Happy Thanksgiving 2020

Happy Thanksgiving and God Bless!

The ARRA News Service is not expected to publish additional articles on Wednesday thru  Sunday.   It is time for some R and R and catching up with family and friends!

Below is a Thanksgiving Quiz developed by Kirby Anderson in 2001. Regardless of the passage of time, facts and truth remain timeless. Good items to share with your family. ~ Dr. Bill Smith, Editor

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A Thanksgiving Quiz by Kerby Anderson, Contributing Author: This nation was founded by Christians, and Thanksgiving is a time when we can reflect upon this rich, Christian heritage. But many of us are often ignorant of our country’s origins, so we have put together a Thanksgiving quiz to test your knowledge about this nation’s biblical foundations. We hope that you will not only take this test and pass it on to others, but we also hope that you will be encouraged to study more about the Christian foundations of this country.

1. What group began the tradition of Thanksgiving?
A day of thanksgiving was set aside by the Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony. This colony was the first permanent settlement in New England. The Pilgrims were originally known as the Forefathers or Founders. The term Pilgrim was first used in the writings of colonist William Bradford and is now used to designate them.

2. Why did they celebrate Thanksgiving?
Life was hard in the New World. Out of 103 Pilgrims, 51 of these died in the first terrible winter. After the first harvest was completed, Governor William Bradford proclaimed a day of thanksgiving and prayer. By 1623, a day of fasting and prayer during a period of drought was changed to one of thanksgiving because the rain came during their prayers. The custom prevailed in New England and eventually became a national holiday.

3. When did Thanksgiving become a national holiday?
The state of New York adopted Thanksgiving Day as an annual custom in 1817. By the time of the Civil War, many other states had done the same. In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln appointed a day of thanksgiving. Since then, each president has issued a Thanksgiving Day proclamation for the fourth Thursday of November.

4. Why did the Pilgrims leave Europe?
Among the early Pilgrims was a group of Separatists who were members of a religious movement that broke from the Church of England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1606 William Brewster led a group of Separatists to Leiden (in the Netherlands) to escape religious persecution in England. After living in Leiden for more than ten years, some members of the group voted to emigrate to America. The voyage was financed by a group of London investors who were promised produce from America in exchange for their assistance.

5. How did the Pilgrims emigrate to the New World?
On September 16, 1620, a group numbering 102 men, women, and children left Plymouth, England, for America on the Mayflower. Having been blown off course from their intended landing in Virginia by a terrible storm, the Pilgrims landed at Cape Cod on November 11. On December 21, they landed on the site of Plymouth Colony. While still on the ship, the Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact.

6. What is the Mayflower Compact?
On November 11, 1620, Governor William Bradford and the leaders on the Mayflower signed the Mayflower Compact before setting foot on land. They wanted to acknowledge God’s sovereignty in their lives and their need to obey Him. The Mayflower Compact was America’s first great constitutional document and is often called “The American Covenant.”

7. What is the significance of the Mayflower Compact?
After suffering years of persecution in England and spending difficult years of exile in the Netherlands, the Pilgrims wanted to establish their colony on the biblical principles they suffered for in Europe. Before they set foot on land, they drew up this covenant with God. They feared launching their colony until there was a recognition of God’s sovereignty and their collective need to obey Him.

8. What does the Mayflower Compact say?
“In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland king, defender of the faith, etc., Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these present solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends foresaid, and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have here under subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our sovereign Lord, King James, of England, France, and Ireland.”

9. Why didn’t the pilgrims sail to the original destination in Virginia?
The Pilgrims were blown off course and landed at Cape Cod in what now appears to be God’s providence. Because their patent did not include this territory, they consulted with the Captain of the Mayflower and resolved to sail southward. But the weather and geography did not allow them to do so. They encountered “dangerous shoals and roaring breakers” and were quickly forced to return to Cape Cod. From there they began scouting expeditions and finally discovered what is now Plymouth. Had they arrived just a few years earlier, they would have been attacked and destroyed by one of the fiercest tribes in the region. However, three years earlier (in 1617), the Patuxet tribe had been wiped out by a plague. The Pilgrims thus landed in one of the few places where they could survive.

10. What role did the lone surviving Indian play in the lives of the Pilgrims?There was one survivor of the Patuxet tribe: Squanto. He was kidnapped in 1605 by Captain Weymouth and taken to England where he learned English and was eventually able to return to New England. When he found his tribe had been wiped out by the plague, he lived with a neighboring tribe. When Squanto learned that the Pilgrims were at Plymouth, he came to them and showed them how to plant corn and fertilize with fish. He later converted to Christianity. William Bradford said that Squanto “was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.”

11. What was William Bradford’s proclamation for Thanksgiving?
Three years after their arrival, and two years after the first Thanksgiving, Governor Bradford made an official proclamation of a day of Thanksgiving:

Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as he has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience; now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all Pilgrims, with your wives and little ones, do gather at the meeting house, on the hill, between the hours of 9 and 12 in the day time, on Thursday, November the 29th, of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and twenty-three, and the third year since Pilgrims landed on ye Pilgrim Rock, there to listen to the pastor and render thanksgiving to Almighty God for all His blessings.

12. Were the colonists dedicated to Christian principles in their lives on days other than Thanksgiving?
The Pilgrims were, and so were the other colonists. Consider this sermon by John Winthrop given while aboard the Arabella in 1630. This is what he said about the Puritans who formed the Massachusetts Bay Colony: “For the persons, we are a Company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ. . . . For the work we have in hand, it is by a mutual consent through a special overruling providence, and a more than an ordinary approbation of the Churches of Christ to seek out a place of Cohabitation and Consortship under a due form of Government both civil and ecclesiastical.” They established a Christian Commonwealth in which every area of their lives both civil and ecclesiastical fell under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

13. How did the Puritans organize their economic activities
After the first year, the colony foundered because of the collective economic system forced upon them by the merchants in London. All the settlers worked only for the joint partnership and were fed out of the common stores. The land and the houses built on it were the joint property of the merchants and colonists for seven years and then divided equally.

When Deacon Carver died, William Bradford became governor. Seeing the failure of communal farming, he instituted what today would be called free enterprise innovations. Bradford assigned plots of land to each family to work, and the colony began to flourish. Each colonist was challenged to better themselves and their land by working to their fullest capacity. Many Christian historians and economists today point to this fundamental economic change as one of the key reasons for the success of the Pilgrims at Plymouth.

14. What has been the significance of the Pilgrims and their legacy of Thanksgiving?
On the bicentennial celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Daniel Webster on December 22, 1820, declared the following: “Let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.”

The legacy of the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving is the legacy of godly men and women who sought to bring Christian principles to this nation. These spread throughout the nation for centuries.

15. How were Christian principles brought to the founding of this republic?
Most historians will acknowledge that America was born in the midst of a revival. This occurred from approximately 1740-1770 and was known as the First Great Awakening. Two prominent preachers during that time were Jonathan Edwards (best known for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) and George Whitfield. They preached up and down the East Coast and saw revival break out. Churches were planted, schools were built, and lives were changed.

16. How influential were Christian ideas in the Constitution?
While the Constitution does not specifically mention God or the Bible, the influence of Christianity can plainly be seen. Professor M.E. Bradford shows in his book A Worthy Company, that fifty of the fifty-five men who signed the Constitution were church members who endorsed the Christian faith.

17. Weren’t many of the founders non-Christians?
Yes, some were. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin are good examples of men involved in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence who were influenced by ideas from the Enlightenment. Yet revisionists have attempted to make these men more secular than they really were. Jefferson, for example, wrote to Benjamin Rush that “I am a Christian . . . sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others.” Franklin called for prayer at the Constitutional Convention saying, “God governs the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his notice?” While they were hardly examples of biblical Christianity, they nevertheless believed in God and believed in absolute standards which should be a part of the civil order.

18. How important was Christianity in colonial education in America?
Young colonists’ education usually came from the Bible, the Hornbook, and the New England Primer. The Hornbook consisted of a single piece of parchment attached to a paddle of wood. Usually the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, and religious doctrines were written on it. The New England Primer taught a number of lessons and included such things as the names of the Old and New Testament books, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and John Cotton’s “Spiritual Milk for American Babies.” Even when teaching the alphabet, biblical themes were used: “A is for Adam’s fall, we sinned all. B is for Heaven to find, the Bible mind. C is for Christ crucified, for sinners died.”

19. How important was Christianity in colonial higher education?
Most of the major universities were established by Christian denominations. Harvard was a Puritan school. William and Mary was an Anglican school. Yale was Congregational, Princeton was Presbyterian, and Brown was Baptist. The first motto for Harvard was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae (Truth for Christ and the Church). Students gathered for prayer and readings from the Scriptures every day. Yale was established by Increase Mather and Cotton Mather because Harvard was moving away from its original Calvinist philosophy and eventually drifted to Unitarianism. The founders of Yale said that “every student shall consider the main end of his study to wit to know God in Jesus Christ and answerable to lead a Godly, sober life.”

20. If Christianity was so important in colonial America, why does the Constitution establish a wall of separation between church and state?
Contrary to what many Americans may think, the phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear anywhere in the Constitution. In fact, there is no mention of the words church, state, or separation in the First Amendment or anywhere within the Constitution. The First Amendment does guarantee freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion.

The phrase is found in a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Baptist pastors in Danbry, Connecticut in 1802 in which he gave his opinion of the establishment clause of the First Amendment and then felt that this was “building a wall of separation between church and state.” At best this was a commentary on the First Amendment, from an individual who was in France when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were drafted.
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Kerby Anderson is a radio talk show host heard on numerous stations via the Point of View Network endorsed by Dr. Bill Smith, Editor, ARRA News Service

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Tags: Thanksgiving, 2020, Bill Smith, ARRA News Service, Kerby Anderson, Point of View, A Thanksgiving Quiz To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Conservative Values Won Big Across America, Except in Contested Swing States

by Connor Semelsberger: The 2020 election revealed many interesting trends. Most notably, it revealed a number of unexpected conservative victories in federal and state elections. From the suburbs of Miami, Los Angeles, and Cincinnati to key races in Iowa and Montana, Republicans held onto key seats or made substantial gains despite millions of dollars in spending by Democrats. Yet despite these positive results, with ample opportunity to win similar races in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, Republicans came up short in these states. What explains this?

One of the biggest headlines from the 2020 election was President Donald Trump’s increased number of votes in major urban areas across the country, including substantial gains among the Latino community, especially in Florida. President Trump improved his percentage of the vote from 2016 in Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, Toledo, and even Portland and Seattle. These gains propelled President Trump to capturing north of 73 million votes nationwide, even beating President Obama’s record-setting popular vote total in 2008.

Republican candidates down ballot also had several major victories:

• Florida – Republicans flipped two U.S. House seats and made gains in the state legislature.
• Iowa – Joni Ernst won her tightly contested Senate race and Republicans picked up one and potentially two U.S. House seats.
• New Hampshire – Republicans lost competitive U.S. House races but flipped both state legislative chambers.
• Montana – Republicans held onto the U.S. Senate and House seats and flipped the Governorship.
• Texas – John Cornyn won his Senate race, and Republicans kept control of both state legislative chambers despite aggressive Democrat challenges.
• California and New York – Republicans have flipped at least one seat in each state and are on track to take back several more.

Republicans outperformed expectations in nearly every state, except the key battlegrounds that continue to have election integrity questions and will ultimately decide the final outcome of the electoral college.

There were very similar opportunities for Republican success in down-ballot federal and state races; however, they all came up short in these states.

• Arizona – Incumbent Senator Martha McSally lost her race, and Republicans failed to pick up either competitive U.S. House seats outside of Phoenix.
• Georgia – Both Sen. David Perdue and Sen. Kelly Loeffler failed to secure 50 percent of the votes, triggering runoff elections. Also, Republicans failed to pick-up a competitive U.S. House seat in the Atlanta suburbs and lost a nearby seat, the only Democrat pickup not caused by redistricting.
• Michigan – John James failed to unseat incumbent Sen. Gary Peters in a very close race and Republicans failed to pick up either of the two competitive U.S. House seats covering Oakland and Wayne counties outside of Detroit.
• Nevada – Republicans had very strong challengers in two U.S. House seats just outside of Las Vegas, but both came up short to the Democrat incumbents.
• Pennsylvania – Republicans held two competitive U.S. House Seats. However, they failed to pick off any of the three vulnerable Democrats in districts outside the major population centers of Allentown, Pittsburgh, and Scranton.

The geographic and demographic analysis of these key states reveals a lot. Urban and suburban districts in regions across the country turned favorably for Republicans, causing House districts to flip and President Trump to secure key swing states like Florida, Iowa, and Ohio. Having campaigned on law and order in response to the civil unrest throughout the summer, it makes sense why Republicans saw their prospects improve in these areas. However it is odd that these gains happened nearly everywhere in the country except for the key battlegrounds states, especially when President Trump campaigned almost exclusively in these states in the final days. National Review did address outliers for Joe Biden’s performance in several major cities, but no piece has fully captured how Trump performed compared to his 2016 totals and the impact on down ballot races in key urban and suburban centers.

One answer may be that President Trump’s message just did not resonate with the swing voters in these key battlegrounds or that there was a much stronger anti-Trump sentiment that turned out for Biden. That may be true to some degree. Yet why did geographically and demographically-similar cities and regions swing even more favorably for President Trump? The rust belt cities of Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago, and Gary, Indiana saw President Trump improve his vote totals, and in some cases saw Biden lose support compared to past Democrat presidential candidates. Compare those cities to Pittsburgh and Milwaukee, where Joe Biden beat Barack Obama’s unprecedented totals from 2008 and Trump underperformed, even losing support in the blue collar pro-coal, pro-steel city of Pittsburgh. When we compare them, something is amiss.

Another theory is that conservative values are gaining traction in unlikely areas, but voters just did not like Trump and his personality and so voted against him. However, if that were the case, then it would have been likely that at least one U.S. Senate or House seat would have gone in Republicans’ favor in either Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, or Pennsylvania. Instead, Democrats won nearly every close race.

It is not clear what this contrast between the presidential results and the down ballot races in key swings states means, but it certainly exists. If voter fraud were occurring, that could help explain it. There continue to be allegations of targeted voter fraud in these key swing states; allegations are currently being resolved by courts and state legislatures.

Whatever the ultimate explanation, these seemingly strange outcomes in down ballot races deserve to be analyzed and explained.
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Connor Semelsberger writes for FRC Action. Tags: Connor Semelsberger, Conservative Values, Won Big, Across America, Except in Contested Swing States 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 Rural Way

City-dwellers and suburbanites get a hard lesson in human nature, common sense, and the value of self-reliance.

Victor Davis Hanson

by Victor Davis Hanson: Almost every national Election Night reveals the same old red/blue map. The country geographically is a sea of red. The coasts and small areas along the southern border and around the Great Lakes remain blue atolls.

Yet when the maps are recalibrated for population rather than area, the blue areas blow up, expanding to smother half the country — a graphical metaphor for the dominant cultural influence of city over country.

Ideological differences are now being recalibrated as rural-urban on issues from guns and abortion to taxes and foreign policy.

Red/conservative is often synonymous with small-town and rural.
Blue/progressive is equivalent to urban/suburban.

Gone are the old New Deal Democratic coalitions of New England and the South, or the 19th- and mid-20th-century Republican alliances between the farm belt and the mid-Atlantic states.

Instead, globalization has become a worrisome force-multiplying effect of geography, culture, and ideology — not seen since the political differences of the pre-Civil War mapped out two potentially different Americas, north and south of the Mason-Dixon line.

On Election Night, news analysts and talking heads matter-of-factly cite returns as if there is no need to explain that the red areas are more rural and conservative, while the blue cities and suburbs are more progressive. A few small adjustments are made for Republican-run cities in mostly red Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas, and some blue or purple rural states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine that serve as rural retirements and refuges for the nearby blue states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York.

The media figures who report on the election are urban denizens. Few have any idea of why half the country votes as it does. So they just assume that pollsters, like themselves, are better educated, smarter, and of greater value to society than those whom they often to fail to find in their surveys.

The cities since antiquity have been considered cosmopolitan and progressive; the countryside, traditional and conservative. In the positive appraisal, Western literature always thematically emphasized the sophistication and energy of cities, balanced by the purity and autonomy of the country.

More darkly, in the pejorative sense, the former of the cities were all too prone to Petronian decadence and excess; the latter outside the walls, to Aristophanic parochialism and rusticity. Aristotle adjudicated the divide in his Politics by arguing that the “best” type of democracy was in a sense the least — and thus the most rural (farmers by necessity would have less time to walk into town, loiter about, and as “agora-lounger” busybodies cram the assembly).

Much of these eternal radical differences transcend time and space. Even in the age of a mobile and transient population — and our omnipresent Internet, social media, cellphones, and telecommuting — the material landscapes, population densities, and need for physical work still explain radical differences in outlook and mindset. That eternal divide guided our gentry Framers. In classical terms, they took for granted that their farms and urban lives balanced each other and remedied the limitations of each.

That fact of the rural/urban dichotomy is underappreciated, but it remains at the heart of the Constitution — to the continuing chagrin of our globalist coastal elite who wish to wipe it out. The Electoral College and the quite antithetical makeup of the Senate and the House keep a Montana, Utah, or Wyoming from being politically neutered by California and New York. The idea, deemed outrageously “unfair” by academics and the media, is that a Wyoming rancher might have as much of a say in the direction of the country as thousands of more redundant city dwellers. Yet the classical idea of federal republicanism was to save democracy by not allowing 51 percent (of an increasingly urban population) to create laws on any given day at any given hour.

So the originalist theories of the Founders — nursed on classical tropes found in bucolic, pastoral, and agrarian romance, and on the skepticism of human nature conveyed throughout classical political philosophy — was that in a republic, real diversity is needed to offset sheer numbers. That is, rural voices, always to be in a minority, provided checks on the exuberance and occasional danger of the volatile cities, prone to fads that could devolve into hysteria and worse.

Few city dwellers realize that half the country probably always found the increasingly hyped burlesque halftime shows of the Super Bowl buffoonish, boring, and a time to wash dishes, make a beer run, or shut off the television. The old network anchors never grasped that plenty didn’t appreciate their snarky frowns and their eye-rolling.

Articles written under the masthead of the New York Times mean no more to someone in North Dakota than posts from a blogger with a well-viewed website.

Live in Portland, Seattle, Washington, D.C., or New York, or watch news generated from there, and an American might think that what BLM and Antifa wrought this summer was America’s collective future — until one paused and thought, “Why don’t they try all that across the small towns of Kansas or in the midsize cities of Utah or the suburbs of Oklahoma City?” And, “Why isn’t Antifa taking hold in Tulare County, Calif., or Arkansas?”

The Western exegeses of these differences was often simplistic. Rural people, with or without proximity to the frontier, had to rely more on themselves for their own defense, for obtaining their water, for disposing their sewage, for feeding themselves. What they did not make or grow themselves, they saw produced by others living around them — minerals, metals, fuels, wood — to be sent into the city.

Nature for them was not distant, not a romance, but a mercurial partner to be respected, feared, and occasionally with difficulty brought to heel and for a while harnessed. When you see, firsthand, wondrous life born around you, from the barn to the woods, and rural underpopulation not overpopulation is an ancient worry, abortion is not just a moral crime, but a tragic loss of a precious resource, a needed voice, another ally in an eternal struggle.

From that autonomy or autarchy came a distrust of larger government redistribution and dependence on anonymous others. Self-sufficiency was an impossible luxury for dependent city-dwellers in a dense Athens, Constantinople, Rome, Paris, Venice, or London, whose sophistication, talents, and scientific knowledge came at the cost of being entirely reliant on the extramural activities of those with less impressive speech, appearance, and manners.

For the ancients, living in the same place as one’s parents was not proof of parochial mediocrity (although Jefferson thought that a farm was a refuge from failure elsewhere), but an obligation to allow the next in line to have the same chance to live apart from the city. And indeed, even in our increasingly urbanized world, the lessons of vestigial agrarianism still can echo and permeate our society in the most unexpected ways.

In our time, savior-designate candidate Michael Bloomberg blew $1 billion without winning one delegate. He poured $100 million into Florida and Ohio to see both states go for Trump far more easily this year than in 2016.

Bloomberg could ridiculously lecture an audience of Oxford sophisticates that farming was just a simplistic matter of dropping a seed in the ground and watching it sprout automatically (“You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn”) — without being laughed out of the lecture hall as a dunce. Imagine if a farmer had said of stocks, “You just make a call, place your buy, and up comes the dividend.”

In other words, Bloomberg was a man unaware of his own limitations. The ability to navigate Wall Street, or the financial markets of communist China, or A-list dinners, or the New York–Washington media, or to be courted by Aspen and Davos did not mean that he had any appreciation for the tenuousness of his own existence, that all his billions could not guarantee him water, food, or sewage removal during a COVID lockdown, or that in extremis he could secure his family without the NYPD. Had Bloomberg in 2010 just taken care of the snow first, and fatty foods and super-sized drinks second, he might have avoided the disastrous effects of the blizzard that paralyzed New York.

We can see this incidental dichotomy between pragmatism and accepted authority almost everywhere today. In the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings, crusty old farmer emeritus Chuck Grassley drew on common sense and a knowledge of human nature; urban sophisticate Dianne Feinstein, on ideology and current fad. Missouri’s Josh Hawley recently sliced and diced the masters of the Silicon Valley Universe, because he was able to reduce all their arguments from authority and esoterica about social media into the pragmatic: These billionaire modulators of influence had no defense of their own power to adjudicate the free expression of millions of Americans. Read dairy farmer Devin Nunes’s final memo concerning the Russian collusion hoax and compare it to that of his counterpart Adam Schiff. The former is blunt, truthful, and logical; the latter rhetoric is a dishonest mess masquerading as an exposé.

In other words, there is still much value in vestigial Americans countering the increasing legions of apartment-living, densely packed, and mass-transit-community urban dwellers, as we saw during the COVID epidemic and subsequent quarantine. A Governor Noem of South Dakota, despite a media hit campaign, radiated steady and consistent confidence in her own people, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio were a maze of contradictions and policy incoherence, as their yesterday’s gospel became tomorrow’s heresy.

A balance between real and urban, Homo rusticus and urbanus is, of course, needed. But in our currently globalized and bifurcated society, the influence and power of our coasts have vastly overshadowed those of the interior. We have measured worth by money, credentials, and titles and inordinately been awed by the veneer of cosmopolitanism that surrounds them. Losers never learned to code, winners thought mere coding was quaint. Welding and plumbing were drudgery; a barista with $100,000 in debt from her women’s-studies major was considered the next angry Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Few pondered whether a good welder might make a far better congressman than an indebted sociology graduate, angry that the world had not appreciated his singular college-branded degree.

So much of the absurdity of the modern world relates to a culture entirely divorced from the commonsense audits of 2,500 years of rural pragmatism. Antifa is the ultimate expression of tens of thousands of urban youth, many deeply in college debt, many with degrees but little learning — and oblivious of how they are completely dependent on what they despise, from the police to those who truck in their food and take out their waste, to those who make and sell them their riot appurtenances and communications gadgetry.

Listen to the automaton Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey masquerading as a bewildered Robinson Crusoe, and one shudders that elites like these massage what millions think and how we communicate. The current fear is not just that America is becoming an urbanized and suburbanized nation — in the manner that many of the Founders feared would make our nation a European replicant.

Rather, what is strange is that so many who are not rural are becoming fearful of their cannibalistic own, and what they have in store for the suburbs and cities — and thus are becoming desperate either to graft the values of the countryside onto the urban sprawl or leave the latter altogether.
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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. H/T National Review.

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The Legal Fight Continues, Getting Tough On Israel, Teen Indoctrination

Gary Bauer

by Gary Bauer: The Legal Fight Continues
Yesterday Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), authorized the Biden campaign to access federal funding and facilities in order to begin the formal transition process.

It was telling to see one of the reasons President Trump mentioned for allowing the transition to begin. The president tweeted:

"I want to thank Emily Murphy at GSA for her steadfast dedication and loyalty to our Country. She has been harassed, threatened, and abused – and I do not want to see this happen to her, her family, or employees of GSA. Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good fight, and I believe we will prevail!

"Nevertheless, in the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same."

Murphy was being subjected to what Christians, pro-life advocates and other conservatives are routinely subjected too. She was being threatened and doxed, and the president didn't want her to face that any longer.

This is now the established pattern. You could write a book about the people the left has attempted to ruin simply for being conservative. Sadly, it works, and as long as it works the left will continue to do it.

This is a fundamental violation of the rules of a constitutional republic (not to mention basic decency), and we must come up with an answer.

But, as the president reiterated, this development does not in any way impact the ongoing legal challenges in a number of states. Those challenges will continue. The legal stumbling block so far is completely unrelated to when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris receive their transition briefings.

The main legal problem, as Rudy Giuliani has alleged, is that once invalid ballots were separated from their envelopes and put into the voter stream, judges who have heard these cases are confronted with a very extreme remedy – to throw out all the ballots that the tainted ballots were mixed in with.

I suppose a new election could be ordered under close observation. But those are very difficult legal remedies for any judge to order.

In the meantime, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to expedite the Trump campaign's lawsuit against the state of Pennsylvania, taking the case one step closer to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ready For Open Borders?
If Joe Biden becomes president, we know a lot of bad things will take place on inauguration day as the Biden/Harris team prepares to undo many of President Trump's executive orders. But it has already started to happen.

Sources in the Border Patrol and ICE report that many people are gathering at the southern border. When the October fake news polls showed a Biden landslide coming, there was an immediate uptick in the number of people attempting to cross the border illegally.

It's easy to understand why. Biden has already said he will end deportations, scrap virtually all of Trump's border control policies and provide healthcare to illegal immigrants. Border Patrol officials are warning of a coming crisis on the southern border.

By the way, Biden has announced that Alejandro Mayorkas will lead the Department of Homeland Security. Well, Mayorkas was the creator of Obama's DACA program, which instituted a quasi-amnesty by instructing immigration authorities to ignore existing law.

And here is an issue that our lying media will not report: The growing number of people who attempted to illegally enter the country in October are putting Border Patrol agents and Americans in border communities at increased risk.

Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan said last week:

"Against the backdrop of an unprecedented public health crisis, those attempting to illegally enter our country are actually increasing. The migrants themselves, what we're encountering, they know or highly suspect that they have COVID, yet they still try to illegally enter."

No one is pointing out that the open borders left is promising free healthcare in the middle of a pandemic while shutting down our businesses and churches. The responsible thing to do would be to shut down illegal immigration rather than our economy.

But once again the left is punishing hard-working Americans who know that businesses can't survive without consumers and profits.

Getting Tough On Israel
Yesterday we noted that Joe Biden intended to nominate Avril Haines to be his director of National Intelligence. In May, Haines signed a letter urging delegates at the Democrat National Convention to adopt a tougher stand against Israel.

The letter complained that U.S. policy was too pro-Israel. It condemned Israel's "ongoing occupation" of Palestinian territory and "settlement expansion." The letter also demanded "clear opposition to violence, terrorism and incitement from all sides."

First of all, there is no "moral equivalency" between the state of Israel and the terrorism and incitement from the Palestinian Authority. To suggest that "all sides" are guilty of "violence, terrorism and incitement" is beyond disgusting.

Second, there are 600,000 Israelis living in these so-called "settlements." What Haines is really objecting to is Jews living in Judea and Samaria.

So, Joe Biden's director of National Intelligence thinks Israel is guilty of "terrorism and incitement," and that Jews have no right to live in Judea and Samaria. That tells you a lot about what the next four years could be like.

Teen Indoctrination
Parenting has never been an easy job, and it has only gotten harder in the digital age. We must be eagle-eyed about what our children and grandchildren are reading. And if they are reading Teen Vogue, there's a huge problem: It is filled with socialist poison.

The outlet recently published a column that condemns America for being founded on genocide and slavery. The column denounces America as "an empire," and declares, "At its core, America's values are white supremacy and capitalism."

Even Joe Biden's call for unity is rejected as "nationalist propaganda," with the author asking, "Why should people who have been systematically oppressed . . . be asked to hold hands with their oppressors?"

This is propaganda straight out of the Soviet Union or communist China! And it is being fed to children, indoctrinating them to hate our country.

Renaming The Lincoln Project
You know the Lincoln Project. It's a group of Never Trumpers funded by left-wing millionaires and billionaires. They have run ads undermining President Trump, attacking conservative senators, and they continue doing so today.

Their latest ads suggest that a president who follows legal remedies is guilty of being undemocratic and like dictators in Russia, China and North Korea. They are also condemning anyone who defends the president as dangerous to our democracy.

How can these so-called "Republicans," who are getting money from socialist Democrats to smear a conservative populist, sleep at night?

They seem intent on destroying the party of Lincoln, turning it into another version of the Democrat Party. They're already looking for "common ground" with AOC and her progressive squad.

I suggest they change their name to the "John Wilkes Booth Project." He was on the Democrats' side too.
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Gary Bauer (@GaryLBauer)  is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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Tags: Gary Bauer, Campaign for Working Families, The Legal Fight Continues, Getting Tough On Israel, Teen Indoctrination To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Biden Taps Globalist Blinken for Sec of State

And picks John Kerry to serve as special climate envoy. 

Anthony Blinken

by Joseph Klein: Joe Biden has gone back to the well of the foreign policy establishment to select his Secretary of State-designate. Biden chose his longtime confidante Antony Blinken, who served as the former Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy National Security Advisor in the Obama administration and as then-Vice President Biden’s National Security Advisor. Blinken is a globalist who worries more about how other countries perceive America than how other countries, especially China, have manipulated multilateral institutions and agreements to the detriment of the American people.

Indeed, Blinken wants to re-engage with the Chinese regime to deal with such global threats as climate change and pandemics. Blinken seems oblivious to the fact that China has made these problems worse in pursuit of its goal to overtake the United States as the world’s number one superpower. China has continued to increase its greenhouse gas emissions to support its economic growth while expecting the U.S to cut its emissions. And China hid the truth about the coronavirus outbreak, which originated in China, during the outbreak’s early days when the virus could have been prevented from spreading worldwide.

Blinken has said that climate change will be “a number one priority” for a Biden administration. To drive this point home, Biden chose former Secretary of State John Kerry to serve as his special presidential envoy for climate. In that role Kerry will sit on the National Security Council, where he will have plenty of opportunity to spout off to a receptive audience that climate change is our preeminent national security threat.

During the Obama-Biden administration, Kerry was a prime mover behind engaging with China to enter into the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Kerry was swindled then. And now he is back. “America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is,” Kerry tweeted after Biden’s announcement. “I'm proud to partner with the President-elect, our allies, and the young leaders of the climate movement to take on this crisis as the President's Climate Envoy.”

Through the artifice of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, China managed to maneuver the Obama-Biden administration into agreeing to severely handicap the U.S. economy. The Obama-Biden administration committed to make significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, through stifling, job-killing regulations. China meanwhile would be allowed to continue spewing more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as it further accelerates its economic growth. President Trump wisely withdrew the U.S. from this con game. But Biden, with Blinken and Kerry by his side, intends to rejoin the Paris Agreement on Climate Change on day one of his administration and allow China to take us to the cleaners once again.

During an interview with the Hudson Institute last July, Antony Blinken admitted that “the status quo was really not sustainable particularly when it comes to China’s commercial and economic practices,” including “the lack of reciprocity in the relationships.” But Blinken, who left out his boss Biden’s part in helping to create this non-sustainable status quo in the first place, is ready to repeat the same mistakes while hoping this time for a more constructive response from China. That fits the classic definition of insanity, attributed to Albert Einstein, which is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Beginning in 2002, Blinken served for six years as Democratic Staff Director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when then-Senator Biden was committee chairman. Biden at the time was pushing for expanded trade with China within the framework of the rules-based World Trade Organization. Biden expected China to play by the rules and to reform its own government as it was integrated into the global economic system. That didn’t happen.

Nothing changed while Blinken was working closely with then-Vice President Biden as his National Security Advisor. Biden said in May 2011 that “a rising China is a positive, positive development, not only for China but for America and the world writ large.”

We know how that worked out. On Biden and Blinken’s watch at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then during the Obama administration, a “rising China” has turned into an extremely negative development for “America and the world writ large.” Yet we are now supposed to believe that this same dynamic duo, together with John Kerry, will fix the mess that they helped create by reversing President Trump’s successful efforts to confront the “rising China” head-on. That’s like calling the arsonist to put out the fire.

During his Hudson Institute interview, Blinken said that “we are in a competition with China and there’s nothing wrong with competition if it’s fair.” Duh! The question is how to make it fair. Blinken offers more of the same conventional wisdom that he and the rest of the foreign policy establishment are so used to peddling.

“We need, in the first instance, to invest in our own competitiveness,” Blinken said. Until the China Virus came to our shores, the Trump administration had already restored the competitiveness of the American economy to new heights, including in manufacturing. But fair competitiveness requires a level playing field. And with China that means removing from the playing field China’s unfair trade practices and massive thefts of intellectual property. Blinken said during his Hudson Institute interview that a Biden administration will be tougher with China than in years past. But there is nothing in Biden’s long record of failures or in what Blinken recommended in his interview with the Hudson Institute that gives us any reason to believe him.

“We need to rally our allies and partners instead of alienating them to deal with some of the challenges that China poses,” Blinken suggested. Fine, but what happens if, out of fear, self-interest or both, they refuse to cooperate in taking on China’s increasingly aggressive behavior? Trump was willing to lead by example from the front with strong actions of his own. He had no use for collective cowardice with the U.S. leading from behind.

Blinken said during his Hudson Institute interview that “we need to be standing up for our values and put them back at the center of our foreign policy, not walk away from them.” While Blinken no doubt intended this comment as a slap at the Trump administration’s focus on economic and national security issues with China, he is barking up the wrong tree. Trump did not walk away from our values. Far from it. Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020. And the Trump administration followed through by imposing sanctions on several senior officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The list of sanctioned senior officials included a member of CCP's most powerful political body, the 25-member Politburo.

The difference between Trump and the Biden-Blinken-Kerry foreign policy establishment is that Trump does not stop with high sounding rhetoric or meaningless symbolic gestures. He takes effective action.

Blinken makes the same mistake when it comes to defending the disastrous nuclear deal the Obama-Biden administration negotiated with Iran, with John Kerry leading the charge. Blinken sharply criticized the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the deal (known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) and apply maximum economic pressure on the Iranian regime. “We’re heading right back to where we were before the agreement,” Blinken said, “which is a really terrible binary choice between either taking action to stop the program of all of the potential unintended consequences of doing that (sic) or doing nothing and allowing Iran to be in a breakout position where it can develop a nuclear weapon on very, very short order.”

However, we would be facing precisely the same “binary choice” Blinken worries about just a few years from now if the U.S. had remained in the JCPOA as originally negotiated. Obama himself admitted back in 2015 that once the deal’s restrictions on Iran’s use of advanced centrifuges are lifted, Iran would be able to break out to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb in “almost zero” time by 2028 or so. All that the JCPOA did was to kick the can down the road for a short time. By then, Iran will be more militarily prepared to defend its nuclear weapons production facilities than it is now.

Dictatorships like the Chinese and Iranian regimes pay lip service to the rules of multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization and World Health Organization while regularly flouting them in practice. They enter into multilateral agreements such as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the JCPOA with every intention of manipulating them at the expense of their adversaries in a zero-sum game. With globalists like Antony Blinken and John Kerry around, Trump’s America First policies will be replaced by Biden’s sellout of America.
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Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam. He writes for FrontPage Mag.

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Tags: Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Cancel Fox News?

Conservative anger with the network has been growing lately.

by Nate Jackson: It’s been brewing for some time, the tiff between President Donald Trump and Fox News. But when the network called Arizona for Joe Biden on Election Night, it was the final straw for some number of conservative viewers. If New York/Beltway churn was what people were after, fine — those outlets are a dime a dozen. But many conservatives who want conservative news were going to look elsewhere.

We’ve certainly had our beefs with Fox over the years, primarily because of its ad-revenue-driven model for infotainment. Hyping the same non-stories 24/7 with obnoxious “ALERTS” every time a meaningless detail is released gets eyeballs, and eyeballs get advertisers to pay for time. By stark contrast, your humble team at The Patriot Post, which began our enterprise just before Fox did in 1996, opted not to bow to the wishes of advertisers by electing to be donor supported. That way we could focus on what matters, not on what sells. At Fox, however, the almighty advertising dollar speaks — sometimes loudly. When everything is an “ALERT,” nothing is.

That was certainly the case with former Fox host Bill O'Reilly, who was dumped in 2017 after 21 years at the network. The advertisers spoke, and Bill had to go.

But are conservative news consumers cutting off their nose to spite their face?

Over at the Washington Examiner, Derek Hunter recounts some of Fox’s good work just this year: “interview[ing] Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s former business partner”; covering the “BLM-Antifa goons destroying cities and attacking people”; having actual diversity of opinion on its programs; and “the Fox prime-time lineup is unapologetically conservative.” Fox is the only major outlet to give airtime to the Biden Crime Family scandal.

We’re always glad to see competition in the marketplace no matter the product. Competition makes things better. Along those same lines, we also believe that Cancel Culture is of the Left — not of the Right. Squelching speech, canceling those with whom you disagree, is anti-competitive and anti-Liberty. Those are not conservative values.

Yet there is a growing movement on the Right that seeks to shun and silence anyone or any publication that gets so much as a toe over the line of whatever is perceived as acceptable opinion. Fox is only the biggest target. This, again, is leftist thinking, not the practice of Patriots who love free speech and Liberty itself.

There is, of course, a limit to how much garbage anyone can put up with, and we understand why a lot of folks have concluded Fox has simply crossed that line too many times. There is little need to watch CNN, for example, to know what Democrats want you to think. We merely offer the idea that, sometimes, reading and listening to a variety of opinions, especially from those on our own side, makes us all better than if we hunker down in our echo chambers and only hear what we want to hear.
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Nate Jackson writes for The Patriot Post.

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Past Is Prologue: Obama-Biden Was Owned and Operated by Big Tech, So…

by Seton Motley, Contributing Author: “What is past is prologue” — William Shakespeare, The Tempest

The Barack Obama-Joe Biden Administration was exceedingly awful in ways too exceeding to innumerate.

Which is why successor President Donald Trump’s three year pre-China Virus Lockdown turnaround to perhaps the greatest economy in American history was so exceedingly impressive.

One is left to wonder: What will a prospective Biden Administration do – should they be successful in finally, fully stealing the election?

The Bard tells us: All the awfulness Biden foisted upon us as second banana – he will almost certainly foist again as the lead banana. In this now-Banana Republic.

One area in which Trump Made America Great Again? Which was a fundamental component of his entire overall economic turnaround? Intellectual Property (IP) creation and its protection.

Which was a good thing, Because Obama-Biden destroyed US:

“When Obama entered the White House, the US was on the global innovation ranking list – consistently #1 or very close to it.

“By the time we were rid of Obama?”

Intellectual Property Crisis: U.S. Drops Out Of The Top Ten In Innovation Ranking

How’d Trump – and his head of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Andrei Iancu – do in cleaning up this particular Obama-Biden mess?:

“Iancu’s work to restore our patent system – has borne fruit….We’re now back up to #3. And rising with a bullet.”

Except that bullet will now almost certainly be stopped…and reversed. By an incoming Biden – who ain’t no Superman.

Facing the Consequences: Biden’s Transition Team Should Concern the IP Community:

“(L)ooming for the patent and innovation community is a potential disaster.”

I am exceedingly older and have seen much of humanity and its nature. This political thing – the desire to cut one’s own throat – still vexes me:

“I know that many patent and innovation proponents did not vote for President Trump, (but) elections have consequences.

“A byproduct of President Trump losing, is the loss of the pro-patent and unapologetically pro-patent system agenda ushered in by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu.

“It also means losing the pro-patent agenda – the New Madison Approach – brought to bear at the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division by Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim….

“(T)here is growing concern that the groundwork laid by each man will be erased by a Biden Administration, which would be for the benefit of technology implementers – who are sometimes referred to as efficient infringers because of their cavalier attitude toward the patent rights of others.”

“Efficient infringers” with a “cavalier attitude toward the patent rights of others” – is a delicate way of saying “frigging patent thieves.”

We don’t yet know for sure how awful Biden will be – but we can guess. Past being prologue:

“A review of the announced members of the Biden Transition Team only bolsters these concerns.

“It appears as if the only person who will advise a President-Elect Biden regarding the Department of Commerce who has any knowledge of patents is Colleen Chien, who served in the Obama Administration in the Office of Science and Technology Policy during Obama’s second term.

“Chien, who, according to her LinkedIn page, ‘helped formulate White House policy on innovation and intellectual property with a focus on patents,’ advised President Obama during a period that saw former Google Executive Michelle Lee chosen as Director of the USPTO.”

Wait – Google?

Google’s Business Model – Is Theft

The Evidence Google’s Systematic Theft is Anti-Competitive

I would argue that again putting the likes of that $1.2 trillion fox in charge of the hen house isn’t exactly sound IP policy for the US.

But then, I’m not bought and paid for by the likes of that $1.2 trillion fox.

The Obama-Biden Administration absolutely was.

Currently In Power: The Google Administration:

“‘Search giant averages a White House meeting a week during Obama administration.’”

And it looks like we’re again on the way to anti-IP crony captivity in the Biden Administration:

“Chien’s views on patents are academic, not grounded in the real world, and her default is to be in favor of Silicon Valley implementers who successfully convinced Congress and the Obama Administration to significantly tilt U.S. patent laws away from innovators and toward infringers.”

“Infringers?” This guy Gene Quinn is way too exceedingly nice. They’re IP thieves. Google is the biggest IP thief this side of Communist China. In fact, they’re brothers in thieving arms.

Google’s Thieving Collaboration with Communist China Doesn’t Speak Well for Google

And Google and their thieving Big Tech cohorts – have already primed the IP heist pump with scads of Biden campaign assistance:

“(T)he social media giants and Google did much to support the Democratic ticket during this most recent election, not just financially, but very publicly suppressing news stories (for whatever reason) and removing conservative media from search results….Biden owes quite a lot to the FAANGs of Silicon Valley.

“Will this mean the next USPTO Director will again come from Google or Facebook or Amazon, as was the case during Obama’s second term?

“Will the antitrust lawsuit just filed against Google continue, or will the Antitrust Division of the DOJ step in? Will the Antitrust Division of the DOJ withdraw from the 2019 joint policy statement entered into with the USPTO and NIST, which recognized that injunctions can be appropriate even when dealing with standard essential patents?

“Given the support the Biden-Harris ticket received from Silicon Valley and the makeup of the Biden Transition Team, legitimate fears are percolating about whether a first Biden term might look an awful lot like a third Obama term insofar as patents and innovation policy is concerned – even among some Democrats who voted for Biden.”

“Legitimate fears” indeed.

Willie Shakespeare knew of what he wrote:

What is past is prologue.
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Seton Motley is the President of Less Government and he contributes articles to ARRA News Service. Please feel free to follow him him on Facebook.

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Tags: Seton Motley, Less Government, Past Is Prologue, Obama-Biden, Was Owned and Operated, by Big Tech, So… To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Biden’s Allies Threaten Religious Liberty

Joe Biden

by Bill Donohue: Left-wing advocacy organizations are wasting no time pressing Joe Biden to do away with the religious liberty protections afforded by the Trump administration. As we have previously detailed, no president has done more to secure religious liberty than Donald Trump.

The three most prominent organizations asking Biden to undo Trump’s progress are the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign, and the Center for American Progress.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is obsessed with sex: it wants to make sure that homosexuals, the sexually confused (transgender people), and women seeking an abortion never have rights that are subordinate to religious rights. It does not matter to the civil libertarians that the former are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution and the latter are enshrined in the First Amendment. The ACLU is worried that “a new wave of bills seeking to create religious exemptions” will succeed, endangering the rights of “LGBTQ” people.

No right is more important than conscience rights, a liberty which is ineluctably tied to religious rights. It is this premier right that the ACLU loathes. In a statement released after the election, it condemned “attempts by the Trump administration to invoke religious or personal beliefs.” It said that such exercises can be used to discriminate against LGBTQ people. It further stated that “invoking religious or moral objections” to the LGBTQ agenda cannot be tolerated.

On November 11, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) issued its “Blueprint for Positive Change 2020.” It is chock-a-block full of recommendations for Biden. One of its priorities is to upend the new direction taken by the Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Health and Human Services under President Trump. It specifically takes aim at the Office’s enforcement of “federal conscience and religious liberty laws.” Once again, the LGBTQ agenda is considered to be more important. Thus HRC joins the ACLU in the left-wing assault on conscience rights.

HRC also wants to pare back the religious liberty protections afforded faith-based programs by the Trump administration. If its position were followed, it would essentially excise the faith element in faith-based initiatives. This, of course, is its goal.

The most draconian recommendation promoted by HRC is its call for the Department of Education to reconsider its standards for accrediting religious institutions of higher education. In short, it wants to deny accreditation to religious colleges and universities that do not meet its secular vision of education.

HRC is incensed over the current mandate that accreditation agencies “respect the stated mission” of these religious institutions. It takes particular umbrage at the religious liberty protections cited in the Higher Education Opportunity Act, a law passed by the Congress during the outgoing Bush administration in 2008.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) encourages the Biden Administration to do everything the ACLU and HRC want, focusing on doing away with religious exemptions initiated by the Trump administration. However, it does have a few novel ideas of its own.

CAP is big on “diversity outreach” efforts to minority religions. This multicultural game, of course, is less interested in recognizing minority religions than it is in whittling away at our Judeo-Christian heritage. It does not stop there.

“Religious outreach efforts should also specifically include secular humanist or nonreligious groups, as well as faith-based or spirit-rooted communities who do not observe a specific religious tradition.” If the gurus who wrote this were honest, they would simply say that religious outreach efforts should embrace organizations founded to subvert religion. Inviting atheists to have a table at religious gatherings is like having racists participate in a forum on racism. Yes, there are non-bigoted atheists, but organized atheist entities invariably harbor an animus against religion.

CAP urges the Biden administration to “safeguard the separation between religion and government.” Really? Then why does it say, “Together with Pope Francis, the Biden administration should organize a global gathering of religious leaders to discuss climate change and refugee issues”?

Whatever happened to that proverbial “wall” separating church and state? No matter, if the pope is to have a voice on climate change (not exactly his specialty), why not invite the Holy Father to share his views on gender ideology—the fanciful notion that we can switch our sex? He properly calls it “demonic.”

Constitutional law professor Patrick Garry notes that it was never the intent of the Founders to “place religion and nonreligion on the same level.” In fact, “Textually, the Constitution provides greater protection of religious practices than for any secular-belief-related activities.” This is what gnaws at the ACLU, HRC and CAP.

Much is being made of Biden’s alleged “devout” Catholic status. Yet many of his polices on life, marriage, the family, and sexuality are at variance with the teachings of the Catholic Church. Now he is being besieged by organizations that are positively inimical to his professed religion. He cannot have it both ways any more. It is time for him to draw a line in the sand, before his allies eviscerate it altogether.
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Bill Donohue (@CatholicLeague) is a sociologist and president of the Catholic League.

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