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Richard Torres-Estrada

United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) hired Richard Torres-Estrada, a woke, toxic leftist as its first “Diversity and Inclusion Chief” last week and he has already been reassigned to new duties pending an investigation into anti-Trump memes.

Just The News reported:

The U.S. Special Operations Command has reassigned its new diversity chief, Richard Torres-Estrada, to new duties while he is investigated for spreading anti-Donald Trump memes and comparing the former president to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, a spokesperson told Just the News.

“Mr. Torres-Estrada has been assigned to other duties pending the results of the investigation,” SOCOM spokesman Ken McGraw wrote in a Tuesday email.

Joe Biden and his handlers are trying to create an army of unhinged political-minded liberals.

This is another grotesque move by Democrats which is not best for the country or the military but suits their political objectives.

Mr. Torres-Estrada would never be hired if the goal was to improve the military and our future as a country.

The man is a bigot and far-left Never Trumper.  His previous actions should have disqualified him.

Breitbart shared a few of his recent social media posts – this one says it all:

The post JUST IN: Biden’s Woke SOCOM “Diversity and Inclusion Chief” Reassigned to New Duties Pending Investigation Into Anti-Trump Memes appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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South Dakota, Texas and Utah were the country’s economic engines in the fourth quarter of last year, according to a report from the US Department of Commerce.

The three states were all tagged as red states led by Republicans — from governors, state senators and Republican state assemblies.

The Commerce department’s report is based on the 2020 fourth quarter gross domestic product (GDP) data and February 2021 unemployment rates, the Center Square reported.

While real GDP — which measures the inflation-adjusted value of goods and services produced in a particular area —  rose in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the percent change in the last quarter of 2020 ranged from 9.9% recorded in South Dakota to 1.2% in the District of Columbia.

“The Texas economy is on ” said Gov. @GregAbbott_TX.

Red states are leading the charge in #EconomicRecovery, as measured by 2020 4Q #GDP numbers and February 2021 #Unemployment rates, according to new government figures. https://t.co/ZITsnnnAO4

— The Epoch Times (@EpochTimes) March 27, 2021

Real GDP for the US as a whole increased at an annual rate of 4.3%. 

“The top three states in quarter-over-quarter growth were South Dakota (9.9%), Texas (7.5%), and Utah (7.1%). All three have Republican trifecta governments, with Republicans controlling the governor’s offices and both chambers of state legislatures,” the report said.

Of the remaining seven other states in the top 10 leading the US’ economic growth, five were also Republican strongholds: Tennessee with 6.7% growth, Iowa and Nebraska recording 6.3% growth each, Alaska with 5.8% GDP increase and Missouri with 5.6% growth recorded.

Meanwhile, only two Democrat-held states entered the top 10 with the highest economic growth recorded last year — Connecticut with 7% economic growth rate and Delaware which saw a 5.8% GDP growth for the period.

The report noted that aside from the economic growth, unemployment rates were also lowest in red states. 

South Dakota and Utah, for example, registered the lowest unemployment rates in the country, at 2.9% and 3%, respectively. Meanwhile, Democrat-led states Hawaii and California saw the highest unemployment rates, at 9.2% and 9% during the period.

Pointing to the report, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also tweeted of Texas’ good growth record.

“The Texas economy expanded at a rapid pace of 7.5% in the last quarter of 2020. That means more jobs & more prosperity for Texans,” the governor said referring to the red state’s performance.

“Only one state — and no large state — had better economic growth than Texas. The Texas economy is on fire,” he added.

The Texas economy expanded at a rapid pace of 7.5% in the last quarter of 2020.

That means more jobs & more prosperity for Texans.

Only one state—and no large state—had better economic growth than Texas.

The Texas economy is on pic.twitter.com/8g0cESIHe4

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) March 26, 2021

Iowa Republican Governor Kim Reynolds also pointed to Iowa’s growth of 6.3% for the period.

ICYMI Iowa is:

→ The #1 state for opportunity
→ GDP growth faster than the national avg.
→ Had kids back in school since August

How else can we keep Iowa moving in the right direction? Take our survey today to let us know!

— Kim Reynolds (@KimReynoldsIA) March 26, 2021

The new report from the Department of Commerce follows one from October showing the third quarter of 2020 as the best quarter in American history under former President Donald Trump, according to a report by The Daily Wire.

Under the former Republican president, GDP oversaw an annual average growth of 2.5% — which already accounted for the huge economic drag of the coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile, the last three years of the Obama administration saw a 2.3% growth.

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Athletes competing in the U.S. Olympic trials will be allowed to kneel during the national anthem, as well as participate in other “Racial and Social Justice Demonstrations,” according to new guidance from the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. The document released Tuesday said that some such demonstrations will be allowed without fear of sanction. “This…

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President Joe Biden’s COVID team appears to have entertained an electronic test-and-trace program pioneered by the University of Illinois that would have let businesses deny service to patrons based on their health data, a PowerPoint presentation obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows. The program has eerie echoes of China’s surveillance system, which uses data from citizens’ phones to impose quarantines.

A PowerPoint produced by the school suggests scaling up the university’s intrusive contact tracing system for use across the United States. Its file name, "2020-12-14 Shield Biden Covid Team," indicates that it was presented to the Biden team in December, amid an ongoing search for solutions to a seemingly insoluble problem: how to stop the virus without stopping the economy? The presentation proffered an answer.

The school’s system uses a mobile app that records test results and Bluetooth data to determine who has been exposed to the virus—and "links building access" on campus to that information. Local businesses have also embraced it, making entry conditional on a "safe status" reading from the app.

 

The system resembles the one being used in China, where a mandatory app gives each user a "health status"—green, yellow, or red—that dictates access to public spaces. The University of Illinois app likewise divides users into three categories: "yellow" if they’ve recently tested negative, "orange" if they’ve potentially been exposed, and "red" if they’ve recently tested positive. Only students with a yellow status may enter buildings.

The proposal would amount to a more extreme version of the "vaccine passports" being rolled out by airlines and some U.S. cities, which are already causing controversy. Those passports, such as New York’s "Excelsior" app, indicate whether an individual has tested negative or been vaccinated, but not whether they’ve been exposed to the virus based on tracking data. They collect less information and use a less granular classification scheme than the University of Illinois app, meaning they pose relatively fewer risks to civil liberties.

It’s unclear how such a scheme would play with liberal activists. While it represents the sort of ambitious, nationwide COVID response Biden has said he wants, it also threatens to exclude far more Americans from public life than measures like voter ID laws, which progressives have decried as the "new Jim Crow."

Only 11 percent of Americans do not have a government-issued ID, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, whereas 19 percent don’t own a smartphone. Widespread adoption of the app could ice nearly a fifth of the United States out of the economy, never mind the polling booth.

Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight, whose founder has called voter ID laws a way to "scare people out of voting," did not respond to a request for comment.

The app’s selling point is its ability to quickly isolate cases. "We need a SWAT team approach for hotspots," the presentation reads. "The goal should be to isolate confirmed positives in hours, not days." It further encourages the universal adoption of the app’s "safe status requirements," saying they are a "critical aspect of curbing the spread in any community."

Asked to clarify the context of the presentation, neither the university nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

Digital contact tracing has proven an effective substitute for lockdowns in many countries, allowing them to remain open without uncontrollable spread. Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea all mandated the use of mobile contact tracing apps and were largely spared the tradeoffs Western countries ended up making.

The University of Illinois saw similar success. As of December, its test positivity rate was just 0.43 percent, whereas the rate for the surrounding county was 7.9 percent, according to a graphic in the presentation.

 

All this would have made digital contact tracing of interest to Biden, who said on the campaign trail that he would "shut down the virus, not the country."

"Opening up society as much as possible for economic, educational, entertainment, and religious activity depends on local successes in testing, contact tracing, [and] isolation," the presentation reads. "Overwhelming the health care infrastructure is extremely costly and shuts down the economy."

Even so, the proposal effectively substitutes one tradeoff for another: Digital test-and-trace could have enabled faster reopenings at lower risk, without centralizing surveillance in the hands of the federal government. But it would likely have encouraged a form of decentralized surveillance among businesses and local bureaucrats, which poses threats of its own.

Privacy and public health experts are ambivalent about the tradeoff.

"The concerns for privacy and liberty here are obvious," said Ari Schulman, the editor in chief of the New Atlantis, which has run several essays on the dangers of digital surveillance. "The best way to strike the right balance with a system like this is to offer model programs and infrastructure to local institutions, but leave it to them to adapt it in a way that their members will find legitimate."

The proposal gestures at this point. It assumes adoption of the app would be optional and says it can be tailored to the needs of local communities. The federal government should support these measures, the presentation states, but "efforts to mitigate the virus need to be led and managed locally."

In order to be effective, however, the app requires widespread participation—meaning local institutions would have a strong incentive to mandate it. If every business in a city made the app a requirement for entry, residents would have little option but to download the app. That might drive down cases and stave off lockdowns, an attractive prospect for the retailers hurt by them. But it could also be the beginning of a kind of social credit system, in which access to public life is determined by personal data.

Nicholas Christakis, an epidemiologist at Yale University, noted that many Asian countries had taken steps in this direction to fight the pandemic.

In South Korea, Christakis said, the government tracked "people’s credit card usage to see which stores they had been in," a move that would have raised legal issues in the United States and Europe. "I was concerned by the extreme measures that China and Korea and Singapore employed in this regard," he said. "Requiring people to have negative tests to enter a building is concerning from a privacy point of view."

But, Christakis added, it may be necessary. "The measures in the slide deck do not strike me as that extreme" compared with other countries, Christakis said, "and we, as a society, must make at least some sacrifices if we are to work together to effectively counter a collective threat."

Because the University of Illinois app uses Bluetooth data to determine exposures, it is less invasive than some other systems that rely on GPS tracking. "When a user has a positive test result," the school’s website explains, students who have come within Bluetooth range of that user are notified and marked as exposures. In other words, the app doesn’t track users’ locations, just their proximity to one another.

But the surveillance schematic is there, and it could become a flashpoint in future crises. With over a sixth of the population fully vaccinated, such schemes have been temporarily tabled by the Biden administration. Whether they stay that way is an open question.

The post COVID Tracking Apps Have Eerie Echoes of Chinese Surveillance System appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

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On July 10, 1925, the eyes of the nation looked upon the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, as an all-star cast took the stage. Clarence Darrow played the lead for the defense team organized by the American Civil Liberties Union. William Jennings Bryan stepped in to assist the prosecution. There to chronicle it all was H.L. Mencken.

Darrow was the most successful and famous — and, to some, notorious — defense attorney of the day. Recently retired, he relished another opportunity to face off with Bryan. William Jennings Bryan was a three-time candidate for the presidency of the United States, sat in the House of Representatives, and served as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. He was called “The Great Commoner.”

Mencken epitomized the cigar-chomping journalist. From his desk at The Baltimore Sun, he opined on nearly every topic, including literature, art, politics, philosophy, and especially religion. Though he took only a single course post high school, he was a noted intellectual in addition to being a journalist, producing a bevy of books. It was Mencken who dubbed this trial that took place in the summer of 1925 “The Monkey Trial.”

Monkey Trial

This was a misdemeanor case that attracted over one hundred journalists, captured a nation’s interest, and was dubbed (at the time) the trial of the century. John T. Scopes, a math and science teacher at Rhea County Central High School, was clearly guilty. He violated the Butler Act of Tennessee law, named for Tennessee state representative John W. Butler. Passed in March of 1925, the Butler Act made teaching the theory of evolution in public schools a crime. The trial lasted eight days. The jury took merely eight minutes to return the guilty verdict. Scopes was fined $100.

Darrow, never short on courtroom drama, had called Bryan to the stand as his only witness. Many have written of how Darrow humiliated Bryan in the exchange. Then, in his closing argument, Darrow actually reversed his client’s plea from not guilty to guilty. This ploy kept Bryan from making a closing argument and was part of a larger strategy of Darrow and the ACLU to take this case on appeals all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The first round in Dayton had clearly taken its toll on the Great Commoner. Five days after the trial, Bryan died in his sleep, at the age of 65.

During the trial, the town of Dayton had been transformed into a circus. The courthouse square was overrun with vendors, exhibits of chimpanzees dressed in suits, protesters trying to out-shout each other, and hawkers of souvenirs. The whole thing played out like a hastily constructed movie set. And the whole thing was orchestrated. The school superintendent and a few others enlisted Scopes, who had a law degree. They were eager for an opportunity to violate the newly minted law. The ACLU, equally eager, saw this as a first shot of a long war they were zealous to wage.

Much, much more was happening here than the clear-cut violation of a Tennessee law and a misdemeanor offense. Some have said the Bible was on trial. This case was about the biblical teaching on origins versus the theory of evolution. This case was about the role of religion in American public life and culture. The Scopes Case was a clash of worldviews.

Battle Cry of Modernism

From the turn of the twentieth century, perhaps the most significant cultural impulse was that of progress. The twentieth century would be a century of progress, fueled by an enshrinement of science. The theory of biological evolution itself evolved into the theory of social evolution. There was a near-giddy sense of being on the cusp of mankind’s achievement of greatness. All eyes were looking forward to new discoveries upon new horizons, new beliefs, new possibilities. There could be no going backward, no looking back.

At issue here, of course, is the role of an ancient book, the role of the Bible. And the singular question of the moment was how the church would respond to this cultural impulse of progress. Would the church look to God’s word as the authority for life in the twentieth century? Or would the church broker a peace with a new authority?

American culture was ready to move on from the Bible. The Bible speaks of man and woman created in God’s image. The Bible speaks of a person’s crowning achievement of reflecting the glory of his Creator. To glorify God and enjoy him forever — that is the goal. To live in obedience to God’s word — that is the ethical standard.

But by the 1920s, the science of anthropology had espoused the notion that all religion was merely a human creation and human aspiration, the product of oversized hopes naively and falsely placed in some divine being. For many of the cultural gatekeepers and tastemakers, the idea of God was a relic from our pre-scientific, pre-modern past. The battle cry of modernism was that the Bible needed to go.

Compromise Called ‘Liberalism’

Having played a significant role in American culture up until this point, the church faced a crisis in the 1920s. Could it continue to have a voice in this new modern world?

And here entered the temptation to compromise. Whole denominations began to “rethink” key orthodox beliefs, among them the belief in the divine origin, truthfulness, and trustworthiness of the Bible. A new view emerged, a view that would be selective regarding the Bible’s teachings, a view that would submit the Bible to modernist sensibilities, to the new ways of thinking.

In his classic text from 1923, Christianity & Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen saw a clear divide between the orthodox view and that of liberalism. The Christian, he wrote, “finds the seat of authority in the whole Bible, which he regards as no mere word of man but as the very word of God” (64).

Liberalism believes that you can hold on to cultural influence by compromising your convictions. And in so being and doing, it is a fool’s errand. For one, the world or culture is not interested in compromise. Nothing short of wholesale endorsement will suffice. Second, compromising the Bible’s truthfulness and trustworthiness destroys the foundation and the superstructure of Christianity itself. The church does not stand over God’s word. Culture or “progress” does not have the final word on matters.

To be sure, the Bible is not the only word on matters. This is the world God made, which is to say, there is general revelation. We are called to explore and learn from this world. We praise God for mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. We need not eschew new discoveries or disdain the sciences. Science is not the same as “scientism.” Scientism believes that the seat of authority is science. This clash of worldviews is what the Scopes Case in 1925 was truly about.

Still on Trial

What can we learn from that moment nearly a century ago? One thing is that the Bible remains on trial. In 1925, the attacks on the Bible came from the hard sciences. Those attacks remain. Today, however, additional attacks come from the social sciences. Same-sex and transgender issues directly contradict the teaching of Genesis 1–3. These opening chapters of the Bible declare that we are created in the image of God, that we are created as male and female, and that marriage is between a man and a woman. We did not evolve. Gender is not a social construct. So-called homosexual marriage is both unnatural — not according to nature — and unbiblical.

Behind these particular issues are two opposing worldviews. One takes God’s word, an ancient book, as the authority even for today. The other worldview sees no reason whatsoever to be fettered to an ancient book when, through science, we know so much more and so much better today.

How has this clash of worldviews affected the church? Some in the church have chosen cultural influence by compromising their convictions. They seek to broker a truce with culture by “rethinking” gender and marriage. As it was in 1925, this strategy is a fool’s errand. Again, culture is not looking for a compromise; nothing short of wholesale endorsement will suffice.

We are not serving fellow men and women well by not telling them the truth. When we compromise our convictions, we no longer have the truth to offer. We must, of course, speak the truth in love. But we must speak the truth. We are serving our neighbor when we speak the truth. We are loving our neighbor when we speak the truth.

The Greek word apologia is a legal term, referring to the defense offered in court. In 1925, a literal courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, served as the setting for an apologetic for the Bible’s authority. The crucial question was this: Does an ancient book, the Bible, still have authority? That was the question one hundred years ago, and it remains the question today. As 1 Peter 3:15 commands, we must be ready, always ready, to give an answer.

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Alaska’s Republican governor essentially told President Joe Biden to take a hike in response to the Democrat’s insistence on a nationwide, one-size-fits-all coronavirus mask mandate. “No thanks, @POTUS – you can keep your mask mandate,” Mike Dunleavy tweeted Monday evening. “We’ll keep doing it the #Alaska way: trust the people & let them live their…

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House Democrats blocked a proposal Tuesday that would have required illegal immigrants to test negative for the coronavirus before they are released into the U.S. by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Requiring Every Alien Receive a COVID-19 Test (REACT) Act was introduced by Republican Iowa Freshman Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks. It would require the Department […]

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