The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plans to place special gun-carrying agents in all 50 U.S. states

According to the agency’s website, the Criminal Investigation (CI) division is looking for IRS employees authorized by law to carry and use firearms, which are responsible for investigating financial crimes, money laundering, tax-related identity theft, and terrorist financing efforts.

The “major duties” listed for the position say that agents will be trained to “follow the money” and prosecute any financial crimes.

“No matter what the source, all income earned, both legal and illegal, has the potential of becoming involved in crimes which fall within the investigative jurisdiction of the IRS Criminal Investigation. Because of the expertise required to conduct these complex financial investigations, IRS Special Agents are considered the premier financial investigators for the Federal government,” the website reads.

Additionally, agents must carry a gun and be prepared to protect themselves from physical attacks without any warning. The description for the role also cautions that the agent may face life-threatening situations forcing them to use a firearm.

Special agents with the CI division must also be able to pass pre-employment medical and tax exams and be “willing and able to participate in arrests, execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments.”

The website indicates that would-be agents must remain physically fit to respond to life-threatening situations while on the clock.

The job posting lists 360 vacancies in 249 locations nationwide — at least one in each state.

The IRS faced heavy criticism last year when after Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $80 billion in increased funding for the IRS for over a decade during a recession at a time when inflation was well over nine percent. The agency also announced that it would add at least 87,000 agents to the force to harass hard-working Americans.

Almost a Year After Dobbs Leak, Justice Alito Shares His Thoughts

 This piece has been updated to include a statement from Curt Levey, a constitutional law attorney and the president of the Committee for Justice.

On May 2, 2022, someone leaked the draft opinion of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision which indicated the U.S. Supreme Court was going to overturn Roe v. Wade. While the official opinion, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, wasn't handed down until June 24, 2022, plenty of hysterical backlash against conservative justices took place before then. Now, almost a year later, Justice Alito has shared his thoughts with reporters from the Wall Street Journal, in a piece aptly titled "Justice Samuel Alito: ‘This Made Us Targets of Assassination.’"

This isn't mere hyperbole. Someone wanted to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It was also later revealed that Nicholas Roske, who pled not guilty to federal charges, wanted to potentially target two other conservative justices.

"Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination," Alito shared "It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us."

Alito also denounced the idea that it was a conservative who leaked the draft. "That’s infuriating to me," he said about that theory. "Look, this made us targets of assassination. Would I do that to myself? Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible," Alito stressed.

Professor Jonathan Turley named NPR's Nina Totenberg as one of those who offered it was a conservative who leaked the draft. This is the same Totenberg who tried to stir up debunked controversy on masks between Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor.

    ...Alito says that the person was clearly intending to stop the release of the opinion. If true, that contradicts claims of some like NPR's Totenberg that the leaker likely was a conservative. https://t.co/NUn6680LYD
    — Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) April 28, 2023

Alito thinks he knows who did leak it. While he agrees there wasn't sufficient evidence to make a public accusation, as was the case back in January, Alito shared "I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody."

He also believes someone leaked the draft as "a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft... from becoming the decision of the court," adding "that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside--as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court."

There's another reason as to why the theory the leaker is a conservative is so ridiculous.

"Of course, if the likely leaker were a conservative, their name would almost surely have been reported by the media by now. Alito tells us he is nonetheless certain the leak was intended to prevent the Dobbs draft from being issued," Curt Levey a constitutional law attorney and the president of the Committee for Justice, pointed out to Townhall. "Common sense tells us he is right. After all, only someone on the Left would have had the requisite anger about the Dobbs decision to do something so damaging to the Court. Justice Alito is right to be infuriated at progressives who claim the leak came from a conservative--all the more so in light of his observation that the leaker knew they might be able to stop the Dobbs decision by motivating someone to kill one of the five justices in the majority."

While Alito is in safer hands now, that doesn't mean he didn't suffer before:

    [Alito] adds that “I don’t feel physically unsafe, because we now have a lot of protection.” He is “driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force.” Deputy U.S. marshals guard the justices’ homes 24/7. (The U.S. Marshals Service, a bureau of the Justice Department, is distinct from the marshal of the court, who reports to the justices and oversees the Supreme Court Police.)

    A federal law called Section 1507 makes it a crime to picket or parade “in or near” a federal judge’s residence “with the intent of influencing” him “in the discharge of his duty.” During a hearing last month, Attorney General Merrick Garland told Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) that the marshals have “full authority to arrest” violators of Section 1507. But according to training slides obtained by Sen. Katie Britt (R., Ala.), deputies on the justices’ residential details are told to enforce the law only as “a last resort to prevent physical harm to the Justices and/or their families.”

    Although the Supreme Court has held that the Constitution allows for reasonable restrictions on the time, place and manner of speech, the training slides indicate that the Justice Department believes it is unconstitutional to enforce Section 1507 absent “criminal threats and intimidation.” Regular protests outside the justices’ homes continue.

Levey called the lengths Alito has to go through a "shame." He also warned it was "a result, in part, of the signal sent by Attorney General Garland’s refusal to enforce the federal statute that makes it a crime to protest near a federal judge’s home with the intent of influencing his or her decisions."

Attorney General Merrick Garland certainly deserves criticism, as highlighted above. Beyond that, then White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said they "encourage" protests, so long as they were peaceful, and was more so concerned about the end of Roe. Her successor, Karine Jean-Pierre, similarly wouldn't denounce protestors seeking to interrupt Justice Kavanaugh at dinner.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who as minority leader threatened Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch in 2020 not to vote a certain way in an abortion case, laughed off the protests since he himself has experienced them.

Alito had to leave his home for a time due to the protests. The opening of this Wall Street Journal piece also calls to mind how he had to give remarks remotely for an event:

    Justice Samuel Alito was supposed to speak to law students at George Mason University in Arlington, Va., but when they showed up, he wasn’t there. “That Alito was speaking via closed circuit from a room at the Supreme Court seven miles away, rather than in person, was a sign these are not normal times,” the Washington Post reported. The Post didn’t explain what made the “times” abnormal.

    It wasn’t a lingering fear of Covid-19. In a mid-April interview in his chambers, Justice Alito fills us in on the May 12, 2022, event: “Our police conferred with the George Mason Police and the Arlington Police and they said, ‘It’s not a good idea. He shouldn’t come here. . . . The security problems will be severe.’ So I ended up giving the speech by Zoom,” he says. “Still, there were so many protesters and they were so loud that you could hear them.”

Even still, the Court faces doubt and scrutiny as an institution, but also when it comes to individual members.

Democrats bought into debunked claims about Alito and the Hobby Lobby case from 2014. Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have been the subject of criticized reports about their financial disclosures.

Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) of the Senate Judiciary Committee invited Chief Justice John Roberts to appear before the committee, who denied the unusual request. While Durbin knew better than to subpoena Roberts, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who sits on the committee has raised subpoenas as an option and even suggested the House Judiciary Committee has a "responsibility" to impeach Justice Thomas.

Alito spoke in-depth to the ways in which Democrats have attacked the Court:

    But as the court has grown more conservative in recent years, the left has stepped up the attacks on the court’s “legitimacy,” including character assassination of individual justices, with little objection from mainstream Democrats and plenty of help from the media.

    Justice Alito says “this type of concerted attack on the court and on individual justices” is “new during my lifetime. . . . We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us. The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms, but if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organized bar will come to their defense.” Instead, “if anything, they’ve participated to some degree in these attacks.”

    Judges are in a double bind: If they don’t respond, the attacks stand. If they do, they diminish the mystique on which judicial authority depends. Justice Alito demurs when we ask about “ethics” accusations against Justice Clarence Thomas from partisan media: “I’ll stay away from that.” But he does address a less-recent drama: “After Justice Kavanaugh was accused of being a rapist during his Senate confirmation hearings, he made an impassioned speech, made an impassioned scene, and he was criticized because it was supposedly not judicious, not the proper behavior for a judge to speak in those terms. I don’t know—if somebody calls you a rapist?”

    Those who throw the mud then disparage the justices for being dirty. “We’re being bombarded with this,” Justice Alito says, “and then those who are attacking us say, ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval rating has sunk.’ Well, yeah, what do you expect when you’re—day in and day out, ‘They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct. They’re doing this, they’re doing that’?”

    It “undermines confidence in the government,” Justice Alito says. “It’s one thing to say the court is wrong; it’s another thing to say it’s an illegitimate institution. You could say the same thing about Congress and the president. . . . When you say that they’re illegitimate, any of the three branches of government, you’re really striking at something that’s essential to self-government.”

He also spoke to the long-term consequences of such attacks as well:

    The court’s attackers clearly seek to poison the well, but to what end? They sometimes proclaim unrealistic goals such as pressuring a disfavored justice to retire or removing him from office through impeachment. Sometimes they speak of packing or “expanding” the court—enacting legislation to create new seats that would immediately be filled by a Democratic president and Senate.

    That might become possible if the Democrats have a good election in 2024, although Franklin D. Roosevelt failed in 1937 with enormous majorities, and Joe Biden, with narrow ones in 2021, punted the idea to a committee. It also would open the door to retaliatory packing by a future Republican president and Congress. Justice Alito finds the whole notion appalling: “To change the size of the court just because you want to change the result in cases—that would destroy it. You want to talk about our legitimacy? That would destroy the perception that we’re anything other than a political body.”

Levey also stressed that the damage caused was "no accident" and that "damaging the Court’s legitimacy was one of the purposes of the leak, just like it is the aim of the withering attacks on the conservative justices, especially when--as Alito notes--the mainstream media and even the organized bar cheers those attacks on."

"Justice Alito" and "Samuel Alito" are trending on Twitter as people react to such revelations, which our friends at Twitchy also picked up on.

The Tucker Carlson Story Brings Out the Media Stupid

 Everyone has a Tucker Carlson story, how they met him one time and how he was really cool, etc. It’s true, he is mostly what you see. But that’s not really what this is about, nor is it really about Tucker, though he will feature throughout. It’s about media and just how horrible and, frankly stupid, it has become.

My Tucker story is fun and involved, it goes from meeting him at a party at the home of Christopher Hitchens and continues through being the first hire for the Daily Caller, long before it launched or was named that (there was talk of calling it “The Northwest Corner,” which I successfully fought), through my wedding and up until today. The details are irrelevant and private, but the basics are not uncommon. His birthday is coming up, as is mine, and texts are always exchanged to commemorate each. This is not unique.

That’s the thing about Tucker – having gotten to know a lot of “political famous” people, very few are anything like their public image. Tucker is almost exactly the same, though maybe a little shorter. He texts during commercial breaks, when there’s news about you and it gets to him, he will get to you (he reached out as soon as he heard about my father passing, for example). And he doesn’t rush you to shut up or stop, even when you should. He’s just who he is, love it or hate it.

The media storm surrounding his leaving Fox News once again exposed all those jackals as the exact opposite – a narcissistic group of credentialed phonies who will never let the absence of information slow down their speculation.

I don’t know why Tucker is no longer on Fox, and neither does anyone who’s been all over television this week talking like they do. The only difference is I admit it.

I’ve been asked, as I suspect anyone tangentially connected to him has been asked a thousand times since Monday. I do not know. And it’s not my business. I sent a text saying I hope he’s ok, but he’s not going to pick up the phone and pour his soul out to me or anyone else he isn’t related to or hasn’t known for decades, nor should he. He doesn’t owe anyone a justification for his life and the events of it, no matter how public much of it has been.

So-called journalists, however, will simply take “information” from anyone to feed the rumor mill. I swear, if I told a reporter that he once told me he’s a necrophiliac and he was fired for hanging around Grant’s tomb a little too often, it would be “reported.” Not only have the standards for what constitutes news fallen through the floor, the standards for what is able to be reported are completely gone.

The morning after the news broke I forced myself to watch Morning Joe. It’s normally a vapid echo chamber, but this week set a new marker for intellectual voidism. There was no conspiracy theory too absurd for mention, nothing too dumb to be said.

On a good day, Mika Brzezinski is lucky that breathing is a reflex because otherwise she’d forget to do it. She and her second husband, Joe Scarborough (she’s his third wife), had one of the all-time dumbest exchanges in the history of television (not just cable news, but anything ever broadcast). They talked about the security footage from January 6th Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave to Carlson as though there was only one copy and it was on a series of VHS tapes.

“I think the question about the January 6 tapes is a really big one. What exactly happens to those? Do they stay in his possession?” Mika asked from her tax haven Florida mansion as if there was a shoebox full of Betamax tapes laying around somewhere.

“Kevin McCarthy needs to get the tapes back. And he needs to get lawyers to have documents signed that they’re not going to be used anywhere else in the future, or any of its contents revealed,” dumbass Joe added from the seat beside his pancake make-up covered wife with an oddly unmovable, smooth forehead.

They work in media, are they as unaware of digital as they appear to be of high definition? (We have to be grateful Mika is too old to have kids, the offspring of this much idiocy would surely bring about the end of life as we know it.)

This is just one example of the MOJO morons this week seemingly using the career moves of someone they hate as foreplay. Just one example…from one show…on one network – it’s been a non-stop and is beyond pathetic, yet it is what news has become. Who needs the National Enquirer or the late Weekly World News when you’ve got MSNBC? Actually, we all could. At least they’d get a story right every once in a while, if only by accident. MSNBC doesn’t have that issue.

RFK Jr.: ‘Every Totalitarian Regime in the History of Mankind’ Has Sought ‘Total Control’

 “It’s been the dream ambition of every totalitarian regime in the history of mankind to exert total control over every aspect of human behavior,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained in a recent sit-down interview.

The difference between other historical examples and the kind of WEF technocratic totalitarianism we face now, he explains, is the disparity in technological capacity to exert total social control.

This analysis is 100% pure veritas.

RFK Jr. is in possession of an exceedingly rare combination of traits for a politician: deep insight into how American politics work and an equally deep moral character to match.

He is the real deal, in my estimation. It doesn’t matter at all to me that he’s a nominal Democrat because he’s unlike any other mainstream Democrat that I have seen in recent memory, except for perhaps Dennis Kucinich (driven out of the party for not going along with its warmongering and catering to Wall Street).

Roger Stone has recently floated a Trump-RFK ticket for the GOP nomination. While titillating, the problem with this proposition is the disparate positions between the two men on the COVID-19 so-called vaccine.

RFK Jr. has been outspoken since before the rollout of the shots in his criticism of the rushed trial process and the obvious collusion between Pfizer, Moderna, and the regulatory agencies tasked with overseeing them.

Trump, on the other hand, not only spearheaded Operation Warpspeed, which delivered the shots to market in less than a year when the average testing period for new vaccines has always been 10-15 years; he also publicly bragged about his alleged accomplishment over and over and over, as late as last year, before he finally stopped talking about it altogether because of the political damage he was doing to himself.

Yes, the Deep State hates Trump because, unlike nearly every major political figure from either party, he is both beyond the control of the power structure and immensely popular with a large swathe of the electorate. He is therefore a potential asset to the populist movement.

However, Trump is not a visionary leader. He’s mostly a narcissistic self-dealer with an extraordinary flair for guerrilla marketing. He’s a showman above all with, ironically, better political instincts than most Swamp creatures who’ve spent their whole careers practicing their best impression of a likable, relatable real American straight from Main Street USA.

As Tucker Carlson noted, Trump is very good at destroying things and not so great at building them. He’s a human wrecking ball, in short — perhaps what we needed in 2016 to break the corrupt corporate state duopoly, which he did admirably, but lacking in the kind of long-term strategic vision that would make a meaningful difference in American politics.

Related: Just When Dem Debates Would Have Been Interesting, DNC Says There Will Be No Debates

Assuming that bringing RFK Jr. onto the Trump 2024 ticket could actually be useful for shaping Trump’s policy and personnel decision-making (which is sorely lacking given the kind of people like Jared Kushner he surrounded himself with the first go-round), RFK Jr. could do immensely beneficial things in his role as VP candidate.

Just close your eyes and imagine, for an indulgent moment, an RFK Jr. vs. Kamala Harris VP debate. It would be a bloodbath. On one hand, viewers would see a clearly principled man with an impressive depth of knowledge and, on the other, a vapid career climber who (allegedly) slept her way to the top of the Democrat Party and can barely spit out a sentence that doesn’t sound like it was manufactured in some think tank focus group.

That alone could be enough to sway voters on the fence — even Democrat ones — to vote the right way in 2024.

The New Baby-Killers

 Extremists have got to learn to take half a loaf. Just like the cheap labor-demanding GOP donors, pro-lifers need to be told: You can’t get everything you want. If Republicans give you this, they’ll lose their jobs, and the people who’ll replace them want you dead.

Unlike a lot of people complaining about the anti-abortion zealots, I am an anti-abortion zealot. That’s why I’m begging them to stop pushing wildly unpopular ideas. These fanatics are going to get millions more babies killed when Democrats win supermajorities in both houses of Congress and immediately pass a federal law making abortion-on-demand the law of the land.

They’re also going to get a lot more adults killed when those same Democratic supermajorities pass laws taking our guns, defunding the police and packing the court, among other great Democratic ideas.

We’ve been rolling our eyes at pro-choicers forever, telling them to calm down, that overturning Roe would just return the issue to the states. Blue states would make abortion legal until the kid turns 14. A few states, like Louisiana, would impose tough restrictions, but most states would come out in the middle — allowing abortions in the first trimester, plus parental notification laws, and exceptions for rape and incest.

Instead, the moment Dobbs was released, pro-life nuts rushed to the mics, saying, This is gonna be great! We’re going to ban abortion from the moment of conception and prosecute the mothers for murder!

The Democratic Party has been using abortion to scare suburban women in every election cycle for 50 years. Now, Republicans are finally giving them something to be scared about.

In Michigan, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, Tudor Dixon, said she opposed abortion for 14-year-old girls who’d been raped because giving birth to her rapist’s baby could be “healing.”

Does the name Todd Akin mean anything to you? Anything at all? Richard Mourdock?

Dixon lost by 11 points.

Pennsylvania responded, Watch this! Doug Mastriano, Republican candidate for governor, called abortion the “number one” issue of his campaign and said he looked forward to signing a six-week abortion ban. In 2019, he’d called for criminally prosecuting women who got abortions and doctors who performed them.

Mastriano lost by 15 points, taking the Republican Senate candidate down with him.

If we don’t bind and gag these pro-life militants, in about two more election cycles, we’ll have no Republicans in office anywhere. Good luck saving babies then!

Of course, it’s possible that there were other things voters didn’t like about Dixon and Mastriano.

Ah, but we also have pure test cases. Since Dobbs, there have been a total of six statewide ballot initiatives exclusively about abortion. The pro-life side lost every single time. They lost in blue states, in purple states and in red states. They were not outspent. These were direct-to-the-people votes. The tiniest restriction on abortion failed — even wholly theoretical restrictions! Every expansion of abortion rights won.

Army of Todd Akins: I don’t care! They’re wrong! They’re evil! What about the babies??? [Please give me a standing ovation now.]

In Montana, a proposal merely to require doctors to give life-saving treatment to babies born alive after a botched abortion lost 53% to 47%. Trump won Montana by 20 points in 2016 and 15 points in 2020.

In Kansas, pro-lifers wrote a ballot initiative that would have amended the constitution to clarify that it said nothing at all about abortion. The initiative placed no new restrictions on abortion, but simply moved the issue from the courts to the legislature.

It failed by 18 points, 59-41, losing in every congressional district in the state. Trump won Kansas by 20 points in 2016 and 15 points in 2020.

Kentucky voted on a similar initiative, proposing to amend the state constitution to say: “… nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.”

That initiative lost 52-48. In 2016, Trump won Kentucky by a whopping 30 points, and in 2020 by 25 points.

In three other states, Michigan, Vermont and California, voters put a right to abortion in their state constitutions.

Six ballot initiatives expressly on abortion, and the pro-life side lost ’em all.

We’ve been waiting half a century to get Roe overruled so Americans could finally vote on the issue. Well, guess what? They’ve voted! In the privacy of the voting booth, the people have spoken, and what they’ve said is: We don’t want the stupid and incompetent having any more babies.

The fanatics cite three Republican governors who won reelection after signing six-week abortion bans as proof that a certain miracle governor in Florida hasn’t just nuked his own presidential chances by approving such a law. All three governors signed their six-week bans when Roe was still the law of the land. All three bans were tied up in litigation on Election Day.

But more important, in the entire country, only one incumbent governor lost in 2022 — pro-life, pro-choice, it didn’t matter. Thirty-six governors up for reelection; 35 won.

The only flipped governorship was in Nevada, where the winning Republican, Joe Lombardo, said he opposed a national abortion ban. Luckily, abortion was a complete nonissue because state law already allows abortion up to 24 weeks and can only be changed by a vote of the people. (Lombardo also said there was no fraud in the 2020 election, for any Republicans who care about winning.)

But even in the face of a brutal 6-0 losing record, there are still pro-lifers who will say, I’m proud and I’d do it again! (Did you see my write-up in Catholic Insights magazine?)

This is our “DEFUND THE POLICE” faction — people whose ideological zealotry outruns their rationality.

Fine, be a showoff. Just understand, you’re going to get a lot more babies killed. I hope that’s worth your moral preening.

South Korea Knows the Korean War Isn’t Over

As U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol meet in Washington their nations have cause to celebrate. Ranking economies by GDP, the U.S. (population 330 million) is No. 1 and South Korea (52 million) is No. 12 (possibly 10).

But behind the photo-ops aides are discussing North Korea’s nuclear threats and communist China’s regional and global threats.

Difficult fact: The Korean War remains unfinished business. When media claim Afghanistan was America’s longest war, they ignore the frozen war on the Korean peninsula and the American troops still there, pulling guard duty.

The July 27, 1953, Korean Armistice Agreement established a ceasefire. Seventy years later there is no peace treaty.

Around 2.6 million human beings died during the war’s most intense combat (June 1950-July 1953). One million South Korean civilians died (estimated). North Korea lost a million soldiers and civilians. The U.S. military lost 37,000 killed in action.

In November 1950, the Chinese Communist Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) invaded North Korea and attacked American units. By July 1953 the PLA had suffered an estimated 600,000 dead.

So, here’s a fact relevant to 2023 and the Biden-Yoon meeting: At its height the Korean War was a war between the U.S. and communist China.

The PLA withdrew after the armistice. The U.S., however, didn’t cut and run. The war didn’t end. North Korea, backed by communist China and Russia, waged “gray zone war” — terror, firefights and infiltration in 1990s Pyongyang added threats of nuclear war.

We’ve a relic Cold War stand-off. Behind North Korea is an imperialist and expansionist communist China. The U.S. still stands with South Korea.

Celebration aside, is the U.S.-South Korea alliance secure?

Media report Biden wants to emphasize America’s commitment to deterring North Korean nuclear attack.

That’s good, but belated and, to my mind, another example of Biden attempting to avoid responsibility for making the world a more dangerous place than it was in January 2021. The Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal disaster damaged America’s reputation for reliability, strength and leadership in crisis. Globally deterrence took a hit.

In February I wrote a column discussing the possibility of South Korea and Japan acquiring nukes. They have the technology.

When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 it violated an agreement guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. In 1994 Ukraine had the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. Ukraine traded its nuclear weapons for mutual security guarantees.

In January of this year, after North Korean drones penetrated South Korean territory, Yoon said South Korea may deploy tactical nuclear weapons “or possess its own nuclear capabilities” if North Korean threats intensify.

I am certain the Afghanistan debacle told Russia’s Vladimir Putin that Biden’s weak, feckless leadership meant he could launch an all-out invasion of Ukraine and suffer no serious consequences.

Remember, Biden urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to flee. That’s a fact. Zelenskyy didn’t cut and run. Ukrainians fought and are still fighting.

Deterrence in eastern Europe definitely failed on Biden’s watch.

South Korea needs U.S. support. The U.S. needs allies and South Korea is a first-class ally with a world class economy, superb military forces and rock stars (K-pop rules Asia). South Korea is also a nation in arms. Its citizens are prepared to fight. Invaders will face organized, well-trained and supplied popular resistance forces. (I rate Finland, Israel and now Ukraine as other proven nations-in-arms.)

South Korea offers a lot to a larger coalition or alliance. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue is an unofficial coalition of Japan, Australia, America and India. All four regard China as a “disruptive actor” (Japan’s phrase) in the Indo-Pacific.

In March 2020, South Korea attended the first “Quad Plus” meeting, as did diplomats from New Zealand and Vietnam.

Very promising, but no matter the diplomatic arrangement, South Korea’s first defense priority is eliminating North Korea’s nukes.

A lesson in so-called forever war is deep background for this week’s celebration of the seven-decade-long U.S.-South Korea bilateral alliance.

As U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol meet in Washington their nations have cause to celebrate. Ranking economies by GDP, the U.S. (population 330 million) is No. 1 and South Korea (52 million) is No. 12 (possibly 10).

But behind the photo-ops aides are discussing North Korea’s nuclear threats and communist China’s regional and global threats.

Difficult fact: The Korean War remains unfinished business. When media claim Afghanistan was America’s longest war, they ignore the frozen war on the Korean peninsula and the American troops still there, pulling guard duty.

The July 27, 1953, Korean Armistice Agreement established a ceasefire. Seventy years later there is no peace treaty.

Around 2.6 million human beings died during the war’s most intense combat (June 1950-July 1953). One million South Korean civilians died (estimated). North Korea lost a million soldiers and civilians. The U.S. military lost 37,000 killed in action.

In November 1950, the Chinese Communist Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) invaded North Korea and attacked American units. By July 1953 the PLA had suffered an estimated 600,000 dead.

So, here’s a fact relevant to 2023 and the Biden-Yoon meeting: At its height the Korean War was a war between the U.S. and communist China.

The PLA withdrew after the armistice. The U.S., however, didn’t cut and run. The war didn’t end. North Korea, backed by communist China and Russia, waged “gray zone war” — terror, firefights and infiltration in 1990s Pyongyang added threats of nuclear war.

We’ve a relic Cold War stand-off. Behind North Korea is an imperialist and expansionist communist China. The U.S. still stands with South Korea.

Celebration aside, is the U.S.-South Korea alliance secure?

Media report Biden wants to emphasize America’s commitment to deterring North Korean nuclear attack.

That’s good, but belated and, to my mind, another example of Biden attempting to avoid responsibility for making the world a more dangerous place than it was in January 2021. The Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal disaster damaged America’s reputation for reliability, strength and leadership in crisis. Globally deterrence took a hit.

In February I wrote a column discussing the possibility of South Korea and Japan acquiring nukes. They have the technology.

When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 it violated an agreement guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. In 1994 Ukraine had the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. Ukraine traded its nuclear weapons for mutual security guarantees.

In January of this year, after North Korean drones penetrated South Korean territory, Yoon said South Korea may deploy tactical nuclear weapons “or possess its own nuclear capabilities” if North Korean threats intensify.

I am certain the Afghanistan debacle told Russia’s Vladimir Putin that Biden’s weak, feckless leadership meant he could launch an all-out invasion of Ukraine and suffer no serious consequences.

Remember, Biden urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to flee. That’s a fact. Zelenskyy didn’t cut and run. Ukrainians fought and are still fighting.

Deterrence in eastern Europe definitely failed on Biden’s watch.

South Korea needs U.S. support. The U.S. needs allies and South Korea is a first-class ally with a world class economy, superb military forces and rock stars (K-pop rules Asia). South Korea is also a nation in arms. Its citizens are prepared to fight. Invaders will face organized, well-trained and supplied popular resistance forces. (I rate Finland, Israel and now Ukraine as other proven nations-in-arms.)

South Korea offers a lot to a larger coalition or alliance. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue is an unofficial coalition of Japan, Australia, America and India. All four regard China as a “disruptive actor” (Japan’s phrase) in the Indo-Pacific.

In March 2020, South Korea attended the first “Quad Plus” meeting, as did diplomats from New Zealand and Vietnam.

Very promising, but no matter the diplomatic arrangement, South Korea’s first defense priority is eliminating North Korea’s nukes.
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NY Democrat to Testify Against ‘Soft on Crime’ Alvin Bragg, Praises Giuliani for Saving the City

 A Democrat New York City councilman will testify against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, saying the woke DA has contributed to the city’s “lawlessness.”

Bob Holden will appear at the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee, “Victims of Violent Crime in Manhattan,” next week, pointing fingers at Bragg’s soft-on-crime policies is driving chaos into the streets of the city.

“When Bragg came in, he issued that ridiculous edict that he was not going to prosecute smaller crimes,” Holden said. “What do we have in New York City? We have lawlessness on the streets.”

Holden, a long-time New Yorker, said he had never seen the city so dangerous as it is now, noting the timing of the rise in crime directly correlates to when Bragg took over as DA in January 2022.

“I have an issue with soft-on-crime politicians and DAs, so, you know, I offered. I said, ‘Look, I have a view of this that’s different from my Democratic, or most of my Democratic colleagues, so I would say that there are issues why New York City is the way it is,” Holden said.

Holden recalled that on day one of Bragg being in office, red flags went up throughout the city. Then, on his third day in office, the woke DA ordered prosecutors not to give out prison sentences for several crimes and downgrade charges for crimes such as robberies and commercial burglaries.

He noted New York’s crime issue improved when Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in office. Then, however, it rapidly declined through the years as the city’s implementation of a sweeping bail reform law in 2020 took effect.

“I credit Rudy Giuliani as the mayor who saved New York… I lived through that. They don’t like to hear it. But I lived through it,” Holden said. “I remember the city turning around, and we had 17 straight years of decline in crime until the bail reform, and then you couple that with DAs like Bragg, and it’s a bad, bad recipe there.”

As a result, Bragg claims, police officers don’t have the motive to arrest and implement law and order in the predominantly blue city.

The Republican committee also plans to have Madeline Brame, whose son was fatally stabbed; Harlem bodega clerk Jose Alba, who was once charged with murder over the death of someone who attacked him at work; and Jennifer Harrison, founder of Victims Rights NY to all testify against Bragg’s pro-crime policies.

The Steele Dossier Boosters Lecture Fox on Truth?

 It’s a heady time for the badly disguised Democrats in the “objective media,” seeing Fox News settle a fake news lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over wild and unproven claims of mass voting machine fraud. But a new book excerpt from “BuzzFeed Ben” Smith should remind everyone that the same “Truth matters” cheerleaders accepted wild and unproven claims about former President Donald Trump willy-nilly.

The Atlantic published Smith’s proclamation that “After All That, I Would Still Publish the Dossier.” This refers to his 2017 decision as the boss at BuzzFeed News to publish — in its entirety — the Steele Dossier, a burning rubbish pit of unproven gossip about Trump that was pushed by Hillary Clinton’s lawyers through the “opposition research” firm Fusion GPS.

Smith now admits this ended up in a media cluster … bungle. “The dossier’s overreaching allegation of an immense and perverse conspiracy would, (author Barry Meier) predicted, ‘ultimately benefit Donald Trump.’ Six years after publication, I accept that conclusion.”

So, the biggest regret on the Left isn’t that it was false, but that it backfired and helped Trump. Smith says he did it in defense of the intelligence of the public, that they can figure this out. Isn’t that better than a circle of journalists keeping it secret until wild charges can be proven?

This assertion is easy to refute. Just put Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden in the blank slot. If Breitbart published an unproven packet of sleaze that Biden hired Russian hookers to urinate on someone’s bed, they would be denounced with the greatest vigor. Every “disinformation reporter” on the Left would be screaming that social media giants should be crushing these allegations into internet dust.

In fact, you see an analogue in the Hunter Biden laptop, including hookers. The Fox-hating media all avoided any attempt to confirm it and merely screamed “disinformation.”

You can also pause to think of the Dominion lawsuit when Smith recounts how BuzzFeed avoided any punishment in the legal system. “We faced a difficult series of lawsuits, but we won them all, in part because we’d maintained our journalistic distance. We argued, successfully, that we were not making these claims ourselves; we were making the ‘fair report’ of what amounted to a government document.”

It “amounted to a government document” because Fusion GPS shopped it with the FBI. Smith recounts how that firm assembled a clique of reliable liberal sources — The New York Times, The New Yorker, ABC News, CNN — at the Tabard Inn in Washington, D.C., where “Steele calmly shared his shocking suggestion that Trump had been compromised by the Russian government.”

In 2019, Robert Mueller’s report and then the Justice Department inspector general’s report eviscerated Steele’s gossip. Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple — who’s written many hard-charging critiques of Fox — devoted a pile of columns to revisiting the wreckage of the media’s dossier coverage.

When he went around asking the dossier’s most enthusiastic promoters for comment, MSNBC analyst Howard Fineman earnestly replied to Wemple: “For much of its public existence, the dossier got credibility from the very fact that the feds seemed to think it was a real road map. I came to accept it on that basis. I now regret citing the Steele (dossier) for any proposition.”

He was the exception. Wemple found a pile of refusals to comment, including Rachel Maddow, John Berman, Alisyn Camerota, Phil Mudd, Natasha Bertrand and Jacob Weisberg. Manu Raju referred Wemple to CNN’s public relations department, which issued this statement: “CNN stands by our reporting.”

These are the people now fulminating that Fox didn’t have to make a public apology.

A Liberal Magazine Got Blunt About Ukraine

 It’s been quite some time since I’ve read something from The Nation and almost wholly agreed with the premise. It doesn’t happen often, but a broken clock is right twice a day. And it so happens to be about foreign policy and Ukraine. It’s a piece that some Biden supporters would smear as pro-Putin propaganda because it’s not a full-throated endorsement of our proxy war in that Eastern European nation that’s lasted over a year. The article is blunt: we can’t keep up with Ukraine’s military needs, these forever wars are killing our future, and it’s time voters stand up to the bipartisan war machine that’s run amok for the better part of a generation.

Some interesting points were mentioned mid-way through the piece. It’s The Nation, so be prepared that the opening paragraphs trash the GOP. We produce over 12,000 155mm shells every day, but Ukraine has fired that many and more within two days. The economic fallout from America’s perpetual state of war has led to slippage concerning global currency reserves. The Great Society was probably the Democrats’ most extensive attempt at a wholesale overhaul of the country, and it might have been successful if Vietnam hadn’t derailed it. The piece aptly quotes the late Lyndon Johnson saying, “that bitch of a war” ruined his domestic agenda and presidency. It then went into how Ronald Reagan borrowed the cash to fund these excursions, while Nixon killed the anti-war movement by discontinuing the draft in 1973 (via The Nation):
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With bipartisan support from establishment politicians, plutocrats, and pundits, Biden has now committed us to a four-front global crusade against Russia, China, Iran, and a continually shifting terrorist hit list.
 
None of these “enemies” threaten the survival or well-being of Americans. And the record of the United States in coddling dictators and torturers, violating international law, and invading other countries mocks the claim that we are fighting for universal human values.
 
The core conflict in each theater of war is over the United States’ control of other nations’ geographic alliances. US armed forces are present in 750 bases in 80 countries. Analysts on both the left and the right concluded long ago that this “superb” military is bloated, inefficient, and overpriced. The war machine budget just for 2024 is $842 billion. Add the money for homeland security, the State Department, and the proposed budget for veterans’ benefits, and you reach a national security tab of over $1.3 trillion. Lots of money for a military that hasn’t won a serious war since 1945.
 
[…]
 
So long as these forever wars were limited to distant places most Americans couldn’t find on a map, and Pentagon contracts were deftly allocated among congressional districts, it was all politically manageable. Protected by distance and dollars, Americans could root for Team America on their infotainment channels. Insulated from their constituents, politicians could play and profit from the “great game” of global geopolitics.
 
[…]
 
We have already reached the limits of our productive capacity supplying weapons to Ukraine. Ukraine has used up a 13-year supply of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and a five-year supply of Javelin anti-tank missiles. The US produces 14,000 155-mm artillery shells a month; Ukraine burns through that much in two days. Neither we nor our NATO allies can deliver what Ukraine needs for the “victory” we are promising it.
 
At the same time, Washington is openly preparing for a war with China over Taiwan. War game simulations have shown that we would run out of long-range naval missiles a week after the shooting started. The Air Force is short 1,650 pilots; the Navy says it needs several hundred new warships; and the Army plans to reduce its troop count by 10,000 because it can’t get enough recruits. Biden has pledged to make Taiwan a “porcupine” of missiles aimed at China. Yet we have a $19 billion backlog in weapons previously promised to Taipei.
 
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Today, our 15 percent share of global GDP is slightly less than China’s. Two-thirds of the world’s countries trade more with China than with the US. We run chronic trade and fiscal deficits. The dollar still dominates but has slipped from 70 to 60 percent of global reserves in the past 20 years. And our aggressive confiscation of a growing list of foreigners’ assets is making investors nervous.
 
[…]
 
The dogs of war may be unleashed “over there,” but they will feed here at home. And devour our future.

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A Lesson in Corporate Wokeness: The Disaster After Making Aunt Jemima a Pariah
Brad Slager

I was all for blowing stuff up after the 9/11 attacks. Radical Islamic terrorists murdered close to 3,000 Americans. Payback was warranted and righteous, but then the dominant neoconservative contingent in the Bush White House decided to put all the chips in the middle of the table, leveraging American military and economic power to export liberal democracy to a region of the world where this governing theory historically has no roots. Kill the terrorists, remove their allies from power, and then occupy and transform that society to be more like ours—the end game: perpetual peace under the banner of democracy, freedom, and the American way. The theory was with Israel being the Middle East’s only functioning democracy, adding more would increase the likelihood of stability. Democratic peace theory was going to be injected with steroids. All it got us was a trillion-dollar-plus war in Afghanistan and Iraq, thousands of Americans killed, and our force trapped in nations rife with sectarian divisions.

The Bush presidency derailed the tenets of the now-defunct neoconservative Project for the New American Century. American armies cannot accelerate what should be the organic change among these societies. There will be some who don’t want democracy. Washington must learn this, along with veering clear of the Left’s hyper-interventionist policy of humanitarian intervention.

To boot, the powers that come to justify these conflicts can and have been used to chip away at American civil liberties. Democrats want to use notoriously unreliable no-fly lists to limit the sale of firearms. The logic is that anyone on these lists shouldn’t be able to buy guns, which sounds excellent on camera, but the lack of transparency and due process has been an issue for years. There are six-year-olds on these lists. Need I say more?

It would be refreshing for an American president to put stock in the belief that it should be a constitutional responsibility to keep the nation out of war. These debts are accruing and will be called soon; we don’t have the cash for it.

BREAKING: Anheuser-Busch CEO Speaks After Company Gets Crushed

 After alienating "fratty" customers and hiring biological male Dylan Mulvaney to promote Bud Light, resulting in a $5 billion loss over the past few days, Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth is finally weighing in.

"As the CEO of a company founded in America’s heartland more than 165 years ago, I am responsible for ensuring every consumer feels proud of the beer we brew, We’re honored to be part of the fabric of this country. Anheuser-Busch employs more than 18,000 people and our independent distributors employ an additional 47,000 valued colleagues. We have thousands of partners, millions of fans and a proud history supporting our communities, military, first responders, sports fans and hard-working Americans everywhere."

"We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer," he continued. "My time serving this country taught me the importance of accountability and the values upon which America was founded: freedom, hard work and respect for one another. As CEO of Anheuser-Busch, I am focused on building and protecting our remarkable history and heritage."

    pic.twitter.com/oyyfPzd1FM
    — Anheuser-Busch (@AnheuserBusch) April 14, 2023

"I care deeply about this country, this company, our brands and our partners. I spend much of my time traveling across America, listening to and learning from our customers, distributors and others," Whitworth concluded. "Moving forward, I will continue to work tirelessly to bring great beers to consumers across our nation."

Meanwhile, no word from Bud Light Vice President of Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid over her decision to destroy the brand.

    Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s VP of Marketing, doubles down on her extreme woke strategy to promote the “declining” American beer brand to “young people”, while smearing her former customers as “fratty and out of touch”.

    How’s that working out for you, lady? @budlight pic.twitter.com/zNYKbMnZnu
    — Old Row (@OldRowOfficial) April 9, 2023

Alleged Nintendo Switch 2 Specs Leak Out: Powered by NVIDIA Ampere GPU With Ray Tracing & DLSS 2.2 Support

 Nintendo's Next-Gen Switch 2 Console Specs Leak Out, Could Be Powered By NVIDIA Ampere GPU With Ray Tracing & DLSS 2.2 Support

Yesterday's NVIDIA leak was undoubtedly a major one, revealing several crucial and confidential information of existing and upcoming products. One of the leaks seemingly featured the source code for NVIDIA's DLSS technology but users were quick to spot 'NVN2' mentioned in the source files which is allegedly the graphics API for the next-generation Switch 2 or Switch Pro consoles.
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    NVIDIA leaks have "nvn2", which seems to be the graphics api for the Switch Pro, based on Ampere with ray tracing support and DLSS 2.2 pic.twitter.com/k6nEr31CcY

    — Nikki™ 🌹 (@NWPlayer123) March 1, 2022

Digging through the leaked files, several users were able to spot that the NVN2 API is designed to work with NVIDIA's Ampere GPU architecture and will feature support for both Ray Tracing & the aforementioned DLSS (2.2) technology. Now what's more interesting is that there are references to the T234/T239 SOCs which according to Kopite7kimi were going to power the new Nintendo Switch 2 console. Do note that there have already been reports of a DLSS powered Switch console in the works prior to this leak.
NVIDIA's leaked files mention NVN2 API which is used specifically by the Switch console from Nintendo. (Image Credits: TechpowerUp)
NVIDIA's leaked files mention NVN2 API which is used specifically by the Switch console from Nintendo. (Image Credits: TechpowerUp)

These SOCs will be a custom Orin design and will have a codename starting with a 'D'. The two possible codenames for the SOC are either Dane or Drake though some believe that these SOCs and the codenames were only specific to the Switch Pro which has been canceled in favor of a truly next-gen Switch console.

The T234 SOC is suggested to feature 2048 Ampere GPU CUDA Cores and 12x ARM Cortex-A78AE (Hercules) 64-bit cores. The T239 which will be custom-designed based on this is suggested to offer slightly different specifications. The specific GPU that the SOC will be using seems to be the Ampere GA10F and it is rumored to feature the chip is said (or rumored) to feature the same SEC8N rate as ORIN, 1024 FP32 rate, or half of Orin. The SOC will also likely carry AV1 support.

    It's funny. What I said about "the new Switch SoC"?
    1. T239 ✔️
    2. Black Knight/Dane Whitman ❌ (Tim Drake is also start from D.) 🤣🤣🤣
    3. AD10F/based on Ada Lovelace ❌ (GA10F)
    4. SEC8N/the same as Orin ❓
    5. 1024FP32/half of Orin ❓

    — kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) March 2, 2022

While the leak does report these specifications to be true, we can't say with certainty that these will be the final specs used for the next-gen Nintendo Switch 2 console. It could be entirely possible that these specs are specific to an unreleased or canceled version of the console and a new variant with far better specs could be in the works. So in the end, it's best we wait for final announcement or confirmation from Nintendo itself.

Kevin McCarthy's Job Approval Reaches New Heights Since Taking the House Speaker Gavel

 House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif) popularity has spiked since taking on the new job as Speaker of the House this year.

According to the latest Economist/YouGov Poll, McCarthy’s job approval rating is taking new heights, up 15 points from last year. He currently has a rating of positive seven.

The poll found that 44 percent of voters approved of McCarthy’s job as Speaker, while only 37 percent said they disapproved.

In December, just a month before securing the House Speaker votes, McCarthy’s job approval rating was at a negative eight, with only 36 percent of voters strongly or somewhat approving of his job, which at the time was the House minority leader.

McCarthy secured the gavel after a dramatic four days and 15 rounds of voting. As he reaches his 100-day mark in the new Congress, his time has been spent destroying Democrat’s radical plans, boosting Republicans’ priorities, and doubling down on his statement that President Joe Biden is jeopardizing the U.S. economy.

McCarthy has had a successful four months.

He has pushed Biden to sign the D.C. Crime Bill Nullification, which blocks the nation’s capital, “proposed soft-on-crime criminal code rewrite that treated violent criminals like victims and discarded the views of law enforcement.” He also launched a bipartisan select committee to confront China’s global influence and the dangerous implications the communist country has on the U.S.

However, he did stop short of agreeing on the debt limit with the Democrats. Biden and his party have demanded a clean package without added frills, while McCarthy and the rest of the GOP are pressing spending cuts.

Per the Republican’s proposal, if major cutbacks exist, the GOP looks to extend the debt limit until May 2024. McCarthy also wants to examine Biden’s hefty student loan forgiveness program and “green” tax credits.

To compare,  when Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) was Speaker of the House last year, her job approval rating was at a negative five, with only 45 percent of Americans approving of her role,  more than 50 percent disapproved

A Radical Group Tried to Disrupt 'Record' Fundraiser Headlined by Ron DeSantis

On Friday night, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) was the keynote speaker at the Amos Tuck fundraising dinner in Manchester, New Hampshire. Not only were claims from the media that DeSantis was having fundraising issues "totally fake news" according to NH GOP Chairman Chris Ager, but the popular governor brought in a "record" amount of money. Not all were happy with DeSantis' appearance, though, as a group known as If Not Now tried to disrupt his speech.

    #BREAKING: Protestors storm an unphased Gov. Ron DeSantis at New Hampshire event

    They chanted "Jews against DeSantis!"

    DeSantis: "Why you'd want to pay the ticket to get in just to do that, I don't know!" pic.twitter.com/zwNnlz7590
    — Florida’s Voice (@FLVoiceNews) April 14, 2023

DeSantis was talking about previous governors' races when two women came up to the stage. "Yeah, thank you," the governor said as security removed them. The young women yelled out "Jews against DeSantis!" while they were hauled off, as the audience booed the brief interruption.

The governor took it in stride, though. "You gotta have a little spice in the speech, right? I mean you gotta have a little fun," he said as the audience applauded the removal of the women. "Why you'd want to pay the ticket to get in just to do that, I don't know, but different strokes for different folks," DeSantis said as he then continued on.

The activists have taken their radical tactics elsewhere, which have been carried out in even more egregious ways. And, to say that they are anti-Israel would be an understatement with all the accusations they hurl at the only democracy in the Middle East with claims about an "occupation," bringing them in line with the anti-Israel squad members in Congress.

A glowing profile of the group in New York magazine from 2018 discusses how they also have disrupted Birthright trips, sought to impart their views onto counselors at Jewish summer camps to be taught to campers, and as one of them even did at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel, "drew parallels between Nazi genocide and the plight of the Palestinians."


"American Jews organizing our community to end U.S. support for Israel's apartheid system and demand equality, justice, and a thriving future for all," their Twitter bio reads.

The group's pinned tweet is a thread which contains another angle of the interruption, which claims they are "making clear that DeSantis is an antisemite whose actions and policies both support Israeli apartheid and put Jews in danger."

    BREAKING: IfNotNow members are confronting Ron DeSantis at a GOP fundraiser in New Hampshire this evening.

    We’re making clear that DeSantis is an antisemite whose actions and policies both support Israeli apartheid and put Jews in danger. THREAD pic.twitter.com/SwCUuCAtMb
    — IfNotNow🔥 (@IfNotNowOrg) April 14, 2023

Also targeted in the thread is American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a political action committee which emphasizes it's bipartisan, pro-Israel ties.

    AIPAC and DeSantis support occupation and apartheid at the expense of Jewish safety.

    We believe in the opposite vision: where liberation for Jews and Palestinians are inextricably linked. We fight for equality, justice, and a thriving future for all Israelis and Palestinians.
    — IfNotNow🔥 (@IfNotNowOrg) April 14, 2023

Earlier on Friday, the same day that the fundraiser occurred, the group retweeted Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who along with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), led members in a letter to President Joe Biden and Secretary Antony Blinken regarding their concerns with the new Israeli government. The tweet is noteworthy in that it claims Israel as an "increasingly authoritarian regime."

    We have a choice:
    Keep funding Israel's increasingly authoritarian regime as it continues to oppress Palestinians...

    Or stand up for democracy and equality for all.

    Thank you @RepBowman & @SenSanders for your moral leadership. https://t.co/1Cv1fbBHTZ
    — IfNotNow🔥 (@IfNotNowOrg) April 14, 2023

DeSantis' record shows that this group doesn't speak for Florida Jews, though. The popular sitting governor was not only reelected last November by nearly 20 points, he did so with a significant portion of the Jewish vote, a demographic which doesn't typically vote Republican.

Last December, The Jewish Chronicle published an article raising questions about DeSantis' political future, also discussing his record as it applies to Jews and Israel:

    Days after his stunning 19-point win, DeSantis was the star of the show at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual con-flab where he wowed conservatives with his Florida “blueprint for success” – an apparently electorally potent formula which stands in stark to the party’s underwhelmingly mid-terms’ performance.

    A Catholic, DeSantis has long been keen to present himself as a strong friend of Jews and a staunch ally of Israel.

    “We won the highest share of the Jewish vote for any Republican candidate in Florida history,” the governor boasted. “I will say if you look at our record on issues related to Israel and supporting the Jewish community it is second to none.”

    
DeSantis, who pledged when he ran for a first term in 2018 that he would be the “nation’s most pro-Israel governor”, tickled his conservative hosts by referring to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” and denying it was occupied. “We understand history. We know those are thousands of years of connection to the Jewish people,” he suggested. “I don’t care what the State Department says. They are not occupied territory, it is disputed territory.”

    DeSantis’ record on the Jewish state certainly isn’t all talk. He took his whole cabinet to Israel in 2019; used Florida’s anti-BDS legislation to take on Ben & Jerry’s and Airbnb; and increased collaboration between Israel and the state’s aerospace industry.

    The governor also cheer-led a series of Trump-era policies such as moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and recognising Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Unsurprisingly, he’s not a fan of what he terms the “Biden-Khamenei nuclear deal”.

    DeSantis has also enacted other measures to crack down on antisemitism in Florida’s public schools and boost Holocaust education and better security at Jewish day schools.

    No wonder Jewish conservatives are swooning. “A remarkable Jewish renaissance is under way in Florida,” wrote Bush administration alumni Elliott Abrams and his co-chair of the Jewish Leadership Conference, Eric Cohen, earlier this year. “Jewish schools and synagogues are rapidly expanding. Jews from the Northeast and Midwest, as well as Latin America and Israel, are migrating to the Sunshine State in significant numbers, making the Jewish communities there lively and varied.”

    In a state which is home to over 650,000 Jews – America’s third largest Jewish electorate – there is naturally a strong political imperative to woo the “kosher vote”. Four years ago, the governor’s Democrat opponent, left-winger Andrew Gillum, learned that to his cost. Gillum lost the gubernatorial race by 30,000 votes after DeSantis repeatedly attacked him for being insufficiently supportive of Israel, suggesting that his positions were more appropriate to “running for mayor of the Gaza Strip”. (Gillum denied that he supported BDS and said he’d enforce the state’s 2016 anti-boycotts legislation).

    And while he didn’t win a majority of Jewish voters – Republicans put his score at 45 percent – DeSantis’ overall victory margin was no doubt padded by this impressive performance. Indeed, Florida’s growing ultra-Orthodox population – who largely back the Republicans – is thought to have been key to DeSantis’ inroads into the Democrats’ hold on the Jewish vote.

The Jerusalem Post shared shortly after the election last year that exit polling shows Jews are increasingly voting Republican, with the 33 percent figure from 2022 up from 30 percent in 2020. Sam Markstein, of the Republican Jewish Coalition, is quoted as saying that the 2022 election saw "a record-smashing level of support in Florida, at 45% of the Jewish vote."

NY Democrat to Testify Against 'Soft on Crime' Alvin Bragg, Praises Giuliani for Saving the City

 

A Democrat New York City councilman will testify against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, saying the woke DA has contributed to the city's "lawlessness."

Bob Holden will appear at the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee, "Victims of Violent Crime in Manhattan," next week, pointing fingers at Bragg's soft-on-crime policies is driving chaos into the streets of the city.

"When Bragg came in, he issued that ridiculous edict that he was not going to prosecute smaller crimes," Holden said. "What do we have in New York City? We have lawlessness on the streets."

Holden, a long-time New Yorker, said he had never seen the city so dangerous as it is now, noting the timing of the rise in crime directly correlates to when Bragg took over as DA in January 2022.

"I have an issue with soft-on-crime politicians and DAs, so, you know, I offered. I said, 'Look, I have a view of this that's different from my Democratic, or most of my Democratic colleagues, so I would say that there are issues why New York City is the way it is," Holden said.

Holden recalled that on day one of Bragg being in office, red flags went up throughout the city. Then, on his third day in office, the woke DA ordered prosecutors not to give out prison sentences for several crimes and downgrade charges for crimes such as robberies and commercial burglaries.

He noted New York's crime issue improved when Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in office. Then, however, it rapidly declined through the years as the city's implementation of a sweeping bail reform law in 2020 took effect.


"I credit Rudy Giuliani as the mayor who saved New York… I lived through that. They don't like to hear it. But I lived through it," Holden said. "I remember the city turning around, and we had 17 straight years of decline in crime until the bail reform, and then you couple that with DAs like Bragg, and it's a bad, bad recipe there."

As a result, Bragg claims, police officers don't have the motive to arrest and implement law and order in the predominantly blue city.

The Republican committee also plans to have Madeline Brame, whose son was fatally stabbed; Harlem bodega clerk Jose Alba, who was once charged with murder over the death of someone who attacked him at work; and Jennifer Harrison, founder of Victims Rights NY to all testify against Bragg's pro-crime policies.

Technology is to blame for the ‘Great Resignation’

 Have you heard about the September exodus? More than four million Americans quit their jobs that month, shattering the record for resignations previously set the month before. And some 40% of remaining employees are thinking of quitting, too, according to a Microsoft report.

The crisis is even worse in technology. TalentLMS and Workable reported recently that 72% of US-based tech employees are thinking of quitting their job in the next 12 months.

It’s not just the US. The Great Resignation is a global phenomenon.
[ Keep up on the latest thought leadership, insights, how-to, and analysis on IT through Computerworld’s newsletters. ]

Pundits point to many causes for the trend, from government stimulus checks to the rise of remote work to entitled millennials and even pandemic-driven stress.

In general, it’s clear that there’s a growing incompatibility between the reality and the expectation of the employee experience.

Making matters worse: The more people quit, the harder life gets for those who remain on the job. This is especially true of tech workers. IT departments have been notoriously understaffed, and as the Great Resignation increasingly hits tech workers, all employees suffer more downtime, cyberattacks, and tech implementation slowdowns.

This is an emergency. You need to know why people are resigning in such high numbers.
[ REGISTER NOW for May 11, in-person event, FutureIT Washington, D.C.: Building the Digital Business with Cloud, AI and Security ]
The many reasons people quit

After extensively reviewing the interviews, surveys, and reports, I’ve compiled a list of the major reasons people give for quitting during the Great Resignation. These are:

    Frustration with laptops, desktops, networks, and systems that don’t work well, a trend exacerbated during the pandemic when many remote employees were literally left to their own devices. There’s also widespread confusion about how to proceed when technology doesn’t work.
    Lack of control over workspaces and processes. Many employees feel they have much to contribute to how work gets done, but are blocked from having their say.
    A “toxic mix” of low pay, high workloads, and a broader lack of recognition. This observation comes from the Trades Union Congress about employees in the public sector.
    Lack of work-life balance. Covid-driven remote work gave millions of employees a taste of commuting less and spending more time with family, and they realize that they might retain that with another employer.
    General inflexibility about how things work, how work is done, and when.
    Lack of training opportunities. Tech workers, especially, want more training opportunities — 91% said so in the TalentLMS and Workable survey report.
    Many are quitting because they’re physically and emotionally exhausted. And the departure of so many makes it that much worse for those who remain.

While these reasons aren’t surprising, it’s important to realize what all these have in common.
This is all about technology… and culture

While businesses of all sizes are scratching their heads and trying to figure this out, the truth is that our technology products and how they’re used, plus our culture around management and employee interaction, is exactly what’s driving people out the door.

Technology is frustrating workers, creating friction and inertia, blocking employee progress and empowerment, creating needless work and engendering a feeling of isolation and impotence.

The good news is that better technology is a big part of the solution. Here’s what you need to do to start retaining and attracting employees.

    Transform training. Artificial Intelligence(AI)-based adaptive learning technology can make employee training far more relevant by enabling employee-driven learning based on what the person already knows — ending the frustration with classroom-like or generic training systems. In general, ramp up training and career development. Promote from within whenever possible. Guide employees on their career path, wherever it leads, within the company. Just as products need a roadmap, so does each employee.
    Enable natural connections between employees. User-friendly collaboration tools foster connection and culture. Focus not just on getting the work done, but on team building and the psychology of each employee being part of a team.
    Use advanced technology for HR, but over-communicate with a human touch. Automated HR is contributing to the burnout issue. When it comes to changes in employee status, pay, benefits, supervisors and other personnel events that have an emotional impact on the employee, the communication around this should always be human-to-human, not emails or automated notifications.
    Avoid employee surveillance. Many companies reacted to the rush to remote work with employee surveillance software. Monitoring screen activity, mouse movements, time online and other metrics are the surest way to drive employees away. Nobody wants Big Brother to always be watching — especially in one’s own home. Develop alternative means to measure and gauge employee performance. Be results-driven and don’t rank employees based on how often their mouse moves. This is true of remote workers, office workers, and everyone in the new hybrid workforce.
    Embrace transparency, authenticity and empathy. Most business culture  change happens because each year a new group of young people enter the workforce and an older group retires. The youngest employees — those who have joined the workforce in the past 10 years — have very different expectations about how their employer behaves. They want to know what’s going on, and to work with human beings who care. If younger employees feel like a cog in a machine, they’re more likely to pack up and go.
    Embrace agility and flexibility. Technology that drives flexibility in hybrid work, remote work, shifting teams, and flexible hours will go a long way in improving the employee experience and sense of wellbeing.
    Develop a holistic approach to employee satisfaction. With remote and hybrid workforces, companies need to help employees cope psychologically and emotionally to the realities of disparate and shifting work locations and environments. In the past, it was enough to hold occasional team-building exercises and offsite events. Now, managers, supervisors and leaders should be helping employees not only feel like they’re part of the team, but also helping employees maintain physical and mental health. Part of this process is technological. The feelings of connection, involvement, the sense of mission, and a work-life balance can all be helped — or harmed — by technology choices, as well as work policies and management approaches.
    Make burnout avoidance top of the list when choosing technology. With each passing month, AI gains ground in tech, for example. But it can have opposite effects, either contributing to burnout or alleviating it. AI that replaces human interaction — for example, overly automated HR — can leave employees feeling frustrated and abandoned. AI that augments human performance can boost employees, making them feel empowered and supported. It’s also true that automating repetitive tasks can free up employees to do the things that only humans can do. Automation should be applied to helping and empowering humans, not replacing them.

The reasons for the Great Resignation are many. But it’s time we acknowledge the role technology has played in driving away employees in droves — and the role it can play in bringing people back by creating a flexible, humane, and empowering workplace that will make employees happy, productive and invested in the mission of the company.

Mary Was A She

 She matters. Without a ‘she’ and a ‘he’, we wouldn’t be we. They wouldn’t be they. You and I wouldn’t be. Period.

We live in a culture that is increasingly more hopeless and meaningless because of the determination to be genderless. Our DNA determines our sex/gender, but anytime we deny God’s design for humanity, disaster always follows.

We live in a culture so obsessed with self that our national religion might as well be narcissism. Too many want to live a life of boundless “freedom”, regardless of how their lives or actions negatively affect others. People want to make up false “authentic” (yet drastically altered) selves and demand that the world see them through broken filters. Social media platforms, academics, news media, and politicians amplify this cult of selfishness by advancing policies that try to silence any (informed) dissent.

We’re not avatars living in some make-believe world. We’re all bound by the same scientific and moral laws. This is reality. Tragically, many have no use for what it actually is. They want to conjure up a surreality untethered from facts and consequences.

But truth can never be silenced. It will always find a way to cry out. It’s why my wife and I wrote the ground-breaking children’s book She is She, to celebrate undeniable, biological, beautiful her. We’re definitely not good at being quiet.

Mary was a ‘she’, and of course, she knew it. She understood that it was humanly impossible to become pregnant without sex, hence the response to the angel Gabriel: “How will this be, since I am a virgin and have no intimacy with any man?” Several thousand years ago, this basic science was understood. She recognized her beautiful biological differences.

The Savior of the world needed a woman, a mother, a female, to carry Him in a supernatural pregnancy and bring Him into the world. She mattered. All of us enter into this life through the natural process of pregnancy that can only occur in those designed to conceive. Women. “And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son and shall call His name Jesus,” the angel explained in Luke 1:31.

Gabriel didn’t approach Joseph and offered a gender-bending twist. Indeed, God can operate in any miraculous way He chooses, but He adhered to His design for sexuality. He used their marital relationship to make possible our path to salvation.

Mary was no frail female. She understood the dangers – in normal circumstances – of becoming pregnant “outside” of her marriage with Joseph. She could’ve been publicly shamed, even worse, stoned. What courage for her to agree to play an integral role in God’s plan: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; may it be done to me according to your word.”  Her level of self-sacrifice defies the narcissism of our age.

A Savior was born because she was she. Mary chose the gift of motherhood. She trusted in the Lord to help navigate through the humanly “unplanned.” There was no “how-to” book on this. She clung to the angel’s words: “For with God, nothing shall be impossible.”

A Savior was born because he was he. Joseph chose the gift of fatherhood. He could’ve been a rejecter but became a protector instead. Both of their lives were in constant peril under Roman rule, under a demented King who wanted to kill their child, and under the tremendous inconceivable weight of raising the Son of the Most High.

This Easter, we get to celebrate how God used a mother and a father to change the world forever. We get to rejoice because they went to great lengths to protect him, love him, and release him into his ministry. We get to be redeemed because God loved us so much that He sent His only Son – Jesus – to die for our sins in the most brutal death one could imagine. He rose again to prove there is no power stronger than the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Love breaks through confusion. Love breaks through hopelessness. Love breaks through anything to get to our hearts.  

Like the Lord reassured Paul the Apostle in a hostile environment: “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent.” Trends change. Culture changes. But the truth never does. God’s heart for rescuing and redeeming the broken always remains the same.

And like Mary said in The Magnificat (or Mary’s Song): “My soul magnifies and exalts the Lord. And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” Yes, we’re all sinners in need of a Savior.

What Happened in Wisconsin Could Be a Massive Red Flag for Republicans

 I dismissed the arguments about abortion being a critical issue that could engender Republicans. Every governor who signed more restrictive laws post-Dobbs won their re-election bids. When polled, these restrictions are not unpopular. Kansas was used as an example of the political blowback on the GOP, but Kansas already bans state funding, has parental consent laws, and bans abortions after 20 weeks. Many, including conservatives in the state, viewed the right-to-life amendment to the state constitution as unnecessary—you don’t get 58 percent voting “no” without GOP voters. I think the fallout and the media coverage will be overblown, but it’s time to pay more attention to the detrimental aspects because what happened in Wisconsin should be a massive warning sign to Republicans ahead of the 2024 elections.

The state has a solid 4-3 liberal majority on its state supreme court. The new judge, Janet Protasiewicz, has vowed to roll back abortion restrictions and torpedo the legislative map that favors the GOP. These are not shocking consequences, but the candidate was backed by groups who supposedly represented 2020 election deniers. The latter part is more relevant right now. Abortion isn’t popular and never will be, but voters are tired of candidates, specifically Republicans, whining about the 2020 election.

There was funny business, but that fight is long over. It’s done, and voters, Republicans included, want to move on with their lives. That issue, I think, hurt the GOP more in 2022 than the abortion fallout. We had a slew of candidates who would pepper their rallies about the 2020 election. It scared away right-leaning independents and other voters who hate Biden but weren’t going to give the reins of power to this rambunctious bunch as their wallets are being torched by high inflation.

This Wisconsin Supreme Court race also seemed to have a candidate quality issue as well, I hate to use that phrase, but it is what it is (via NYT):


    The commanding victory on Tuesday by a liberal candidate in a pivotal race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court showed the enduring power of abortion rights and issues of democracy as motivators for Democratic voters, as well as a continuing struggle among conservatives to put forward candidates who can unite Republicans and win general elections.

    The liberal candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, swept onto the bench by 11 percentage points, a staggering margin in an evenly divided battleground state that signaled just how much last summer’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade has transformed American politics.

    The Wisconsin race centered squarely on abortion rights and political representation: Judge Protasiewicz all but promised voters that if they elected her, the court’s new 4-to-3 liberal majority would reverse Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban and overturn the state’s famously gerrymandered, Republican-friendly legislative maps.

    Wisconsinites responded to that pitch, rejecting a conservative candidate backed by anti-abortion groups who took 2020 election deniers as a client and struggled to rally Republican donors behind him.

Justice Kelly, the Republican, struggled to get donors behind him, admitting a statewide race is hard in rallies. That’s not what you want to hear. The hyper-focus on rising crime is an issue, but we have yet another election where it falls flat. Some retooling needs to occur, and fast.

4 Keys to Forgiveness to Ponder This Easter Season

 As we celebrate Easter, the concept of forgiveness has been pressed on my heart. Perhaps that is because this specific season serves as a special time of reflection revolving around God’s tangible act of goodness and grace.  

Forgiveness is a foundational principle that is frequently talked about both within and outside of the Church—yet, how many people know what true forgiveness looks like?  It’s a common struggle that we cover on “Prayer Therapy with Dr. Phil” on pray.com, but here are a few basics that are helpful for us all to be reminded of.

What is Forgiveness?

Going through the motions, saying the words, “I forgive ___,”and trying to push painful memories under the emotional rug in our subconscious isn’t enough. If this is our forgiveness process, we are oftentimes left feeling still angry and resentful towards those we need to forgive. This is because although we have tried to forgive in our minds, we have yet to forgive in our hearts and that means we have to exercise our God given Free Will and choose to let go of our emotions about the transgression we believe we have suffered.   We choose to turn it over to God instead of continuing to feel victimized.

Forgiveness from the depths of our hearts is a daunting process but it is a choice God gives us the strength to make. It is rather scary to think about reliving our pain and suffering; we think, ‘I’m out of that place. I don’t want to go back there. I just want to move on.’  

But putting our past offenders into a compartmentalized box in the back of our minds, telling ourselves we have forgiven them when we really have not, hurts everyone. It hurts them because (whether they know it or not) they are robbed of grace and love from us—who are free to give it. It hurts us (and our loved ones) because it damages our other relationships, our state of health and our self-esteem. It hurts God because He knows the life of freedom and joy we all could experience—the life we are inherently bypassing by not walking in true heart forgiveness towards others.  


Forgiveness is not easy. On the contrary, it is one of the most difficult things we absolutely must do on this side of heaven. Forgiveness does not mean that what the person did was right or acceptable; rather, it means that we are able to ultimately overcome what was meant for evil, allowing God to transform our hearts and write beautiful redemption stories in our lives.

So, how do we truly forgive?

Resolve to choose to give up the harsh, destructive feelings of anger, resentment and bitterness.   

Despite what the world tells us, it is not our right or privilege to harbor pernicious heart postures towards those who have hurt us. In fact, the longer we cling to these feelings, the more ingrained they become within the depths of our soul—and the harder they become to uproot. Rather, we are called to another standard; we must willingly give these up so that they will not poison us from the inside out and multiply from within us.  

Let go of revenge—and cosmic revenge.  

Forgiveness involves letting go of our desire to get even. When we hope to see another person hurt, embarrassed or paid back for what they have done to us—we can be assured that we have yet to forgive them. This mindset is an undeniable stronghold. Thankfully, there is hope. God’s sovereignty assures us that His power can demolish strongholds in our lives. We must be willing to surrender desire for revenge, allowing grace to take root within us and consume our hearts.

Choose not to focus on the offense.

While we will always retain certain memories of the past, they can serve as a chapter in our stories that no longer define us or rob us of joy and freedom. We don’t have to read from that book of pain every day.   We can put it on a “back shelf,” and choose to move forward.

Love them, pray for them, and bless them.  

I firmly believe it is impossible to remain wholly passive or neutral towards those who have hurt us. Therefore, to truly combat unforgiveness, it is absolutely necessary to turn hatred on its head by intentionally choosing to love, serve and pray for our offenders. It's incredibly hard to resent someone when we are making every effort to meet them with genuine kindness. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to interact with them at all. This is between you and God, and it may all take place within your heart. Every situation is different, but the constant is the grace with which you manage yourself.

In light of the present Easter season, I am left to ponder the depth of forgiveness Christ stepped into for us all. Jesus was the perfect example of quintessential forgiveness and pure love. Though He was beaten, mocked and left hanging on a cross, in his last moments He lovingly asked God to forgive those persecuting Him. This is real love.  

As we celebrate Easter with our families this season, may we consider those laid upon our hearts who need our forgiveness and love. Whether they are deserving or not, we must forgive as God has chosen to forgive us. On the other side of true forgiveness is real joy, contagious love and transformative freedom. 

The Youth Awakening in America Has Begun

 Looking at things through natural eyes, without faith and spiritual insight, it is not good for young people in America when it comes to their faith in the Lord.

Already in 2018, Barna could report that, “More than any other generation before them, Gen Z does not assert a religious identity. They might be drawn to spiritual things, but with a vastly different starting point from previous generations, many of whom received a basic education on the Bible and Christianity. And it shows: The percentage of Gen Z that identifies as atheist is double that of the U.S. adult population” (emphasis in the original).

Quoting from  The Kaleidoscope Effect: What Emerging Generations Seek in Leaders, an article on Logos.com notes that, “Whereas 85% of the silent generation (born 1928–1945) call themselves Christians, just 56% of today’s younger Millennials (born 1990–1996) do the same, even though the vast majority (about 8 in 10) was raised in religious homes. Over the past 70 years, each successive generation has included fewer and fewer Christians, and the overwhelming majority of the Christians remaining today are over the age of 35.”

The same article notes that, “According to Springtide Research’s The State of Religion and Young People report, ‘Nearly 40% of young people ages 13–25 indicate that they are unaffiliated, whether agnostic, atheist, or ‘nothing in particular.’”

Directly related to all this is the finding in a 2021 Barna poll that, “Nearly 40 Percent of U.S. Gen Zs, 30 Percent of Young Christians Identify as LGBTQ.” (The most recent Gallup poll puts the stats at about half or less than the Barna findings, but these numbers are still very significant, trending dramatically higher than among older generations.)

Why, then, do I say that a youth awakening has already begun in America? It is certainly not by way of a published statistical analysis, nor is it by my own personal surveying of hundreds of churches and youth ministries in America.

Instead, it is something I sense in my spirit, reinforced by something I have been witnessing with increasing frequency, namely, deep, powerful movings of the Spirit among spiritually hungry young people. Added to this is the ripeness of the harvest among the younger generation because of the increasing anxiety, depression, loneliness, fear, and uncertainty which they often experience/ This makes them more open to look to God for help and transformation.

Recently, Pastor Brent Simpson sent me a picture taken towards the end of their Sunday night service on January 29.

Brent is an ordained Assembly of God minister who leads Arise Church in Tampa (with three local campuses). He also helps church planters and those working to revitalize older, dying congregations in his denomination. And he has looked to me as a mentor over the years, because of which I have been able to see firsthand what the Spirit is doing in their midst.

January 29 was the last day of a 21-day corporate fast, meaning that many of the members fasted during some or all of that time period, also gathering for special times of prayer.

At the end of the service, after I called on all present to surrender their lives afresh to the Lord, I then called all the young people in attendance to join me on the platform, from children to college students.

The platform was soon packed to capacity, as these young people began to cry out to God to move on their generation. (And remember: they had already been to a church service that morning and were now we're back out on a Sunday night.)

The photo that Brent sent me epitomizes the saying that one picture is worth a thousand words, as you can see the passion, the devotion, the hunger, and the fervor of these kids and young adults. This was not about entertainment or hype. This was about Jesus. All for Jesus! Heart and soul and mind and strength for the Lord!

I then turned to these young people and said with full assurance of faith, “Look at me! I’m not dreaming! You’re going to see it with your own eyes! You’re going to see a great youth awakening! You’re going to see it!”

In the past, when gripped in the same way by the Spirit, I have turned to crowds of ministry school students and assured them of what was coming. I knew what I was saying was true as surely as I knew my own name, and by God’s grace, those things have come to pass.

Now, I am convinced that something is afoot here in America among the young people, something that will be deep and lasting and radically transformational. And if it goes deep enough, it is even something that, over time, could turn the course of the nation.

And I don’t say this because of a single service at a single church – although, again, that sacred moment captured on camera is priceless – but because I have seen similar scenes like this across America. God is powerfully on the move!

Of course, God has always been on the move in every generation, and there have always been small pockets of spiritually hungry young people. I am grateful for the multiplied thousands who have been seeking God in prayer and fasting over the last 25+ years.

But I truly believe something new has begun among us, which is why I announced on radio in late January that the beginning of the first wave of revival had already hit America. And, as many readers would recall, about one week later, the Lord Himself put an exclamation point on the subject of revival in America, sending a fresh outpouring to Asbury University.

Our French Revolution

We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary.

The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020.

Hard-left ideologues absorbed it. They were bent on radically altering, or hijacking, existing institutions to force radical, equality-of-result agendas that otherwise do not earn majority support.

The American people want affordable power and fuel, and energy autonomy. They do not want a Green New Deal that results in dependence on the Middle East.

They want fiscal sobriety, not a permanent stagflationary economy marked by bank failures, soaring interest rates, crony capitalism, and subsidies for those who choose not to work.

They know no country can exist without a border, much less while offering blank checks to foreign cartels that kill 100,000 Americans yearly.

They demand realist deterrence abroad, not the current woke military whose erosion is spelling the end to American credibility and global stability.

Racialists are eerily embracing discredited Neo-Confederate notions of racial chauvinism, discrimination, segregation, and the old one-drop rule of racial obsession. They are turning America toward a Balkanized war-of-all-against-all.

To implement such an unpopular program, the new Left must radically alter our institutions.

So the “Democrats” periodically threaten to pack the courts, end the filibuster, destroy the Electoral College, and override the states’ prerogatives to establish balloting laws.

They deny the committee assignments of the House minority leader. They engage in stunts like tearing up the State of the Union address on national television. With impunity, they mob the homes of Supreme Court justices to leverage their decisions.

Elites run this revolution, and is a top-down operation.

University deans all but prompt students to disrupt invited campus speakers. District attorneys release violent arrested criminals without bail. Woke generals call their Chinese counterparts to warn them against their own commander-in-chief.

The Pentagon lectures the country on its supposed innate racism – even as the United States continues to lose wars abroad, abandons billions of dollars of equipment to terrorists, and allows communist China to surveil domestic American military bases with impunity.

Words change their meanings. “Racist” now means “don’t dare object.” “White” became the pejorative stereotype used by racists. “Diversity” means tired orthodoxy. “Equity” is a synonym for bias. “Inclusion” ensures exclusion.

 

 Seattle, Washington

Institutions are no longer recognizable. The FBI as we knew it no longer exists. Three former FBI directors either lied under oath to federal investigators or pleaded amnesia in congressional testimonies.

Our highest former national intelligence officers lied under oath to the Senate. The IRS is weaponized against political opponents of the Democrats. The Department of Justice is more likely to send the FBI after grammar school parents than mobs threatening the homes of Supreme Court justices.

Still, to thoroughly erase America, our Jacobins must radically alter our customs and traditions.

So under the cover of the COVID-19 quarantines, Election Day was made irrelevant. In the new America, 70 percent did not vote on the designated day but, fueled by third-party vote harvesting and relaxation of audits of non-Election-Day ballots, extended the vote over a period of several weeks.

Like the Jacobins, names, and dates had to be radically transformed. 1619, not 1776, is now America’s birthdate, and, we are told, it was an ignominious one.

Statues are toppled, and careers Trotskyized.

Biological males suddenly have hijacked women’s sports – destroying five decades of women’s hard-won efforts to achieve equal treatment and respect in athletics.

What triggered the collective madness and this Jacobin takeover?

The Left’s perfect storm of the 120 days of riot, death, arson and looting of 2020? The COVID-19 pandemic? The disastrous two-year lockdown? The 2016 election of the outsider Donald Trump?

All those catalysts and more.

As the country collapses under leftist nihilism, the revolution’s last gasp is to destroy Trump – by empowering him. That is, the leftist legal vendetta is designed to win him just enough empathy to be nominated the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, but then to keep on indicting, gagging, and hemorrhaging him legally until Election Day 2024.

Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, to be tried by the Senate as a private citizen, and to have his private home raided by the FBI. Now he is the first president to have been indicted, effectively ending America’s moral authority abroad.

America now has three potential futures and two are bad.

First, the Jacobins have two more years to finish what they started as the founders’ dream descends into our worst nightmare.

Second, the revolution has so warped our legal system, our voting on Election Day, and the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, and the IRS that even a despised, unpopular Left will “win” elections.

The third is that New York Prosecutor Alan Bragg has jumped the shark.

His pathetic prosecution is so patently incoherent, illiberal, and in spirit anti-American that two-thirds of the country will soon conclude the center is not holding. The Jacobins’ reign of terror is unsustainable. And so in 2024, the Left will not be defeated but so defeated that it will be utterly discredited.