53percenter's Blog

Sure looks like Ilhan Omar isn’t the only problem Democrats have as they seek to halt the Trump revolution in 2020.

Former Starbucks CEO Howie Schultz is still around, and based on what’s in his Twitter feed, he’s indeed running for president. In fact, based on what he’s got up, his campaign train has taken off from the station without telling the Democrats or its mainstream media allies. Look at his last five tweets:

 

See you soon Texas! Excited to talk to Texans about the vital importance of the political center to American democracy. More to come from the people we meet across the state. pic.twitter.com/hbohOBRDhS

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) March 3, 2019

 

 

The failed political class of Washington, D.C., has broken America’s political system. And out of that are rising political extremes on both sides. President Trump is one extreme and on the other side is a vitriolic undermining of the American free enterprise system.

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) March 2, 2019

 

 

Shouting down political opponents, inflexible dogma, and the making of lists of the politically impure, unfavored classes, and offending businesses, has always been integral to socialism. History is utterly clear on this point. The list is always acted on.

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) March 2, 2019

 

 

From the sad spectacle of the Cohen hearing and the craven defense of the president by Republicans, to the reports of fights inside the Democratic Caucus between the ascendant left wing and a more moderate wing of the party, this was another sad week in American politics.

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) March 2, 2019

 

 

Be one of the 11 million to watch  #UnbreakingAmerica. Incredible film, @representus https://t.co/yBp3FP31PP

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) February 28, 2019

 

Actually, there’s about 20 of those kinds of tweets, geared precisely in statements and appearances to someone running for president. Note the criticism of both parties, which is what a candidate running as a centrist would do. Note the campaign-style appearances, as well as advance notice of them. Look at the attacks on socialism and the swamp – two things that served President Trump very well in his own campaign efforts, past and present.

Schultz knows what he is doing. What’s fascinating is that not only have the Democrats not noticed (at least publicly), the mainstream media hasn’t noticed (and that has to be public or they haven’t noticed). Schultz has apparently decided he does want to run and is just chugging along and drawing in potential voters to see him up close and try to win them over. It’s a very interesting kind of retail politics, untethered to the press.

Yes, he could be a problem for President Trump, too. But with the Democrats swinging over to the McGovern-cubed socialist model, he’s really going to be a problem for them – and from what I can tell, they’re caught flatfooted.

Run, Howie, run!

Sure looks like Ilhan Omar isn’t the only problem Democrats have as they seek to halt the Trump revolution in 2020.

Former Starbucks CEO Howie Schultz is still around, and based on what’s in his Twitter feed, he’s indeed running for president. In fact, based on what he’s got up, his campaign train has taken off from the station without telling the Democrats or its mainstream media allies. Look at his last five tweets:

 

See you soon Texas! Excited to talk to Texans about the vital importance of the political center to American democracy. More to come from the people we meet across the state. pic.twitter.com/hbohOBRDhS

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) March 3, 2019

 

 

The failed political class of Washington, D.C., has broken America’s political system. And out of that are rising political extremes on both sides. President Trump is one extreme and on the other side is a vitriolic undermining of the American free enterprise system.

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) March 2, 2019

 

 

Shouting down political opponents, inflexible dogma, and the making of lists of the politically impure, unfavored classes, and offending businesses, has always been integral to socialism. History is utterly clear on this point. The list is always acted on.

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) March 2, 2019

 

 

From the sad spectacle of the Cohen hearing and the craven defense of the president by Republicans, to the reports of fights inside the Democratic Caucus between the ascendant left wing and a more moderate wing of the party, this was another sad week in American politics.

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) March 2, 2019

 

 

Be one of the 11 million to watch  #UnbreakingAmerica. Incredible film, @representus https://t.co/yBp3FP31PP

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) February 28, 2019

 

Actually, there’s about 20 of those kinds of tweets, geared precisely in statements and appearances to someone running for president. Note the criticism of both parties, which is what a candidate running as a centrist would do. Note the campaign-style appearances, as well as advance notice of them. Look at the attacks on socialism and the swamp – two things that served President Trump very well in his own campaign efforts, past and present.

Schultz knows what he is doing. What’s fascinating is that not only have the Democrats not noticed (at least publicly), the mainstream media hasn’t noticed (and that has to be public or they haven’t noticed). Schultz has apparently decided he does want to run and is just chugging along and drawing in potential voters to see him up close and try to win them over. It’s a very interesting kind of retail politics, untethered to the press.

Yes, he could be a problem for President Trump, too. But with the Democrats swinging over to the McGovern-cubed socialist model, he’s really going to be a problem for them – and from what I can tell, they’re caught flatfooted.

Run, Howie, run!

The Green New Deal will cost the US taxpayer tens of trillions of dollars, add trillions to the deficit, and ruin the economy in the process.

But it’s OK. It doesn’t matter how much it costs because unless we spend the money, the human race is doomed. Plus, all the other issues attached to the Green New Deal – “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, clean air and water, married to traditional bread-and-butter progressive issues, such as a job guarantee and universal health care” – will cost more trillions.

How in the name of all that is good and holy do we pay for it?

The answer, according to the emerging narrative on the left, appears to be; we don’t.

Slate:

Shorn of ideological rhetoric, the answer to the second question is actually quite simple. We “pay” for these specific proposals much as we do with any government initiative: Congress appropriates the funds, and the government literally spends the money into existence. The key point here is that when a government issues a currency that is not backed by any metal or pegged to another currency (i.e., the currency is created via government order, or “fiat,” hence the term, “fiat currency”), then there is no reason why it should be constrained in its ability to finance its spending by issuing currency in the way it was, say, under a gold standard (in which the supply of gold held by each nation literally controlled its capacity to spend). By extension, taxes don’t actually “fund” the government, so much as they constrain overall expenditures in the economy. In essence, government spending adds new money to the economy, whereas the imposition of taxes takes some of that money out again. The constant addition and subtraction of these spending and taxing activities is how “fiscal policy” actually works (and the sequencing is actually the opposite of what is traditionally taught in most economics textbooks). 

To paraphase my favorite home state Senator of all-time, Everett Dirksen talking about federal spending: “A trillion dollars here and a trillion dollars there and pretty soon, we’re talking about real money.” 

See? It’s not “real” money, it’s government money. There are no consequences to printing tens of trillions of dollars because nothing bad could ever happen. “There is no reason why it should be constrained in its ability to finance its spending by issuing currency” because we’ll make Pollyanna our Secretary of the Treasury. 

And economics textbooks are wrong! Just add a little, and subtract a little, and presto! Socialist paradise.

I’d like to think that the left can come up with a better narrative than “it doesn’t matter.” Surely, the master propagandists on the left can try something a little more creative.

But the bottom line appears to be the tsunami of cash that Washington will flood the economy with won’t cause inflation to rise, won’t lead to catastrophically high interest rates because the Fed governors, at heart, are socialists and understand perfectly that economics textbooks are wrong, loony lefty economists are right.

Climate hysterics are not all on board the Green New Deal bandwagon – not because it isn’t necessary but because it’s politically impossible. Some of them worry it’s far too ambitious and would like to see a scaled back version implemented.

When faced with imminent destruction, any amount of money becomes “necessary.”  That looks like how the left will manage the PR effort to adopt the Green New Deal and go easy on details like no meat, no airplanes – and no economy.

 

The Green New Deal will cost the US taxpayer tens of trillions of dollars, add trillions to the deficit, and ruin the economy in the process.

But it’s OK. It doesn’t matter how much it costs because unless we spend the money, the human race is doomed. Plus, all the other issues attached to the Green New Deal – “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, clean air and water, married to traditional bread-and-butter progressive issues, such as a job guarantee and universal health care” – will cost more trillions.

How in the name of all that is good and holy do we pay for it?

The answer, according to the emerging narrative on the left, appears to be; we don’t.

Slate:

Shorn of ideological rhetoric, the answer to the second question is actually quite simple. We “pay” for these specific proposals much as we do with any government initiative: Congress appropriates the funds, and the government literally spends the money into existence. The key point here is that when a government issues a currency that is not backed by any metal or pegged to another currency (i.e., the currency is created via government order, or “fiat,” hence the term, “fiat currency”), then there is no reason why it should be constrained in its ability to finance its spending by issuing currency in the way it was, say, under a gold standard (in which the supply of gold held by each nation literally controlled its capacity to spend). By extension, taxes don’t actually “fund” the government, so much as they constrain overall expenditures in the economy. In essence, government spending adds new money to the economy, whereas the imposition of taxes takes some of that money out again. The constant addition and subtraction of these spending and taxing activities is how “fiscal policy” actually works (and the sequencing is actually the opposite of what is traditionally taught in most economics textbooks). 

To paraphase my favorite home state Senator of all-time, Everett Dirksen talking about federal spending: “A trillion dollars here and a trillion dollars there and pretty soon, we’re talking about real money.” 

See? It’s not “real” money, it’s government money. There are no consequences to printing tens of trillions of dollars because nothing bad could ever happen. “There is no reason why it should be constrained in its ability to finance its spending by issuing currency” because we’ll make Pollyanna our Secretary of the Treasury. 

And economics textbooks are wrong! Just add a little, and subtract a little, and presto! Socialist paradise.

I’d like to think that the left can come up with a better narrative than “it doesn’t matter.” Surely, the master propagandists on the left can try something a little more creative.

But the bottom line appears to be the tsunami of cash that Washington will flood the economy with won’t cause inflation to rise, won’t lead to catastrophically high interest rates because the Fed governors, at heart, are socialists and understand perfectly that economics textbooks are wrong, loony lefty economists are right.

Climate hysterics are not all on board the Green New Deal bandwagon – not because it isn’t necessary but because it’s politically impossible. Some of them worry it’s far too ambitious and would like to see a scaled back version implemented.

When faced with imminent destruction, any amount of money becomes “necessary.”  That looks like how the left will manage the PR effort to adopt the Green New Deal and go easy on details like no meat, no airplanes – and no economy.

 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has cooked up something new for Monday morning, a so-called “sweeping anti-corruption package” communistically titled the “For the People Act.” or H.R. 1, which pretty much seeks to bring the California model of politics to the rest of the states in terms of rigging elections. A more accurate title for this nasty brew would be the “Ballot Harvester’s Delight Bill of 2019.” Or as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put it, “The Democrat Politician Protection Plan.”

Here’s how bad it is, according to center-left Axios:

The bill’s key provisions:

• Campaign finance: Create a small donor, matching-fund system for congressional and presidential candidates; expand the prohibition of foreign political donations; require super PACs and “dark money” political groups to make their donors public; and restructure the Federal Election Commission.
• Ethics: Mandate that presidents and vice presidents release 10 years of their tax returns; create an ethics code for the Supreme Court; and bar members of Congress from serving on corporate boards.
• Voting rights: Allow citizens to register to vote online and be registered automatically; require paper ballots in federal elections; make Election Day a federal holiday; prohibit voter roll purging; and end partisan gerrymandering by having independent commissions redraw congressional districts.

The matching fund system is disgusting all by itself, enabling leftists to not have to raise campaign money to hold onto office even after presenting a raft of bad ideas. Imagine Ilhan Omar getting free taxpayer money to buy television ads and take advantage of her name-recognition (bad as it is) to hold onto her congressional seat. Free money for pols to advertise themselves on television or in other matters always ensures that they’ll find a way to get more of it. I always vote ‘no’ on that little tax box for the donation of a dollar of taxes to presidential campaigns and the fact that most of us do pretty well tells us how unpopular that idea is.

But it gets worse, far worse. The tax returns item is obviously aimed at President Trump because he made a lot of money in business before he became president, and as such amounts to a shot against him alone. Most us would be fine with billionaires releasing their tax forms if it included all billionaires, with George Soros in the mix. And everyone else, too while we are at it – I’m looking at you, Nancy Pelosi. If she doesn’t want to join the fun, then maybe we should leave the IRS to look at the matter and inform us when there’s a problem.

Worst of all is that third provision described in the Axios report. Online voter registation, the bots’ paradise? Just say no. Automatic voter registration whether you like it or not? Such as they have in California, which has resulted in tens of thousands of illegally registered non-citizen voters? Way to go – just Californify the whole nation. Paper ballots? What they mean by that is involuntary mail-in ballots, the kind I get without ever asking for them here in California - which is precisely what enables ballot-harvesting by foreign nationals in California’s election. Given the potential for fraud with electronic systems, paper ballots sound all so very nice, but we all know how Democrats use them to their advantage in California — they were ahead of all of us. An end to voter-roll purging? After people have moved and registered elsewhere, but the mail-in ballots are still appearing at their mailboxes as the ballot-harvesters watch election returns and check voter rolls to see who hasn’t voted? Such a huge recipe for fraud. Inactive voters should be thrown out immediately. Judicial Watc had to sue Los Angeles, home of the nation’s largest concentration of illegal immigrants, to force the county to purge its massive, 1.5-million-strong inactive voter roll tally, given its potential for ballot-box stuffing.

As for partisan gerrymandering, yes, bad stuff, but since when has an independent commission ever been independent? Democrats will stack those things and call them ‘independent.’ To heck with that, far better to just elect people who will have to answer to the voters for sneaky maneuvers made. The voters are the only truly independent commission.

Bloomberg dismisses the bill contemptuously as a ‘dead-end’ bill because it has no chance of passing the Senate or being signed by President Trump. That’s fair enough. But given that Democrats are laying out what they stand for by it, it also serves as a warning of what they really have in mind should they take power. This is it – the full Californification of U.S. electoral politics to ensure that the entire U.S. becomes a permanently blue state, based on tactics duplicated from Mexico’s PRI party, the one Mario Vargas Llosa described as “the perfect dictatorship” given that it ruled unopposed in what was billed as a ‘democracy’ for more than 70 years.

This ought to be a rallying point for Republicans as the truth of the matter about this 571-page bill passes the House and gets touted as an ‘anti-corruption bill’ in the press. This one’s overdue for some GOP truth-telling pushback.

 

 

 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has cooked up something new for Monday morning, a so-called “sweeping anti-corruption package” communistically titled the “For the People Act.” or H.R. 1, which pretty much seeks to bring the California model of politics to the rest of the states in terms of rigging elections. A more accurate title for this nasty brew would be the “Ballot Harvester’s Delight Bill of 2019.” Or as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put it, “The Democrat Politician Protection Plan.”

Here’s how bad it is, according to center-left Axios:

The bill’s key provisions:

• Campaign finance: Create a small donor, matching-fund system for congressional and presidential candidates; expand the prohibition of foreign political donations; require super PACs and “dark money” political groups to make their donors public; and restructure the Federal Election Commission.
• Ethics: Mandate that presidents and vice presidents release 10 years of their tax returns; create an ethics code for the Supreme Court; and bar members of Congress from serving on corporate boards.
• Voting rights: Allow citizens to register to vote online and be registered automatically; require paper ballots in federal elections; make Election Day a federal holiday; prohibit voter roll purging; and end partisan gerrymandering by having independent commissions redraw congressional districts.

The matching fund system is disgusting all by itself, enabling leftists to not have to raise campaign money to hold onto office even after presenting a raft of bad ideas. Imagine Ilhan Omar getting free taxpayer money to buy television ads and take advantage of her name-recognition (bad as it is) to hold onto her congressional seat. Free money for pols to advertise themselves on television or in other matters always ensures that they’ll find a way to get more of it. I always vote ‘no’ on that little tax box for the donation of a dollar of taxes to presidential campaigns and the fact that most of us do pretty well tells us how unpopular that idea is.

But it gets worse, far worse. The tax returns item is obviously aimed at President Trump because he made a lot of money in business before he became president, and as such amounts to a shot against him alone. Most us would be fine with billionaires releasing their tax forms if it included all billionaires, with George Soros in the mix. And everyone else, too while we are at it – I’m looking at you, Nancy Pelosi. If she doesn’t want to join the fun, then maybe we should leave the IRS to look at the matter and inform us when there’s a problem.

Worst of all is that third provision described in the Axios report. Online voter registation, the bots’ paradise? Just say no. Automatic voter registration whether you like it or not? Such as they have in California, which has resulted in tens of thousands of illegally registered non-citizen voters? Way to go – just Californify the whole nation. Paper ballots? What they mean by that is involuntary mail-in ballots, the kind I get without ever asking for them here in California - which is precisely what enables ballot-harvesting by foreign nationals in California’s election. Given the potential for fraud with electronic systems, paper ballots sound all so very nice, but we all know how Democrats use them to their advantage in California — they were ahead of all of us. An end to voter-roll purging? After people have moved and registered elsewhere, but the mail-in ballots are still appearing at their mailboxes as the ballot-harvesters watch election returns and check voter rolls to see who hasn’t voted? Such a huge recipe for fraud. Inactive voters should be thrown out immediately. Judicial Watc had to sue Los Angeles, home of the nation’s largest concentration of illegal immigrants, to force the county to purge its massive, 1.5-million-strong inactive voter roll tally, given its potential for ballot-box stuffing.

As for partisan gerrymandering, yes, bad stuff, but since when has an independent commission ever been independent? Democrats will stack those things and call them ‘independent.’ To heck with that, far better to just elect people who will have to answer to the voters for sneaky maneuvers made. The voters are the only truly independent commission.

Bloomberg dismisses the bill contemptuously as a ‘dead-end’ bill because it has no chance of passing the Senate or being signed by President Trump. That’s fair enough. But given that Democrats are laying out what they stand for by it, it also serves as a warning of what they really have in mind should they take power. This is it – the full Californification of U.S. electoral politics to ensure that the entire U.S. becomes a permanently blue state, based on tactics duplicated from Mexico’s PRI party, the one Mario Vargas Llosa described as “the perfect dictatorship” given that it ruled unopposed in what was billed as a ‘democracy’ for more than 70 years.

This ought to be a rallying point for Republicans as the truth of the matter about this 571-page bill passes the House and gets touted as an ‘anti-corruption bill’ in the press. This one’s overdue for some GOP truth-telling pushback.

 

 

 

Violent criminal aliens, gang members, and drug smugglers continue to exploit gaps in border barriers in the Rio Grande Valley Sector to move into the U.S. from Mexico.

Agents assigned to the Rio Grande City Station patrolling near Roma, Texas, came upon a Salvadoran national who had just crossed the border illegally last week. The agents transported the man to the station where they conducted a biometric background investigation on the subject, according to information provided by Rio Grande Valley Sector Border Patrol officials.

The background investigation revealed the man to be a previously deported criminal alien who is a member of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). His record includes an extensive history in New York, where police arrested him for criminal possession of a weapon with intent to use and resisting arrest, officials stated.

A few days later, Weslaco Station agents arrested an Ecuadoran man after he illegally crossed the border. After transporting the migrant to the station, agents learned he has an active warrant from Anoka County, Minnesota, for a charge of 3rd degree sexual conduct, Border Patrol officials stated. Deputies with the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office previously arrested the man.

In addition to previously deported criminal aliens exploiting the incomplete border barriers, drug smugglers also take advantage of the weakness in border security and the fact that RGV Sector agents are occupied with nearly 1,000 migrant apprehensions every day.

On Wednesday, Rio Grande City Station agents patrolling near La Rosita, Texas, came upon a group of people carrying large bundles. The suspected drug smugglers were walking north from the Rio Grande River officials reported.

As agents approached the group, the illegal aliens jumped back into the Rio Grande and swam to Mexico. The agents searched the area they found three bundles containing more than 175 pounds of marijuana. The agents stated the value of the seized drugs at approximately $326,000.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for the Breitbart Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.

President Donald Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday that he would soon issue an executive order protecting free speech on campus, withholding federal grants to schools that fail to comply.

It is not clear what the executive order would entail, though Robby Soave of the libertarian website Reason.com reported that “the plan is to penalize universities that do not protect free speech by taking away their federal grants.”

Soave noted two principled objections to the executive order. First, it may not work, because the problem is “cultural”:

[T]here are some far-left activist students who view speech with which they disagree as a form of violence, and they insist on shutting down controversial speakers on self-defense grounds. It is this tiny illiberal minority making life difficult: When they threaten violence against conservative speakers, they force university administrations to spend more money on security—costs that are sometimes passed along to other students.

Second, he notes, using an executive order might worsen the problem of executive overreach. That is not directly related to free speech, though President Barack Obama — who recognized no real limits to executive power — tried to dictate leftist campus sexual assault policies. Expanding executive power further would create a bad precedent.

Beyond the points Soave raises, it would also be politically difficult to cancel grants outright. Critics would argue that Trump was throwing away valuable research, or lob counter-charges of interfering in academic freedom.

But there are responses to these objections.

First, the Trump administration has already begun to address the “cultural” problem. Last year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the administration would continue to intervene in campus free speech cases on the side of students who were victims of discriminatory policies. That approach succeeded in forcing UC Berkeley to reach a settlement with conservative students and to revise its policies. Others may follow.

Second, there are tools Trump has to address the “cultural” problem that are already within his executive authority. One is to restrict the percentage of federal research grants that universities can devote to “overhead” costs. These costs supposedly fund the administrative and operations expenses that make research possible, but in practice they also operate as slush funds that support a wide array of radical left-wing causes that have become institutionalized.

When the Trump administration proposed cutting “overhead” costs in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants from 30% to 10% in 2017, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. But critics acknowledged that Trump could make the change unilaterally, without congressional legislation.

Trump could change the culture on campus by lowering overhead limits, while preserving the core research function of the grants themselves — and could tell the many public universities that enforce “speech codes” that their overhead limits would become even more stringent unless they respected both free speech and academic freedom.

To some extent, there will always be a left-wing bias on campus: it is in the nature of youth to challenge hierarchies, even necessary ones. But students themselves would benefit from puncturing the current climate of conformity.

Fewer would leave college believing in socialist fairy tales or interpreting fair criticism as the result of hidden prejudice — patterns that seem disturbingly common among the somewhat recent graduates elected to Congress last year.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

The largest pro-life youth organization in the United States has launched its first chapter at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU).

“It’s time that we spark this revolution to abolish abortion within the African-American community,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America (SFLA), in an email letter to supporters as she introduced the group at Mississippi Valley State University (MVSU).

In the video announcing the launch of SFLA at MVSU, black pro-life leaders speak about the significance of the pro-life movement, especially for African Americans.

Radiance Foundation founder Ryan Bomberger said the pro-life movement, in general, has been “so demonized by mainstream media.”

“It’s demonized by liberal politicians that they’ve made it look like it’s a white Republican issue,” he said.

#NABJMillennials, ask yourselves, “why does every black media outlet promote #PlannedParenthood & offer zero scrutiny of the #1 killer in the black community”? Why does @NABJ defend @PPFA? Fannie Lou Hamer called abortion “genocide”. https://t.co/5nVMzjxNYD #journalismmatters pic.twitter.com/GLIqDOLb5r

— Radiance Foundation (@lifehaspurpose) March 2, 2019

“Being an African American and especially seeing what’s going on in our communities, where, you know, 13 percent of the women in the country – 13 percent are African American with 30 percent of them having an abortion,” said former NFL running back Willie Green. “The leading killer in our black community is abortion.”

In a study released last summer, researchers at the University of North Carolina revealed that induced abortion is responsible for 61 percent of deaths of black Americans.

In addition, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found that between 2007 and 2010, more than 35 percent of the deaths by abortion in the United States occurred with black babies, even though blacks represent only 12.8 percent of the population.

In the video, Sentarius J. Shird-Tolliver, president of the freshman class at MVSU, said, “We’re missing so many generations, and that hurts to say that.”

“But we are, in my community and the African American community, there is more children being killed by abortions than any other community there is,” she added.

SFLA at MVSU marched together for the first time at the March for Life in Washington, DC, in January.

“I’m gonna do whatever I can to basically recruit more students from my campus who want to make a difference,” said Acquedius Smith, president of SFLA at MVSU. “Students can make a difference.”

“I think the black community is especially targeted by abortions because Planned Parenthood is located near the low income areas,” explained Devin McLaurin, vice president of SFLA at MVSU. “People see it as an easy out, an easy option, when it’s not really the answer, and it really affects us emotionally and physically in the long term – and not just women, either.”

“There’s always an alternative to abortion,” he continued, adding that his group is working with students through campus ministry.

“Stand strong in your faith, and don’t be deterred or discouraged because you are not alone,” McLaurin said. “We are strong in numbers all over the country and … Students for Life of America is constantly growing.”

A recent article in the New York Times discusses Facebook and Telegram’s plans to introduce their own cryptocurrencies in the coming future.

The article in the Times titled “Facebook and Telegram Are Hoping to Succeed Where Bitcoin Failed,” discusses how social media giant Facebook and messaging service Telegram have plans for a cryptocurrency system of their own. Breitbart News reported on Facebook’s own cryptocurrency plans in December of 2018.

In a post to his Facebook page in January of 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that every year he takes on a new personal challenge and so far has, “visited every US state, run 365 miles, built an AI for my home, read 25 books, and learned Mandarin.” Now this year, the billionaire CEO has turned his sights towards cryptocurrencies in 2018. Zuckerberg first began discussing the work that Facebook needs to do saying, “The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do — whether it’s protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”

Now it seems that apps such as Telegram and Facebook want to get in on the cryptocurrency business. The New York Times writes:

The internet outfits, including Facebook, Telegram and Signal, are planning to roll out new cryptocurrencies over the next year that are meant to allow users to send money to contacts on their messaging systems, like a Venmo or PayPal that can move across international borders.

The most anticipated but secretive project is underway at Facebook. The company is working on a coin that users of WhatsApp, which Facebook owns, could send to friends and family instantly, said five people briefed on the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.

The Facebook project is far enough along that the social networking giant has held conversations with cryptocurrency exchanges about selling the Facebook coin to consumers, said four people briefed on the negotiations.

The Times notes that payment apps such as Venmo in the U.S. have become popular while in China the WeChat system is used for many payments, meaning that Facebook’s own crypto coin could be successful if run well:

Telegram, which has an estimated 300 million users worldwide, is also working on a digital coin. Signal, an encrypted messaging service that is popular among technologists and privacy advocates, has its own coin in the works. And so do the biggest messaging applications in Korea and Japan, Kakao and Line.

The messaging companies have a reach that dwarfs the backers of earlier cryptocurrencies. Facebook and Telegram can make the digital wallets used for cryptocurrencies available, in an instant, to hundreds of millions of users.

All of the new projects are going after a market that has already proved popular with consumers. Venmo has taken off in the United States by making it easier to send payments by phone. And in China, many consumers use the payment system that operates inside the hugely popular WeChat messaging system.

The Times further notes that Facebook seems to be aiming their coin towards those that wish to make quick easy payments, not speculators wishing to buy the coin at a low value and sell it once the value increases:

 

Facebook is looking at several ways to use the blockchain, the technology introduced by Bitcoin that makes it possible to keep shared records of financial transactions on several computers, rather than relying on one big central player like PayPal or Visa.

The five people who have been briefed on the Facebook team’s work said the company’s most immediate product is likely to be a coin that would be pegged to the value of traditional currencies, as Bloomberg first reported.

A digital token with a stable value would not be attractive to speculators — the main audience for cryptocurrencies so far — but it would allow consumers to hold it and pay for things without worrying about the value of the coin rising and falling.

Read the full article in the New York Times here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com