One Chart To Kill The Medicaid Lies For Good

I & I Editorial Board July 31, 2025

 

Can anyone guess what is wrong with the following headline?

• “Democrats use new tactic to highlight Trump’s gutting of Medicaid: billboards in the rural U.S.” That appeared in The Guardian newspaper over the weekend. 
• How about this one from NPR: “GOP governors stay silent amid plans to slash Medicaid spending in their states.” 
• Or this one from AP: “Rural hospitals brace for financial hits or even closure under Republicans’ $1 trillion Medicaid cut“
• Or this one from NBC News: “Another report suggests Medicaid cuts could lead to thousands of deaths.”

Or countless others like these published in the wake of President Donald Trump’s signing the One Big Beautiful Bill?

What’s wrong with them all? They are all based on one big, fat lie. There are no cuts to Medicaid......To Read More....

Wishful Thinking: Leftists Say Trump ‘Coup’ Has Failed

It’s the latest in an unbroken string of failed anti-Trump narratives. 

 

By Tim Donner Feb 26, 2025 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

 

From the moment it became clear that Donald Trump had secured a decisive electoral victory, the left has been flailing about, desperately seeking a counter-narrative to explain away and diminish the evident allure of his far-reaching, revolutionary agenda.

Early on, unable to challenge the reality of an unambiguous mandate from the American people, the hard left had little choice but to blame the voters. Of course, that has never proven to be a wise strategy, as Hillary Clinton discovered when she wrote off half the electorate as a basket of deplorables. But some lessons are never learned. Right after the 2024 election, in the most egregious of the many instances of leftists condemning the electorate, famed race hustler Al Sharpton blamed Kamala Harris’ loss on misogyny among black and Hispanic voters.

Fast forward to last weekend, when Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of The Squad let loose by expressing a sentiment about Trumpists that her fellow travelers likely share. Displaying an admirable level of honesty, she said the quiet part out loud: “These people are just idiots — I really am at the point where it has become really hard to have an intellectual debate with any of these [Trump supporters] because the level of stupidity that they are displaying every single day is frankly, embarrassing … the dumbing of the United States has arrived, because how else do we get a Trump presidency again?”

Throwing Stuff Against the Wall

Lest you believe the left might have finally come to grips with their catastrophic decline, consider the string of talking points they have adopted and then dropped in trying to convince the American people of the horrible mistake they made last November. Hours after Trump assumed office, they started with the term “oligarch,” believing that because tech titans came alongside Trump at his inauguration, we would now be governed like the Russian oligarchy. Remarkably, we suddenly started hearing the same exact talking point from the media and talking heads.

When that narrative failed, the leftist crowd moved on to “shadow government,” hoping people would shake in their boots at the thought of Elon Musk secretly controlling the government from a hidden bunker. Then they fine-tuned the talking point to “President Musk,” trying in vain to claim that Trump, of all people, had handed power over to the billionaire while simultaneously wailing that Trump has executed a coup d’etat after winning a democratic election – hard to reconcile those two concepts.  With Trump’s public approval stubbornly remaining higher than ever, they flailed away by complaining that Musk is “unelected.” Note to the left: The entire executive branch, other than the president, is unelected.

Since all those strategies proved fruitless, leftists have now adopted an entirely new narrative animated by wishful thinking: Trump is failing. Indeed, a story in the left-wing American Prospect entitled “The Coup Has Failed” – there’s that word again – declared, “Trump’s falling approval ratings reveal an out-of-touch presidency, and have given space for allies to turn against him.” Nice try, but Trump’s approval in the latest Harvard-Harris poll is 52%, higher than at any time in his first administration. In that story and others from the left, a new narrative centers around a handful of districts that Trump won easily, where hundreds of angry voters showed up at town halls to express outrage to their elected representatives. Note to the left: Considering the shouts of “Tax the wealthy,” “Tax the rich,” and “Tax the billionaires,” for example, at one of those town halls in eastern Oregon, these are almost certainly people who voted against Trump. In another wishful, tone-deaf story from a far-left publication, entitled “The DOGE Project Will Backfire,” The Atlantic declared, “Trump’s war on public employees is bad for all of us … let’s dispense with the notion that the government is too big. It is not.”

Blaming Trump for Biden’s Problem

An additional storyline leftists are attempting to peddle is that Trump has done nothing to lower food prices, as if he could fix a problem years in the making in his first month, or could force private companies to lower prices by executive fiat. Similarly, they complain that he has failed to tame inflation, a result of massive overspending in the Biden administration. Yet polling reveals that public confidence in the economy has sharply risen since Trump became president again; in fact, it is higher than at any time since he left office in 2021.

Your News – How You Like It!

Then there’s the narrative that Trump and Musk are out to violate your privacy via DOGE and take away your Social Security, a particularly inflammatory accusation designed to alarm senior citizens on fixed incomes. But there is not a shred of evidence that the administration has any such intent. And then there are all the stories about Musk and DOGE deliberately cutting off funding for the poor, sick, and disabled, again with no evidence to support the claims other than Musk, by his own admission, taking a chainsaw to the deep state legacy of waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption – with broad public approval. As Liberty Nation News has pointed out, 69% of the public in a New York Times/Siena poll before the election favored either major change in the federal government or tearing the system down entirely.

Finally, the left writ large has employed the phrase “potentially illegal” to define some of Trump’s extraordinary string of executive actions, merely throwing that against the wall – without evidence, as the left loves to say – and hoping it might stick, unlike their many other anti-Trump narratives. The 47th president has been breaking eggs to make what he might call a big, beautiful omelet, so it is not terribly difficult to whip people into a frenzy. But the left has so far failed to do so with one flailing accusation after another, confirming the very message delivered by the voters in November.

~

Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

Read More From

Tim Donner

Senior Political Analyst

The Plague of Preconceptualism!

By Rich Kozlovich

 

On September 9, 2024 Jack Hellner published this piece, Recapping some of the most erroneous ‘climate change’ predictions, noting:

 

 “Experts” have been making dire predictions on the climate for over one hundred years, and their solution is always for the government to control our lives. They always falsely claim that the predictions and solutions are based on science, but science has nothing to do with it. It is always about taking more money and power for the government, or $cience. 

The "experts", many of whom had high levels of education, but small levels of integrity, predicted catastrophe a lot over the last one hundred years.  In the early 20th century catastrophic global warming was on the horizon, I wasn't born yet, but it seems since I'm here, my family must have missed that.    Then there we were facing a new Ice Age, and billions were going to starve to death.  Hmmmm, interesting.  I'm shocked, how did I missed that one?    

And now they're back to global warming.  He went on to say:

Hurricane forecasters are bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. The Atlantic hurricane season was supposed to be epic. Instead, it’s turned into a real dud.  Huge storms wreaking havoc on coastlines from Aruba to Long Island were supposed to line up in the Eastern Atlantic in June and hit us one at a time until late September. The damage was going to be historic and the TV coverage was going to give climate change fanatics plenty of air time to vent that ‘this is just a foretaste’ of what’s to come.

It didn't happen!  Why?  Because the experts explained, “Saharan Dust Puts Atlantic Hurricane Season On Pause", and there's always a "because", and there's always a "pause"!  The warming trend stopped about 25 years ago, so, now we have not only a hurricane "pause", we have a warming "pause".

The science of the green/left movement is called "Preconceptual Science", meaning you draw a conclusion without doing any research, and then refuse to hear anything that contradicts those conclusions, ergo, since you never hear anything that refutes the conclusion, the conclusion must be right.

There are a number of things the actually impact climate, especially the, and the decadal cycle of the ocean's currents, neither of which are in these computer models. Why? Because mankind isn't responsible for any of that, it's "all natural". 

A thousand years go during the  (900 CE - 1300 CE) was not only warmer, it was substantially warmer than today, along with the , (250 BCE -400 CE) before that, and there's not one iota of historical evidence any of the horrors they're predicting for today occurred then, in fact humanity flourished during those periods.

If the disasters they're now predicting didn't happen then, why should we believe it's going to happen now? We shouldn't!  Here's the secret to every left/green scare. It's a lie. Start there and then begin your research.   At the end of that journey you will discover ... they lied... with just enough truth to make their lies seem rational.   Lies of omission, lies of commission, logical fallacies, and "what if" speculations. But it all still amounts to deliberate deception. 

That's history, and that history is incontestable, starting with Rachel Carson's science fiction book that was the jump start for the modern green movement, Silent Spring.

When science became rich, it became politics.   Economists write all sorts or eye rolling clabber, and even the good ones will embrace folly because they’re not really writing for the public, they’re writing for their fellow economists, and if they go too far afield from their cultural consensus they won’t be allowed to play in their sandbox any longer.    Culture is king, and heterodoxy isn’t for the faint of heart. 

The Pravda media is equally corrupt. They not only make up their own lies, they brazenly accept and promote lies of others, and anything that refutes those lies is labeled as misinformation destroying democracy, which should be criminalized to stop anyone from refuting the lies.

History is the foundation of truth!  Predicated on that, we know that when we see anything promoted by the left, we must always start with the proposition, it's a lie, until you do the research to see what the truth really is, it must be assumed, it's a lie. 

In science it's called Lysenkoism, I don't know if there's an equivalent term in economics, but we sure do need one..... how about Marxism? 

I find the "Preconceptual" label works for economics, and reality when dealing with leftists of every ilk, and on any given issue or situation, because culture is king, and the culture of the left is predicated on lies, hate, greed, envy, lust, and violence.

It takes a lot of "Preconceptual" lies to make all that palatable, but at the end of your search, you'll invariably find lies are who and what the left is all about. 

Whitewashing Soviet-Era Tyranny and Failure

July 24, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty 

As part of my 100-tragic-years-of-communism series in 2017, I wrote a column about dupes and apologists for Soviet tyranny, as well as a column mocking economists who thought communism was producing good results.

 

The worst part of communism was the depraved brutality that led to 100 million deaths.

But since I’m an economist, let’s focus on the failure of communism to deliver higher living standards.

The Soviet Union, for instance, was a member of the anti-convergence club, falling farther and farther behind the United States over time.

Given these facts, I was shocked to see a report in the New York Times, authored by Ivan Nechepurenko, that waxes nostalgic for “Soviet prosperity” in the country of Georgia (formerly part of the Soviet Union).

I’m not joking. Here are some excerpts.

…those…in poorer parts of the country…pine for a Soviet past that delivered them stable incomes and basic social infrastructure. …the Soviet period…for many people in rural areas…was a time of plenty, when they had jobs and prosperity. …One such town, Chiatura, was once considered a Soviet workers’ paradise… Now, the town center is a shell of what used to be, with shuttered businesses…

“We used to live well under Communism,” said Mamia Gabeskeliani, 68, who lives in Zodi, a mining village outside Chiatura. …Sopo Japaridze, an American-educated workers’ rights activist in Tbilisi, said she wanted to see a closer examination of all sides of Georgia’s Soviet past. …

But life in Georgia since the collapse of the Soviet Union “has degraded in every way,”…she said, so the benefits of Soviet rule also need to be considered. “Life was much richer,” said Ms. Japaridze.

You may be wondering about Sopo Japaridze, who is identified as a “workers’ rights activist.”

What the reporter should have mentioned is that she's a lunatic lefty. It only took me one minute of online searching to find some of her strange output, such as “Imagine a World: Utopian Visions of Marxist Feminism” and a presentation to Kasama Project, which openly states that “We are a communist project that fights, in theory and practice, for the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”

To be fair, I’m sure there are some people in Georgia who are nostalgic for the Soviet Union. Some people who had jobs in subsidized industries probably lost status when communism collapsed. And relative status matters to many people.

But if the goal is more prosperity for the masses, then the dissolution of the Soviet Empire was a big plus for Georgia.

Just as it was in Lithuania, Poland, Estonia, and other parts of the former Soviet Bloc that shifted to free markets.

P.S. I wrote back in 2020 about a reprehensible attempt to whitewash East Germany’s Stalinist dictatorship.

What Passes For A "Demonstration Project" Among Our Government Geniuses

October 19, 2023/ Francis Menton  @ Manhattan Contrarian

A couple of days ago, a Substack called Doomberg had a piece titled “False Utopia.” The piece featured a discussion of a post of mine from February 2023 with the title “We Must Demand A Demonstration Project Of A Mainly Renewables-Based Electrical Grid.” My post argued that we should demand a demonstration project of a mainly renewables-based electrical grid that would include all the key elements — generation mainly from solar and wind, plus sufficient back-up or storage to make the whole thing work for the long term without involvement of the evil fossil fuels, plus any other necessary elements to make the whole thing work.

The Doomberg guys called my post “brilliant,” which is very flattering. I would not say it was brilliant, but only that it says obvious things that for some reason few other people are saying. Among the people who will definitely not mention the need for an all-element fossil-fuel-free renewable grid demonstration project are government officials and green energy advocates. The reasons they won’t mention this need could be:

1. They are not bright enough to understand the subject, or 
2. Their understanding is impaired because they are too blinded by religious fervor to “save the planet,” or
3. They are intentionally deceiving the public to make money or fame or career advancement for themselves. 
4. Or it could be all three!

Meanwhile though, the government “net zero” or “Green New Deal” (or whatever they are currently called) promotional sites are full of talk of things they call demonstration projects. So are they responding to my demand? The opposite. All of what they call demonstration projects follow a common approach, which is only to attempt to demonstrate various portions of the full system that would be needed to provide reliable 24/7/365 electricity from predominantly wind and solar generation.

Consider for instance the latest news on energy storage. A few days ago on October 13, the Department of Energy announced big new grants and subsidies for a series of what they call “hydrogen hubs.” Here is a report from E&E News Energy Wire. Excerpt:

The Department of Energy on Friday announced seven projects that will receive $7 billion to build landmark hydrogen hubs, delivering a major boost to a nascent U.S. industry. The long-awaited move is a key piece of the Biden administration’s climate agenda. On Friday, the White House said it expects the DOE funding to help cut 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, roughly equivalent to removing 5.5 million gasoline-powered vehicles from the road each year. “With this historic investment, the Biden-Harris administration is laying the foundation for a new, American-led industry that will propel the global clean energy transition,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.

According to this further piece from Energy Wire on August 21, the Biden Administration has set a goal of having the U.S. produce 10 million metric tons of “green” hydrogen (by electrolysis from water) by 2030. The E&E piece states that the massive funding for “hydrogen hubs” is coming from a part of the Energy Department called the “Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations,” and also cites the Department as calling the hydrogen hubs “demonstrations.” So this must be the demonstration project we are calling for!

Not quite:

DOE envisions the hydrogen hubs as a demonstration of production, storage, transport and consumption.

I guess at least this is intended to be a demonstration of more than just production of the hydrogen. But still, they are clearly leaving out the critical piece of the puzzle, which is the demonstration of how much of this hydrogen, and capacity to make more of it, will be needed, and at what cost, to get the country — or even some small town — through a full year (or two or five) without need for fossil fuel backup. That completely obvious elephant is not part of this multi-billion dollar “demonstration.”

And DOE is not putting all of its energy storage eggs in the hydrogen basket. They separately have another big bucks effort called the “Long Duration Storage Shot” that is throwing bucketsful of cash at various research efforts into batteries. But the battery efforts are even farther removed from any relevant demonstration project. From DOE’s opening webpage describing that initiative (with a date of September 2021):

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Earthshots Initiative aims to accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions within the decade. Achieving the Energy Earthshots will help America tackle the toughest remaining barriers to addressing the climate crisis, and more quickly reach the Biden-Harris Administration’s goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 while creating good-paying union jobs and growing the clean energy economy. . . . The Long Duration Storage Shot establishes a target to reduce the cost of grid-scale energy storage by 90% for systems that deliver 10+ hours of duration within the decade.

On September 22, 2023 the Administration announced some $325 million for “15 projects across 17 states and one tribal nation” to “accelerate the development” of these “long duration” battery technologies. The $325 million may seem rather paltry compared to the $7 billion just thrown at the hydrogen hub thing last week; but don’t worry, they have many billions more to spread around on this over the coming months.

So are these battery technologies, or any one of them, even a potential solution to the problem of making a mostly wind/solar electricity grid work without fossil fuel backup? Again, you will not find any mention at those links, or at other government or advocate sites discussing the issue of how many of these batteries would be necessary and at what cost to actually fully back up a predominantly wind/solar grid and make it into a functional 24/7/365 electricity system. Indeed, you will not find any mention at any such sites of the fundamental problem with all batteries as the means to back up an intermittently-supplied grid, as identified in the big (and otherwise badly flawed) Royal Society energy storage report that came out in September. 

That problem is that stored energy as the backup mechanism entails engineering requirements that no battery can ever meet. Those include: holding at least several months of average usage, being capable of keeping that energy in storage for years in anticipation of worst-case once every multiple decades wind “droughts,” and being capable of discharging over the course of months if not a full year. The “10+ hours of duration” mentioned as the goal of the Energy Department’s battery program is almost trivial against the real engineering requirements.

Hydrogen, by contrast, has the theoretical capability of meeting all of those engineering requirement. However, there are many elements that don’t currently exist that would be needed to make a fully-functioning wind/solar/hydrogen storage 24/7/365 electricity grid. These include not just the electrolyzers, but also storage for huge amounts of hydrogen (underground caverns?), a full collection of thermal power plants capable of meeting peak demand burning pure hydrogen, and a transport system (pipelines?) to take the hydrogen from the electrolyzers to the storage caverns and then on to the power plants.

I could do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on this to get a rough idea as to cost, which would come to a multiple (not necessarily a huge one, but nonetheless a multiple) of what our current electricity system costs. But I’m not going to do it. The reason I’m not going to do it is that there as an obvious fact that tells you all you need to know, which is that no one in the country is spending their own private money to build out this system. They are all waiting for the government handouts. If this system could be built profitably at a cost competitive with what we have, there would be investors falling all over themselves to build it. When Thomas Edison built his first electricity plant, he did not go to the government for handouts to build it.

Because this is all a fantasy kept alive by government handouts, as soon as the handouts go away or even slow down, the whole thing will dry up and fade away.

CAIR Wants Schools to Consult Mosques Before Teaching Sex Ed

Daniel Greenfield September 13, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Prayers in schools and any kind of religious content, from the Ten Commandments to Christmas songs, remain widely opposed by litigious leftist organizations like the ACLU. And even the most modest efforts to keep kids from being exposed to graphic pornographic content have been assailed by the Biden administration which has sued school districts for trying to keep kids safe.

That’s why CAIR’s guide telling schools how to treat Muslim students is so extraordinary. The Islamist organization lays out rules for Islamic school prayers and tells schools to consult with mosques about sex ed. It warns schools against allowing Muslim girls to interact with boys in co-ed environments like swimming and dancing. And, in a time when leftist governors and school boards force girls to shower with transgender boys who claim to be members of their sex, it even insists that Muslim girls should shower in their burkinis even in single sex settings.

But what is truly extraordinary about the CAIR guide is that there will not be a word of protest against it from the same political establishment and media that smeared Florida laws empowering parents to protect students from sexual content as “Don’t Say Gay”.

There was a good deal of political discomfort when Muslims in Dearborn, MI, an Islamic dominated city, stormed a school board meeting to denounce LGBTQ content. Rather than addressing the fundamental conflict between its politics and Islamic law, the leftist media dishonestly blamed Republicans for having brainwashed Muslims to hate gay people.

Had an influential Christian or Jewish organization put out a similar guide to schools barring them from interacting in co-ed settings or being taught sexual materials, there would be outrage. The media would warn that we were on the verge of theocracy and schools would redouble their sexual programming. But that won’t be the reaction to the Muslim guide.

What will almost certainly happen instead is that the guide will be privately passed around by school administrations and treated as a mandate without it ever being publicly discussed.

But if implemented, these secret carve outs and exemptions will represent discrimination.

For example, under ‘Sex Education’, the CAIR guide states that “sex education material presented in schools are another sensitive matter to many Muslim families.” That is obviously true for all religious families, but apparently only Muslims will be entitled to that privilege.

CAIR claims that, “Islam puts great emphasis on modesty, chastity and morality.” As if Christians and Jews don’t. All parents and students should be able to opt out of sexual content in classes. Treating that as an exclusive entitlement for one single group is discriminatory.

Finally, in a truly extraordinary demand in an educational system that aggressively eliminates even the most basic vestiges of religion, CAIR tells schools that sex ed requires, “close contact with local Islamic centers is essential to encourage input from the Muslim community.”

Can anyone imagine a Christian group telling schools to run their curriculum past the local church in order to get approval from parents? Parental rights advocates were investigated as terrorists by the Biden administration for asking for much more modest limitations on porn and the ability to actually review what their children were being taught by woke teachers.

Beyond that, CAIR lays out an extensive set of proposed accommodations including not shaking hands with members of the opposite sex or looking “at persons of different sexes directly”. CAIR also proposes private showers since “Muslim boys and girls may not wish to take same-sex communal after-sport showers without wearing appropriate covering of their bodies.”

Furthermore, “Muslims may raise religious objections to coed physical education classes” and “should not be forced to participate in coed swimming classes.” They also should not be expected to bow in martial arts classes because that is reserved for their deity of choice. (Muslims in international competitive martial arts sports regularly bow to their opponents.)

Muslims understandably “may be hesitant to recite the pledge of allegiance”, but are expected to pray in schools including individual prayers in unused classrooms and group prayers on Fridays. They also need to wash their feet in the sink that everyone else washes their hands in.

CAIR warns that “lunch items containing ingredients derived from pork must be highlighted clearly” along with dijon mustard, jello and lard. Cafeteria personnel also won’t be allowed to use the same cutter “that has contacted pepperoni pizza” to avoid “cross-contamination.”

Even non-Muslim parents will be warned not to bring snacks that Muslims can’t eat.

The latter goes beyond any kind of reasonable accommodation into forcing Islamic religious practices on other students and their families. Telling other students that they can’t eat bacon sandwiches is not accommodation, it imposes an Islamic ban on pork on everyone else.

Not satisfied with mandating religious behavior for Muslim and non-Muslim students, CAIR tips its hand by demanding control over textbooks and ensuring that they incorporate Islamic views.

“One common error is the definition of ‘Allah’ as a particular Muslim god rather than the same God of Christianity and Judaism,” CAIR complains. It insists that, “Muslim educators should participate in the textbook selection process, particularly for history, social studies, and geography texts.” Are Christian and Jewish authorities allowed the same level of input?

While Muslims do believe that Allah is also the god of Christians and Jews (and that, as the Koran repeatedly claims, Jews and Christians falsified Allah’s teachings which are only to be found in the Koran, not the Bible), many Christians and Jews do not believe this. There is no need to impose an Islamic view on Christians and Jews about their own religions. Schools can teach that Muslims believe that they are the successor (or predecessor) religion to Judaism and Christianity, much as the Bahai believe that they are the successor religion to Islam, but that this is their perspective. Much as Mormons and Christians have different understandings of their relationship, Muslims, Christians and Jews have very different perspectives on the matter.

When Islamist groups like CAIR pressure school officials to impose their theological dogma on non-Muslims, this amounts to transforming schools into missionary enterprises for Islam.

CAIR has been putting out its guide to educators since 1997 and it has not changed a great deal in that time. The latest more polished edition leaves out the missionizing Koran quotes and has softened language that appeared to be mandating student behavior in schools such as “men and boys are always to be covered from the navel to the knee” or “Muslim boys and girls may not take same-sex communal after-sport showers without wearing appropriate covering of their bodies.“ While the language has been made less severe, the intent is the same. CAIR is seeking to exercise control over the behavior of Muslim students in school.

This is also where the CAIR guide fundamentally differs from parents advocating for children. CAIR doesn’t represent parents, it represents Islamic dogma. While Democrats and the media have assailed parental advocacy, they have had nothing to say about an Islamist group putting out a guide dictating the behavior of administrators, teachers, students and non-Muslim parents.

And the real question may be how much of an influence has CAIR’s guide had on schools providing special exemptions for Muslims that they would not allow for non-Muslim students?

Parents of all religions, and of no religion, should be able to opt their children out of coming into contact with sexual materials. And if Democrats and the media want to attack Christian and Jewish parents for making such requests, they should also be consistent and take on CAIR.

Anything else is evidence of religious discrimination.

CAIR wants schools to consult mosques before teaching sex ed. Any schools that have done this also have to consult churches, synagogues and all other religious groups. Schools that allowed Muslim parents to opt out more easily than non-Muslim parents have engaged in religious discrimination and should be sued. The same goes for allowing school prayers and any other exemptions that were reserved specifically for Muslim students, but not non-Muslim ones.

We cannot have a country where non-Muslim girls have to shower with ‘transgender’ boys while Muslim students are offered private showers. Nor a country where mosques get approval over sex ed courses and Islamic scholars determine the theological content of textbooks.

The supreme right to determine the education of children belongs not to schools or to CAIR, but to parents.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

Study Shows Gun Laws Don’t Matter, Race Does

By Daniel Greenfield August 06, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog  

33 people were shot over the weekend in Chicago. Urban gangland violence like that is what real “mass shootings” look like and finally a Journal of the American Medical Association paper addressed the problem by shifting the blame to something it calls “structural racism”.

The JAMA paper, which was quickly picked up by CNN as “Structural Racism may Contribute to Mass Shootings” and by Bloomberg as “Mass Shootings Disproportionately Victimize Black Americans”, acknowledged what conservatives have been saying about gun violence.

“There was no discernible association noted in this study between gun laws and MSEs [mass shootings] with other studies showing similar findings,” it noted.

The issue wasn’t gun laws, it was race. “The study found that in areas with higher black populations, mass shootings are likelier to occur compared to communities with higher white populations,” CNN reported. “The findings disrupt the nation’s image of mass shootings, which has been shaped by tragedies like the Las Vegas festival shooting and Sandy Hook in which most of the victims were not black,” Bloomberg added.

Faced with an immovable statistical object and the unstoppable force of equity, the JAMA paper blames the whole thing on structural racism. The study correlates urban areas and neighborhoods with high concentrations of single-parent households” to mass shootings. It then demonstrates that “structural racism” must be at fault because of “the percentage of the population that is black.” Black people in the study are interchangeable with racism.

Such is the state of woke medical science which tries to fix racism with more racism. The study never comes up with any plausible explanation of how structural racism causes people to shoot each other. At one point it claims that “racial residential segregation practices are predictive of various types of shootings” in a country where segregation had been abolished since 1964.

The study’s definition of segregation is so senseless that it lists majority black cities like Detroit, a 77% black city, as being 73% segregated, and Baltimore, a 62% black city, as being 64% segregated. A city with a strong black majority and black leaders is racially segregated and its people are suffering from “structural racism”. That’s why there are so many mass shootings.

But if segregation is the issue then why does Atlanta, which had actual segregation, have only 18 mass shootings, while Chicago has 141? Southern cities show up as less segregated and less violent in the paper’s data. A history of segregation is clearly not the issue. This isn’t about the past, whether it’s the historical revisionism of the 1619 Project, or any other.

If segregation were the issue, crime would have been far higher during segregation than after it.

Murders actually shot up after the end of segregation. So did most other kinds of crime. (That’s not to suggest that the end of segregation was responsible. After cratering in the fifties, crime was rising sharply even before the end of segregation along with general social breakdowns in which divorce rates rose sharply as did single parent families, Protestant religious denominations declined, so did various forms of institutional allegiance and public confidence.)

Crime did not turn the corner until the middle of the nineties when, by most accounts, gentrification actually pushed black people out of some neighborhoods resulting in what leftists misleadingly described as “resegregation”. It rose sharply again in response to pro-crime policies such as the elimination of bail, the mass release of criminals from prison during the pandemic, and the end of public safety due to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Segregation, real or fictional, has nothing to do with crime rates which track more closely with pro-crime policies, whether those of the Warren Court, that began with inventing the right to a lawyer and concluded with banning the death penalty, and with its modern counterparts.

The JAMA study however sticks to the central premise of anti-racism which is that any black statistical outlers represent systemic racism in action. Higher black crime statistics can only be interpreted as the consequence of white racism even if it means describing Baltimore, a black city with a black mayor and majority black city council, as a segregated city.

Who is segregating Baltimore and Detroit, or for that matter Atlanta and Chicago? Almost all of the cities that the JAMA study lists as the most segregated, including New York City, Buffalo, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco, have black mayors.

What magical “structural racism” is forcing black Democrats to “segregate” their own cities and how does that cause gangs to shoot each other in the street? The JAMA study can’t do much except wave its arms toward generic ideas. “Future research is needed to develop more specific and sensitive markers of structural racism,” it claims. Unable to even define any kind of causative factor between what it deems to be structural racism and violence, it concludes, as every study does, that more research is needed to explain its inexplicable premise.

Every time the study bumps into a statistic that contradicts its premise, it shrugs awkwardly. Despite repeatedly blaming poverty, it observes that the “higher firearm injury rate persists even after correcting for income levels. In fact, the rate of gun violence among the highest income levels in Philadelphia was 15.8 times higher for black residents than white.”

Why are wealthier black people more prone to shooting and being shot? Structural racism.

“A potential explanation may be related to housing policies, as a long history of redlining has resulted in a higher density of black residents in certain neighborhoods,” the paper claims.

Today, what’s holding back any black person in the “highest income levels” from living anywhere he wants in Philly? Like Rittenhouse Square. Why could Stephen Smith, born a slave who bought his own freedom, started a lumber business and became the wealthiest black man in America in an era of actual slavery, live without fear of crime or anything except racist mobs?

The lies of anti-racism lies don’t help black people or anyone else. Gun laws don’t work. Blaming racism doesn’t work. The only thing that works is personal responsibility.

The cult of anti-racism insists, as the study does, that everything can be explained by waving at the “normalized and legitimized range of policies, practices, and attitudes that routinely produce cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color.” Rather than the adverse outcomes being the result of choices from within the community, critical race theory chooses to render black people powerless victims by claiming that their problems all come from outside.

Structural racism, like guns, doesn’t kill people. Poverty isn’t generational, it’s personal. History doesn’t hold us back, to paraphrase Obama, we are the ones holding ourselves back. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Hottest Day Claims and Historical Reality

 By Craig Rucker, President CFACT

 

Global warming campaigners are pushing the notion that we just had the "hottest ever" three days in recorded history.  The warming-compliant media picked up the "hottest ever" line and ran with it.

We posted a serious debunking at CFACT.org.  The Daily Caller's Nick Pope explains that in order to come up with their "hottest ever" hype, warming campaigners turned to "a data tool from the University of Maine which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has warned is not as dependable as traditional observational data."

Reality not hot enough for ya? You can always scare everyone with an agenda-driven computer analysis!  CFACT's Marc Morano called it "weaponizing weather" on Fox and posted that "Biden’s EPA reveals the 1930's had more severe heatwaves in USA than present day."

Climate data expert Tony Heller posted the graph above and tweeted, "the five hottest July's in the U.S. were 1936, 1901, 1934, 1930 and 1931."   Do you think Team Warming will be able to airbrush the searing heat of the 1930s and "the great dust bowl" that resulted out of our collective consciousness?
 

Greenpeace co-founder, and close CFACT friend, Patrick Moore shared the graph above, which reminds us that on a geological time scale we're actually living in a "coldest ever" period for the Earth.  Reporters should start doing their jobs, fully vet these "hottest ever" claims, and ask those who made them the tough questions that will cool down the hype.

The Dirty Money Behind the Lynching of Clarence Thomas

By Daniel Greenfield May 24, 2023 Supreme Court @ Sultan Knish Blog

The country is witnessing the second high-profile lynching effort of Justice Clarence Thomas. Even while the media ignores the millions from foreign nationals passing through shell companies to the Biden family, it has pushed invented scandals for Thomas while demanding his resignation to make way for a radical leftist Biden court appointee.

While no one expects anything but lies and smears from the media, few are aware of how the smear campaign against Justice Thomas was organized and who is funding it.

Before it was splashed all over the media, the Clarence Thomas smears were mostly generated by ProPublica with articles such as “Clarence Thomas’ Secret Life of Luxury” then rebroadcast by the media in stories such as “ProPublica: GOP megadonor paid private school tuition for grandnephew of Justice Clarence Thomas” which keep the smear campaign going.

While the media is deeply interested in who paid for Thomas’ grandnephew’s education, it’s uninterested in where the money that funds ProPublica’s smear campaign is coming from.

ProPublica has amplified the coverage of Harlan Crow, a conservative donor who is friendly with Thomas, but is less interested in discussing some of the men who back its operations. Its leftist smear campaigns are funded by the man who helped bring down the economy with his abusive tactics, a former Enron executive and FTX crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The money that brought down banks is now trying to bring down a Supreme Court Justice.

ProPublica is a leftist nonprofit set up as an “ethical watchdog” by Herbert Sandler, listed by Time Magazine, as one of the 25 people to blame for the financial crisis of 2008, and more bluntly by Saturday Night Live as, ““people who should be shot”. (In a sign of the power and influence of the Sandlers, the SNL skit was quickly censored and cannot be found on NBC.)

Flush with billions from selling off their Golden West mortgage company, which had used “misleading” ads to prey on minority borrowers, to Wachovia Bank, tanking it and helping cause the financial crisis, Herbert invested his money in social justice.

And that made him “the man who made ProPublica possible.”

ProPublica had gotten its initial funding with the money harvested by Sandler from taking down Wachovia, and, more recently, it was promised $10 million by Sam-Bankman Fried whose collapse of FTX helped bring down Silicon Valley Bank and cause the worst wave of bank failures since the Wachovia collapse. When bad men bring down banks with their financial abuses, they write a check to ProPublica while their victims lose everything.

ProPublica, which claims that its mission is to “expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust”, makes no mention of any of this in its profile of Sandler: its beloved founder and chairman whose corrupt greed destroyed the financial security of millions of Americans.

Instead, ProPublica claims that Golden West, which took down the economy, “was considered to be one of the best managed financial institutions in the country” and “most admired savings institution”. This is exactly the kind of “fearless journalism” that has embedded ProPublica’s privately-funded smear campaigns against Republicans in media outlets across America.

ProPublica’s shameless lies are understandable as Sandler chaired the leftist smear group until his demise and Steve Daetz, the deputy general counsel at Golden West, and president of the Sandler Foundation, serves as one of ProPublica’s directors, and the Sandler Foundation continues to fund ProPublica’s smear campaigns of Republicans.

In addition to ProPublica’s origins in the money that helped take down the economy, its leading supporters include John D. Arnold, a former Enron executive who became the youngest billionaire in the country, and the leftist smear group was recently forced to give up $1.6 million from FTX crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried that was originally part of a $10 million grant.

When taking Bankman-Fried’s millions, ProPublica President Robin Sparkman claimed that the money would be used to “hold power accountable”. The exposure of FTX did not come from ProPublica’s vaunted “investigative journalism that holds power accountable” and the leftist group dragged its feet on giving up its latest pile of dirty money until late December 2022.

No word from ProPublica on whether FTX was also “one of the best managed financial institutions in the country”. Or was $10 million not enough to buy such shameless lies?

ProPublica’s list of its “leading” supporters is uniquely tilted to wealthy men in the financial industry who may be in a position to profit from a shift in the Supreme Court. The list of backers for ProPublica’s public smear campaigns includes hedge fund, private equity and venture capital figures. And those who are closely associated with them and their financial interests.

In a word, Wall Street and the Bay Area. Unlike Sandler and Bankman-Fried, there’s no scandal or investigation attached to the majority of such funding sources, but they do raise questions.

While ProPublica draws on money from the usual lefty foundations including Carnegie, W.K. Kellogg F, John S. and James L. Knight, James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation whose money can usually be found around nearly every leftist cause, it also draws on a large number of financial industry donors including S Donald Sussman, a hedge fund executive and party megadonor, Tom Unterman, a venture capital firm founder, Mark Colodny, a managing director at Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm, Bruce Golden, a venture capital firm founder, and Mitchell Lasky, a general partner at a venture capital firm.

Ronald Olson, famous as Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyer, as well as the lawyer handling Bill Gates’ divorce battle, is a ProPublica director and a major financial supporter. Olson is also a director at Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson. The ‘Munger’ is Charlie Munger: Buffett’s partner. Olson is also a Biden donor and sat on the board of Bill Clinton’s defense fund for his Whitewater and Paula Jones scandals.

What impact would removing Justice Clarence Thomas from the Supreme Court have on the finances of Berkshire Hathaway and the potential cases of a ‘super-lawyer’ who is rated as being able to argue cases before the Supreme Court? Olson testified at Justice Clarence Thomas’ Senate hearings and, as the LA Times put it, “chaired the American Bar Assn. committee that rated Clarence Thomas barely qualified for the U. S. Supreme Court.”

Another financial mastermind backing ProPublica is Sir Michael Jonathan Moritz, a Sequoia Capital partner, and major Democrat donor who has also funded dirty operations like Pacronym, American Bridge and the Lincoln Project.

The ProPublica money that raises the most questions comes from an unlikely source: the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Best known for its Golden Globe awards, the HFPA is a collection of foreign reporters that cover Hollywood. The Golden Globe awards are used to fund the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Charitable Trust which is supposed to be a charity funding “entertainment-related charities”. It’s not clear how smearing the only black man on the Supreme Court qualifies as an “entertainment-related” charitable cause.

I ended up playing a small role in the leftist hijacking of the HFPA when a former president sent out one of my Front Page Magazine articles which discussed the connections between Hollywood and BLM, only to be promptly purged and denounced by the organization..

The ugly act of political censorship, widely covered in headlines such as “Former HFPA President Calls BLM a ‘Racist Hate Movement'” and “Former HFPA president blasted over Black Lives Matter” played into a pressure campaign by leftist groups to which the HFPA surrendered. Its funding of ProPublica, a leftist attack dog group which has nothing to do with scholarships for filmmakers or protecting the culture of film, its stated goals, may have been one of the payoffs.

But the funding from HFPA raises its own legal and ethical questions.

The HFPA’s members are not necessarily American citizens and cannot fund political campaigns. While ProPublica is a 501(c)(3) which currently can be funded by foreign donors, at least until necessary reforms prevent the infusion of foreign money into American politics are put into place, its campaigns are obviously directed at achieving Democrat political goals.

While there is currently nothing technically illegal about foreign donors funding a campaign to force a Supreme Court justice off the bench, the problems with such a move are obvious.

Despite claiming to follow ethical standards and even to impose them on others, ProPublica has failed to distinguish which of its political activities are financed by American or foreign donors.

Could foreign money be financing its lynching of Justice Clarence Thomas?

We certainly know that dirty money, the cash that brought down two waves of banks, that destroyed the livelihoods and incomes of millions of Americans, is now trying to bring down a Supreme Court justice.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

NAACP, the Embodiment of Inept Hypocrisy

May 22, 2023 — John Hinderaker

The NAACP has been a worthless organization for a long time, but its latest DNC-echoing attack on the State of Florida–it issued a “travel advisory”–may represent a new low: 

"Under the leadership of Governor Desantis, the state of Florida has become hostile to Black Americans and in direct conflict with the democratic ideals that our union was founded upon." — NAACP President and CEO @DerrickNAACP Take a stand with us.

Of course, it quickly turned out that the NAACP’s leaders have bravely ventured into hostile territory, like tens of millions of other Americans.......... the coup de grâce: the NAACP’s Chairman lives in Florida. So the Florida GOP volunteered to pay his moving expenses if he wants to leave......... We see this every day: liberals don’t mean the things they say. They churn out propaganda that they know to be false, usually because they are well paid to do so. Producing vicious smears is all in a day’s work......... To Read More....

 

Progressives Have Embraced the Counterfeit

April 30, 2023 By Richard A. Chiero

Progressives have been duped! They have been had! The counterfeit, begun in the garden, is in full swing now. It commands the heights! It has been a well devised scheme, a cookbook, a recipe book so to speak. To serve man – was anything but serving man, it was to have man as lunch, as in the old Twilight Zone episode. That is what our progressive leaders, bureaucrats, influencers, and adherents have swallowed hook, line, and sinker. They have turned their back on the godly principles that shaped this nation and have embraced the counterfeit doctrines of the enemy of our souls.

The long march through the institutions was accelerated by the radical leftists of the 60’s who bullied, cajoled, and shouted down young, immature college students to take to the streets in violent protest, and to take over buildings on campus in retaliation for perceived injustices. Using these types of tactics, progressives have been quite successful in the ensuing years, since now they either possess or hold sway over large swathes of academia, media, government, K-12 schooling, and much more..........To Read More.....

Is half information disinformation?

Joe Bastardi March 20th, 2023 190 Comments 

The Media (in this case the WAPO) is at it again. There is no natural event they will not blame climate change for. The latest one to question and expose their ignorance to the other side of the story or purposeful hiding of it is with their claim that your allergies are getting worse because of Climate Change.

Springs are supposedly warmer and earlier. They used the eastern non-winter this year as proof, amazingly unaware that March would turn this cold and another late spring the way March and April are evolving for the country. We have been showing this on Weatherbell since February as the combination of the major stratospheric warming event and a shift in the MJO forcing would mean colder-than-average weather for much of the nation well into April.

To view both sides of the story, I am going to include a google search link on this matter.

It is not just the Washington Post. They are the object of my ire now because I can visibly take apart their graphic. But they simply ECHO what is out there. Funny, if Woodward and Bernstein simply echoed what they were told do you think we would have gotten to the bottom of that situation? But it is the same thing across the board in everything today. I can’t understand how a nation that was built on confronting the challenges of the hard facts we faced is going to survive if we no longer have all of those facts. You outsource your future to those that wish to control it, then you will have no future.

Look at this:..................To Read More....

Enough of the Left's ‘Threats to Democracy’ Rhetoric

Allen West  |  Mar 13, 2023  

 

Most often when someone, or a group, consistently and incessantly refers to others with certain disparaging, demeaning, and destructive accusations it is because they are projecting their own behavior upon others. This is the case with the repeated "threats to democracy" narrative that the progressive socialist left has been firing against anyone opposing their totalitarianism. It began after that abhorrent speech by Joe Biden last year in front of the disturbing backdrop of Independence Hall. This empty assertion continues to be used by the left because, in their minds, it worked for them in the 2022 midterm elections. However, a precise and bold analysis will show that those on the left are the actual threats to our representative democracy in America . . . and remember, America is a Constitutional Republic.

Let's begin our walk down this hypocritical lane..........To Read More....

 

Politicized Black History And The Great American Shakedown

 

March 4, 2023 By Kathleen Brush

For Black History Month 2022, Disney released a Proud Family episode asserting that slaves built America, and Hulu began streaming the 1619 Project docuseries. The latter builds on The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which presents American slavery as the cruelest in the world. This is nonsense and, even as Black History Month 2023 is in the rear-view mirror, it must be countered because it serves as the basis for a never-ending, society-corrupting shakedown.

Both productions assert that, in addition to the basic immorality of slavery itself, whites were unrelievedly cruel to black slaves. From that foundation, leftists insist that the world’s most prosperous and educated black population are still victims of white oppression, justifying economy-busting reparations. It’s a shakedown.

In fact, the uncontested winners for “world’s cruelest slavery” exist outside America’s borders and history. In Haiti, for example, slaves were treated so poorly that they died after a few years. It was cheaper to purchase new slaves than to treat slaves humanely.

Non-American slave owners discouraged reproduction because children often died before they were productive. In 1802, the U.S. black population was 1 million. If the US had duplicated conditions in the Caribbean, the black population would have been 186,000—and that attrition rate would still have been better than in Middle Eastern nations. A thousand years of black slavery are concealed by the virtual absence of black people.

In the Middle East and Africa, it was normal to castrate young boys without pain reducers. The greatest demand, though, was for female sex slaves—”mats of pleasure.” When women became old, say 40, they were often left to die. The immorality of slavery in America, notwithstanding, American enslavers were, uniquely, required to care for their slaves until they died..............To Read More

 

 

The Hard Truth About January 6

The Democrats’ drive for a One-Party State.

January 23, 2023 by David Horowitz 56 Comments 

According to a report by the Inspector General, Donald Trump offered to provide thousands of national guard troops to protect the U.S. Capitol on January 6^th, 2021. Trump was concerned about the possibility of trouble from fringe elements on the left and right who might see it as an occasion to cause trouble. His offer was rejected by Pelosi and the Democrats who instead provided a grossly under-manned Capitol police force instead. The under-manned force was unable to set up a defensive perimeter around the building; which is why there is extensive video footage showing Capitol police officers escorting demonstrators into the building.

The January 6^th protest was milder than any of the hundreds of Black Lives Matter riots the summer before, and led to no serious destruction of Capitol artifacts. But the Democrats en masse pretended to be horrified. They denounced the protest as an “armed insurrection” and compared it to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and other enemy attacks on the United States which resulted in thousands of deaths.

When it was pointed out that no arms were found on the protesters, the Democrats simply dropped the term “armed” but still referred to the demonstration as an “insurrection” – i.e., treason.  They made no effort to explain how one could mount an insurrection without arms. Obviously one can’t..............This is what one expects from a fascist state not a constitutional democracy. It is a lesson ignored at our peril in revealing the criminal determination of the Democrat Party to establish a one-party state at whatever the cost, and to demonize, intimidate and suppress any opposition that stands in their way, by any means necessary..............To Read More.....

Creative Historical Interpretations Are Not History

December 16, 2022 By Jack Bovee @ American Thinker 

 

(Editor's Note:  I have not asked for nor have I received permission to publish this piece in full.  However, as a history buff I know all this to be absolutely true and feel this piece needs the fullest distribution possible.  If American Thinker or the author object I will break it down to a link.  However, the last statements are all important: 

 

"This has been the toll of the false historical narrative. Literally, the survival of our nation is at stake. How do we correct the problem? Simple.  We demand a return to the honest teaching of American history."  RK)

The dominating narrative in American schools and the popular culture today is that slavery began in America in 1619.  Unfortunately, there is about as much truth in that scenario as there was in the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” media crusade in August 2014.  Nikole Hannah-Jones and her Critical Race Theory comrades prove beyond doubt the accuracy of Arthur Schlesinger’s maxim that “history is a weapon.”  They distort the historical narrative by omitting key facts that, if told, would present an entirely different view of the past.

There seems to be a general consensus, regarding the arrival of African slaves at Jamestown in 1619. They were first captured in Angola, and sold to Portuguese slavers based in Luanda. While in transport towards Mexico, two English corsairs flying a Dutch flag captured this Portuguese ship in the Gulf and removed some of the slaves, who were then brought to Jamestown, which was in desperate need of laborers. Here, “some twenty odd” Africans were exchanged for “victuals.”

Then, the historical concurrence stops.  Hannah-Jones argues that all the Africans were reduced to slavery, while others argue that they were given the same status as White contracted laborers. Some argue that the word “servant” and not “slave” was used in Virginia’s first census of 1620. What complicates matters is that indentured servants sometimes referred to themselves as slaves.

The status of the Africans is also unclear because after the 1625 census we lost sight of them.  In putting forth the claim that those Africans who arrived in 1619 were life-long slaves it’s necessary to generalize events and omit key facts. For example, in 2011 Barack Obama signed a proclamation at the landing site, which read:

The first enslaved Africans in England’s colonies in America were brought to this peninsula on a ship flying the Dutch flag in 1619, beginning a long ignoble period of slavery in the colonies and, later, this Nation.

Unfortunately, that’s not the entire story. The words probably, may, and likely, are freely used to support the argument that the enslavement of Africans in colonial America began in 1619.  The Africans were indeed slaves when they arrived in Virginia, and they undoubtedly would have continued to remain slaves had they reached their intended destination in Mexico.  What the historical record in Virginia does show is that the small group of Africans was repeatedly referred to as “servants” in the annual censuses of 1620, 1624, and 1625.  Moreover, several of them appear later as free persons.  For this to happen, they undoubtedly had to have been accorded the status of their White equals (indentured servants).  Anthony  Johnson — one of the earliest Africans to arrive — began his life in Virginia as an indentured servant who gained his freedom and eventually became the owner of 250 acres of land through the headright system. His African wife, Mary, arrived in Virginia around 1622 or 1623 and was reported as living with Anthony in 1625.  They were both free before 1645 and “became comparatively prosperous landowners” on Virginia’s eastern shore.  In February 1653, Johnson’s home and some outbuildings were consumed by fire and he received public assistance from the colony because of his “hard labor and known service.” There’s more:

Two years later, when he and his family had again attained a modicum of prosperity, he successfully sued a prominent planter who he accused of illegally confiscating some of his livestock. Then in 1654, an incident took place that proved that Johnson, a black man, not only owned another member of his race, but was able to keep him in bondage for the rest of his life. The man in question was a ‘Negro called John Casor,’ who convinced a white neighbor that he was an indentured servant who should have been freed at the expiration of his tenure. Believing Casor, the man took him home to work in his own tobacco fields . . . In the end, the justices decided that Casor ‘shall forthwith be returned unto the service of his master Anthony Johnson.’

It’s ironic that this civil suit, which is cited as the first example of an enslaved African, had an African master.  The life of John Pedro provides another example: in 1625, John was listed in the household of Francis West, but was a free landowner in Lancaster, Virginia by the 1650s. Another, John Phillip, was thought to have been “the only African to arrive in Virginia free.”

Unfortunately, the scant records do not tell us much about the lives of these few dozen Africans.  Some Africans achieved free status and successfully sued — not just once, but twice — more prominent White colonists.  It is true that by the 1660s, the colonies were increasingly moving towards the institution of slavery, but when viewed within the context of global events, this is hardly seem surprising.  English civilians had long been at risk of enslavement themselves by Africans — as the White aristocrats in charge of the early Virginia colony were fully aware.  The coasts of England, Scotland, and Ireland had been targeted by Muslim slavers from North Africa.  Since the Berber invasion of Spain and France, large Islamic armies had launched massive slave raids against Christian Europe.  Unlike Europe, which sought spices, Muslim armies sought “white gold” — slaves.  Men  were prized as galley slaves, eunuchs, and laborers who were worked to death in the mines and  quarries of North Africa.  Between 1400 and 1700, hundreds of thousands of white Christian boys and girls were seized by the Ottoman Empire in a form of “child tax” called devshirme.  It should be noted the early English explorer of Virginia, James Smith, was a soldier of fortune whose military experience fighting the Ottomans helped the colony to survive.  In August 1625 — the very year the Virginia census listed 25 Africans living there — Muslim slavers from Africa seized over 60 English residents who sought refuge in a church in Cornwall.  That same month, the Plymouth mayor decried that “27 ships had been taken and all the men on board, over 200 of them – had been made slaves.”

From Lundy Island, Muslim slavers established a permanent base and preyed upon England and Ireland for years. On two occasions, they sailed to Iceland, successfully capturing nearly 400 people, leaving more than 36 dead, some burned alive.  In 1631, African slavers seized 89 women and children and 20 men from Ireland, selling them in Algiers.  African-based slavers even attacked the Faroe Islands while continuing to ravage helpless towns all over coastal Europe. One Icelandic historian writes:

By the 1650s, there were 30,000 prisoners from coastal lands all over Europe in Algiers alone… As one of the hapless 400, Guðríður spent nine years in what’s now Algiers before the Danish government finally came up with ransom money… She was ransomed in June 1636 but had to leave her son behind in Algiers.

Ben Johnson succinctly summarizes it here:

For over 300 years, the coastlines of the south west of England were at the mercy of Barbary pirates (corsairs) from the coast of North Africa… Between 1677 and 1680 the English were losing 3,000 people to Muslim slavers per year, highlighting a problem that had not abated for the entirety of the century.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, more White Europeans were seized and taken to Africa than Black Africans seized and taken to America.

Nor were the English unfamiliar with events in eastern Europe — Ottoman slave raids from the Crimean Khanate enslaved an estimated 2 million people over hundreds of years.  Nor were the colonists in America immune.  The enslavement of White Americans and Europeans continued until actions by the United States in 1815 and England in 1816 finally brought it to an end. By this time, both the nations had outlawed the trans-Atlantic slave trade by stationing fleets of warships to intercept and free any slaves they encountered.  It’s worth remembering that very few of the slaves from Africa ever arrived in North America.  African-American historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states that — of the 10.7 million who disembarked in the New World — only 450,000 African slaves were ever brought to North America.  Africans from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, on the other hand, are estimated to have enslaved 1.25 to 1.5 million  White Europeans.  Just as the facts surrounding the details of those few dozen Africans who disembarked in Virginia remain unclear, so the total number of Europeans who suffered enslavement by people of color remains hazy.

What is clear is that there has been a deliberate omission of the historical record in American schools regarding the subject of slavery and how it influenced the foundation of America.  Nor are many Americans aware that in its first 100 years as a nation, the U.S. fought three anti-slavery wars — two to free White slaves and one to free Blacks.  To deliberately ignore these historical truths is not only deceitful and wrong, it’s malicious.  What has been the result of this deliberate distortion of our nation’s past? National division.  Increased racial tension and hate crimes, emanating from a false narrative.  A lack of patriotism in our younger generation.  New forms of discrimination and racial segregation aimed against those who supposedly “enjoy” the benefits of “White privilege.”  Increased social upheaval within our once grand cities.  A collapse of our educational system.  A weakened military. Increased tribalism all across the nation.

This has been the toll of the false historical narrative. Literally, the survival of our nation is at stake.

How do we correct the problem? Simple.  We demand a return to the honest teaching of American history.