New ’Woke’ Denomination is a Warning Sign to Christians

by David Closson: Over the weekend, the formation of a new Methodist denomination was announced during an online worship service hosted by former and current Methodist church leaders. According to organizers, the Liberation Methodist Connexion (LMX), as the group will be called, is a socially progressive denomination that will reimage what it means to follow Jesus. But even a cursory review of the new denomination reveals nothing close to orthodox Christianity and something more akin to a Marxist, LGBT-pride.

According to LMX leaders, theology and fidelity to Scripture or Christian theology is not a priority for the new denomination. In fact, as one leader explained, "There are no doctrinal litmus tests" for joining the movement. "We seek not answers that lead to correct doctrines as to why we suffer. We seek correct actions, correct praxis, where God sustains us during the unanswerable questions," argued Rev. Althea Spencer-Miller, another LMX leader.

The creation of the new Methodist denomination is not surprising. At the beginning of the year, representatives of the United Methodist Church tentatively agreed to a proposal to split the nation's second largest Protestant denomination over "fundamental differences" regarding doctrinal differences. In recent years, the denomination had reached an impasse on questions related to the morality of homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and the ordination of clergy who identify as gay.

The anticipated vote to split the denomination was set to take place at the 2020 General Conference in May. However, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the vote has been delayed until fall of 2021. In terms of the details of the proposal, progressives within the United Methodist Church will give a newly formed traditionalist Methodist denomination $25 million. Local churches that choose to affiliate with the traditionalist denomination may retain their assets including church buildings and properties. Moreover, conservative clergy may retain their pensions. These concessions were possible because conservatives maintain a governing majority within United Methodism despite the fact that American Methodist leadership is liberal.

However, as evidenced by this weekend's developments, the extended wait time proved too long for some theologically liberal Methodists who see the new denomination as a better fit for their progressive beliefs. "The timeline of the Holy Spirit is driving our decision to launch the LMX at this moment, and we are following her call," explained Spencer-Mill, while using female pronouns to refer to God.

A cursory overview of the LMX website reveals that the denomination will resemble nothing like the movement started by John and Charles Wesley in the 18th century where the importance of the new birth, works of piety, and missions were emphasized. Instead, leaders of the new group promise to journey toward a "new way of being followers of Christ" which include refuting the "powers, principalities, and privileges" they believe have defined Methodism. These include a litany of isms including colonialism, sexism, clericalism, ableism, ageism, transphobia, and "heteronormativity."

While liberals within Methodism have been pushing for the inclusion of more LGBT affirming stances in recent years, the LMX represents a dramatic break from historic Methodist doctrine. But, and to their credit, the leaders of the LMX -- who proudly list their preferred pronouns on their website -- admit, "LMX theology is not written in stone." But while their theology isn't written in stone (or anywhere that I can find), the purpose behind the group is clear: providing ecclesiastical cover for unorthodox views on marriage and sexuality.

Even though the LMX is clearly out of the mainstream of Methodism, its emergence before the expected denominational split is noteworthy. But it is also cautionary. As Mark Tooley, President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and Methodist leader, recently explained, United Methodism "was from the start an experiment in theological pluralism." This meant that over the years an increasingly wide range of theological views was tolerated within the denomination. Eventually, this meant that heterodox views could coexist with orthodoxy without causing too much of a stir. However, as the broader culture drifted further left on issues such as marriage and human sexuality, the strain between conservatives and liberals over these issues became too much. Thus, in retrospect, the splintering of Methodism over biblical interpretation was predictable. Without clear theological guardrails in place, there was nothing to stop those with unbiblical views from entering the denomination's ranks and no meaningful way to expel them.

Thus, while the LMX will likely remain a small group of former United Methodists and others, it stands as a cautionary tale for churches and denominations around the country. In an age when doctrine is not taken seriously, Christians, for the sake of faithfulness, must insist on sound doctrine and fidelity to God's Word.

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Biden's Bizarre Answer, A Troubling Video, Netanyahu's Warning

Gary Bauer

by Gary Bauer: Biden's Bizarre Answer
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sat down for a joint interview with CNN's Jake Tapper yesterday. It was the typical "puff piece" you would expect from the liberal media, but it got interesting when Tapper asked Biden how he and Harris would handle their significant policy differences.

That question alone is odd. One of them is the president of the United States! The other one isn't. What is there to handle? But the question reinforces the idea that they are equals or that Harris is the president-in-waiting.

But Biden's response was just bizarre. He said:

"Like I told Barack, if I reach something where there's a fundamental disagreement we have based on a moral principle, I'll develop some disease and say I have to resign."

There's so much to unpack here, but this is not how an astute politician who has been in office for nearly 50 years would answer such a question. Is he suggesting that Harris should resign the first time they have a major disagreement? Or is he going to resign?

And Biden also indicated he would have lied to the American people about his health. So, has he been lying about his health for the past year?

A Troubling Video
There was a dramatic development in Georgia overnight. A video captured by surveillance cameras appears to show evidence of major voter fraud. Here's what it shows:

Right after the Republican poll watchers were ordered to leave the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, because they were told that counting was done for the night, what appears to be several "suitcases" that were hidden under a table were taken out and brought over to the counting machines.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on there. So how many ballots were in those suitcases in that one counting center in a state Trump lost by just 13,000 votes?

Responding to this disturbing video, Governor Kemp repeated his call for a signature audit of mail-in ballots, but legal authority to order the audit rests with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

I don't see how this media, and particularly Fox News, can continue insisting that the Trump campaign has failed to provide any evidence. The video is evidence, as are the hundreds of affidavits the campaign has amassed. You can undermine evidence in court, but eyewitnesses signing statements under penalty of perjury is evidence.

Unfortunately, the difficulty for the campaign is that it has struggled to articulate a legal argument that compels a court to jump into the middle of this dispute. If the only available remedies involve throwing out thousands of ballots or invalidating the results of an entire state, it is a rare judge who would be willing to do that.

And that makes the efforts of the president's campaign all the more important because if there is no accountability, then this kind of cheating will be repeated over and over again.

It is imperative that Republican officials prosecute anyone found to be involved in election fraud. There must be a price to be paid or we will lose the republic.

Confronting Communist China
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has authored an important column published in the Wall Street Journal that every American should read. Ratcliffe warns in stark terms that communist China "poses the greatest threat to America today, and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II."

Ratcliffe writes, "The intelligence is clear: Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically."

He also warned that China is launching major influence operations aimed at members of Congress "with six times the frequency of Russia and 12 times the frequency of Iran."

Ratcliffe concludes his column by declaring what is plain to everyone: Communist China represents a generational and existential challenge just as the Soviet Union did and for precisely the same reasons. Beijing intends to "reshape the world in its own image and replace America as the dominant superpower."

Netanyahu's Warning
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly concerned about Joe Biden's stated plans to rejoin the Iranian nuclear deal. In an interview with the Hudson Institute, the prime minister was asked about the possibility of the United States returning to the nuclear deal with Iran.

Netanyahu responded frankly, saying that the 2015 Obama/Biden nuclear deal not only failed to stop Iran's nuclear program, but "opened the cage and let the tiger lose."

It empowered the ayatollah's regime by providing it with billions of dollars in sanctions relief that the regime used to "fund an unbelievable campaign of conflicts. . . expanding into Iraq, expanding into Yemen, establishing military bases in Syria, supporting with greater funds Hezbollah, supporting Islamic Jihad and Hamas. . ."

Netanyahu made it as clear as he possibly could that the Iranian nuclear deal put Israel at risk, our interests at risk and the interests of other Arab nations in the region at risk.

Unlike the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of Iran's nuclear program, the strategy of appeasing Iran with "deals" and sanctions relief makes war more likely.

Israel cannot stand by and watch Iran get billions of dollars from us again that will be used to build up its military, while it rushes toward nuclear weapons and vows to wipe the Jewish state off the map.

And here's something to think about: The Obama/Biden deal gave Iran billions of dollars, including pallets of cash. Soon we could see a Biden/Harris deal that again gives Iran billions of dollars. That would make two stimulus deals that Biden has orchestrated, not for you, but for Iran, an avowed enemy of the United States.

Good News
The Supreme Court this week issued another victory for religious liberty. The justices ordered an appeal of California Governor Gavin Newsom's shutdown of churches to be reheard in light of the Supreme Court's decision against Governor Andrew Cuomo last week.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether the district court gets the hint, but it's clear that a majority of justices want these left-wing restrictions against houses of worship to end.

Speaking of judges, the Republican Senate is continuing to confirm as many of President Trump's conservative judges while it can. Next week, the Senate is expected to confirm Justice Barrett's replacement on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

To date, President Trump has appointed 229 federal judges. That's more than Barack Obama (160), more than George W. Bush (204) and more than Bill Clinton (203) and they each had eight years in the White House!
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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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Effort to Win Georgia Senate Races by Bringing In Out-of-Staters to Vote Is Illegal

by Hans A. von Spakovsky: Celebrities and politicians urging people to visit Georgia and falsely claim residency for the sole purpose of voting in two critical U.S. Senate runoff elections Jan. 5 are advocating criminal actions and should be ashamed of themselves. This call for voter fraud should be rejected.

The Georgia runoff elections are extraordinarily important because they will determine which political party controls the U.S. Senate.

Results of the Nov. 3 election gave Republicans 50 seats in the 100-member Senate and gave Democrats 48. If Republicans win one of the Georgia seats Jan. 5 they will hold a 51-49 majority in the Senate; if the GOP wins both seats it will hold a 52-48 majority.

But if Democrats win both Georgia races the Senate will be split 50-50 between the two parties. Assuming that President Trump’s lawsuits fail and he is replaced by Joe Biden as president Jan. 20, Kamala Harris will be vice president and can break the 50-50 tie in the Senate to give Democrats majority control of the chamber by the slimmest possible margin.

Multiple candidates ran for the two Senate seats representing Georgia, preventing any candidate from gaining a majority. As a result, Georgia law requires the top two candidates for each seat to face each other in runoff elections to be held Jan. 5.

It is a felony for people to visit Georgia and falsely claim to be residents just so they can vote. Millions of us have visited states on vacation or business, but that doesn’t make us residents entitled to vote there.

Georgia Code §21-2-561 states that providing false information when you are registering to vote is a felony. So is voting by an “unqualified elector” under §21-2-571. So if you register to vote when you know that your assertion of residency is false, and then you vote or even just attempt to vote Jan. 5 knowing you are not a qualified voter of the state, you have violated both of these state criminal statutes

Candidates in Georgia Senate runoff elections Jan. 5, left to right: Jon Ossoff, Sen. David Perdue, Raphael Warnock and Sen. Kelly Loeffler.

The punishment for this illegal activity under Georgia law is a minimum of one year and a maximum of up to 10 years in prison and as much as a $100,000 fine. Georgia obviously takes this crime very seriously.

No matter how interested non-residents of Georgia are in that state’s crucial election, they should not listen to the ill-informed, manipulative and reckless tweets and calls for them to break the law and pretend to be Georgia residents just so they can vote in the two Senate races.

This call for illegal voting—coming primarily from Democrats—is a basic betrayal of the democratic process. Everyone who urges or participates in this criminal activity should be ashamed of themselves and deserves to be criticized, no matter who they are and which party they favor.

Fox News reports, for example, that in a now-deleted tweet, New Yorker journalist Eric Levitz wrote: “These run-offs will decide which party controls the Senate and thus, whether we’ll have any hope for a large stimulus/climate bill. If you have the means and fervor to make a temporary move to GA, believe anyone who registers by Dec 7 can vote in these elections.”

Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang also tweeted that he and his wife are moving to Georgia to help the two Democratic contenders.

In the Nov. 3 election in Georgia, Republican Sen. David Perdue received 49.71% of the vote and Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff received 47.96%, forcing them into a runoff.

The other Senate race on the ballot Nov. 3 was a special election. Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson retired in 2018, before the end of his term. Republican Kelly Loeffler was appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp to fill the seat until the special election. She and Rep. Doug Collins split the Republican vote Nov. 3; Loeffler received 25.9% and Collins got 19.95%. Democrat Raphael Warnock got the highest vote total, with 32.91%. Therefore, the two top vote-getters, Loeffler and Warnock, will be in the Jan. 5 runoff election.

Dec. 7 is the deadline to register to vote in Georgia for the Jan. 5 election for any residents of the state who have not already registered, including voters who have just moved to Georgia. But under the Georgia Election Code, §21-2-217, you have to be an actual resident of the state to vote, not just a visitor.

Georgia law says that a voter cannot be in the state “for temporary purposes only without the intention of making [Georgia] such person’s permanent place of abode.” In other words, if you head to Georgia for the primary purpose of helping the candidates in the special election with no intention of actually staying in the state and living there, you are not eligible to register or vote.

Those who think they can get around this requirement by simply lying and asserting their intention to make Georgia their permanent abode should beware. Under the law, county registrars are given the authority to consider a long list of other factors that may contradict the “applicant’s expressed intent.”

These factors include an individual’s “business pursuits, employment, income sources, residence for income tax purposes ... leaseholds, sites of personal and real property owned by the applicant, motor vehicle and other personal property registration, and other such factors that registrars may reasonably deem necessary to determine” the applicant’s legal residence for voting purposes.

And it is not just registrars. Under Georgia law, §21-2-230, any registered voter can challenge the eligibility of any other registrant in his or her county or municipality. So there is an entire army of grassroots Georgia voters out there who can be, and should be, on the lookout for out-of-staters registering to vote who falsely claim to live in their neighborhoods and their communities.

The Jan. 5 Senate races in Georgia are understandably capturing national attention, and both Republicans and Democrats are mounting major efforts to win the seats. That’s how democracy is supposed to work. But having out-of-state voters visit a state for a few weeks to masquerade as Georgia residents is not a democratic exercise—it’s a crime.

Anyone who visits Georgia temporarily and falsely claims to be a resident cheats the real residents of the state—no matter which side of the political aisle they favor—by interfering in their choice of who should represent them in Congress. There’s no justification for that, no matter how passionate you are about the outcome of an election.

Vote in your own home state when elections are held—not in the home state of others.
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Hans von Spakovsky, an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. More ARRA News Service articles by or about Hans von Spakovsky.

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Tags: Hans von Spakovsky, Effort to Win, Georgia Senate Races, by Bringing In, Out-of-Staters, to Vote Is Illegal To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Unserious

by Kerby Anderson: Most Americans say we face serious problems and yet there is growing evidence that we aren’t really serious about serious problems. Ned Ryan wrote a commentary about “An Unserious Movement for an Unserious People.” Although many of his criticisms are focused on the Republican party, most of his comments apply to both parties and most political leaders today.

He says we need to acknowledge that we “in many ways, have become an unserious people. No serious civilization and society would allow a fraction of what is taking place here—from the absurdity of our education system to the dominance of big tech monopolies to our current form of elections.”

Let’s just focus on the election system. The last elections were a reminder that we allowed mail-in ballots, questionable voting software, and voting rolls with lots of inaccuracies. For example, the mail-in ballot system we have has been rejected by “nearly all civilized nations, ones even the Left recognizes as among the most advanced.”

What about electronic voting? “Canada will not even allow electronic voting. They have paper ballots and have observers installed in every polling station because faith in the outcome of elections is important there.”

In the past, I have asked how serious we are about education. Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools is $739 billion. That works out to $14,439 per public school student. Let me ask you a question, if I gave you more than $14,000 per student, would you spend it the way we currently spend it?

Same question for health care. We currently spend $3.6 trillion on health care. If I gave you more than $3 trillion to spend, would you spend it the way we currently spend it? Of course not. We aren’t really serious.
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Kerby Anderson (@KerbyAnderson) is an author, lecturer, visiting professor and radio host and contributor on nationally syndicated Point of View and the "Probe" radio programs.

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Supreme Court Sides Against Newsom on California Church Restrictions

California Gov. Gavin Newsom

by Mary Margaret Olohan: The U.S. Supreme Court sided Thursday against California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s restrictions on worship services during the coronavirus pandemic.

Justices tossed out an order from a Central District of California court that had upheld the Democratic governor’s restrictions on houses of worship, CBS News reported. In light of last week’s Supreme Court ruling, which granted temporary relief from coronavirus restrictions imposed on houses of worship by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, also a Democrat, the justices sent the dispute back to a lower court for further review.

The conservative justices, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, favored religious organizations in the Thanksgiving 5-4 ruling, while Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal justices. It was the first time Barrett was a deciding factor as the court’s newest justice after replacing the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

As we work to slow the latest surge of #COVID19 -- small businesses need immediate relief.

Our Emergency Relief Package will provide businesses a bridge while we wait for federal funds and work with the legislature to provide longer term aid. https://t.co/qauPDXrKY8

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) December 1, 2020

The majority said that Cuomo’s coronavirus restrictions on religious communities are “far more restrictive than any Covid-related regulations that have previously come before the Court, much tighter than those adopted by many other jurisdictions hard hit by the pandemic, and far more severe than has been shown to be required to prevent the spread of the virus.”

Harvest Rock Church and Harvest International Ministries brought the California case to the Supreme Court, arguing that Newsom’s restrictions on houses of worship violated the First Amendment, CBS reported.

Lawyers for Harvest Rock Church argued that Newsom allowed nonreligious businesses or entities to open or gather with few restrictions while restricting houses of worship more severely, according to the publication.

“For the governor, COVID-19 restrictions are apparently optional and penalty free,” the lawyers argued. “But for Churches or anyone worshipping in their own home with someone who does not live there, COVID-19 restrictions are mandatory and enforced via criminal penalties.”

Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation and shared on The Daily Signal.

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Democrat Lockdowns Exempt Hollywood, Destroy Small Businesses

by Daniel Greenfield: Before Thanksgiving, Los Angeles imposed a curfew and, in a shocking oversight, asked Hollywood to follow it. While the entertainment industry isn't as big a part of the local economy as it would like you to think, its producers, directors, and stars provide a disproportionate share of the capital that the Democrats politicians who run the place use to get elected to higher office.

After ordering Hollywood to restrict filming to the same curfew as other businesses, a few hours later the order was withdrawn followed by a final plea to film shoots to “to voluntarily limit and/or avoid activities likely to invite a negative community response" which could "jeopardize community confidence in our ability to operate safely."

As if allowing movie studios to shoot around the clock while shutting down small businesses might "invite a negative community response" or raise questions about the corrupt system.

The film permit office now claims that “the State of California has viewed workers supporting the film, television and commercial production industry… as essential for the state’s critical infrastructure.”

What role does shooting movies play in the “critical infrastructure” of California? Money.

Not for the economy. In that regard, the entertainment industry is much less crucial than many of the industries that had been shut down by the lockdowns. With unemployment claims topping 8 million and California Democrat leaders fighting to eliminate freelance workers, that’s a drop in the bucket. If the crews in question were working in restaurants, they wouldn’t matter.

But the critical infrastructure that Hollywood funds is the political ambitions of the Democrats.

During the gubernatorial race, Hollywood poured millions into Newsom’s campaign, and celebrity fundraising helped put Garcetti into the mayor’s office. The Democrat with the biggest haul of industry cash usually wins. Your local pizza shop isn’t going to compete with that.

If only there were some sort of industry dedicated to exposing social injustice using art.

While restaurants spent a fortune prepping to meet the new regulations, only to be shut down anyway, the entertainment industry goes into a new lockdown with nothing to worry about.

All of this is happening under the watch of Muntu Davis, LA’s top health officer who was picked in the wake of the Black Lives Matter race riots to implement “equity”. Equity is now the top value at LA County's Department of Public Health which declares that it seeks to "ensure just systems, policies and practices". That means giving Disney a pass, but shutting down cafes.

This is what social justice lockdowns look like. Not just in LA, but across the country.

"New York City's economy is in a downturn, but film production has been a bright spot," a New York Times article chirps. Even while Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio targeted Chassidic Jews, ranting about weddings and synagogues, the entertainment industry and its allied media were exempted, and the accompanying rules were bent and broken.

Even while Democrat leaders were lecturing about the dangers of church and synagogue services, the Video Music Awards went on and celebrities were allowed to dodge curfew.

Since no election could go forward without Saturday Night Live, the high school talent show staffed by unfunny social justice activists, with occasional celebrity cameos, went forward, along with a live studio audience. Cuomo and De Blasio, not to mention the media, decided not to notice that SNL was flouting the rules by paying audience members so they counted as crew.

Having a live audience of Manhattanites to laugh when you howl insults at President Trump is an essential activity in New York. Unlike irresponsible, non-essential stuff like religious services.

As the New York Times notes, "The major studios... all report that they are full." 559 permits have been granted and 35 series are already filming in the city even though, as one studio boss notes, “one person every week or two test positive somewhere on the lot.” Unlike churches or synagogues, or weddings, these shoots are never described as superspreader events.

In a truly surreal scene, New Amsterdam, a TV drama, was caught filming outside Bellevue Hospital, blocking the path of real doctors and nurses, a population prone to infections. Even while Democrat leaders complain that there aren’t enough hospital beds, the NBC medical drama takes up space in and around hospitals while getting a free pass from the authorities.

The Times story noted that, “the large crew found it impossible to perfectly socially distance” and leaves it at that, while photos show no actual social distancing by the crews.

But the New York Times has its own Hollywood studio deals involving the 1619 Project.

Governor Cuomo is so dependent on entertainment industry cash that he flew out to California for fundraisers, including one organized in Beverly Hills by the MPAA featuring major studio heads with tickets going for as much as $50,000. This year, Cuomo held a fundraiser for his birthday featuring movie stars who praised him for protecting Hollywood's tax credits.

Those $420 million in tax credits are a net loss for the state, but a gain for Cuomo. That tops California’s film tax credit total of $330 million.

Cuomo had been insisting that the “state has no money”, and was threatening to cut first responders. He even tried to tax volunteers who came to help during the pandemic.

"We're not in a position to provide any subsidies right now," Cuomo falsely claimed. Then he called for maintaining the same insane level of Hollywood subsidies, and went further by making sure that only the big studios who fund his corrupt ambitions cash in on the $420 million.

After claiming that there would be no money to pay police, no money for anything, New York State kept the $420 million in subsidies but limited it to studios spending over $1 million.

The “state has no money” for cops and firefighters, but has $420 million for Hollywood.

Just to bring the corruption up to Chicago levels, Cuomo's proposal made sure that Saturday Night Live, but no new productions, would get access to the $420 million subsidy. If only there were some talented political satirists with a weekend show who could mock this crookedness.

Back in California, Disney's Captain Marvel got $20 million in tax credits in California. Netflix's 13 Reasons Why, which has been blamed for encouraging teenage suicide, vacuumed up over $40 million. You can’t expect one of the wealthiest companies in America to set off a spike in teenage suicides and promote pedophilia without some serious taxpayer subsidies.

When California and New York dole out $750 million in tax breaks to some of the wealthiest donors in a powerful industry who fund the political ambitions of top Democrats like Newsom and Cuomo, there’s no reason to expect their projects to be subjected to everyone else’s rules.

That’s why the order to limit film shoots to the 7 AM to 10 PM curfew was quickly pulled in LA. The county may be banning public gatherings, and destroying the last surviving small businesses who were on their last legs, but film shoots are back at half of pre-pandemic levels.

And that’s not just in America.

The UK has some of the most onerous lockdowns around, and its order shut down clothing stores, mobile phone shops, cafes, hotels, museums and “places of worship”, but left open "professional film and TV filming". Religion is non-essential, but television must go on.

There has been a great deal of discussion about the harm caused by the lockdowns to the livelihoods of tens of millions of people, but there’s been little discussion about who has been exempted from lockdown restrictions and their corrupt political and economic rationales.

The best leverage against lockdown self-righteousness is the exposure of the hypocritical and discriminatory treatment that closes small businesses while leaving giants like Amazon and Target, Disney and Netflix, wealthier than ever because of the lockdowns that benefit them.

The LA Film Office warned productions about a “negative community response”. It’s about time.
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Daniel Greenfield (@Sultanknish) is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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GOP Senate Is Trump's to Win or Lose

by Thomas Gallatin: For those who don’t know, there are a pair of runoff elections in Georgia on January 5 that will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. And irrespective of how things work out in the presidential election, the fact of the matter is that, for freedom-loving Americans and for the preservation of the American Republic as we know it, Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue need to secure at least one of the two seats.

In light of this reality, the open mud-slinging that has erupted between President Donald Trump and Republicans in Georgia is, to put it mildly, quite disturbing. While Trump should express his legitimate concerns over potential election fraud, his hammering of Republicans like Governor Brian Kemp does little to build consensus among party faithful in support of the president’s efforts to investigate election fraud, nor does it energize Georgia Republican voters to turn out for the runoff.

Epitomizing the madness of this political fratricide are the statements from Trump-backing attorneys Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, who, in attempting to make their case of massive election fraud, have literally called on Trump supporters in Georgia to boycott the Senate runoff. Thankfully, Donald Trump Jr. called out the insanity of this suggestion, stating, “I’m seeing a lot of talk from people that are supposed to be on our side telling GOP voters not to go out & vote for [Kelly Loeffler] and [David Perdue] Senate. That is NONSENSE. IGNORE those people. We need ALL of our people coming out to vote for Kelly & David.”

To be clear, Trump has endorsed both Loeffler and Perdue and will be stumping for them in Georgia Saturday. Yet the question many Republicans are asking is whether Trump will stay focused on campaigning for Loeffler and Perdue or devolve into rancor over the Democrats’ efforts to steal the election while accusing Georgia Republicans of not doing enough to stop it. Ginning up anger over the Democrats’ efforts to rig the election is fine so long as he also pushes hard for voters to get out and prevent the Democrats from moving forward with their radical agenda. Attacking fellow Republicans only hurts that message.

Trump’s recent statement regarding Georgia’s secretary of state serves as just one example of why Republicans are so nervous. Trump wrote, “Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud. Why? Without this the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless. Everyone knows that we won the state. Where is @BrianKempGA?” How does saying “the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless” encourage conservatives to vote in the runoff?

In any case, likely in an effort to generate a little team spirit, Governor Kemp has (once again) called for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to conduct a signature audit of mailed ballots.

It behooves Trump to do his best to ensure the GOP holds onto the Senate, especially if he has his eyes on 2024. As The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes, “Mr. Trump is already sounding like he wants to run again in 2024, and his stolen-election claims sound like an opening bid for campaign donations. At least for now he can say, with justification, that he helped the GOP gain seats in the House and avoid a rout in the Senate. But that narrative changes for the worse if the GOP loses in Georgia after Mr. Trump divided his own party to serve his personal political interest. He needs a GOP Senate nearly as much as Mr. McConnell does.”
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Thomas Gallatin writes for The Patriot Post.

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Widespread Censorship . . .

. . . Every day more evidence of election fraud and malfeasance is coming out while the media ignores it.

Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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A Tyrant’s License

by Paul Jacob The “lockdowns” are not how a free society would handle a contagion. 

Free people might advisedly wear masks and physically distance themselves from others when they are especially vulnerable to an airborne disease, or they themselves show some symptoms.*

But free people take risks, too, and accept responsibility for risks taken. And they go about trying to improve their lives generally, in society.

In society, via commerce.

Furthermore, free people would also change their behavior based on good information freely discussed.

What they would not do is engage in bullying to suppress information, cheer on institutional debate suppression, or mandate abridgments to other’s liberties on the basis of personal or sectarian opinion.

That is, they would not do what we do now.

And, perhaps most importantly, free people would utterly condemn leaders who lied to them, or who took special privileges by flouting their own mandates, enforced on the rest of us.

We’ve sure seen a lot of this latter.

The latest case is that of Austin, Texas, Mayor Steve Adler, who has been caught in one of those grand hypocrisies that show the panic to be mostly political opportunism: he had recorded his early November message to “stay home if you can” after attending his daughter’s wedding with 20 guests and then taking a getaway trip with a party of eight.

“This is not the time to relax,” he warned, however. “We may have to close things down if we’re not careful.”

Recorded in Mexico, I guess that “social distance” allowed him the gumption to deliver a threat: if you don’t self-quarantine, I will quarantine everybody!

Except, of course, himself.

Freedom is not just something for our rulers. Liberty with an exception clause is spelled “L-I-C-E-N-S-E.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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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.

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Democrats Reaping What They Sow

by Michael Barone: "My sense is that if Trump wins, Hillary supporters will be sad," left-wing writer Sally Kohn tweeted the day of the 2016 election. "If Hillary wins, Trump supporters will be angry. Important difference." Kohn turned out to be wrong about her own side that year, which angrily set about delegitimizing Donald Trump's victory. She was wrong, too, in her apparent assumption -- shared by shop owners who boarded up their windows -- that Trump supporters would react as violently to his defeat as the Black Lives Matter movement reacted to a death in Minneapolis.

Which is not to say that Trump and many of his supporters are responding gracefully to their candidate's failure to repeat his 2016 feat of winning the presidency by a margin of 77,736 votes in three crucial states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania). They are not consoled that Joe Biden's margin of victory in this year's three crucial states (Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin) was an even smaller 43,809 votes.

While accepting, grudgingly, that he must yield the White House on Inauguration Day, Trump has not discouraged efforts by his lawyers and others to, somehow, overturn the result. None have come anywhere close to identifying errors that would justify overturning the result in one state, much less the three needed to reverse the result.

This should not be surprising. When one state whose electoral votes are decisive has a very narrow popular-vote margin, the results will be fiercely contested, as Florida's were in 2000. The final official margin was just 537 votes.

That's a lot less than 77,736 or 43,809, or the 118,601 by which George W. Bush carried the crucial electoral votes of Ohio in 2004. Overturning earlier narrow electoral-vote majorities would have required successful challenges of popular-vote margins of 18,488 in two states in 1976, of 317,742 votes in seven states in 1968 and of 33,538 votes in four states in 1960. That's one reason losing candidates didn't challenge the results.

Another reason is that we have -- or had -- a norm against delegitimizing election results. In 1960, Richard Nixon chose to observe that norm and not challenge results in multiple states. In 2000, Al Gore contested the results in Florida but conceded after the final court ruling and segued from electoral politics to issue advocacy.

Not so in 2016.

In violation of longstanding norms, Obama administration intelligence and law enforcement agencies spied on the opposition party campaign. Officials proffered the dodgy Steele dossier before the FISA court without revealing it was paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign.

In violation of longstanding norms, Democrats refused to accept the result as legitimate. "I will not accede to this. I will resist," tweeted liberal think tank head Neera Tanden (President-elect Joe Biden's choice to head the Office of Management and Budget) five days after the election. Democrats took to calling themselves "the Resistance," suggesting the Trump administration was morally equivalent to the pro-Hitler Vichy regime in France.

Again and again, leading Democrats -- Hillary Clinton, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the late Rep. John Lewis, Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter -- called Trump an "illegitimate" president. For three years, Democrats advanced the Russia-collusion hoax without finding or producing any evidence except for the discredited Steele dossier.

Joe McCarthy had the limp excuse that at some point, there were some communists in the State Department. Democrats and their many allies in the news media lacked a similar excuse for propagating the Russia-collusion hoax.

So, you can find polls that say most Democrats believe Trump is an "illegitimate" president and that Russians hacked election websites and polls that say most Republicans believe Biden stole the election with the connivance of election officials in multiple states.

High-minded commentators who paid relentless and respectful attention to what were obviously absurd and concocted charges of Russian collusion lament this state of affairs. They urge everyone to heed Joe Biden's call to "unify" the nation.

They have a point. Democrats have misbehaved for four years in trying to delegitimize Donald Trump's 77,736-vote victory. Donald Trump and many Republicans have been misbehaving for four weeks in trying to delegitimize Joe Biden's 43,809-vote victory.

The conservative National Review is right to denounce Trump's "disgraceful endgame." But its liberal counterparts have done little or nothing to denounce Democrats' disgraceful flouting of longstanding norms. The few left writers- -- Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi -- have taken flak and separated themselves from institutional affiliations.

Democrats who are dismayed that many Americans aren't meekly accepting the legitimacy of the Biden presidency are in the process of learning a lesson taught a very long time ago. You reap what you sow.
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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.

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Ignoring the War Risks of Red Lines

by Patrick J. Buchanan: When America did nothing after Obama’s red line was crossed, U.S. credibility suffered.

In early August 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait and declared it to be his nation’s lost 19th province.

Said George H. W. Bush, “This will not stand!”

Translation: Get out of Kuwait, Saddam, or we will come over there and throw you out.

Six months later, after a five-week air assault on Iraq, a U.S.-led army of 500,000, in a 100-hour ground war, sent Saddam’s legions back up the road to Basra and Baghdad.

President Bush was a serious man.

A decade later, Barack Obama warned Syria’s Bashar Assad that if he used chemical or biological weapons in his civil war, this would cross his “red line” and Obama would respond.

Thus, when chemical weapons were used, allegedly by the regime, Obama prepared to make good on his warning.

Unfortunately for Obama, Americans arose in protest against his taking us into Syria’s civil war and Congress balked at authorizing an attack, though Secretary of State John Kerry pleaded and promised that the U.S. strike would be “unbelievably small.”

When America did nothing after Obama’s red line was crossed, U.S. credibility suffered.

In April 2018, after Assad allegedly used chlorine gas in his civil war, Trump joined our NATO allies in launching 120 cruise missiles.

Presumably, U.S. credibility was reestablished.

Of late, Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s foreign policy team have both been drawing red lines and warning Iran and China not to cross them or they’d face U.S. military action, even at risk of a wider war.

Trump has reportedly put out word that any killing of an American anywhere in the Middle East, traceable to Iran or its proxies, will result in U.S. action against Iran itself.

A general of the Iranian Republican Guard has reportedly warned Iran’s militia allies in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq to hold off any attack on Americans so as not to give Trump an excuse to launch a war.

Other red lines have lately been drawn.

In a Nov. 12 phone call with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Joe Biden apparently agreed that the U.S.-Japan security treaty of 1960 covers the Senkaku Islands controlled by Japan but claimed by China. Almost every day of 2020, China has sent ships into the waters around the Senkakus.

Said Suga, “President-elect Biden gave me a commitment that Article 5 of the US-Japan security treaty applies to the Senkaku Islands.”

If taken literally, this means the U.S. would treat a Chinese attempt to seize these rocks as we would treat a Chinese attack on the Japanese Home Islands.

The newest red line was drawn by Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien.

Presumably, U.S. credibility was reestablished.

Of late, Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s foreign policy team have both been drawing red lines and warning Iran and China not to cross them or they’d face U.S. military action, even at risk of a wider war.

Trump has reportedly put out word that any killing of an American anywhere in the Middle East, traceable to Iran or its proxies, will result in U.S. action against Iran itself.

A general of the Iranian Republican Guard has reportedly warned Iran’s militia allies in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq to hold off any attack on Americans so as not to give Trump an excuse to launch a war.

Other red lines have lately been drawn.

In a Nov. 12 phone call with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Joe Biden apparently agreed that the U.S.-Japan security treaty of 1960 covers the Senkaku Islands controlled by Japan but claimed by China. Almost every day of 2020, China has sent ships into the waters around the Senkakus.

Said Suga, “President-elect Biden gave me a commitment that Article 5 of the US-Japan security treaty applies to the Senkaku Islands.”

If taken literally, this means the U.S. would treat a Chinese attempt to seize these rocks as we would treat a Chinese attack on the Japanese Home Islands.

The newest red line was drawn by Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien.

Watch the Latest Videos on Our Buchanan-Trump YouTube Playlist!

A year ago, a Chinese ship smashed up a wooden trawler with two dozen Filipino fishermen aboard near Reed Bank in the South China Sea. Fortunately, the Filipinos were rescued by a Vietnamese fishing boat. Reed Bank is also claimed by China.

On a trip to Asia, O’Brien told Philippines officials that the U.S. does not recognize the Chinese claim, and they should go ahead and exploit the resources around Reed Bank. And if Philippine vessels come under attack, our mutual security treaty dating to the 1950s will be invoked and America will come to the defense of the Philippines.

What this sounds like, indeed, appears to be to Beijing, is a U.S. commitment to fight to defend Manila’s claims to shoals, reefs and rocks in the South China Sea. Earlier this fall, Manila announced plans to restart oil and gas exploration around Reed Bank.

O’Brien said bluntly of the territories around Reed Bank:

“They belong to the Philippine people. They don’t belong to some other country that just because they may be bigger than the Philippines they can come take away and convert the resources of the Philippine people. That’s just wrong.”

O’Brien added: “Any armed attack on Philippine forces aircraft or public vessels in the South China Sea will trigger our mutual defense obligations.”

Beijing is visibly angered by the U.S. assertions that they have no legitimate claim to the Senkakus in the East China Sea or to the Manila-claimed islets, reefs and rocks in the South China Sea, and that the U.S. military will take the side of Tokyo and Manila in a collision with China.

Red lines are, at root, war guarantees. And, often, the result of issuing such war guarantees is that they are called in and lead to wars that are sometimes fatal to the great powers that issue them.

In 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm issued his famous “blank check” to his Austrian allies to punish the Serbs for complicity in the assassination of their archduke. Austria’s attack on Serbia led to World War I, and the end of the Kaiser’s Hohenzollern dynasty.

In late March of 1938, Neville Chamberlain gave an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland, to come to its defense if the Polish colonels refused to negotiate with Berlin over the German port of Danzig.

How did that one work out for the Brits?
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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.

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Trump Won His Other Campaign — to Destroy Media Credibility

by Larry Elder: Convinced that President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, the media suddenly became less hysterical. Just like that, the media, at least to some degree, rediscovered concepts such as fairness and perspective, AWOL the last four years.

Two weeks after the election, New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof haltingly, grudgingly and reluctantly, admitted that yes, Trump was right. Banning in-person school education to fight COVID-19 was and is bad policy. Kristof wrote: “Some things are true even though President Trump says them. Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right. Schools, especially elementary schools, do not appear to have been major sources of coronavirus transmission, and remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children.” Kristof, of course, could not acknowledge Trump’s correct judgement without the “somethings are true even though Trump says them” snark. But remember, this is The New York Times, a paper that has not endorsed a Republican for president since 1956. Little steps.

Kristof even took a Trump-like swipe at Democratic-run cities. And, whether inadvertently or not, he made the case for K-12 vouchers for inner city kids: “So Democrats helped preside over school closures that have devastated millions of families and damaged children’s futures. Cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., have closed schools while allowing restaurants to operate. … School closures magnify these inequities, as many private schools remain open and affluent parents are better able to help kids adjust to remote learning. At the same time, low-income children fall even further behind.”

The New York Times again, after the media awarded the election to former Vice President Joe Biden, even questioned the science behind a ban on outdoor dining, like most counties in California recently enacted. In “Small Gatherings Spread the Virus, but Are They Causing the Surge?” the Times wrote:

“But are dinners and backyard barbecues really the engine driving the current surge of infections? The available data do not support that contention, scientists say. Still, the idea has been repeated so often it has become conventional wisdom, leading to significant restrictions in many states. …

“But many epidemiologists are far less certain, saying there is little evidence to suggest that household gatherings were the source of the majority of infections since the summer. Indeed, it has become much harder to pinpoint any source of any outbreak, now that the virus is so widespread and Americans may be exposed in so many ways. …

“A constant drumbeat about the dangers of social gatherings may help to convey the seriousness of the current surge, (Harvard University infectious disease epidemiologist Julia Marcus) said. On the other hand, in some states the misperception has led to draconian policies that don’t square with science.”

Goodness! If Pulitzer gave a prize for “Fair and Balanced Coronavirus Stories in the Post-Trump Era,” The New York Times might actually deserve this one.

Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein shared the mood of much of the Trump-hating left when he accused Trump of “homicidal negligence” in his handling of the coronavirus. But Dr. Anthony Fauci, post-election, also sounds Trumpian. On the possibility of further lockdowns, Fauci recently said: “There is no appetite for locking down in the American public, but I believe that we can do it without a lockdown. I really do. … You could still get businesses going. You could still have economic forward thinking while you’re doing that. You don’t necessarily have to shut everything down. Hopefully we won’t have to do that.”

No “appetite” for another lockdown? What happened to “follow the science”? This is yet another tacit admission that, as Trump insisted, we must consider the unintended consequences of shutting down the economy, including increased rates of suicide, depression, homicide, drug abuse, alcoholism and domestic violence.

Finally, did serial Trump CNN critic, Jake Tapper praise, literally praise and credit Trump for the speed with which drug manufacturers have apparently developed vaccines for COVID-19? Yes, he did. Tapper said: “We should take a moment, as we always have when discussing vaccine and Operation Warp Speed, that this is — you know, putting aside all of the failures of the Trump administration when it comes to the coronavirus, and there are lots — this is an unmitigated success and we should acknowledge that.”

For four years, major media, along with their Democratic comrades, banded together to bring down Trump. They appear to have succeeded. But as to Trump’s campaign to expose the media’s blatant, often vicious anti-Republican bias so that much of America will never again trust it, Trump won. Huge.
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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.

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Tags: Lary Elder, Trump Won, His Other Campaign, to Destroy, Media Credibility To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Gov. Newsom: If Lockdowns Are So Successful, Why Do We Need to Keep Having Them?

‘Don We Now Our Plague Apparel’
by Tom McClintock: Mr. Speaker:
Governor Newsom made a groundbreaking discovery regarding Covid-19 last week. Apparently, it has learned to tell time. Thus, acting under the strictest of scientific standards, he has ordered Californians to run home before 10 pm, lock their doors and hide from this insidious virus until daybreak.

Unfortunately, Covid doesn’t seem to be following the curfew, so Newsom is now threatening a “hard lockdown” of virtually the entire state throughout the Christmas season. Don we now our plague apparel. There’s just one nagging question the Governor hasn’t bothered to answer: if these lockdowns are so successful, why do we need to keep having them?

Not to worry: We are cheerfully assured that the jobs that are being destroyed are “non-essential.” Their term, “non-essential.” I have news for these self-absorbed elitists: If a job is putting food on your table and a roof over your head, that job IS essential for you and the family that depends on you.

Last Spring, I asked Anthony Fauci if he had taken into account the human cost of the lockdowns – the suicides, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, deferred health screenings and treatments and poverty related deaths that his policies were setting in motion. “No, we really haven’t considered that,” he breezily replied. Don’t know. Don’t care.


Before Fauci and his followers took a wrecking ball to our nation, poverty had dropped to its lowest rate since 1959, unemployment was the lowest in 50 years, the income gap was narrowing, wages showed strongest growth in 40 years. How many millions of these jobs have now been wantonly destroyed by autocratic officials who seem oblivious to the damage they are causing?

According to the CDC’s best estimates, those under 50 have a 99.98 percent chance of recovering from COVID – if they get it at all – and 40 percent who get it don’t even know they have it. Even for those in the most vulnerable group – over 70 – the survival rate is 94.6 percent.

Sweden didn’t force its businesses to close. Sweden didn’t shut down its schools and abandon its children to the streets. Sweden didn’t even order a mask mandate. Sweden did what free societies do: they gave the best advice they could and trusted their citizens to use their own judgment of what measures made sense to them.

The result? As of this morning, Sweden’s mortality rate for Covid is 154 deaths PER million below that of the United States, meaning if we had Sweden’s mortality rate it would mean 50,000 fewer American Covid deaths. Meanwhile, Sweden has sustained a fraction of the economic damage that our lockdown leftists have inflicted on innocent Americans. Globally, the United Nations warns that 130 million people will starve to death around the world because of the economic damage caused by these measures.

Mr. Speaker, this has to stop. The good news is that more and more Americans are questioning the lunacy of these policies and the hypocrisy of those that impose them. Newsom’s curfew order was met with spontaneous defiant demonstrations across the state. Elected sheriffs are increasingly refusing to enforce these orders. Pastors are reopening their churches. Businesses are reopening even as their owners are taken away in handcuffs.

All mass hysterias are driven by blind fear, fanned by politicians who see opportunity in them. We have learned that such fear can cause a free people to abandon their legacy of freedom and independence, their prosperity and commonsense – for a while. Yet every time in history this has happened, there is always a moment when the fear fever breaks, and the hysteria suddenly burns itself out. The French Revolution, the Salem Witch Trials, the Communist hysteria of the 1950’s all had a moment when the absurdity of it all became so apparent that it overcame the fear – and the people turned on their tormentors.

I don’t know if the recent wave of business and religious persecutions, the unlimited home detention orders and the demonstrated hypocrisy of those who ordered them signals that moment. But every shopkeeper who defies these petty tyrants, every parent who confronts their school officials, every person who refuses to submit to the dysfunctional, dystopian world created by the lockdown left, brings us one step closer to that turning point.

It can’t come soon enough.
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Congressman Tom McClintock (@RepMcClintock)  (R) represents California’s 4th Congressional District.

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Tags: Congressman, Tom McClintock, Gov. Newsom, If Lockdowns Are So Successful, Why Do We Need to Keep Having Them? To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Leftist Politicians’ Hypocrisy Demonstrates Shallowness of ‘Party of Science’

California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom

by Jarrett Stepman: States around the country are heading into the second wave of pandemic lockdowns, but many Americans may not be so keen on complying this time around.

Progressives and Democrats are apparently the most eager to shut everything down to stop the spread of the coronavirus, even though this policy stance ignores what science is telling us—namely, that full lockdowns are not as effective as a targeted approach.

However, the personal behavior of political leaders in the “party of science” suggests that they either don’t take their own proposals seriously or that lockdowns are for the “masses” and not very important people like themselves.

No wonder so many Americans are in a populist mood.

In the opening days of the COVID-19 outbreak, extreme measures may have been justified to bend the curve of cases and preserve the American health care system.

Certainly, government at all levels can and should provide assistance in beating this pandemic—streamlining the process of approving rapid self-testing kits would be a huge boon in coming months—but it is now too often being wielded like a blunt instrument by overzealous politicians.

And far too many of those politicians have demonstrated that the draconian and often absurd rules they want to foist on Americans don’t really apply to themselves.

Leave it to the California governor to be the most ridiculous pandemic lockdown hypocrite.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, a California Democrat, was rather infamously caught dining with a group of friends, advisers, and—perhaps most importantly—a powerful lobbyist at The French Laundry, one of the country’s most expensive and exclusive high-end restaurants. Newsom’s dinner party came just hours after he urged families not to travel and gather for the holidays.

And remember, California’s rules for Thanksgiving were so strict as to be absurd. Californians were told that all gatherings must be outside, that restrooms could only be used if frequently sanitized, and that gatherings should be two hours or less, and that every guest must be seated 6 feet apart.

Oh, and no singing.

Do Newsom and his fellow French Laundry diners appear to be 6 feet apart or outside here?

“Party of science” hypocrisy appears to be at its worst in the Golden State, where a virtual one-party lock on government power means politicians pay little price for bad behavior.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was caught going to a hair salon when San Francisco had banned the practice.

Her excuse was that it was a setup to make her look bad.

Mission accomplished, I guess.

“Cases are spiking, in part because we’re letting our guard (and masks) down with family & friends,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo tweeted just before Thanksgiving. “Let’s cancel the big gatherings this year and focus on keeping each other safe.”

Cases are spiking, in part because we’re letting our guard (and masks) down with family & friends. Let’s cancel the big gatherings this year and focus on keeping each other safe https://t.co/oHFXb6DZ82

— Sam Liccardo (@sliccardo) November 25, 2020</a>

Liccardo then proceeded to have a gathering of eight people, comprising several households.

I apologize for my decision to gather for Thanksgiving with my family, contrary to the rules. I understand my obligation as a public official to provide exemplary compliance w/ public health orders, & not to ignore them. I commit to do better. My statement: pic.twitter.com/LFhX2LCUf3

— Sam Liccardo (@sliccardo) December 1, 2020

Of course, it’s not just California politicians who’ve been hypocrites during the pandemic.

There have been countless other examples around the country of politicians and public officials who have been zealous about shutting everything down for our own good, but finding ways to personally skirt the rules.

District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser went to an Election Day party in Delaware despite the state being put on a high-risk travel advisory, a trip she called “necessary.”

The message from all these activities is clear: The political class has deemed swamp slithering more important than whatever silly little business, family matter, or religious gathering you think is essential.

It’s understandable that these politicians wish to go about their lives, but how can they justify this when Americans have been entirely barred from, say, going to funerals and activities they deem absolutely necessary?

Unfortunately, it’s not just politicians betraying public trust with blatant double standards.

Public health officials have made pronouncements that lockdowns are necessary, and people shouldn’t gather, then ignore those guidelines for political movements they sympathize with.

Much of the legacy media seems in on the game too, of course. The almost ridiculous difference in coverage between rallies for President Donald Trump and Joe Biden street parties was beyond laughable.

One was an example of a superspreader event, the other a wonderful expression of democracy. For those paying attention, is this kind of one-sided coverage really a surprise?

These individual cases of hypocrisy might be no more than a mockable trifle in normal circumstances. But when you put them all together, they are examples of a larger phenomenon taking place in the United States and the West in general. People are losing faith in once trusted institutions and look upon them with hostile suspicion.

This crisis of the elite has been simmering for quite a while, the pandemic merely brought it more clearly out into the open.

The result is that people are less likely to take politicians, the media, and “experts” seriously.

Yes, the people are revolting, and they have a very good reason to be. Perhaps we should be using common sense and actual science to aid individuals and civil society in clamping down on the second COVID-19 wave instead of rushing back into a total lockdown.
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Jarrett Stepman writes for The Daily Signal.

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Tags: Jarrett Stepman, The Daily Signal, Leftist Politicians, Hypocrisy Demonstrates, Shallowness, of ‘Party of Science’ To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Denigrating Hoover

Victor Davis Hanson

by Victor Davis Hanson: Matt Larson (“Hoover has gone too far,” Nov. 19, 2020) cited me among others in his Stanford Daily angry attack on Hoover Institution scholars. He alleges that we at Hoover are purportedly “more interested in making money and promoting right-wing politics than in doing actual academic research.” Larson also charges that “Hoover fellows constitute a veritable wall of shame. They have been involved in just about every type of skeezy behavior imaginable.” These are serious writs against our institution and yet mostly leveled without substantiation.

My colleagues can address these particular loaded charges of “every type of skeezy behavior imaginable” in their own fashion. But to the degree that these unfounded stereotypes pertain to me, and for the record, I have never received any compensation for media appearances. I am not “making money” on corporate boards. Nor have I ever worked in “right wing politics” — or on any campaign of either party. I am a registered independent voter without party affiliation, and the author of over 20 scholarly books on classical, agrarian and military history and culture. Scholarship, and its dissemination among the broader public, are the major criteria by which all Hoover senior fellows are annually reviewed.

Writing additional political, cultural and social commentary, or appearing on air to discuss written work, is not spreading “disinformation.” That is a false charge that Larson also lodged by focusing solely on one particular television interview I did on Fox News — in part, ironically critical of election coverage on Fox News. But even within such a narrow focus, Larson’s allegations are an unfortunate conglomeration of falsehoods, misrepresentations and half-truths.

In that interview, I certainly did not spread “baseless and implausible conspiracy theories” and did not, as Larson alleges, “suggest that Democrats like Hillary Clinton intentionally created the COVID-19 pandemic.” That charge is also unfortunately as absurd as it is false.

What I actually said in that brief interview was that some politicians have admitted to seeing the COVID-19 crisis as a way to implement political agendas that otherwise might not be viable.

It was in that very context that I referenced statements on the COVID-19 crisis by politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom (who has said of the crisis and capitalism: “There is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism. So yes, absolutely we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”) and Hillary Clinton (who spoke of the crisis as a chance to push government-run health care: “Again, enlist people that this would be a terrible crisis to waste, as the old saying goes” and who has a history of seeing crises as moments to push her agendas).

I added that when politicians boast of reckless things like this, it creates legitimate worries that they anticipate such crises as rare opportunities to be utilized to push political initiatives that otherwise might not have requisite support — to the point that people might feel manipulated during such times of harsh quarantines and general duress, which is the reason why I deemed such statements “scary.”

Larson charges, “Hanson also falsely claimed that there were widespread irregularities in the 2020 election. Hanson’s incessant spreading of nonsensical conspiracy theories is contrary to the very idea of the University as a source of knowledge.”

Are we to laugh or cry at that puerile tirade?

Universities encourage inductive reasoning to investigate challenging issues, not to dismiss them when they don’t fit political agendas. Aside from the fact that the referenced single television interview is hardly proof of “incessant spreading of nonsensical conspiracy theories,” it is a matter of record that there were well before the election and after dozens of ongoing lawsuits — most now dismissed, but some still being filed or on appeal — alleging that voting laws passed by state legislatures were in some states modified by state justices and bureaucrats, allegedly contrary to constitutional law. There were episodic discoveries of unusually large computer glitches that until found had resulted in votes wrongly transferred from one candidate to another and hundreds of affidavits of witnesses, whose authenticity is being adjudicated, that were produced to argue for widespread violations of polling rules.

There were occasional troves that have appeared of previously unknown ballots and reports of ineligible out-of-state voters. Before the election, computer experts, including many Democrats, had warned that the new machines simply did not inspire confidence. Prominent Democrats had once insisted that all mail-in ballots, to be valid, had to have authenticated signatures. A respected cyber-security expert after the election has questioned the likelihood of some historically lopsided precinct tallies. All of the above explains why large percentages of the electorate (six in 10 Americans) have doubts about the accuracy of the 2020 voting, reflecting a bipartisan fear about the validity of mail-in voting expressed even well before the election.

Yet what Larson also conveniently fails to note in his false accusation is what I did not say and have not said of the above reported irregularities: that such worrisome documented anomalies have been proven of such a magnitude to have changed the ultimate outcome of the election. That is the real point of all contention. But it had not yet been proven at the time I spoke or of this present letter — and that is why I did not allege that. In fact, I have cautioned since the election repeatedly not to embrace conspiracy theories alleging a computer theft of a vast Trump landslide.

Any fair listener to that brief interview would grasp its general theme and content: The traditional American idea of Election Day voting has now been altered — mostly by mail-in voting that raises questions of authenticity and is seen by lots of American as partisan-driven. In some states, the rush to rely preponderantly on mail-in balloting has made on-site certification of signatures and addresses much more problematic and a matter of constant litigation. Six months ago liberal organizations, legal groups and university affiliates, Stanford included, were worried over proper compliance with new and rushed COVID-19 mandated rules for early voting. Potential late campaign comebacks and newsworthy events occurring during the last days of the race can now become irrelevant — and were seen as such. Those challenges are only amplified by increasing third-party so-called vote harvesting, and near-automatic mailing by many state agencies of voter registration forms, sometimes to unverified addresses.

Together with charges that Arizona, for example, was called far too early, on the basis of early returns or problematic counting, and questionable pre-election polls that were once again widely off, many Americans naturally have legitimate concerns about all these departures from prior election norms. The result is that the public can insidiously lose confidence in the foundation of citizenship: the sanctity of voting.

Nor, as Larson alleges, did I say that early voting or mail voting were not done in the past, but rather they were done often under the auspices of more infrequent “absentee voting.” I illustrated that fact philologically by noting the phrase “absentee voting” is disappearing from our Election day media vocabulary, replaced by the new standard “mail-in voting” and “early voting” phraseology.

Again, my point was that the accelerated transition away from normative Election Day voting — brought about most dramatically by the lockdown and new voting strategies — raises fundamental questions of preserving vote sanctity and authenticity, mostly by the unprecedented magnitude of the changeover rather than its novelty per se. Indeed, early and mail-in voting — comprising in 2020 nearly 100 million ballots — was seen on the Left as a “revolution” by the very way millions of Americans voted without showing up to the polls just on Election Day.

Yes, thousands of soldiers in the Civil War voted away from home, by what then was often called “postal voting,” as well as through tally sheets and on-site polls at the front — and usually with far more scrutiny and authentication than today’s voting. Indeed, the current controversies over mass mail-in voting began during the Civil War, when the new practice met stern opposition that it departed from constitutional practices and was often massaged to favor the incumbent president.

But the practice of military absentee voting has traditionally been regarded as a special case, seen as somewhat different from civilian absentee voting and the current trend to “mail-in balloting” and “early voting.” If that was not so, we would no longer need to use the customary qualifying prefix “military” to identify special categories such as “military” voting or “military” ballots.

Finally, the Hoover Institution has been a part of Stanford University for over 100 years. Larson’s rant against Hoover made little attempt to understand the historic, occasional and natural tensions that can arise between a center/right research and archival institution and a center/left university. Naturally, there can arise some reasons for both parties to find fault with the other — even without the unfortunate defamatory agendas of partisans like Larson.

Yet Hoover scholars as a general rule do not fixate on Stanford, whether the University, its students or its professors, for their perceived lapses in judgement or controversies that often can arise at large campuses — such as the recent sensational allegations concerning admissions fraud; a recent Stanford affiliated visiting researcher arrested for allegedly hiding ties with the Chinese military; Department of Education allegations that Stanford had not properly and fully disclosed, as required, sizable gifts from Chinese government-related sources; sex scandal allegations at the business school; efforts to disrupt a campus speaker while spreading a grotesque anti-Semitic flyer; and general concern on the campus concerning a wave of anti-Semitic incidents.

Even though those incidents are factual, what would be the point of collating them in service to a slanted and one-sided Stanford Daily hit op-ed — other than to stereotype, misrepresent, and denigrate the totality of the mission of a university that has done the world a great deal of good?
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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.

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