In a move that is sure to trigger widespread discussion concerning the independence, objectivity and wisdom of granting authority to the WHO to manage global infectious diseases responses, the monkeypox outbreak has been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by the World Health Organization.
The declaration was made unilaterally, in direct contradiction of independent review panel advice, by WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Tedros made the declaration despite a lack of consensus among members of the WHO’s emergency committee on the monkeypox outbreak, and in so doing overruled his own review panel, who had voted 9 against, 6 for declaring the PHEIC. Tedros asserted that this committee of experts (who met on Thursday) was unable to reach a consensus, so it fell on him to decide whether to trigger the highest alert possible.
When the group met in June, the breakdown was 11 against and three for. It is not clear what has changed in the intervening four weeks to justify the change in Tedros’ position, although comments from internet pundits raise concerns that the unilateral action was taken in response to pressure from special interest advocacy groups.
There has also been a sudden burst of coordinated social media postings raising concerns regarding Monkeypox risks to children, which raises the question “If Monkeypox is a sexually transmitted disease, why are kids getting it?”
On Friday, the U.S. confirmed the first two cases of monkeypox in children, Centers for Disease Control Prevention and Control (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday. The CDC has said children, especially those under 8 years old, are among those at “especially increased risk” for severe monkeypox disease.
At a virtual event with the Washington Post on Friday focused on new coronavirus variants, Walensky stated that:
“Both of those children are traced back to individuals who come from the men-who-have-sex-with-men community, the gay men’s community,”
The WHO defines a PHEIC as “an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response.”
The WHO further explains how this definition implies a situation that is serious, sudden, unusual or unexpected; carries implications for public health beyond an affected country’s border and may require immediate international action. Since the procedures to declare a PHEIC were implemented in 2005, the WHO has only done so six times. The last time was in early 2020, for Covid-19.
Tedros’ statements clearly demonstrate that he unilaterally substituted his own opinions for those of the convened panel, raising questions of his objectivity, commitment to process and protocol, and whether he has been unduly influenced by external agents.
As the outbreak continues to grow, epidemiologists are split as to whether the WHO’s decision was correct. The meeting was the second time the emergency committee convened, after a meeting on June 23 when it decided the outbreak had not met that threshold.
Dr. Jimmy Whitworth, a professor of international public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine:
“It is a tricky decision for the committee, in some senses, it meets the definition — it is an unprecedented outbreak widespread in many countries and would benefit from increased international coordination.
On the other hand, it seems to be an infection for which we have the necessary tools for control; most cases are mild and the mortality rate is extremely low.”
The PHEIC designation comes from the International Health Regulations (IHR) created in 2005, and it represents an international “agreement” to help the prevent and respond to public health risks that have the potential to spread around the globe.
These are the same IHR which the Biden administration sought to further strengthen, but the attempt to implement proposed modifications were placed on hold after an international, multi-country outcry concerning loss of national autonomy. The unilateral actions of Tedros in this current situation clearly demonstrate that these concerns were warranted.
In an article supportive of the declaration, Vox news provided a summary of the potential financial beneficiaries of this declaration; that being vaccine manufacturers and the holding companies who have invested in them.
My Comment on Monkeypox Hygiene Guidelines
The usual suspects are stirring the panic pot over Monkeypox, and so far our trusted sources of health guidance, like CDC and FDA and NIH, have been silent. So in the public interest I put forward a two-step program by which every individual can self-protect against Monkeypox.
1. Do not handle monkeys, squirrels or other rodents,
2. Do not have sex with anyone who does, or who has open skin sores.
There you go. Refrain from these two activities and no vaccine required.
More from Dr. Malone, who actually is trustworthy:
In his American Greatness article Roger Kimball warns of Big Government Benevolence. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The union of abstract benevolence, which takes mankind as a whole for its object, with unbridled moralism is a toxic, misery-producing brew.
Consider, for example, the actor Jim Carrey, who back in 2018 told Bill Maher that “we have to say yes to socialism—to the word and everything. We have to stop apologizing.” What a card! Were socialism to be instituted in the United States, one of the first things that would happen is that people like Jim Carrey—estimated net worth, $180 million—would be instantly pauperized. For what are the two fundamental pillars of socialism? 1) The abolition of private property and 2) the equalization of wealth. And the cherry on top of this fudge sundae is that Jim Carrey actually starred in a movie called “Dumb and Dumber,” which is about “two unintelligent but well-meaning friends from Providence, Rhode Island.” Talk about art imitating life.
Let’s leave the latest incarnation of really-existing-socialism—the country of Venezuela—to one side. That is a laboratory demonstration of what happens when you take a prosperous country and rigorously impose socialist policies on it. The former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was partly right when he said that the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez showed that there was “another way” of doing politics and “it’s called socialism.”
Corbyn forgot to add: that way leads to universal immiseration and societal collapse, which is exactly what is happening in the once-rich country of Venezuela now.
Jim Carrey—like “It” Girl Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—likes to talk about the wonders of socialism whenever there are cameras nearby. It is practically a Pavlovian response: bring media into proximity with educationally challenged scions of capitalist success and, glossolalia-like, out pop nostrums in praise of socialism.
It is easy to make fun of such prognostications. But it is important to understand 1) the emotional motor that continues to drive them—hence Carrey, Ocasio-Cortez, Jeremy Corbyn, et al.—and 2) the disastrous reality that is the inevitable obverse of that smiling emotional impulse.
So, what is the emotional motor of socialism? In a word, benevolence.
That may seem counterintuitive. Isn’t benevolence a good thing?
That depends. Benevolence is a curious mental or characterological attribute. It is, as the philosopher David Stove observed, less a virtue than an emotion. To be benevolent means—what? To be disposed to relieve the misery and increase the happiness of others. Whether your benevolent attitude or action actually has that effect is beside the point. Yes, “benevolence, by the very meaning of the word,” Stove writes, “is a desire for the happiness, rather than the misery, of its object.” But here’s the rub:
the fact simply is that its actual effect is often the opposite of the intended one. The adult who had been hopelessly ‘spoilt’ in childhood is the commonest kind of example; that is, someone who is unhappy in adult life because his parents were too successful, when he was a child, in protecting him from every source of unhappiness.
It’s not that benevolence is a bad thing per se. It’s just that, like charity, it works best the more local are its aims. Enlarged, it becomes like that “telescopic philanthropy” Dickens attributes to Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House. Her philanthropy is more ardent the more abstract and distant its objects. When it comes to her own family, she is hopeless.
The sad truth is that theoretical benevolence is compatible
with any amount of practical indifference or even cruelty.
You feel kindly towards others. That is what matters: your feelings. The effects of your benevolent feelings in the real world are secondary, or rather totally irrelevant. Rousseau was a philosopher of benevolence. So was Karl Marx. Yet everywhere that Marx’s ideas have been put into practice, the result has been universal immiseration. But his intention was the benevolent one of forging a more equitable society by abolishing private property and, to adopt a famous phrase from Barack Obama, by spreading the wealth around.
An absolute commitment to benevolence, like the road that is paved with good intentions, typically leads to an unprofitable destination.
Just so with the modern welfare state. It doesn’t matter that the welfare state actually creates more of the poverty and dependence it was instituted to abolish. The intentions behind it are benevolent. Which is one of the reasons it is so seductive. It flatters the vanity of those who espouse it even as it nourishes the egalitarian ambitions that have always been at the center of Enlightened thought. This is why Stove describes benevolence as “the heroin of the Enlightened.” It is intoxicating, addictive, expensive, and ultimately ruinous.
The intoxicating effects of benevolence help to explain the growing appeal of politically correct attitudes about everything from “the environment” to the fate of the Third World. Why does the consistent failure of statist policies not disabuse their advocates of the statist agenda? One reason is that statist policies have the sanction of benevolence. They are “against poverty,” “against war,” “against oppression,” “for the environment.” And why shouldn’t they be? Where else are the pleasures of smug self-righteousness to be had at so little cost?
The intoxicating effects of benevolence—what Rousseau called the “indescribably sweet” feeling of virtue—also help to explain why unanchored benevolence is inherently expansionist. The party of benevolence is always the party of big government.
The imperatives of benevolence are intrinsically opposed to
the pragmatism that underlies the allegiance to limited government.
The union of abstract benevolence, which takes mankind as a whole for its object, with unbridled moralism is a toxic, misery-producing brew. This “lethal combination” is by no means peculiar to Communists. It provides the emotional fuel for utopians from Robespierre to the politically correct bureaucrats who preside over more and more of life in Western societies today, not to mention chattering celebrities like Jim Carrey who think it is chic to praise a philosophy that, were it instantiated, would entail his impoverishment and probably his incarceration.
Perhaps these folks mean well. Or perhaps they are just unstoppable narcissists and intolerant ideologues. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they really do seek to boost all mankind up to their own plane of enlightenment. Maybe inequality really does outrage their sense of justice.
Such attitudes are all but ubiquitous in modern democratic societies. Although of relatively recent vintage, they have spread rapidly. The triumph of this aspect of Enlightened thinking, as David Stove notes, marked the moment when “the softening of human life became the great, almost the only, moral desideratum.”
The modern welfare state is one result of the triumph of abstract benevolence. Its chief effects are to institutionalize dependence on the state while also assuring the steady growth of the bureaucracy charged with managing government largess. Both help to explain why the welfare state has proved so difficult to dismantle.
Is there an alternative? Stove quotes Thomas Malthus’ observation, from his famous Essay on the Principle of Population, that “we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of human genius, for everything that distinguishes the civilised from the savage state,” to “the laws of property and marriage, and to the apparently narrow principle of self-interest which prompts each individual to exert himself in bettering his condition.” The apparently narrow principle of self-interest, mind.
Contrast that robust, realistic observation with Robert Owen’s blather about replacing the “individual selfish system” with a “united social” system that, he promised, would bring forth a “new man.”
Stove observes that Malthus’ arguments for the genuinely beneficent effects of “the apparently narrow principle of self-interest” “cannot be too often repeated.” Indeed. Even so, a look around at the childish pretended enthusiasm for socialism makes me think that, for all his emphasis, David Stove understated the case. Jim Carrey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and a college student near you) would profit by having a closer acquaintance with the clear-eyed thinking of Thomas Malthus.
Jay Valentine reports what is known about the phantom voting industry and those fighting it for the sake of US election integrity. His American Thinker article is Election Heroes Are Stopping Fraudulent Voting…Right Now. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The soul of phantom voter fraud is the occasional, non-committed voter.
They show up at the last minute, delivering winning margins.
Actually, nobody shows up. Nor does anyone return an absentee ballot. That magic comes from a wonderful customer service innovation, the Phantom Voter Concierge, who casts the non-committed voters’ votes for them.
1. Building Reserves of Phantom Voter Identities
Let’s go there. Voter rolls are crammed with millions of voters who seldom, occasionally, or never vote. Democrat-leaning organizations run voter registration drives in edge communities, collecting identities they expect will never vote. You remember ACORN registering drug addicts on city streets? You might have said, “Why? They will never vote!”
They aren’t expected to vote. They are simply voter identity placeholders
later used by vote-harvesters.
State-funded groups like ERIC are paid by a dozen state governments, some with clueless Republican governors, to make sure almost nobody is ever taken off voter rolls. The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) provides institutional cover to this national phantom voter scam.
During early voting, vote-harvesters track those who never voted
or have not voted yet and vote for them.
In some states, like Wisconsin, leftist groups had access to the online voter rolls — something nobody else had. They could track every voter and vote for all of them if they did not show up in 2020.
Remember the stories in 2020 of people coming out to vote, often for the first time in years, to be told, “Sorry, you already voted”? Your Voter Concierge voted for you! Saved you the gas money to drive to the polls!
There are people voting from Salvation Army Food Banks who registered at that address twelve years ago. Those people are likely dead or living in a tent in Austin now — but still voting.
There are people at the Alabama college dorm, registered since 1984, still active and voting.
In Wisconsin, the Voter Concierges went to cognitive care facilities, where the patients did not recognize their own children. Their Voter Concierge voted them. Now part of a criminal investigation, this is how it’s done.
So how bad is the problem?
The Wisconsin voter integrity team did a deep dive, using U.S. government and state databases, and found 225,000 active, current voters who had “issues.” Those included addresses that did not exist; locations that could not be a true registration address, like a jail; and scores of others.
Elections are often decided by 1% of the vote. The Wisconsin team identified potential phantom voters easily able to impact an election.
2. Creating a Surplus of Empty Ballots
The other half of the scam is sending out absentee ballots to addresses that don’t line up.
For instance, there may be an apartment building at 145 Essex Street. The ballot-harvesting industry registers people there, deliberately skipping their apartment number.
Their mail gets returned to — you guessed it, smarty-pants! Those absentee ballots accumulate at the local Post Office.
The Wisconsin voter integrity team, one of the best in the country, found evidence that the Post Office collected those ballots and gave them to the Voter Concierges — to vote. Pretty good USPS customer service!
You might think this would be caught with signature matching. Right! That is why so many states or counties eliminate the signature match — like Maricopa County in Arizona.
If your blood is boiling right now, you just don’t get it. This is customer service on a whole new level. The Voter Concierge gets votes counted – even if the voter never casts that vote.
3. Scrubbing Clean the Voter Rolls
Voter integrity teams are now applying advanced computer technology to thwart the Voter Concierge by deep-cleaning the rolls.
In 2022, the vote-harvesting industry will again flood the zone in swing counties with over 250,000 new registrants from September to November.
Several voter integrity teams, using advanced artificial intelligence technology, can check every registrant, at silicon speed, against over 30 databases, with a billion records, ensuring that the registrant is not living in an R.V. park, a church, or a UPS store, and that his address meets current legal standards.
Sorry, Beto, but registering every itinerant is no longer the key to the Texas Governor’s Mansion.
For the first time, phantom voters are being identified before their registrations take effect.
Living in an apartment where you do not designate the apartment number? Sorry, pal — you aren’t voting this year. Registering from a church? There had better be enough bathrooms to meet the certificate of occupancy requirements for that county.
More voters showing up in a county than there are eligible citizens? Flagged hourly! Alert issued before the ballots are counted!
4. Applying Real-Time Voter Integrity Technology
As ballots arrive during early voting, artificial intelligence snapshots aggregate voter identities. That guy who voted on day 2 in person, disappeared on snapshot 8, reappeared on snapshot 11 with his ballot changed to absentee…is identified. Before that ballot is tabulated, it is red-flagged, and the voter integrity team files a protest.
Thirty-five thousand inactive voters, changed to active — then voted, then changed to inactive again? The A.I. systems pick this up with snapshot analysis. That scam is over!
For the first time, voter integrity teams have technology ballot-harvesters cannot outrun.
When Sheriff Clarke and Mike Lindell started supporting these kinds of technologies, after the 2020 election, the focus was voter roll anomalies. Anomalies were abundant.
The battlefield has changed to real-time analysis, driven by artificial intelligence.
The combined knowledge of a dozen gifted voter integrity teams, with 16 months of experience, is built into an artificial intelligence engine, identifying phantom voters before they are registered, before they can illegally vote.
Every time a fake vote is cast by a Voter Concierge, an American is disenfranchised. Artificial intelligence helps the good guys protect the vote and gives confidence to all Americans that their elections are legit.
Voter integrity teams learned that chasing 2020 voter fraud after the election is too late. Some leading election integrity teams are stopping phantom voter fraud before it impacts elections. Cleaning up voter rolls just became an A.I.-driven, real time endeavor.
Jay Valentine led the team that built the eBay fraud detection engine and the TSA No-Fly List. Jay’s website is JayValentine.com. He can be reached at Jay@ContingencySales.com.
Gregory R. Wrightstone writes at Real Clear Energy LinkedIn Shuts Out Truth — Again. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some added images
Censors at LinkedIn have permanently banned me from the social media site after I presented data drawn from peer-reviewed data used by the preeminent promoter of the narrative that man-made global warming threatens the planet— the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
How can this be? Well, first, my offending posts placed today’s level of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the context of geological time, suggesting that life would be well served if there were more CO2 — exactly the opposite of what climate alarmists say. Secondly, I’ve had the audacity to publish facts — also know as the truth, multiple times on LinkedIn— that contradict the theory that humans face an “existential threat” from a harmless gas of which each of us daily exhales two pounds.
“Your account has violated the LinkedIn User Agreement and Professional Community Policies,” read the email from the site. “Due to the number and/or the severity of these violations, this account has been permanently restricted.”
The posts were of two charts. One showed that carbon dioxide levels were nearly 6,000 parts per million (ppm) 600 million years ago when many animal life forms first appeared in the Cambrian Era. Another illustrated a 140-million-year decline of CO2 levels — from 2,500 parts per million (ppm) to the current 420 ppm.
Implied in the data is that carbon dioxide levels eventually would drop to 150 ppm, at which point plants — and ultimately all life — begin to die from CO2 starvation. The concentration got as low as 180 ppm in the last ice age about 12,000 years ago. It was at 280 ppm at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.
The addition of 140 ppm since then have likely come from man’s activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels. If so, human activity has saved the planet from the existential threat of too little CO2. In any case, more of the powerful plant food is a good thing, as evidenced by the overall greening of Earth and record crop harvests of recent decades.
As executive director of the CO2 Coalition, I’ve had previous run-ins with LinkedIn censors. One involved a post about a CO2 Coalition paper on global temperatures. Although LinkedIn did not identify the broken rules, the only possible “violation” would have been an admonition to “not share false or misleading content.” The censored paper, The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record,was fully sourced and written by two of the top climate scientists in the world, Richard Lindzen and John Christy.
These are no lightweight scientists. Dr. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an award recipient of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was a lead author of the IPCC’s third assessment report’s scientific volume.
Professor Christy is the director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and has been Alabama’s State Climatologist since 2000. Along with Dr. Roy Spencer, he has maintained one of the key global temperature data sets relied on by scientists and government bodies. For this achievement, they were awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
Figure 4. As in Fig. 3 except for seasonal station and global anomalies. As noted in the text, the inhabitants of the Earth experience the anomalies as noted by the black circles, not the yellow squares.
The main thrust of the paper was to put the modest one-degree rise in temperature since 1900 in its proper perspective. When compared to wide swings in temperature experienced on a daily and yearly basis, that slight rise in global temperature over the last 120 years does not appear as alarming as portrayed by the purveyors of climate doom. Like so many others who challenge the notion of catastrophic man-made warming, the authors risked being censored by the intellectual elite — or those who identify as such. And they were.
The CO2 Coalition has been attacked by other climate cultists, including Facebook and members of a political class that insists on forcing its ideology on everybody. Obviously, we care more about the truth — and our freedom — than anybody’s approval.
As noted philosopher of science Karl Popper said, “Democracy (that is, a form of government devoted to the protection of the open society) cannot flourish if science becomes the exclusive possession of a closed set of specialists.”
Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist, executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Va., and author of “Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know.” He has been an IPCC expert reviewer.
The litany of woke entitlements alleged by the left infringe on existing rights,
restricting the freedoms of some in order to benefit others.
When the political left finds a meme they really think sells, they go all-in. Such is the case with “forced birth” or “forced motherhood” in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and stated a Constitutional right to abortion does not exist. I wrote recently about how “forced birth” is a nonsensical description of pregnancies resulting (as is almost always the case) from consensual sex. Babies are a natural consequence of sex and procreation is the primary reason sex exists in the first place.
“Forced birth” or “forced motherhood” are projections of the left’s own brutality and reliance on force onto their political and cultural opposition. Abortion is force. Abortion kills; it is a brutal denial of this tiny, developing human’s right to life, the most fundamental of all rights. For the woman’s “right” to be exercised, another life must end. This wretched truth differs from the left’s construction of other “rights” only in degree, not in kind.
They predicate many of their “fundamental rights” on the coercion of others,
and if a so-called “right” is based on coercion, it is not fundamental,
merely an entitlement guaranteed by a bully state.
Of course, when we speak about coercion, abortion advocates point to exceptional cases such as pregnancy resulting from rape. As I wrote in my last piece, nonconsensual sex, especially resulting in pregnancy, is a grave loss of autonomy. Yet the innocent baby’s more essential right to life supersedes this loss of autonomy for nine months, as difficult a circumstance as it may be. One tragedy should not be compounded by another.
A baby’s right to life obviously doesn’t supersede a mother’s right to life.
That may be a reason to deliver a baby early, even too early to survive, but not a reason for deliberate destruction. What opponents of abortion are referring to, and what is being debated, is not situations in which carrying a preborn baby endangers the mother. The practice we condemn is the premeditated killing of a baby in the womb because that baby is not wanted, whether because of his paternity, apparent defect, or general inconvenience to the parents.
One of the definitions of “coerce” is “to deprive of by force.” So, it is fitting we call this kind of “right” a coercive entitlement. That classification extends far beyond abortion, though abortion is the most heinous of all.
Before further characterizing these coercive entitlements, let me address the other objection that will doubtlessly arise: that all our rights rely on at least the threat of the use of force, so what’s the difference? Force wielded by the state on those who would violate a right, which is the only way rights can be protected, is not the same as coercion or restrictions applied to people in order for a right to be exercised in the first place.
If I give a public speech and someone who hates my views comes and tries to drag me off the stage to shut me up, police should intervene to protect my right and take the perpetrator into custody. If, on the other hand, the police themselves drag me off the stage because my speech violates a law against “hate speech” meant to “protect” certain demographics, or if I don’t make that speech in the first place due to the threat of being dragged off to jail, that is force necessarily applied or threatened in order to guarantee this “right” to not be a victim of “hate speech.”
The Right Not to be Offended
Woke rights are entitlements to coercion and the restriction of others’ rights previously recognized. To protect certain people’s “right to live their true selves,” for example, the far left alleges it has the constitutional right to limit others’ free speech so that some groups are not offended or emotionally wounded. With “misgendering” and “dead-naming,” we must in some cases be forced into certain speech for this right to “be one’s authentic self” to exist.
Again, with transgender athletes: it isn’t “equality” unless all institutions are forced to allow them to compete with the sex with which they identify. The right of parents to protect their children is also threatened by the left as children far below the age of consent are alleged to have the “right” to do permanent and severe damage to their bodies with so-called gender transition. They allege this “right” while children face social contagions they’re poorly equipped to handle and gender doctrines that confuse rather than elucidate. The right of parents to make medical decisions for minors are critical in these circumstances, and the far left would have them erased.
More Coercion Regarding Gays, Lockdowns
The alleged “right to equal treatment” for gay couples a la Masterpiece Cake Shop also relies on coercion. The left claims true “equality” isn’t achieved unless bakers, photographers, and floral designers can be forced to express views or support behaviors they disagree with.
Consider more recently the left’s fervent support for lockdowns in the name of a supposed “right” to not be infected, smearing those who disagree with them, who simply want to exercise their freedom to live a normal life, as “reckless” and “murderous.” The alleged entitlement to a reduced threat of Covid infection (or insert latest panic-inducing pathogen here) is dependent on restricting the more basic freedoms of others. Mask and vaccine mandates follow the same flawed logic.
Affirmative Action and Taxes
Universities likewise violate the right to equal treatment under the law through affirmative action. Applicants of certain minority statuses are given preferential treatment while non-minority applications may be “downgraded” simply due to applicants’ ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. The left would see affirmative action expanded and racial quotas in employment, now banned, used widely.
Even the most basic right to keep the money you earn has been infringed upon for decades by the government expressly for the purpose of distributing it to others who earn less. Those with fewer resources are entitled to the resources gained by others, according to the left.
Supplanting Natural Rights
The new, “woke” set of rights are just more aggressive iterations of this long-standing belief of the left: government must take some of the wealth, opportunity, freedoms, and rights of some in order to benefit others. Thus, the leftist coercive rights supplant natural rights identified by the Framers of our Constitution, rights that come from the Creator. Abortion as a “fundamental” right supplants the right to life. They cannot coexist. The rights to not be “victimized” by disfavored speech and to “be one’s true self” and be “equal” supplant the right to free speech. The “right” to not be infected with a certain pathogen supplants the rights to move about freely and to peaceably assemble. The latter rights must be abridged to uphold the new ones.
The “forced birth” talking point discussed above reminds us what is inside this trojan horse of entitlements alleged to be “civil rights” or “fundamental human rights:” bondage. The only real fundamental right leftists believe in is the right of the state to use force in enacting their agenda. From abortion to so-called gender transition, these new rights are definitionally authoritarian, abridging pre-existing rights to support themselves.
The quest of the woke left to free themselves from biological realities and natural order, as in the case of abortion, gender, and sexuality, and to achieve a more “equitable” society, relies on submission, subjugation, and if necessary, lethal force. The truth remains amid the temper tantrums and the angry memes:
There is no free, thriving society that can be achieved through the use of force
by one group of citizens in the name of another.
The usual suspects are stirring the panic pot over Monkeypox, and so far our trusted sources of health guidance, like CDC and FDA and NIH, have been silent. So in the public interest I put forward a two-step program by which every individual can self-protect against Monkeypox.
1. Do not handle monkeys, squirrels or other rodents,
2. Do not have sex with anyone who does, or who has open skin sores.
There you go. Refrain from these two activities and no vaccine required.
More from Dr. Malone, who actually is trustworthy:
The phrase “New World Order” (“NWO”) is a loaded term. For starters, the people who are pushing for a single world government prefer to call it “The Great Reset.” Additionally, NWO sounds like the ultimate conspiracy theory, complete with indivisible dots, imaginary lines, and tin foil hats. And yet there’s no doubt that the self-anointed elites across the world have coalesced around a single vision that involves ending fossil fuel and achieving total control over individuals to “protect” them from COVID. Still, people across the globe are pushing back and one group has a global vision of what this pushback can look like.
During COVID’s first two years, we learned that most First World governments happily embraced tyranny. Even in the face of mountains of evidence that the lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates did nothing to improve the situation, governments not only didn’t stop, but they also dug in deeper, systematically taking away people’s rights.
No person embodied this more than Canada’s Justin Trudeau, who went from fuzzy tree hugger to steely-eyed tyrant overnight. Canada is still in deep lockdown mode, right there with China, with millions of gleeful fascist apparatchiks happily imposing the government’s diktats:
With COVID losing its power to frighten people, the world’s budding dictators are reverting to Climate Change to clamp down on power. The most recent outburst of this madness was in Holland, where the government announced that it was shutting down farmland (i.e., the place where food is grown) essentially to stop fertilizer and cow farts. (I simplify a bit but you know what I mean.) The farmers pushed back hard.
The Hague: Thousands of farmers drove their tractors along roads and highways across the Netherlands, snarling morning traffic as they headed for a mass protest against the Dutch government’s plans to rein in emissions of nitrogen oxide and ammonia.
And indeed, although it never makes it to the New York Times or Washington Post unless they can no longer avoid the topic, people all over the world are pushing back at COVID and Climate Change totalitarianism:
When vaccine passports were being implemented, protests took place around the world – but there was hardly any coverage from the media.
Due to the cost of living crisis, protests are happening around the world – but again, the media turns a blind eye.
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which records protests worldwide, 11 countries are currently seeing protests of more than 1,000 people in response to the rising cost of living and other economic woes in 2022. As of July 5, Carnegie had recorded protests of more than 120,000 people in France, 100,000 in Spain, 10,000 in Greece, 10,000 in Kazakhstan, 10,000 in Sri Lanka, 10,000 in India, 5,000 in Iran, 5,000 in Peru, 1,000 people in Argentina, 1,000 in Morocco, and 1,000 in the U.K.
It’s Americans who are behind the curve on this one for two possible reasons. One, we believe ourConstitution will protect us. And while it certainly offers protections in theory, there’s every reason to believe that the Democrats currently controlling the federal government have no intention of letting it offer those protections in fact. Two, the Democrats’ January 6 “insurrection” hysteria has frightened Americans into abandoning their First Amendment rights.
But just as the tech world offers governments unprecedented power to control individuals by monitoring their every word, thought, and move, technology also can still be used to bring people across the world together in one giant, peaceful “NO!” against the gathering forces of tyranny. That’s the goal of an organization called Reignite World Freedom.
The organization’s mission is simple: End the globalism that is wrapping itself around the earth like a giant chain, magnifying the power of world governments stealing away their citizens’ liberty. The organization hopes to have what it calls a “global walk out.”
A unified, global event and convoy to your capital city.
Unelected bureaucracies like The World Health Organization (WHO) and The World Economic Forum (WEF) should not have the power to dictate policies in our countries.
Let’s send them a clear message they can’t ignore.
It’s time for governments around the world to consider replacing and leaving these ‘globalist’ organizations.
I.How will the Global Walkout work?
1.A global WALK OUT from the society they’re trying to enslave us into, including an optional convoy to occupy your capital city. The length of the walkout will depend on the momentum built in each country.
2.We will not announce the walk out dates until we have enough pledges worldwide.
3.If you can’t participate in the convoy, that’s fine. You can still commit to walk out for as long as you can.
4.You can choose one or more of these options when you pledge;
Walk out of work and have a holiday.
Walk your children out of school.
Walk away from spending money at corporations that support globalism.
Walk away from consuming any mainstream media or streaming channels.
Convoy to your capital city on the scheduled dates (yet to be announced). Read more here.
The organizers want people to sign a pledge before setting a date.
I don’t know how well this fascinating idea will work in the U.S., especially because of the January 6 crackdown. Still, if people don’t push back against the COVID and Climate Change cudgels, we will enter a new dark age (literally dark, as in no fossil fuels) in which most Westerners, after decades of prosperity, live in squalor and despair.
MN Gordon explains the financial debacle in his Economic Prism article Modern Monetary Theory Bites the DustExcerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Just a couple of years ago Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was all the rage. But that was before rampant money printing triggered an official consumer price inflation rate, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), of 9.1 percent.
Hindsight is always 20/20. Yet, sometimes, foresight is 20/20 too. In the case of MMT, practically everyone could see there would be hell to pay…even through broken spectacles.
The future consequences were crystal clear. Printing up money and passing it out around town, thus entitling people to claims on goods and services without commensurate production, is fundamentally foolish, reckless, and outright suicidal.
Only academics and central bankers were blind to the arrival of today’s inflation.
If you recall, as inflation was heating up during the second part of 2021, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told everyone it was transitory. Then, as inflation continued unabated, Powell finally admitted in December 2021 that inflation was no longer transitory and that the word needed to be retired.
Powell and Yellen have their finger prints all over this consumer price inflation mess. Yet they didn’t act alone. Advocates of MMT cheered on their mass money printing with righteous assurances. They said inflation wouldn’t be a problem.
But now that consumer price inflation is raging at a 40 year high, where did the promoters of MMT go? Why aren’t they tackling inflation with the same enthusiasm?
Fanciful schemes offering the more abundant life always yield the unsuspecting and outright gullible to the assurances of dreamers, schemers, theorists, reformers, and scoundrels of all stripes. Promises of something for nothing are too intoxicating to pass up.
For several years Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and other American socialists, served up fresh pitchers of grape Flavor-Aid laced with MMT as a solution to all the downtrodden’s problems. To join the cult all you had to do was drink from their cup.
MMT, as you may have heard, offers booms without busts, and money without limits.
The nuts and bolts of the theory state that a government that creates its own money, like the USA, cannot default on its dollar based debts. Therefore, the USA can print all the money it needs to amplify the economy – debts and deficits be damned.
Should such overt dollar debasement lead to price inflation, MMT has just the solution. Raise taxes and issue bonds to remove the excess money from circulation.
Taxes, you see, are not for funding government spending. Rather, they’re for throttling back the money supply to attain the magical balance of growth and inflation. With MMT, big government statists can hatch boondoggles first, and leave taxation for later.
The whole theory, or lack thereof, is abundantly retarded. Yet in early 2020, something abundantly retarded was precisely what was needed.
When quantitative tightening (QT) was abruptly terminated and reversed in September 2019, the Fed’s balance sheet was $3.7 trillion. Soon after, in the face of the fabricated coronavirus hysteria, the Fed jacked up its balance sheet by $5.2 trillion to a high of $8.9 trillion. A good part of this took place between March and June 2020.
What happened next…
Cult of MMT
At first, the consequences were nonexistent. In February 2021, after nearly a year of monster money printing, the CPI showed an annual rate of inflation of just 1.7 percent. MMT supporters were riding high.
By that point, the U.S. government, and by extension the American people, were fully committed to a program of currency debasement to finance government mandated lockdowns. Washington was also attempting to inflate away its debt burden. The authorities prefer an implicit default via inflation as opposed to missing bond payments to creditors.
…all so governments, and individuals, can spend well above what they can afford, and then welsh on the debt without consequences.
During the rampant money printing of 2020 and 2021 Stephanie Kelton emerged as the MMT messiah. In June 2020, her book, “The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy,” was published.
It quickly became a New York Times Bestseller. And it also received rave reviews from unlikely places. Upon reading the book, gangsta rap pioneer, Ice Cube, for example, tweeted on September 3, 2020, the following means of salvation:
“America loves to cry broke. But in America money does grow on trees.”
“America is a currency creator so there’s no reason for people to live like this. Government and the banks have made a deal to keep the people in debt. They always say if you print money it will cause inflation. They just printed 3 trillion. Little or no inflation.”
Does a 9.1 percent CPI reading, with an unofficial reading of nearly 18 percent,
constitute little or no inflation?
Modern Monetary Theory Bites the Dust
Currently, the Fed’s balance sheet is roughly $8.9 trillion. And consumer price inflation is raging at a 40 year high. What’s more, the Fed is hiking rates with the purpose of containing inflation. But the only way for the Fed to contain inflation is to trigger a massive, 1930s-style depression.
The cult of MMT, like most cults, has proven to be lacking for the general populace. Instead of bringing wealth and abundance to the American worker it has brought wealth and abundance to the elites and central planners who first receive and direct the flow of the newly minted fake money.
Moreover, like most cults, when MMT’s leaders are needed most, they conveniently disappear.
Is Kelton not a true believer in MMT, after all? Because if Kelton was a true believer, wouldn’t she be advocating for higher taxes right now?
That’s how MMT is supposed to work, right? When inflation heats up, taxes are supposed to be raised to remove excess money from circulation? Isn’t that the MMT solution to inflation?
Kelton, however, is not banging the drum for higher taxes. Perhaps, this is because higher taxes are perennially unpopular. Similarly, promoting money printing is much more hip and cool than promoting higher taxes.
Did MMT just bite the dust?
For now, it appears to have. We suspect it will be gone until a massive depression wipes away inflation.
Then it will be resurrected to great folly so the money printers can really get to work.
Background on Magical Money Theory
Pardon me for mixing up acronyms. Somehow the increasing mention of MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) made me think of the classic Beatles trip album. Perhaps that association was triggered by today’s suddenly fashionable socialists relying on MMT to pay for their “everything free for everybody” political visions. (Maybe one of the Ms could stand for ‘mushrooms”.)
A primer on what MMT is and is not, is an article by Karl Smith (descendant of Adam?) in National Review The Uses and Abuses of Modern Monetary Theory. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
MMT advocates overlook its flaws.
Newly elected representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) argued on Monday that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) ought to be a part of the conversation when it comes to funding major social-policy initiatives, such as her proposed Green New Deal. Stephanie Kelton, former economic advisor to Bernie Sanders, has likewise insisted that MMT should replace our current thinking about government finance. Yet what is MMT? And is it really as revolutionary as its proponents claim?
At its heart, MMT is a way of describing the federal budget and the Federal Reserve as if they were unified under a single executive authority. In describing the system so, the dangers of federal deficit spending are no longer that it crowds out private investment and slows economic growth, but that it leads potentially to excess inflation.
Yet Modern Monetary Theorists then invariably argue that inflation is not, and indeed could not be, a major problem for the United States. Many hard-core adherents go so far as to propose a job-guarantee program paid for by the federal government, which, they argue, will virtually eliminate both unemployment and the possibility of runaway inflation.
The tenets of MMT should be familiar to an older generation of fiscal conservatives. Before the 1980s, central banks such as the Federal Reserve were controlled far more directly by their governments. As a result, they could — and often did — bail out profligate governments by simply printing more money to cover the government’s debt.
This led to massive currency devaluation, runaway inflation, or both. In the early 1980s, however, central banks in the developed world were granted independence in the hopes that doing so would stop the spiraling inflation of the late 1960s and 1970s.
In the U.S., Fed chairman Paul Volcker was spectacularly successful at this. So were, to varying degrees, most central banks in the developed world. Some holdouts existed, notably in Southern Europe — a situation that would come back to haunt them decades later.
But MMT waves away the significance of these developments, instead focusing attention on several technical facts. First, when the federal government wants to spend money, it does so by having the Treasury issue checks. These checks are processed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY). Second, the FRBNY does this literally by marking up the value of digital reserves in an account belonging to the check recipients’ bank and marking down the account of the Treasury by an equal amount.
These two operations are, in theory, separate. There is no technical reason why the FRBNY has to mark down the Treasury account. It only does so because laws require the federal government to meet all of its obligations. Such laws, argue Modern Monetary Theorists, cannot bind Congress, which after all has the power to alter them.
MMT advocates argue that Congress should ask the Treasury to sell Treasury bonds to cover any of its outstanding obligations. This is not, however, because they think it is necessary to fulfill the government’s obligations, but because doing so would help stabilize the macroeconomy.
All well and good. But at some point, won’t the debt become so large that merely paying interest on it will require issuing additional debt? Won’t this process feed on itself until all the borrowing capacity in the economy is soaked up?
No, MMT advocates reply, because the government can simply stop issuing debt — meeting its obligations instead by having the Federal Reserve simply create money on its behalf.
Indeed, this is what distressed governments have traditionally done when their liabilities add up — and the result has typically been hyperinflation. Modern Monetary Theorists argue that this need not be the case. Their exact reasoning differs.
At times, they argue that hyperinflation only occurs in countries that borrow from abroad in debt denominated in a foreign government’s currency. I don’t know enough about every single instance of hyperinflation to verify this claim, but it is true that the worst incidences of hyperinflation are typically associated with borrowing from abroad.
When a country prints money in an attempt to fund the government, the international exchange value of its currency collapses. If the country owes debt denominated in a foreign currency, that debt becomes more difficult to pay down as its own currency falls. Then the country has to print even more money to meet its debt payments, which of course causes the exchange value of its currency to fall further, creating a vicious circle that ends in hyperinflation.
Modern Monetary Theorists argue that this can’t happen to the United States because all of our debt is in the form of Treasury bonds that are denominated in dollars. If the international exchange value of the dollar falls, that does not change the value of our debt.
It does, however, mean that foreigners will be repaid in a currency that will be worth much less to them. Foreign bondholders are not stupid; they would regard this as a type of unofficial default. After experiencing this type of default through currency devaluation, they would be much less willing to buy Treasury bonds or indeed any type of American security again. This is precisely the situation that Italy, Spain, and Greece found themselves in during the 1980s.
Both countries had regularly devalued their currency as a way to get out from underneath foreign debts and were increasingly locked out of international markets. The euro was created, at least in part, in an effort to solve this. It could ultimately be printed only with the authority of the European Central Bank, meaning that neither Italy, Spain, Greece, nor any other member country could avert a debt crisis by devaluing its currency. Instead, they would have to raise taxes to meet their obligations.
That brings us to the second argument MMT advocates invoke when arguing that we should not worry about excessive debt leading to inflation: If inflation becomes a problem, the federal government can simply raise taxes, slowing down the economy which, in turn, will cool inflation.
But there are two problems with this approach. First, it is political suicide. At a time when consumers are facing ever-rising prices, it would seem cruel beyond measure to slap them with a tax increase. Very few governments would have the nerve to do this. If anything, history shows us that governments will instead resort to spending money on subsidies to ease the burden of rapidly rising prices.
Second, committing to this approach would risk an economic calamity. In 1973, OPEC placed an embargo on the United States that resulted in the price of oil quadrupling overnight. The sharply rising price of oil led both to a slowing economy and an increase in inflation — a dangerous mix.
A slowing economy lowers tax revenues, making it more difficult for the government to meet its debt payments. Suppose, at a time when the economy was slowing but inflation was rising, the U.S. government had firmly committed itself to MMT principles and refused to waver. In that case, it would not be able to resort to money printing because inflation was rising. Instead, it would be obligated to raise taxes both to meet its debt payments and to slow the rate of inflation.
Sharp increases in taxes during a recession, however, can be self-defeating. This is exactly the situation that Greece, and to a lesser extent Italy and Spain, found themselves in during the Great Recession. The crises lowered revenue, which worsened their budget deficits.
As a result, the government was forced to raise taxes and lower spending during the recession. This caused the economy to contract further, which caused tax revenue to fall so much that the budget deficit actually rose. In the case of Greece, this self-defeating cycle of higher taxes and lower revenues caused the government to ultimately default on its debts anyway. That, of course, worsened the economic crisis the country was already facing.
In the face of such a calamity, no sovereign government would or perhaps even should refrain from devaluing its currency and inflating away at least some of its debts. For that reason, governments have designed institutions to avoid falling into this trap.
In the United States, that means both making the Federal Reserve independent and not subject to the direct authority of the Treasury, and requiring the Treasury to meet all of its obligations with cash raised from tax revenues or Treasury-bond sales. In effect, we’ve outlawed the methods of Modern Monetary Theory — and with good reason.
KARL SMITH — Karl Smith is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He was previously Assistant Professor of Economics and Government at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Government.
Oh the Irony! A 2015 cartoon where a vaccine scientist is miffed at incredibility displayed by climate scientists. Dennis Prager explains why these days citizens have lost trust in scientists of all stripes. His American Greatness article is You’re a Scientist? So What? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Scientists helped ruin millions of children’s educations and helped spur a sharp increase in depression, drug use, and suicide among young people. So, by all means, question the science!
A caller to my radio show this week, a physician, took strong issue with me regarding COVID-19 therapeutics. He accused me of not believing in science. His last words before we had to go to a commercial break were, “I’m a scientist.”
Given that I am not a scientist, he assumed that comment would persuade me—or at least persuade many listeners—that I was not qualified to disagree with him. If that was his assumption, he was wrong.
“I don’t care,” I responded. “It’s irrelevant. Scientists have given science a bad name.”
I would not have said that as recently as three years ago. But in recent years, and especially in the past two years, some basic suppositions of mine have changed.
I no longer assume when I read a statement by a scientist that the statement is based on science. In fact, I believe I am more committed to scientific truth than many scientists are.
The American Medical Association advocates the removal of sex designation from birth certificates. If many doctors or other scientists have issued a dissent, I am not aware of it.
“Assigning sex using binary variables in the public portion of the birth certificate fails to recognize the medical spectrum of gender identity.” Those are the words of the author of the AMA report, Willie Underwood III, M.D.
Sarah Mae Smith, M.D., an AMA delegate from California, speaking on behalf of the Women Physicians Section, said, “We need to recognize gender is not a binary but a spectrum.”
When the American Medical Association and a plethora of physicians tell us that human beings, unlike every other animal above some reptilian species, are “not binary,” i.e., neither male nor female, the assertion “I am a scientist” becomes meaningless.
In mid-2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the medical community was demanding physical distancing, mask-wearing, and the lockdown of businesses and schools, more than a thousand health care professionals announced that the protests against racism then taking place—events with no social distancing, often no masks, plenty of yelling, and people “coughing uncontrollably” (New York Times description)—were medically necessary.
Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, tweeted, “We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus. In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”
Over 1,000 health care professionals signed an “open letter advocating for an anti-racist public health response to demonstrations against systemic injustice occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The letter said, among other things, “Do not disband protests under the guise of maintaining public health for COVID-19 restrictions” and labeled “pervasive racism . . . the paramount public health problem.” That’s a left-wing cant, not science.
Now you can better appreciate why “I am a scientist” no longer means what it once did.
How about the cruelty of not allowing the dying to be visited by loved ones—even if they wore a hospital mask, even if they agreed to wear a hazmat suit? Did that enhance your view of scientists’ medical judgment?
Then there was the American medical community’s opposition to therapeutics, dismissing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (both used with zinc) as frauds despite the testimony of numerous physicians that they saved COVID-19 patients’ lives when used appropriately. State medical boards around the country threatened to revoke the medical license of any physician who prescribed these drugs to treat COVID-19—despite these drugs being among the safest prescription drugs available.
As early as July 2020, Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, wrote in Newsweek: “I myself know of two doctors who have saved the lives of hundreds of patients with these medications, but are now fighting state medical boards to save their licenses and reputations. The cases against them are completely without scientific merit.”
As a result of the American medical community’s opposition to therapeutics, Risch wrote, “tens of thousands of patients with COVID-19 are dying unnecessarily.”
Doctors throughout America were essentially telling COVID-19 patients, “Go home, get rest, and wait to see if your COVID-19 gets worse. If you can’t breathe, come to the hospital where we can put you on a ventilator.” Ventilators, it quickly became clear, were a virtual death sentence for COVID-19 patients. And then they died alone.
Another example of the decline of seriousness about science among scientists was National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins urging his colleagues to boycott any “high-level” scientific conference that doesn’t have women and underrepresented minorities in marquee speaking slots.
And another: Heather Mac Donald reported that in 2020, “The NIH announced a new round of ‘Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research.’ Academic science labs could get additional federal money if they hire ‘diverse’ researchers; no mention was made of relevant scientific qualifications” (emphasis added).
How many scientists protested the shutting down of schools for nearly two years? Some did, like those who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, but for the most part the scientific community was silent. In other words, scientists helped ruin millions of American children’s educations, not to mention abetted the unprecedented increase in depression, drug use, and suicide among young people.
These are only a few reasons not to take “I am a scientist” as seriously as we once did.
But there may be two consolations: One is that the same rule now applies to “I am a professor,” “I am a teacher,” “I am a rabbi,” “I am a priest,” “I am a pastor,” “I am a journalist,” and “I am a doctor.”
The other is that there are exceptions. Thank God.
Footnote: Some Additional Reasons to Doubt Scientists
Some good news about education materials to inoculate children against brainwashing by woke teachers and social media messaging. H/T Tom Woods for an alert to these timely resources for today’s families. From Tuttle Twins website.
Dear Parent,
If you’re like me, you’re worried about the “new normal” society is trying to cram down our throats.
In the wake of Covid-19, the government has asserted its power, printed a ton of new money, and restricted our rights.
Our kids have had to adjust, too — and many of us struggle to know how to help them understand what’s happening in the world.
To make matters worse, the public school system, the mainstream media, and the entertainment industry aren’t helping. They are openly pushing socialism and woke-ism
into the minds of our kids every day.
Just recently, an elementary school in my community plastered the wall with the ABCs of socialist activism — teaching kids terms such as “W is for woke,” “S is for social justice,” and “A is for activist.”
These radical messages work their way into school curriculum, movies, advertising, and social media platforms to persuade our impressionable children.
Parents like you struggle to find educational material that doesn’t lie about our nation’s history or teach that the government is the solution to our problems.
You want to help your children learn about true history, sound money, personal freedom and responsibility, entrepreneurship, individual rights, and more.
The Tuttle Twins are the only books that help children develop critical thinking skills about real-world concepts—sharing ideas with kids that most adults don’t even know!
Let’s be honest, most children’s books teach very basic ideas, if any at all—they’re full of fluff and silly stories. And while these can be good to develop reading skills and phonetics, they typically don’t teach children important ideas that they can apply in their life.
Our books recognize that the world is full of companies, people, and politicians who want to expose your children to ideas you do not support.
This includes school teachers who see their job as “activism” to spread leftist ideas and encourage children to think like they do.
The Tuttle Twins empower parents like you to make sure your children have a foundation of freedom—to understand the ideas of a free society that socialists are trying to hard to undermine.
With our books, your children will learn things like:
Why a free market economy is the greatest way to lift people out of poverty and allow people to trade with one another.
How property rights allows us to decide what’s best for us, and make decisions for our family.
Why the world is a better place because of entrepreneurs who create businesses to help serve us and improve our lives.
What socialism is and why it is so destructive to our freedoms and well being.
How the Golden Rule is so important to people getting along with one another, no matter where we live, what we look like, or what we believe.
Why education is so important, and why children should be allowed to learn things they are interested in.
What true laws are, and why the government should protect our rights.
…and so much more!
Footnote: Woke Pressure on Authors of Books for Children
Dr. Seuss books were the best sellers
Until In recent years they have been targeted for imagery deemed stereotypical or out-of-date. A 2014 scholarly work asserted that The Cat in the Hat is an elaborate mockery of black people. In 2017, when then-First Lady Melania Trump gifted a collection of Dr. Seuss to a Massachusetts school, the books were returned by librarian Liz Phipps Soeiro with a note that the literature was “steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”
In 2019 a full on witch hunt was triggered when researchers Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens published a study in the journal “Research on Diversity in Youth Literature” entitled “The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, AntiBlackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books,” deeming them vehicles of “white supremacy.” To appease outraged woke parents (activists?) Dr. Seuss school events were canceled and six popular books selected to go out of print.
After canceling six Dr. Seuss books on spurious charges of racism, the massive German publishing giant and the secretive company that owns the rights to the deceased author’s work announced that they would be unveiling new “inclusive” Seuss books by diverse writers.
Seuss, or Theodor Geisel, an old dead white man is insufficiently diverse for his publishers.
While the names of the new stable of “inclusive” writers haven’t been made public, Penguin Random House, a subsidiary of the German Berteslman giant, also publishes or distributes prominent racists like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Remember the Magic School Bus?
The Magic School Bus is back in the new Netflix series The Magic School Bus Rides Again! Overall, it’s still a nice, fun 13-episode series like we remember from when we were kids, but with some left turns. There is a pretty predictable take on climate change propaganda for little kids, but that wasn’t the worst. That dubious honor goes to the episode that teaches kids that a monster will eat them if they don’t use alternative clean energy sources.
Episode 12, “Monster Power,” teaches kids that a monster will eat them if they don’t use alternative clean energy sources. Albert, one of the students, has seen a movie in which the evil monster loves pollution and is “coming for us next for what we’ve done to this planet!” With the class camping in the woods, Miss Frizzle and the other students help him come up with clean energy alternatives (wind, water, etc) so they won’t be eaten. Instead, Miss Frizzle could tell him that monsters aren’t real, but I guess that didn’t occur to her.
Babylon Bee Chimes in with their list of dangerous children’s books
Your child’s bookshelves are crawling with racism and toxic problematicness.
But don’t worry — it’s nothing we can’t fix with a little good, old-fashioned book burning.
There are hundreds of children’s books that could use a good canceling. But let’s just start with these for now:
1. Horton Hears a Who — This Seuss book hasn’t been canceled yet, but it sure needs to be. The book claims a person is a person no matter how small, showing that Seuss hates women’s rights and wants to control their bodies.
2. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom — Prominently features the letter “Q.”
3. Every Berenstain Bears book — These books perpetuate the idea of a nuclear family with traditional values. They also appropriated furry culture.
4. Clifford the Big Red Dog — He’s literally a dog whistle for far-right neo-Nazi extremists and their affinity to the color red.
5. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — Teaches kids there should be consequences for bad behavior without even considering the child’s race, ethnicity, or history of being oppressed.
6. The Very Hungry Caterpillar — This book encourages kids to consume and consume, destroying the environment for their own personal gain.
7. Goodnight Moon — Honestly, it’s probably not racist, but if we have to read this book to our kids one more time we’re gonna die.
8. The Jungle Book — Insensitive and stereotypical of Indian culture. Mowgli is called “man-cub,” and don’t even get us started on that loaded term. How has this not been canceled already?
9. If You Give A Mouse A Cookie — Teaches kids about cause and effect– which, as we all know from corporate anti-racism training, is an aspect of white culture not shared by other people groups.
10. The Tuttle Twins — Free markets? Individual responsibility? American history? Are you kidding? Where do we even start? We literally can’t even with this one.
11. The Little Engine That Could — Implies that hard work and effort can help you overcome challenges, which is pretty tone-deaf considering oppressed groups aren’t able to benefit from hard work.
12. Genderqueer Marxist Baby — Actually this one seems fine.
Get out the kerosene if you love your children. (satire/off)
In April, CNN published an opinion piece arguing that the “right-wing children’s entertainment complex is upon us.” Prominently featured as a case in point were the Tuttle Twins children’s books, created by Connor Boyack to offset the progressive propaganda that many children now confront in classrooms across the country.
The books, which have sold more than 3.5 million copies, weave in libertarian themes related to individual freedom, limited government, free markets, and entrepreneurship, and frequently highlight the work of great thinkers such as Frederic Bastiat, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and FEE founder, Leonard Read.
“The goal is to seal conservatives’ children off from a broader culture, to protect them from supposed liberal indoctrination by getting a head start on conservative indoctrination,” wrote Nicole Hemmer, a researcher at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project, in her CNN article.
Boyack laughed when he read that. “I find it humorous that those in the left-dominated media are wringing their hands about a few of us doing what they have long been doing,” he told me this week. “The progressive mob has long been infiltrating and leveraging pop culture, the school system, and entertainment outlets—and suddenly they’re outraged when we’re providing a counter message to their myopic, woke worldview? They’re clearly crocodile tears—faux outrage over something the ‘left’ has long been up to.”
But Boyack welcomes more criticism from left-leaningmedia sites because it boosts his sales. Parents, it turns out, are clamoring for learning materials that offer different viewpoints and perspectives than what their children receive in their schools and throughout the broader culture.
Science Matters 