God rather than men.”

After being warned, the Church in the 1st century did the exact opposite. They rose up and became even more bold to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ, accompanied by signs and wonders. And that is what the Church in the 21st century must do, during this hour of persecution!
------------------------
Mario Murillo is an evangelist Mario Murillo, minister, blogger.

---

Tags: Mario Murillo, Ministries, Democrats, Have No Intention, Of Ever, Reopening Churches To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

The Real Election 'Trump Card': Refuse to Certify

by Jay Valentine: This week started off with almost every Big Media entity congratulating "President-Elect Joe Biden." There is now an Office of the President Elect, some fabrication that I recall was created by Obama to suck the oxygen out of the room even before he took office.

Republicans are being pilloried for not being able to show "proof" of election fraud. Trump's team has provided the List of the Dead, an Egyptian-like roll of voters who voted from the grave. Tucker Carlson ran lists on his show — dead people who rose from the grave to vote.

As Republicans seek those gnarly voter rolls, get their hands on the most egregious ballots, they are stymied at every step. For every Republican court case, there are Democrats opposing them or sitting on the judicial bench thwarting them. Running out the clock.

Well, what should one do? This is where the fun really begins, and our pals the Democrats have brought us this little party. Let's go there.

As the "anecdotal fraud" stories grew, they further inflamed people. Funny thing about anecdotes: They may not add up to lots of fraud votes, but every one is a memorable story. A story is far more important right now than being able to snag the names of more dead from the roles. Tucker pretty much topped that off.

Anecdotes are stories, and stories are the oldest form of human communication. The Bible came to us from stories, later written down and passed through the ages. Homer's Iliad and later Beowulf are stories that remain today the most intimate view into the life and times of early Bronze Age Greeks and the early Middle Ages. Stories move — statistics not so much.

Anecdotes are driving 71 million Americans mad.

Americans are particularly sensitive to fairness. A young child recognizes someone cutting in line. Fairness is innate; we all have it. For some, it is baked out by ideology when they adopt "the end justifies the means" kind of thinking. But those are not the Trump voters.

This election was not fair. Everyone, or about everyone, sees it, and, clearly, about 71 million people who voted for Trump cannot get past it.

To make it more unfair, those who committed the fraud will not let Trump's team see the scorecards. No vote-counting unless they are bludgeoned into it. Lower courts, often with Democratic judges, are equally opaque. Nothing to see here.

Sometimes you have to thank your opponent for being really stupid. Napoleon said never needlessly interfere with your enemy when he is destroying himself. We might create a corollary here: when your opponent drives you to high ground, take it. And say thanks.

Let's do that. Let's call it the American Thinker corollary. Give it a name like the Overton Window or Occam's razor, and into Wikipedia it goes. Fun times.

We cannot win the mind-numbing, detailed, line-by-line, opposed at every step swamp war with those who just stole an election. At least we cannot do it in 30 days, which is about all we have. More importantly, we cannot deliver every day the statistics to reverse the media drum beat to just move along and go with Joe.

We can, or Trump himself can, take the stories to the people, all 71 million of them. It appears he is starting down that path. This week, the speaker of the Pennsylvania House, a now key player in this drama, said "no certification without audits."

Here's what that means.

Screw the stats. Trump is the number-one communicator in this quadrant of the galaxy. Trump has scores of anecdotes like that loose string on the sock where, when you pull it a bit, the sock comes apart.

The Trump rallies hit every swing state and educate their legislatures about the power of anecdotes. Anecdotes drive voters. Everyone remembers a story. Voters remember.

This election must be certified by two chambers of every swing-state Legislature.

The speaker in Pennsylvania just showed us the high ground. The Republican legislatures follow his lead and say no certification without the following:
- a full audit, by hand of every vote,
- any court or election official mandate not approved by the Legislature does not count — take out those votes, - voting machines: cough up the source code, the audit logs for our forensic teams.

You get the picture.

If the Democrats challenge this, the clock works against them. Thirty days. Tick, tick.

Trump plays the Trump card. Seventy-one million people demanding a recount — fair, honest, transparent.

No recount, no certification. No voting machine code review, no certification.

No certification, and the House of Representatives makes the call, and Trump gets off the golf course and back to work.

This is the high ground. The Democrats have given it to us; let us gather together and say "thanks."
----------------------
Jay Valentine writes at the American Thinker.
---------------------
Footnote added from RIP: Remember, Article 12 of the Constitution provides that if the election goes to the House, each state gets only ONE vote, and there is a solid majority of Republican states.

---

Tags: Jay Valentine, The Real Election 'Trump Card', Refuse to Certify To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Attorneys General Hit Pennsylvania’s State of Confusion

by Tony Perkins: "The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has violated the U.S. Constitution," said Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry. General Landry, my state attorney general, joined me on "Washington Watch" yesterday. He was part of ten state attorneys general who filed a brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Pennsylvania court's ruling.

In the weeks before the election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots could be received until up to three days after the election. The ruling changed a provision in Pennsylvania election law, which clearly stated that mail-in ballots had to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day. And that, said Landry, violates the U.S. Constitution.

"The U.S. Constitution spells out the way that the president is going to be elected in this country," he said. It gives state legislatures the responsibility for "setting out the time, place, and manner of the elections." Landry said the Pennsylvania General Assembly had outlined the rules for receiving mail-in ballots, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overruled them, but "that's not the job of the courts."

Those late-arriving mail-in ballots proved to be a much bigger deal than anyone expected, as President Trump's Election Night lead in Pennsylvania slowly eroded away. Now, Landry and nine other state attorneys general have asked the Supreme Court to take a closer look at Pennsylvania's mail-in ballot rules. But for Landry, the issue is bigger than which candidate received more legal votes in Pennsylvania, although that may very well decide the election.

The broader issue is about whether we'll agree on the way we choose our leaders, said Landry. "It is imperative that in today's world where the country is so divided that we ensure that the one thing we're united on is our election." And that's a problem when "courts com[e] in and substitute[e] themselves as the legislature," or when the media prematurely calls the election.

I couldn't agree more. America needs transparent, fair elections so we can all confidently accept the results. You'd think the Democrats would understand this after they spent four years refusing to accept the legitimacy of President Donald Trump.

It remains to be seen whether President Trump will succeed in challenging Pennsylvania's election results, whether that will affect the outcome by a large enough margin, or whether the U.S. Supreme Court will get involved. Regardless we must pray and work to uphold the rule of law so we can have confidence in our elections and our leaders.

--------------------------
Tony Perkins (@tperkins) is President of the Family Research Council . Article on Tony Perkins' Washington Update and written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

---

Tags: Tony Perkins, Family Research Council, Attorney General, Pennsylvania, state of confusion To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!