Commentary: TikTok and Instagram Turned Me into a Leftist, but X Helped Me Escape

Black Lives Matter Rally

Social media plays a significant role in shaping the opinions of those 35 and under — it’s the primary news source for most in that age group, one survey found.

Some stats report that daily screen time for 16- to 24-year-olds is nearly eight hours among females and seven hours among males. To put that in perspective — that’s equivalent to the average time in a school day.

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One of Oldest Women’s Studies Departments in U.S. on Chopping Block, Citing ‘Low Student Interest’

Wichita State University

Wichita State University is closing its women’s studies department, one of the oldest in the country, due to continuously low student interest.

The Department of Women, Ethnicity, and Intersectional Studies will be dissolved and its degree program will be merged with the English Department, according to an action plan approved earlier this month by the Kansas Board of Regents.

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Study: ‘Vast DEI Bureaucracy’ Negatively Impacting U.S. Armed Forces

F35 A - Nellis Air Force Base

A new Arizona State University study suggests that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts in the United States military are ineffective.

The study done by the university’s Center for American Institutions argued that there is a emphasis on training new soldiers about social issues like “unconscious bias” and “intersectionality” in a way the center says runs contrary to typical American ideals. The study examined DEI plan’s in different sector of the military, including DEI office staffing and education at academies like West Point.

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U.S. Drivers Killed Fewer Pedestrians in 2023, Except in Pennsylvania

Pedestrians

Pedestrian deaths are finally starting to drop across America to pre-pandemic levels.

Pennsylvania, however, bucked the national trend. Drivers killed 192 pedestrians in 2023, eight more than in 2022, and 25 percent more than in 2019, according to an analysis from the Governors Highway Safety Administration.

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‘Social Justice Lawyers’ Told WPATH to Avoid ‘Evidence-Based Review’ of Sex-Change Guidelines for Minors, Docs Reveal

Pediatrician with child patient

The World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) avoided “evidence-based” reviews of child sex-change procedures on the advice of “social justice lawyers,” a court filing states.

Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall of Alabama filed a motion for summary judgment in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama Wednesday, seeking to beat back a challenge to Alabama’s law restricting the procedures. The Alabama attorney general’s office accused WPATH of placing “advocacy concerns” at the forefront of the creation of the organization’s “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8” (SOC-8), which was based in part on the advice of the “social justice” attorneys who advised the organization to avoid seeking evidence-based recommendations.

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Interior Department Tells Employees to Stop Using Gendered Terms Such as ‘Husband’ and ‘Son’

Business Meeting

The Interior Department has updated its “inclusive language guide” to include instructions for employees to stop using such gender-specific terms as “son” and “daughter,” and replace them with more generalized terms such as “kid” or “child.”

The 24-page guide said agency employees should also replace terms such as “husband” and “wife” with “spouse,” The Daily Wire reported Thursday.

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Commentary: Single-Sex Education Is a Tradition to Reconsider

All Boys School

The last time I was a member of an officially male group, I was 12 and in the Little League. After that, I shied away from them. There was a nearly all-male Catholic high school I earned a scholarship to, but I chose another school and another scholarship. There were still several prestigious all-male colleges to choose from, but I had no desire to go to those places. Princeton got me instead.

But as I look back and as I’ve grown more aware of what colleges used to be like, I wonder why we take for granted the superiority of having boys and girls, or young men and women, together everywhere and all the time. Shouldn’t there be at least some places that are otherwise? Here, one of the tenets of the progressive creed, that people’s sexual proclivities ought to be championed no matter what they are, is in flat contradiction with another one of the tenets, that all-male institutions are to be eliminated.

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Commentary: Four Reasons People Chose Not to Have Children

Family Photo

North Carolina State University Professor (Emeritus) Mike Walden is known for explaining complex issues in ways understandable to the general reader. That is unusual among scholars. Three “economic thrillers” written by Professor Walden and his wife M.E. Whitman Walden, Micro Mayhem (2006), Macro Mayhem (2006) and Fiscal Fiasco (2014), show how they do it.

Professor Walden just posted a short, down-to-earth piece, “You Decide: Should We Worry About The Declining Birth Rate?” He is writing not as an advocate, but simply raises relevant points. In a few succinct sentences he distills the falling fertility conundrum to its essence, citing four reasons why Americans are having fewer children these days:

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‘Life Act’ Would Outlaw Federal Dollars Going to Abortions

Congressman Bob Good

Rep. Bob Good introduced the Life Act on Thursday, legislation that outlaws abortions of unborn babies “to the fullest extent at the federal level” by prohibiting federal dollars from being used for abortions.

The Virginia Republican’s bill, which builds on a consensus from House Republicans to provide stronger enforcement mechanisms for pro-life laws, bans federally regulated health care programs from using funds to pay for abortions and federally regulated health plans from covering abortions.

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Top Pediatric Organization Quietly Colluded with Trans Ideologues to Push Child Sex Changes, Emails Show

Transgender youth

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the nation’s preeminent pediatric medical organization, worked “very closely” with a transgender medical activist group to advocate for children to receive sex changes, according to emails obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Numerous Republican-led states have recently passed protective legislation banning minors from accessing experimental procedures, such as puberty blockers and genital surgery, as more and more evidence emerged challenging the justification for child sex changes. To combat these bans, the AAP quietly partnered with the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), a group that’s been widely criticized for pushing transgender ideology over sound medical science.

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Oklahoma Supreme Court Rules Against First Publicly-Funded Religious Charter School

Gentner Drummond

The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that the approval of what would have been the nation’s first publicly-funded religious school was unconstitutional, according to court records.

Oklahoma’s Virtual Charter School Board voted to approve an application for a virtual religious charter school in June 2023, prompting state Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond to file a lawsuit in October to block the funding, calling it “an irreparable violation of our individual religious liberty” and “an unthinkable waste of our tax dollars.” The Oklahoma Supreme Court ultimately sided with Drummond on Tuesday, finding that “under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school” and that “as such, a charter school must be nonsectarian,” per court filings.

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Commentary: The Logic in All the Madness

Joe Biden

by Victor Davis Hanson   Most Americans believe it is unhinged to deliberately destroy the border and allow 10 million illegal aliens to enter the country without background audits, means of support, any claims to legal residency, and definable skills. And worse still, why would federal authorities be ordered to…

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Youngkin: America’s Foundations Crumbling Under Biden, Progressives

Governor Glenn Youngkin

The Founders built America on a rock, but today, because of the Left, the rock is crumbling, and the country must assert moral clarity on several fronts to fix it, said Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who fired up the crowd at the Road to Majority Conference Saturday.

“They built it on rock. They unleashed a wave of freedom across the world with the prosperity of seeing a shining sea, the greatest nation ever built,” Youngkin said. “Yet today, we can feel the great American house shaking. Across our college campuses, echoes of extermination speech, while chaos roars across our borders.”

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Nearly a Third of ‘Pro-Palestine’ Campus Protesters Had a Job Offer Rescinded, Survey Finds

Pro-Palestine protesters

A recent survey found that 3 in 10 college students or recent graduates had job offers rescinded as a result of their “pro-Palestine” activism.

Intelligent surveyed 672 students or recent college graduates who have engaged in anti-Israel activism and found that 29% of them had a job offer rescinded in the past six months and 55% believe there was bias against them in the hiring process because of their activism.

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Children Need ‘Liberation’ from Parents, Scholar Argues

Lorna Finlayson

A philosophy scholar interested in Marxism argues for the “liberation” of children from their parents in a new book, set to come out in 2026.

The book, “Child Liberation: The oppression of children and the case for change,” is by Lorna Finlayson (pictured above), a lecturer of philosophy at the University of Essex in England.

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Commentary: The Extraordinary Joys of Ordinary Family Life

Family Unit

Our world of hookup culture, abortion on demand, and fading traditional family structure is pushing a rising number of young people away from wanting to have children. Even married couples are choosing to remain childless, citing everything from financial freedom to environmental concerns.

This drastic decision is often made from a place of fear and blindness, out of worry about what young couples will have to give up if they have a family. But that’s just one side of the coin. These people are also depriving themselves of the extraordinary joys that having children brings to ordinary life. So let’s start shifting the narrative. We can voice the delights of parenthood and share why it’s so meaningful, showing the world how valuable and incredible children are. They change us and challenge us in so many ways. What miracles do little ones bring to our daily lives? Here are just a few:

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Becket Fund Lawyer Argues for Religious Liberty of Catholic School

St. Joseph Catholic School

A Catholic school’s ability to operate in accord with its faith is in jeopardy.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit heard oral arguments June 11 in St. Joseph Parish v. Nessel. The case involves St. Joseph Catholic School in Saint Johns, Michigan, which is asking the court to protect its ability to hire staff who share the same faith.

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Commentary: More Catholics Believe in the Eucharist than Previously Thought

Catholic Eucharist

A new study by Catholic market research company Vinea Research found that belief in the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist is greater than a 2019 Pew Research study previously estimated.

Pew Research had found that 69 percent of U.S. Catholics personally believe that “the bread and wine used in Communion ‘are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.’” By contrast, only 31 percent of Catholics said that they believe that “the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus.”

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Wikipedia Is Biased in Favor of Liberals, Study Finds

Wikipedia entries are more likely to paint public figures on the right in a negative light than the left, a Manhattan Institute study released Thursday found.

The study analyzed the sentiments of 1,628 words that were used in reference to political topics and found that Wikipedia generally uses more negative terms in reference to right-leaning public figures, and less when referencing left-leaning figures. The results would suggest that Wikipedia is contradicting its “neutral-point-of-view” policy, according to the study.

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Commentary: Juneteenth Usurped the Emancipation Proclamation

Carol Swain

How did Juneteenth, once just a regional celebration, become a federal holiday instead of the far more significant Emancipation Proclamation? The latter freed over 3 million slaves, including the ones in Galveston, Texas that didn’t know of their freedom. Let’s walk through some of the facts of the latter’s superiority over the former before grappling with the politics of our times.

President Abraham Lincoln issued The Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. It never became a federal holiday despite the wishes of some organizations. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), presented a proposal in 2014 seeking to establish “A National Holiday Commemorating Emancipation of the Slaves” for the “history and story” to be “properly researched and archived for the American People. It acknowledged the importance of the document for all Americans and sought for the holiday to be celebrated on January 1 of each year as a Jubilee. The NAACP resolution was presented during the Obama Administration. It was written before the word “slaves” was swapped for “enslaved peoples.”

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Detroit Pastor Thanks Trump for Visiting the ‘Hood,’ Says Biden, Obama ‘Never Came’

Pastor Lorenzo Sewell

Trump also announced multiple endorsements from high-profile black community leaders ahead of his meeting in Michigan.

Detroit Pastor Lorenzo Sewell of 180 Church thanked former President Donald Trump for visiting what he called the “hood,” and he pointed out that neither President Joe Biden nor former President Barack Obama made the trip.

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Review: New Book Confronts Anti-White Racism

Jeremy Carl

A new book confronts the longstanding problem of “anti-white racism.”

Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Jeremy Carl discussed his new book, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart,” during a virtual event hosted by the think tank.

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Less than 30 Percent of Americans Approve of Biden’s Handling on Immigration, Poll Finds

Illegal Immigrants

Less than half of Americans approve of President Joe Biden’s handling on immigration, a new survey found.

Only 29% of Americans said they approve of the president’s handling of immigration, according to an Economist/YouGov poll released Wednesday. Conversely, more than 60% of respondents said they disapproved of his handling of the issue, and among those, 47% said they strongly disapproved.

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Commentary: Further Thoughts About the Foreseeable Future

Donald Trump and Joe Biden

Some years ago,  five or six years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, I was asked to participate in a conference at Boston University’s marvelously named Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.

The details of the conference are swaddled in the mists of times gone by, but I do remember that part of my talk was devoted to some thoughts about our tendency to deploy language to emasculate surprise. In particular, I dilated on the curious phrase “the foreseeable future.” With what cheery abandon we employ it! Yet what a nugget of unfounded optimism those three words embrace!

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Commentary: ‘LGBT’ Is a System

Pride Parade

When T.S. Eliot said that there are no lost causes because there are no won causes, he probably was not thinking of American conservatism,” begins the opening paragraph of Sam Francis’ seminal 1991 essay, “Beautiful Losers.”

“American conservatism,” Francis wrote, “is a failure, and all the think tanks, magazines, direct mail barons, inaugural balls, and campaign buttons cannot disguise or alter it. Virtually every cause to which conservatives have attached themselves for the past three generations has been lost, and the tide of political and cultural battle is not likely to turn any time soon.”

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Commentary: Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto Released Despite FBI Resistance

The 2023 Nashville Covenant School murders understandably received massive news coverage when they occurred. The fight over obtaining the murderer’s diary also received news attention. But when “nearly four dozen pages” of the murderer’s diary were finally released last week, the mainstream media completely ignored it. It turns out that behind the scenes, the FBI had fought hard against the diary’s release. Some Covenant School parents also opposed releasing the diary because it would force families to re-live the nightmare. The Tennessee Star’s parent company, Star News Digital Media, successfully filed two lawsuits to obtain the diary.

Five days after the release of the diary, with the exception of the New York Post, which is a national news outlet, the news coverage was limited to seven other conservative outlets such as The Daily Wire and Newsbusters.

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Commentary: Fossil Fuels Are the Best-Kept Secret in Our World Today

Oil Platform

Apparently, you can litigate anything these days, and it’s gotten far more insidious than suing McDonald’s over hot coffee being, you know, hot. A new climate activist group called Our Children’s Trust is suing state and federal government agencies on behalf of individual children, claiming that fossil fuel regulators are negligently ruining their future.

That children should feel entitled to come of age under a specific set of favorable environmental and political circumstances — and to demand punishment for individuals they disagree with — isn’t just a testament to the egocentrism dominating the 21st Century. It also exposes our culture’s deeply warped understanding of climate science, which, surprisingly to many of us, actually shows global warming has no meaningful negative effects on our lives or our environment.

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Commentary: A COVID Vaccine Injury Story

Vaccine Shot

Craig Norkus thought there was no reason to question the safety of the COVID vaccines. He’d received two shots already with no ill effects, and he, along with the rest of the public, was continuously assured that the vaccines were safe and effective. So on November 3, 2022, he received his third booster, and his saga of suffering began.

Craig grew up in Rochester, NY, moving to the Twin Cities in 2001. He’s the father of two adult children, an avid Vikings fan, and a dedicated fitness enthusiast. Prior to his vaccine injury, Craig worked out seven days per week and enjoyed golf and hiking.

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Commentary: The West Is Sick of the New Woke Jihadism

UPenn Students participating in a pro-Palestinian protest

What are the mobs in Washington defiling iconic federal statues with impunity and pelting policemen really protesting?

What are the students at Stanford University vandalizing the president’s office really demonstrating against?

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Southern Baptist Convention Votes Against Ban on Female Pastors

Female Pastor

The Southern Baptist Convention voted Wednesday against enshrining a ban on churches with female pastors.

While 61% of those who voted supported the ban, it needed a two-thirds majority to pass, according to CNN. The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest protestant denomination in the U.S. and held its annual meeting in Indianapolis.

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Hollywood Teams Up with Biden Advisers to Launch Super PAC

Joe Biden in front of the Hollywood sign (composite image)

With less than five months to go before the November election, a new super PAC has been launched as a joint effort between Hollywood employees and Democratic political strategists.

As reported by Politico, the new group is called Won’t PAC Down; its goal is to increase outreach to younger voters who are increasingly disillusioned with Biden over a number of issues, ranging from the war in Israel and the environment to the student loan crisis and inflation.

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Commentary: The Left Brands Conservatives ‘Haters’ for Daring to Question Woke Cultural Supremacy

LGBTQ

Wokeness is impossible to escape. Everywhere you turn, you see rainbow flags, Black Lives Matter signs, or calls for “diversity and inclusion.” Companies force DEI trainings on staff. FBI agents march in Pride parades. Teachers tell kids in school that they are oppressors or oppressed based on their skin color. Target stores sell transgender swimsuits and Bud Light teams up with a grown man who acts like a little girl. Even Buzz Lightyear and “Star Wars” have gone woke.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is falling all over itself to push transgender pronouns, to promote drag queens, and to celebrate Pride—even on Easter Sunday!

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Commentary: The Left Knows Leftism Doesn’t Work

Joe Biden in front of a burning building (composite image)

Do not expect the radical left to survey the wreckage of socialism and communism in history and accept that statism impoverishes people and erodes their freedoms. There will never be admissions by our elite that progressivism exists mainly for the acquisition of power by the utopian and virtue-signaling few, who ensure that they are never subject to the baleful implementation of their ideological agendas on the rest of us.

Still, leftists look around at what they have done to America in the last four years and implicitly know that the plan did not work, the people detested it, or both.

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Pro-Palestinian Protesters Vandalize Statues Outside White House During Massive Protest

Pro-Palestinian Protesters

Pro-Palestinian protesters vandalized statues and threw items at a National Park Service ranger near the White House during a Saturday protest calling for a cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hamas, according to multiple videos.

“Surround the White House for Gaza” was held Saturday afternoon and deemed a “national mobilization” to call for an “immediate ceasefire, an immediate end to the siege on Gaza, the freedom of all Palestinian prisoners, and an end to the occupation of Palestine,” according to a description of the event. Videos posted on social media appeared to show protesters vandalized statues, harassed a National Park Service ranger and set off smoke bombs.

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SPLC Changes Number of ‘Radical Traditional Catholic Hate Groups’ in Latest ‘Hate Map’ After FBI Backlash

You may have heard that, early last year, the FBI issued a memo targeting Catholics—specifically “radical traditional Catholics”—that relied on the work of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center. The FBI rushed to rescind the memo on Catholics after a whistleblower published it and The Daily Signal demanded answers.

This week, the SPLC released its annual list of “hate groups” and the “radical traditional Catholic” category remains.

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Commentary: Christianity, Capitalism, and Colonialism Are Nothing to Be Ashamed Of

Catholic Chapel

We’ve all heard the rhetorical attacks on Western Civilization—often centered on Christianity, capitalism, or colonialism, and often on all three. Among radical leftists, the consensus is that these elements are evil, but given that each is currently or historically integral to civilization as we know it, it’s worth examining the data to determine whether they deserve to be so despised.

First, Christianity. A 2018 study found that religion was “the decisive background factor” determining how much human rights were respected in any given country. And not all religions had the same impact. The percentage of Christians in the population was closely associated with a nation upholding human rights, whereas the percentage of Muslims was the opposite—that is, Muslim countries were less likely to uphold such rights. Another study reached similar conclusions about the effects of Christianity vis-à-vis Islam on nations’ ranking in the Good Country Index. (The index measures countries’ “contributions to global prosperity in domains such as peace, climate and health.”)

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Olympic Committee Warns Media Against Using ‘Biologically Male,’ ‘Female’ When Referring to Trans Athletes

Olympic athletes

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued media guidelines on Thursday that urged reporters not to use specific terms while covering transgender athletes.

The IOC, which governs the Olympic Games, published its Portrayal Guidelines ahead of the 2024 Paris event to “provide practical checklists and advice to help ensure gender-equal and fair representation of all athletes across all forms of media and communication,” the press release reads. The guide includes a section on “Problematic Language” that included the phrases “biologically male” and “biologically female.”

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Analysis: Ibram Kendi’s ‘Antiracist’ Center Is Racist by His Own Standards

Ibram Kendi

Ibram Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research is racist – according to the founder’s own definition.

The College Fix analyzed the remaining team at his Boston University center, which has shrunk since last year due to budgetary problems.

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Commentary: Bob Iger, DEI, and Wokism Broke Disney’s Trust with America

Bob Iger Disney

There is something of a subculture on YouTube of armchair analysts and commentators, WDW Pro, Valliant Renegade, and ClownfishTV, to name just three (beyond traditional financial websites like CNBC and Seeking Alpha), who track every cultural, corporate, programming, and financial move of The Walt Disney Company, previously one of America’s most iconic and trusted companies. Note: I used the past tense in describing The Walt Disney Company. It is no longer one of America’s most trusted brands, and it’s about to lose its iconic status.

How did this happen?

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Commentary: The New Fundamentalism and the Religion of Politics

Congress at Night

Those who would abolish religion and prohibit the free exercise thereof, are themselves religious. Those who would replace religion with the cult of reason, and sacrifice the soul before the altar of science, are unreasonable in the extreme: they are political extremists whose religion is politics.

This religion, with contempt for one nation under God, is in opposition to our civil religion. This religion, with contempt for the idea of God, that God exists, that God is true, that God is just, is without mercy. This religion, with contempt for the sons of Abraham, and of all who are children of God through faith, is a declaration of war against Jews and Christians

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SPLC Adds Openly Gay Group to List of ‘Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate Groups’

Gays Against Groomers

The Left’s main smear organ has targeted an openly gay organization and groups of doctors who oppose “gender-affirming care” in efforts to silence opposition to the transgender agenda and drag queen story hours.

The Southern Poverty Law Center released its “Year in Hate and Extremism” report Tuesday, warning about encroaching “theocracy” and an “authoritarian takeover” as part of the “organizational infrastructure … upholding white supremacy in the United States.”

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Commentary: The Declaration of Independence Is Now Problematic for the Authoritarian Left

Flags Across America event at Arlington National Cemetery

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,”the authoritarian government had power over every aspect of people’s lives, especially their thoughts. To reshape minds, even history could be changed:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered,” Orwell wrote. “And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”

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Commentary: Joe Biden’s America Is a Gay Version of the Soviet Union

President Joe Biden at a pride event

“Show me the man and I will show you the crime,” so said Lavenitry Beria, the longtime head of Stalin’s secret police.

The Trump conviction shows that the same crooked principle of justice animates American courts today. Should we be surprised? The alliance between the United States and the USSR during the 1940s—the American taxpayer funded the Soviet takeover of half of Europe and Asia to the tune of 300 billion inflation-adjusted dollars—was the central event of the 20th century.

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Reports: California Exodus Continues, Southeastern States as Primary Destinations

Austin, Texas

As the California exodus continues, a new migration trend is occurring, with southeastern and Appalachian states taking the top spots as inbound migration destinations, according to new reports.

According to a new Consumer Affairs 2024 Migration Trends report, “California’s mass exodus continues to ensue,” with the South and Southeast region of the country being the “hottest regions for people moving.”

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