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The So-Called Equality Act: Making Some Americans More Equal than Others

Allan Josephson, M.D., is one of the nation’s top child and adolescent psychiatrists.  So why was he just fired by the University of Louisville?

It started when Dr. Josephson spoke at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., where he expressed his concern as a medical professional over what is becoming common treatment for children with gender dysphoria — puberty blockers, hormones, multiple surgeries.  He disputed the notion that gender identity “should trump chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics,” calling it “counter to medical science.”

In today’s political climate, however, it is considered unacceptable to offer anything other than complete affirmation of a child’s claimed transgender identity.  To ideologues, it does not matter that for nearly fifteen years Dr. Josephson headed up the University of Louisville’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology Division, leading it to national prominence.  It does not matter that he provided such outstanding leadership that he was awarded perfect marks in his 2014, 2015, and 2016 annual reviews.

All that matters is that he committed a sin against the dictates of political correctness.  The university first demoted Dr. Josephson and then, a few months later, terminated him.

Dr. Josephson is suing the university for violating his constitutional right to freedom of speech.  But if the deceptively named Equality Act passes, this man of science won’t stand a chance.  And neither will anyone else who does not pledge allegiance to the state-sanctioned sexual ideology.

Introduced by Nancy Pelosi, the Equality Act inserts “sexual orientation and gender identity” (SOGI) into the Civil Rights Act, elevating them to the status of protected categories, like race and religion.  If the act passes, any person or institution that does not bow before a radical sexual ideology will be silenced.

We can predict the Equality Act’s likely impact based on what is happening in states, cities, and local jurisdictions that already have SOGI laws, Here are a few of the ways they have been used to silence dissent from a state-imposed sexual orthodoxy:

  • Individuals are losing their jobs, from medical professionals like Dr. Josephson to schoolteachers to tech innovator Brendan Eich, the founder of Mozilla, who was kicked out of his own company.

  • Schools collude with trans activists by refusing to tell parents which gender identity their children claim at school.  Teachers are using the students’ opposite-sex names and connecting them with therapists who help them transition — without informing their parents.

  • Women’s spaces are being invaded by men who identify as women.  For example, the Downtown Hope Center, a shelter for homeless, abused, and trafficked women in Anchorage, Alaska, is being sued for not accepting a biological male.

  • Small business owners whose craft involves expression are being sued for declining to express views on sexuality that they disagree with.  The Colorado baker Jack Phillips was taken to court twice, when activists asked him to bake a cake with a pro-homosexual message and later with a pro-trans message.

The Equality Act would universalize SOGI laws, imposing a single coercive set of rules that constrains all schools, all therapists, all medical professionals, all sports leagues, all charities, all business owners.  All dissent would be silenced. 

More ominously, even silence will not be not tolerated.  Failure to use a person’s preferred pronoun will be interpreted as failure to adequately support the SOGI agenda.  Already laws are being passed that require a positive affirmation: In 2016 the New York City Human Rights Commission released a list of thirty-one terms of gender expression (androgynous, genderqueer, nonbinary, pangender, bi-gendered, gender fluid, third sex, two spirit, and so on), which you must use with your employees, tenants, customers, or clients — or face exorbitant fines of up to $250,000.

In essence, the Equality Act would punish anyone who does not affirm the state’s preferred viewpoint of marriage and biological sex. 

Moreover, the Equality Act explicitly rejects (SEC. 1107) the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which would have permitted religious exemptions for Christian churches, schools, ministries, and charities.  No diversity will be allowed. 

Every totalitarian system has used the tactic of coercing people to affirm the regime’s agenda, even when they disagree.  Forcing people to mouth politically correct dogmas that they know are false is designed to break their spirit and their resistance.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said the worst aspect of Communist totalitarianism was not the economic poverty or the lack of political rights; it was being forced to repeat the regime’s lies: “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.” 

Just a few years ago, few imagined that the greatest threat to liberty would come via the sexual revolution.  Its promise of liberation for some has turned into repression for everyone else.  Homosexual and transgender people are not a “vulnerable and marginalized population,” as their propaganda puts it; they are now the favored few.

The Equality Act will write into law the Orwellian notion that some Americans are more equal than others.

Nancy Pearcey is a professor and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University. Her most recent book is Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality.

Allan Josephson, M.D., is one of the nation’s top child and adolescent psychiatrists.  So why was he just fired by the University of Louisville?

It started when Dr. Josephson spoke at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., where he expressed his concern as a medical professional over what is becoming common treatment for children with gender dysphoria — puberty blockers, hormones, multiple surgeries.  He disputed the notion that gender identity “should trump chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics,” calling it “counter to medical science.”

In today’s political climate, however, it is considered unacceptable to offer anything other than complete affirmation of a child’s claimed transgender identity.  To ideologues, it does not matter that for nearly fifteen years Dr. Josephson headed up the University of Louisville’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology Division, leading it to national prominence.  It does not matter that he provided such outstanding leadership that he was awarded perfect marks in his 2014, 2015, and 2016 annual reviews.

All that matters is that he committed a sin against the dictates of political correctness.  The university first demoted Dr. Josephson and then, a few months later, terminated him.

Dr. Josephson is suing the university for violating his constitutional right to freedom of speech.  But if the deceptively named Equality Act passes, this man of science won’t stand a chance.  And neither will anyone else who does not pledge allegiance to the state-sanctioned sexual ideology.

Introduced by Nancy Pelosi, the Equality Act inserts “sexual orientation and gender identity” (SOGI) into the Civil Rights Act, elevating them to the status of protected categories, like race and religion.  If the act passes, any person or institution that does not bow before a radical sexual ideology will be silenced.

We can predict the Equality Act’s likely impact based on what is happening in states, cities, and local jurisdictions that already have SOGI laws, Here are a few of the ways they have been used to silence dissent from a state-imposed sexual orthodoxy:

  • Individuals are losing their jobs, from medical professionals like Dr. Josephson to schoolteachers to tech innovator Brendan Eich, the founder of Mozilla, who was kicked out of his own company.

  • Schools collude with trans activists by refusing to tell parents which gender identity their children claim at school.  Teachers are using the students’ opposite-sex names and connecting them with therapists who help them transition — without informing their parents.

  • Women’s spaces are being invaded by men who identify as women.  For example, the Downtown Hope Center, a shelter for homeless, abused, and trafficked women in Anchorage, Alaska, is being sued for not accepting a biological male.

  • Small business owners whose craft involves expression are being sued for declining to express views on sexuality that they disagree with.  The Colorado baker Jack Phillips was taken to court twice, when activists asked him to bake a cake with a pro-homosexual message and later with a pro-trans message.

The Equality Act would universalize SOGI laws, imposing a single coercive set of rules that constrains all schools, all therapists, all medical professionals, all sports leagues, all charities, all business owners.  All dissent would be silenced. 

More ominously, even silence will not be not tolerated.  Failure to use a person’s preferred pronoun will be interpreted as failure to adequately support the SOGI agenda.  Already laws are being passed that require a positive affirmation: In 2016 the New York City Human Rights Commission released a list of thirty-one terms of gender expression (androgynous, genderqueer, nonbinary, pangender, bi-gendered, gender fluid, third sex, two spirit, and so on), which you must use with your employees, tenants, customers, or clients — or face exorbitant fines of up to $250,000.

In essence, the Equality Act would punish anyone who does not affirm the state’s preferred viewpoint of marriage and biological sex. 

Moreover, the Equality Act explicitly rejects (SEC. 1107) the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which would have permitted religious exemptions for Christian churches, schools, ministries, and charities.  No diversity will be allowed. 

Every totalitarian system has used the tactic of coercing people to affirm the regime’s agenda, even when they disagree.  Forcing people to mouth politically correct dogmas that they know are false is designed to break their spirit and their resistance.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said the worst aspect of Communist totalitarianism was not the economic poverty or the lack of political rights; it was being forced to repeat the regime’s lies: “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.” 

Just a few years ago, few imagined that the greatest threat to liberty would come via the sexual revolution.  Its promise of liberation for some has turned into repression for everyone else.  Homosexual and transgender people are not a “vulnerable and marginalized population,” as their propaganda puts it; they are now the favored few.

The Equality Act will write into law the Orwellian notion that some Americans are more equal than others.

Nancy Pearcey is a professor and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University. Her most recent book is Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality.

via American Thinker

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.americanthinker.com/

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The Left Continues to Peddle the Lie that Trump Represents a Threat to Press Freedom

Saturday night’s White House Correspondents dinner once again came and went without most Americans having paid it any serious attention, and for the third straight year, our president chose to miss this increasingly farcical event where journalists pat each other on the back for the fine jobs they believe themselves to be doing.  What made this year’s event a little different than years past is that none of the other senior members of the White House staff attended, either.

“That decision came after Sarah Huckabee Sanders endured cruel taunts at the hands of last year’s featured speaker, comedian Michelle Wolf,” Emily Zanotti reports at The Daily Wire.  “[D]espite a longstanding tradition of good-natured ribbing between the press and the president, through dueling speeches, the White House simply stopped RSVPing to the event.”

Without the luxury of roasting their political enemies in attendance to feign a comedic tone rather than a purely adversarial one, the organizers of the event dropped the façade of humor in favor of a “funerary tone” led by a historian rather than the traditional choice of a comedian. 

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the event offered anything short of bad comedy.

For example, the White House Correspondents Association’s president Olivier Knox committed to a “dark sermon,” according to Grabien News. 

Olivier Knox at the WHCA Dinner

Photo credit: NBC screen grab via YouTube

In February of 2017, he told the audience, “the president called us the enemy of the people,” he said.  A few days later, he said, his son asked if Donald Trump was going to put him in prison.  “At the end of a trip to Mexico,” he continued, “he mused that if the president tried to keep me out of the country, at least Uncle Josh is a good lawyer and will get you home.”

For the record, Trump has never threatened to imprison a journalist or prevent a citizen journalist from reentering the country from abroad.  If Knox were an honest man, he might have told his son: “No, son, none of that will happen.  You only believe that because a lot of people make their living by making up such nonsensical stories about how this president might do such things.”

But he certainly wouldn’t say that, because those are the lies upon which this entire event was centered.  There was a calculated effort to portray this administration as uniquely at odds with a free and critical press in the scope of American history.  For example, historian and host Ron Chernow quipped that “George Washington felt maligned and misunderstood by the press, but he never generalized that as a vendetta against the institution.”

Can any sane person, much less a “historian,” actually argue that Trump is the only president to malign the free press, as an institution, for spreading “fake news?”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt certainly did, and he remains a hero of the left despite having done so.

According to Columbia professor Raymond Moley, a close confidant of FDR, his president believed that a “long list” of newspapers was “guilty of falsifying news.”  He said that “nothing would help him more [in the 1936 election] than to have it known that the newspapers were all against him.”

Sure enough, in the 1936 election campaign, FDR “claimed that 85% of newspapers were against him,” complaining about their “poisonous propaganda.”  Despite there being an awful lot of criticism about the employment of his “new instruments of public power,” FDR was almost certainly exaggerating the extent of the newspapers’ bias against him.  Even still, he was none too kind toward the press about their consistent criticism, and generalized his opinion as a “vendetta against the institution” of the then-mainstream press. 

Should we expect Trump, today, to be any different?  Trump endures a constant barrage of criticism via 24-hour news cycles, prominently disseminated by mainstream coverage, and practical data has suggested that as much as 91% of that coverage is negative.  So, while it’s easy to argue that FDR was imagining (or purposely fabricating) such widespread opposition among the press, such bias against President Trump definitely exists, and it’s obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. 

The difference is that Trump hasn’t used his power to clamp down on his opposition in the press beyond offering harsh criticism.  Sure, he’s been highly critical of the mainstream media which is obviously aligned against him, but he’s never used the power of the federal government to punish journalists.  The closest he’s come, one might argue, is temporarily revoking Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, which was certainly warranted due to his childlike, attention-seeking antics in refusing to surrender his microphone after asking several questions and grandstanding for political effect. 

FDR, on the other hand, famously used the power of the federal government to strongarm newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.  A one-time supporter of Roosevelt in 1932, Randolph had “turned against his ally,” leading FDR to instruct the “Treasury Department to closely monitor Hearst’s taxes,” according to David Beito of Reason.com.

It’s convenient for the left to occasionally ignore this sort of activity, obviously.  After all, the leftist media chose to ignore Barack Obama’s secret monitoring of phone call records of New York Times, AP, and Fox News reporters and exclusion of Fox News from conference calls available to other media, among other abuses. (But “not a whisper of a scandal” in the Obama years, says Joe Biden.)

On the contrary, Trump’s used his executive authority to do no such thing to his political opponents.  Yet, somehow, Trump is the real threat to the First Amendment?

Journalists like Olivier Knox pretending that there’s any realistic possibility that they could be jailed or prevented from reentering the country by this president for having said nasty things about him is worse than an honest fear or fantasy.  It’s nothing more than a comical effort to earn a badge of heroism from his media colleagues on the cheap.  Firstly, there is nothing more fashionable in the broad media circles than criticizing President Trump.  Secondly, the possibility that President Trump might abuse his power in any such way is nothing more than a phantom threat that Knox’s kid might believe, but few others would.

But with some other presidents in American history, such a threat might have been very real. 

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson “warned that those who were disloyal had given up their civil liberties,” and would face “stern repression.”  He used an executive order to create “a new federal agency that would put the government in the business of actively shaping press coverage,” called the Committee on Public Information (CPI). The Committee recruited 75,000 “Four-Minute Men” for their skills in propagandizing Wilson’s agenda in speeches, and it produced newsreels rallying support for the war.  It produced “guidelines” for U.S. newspapers for “patriotic” newspaper editors to follow, and actually published a daily “Official Bulletin,” which some view as the “closest the United States has come to a paper like the Soviet Union’s Pravda.”  Even outside the government press, the CPI publications appeared, at taxpayer expense, in “20,000 newspaper columns each week,” effectively burying the private press beneath mountains of government propaganda.

The Wilson administration’s most famous action against the free press was the Espionage Act of 1917, under which 2,000 people were charged during WWI, and jailed many members of the press.

Interestingly enough, it was under the auspices of the Espionage Act that President Obama cracked down on journalists “more than any other administration since Woodrow Wilson,” according to Michael Barone at the Washington Examiner in 2013.  He cites 20-year veteran of The New York Times, David Sanger, as having called the Obama administration “the most closed, control-freak administration” he’d ever witnessed.

And yet, the same leftist media mouthpieces claiming that Trump is some monumental threat to press freedom were oddly silent during Obama’s presidency while all of that was going on.

Members of the media today suggesting that Donald Trump represents some uniquely dangerous presidential threat to our free press are either in desperate need of education, or they knowingly lack an interest in truth.  And all of the evidence suggests the latter, and that they are willing to sell lies in order to claim some specious mantle of victimhood. 

William Sullivan blogs at Political Palaver and can be followed on Twitter.

Saturday night’s White House Correspondents dinner once again came and went without most Americans having paid it any serious attention, and for the third straight year, our president chose to miss this increasingly farcical event where journalists pat each other on the back for the fine jobs they believe themselves to be doing.  What made this year’s event a little different than years past is that none of the other senior members of the White House staff attended, either.

“That decision came after Sarah Huckabee Sanders endured cruel taunts at the hands of last year’s featured speaker, comedian Michelle Wolf,” Emily Zanotti reports at The Daily Wire.  “[D]espite a longstanding tradition of good-natured ribbing between the press and the president, through dueling speeches, the White House simply stopped RSVPing to the event.”

Without the luxury of roasting their political enemies in attendance to feign a comedic tone rather than a purely adversarial one, the organizers of the event dropped the façade of humor in favor of a “funerary tone” led by a historian rather than the traditional choice of a comedian. 

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the event offered anything short of bad comedy.

For example, the White House Correspondents Association’s president Olivier Knox committed to a “dark sermon,” according to Grabien News. 

Olivier Knox at the WHCA Dinner

Photo credit: NBC screen grab via YouTube

In February of 2017, he told the audience, “the president called us the enemy of the people,” he said.  A few days later, he said, his son asked if Donald Trump was going to put him in prison.  “At the end of a trip to Mexico,” he continued, “he mused that if the president tried to keep me out of the country, at least Uncle Josh is a good lawyer and will get you home.”

For the record, Trump has never threatened to imprison a journalist or prevent a citizen journalist from reentering the country from abroad.  If Knox were an honest man, he might have told his son: “No, son, none of that will happen.  You only believe that because a lot of people make their living by making up such nonsensical stories about how this president might do such things.”

But he certainly wouldn’t say that, because those are the lies upon which this entire event was centered.  There was a calculated effort to portray this administration as uniquely at odds with a free and critical press in the scope of American history.  For example, historian and host Ron Chernow quipped that “George Washington felt maligned and misunderstood by the press, but he never generalized that as a vendetta against the institution.”

Can any sane person, much less a “historian,” actually argue that Trump is the only president to malign the free press, as an institution, for spreading “fake news?”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt certainly did, and he remains a hero of the left despite having done so.

According to Columbia professor Raymond Moley, a close confidant of FDR, his president believed that a “long list” of newspapers was “guilty of falsifying news.”  He said that “nothing would help him more [in the 1936 election] than to have it known that the newspapers were all against him.”

Sure enough, in the 1936 election campaign, FDR “claimed that 85% of newspapers were against him,” complaining about their “poisonous propaganda.”  Despite there being an awful lot of criticism about the employment of his “new instruments of public power,” FDR was almost certainly exaggerating the extent of the newspapers’ bias against him.  Even still, he was none too kind toward the press about their consistent criticism, and generalized his opinion as a “vendetta against the institution” of the then-mainstream press. 

Should we expect Trump, today, to be any different?  Trump endures a constant barrage of criticism via 24-hour news cycles, prominently disseminated by mainstream coverage, and practical data has suggested that as much as 91% of that coverage is negative.  So, while it’s easy to argue that FDR was imagining (or purposely fabricating) such widespread opposition among the press, such bias against President Trump definitely exists, and it’s obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. 

The difference is that Trump hasn’t used his power to clamp down on his opposition in the press beyond offering harsh criticism.  Sure, he’s been highly critical of the mainstream media which is obviously aligned against him, but he’s never used the power of the federal government to punish journalists.  The closest he’s come, one might argue, is temporarily revoking Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, which was certainly warranted due to his childlike, attention-seeking antics in refusing to surrender his microphone after asking several questions and grandstanding for political effect. 

FDR, on the other hand, famously used the power of the federal government to strongarm newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.  A one-time supporter of Roosevelt in 1932, Randolph had “turned against his ally,” leading FDR to instruct the “Treasury Department to closely monitor Hearst’s taxes,” according to David Beito of Reason.com.

It’s convenient for the left to occasionally ignore this sort of activity, obviously.  After all, the leftist media chose to ignore Barack Obama’s secret monitoring of phone call records of New York Times, AP, and Fox News reporters and exclusion of Fox News from conference calls available to other media, among other abuses. (But “not a whisper of a scandal” in the Obama years, says Joe Biden.)

On the contrary, Trump’s used his executive authority to do no such thing to his political opponents.  Yet, somehow, Trump is the real threat to the First Amendment?

Journalists like Olivier Knox pretending that there’s any realistic possibility that they could be jailed or prevented from reentering the country by this president for having said nasty things about him is worse than an honest fear or fantasy.  It’s nothing more than a comical effort to earn a badge of heroism from his media colleagues on the cheap.  Firstly, there is nothing more fashionable in the broad media circles than criticizing President Trump.  Secondly, the possibility that President Trump might abuse his power in any such way is nothing more than a phantom threat that Knox’s kid might believe, but few others would.

But with some other presidents in American history, such a threat might have been very real. 

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson “warned that those who were disloyal had given up their civil liberties,” and would face “stern repression.”  He used an executive order to create “a new federal agency that would put the government in the business of actively shaping press coverage,” called the Committee on Public Information (CPI). The Committee recruited 75,000 “Four-Minute Men” for their skills in propagandizing Wilson’s agenda in speeches, and it produced newsreels rallying support for the war.  It produced “guidelines” for U.S. newspapers for “patriotic” newspaper editors to follow, and actually published a daily “Official Bulletin,” which some view as the “closest the United States has come to a paper like the Soviet Union’s Pravda.”  Even outside the government press, the CPI publications appeared, at taxpayer expense, in “20,000 newspaper columns each week,” effectively burying the private press beneath mountains of government propaganda.

The Wilson administration’s most famous action against the free press was the Espionage Act of 1917, under which 2,000 people were charged during WWI, and jailed many members of the press.

Interestingly enough, it was under the auspices of the Espionage Act that President Obama cracked down on journalists “more than any other administration since Woodrow Wilson,” according to Michael Barone at the Washington Examiner in 2013.  He cites 20-year veteran of The New York Times, David Sanger, as having called the Obama administration “the most closed, control-freak administration” he’d ever witnessed.

And yet, the same leftist media mouthpieces claiming that Trump is some monumental threat to press freedom were oddly silent during Obama’s presidency while all of that was going on.

Members of the media today suggesting that Donald Trump represents some uniquely dangerous presidential threat to our free press are either in desperate need of education, or they knowingly lack an interest in truth.  And all of the evidence suggests the latter, and that they are willing to sell lies in order to claim some specious mantle of victimhood. 

William Sullivan blogs at Political Palaver and can be followed on Twitter.

via American Thinker

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.americanthinker.com/

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California wildfire prevention: Unplugging Grandma’s ventilator

PG&E will respond to California’s reckless environmental policies that cause huge wildfires by unplugging electricity on windy days, despite risks to shut-ins and the elderly.

The California public utility, forced into its second bankruptcy in 16 years after facing $30 billion in liability claims from 2017 and 2018 wildfires, announced a ‘Public Safety Power Shutoff’ policy that will shut down its electrical grid for up to 5.4 million users during ‘Red Flag’ periods with low humidity and sustained winds above 25 mph.

The bankrupt company stated that the shutoff could last up to five days and suggested that special needs, such as the elderly and shutins that “require electricity to sustain life,  may wish to Create An Emergency Preparedness Plan” that could include having public service phone numbers, a backup location, and informing local authorities.

County officials were stunned by the new PG&E policy, expressing fear that patients on medical equipment could be at risk of dying. There are also concerns that PG&E electrical shutoffs during the Carr Fire that swept through Redding and Camp Fire that burned Paradice to the ground, many seniors could not open garage doors to escape.

PG&E argues it has been forced to adopt electrical shutoffs under a bizarre 1999 California Court of Appeals opinion that made utility assets subject to “inverse condemnation” through legal claimant “taking,” without regard any determination of negligence by the utility or its staff, for wind-driven power line sparking wildfires along PG&E’s 18,466 circuit miles of interconnected electric transmission lines.

California has suffered more and larger wildfires since the Clinton administration in 1994 adopted the Northwest Forest Plan that prioritized protecting endangered species, water quality, and old-growth forests in 4.5 million acres of Northern California national forests. Logging roads that acted as fire breaks were abandoned as the industry shriveled, resulting in heavier underbrush and forest tree spacing becoming much denser. As a result, wildfires became bigger, hotter, and more remote from firefighters.

The Bush administration tried to reverse the policies, but environmentalists used lawsuits until the Obama administration reinstated the anti-logging policies and supported Gov. Brown’s California ‘Forest Practice Rules 2015’ that led to even less logging and more road abandonments.

After insurance companies suffered a shockingly high $5.1 billion in wildfires losses over a 10-year period through 2016, underwriting consultant Verisk Solutions warned at the start of the 2017 fire season: “4.5 million U.S. homes were identified at high or extreme risk of wildfire, with more than 2 million in California alone.”

The National Interagency Coordination Center found that Northern California in the last decade had suffered a 385 percent annual increase in acres burned, versus prior years. Of the 129,582 U.S. wildfires that burned 18,793,578 acres between 2017 and 2018, California accounted 15 percent of fires and almost 20 percent of the area burned.  

Facing a high-wind event In October 2018, PG&E shut off power lines in high-risk areas. After no fire occurred, customers protested and the utility was hit with 146 claims for losses, including 25 claims of business economic impacts. A similar wind event the next month sparked the Camp Fire that killed 86 people and destroyed 18,661 structures.

PG&E has not disclosed health issue claims for shutting off power to the 3.8 million, or about 20 percent, of its service area that are over age 60, because under Senate Bill 901 passed by the California Legislature and signed by former Gov. Brown, in 2018 relieved all utilities for liability during a so-called wildfire “de-energizing” event.

With the utilities financially off the hook for wildfire de-energizing claims, the financial liability and burden to care for seniors now falls directly on state and local government.

Newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a ‘Wildfire State of Emergency’ on March 22 that suspended all environmental mitigation mandates to expedite a $50 million for forest clean-up projects before the fire season. Radical environmental and progressive activists that were key to his election were furious when Newsom stated:

“The increasing wildfire risks we face as a state mean we simply can’t wait until a fire starts in order to start deploying emergency resources.”

PG&E will respond to California’s reckless environmental policies that cause huge wildfires by unplugging electricity on windy days, despite risks to shut-ins and the elderly.

The California public utility, forced into its second bankruptcy in 16 years after facing $30 billion in liability claims from 2017 and 2018 wildfires, announced a ‘Public Safety Power Shutoff’ policy that will shut down its electrical grid for up to 5.4 million users during ‘Red Flag’ periods with low humidity and sustained winds above 25 mph.

The bankrupt company stated that the shutoff could last up to five days and suggested that special needs, such as the elderly and shutins that “require electricity to sustain life,  may wish to Create An Emergency Preparedness Plan” that could include having public service phone numbers, a backup location, and informing local authorities.

County officials were stunned by the new PG&E policy, expressing fear that patients on medical equipment could be at risk of dying. There are also concerns that PG&E electrical shutoffs during the Carr Fire that swept through Redding and Camp Fire that burned Paradice to the ground, many seniors could not open garage doors to escape.

PG&E argues it has been forced to adopt electrical shutoffs under a bizarre 1999 California Court of Appeals opinion that made utility assets subject to “inverse condemnation” through legal claimant “taking,” without regard any determination of negligence by the utility or its staff, for wind-driven power line sparking wildfires along PG&E’s 18,466 circuit miles of interconnected electric transmission lines.

California has suffered more and larger wildfires since the Clinton administration in 1994 adopted the Northwest Forest Plan that prioritized protecting endangered species, water quality, and old-growth forests in 4.5 million acres of Northern California national forests. Logging roads that acted as fire breaks were abandoned as the industry shriveled, resulting in heavier underbrush and forest tree spacing becoming much denser. As a result, wildfires became bigger, hotter, and more remote from firefighters.

The Bush administration tried to reverse the policies, but environmentalists used lawsuits until the Obama administration reinstated the anti-logging policies and supported Gov. Brown’s California ‘Forest Practice Rules 2015’ that led to even less logging and more road abandonments.

After insurance companies suffered a shockingly high $5.1 billion in wildfires losses over a 10-year period through 2016, underwriting consultant Verisk Solutions warned at the start of the 2017 fire season: “4.5 million U.S. homes were identified at high or extreme risk of wildfire, with more than 2 million in California alone.”

The National Interagency Coordination Center found that Northern California in the last decade had suffered a 385 percent annual increase in acres burned, versus prior years. Of the 129,582 U.S. wildfires that burned 18,793,578 acres between 2017 and 2018, California accounted 15 percent of fires and almost 20 percent of the area burned.  

Facing a high-wind event In October 2018, PG&E shut off power lines in high-risk areas. After no fire occurred, customers protested and the utility was hit with 146 claims for losses, including 25 claims of business economic impacts. A similar wind event the next month sparked the Camp Fire that killed 86 people and destroyed 18,661 structures.

PG&E has not disclosed health issue claims for shutting off power to the 3.8 million, or about 20 percent, of its service area that are over age 60, because under Senate Bill 901 passed by the California Legislature and signed by former Gov. Brown, in 2018 relieved all utilities for liability during a so-called wildfire “de-energizing” event.

With the utilities financially off the hook for wildfire de-energizing claims, the financial liability and burden to care for seniors now falls directly on state and local government.

Newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a ‘Wildfire State of Emergency’ on March 22 that suspended all environmental mitigation mandates to expedite a $50 million for forest clean-up projects before the fire season. Radical environmental and progressive activists that were key to his election were furious when Newsom stated:

“The increasing wildfire risks we face as a state mean we simply can’t wait until a fire starts in order to start deploying emergency resources.”

via American Thinker Blog

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/

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What if conservatives had done it?

Pete Ingemi of the DaTechGuy blog asked some basic what ifs.  What if the perpetrators of the recent tragedies or other newsworthy items had been conservatives — or, horrors, Trump-supporters — rather than identify, so to speak, as politically correct and/or professional victims and therefore immune to criticism by the liberal media?  Would the incident have been covered differently by the media?

If the National Review had run the cartoon that the NYT did the day before a shooting at a synagogue would not the media be calling for it to be closed down and blaming it for the attack.

If the shooter at the Synagogue in California had a manifesto attacking Barack Obama rather than Donald Trump would that not be the only story in the media today.

If the Baltimore shooter was a white male targeting a group of blacks at an event rather than a black man would the media be demanding a national conversation on “race”

If Halima Aden was not a [Muslim] would the very suggestion that she pose in what is called a “burkini” for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue be seriously considered (Note: she’s still pretty hot but in this woke age are we still allowed to notice this?)

Finally Imagine for a moment that Stephen A Smith is a white sports commentator and he told the story of a white athlete expecting him to defend him based on their shared race.  Would that athlete still be on his team?

While all the individuals or institutions (except Aden) were criticized to varying degrees, there really was none of the foaming-at-the-mouth daily condemnation of the perp’s philosophy that motivated such a heinous act that would have occurred had it been done by an approved politically incorrect and therefore evil entity.  Indeed, Aden has been showered with praise for appearing in modest Muslim attire for such usual politically incorrect institutions — to the politically correct — as the Miss Minnesota beauty pageant and the famous SI swimsuit issue.  Normally, feminists condemn beauty pageants and whine about the millions in profits SI’s swimsuit issue generates.

So Smith’s job at ESPN is safe, and the New York Times will still be read by all those in-the-know P.C. types  because it contains “all the news fit to print.”

No what ifs — the conservatives are really the cause of all the mayhem.  Yes!  According to all the politically correct liberals, the truly guilty person for the Poway and Pittsburgh shootings is not the shooter, but…President Donald J. Trump (R).  Oh, and by the way, he is  also responsible for last month’s massacre in a mosque in faraway New Zealand.

Of course.

Pete Ingemi of the DaTechGuy blog asked some basic what ifs.  What if the perpetrators of the recent tragedies or other newsworthy items had been conservatives — or, horrors, Trump-supporters — rather than identify, so to speak, as politically correct and/or professional victims and therefore immune to criticism by the liberal media?  Would the incident have been covered differently by the media?

If the National Review had run the cartoon that the NYT did the day before a shooting at a synagogue would not the media be calling for it to be closed down and blaming it for the attack.

If the shooter at the Synagogue in California had a manifesto attacking Barack Obama rather than Donald Trump would that not be the only story in the media today.

If the Baltimore shooter was a white male targeting a group of blacks at an event rather than a black man would the media be demanding a national conversation on “race”

If Halima Aden was not a [Muslim] would the very suggestion that she pose in what is called a “burkini” for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue be seriously considered (Note: she’s still pretty hot but in this woke age are we still allowed to notice this?)

Finally Imagine for a moment that Stephen A Smith is a white sports commentator and he told the story of a white athlete expecting him to defend him based on their shared race.  Would that athlete still be on his team?

While all the individuals or institutions (except Aden) were criticized to varying degrees, there really was none of the foaming-at-the-mouth daily condemnation of the perp’s philosophy that motivated such a heinous act that would have occurred had it been done by an approved politically incorrect and therefore evil entity.  Indeed, Aden has been showered with praise for appearing in modest Muslim attire for such usual politically incorrect institutions — to the politically correct — as the Miss Minnesota beauty pageant and the famous SI swimsuit issue.  Normally, feminists condemn beauty pageants and whine about the millions in profits SI’s swimsuit issue generates.

So Smith’s job at ESPN is safe, and the New York Times will still be read by all those in-the-know P.C. types  because it contains “all the news fit to print.”

No what ifs — the conservatives are really the cause of all the mayhem.  Yes!  According to all the politically correct liberals, the truly guilty person for the Poway and Pittsburgh shootings is not the shooter, but…President Donald J. Trump (R).  Oh, and by the way, he is  also responsible for last month’s massacre in a mosque in faraway New Zealand.

Of course.

via American Thinker Blog

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Report: Religious Freedom Conditions Worsening in China

The 2019 annual report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) highlights worsening religious freedom conditions in China over the past year.

The report observes that "religious freedom conditions in China trended negative," especially after new regulations "effectively banned ‘unauthorized’ religious teachings and required religious groups to report any online activity." China’s government "continued to persecute all faiths in an effort to ‘sinicize’ religious belief, a campaign that attempts not only to diminish and erase the independent practice of religion, but also the cultural and linguistic heritage of religious and ethnic communities, particularly Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims."

The report focuses on the persecution of Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, Christians, and the Falun Gong.

Over the past two years, China has detained up to more than two million Uighurs and other Muslims in "internment camps," which the Chinese government initially denied existed, but has since defended "as a means to combat terrorism and provide vocational training." Former prisoners say those in the camps had to renounce their faith and swear loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.

The government has taken other steps to interfere in the lives of Muslims in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, "including discriminatory profiling at armed checkpoints and police stations; travel restrictions both within and outside of China; and Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking systems, facial and iris recognition, DNA sampling, and voice pattern sampling to monitor Muslims." USCIRF also received "credible reports" Chinese security services tried to harass Uighur Muslims living outside of China, including those in the United States.

Anurima Bhargava, one of USCIRF’s commissioners, said the situation for China’s Uighurs has worsened more rapidly in recent years, although the apparent increase in persecution could be a result of the fact that abuse was not documented as closely in past years.

"We are certainly building off of what is an increased sense of awareness of the scope, how many people, the ways in which people are being [treated]…. There’s a sense that it’s getting worse, that we’re in sort of an internment camp situation," Bhargava told the Washington Free Beacon.

In Tibet, Chinese officials "continued to pursue a strategy of forced assimilation and suppression of Tibetan Buddhism." The government imprisoned monks and nuns who would not renounce the Dalai Lama and confiscated the Chinese passports of several hundred Tibetans who attended teachings given by the Dalai Lama in India.

The Chinese government and Catholic Church reached a provisional agreement in September 2018 whereby "the pope would rehabilitate seven bishops from the state-run Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA) who had been excommunicated, in return for a veto over any future appointments by the Chinese government." China’s government used the deal to justify pressuring clergy and underground church members to join the CCPA. There were many reports of Chinese officials closing underground churches and destroying crosses.

Protestants also suffered under an intensified crackdown, as thousands of Christians were arrested and thousands of churches or religious sites were demolished.

Chinese authorities also arrested practitioners of Falun Gong, and many reportedly "suffered physical violence, psychiatric abuse, sexual assault, forced drug administration, and sleep deprivation."

The post Report: Religious Freedom Conditions Worsening in China appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

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Rep. Dan Crenshaw should become the GOP House public point man on urgent reform of asylum law

The word has gone out (including via radio ads), not just to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador but to the entire world.  If you show up at the US border with a child and claim asylum even if you are simply seeking a better standard of living, you will be released after at most a brief detention, and will be able to melt into the interior for years, never bothering to show up for your hearing scheduled years from now. . Unsurprisingly a tidal wave of asylum seekers is overwhelming the system, and potentially millions will show up to exploit this loophole.

Legislation is required urgently. President Trump knows it, and so do the GOP House lackeys of the US Chamber of Commerce, who see their interests lying in an unimpeded flow of low cost labor, as well as the Democrats who see their voters in the faces of the “migrants.” They need to be pushed by public pressure. What’s required is a sustained campaign to introduce and force the Democrat leadership to vote on a simple bill that would require asylum seekers to wait for adjudication of their asylum claims outside the USA, even if they claim to arrive as a family.

Fortunately, Representative Dan Crenshaw, the most impressive freshman House member I have seen in a long time, is ideally situated to assume leadership in this PR campaign that is necessary to force the hands of the House Democrats. Until I saw this tweet, I did not realize how fluent Crenshaw is in Spanish. Even better, he makes his case cogently and persuasively, appealing to the majority of Hispanics who want immigration laws enforced. Democrats would have a hard time standing up against pressure from US Hispanics.

 

 

You may remember that Crenshaw leapt to national prominence when he deftly and graciously handled a nasty bit of criticism from a Saturday Night Live comedian, winning him over with his good humor in an appearance on the show the following Saturday.

Since then, he has handled all sorts of challenges with incredible skill. Watch this, from last weekend, as he was called a “Nazi.”

 

 

Graphic credit: Twitter video screen grab

The word has gone out (including via radio ads), not just to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador but to the entire world.  If you show up at the US border with a child and claim asylum even if you are simply seeking a better standard of living, you will be released after at most a brief detention, and will be able to melt into the interior for years, never bothering to show up for your hearing scheduled years from now. . Unsurprisingly a tidal wave of asylum seekers is overwhelming the system, and potentially millions will show up to exploit this loophole.

Legislation is required urgently. President Trump knows it, and so do the GOP House lackeys of the US Chamber of Commerce, who see their interests lying in an unimpeded flow of low cost labor, as well as the Democrats who see their voters in the faces of the “migrants.” They need to be pushed by public pressure. What’s required is a sustained campaign to introduce and force the Democrat leadership to vote on a simple bill that would require asylum seekers to wait for adjudication of their asylum claims outside the USA, even if they claim to arrive as a family.

Fortunately, Representative Dan Crenshaw, the most impressive freshman House member I have seen in a long time, is ideally situated to assume leadership in this PR campaign that is necessary to force the hands of the House Democrats. Until I saw this tweet, I did not realize how fluent Crenshaw is in Spanish. Even better, he makes his case cogently and persuasively, appealing to the majority of Hispanics who want immigration laws enforced. Democrats would have a hard time standing up against pressure from US Hispanics.

 

 

You may remember that Crenshaw leapt to national prominence when he deftly and graciously handled a nasty bit of criticism from a Saturday Night Live comedian, winning him over with his good humor in an appearance on the show the following Saturday.

Since then, he has handled all sorts of challenges with incredible skill. Watch this, from last weekend, as he was called a “Nazi.”

 

 

Graphic credit: Twitter video screen grab

via American Thinker Blog

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With the walls closing in on Obama, Ben Rhodes weaves a sticky narrative web

Now that the Mueller report is out, effectively exonerating President Trump of colluding with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, the Trump administration has begun investigations as to the origins of the phony Steele dossier and the illegal surveillance of his campaign.  It’s a trail that’s unlikely to lead anywhere but to the office of embittered President Obama, and independent reporter Nicholas Ballasy got a chance to ask the Obama administration’s former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, whether he thought this investigation would eventually lead.

His response was about what you might expect — nowhere Obama might be, along with a string of ”narratives,” so fake that if you weren’t suspicious Obama knew anything about the abuses of power going on, you would be after hearing Rhodes.

There he is, in all his twerpy glory, situated between two bottles of screwtop wine, using the teenage girl’s favorite word “like” as a particle, and perhaps most significantly, blinking his eyes every time he insists that the Obama administration knew nothing about the Steele dossier or the effort to spy on the Trump campaign, even as Ballasy shows admirable restraint in not belting the guy across the table.

It’s interesting that he starts the interview confidently dismissive, but then, seemingly getting into his cups, gets more emphatic and detailed, repeating all sorts of defensive denials, even as the reporter was quite gentle on him.

Here’s one of Rhodes’s clearest whoppers — he actually seems to contradict himself with this sequence — from Ballasy’s report on PJ Media:

“We had nothing to do with that, nothing. I saw it – I heard about it at the very end when, you know, in January of 2017, like, we weren’t involved in commissioning the dossier like that’s crazy, you know.  We learned about it when it was in the report that was appended to the report that went to Congress at the end of the administration,” Rhodes said.  ”I have been investigated by these committees and I’m telling you they didn’t find it.  No, we had nothing to do with the dossier.  I mean, like literally, nothing to do with this dossier.”

He heard of the Steele dossier only after President Trump became president?  Even though it was all over the news in late 2016?  File under ‘disingenuous.’  Suddenly, the man who suggests he gets all his information from the Washington Post…forgot to read the paper.

Now, in Rhodes’s defense, it’s possible he was kept out of the loop by the Obama administration due to his sheer twerpiness, his lightweight intellectual heft.  Someone like Obama, or perhaps his more powerful minions, might have known he wasn’t a guy to be trusted with a secret.  And, as President Obama’s public relations guy, he might not have had a need to know, although that is contradicted by the fact that he was first and foremost President Obama’s chief propagandist, and very much a political operative. 

But Obama officials were intimately involved in the strategy of attempting to undercut candidate Trump and oust President Trump once he got into office.  Sundance over at Conservative Treehouse has good documentation showing just how false that Sergeant Schultzy claim to know nothing is.  The writer there has a strong timeline.

Rhodes annoyingly repeats all sorts of now discredited “narratives” — one that stands out is the now discredited canard that the FBI investigation of Trump was all the result of poor hapless George Papadopoulos’s bar talk with the Australian ambassador, not the Steele dossier.

“To what end is this?  We’re going to attack law enforcement for — I mean, we know from the Mueller report that the initiation of the investigations came from, not the dossier, but from the contacts that George Papadopoulos had in London, right, so the whole origin of this stupid conspiracy theory has been disproven by exhaustive work. So, to me, the whole thing is a waste of time,” Rhodes said.

That fell apart long ago in this Byron York report.  And the Mueller report itself cites a WikiLeaks dump as the origin of the investigation, not Papadopoulos.

There are plenty of others.  It all suggests that Rhodes has returned to fiction-writing as his means of projecting reality.  To the rest of us, it looks like he’s on his back foot and is trying to lie his way out of his self-created morass.  Team Obama has got a sticky web to extricate itself from.

Image credit: Nicolas Ballasy via shareable YouTube, screen shot.

Now that the Mueller report is out, effectively exonerating President Trump of colluding with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, the Trump administration has begun investigations as to the origins of the phony Steele dossier and the illegal surveillance of his campaign.  It’s a trail that’s unlikely to lead anywhere but to the office of embittered President Obama, and independent reporter Nicholas Ballasy got a chance to ask the Obama administration’s former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, whether he thought this investigation would eventually lead.

His response was about what you might expect — nowhere Obama might be, along with a string of ”narratives,” so fake that if you weren’t suspicious Obama knew anything about the abuses of power going on, you would be after hearing Rhodes.

There he is, in all his twerpy glory, situated between two bottles of screwtop wine, using the teenage girl’s favorite word “like” as a particle, and perhaps most significantly, blinking his eyes every time he insists that the Obama administration knew nothing about the Steele dossier or the effort to spy on the Trump campaign, even as Ballasy shows admirable restraint in not belting the guy across the table.

It’s interesting that he starts the interview confidently dismissive, but then, seemingly getting into his cups, gets more emphatic and detailed, repeating all sorts of defensive denials, even as the reporter was quite gentle on him.

Here’s one of Rhodes’s clearest whoppers — he actually seems to contradict himself with this sequence — from Ballasy’s report on PJ Media:

“We had nothing to do with that, nothing. I saw it – I heard about it at the very end when, you know, in January of 2017, like, we weren’t involved in commissioning the dossier like that’s crazy, you know.  We learned about it when it was in the report that was appended to the report that went to Congress at the end of the administration,” Rhodes said.  ”I have been investigated by these committees and I’m telling you they didn’t find it.  No, we had nothing to do with the dossier.  I mean, like literally, nothing to do with this dossier.”

He heard of the Steele dossier only after President Trump became president?  Even though it was all over the news in late 2016?  File under ‘disingenuous.’  Suddenly, the man who suggests he gets all his information from the Washington Post…forgot to read the paper.

Now, in Rhodes’s defense, it’s possible he was kept out of the loop by the Obama administration due to his sheer twerpiness, his lightweight intellectual heft.  Someone like Obama, or perhaps his more powerful minions, might have known he wasn’t a guy to be trusted with a secret.  And, as President Obama’s public relations guy, he might not have had a need to know, although that is contradicted by the fact that he was first and foremost President Obama’s chief propagandist, and very much a political operative. 

But Obama officials were intimately involved in the strategy of attempting to undercut candidate Trump and oust President Trump once he got into office.  Sundance over at Conservative Treehouse has good documentation showing just how false that Sergeant Schultzy claim to know nothing is.  The writer there has a strong timeline.

Rhodes annoyingly repeats all sorts of now discredited “narratives” — one that stands out is the now discredited canard that the FBI investigation of Trump was all the result of poor hapless George Papadopoulos’s bar talk with the Australian ambassador, not the Steele dossier.

“To what end is this?  We’re going to attack law enforcement for — I mean, we know from the Mueller report that the initiation of the investigations came from, not the dossier, but from the contacts that George Papadopoulos had in London, right, so the whole origin of this stupid conspiracy theory has been disproven by exhaustive work. So, to me, the whole thing is a waste of time,” Rhodes said.

That fell apart long ago in this Byron York report.  And the Mueller report itself cites a WikiLeaks dump as the origin of the investigation, not Papadopoulos.

There are plenty of others.  It all suggests that Rhodes has returned to fiction-writing as his means of projecting reality.  To the rest of us, it looks like he’s on his back foot and is trying to lie his way out of his self-created morass.  Team Obama has got a sticky web to extricate itself from.

Image credit: Nicolas Ballasy via shareable YouTube, screen shot.

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U.S. Religious Liberty Commissioner: U.S. Corporations Cozying Up to China ‘Ended Up Changing America’

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. corporations that cozy up to the Chinese communist government and ignore its brutal and even deadly treatment of religious minorities to gain access to their markets need instead to stand up for American values, a commissioner on the United States Commission on International Religious Liberty (USCIRF) said on Monday at the release of its 2019 report.

Commissioner Gary Bauer said that the report “very gently” notes that U.S. corporations are putting profit over principles by ignoring how China is brutalizing its people because of their religious beliefs.

“I’d like to get a little bit more specific,” Bauer said. “Trade with China was supposed to change China. Trade with China ended up changing America as more and more corporations became dependent on the goodwill of the Chinese government.”

“So I will personally say, ‘Shame on you if you are a U.S. corporation and you are forgetting the first part of the description of you — you are a U.S. corporation. You are a corporation founded in a country that was built on religious liberty.’”

“How dare you make a separate peace with the Chinese government in order to advance your financial interests?” he asked. “We hope the U.S. government will keep the pressure on U.S. businesses so that they will stand for the values of the country that allowed them to be successful to begin with.”

Bauer, who is also president of the conservative think tank American Values, told Breitbart News that while he was not speaking broadly about all U.S. corporations, some businesses are ignoring China’s religious and human rights abuses.

“Clearly there are some companies that have put their specific perceived economic interests and having access to the Chinese market ahead of the values they ought to stand for as a United States corporation,” Bauer told Breitbart News.

Bauer said while corporations do have an obligation to their shareholders and even their employees, they also have a responsibility to reflect their American heritage when dealing with other nations.

“I think there’s a lot of evidence that U.S. corporations are becoming in some cases mouthpieces for the Chinese government,” Bauer said. “Apologists for the U.S. government. Or quietly they pressure whatever administration that is in power to not be too harsh on China because it might hurt business opportunities and I, quite frankly, think that that’s disgusting.”

Bauer added that is why he has always opposed granting “favored nation status” to China.

In its annual report, USCIRF focused on 28 countries that are ranked Tier 2 — “countries in which religious freedom conditions do not rise to the statutory level that would mandate a CPC designation but require close monitoring due to the nature and extent of violations of religious freedom engaged in or tolerated by governments,” or Tier 1 — “those countries that commit systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom.”

The countries rated Tier 1 in the report are: Burma, Central African Republic, China, Eritrea, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Tier 2 countries are: Afghansistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cuba, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, and Turkey.

Lauren Ashburn, managing editor and anchor of EWTN News Nightly, moderated the commission’s panel discussion on the report.

“The cover of the report highlights the Uighur Muslims and their plight at the hands of the Chinese government,” Ashburn said to Bauer. “Religious freedom seems to be deteriorating right before our eyes … in China. And the U.S. and China are on the cusp of a major trade agreement. So what should the U.S. government be doing to address these atrocities?” 

“If we were going to rate the Tier 1 countries, China would be in a category all by itself in the level of persecution,” she added. “They are an equal opportunity persecutor. They will go after anybody of any faith that might compete with the communist, atheistic government of China for the loyalty of their citizens.”

“China is an expanding power,” Bauer said. “It’s a country getting more and more powerful by the year. And to have a country with these ideas and this degree of persecution ought to be something that scares everyone.”

Bauer said religious liberty should be on the table whenever anything is negotiated with China, including trade.

“We are continuing to push that idea, and many of the commissioners are working with the administration every chance we get to remind them that it’s not just tariffs and jobs, as important as that is, but it’s also this basic idea – the right of every man and woman whether they’re in China or wherever they are to seek God and worship God as they see fit,” Bauer said.

According to its website “USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission created by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) that monitors the universal right to freedom of religion or belief abroad. USCIRF uses international standards to monitor religious freedom violations globally and makes policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress. USCIRF commissioners are appointed by the President and Congressional leaders of both political parties.”

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Juan Guaido Calls on Venezuelans, Military to End Maduro’s Usurpation

By Angus Berwick and Vivian Sequera

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido said on Tuesday he had begun the "final phase" of his plan to oust President Nicolas Maduro, calling on Venezuelans and the military to back him to end Maduro’s "usurpation."

A Reuters journalist later saw security forces firing tear gas at Guaido and around 70 mostly young armed men in military uniform outside the La Carlota air force base in Caracas. Hundreds of civilians also joined the group.

But around two hours after Guaido tweeted his announcement, there was no sign of any other military activity, and the government dismissed any suggestion of an insurrection.

"We reject this coup movement, which aims to fill the country with violence," said Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino.

He said the armed forces remained "firmly in defense of the national constitution and legitimate authorities," and that all military units across Venezuela "report normality" in their barracks and bases.

The move was Guaido’s boldest effort yet to convince the military to rise up against Maduro. If it fails, it could be seen as evidence that he lacks the support he claims to have.

It might also encourage the authorities, which have already stripped him of parliamentary immunity and opened multiple investigations into him, to arrest him.

The United States is among some 50 countries that recognize Guaido as Venezuela‘s president, and has imposed sanctions to try to dislodge Maduro.

Oil prices topped $73, partly driven higher by the uncertainty in Venezuela, an OPEC member whose oil exports have been hit by U.S. sanctions and an economic crisis.

PRESIDENT "HAS BEEN BRIEFED"

U.S. President Donald Trump "has been briefed and is monitoring the ongoing situation," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.

The White House declined comment on whether the administration had been consulted or had advance knowledge of what Guaido was planning.

A former U.S. official said that while it was unclear whether Guaido’s efforts would touch off a broader military uprising against Maduro, it appeared aimed at building momentum toward Wednesday’s May Day Street protests and making that a turning point.

Venezuelan Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez tweeted that the government was confronting a small group of "military traitors" seeking to promote a coup.

Diosdado Cabello, head of the Constituent Assembly, a legislative body that acts in support of the government, said the opposition had not been able to take over the air base.

He urged Maduro’s backers to rally at the presidential palace in Caracas to support him.

Guaido, in a video posted on his Twitter account, was accompanied by men in military uniform and opposition politician Leopoldo Lopez, who has been placed under house arrest.

"The national armed forces have taken the correct decision, and they are counting on the support of the Venezuelan people," Guaido said.

Guaido, the leader of Venezuela‘s opposition-controlled National Assembly, in January invoked the constitution to assume an interim presidency, arguing that Maduro’s re-election in 2018 was illegitimate.

He has been traveling outside the capital Caracas in recent weeks to try to put pressure on Maduro to step down.

PROTESTS PLANNED

Anti-Maduro protests are planned for Wednesday, including what Guaido has said will be "the largest march in Venezuela‘s history," part of what he calls the "definitive phase" of his effort to take office in order to call fresh elections.

But Maduro, for his part, has appeared to retain control of state institutions and the loyalty of senior military officers.

He has called Guaido a U.S-backed puppet who seeks to oust him in a coup. The government has arrested his top aide, stripped Guaido of his parliamentary immunity and opened multiple probes. It has also barred him from leaving the country, a ban Guaido openly violated earlier this year.

Last week, Guaido said his congressional ally – opposition lawmaker Gilber Caro – had been detained, and that 11 members of his team had been summoned to appear before the Sebin intelligence agency.

Lopez, seen with Guaido, appeared to have left his home for the first time since being placed under house arrest in 2017, after three years in jail.

"I have been freed by soldiers on the side of the constitution and President Guaido," he tweeted. All of us have to mobilize. It’s time to win our freedom."

A soldier in the group with Guaido, who identified himself just as Rivas, denied government accusations that they had been tricked into backing Guaido.

"We’re all afraid," he told Reuters, "but we had to do it".

Spain, the former colonial power in Venezuela and instrumental in setting the European Union line, said that, although it considered Guaido the legitimate leader of Venezuela, it did not support a military coup and wanted to see elections.

(Reporting by Angus Berwick and Vivian Sequera in Caracas; Additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Writing by Kevin Liffey; Editing by Peter Graff, Chizu Nomiyama and Bill Rigby)

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James Woods Is In ‘Twitter Jail.’ Here’s The Tweet That Got Him Suspended.

Outspoken conservative and award-winning actor James Woods has been locked out of his massive Twitter account — which has accumulated over 2 million followers — for over a week now, the actor’s girlfriend Sarah Miller has confirmed.

On April 20, Miller posted a screenshot of the email Woods received from the tech platform.

“Of course Twitter doesn’t inform his followers,” she captioned the photo. The email claims Woods was locked out of his account for “violating” Twitter rules “against abusive behavior.” The tweet supposedly in violation read as follows: “If you try to kill the King, you better not miss. #HangThemAll.”

Woods’ quote was apparently made in reaction to the Mueller report findings exonerating President Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign of collusion with the Russian government.

This is not the first time Woods has been suspended from the platform. It was reported in September that the “Casino” actor was suspended for making a crack about a fake meme, which he acknowledged was likely fake.

“Pretty scary that there is a distinct possibility this could be real. Not likely, but in this day and age of absolute liberal insanity, it is at least possible …” Woods captioned a meme falsely suggesting top Democrat organizations encouraged men to skip voting in the midterms “to make a woman’s vote worth more.”

“The irony is, Twitter accused me of affecting the political process, when in fact, their banning of me is the truly egregious interference,” Woods told the Associated Press at the time of the suspension.

“Because now, having your voice smothered is much more disturbing than having your vocal cords slit. If you want to kill my free speech, man up and slit my throat with a knife, don’t smother me with a pillow,” he continued.

“I wish this were about an unknown Twitter user so that I could be even more passionate about it,” the actor added. “This is not about a celebrity being muzzled. This is about an American being silenced — one tweet at a time.”

Two years ago, Woods temporarily quit the platform over their censorship.

“Since [Twitter] is now in the #censorship business, I will no longer use its service for my constitutional right to free speech. #GoodbyeAll,” the actor posted in a short-lived farewell tweet, noted by The Daily Beast.

Twitter’s bias against conservative or contrarian speech has been well-documented. For example, CEO Jack Dorsey and Twitter’s global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety, Vijaya Gadde were pressed on their ideologically driven speech policies pertaining to transgenderism during a March appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. Radical feminist Meghan Murphy was notably banned from the platform for refusing to use female pronouns when arguing with a transgender woman, who is biologically male. Moreover, Twitter briefly suspended the official Twitter account for the pro-life “Unplanned” movie without cause last month. The account was restored only after fierce backlash.

via Daily Wire

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