Monthly Archives: July 2021

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Daily Broadside | Losing Their Grip They Squeezed Harder

Daily Verse | Isaiah 22:5
The Lord, the Lord Almighty, has a day of tumult and trampling and terror in the Valley of Vision, a day of battering down walls and of crying out to the mountains.

Friday and the end of July even though it feels like we just started the month last week. Let’s meet on the deck at 9:00 tonight. Shoes optional.

As we are carried further downstream by the commie tsunami in our country, Americans like you and me will have to decide when civil disobedience is required against the irrational and ever-changing mask mandates, vaccination pressure campaigns and the specter of vaccine passports. Resident Asterisk* insulted those of us who don’t trust anything he or his team say about the Chinese Lung Pox.

“If you’re not vaccinated, you’re not nearly as smart as I thought you were.” The Resident thinks shaming people is a great way to get them to do something, so that oughta work.

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky indicated this week that “vaccine passports” might be a “path forward” in the U.S.

When probed about next steps, Berman wondered if the CDC would ever “lean into” vaccine passes. Some countries in Europe now require “health passes,” or vaccination certificates, to gain access to things like bars and restaurants. The decision has prompted protests and backlash, with thousands taking to the streets in France earlier in July to voice opposition to the move.

“You know, I think some communities are doing that and that may very well be a path forward,” Walensky declared. “I do want to sort of comment that in some fully vaccinated venues, if they’re unmasked and there are a few people who are transmitting there … Overall it’s so very critical to just get the huge amount of disease in some of these areas down.”

Do you see the level of power and control that’s being suggested? Why doesn’t she just stitch a little yellow virus icon on our clothing?

To top it all off, her comments come as we’re finding out that this fraudulent administration is dumping illegals all over the country and that many of them are being allowed into the interior with Covid-19.

The individual reported that there was a large illegal family inside the restaurant, visibly displaying signs of sickness such as coughing and sneezing without making any efforts to cover themselves, in violation of basic health guidelines. The manager confirmed to the officer that they wanted the illegals to leave the restaurant, since everyone else inside felt “uneasy” at their presence.

Upon approaching the group, the illegals told the officer that they had been apprehended at the border by Border Patrol agents, where they tested positive for the coronavirus; nevertheless, they said they were released a few days later.

Sergeant Casas said in his statement that local law enforcement had never been informed of this development by federal immigration authorities. “No one told the city of La Joya. No one told the police department that these people were here, and no one told us that these people were possibly ill.”

And yet, the jackass who is currently sits in the seat of ‘the most powerful man in the world’ has the temerity to demonize unvaccinated Americans. “We have a pandemic because of the unvaccinated, and they’re sowing enormous confusion. And the more we learn about this virus and the Delta variation, the more we have to be worried and concerned.”

Got it. So you and your team not only encourage border jumpers, but release them, WITH COVID-19, into the interior of the United States without a word to anybody, then turn around and start threatening mask mandates for the actual citizens of this country?!

These people are abusing their elected power and it is time to make them understand that they are not gods and we are not their servants. And by “we” I mean “we.” They need to hear from all of us that they’ve gone too far and we’ve had enough and we’re ready to fight the tyranny.

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | Our Needs Are More Important Than Your Needs

Daily Verse | Isaiah 20:25
The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.”

Happy Thursday, Broadsiders! Tapioca is the best kept secret of this generation.

I do a lot of reading across a variety of topics: American history, biography, cultural issues, apologetics, Christian living, marketing, creativity, branding, political thrillers and popular novels. I was flipping through a used book on social influence yesterday and found this inscribed on the endpaper:

“The needs of the one must be sacrificed [for] the the (sic) needs of the many.”

I think this is probably a reference to the scene in The Wrath of Khan, when Commander Spock says to Captain Kirk, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Kirk answers, “Or the one.” This foreshadows a climatic scene near the end of the movie when Spock enters a highly radioactive chamber in order to fix the ship’s warp drive so the crew can escape a mortal threat. As a result of his heroic actions, Spock dies for the good of the many.

Spock’s logical conclusion is called Utilitarianism, which is based on the premise that “we ought to maximize the good, that is, bring about ‘the greatest amount of good for the greatest number.'” In other words, consideration of what is good for the collective outweighs consideration of what is good for the individual.

Even though it sounds logical, impartial and idyllic—and it is hard to argue with the claim that the morally right action is the one that produces the most good—the utilitarian worldview leaves us with several questions.

  • Who is given the power to determine what is morally “good”?
  • How does that person or group of people determine what is “good”?
  • If people should act for the “good” of the group but don’t, are they free to act immorally (ie. not doing what brings the most good to the greatest number of people)?
  • As people grow and mature, their ideas of what is “good” can change. What happens in a society with different generations who define “good” differently?
  • Who is going to enforce the principle that whatever you do, you do for the greater good?

That last question leads to perhaps the greatest problem with utilitarianism: it leads naturally to a totalitarian political state.

On the utilitarian moral ideal, however, individuals are not seen as responsible for their own lives, health, and happiness; rather, they are regarded as responsible for everyone’s life, health, and happiness. To be moral, according to utilitarianism, people must act so as to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number—and they must sacrifice their personal goals and values to achieve that end. This collectivist moral framework necessitates a collectivist political program. If the collective or the “moral experts” decide it is best for the individual to be forbidden from smoking—or forbidden from doing anything else, or required to do anything else—then the individual morally must obey. (My emphasis.)

Of course, the “collective” is nothing other than Marxism, which divides society into warring tribes. In this case, it’s those who “know” what the good is versus those who don’t. Our current political situation, while not fully Marxist (yet), is certainly showcasing it’s utilitarian chops.

  • You need to wear a mask to protect yourself and others. If you don’t, you’re literally killing people.
  • Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. If you don’t believe that, you’re the greatest threat to our republic.
  • We must increase taxes to provide “free” college to everyone who wants it. You’re selfish for wanting to keep your money so that our young people remain uneducated.

But, in our case, the utilitarian philosophy is also twisted back on itself, so that the premise becomes, increasingly, “we ought to maximize the good, that is, bring about ‘the greatest amount of good’ for the few or the one.” The collective should sacrifice its “greatest good” for the “good” of the few.

  • Give up your power to marginalized brown and black people. Otherwise you’re a racist.
  • My pronouns are ze, zim and zher. The public must use them when addressing me or they are causing me great emotional harm.
  • Biological men who believe they are women must be treated as women. To deny their claim is to deny their personal identity.

You can see how easy it is to require external enforcement for the “greater good” because there are many citizens who don’t agree that these things are “good,” much less “good for all.” But once someone has such power, they don’t want to let go. And that’s the real threat of where utilitarianism and Marxism eventually lead — to absolute power.

“As Roger Scruton observed, our intellectuals were not attracted to Marxism because of the compelling truth that it outlined, but rather our intellectuals were attracted to Marxism because of the power that intellectuals like themselves would have under such a system. What we are dealing with is a raw and swollen case of libido dominandi, a lust for power. The licenses they grant and the laws they decree are simply the bit and bridle that they want you to put on, and they are standing off to the side, booted, spurred, and ready to ride.”

Marxism and Utilitarianism are incompatible with individual rights, such as those granted by the U.S. Constitution, which is why the progressive Left and the cultural Marxists are so dangerous. If you don’t want to live under an oligarchy or dictatorship, which is the destination of the road we’re currently on, you (and I) had better be paying attention and taking action to defend our rights.

They are also incompatible with biblical guidance, which lays out God’s moral code: to love God with your whole being, and to love others as you’d love yourself. Our referent is God’s definition of what is good, not an appointed bureaucrat’s.

He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
— Micah 6:8

The book in which I found Spock’s quote was about why certain ideas or products go viral and others don’t. Why did the previous owner of this book choose to write his maxim in the book, which is otherwise free of markings (no highlighting, no underlining, no notes in the margins)?

Because the quote went viral. And as we’re seeing and experiencing, so did Marxism.

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Daily Broadside | What a Joke: Grown Men Weep Over January 6

Daily Verse | Isaiah 14:12
How you have fallen from heaven,
O morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth,
You who once laid low the nations!

Wednesday and the national emergency we’re living through isn’t the Chinese Lung Pox and its variants, but the kangaroo court taking place in our nation’s Capitol as Granny Pelosi and Adam Schiff-for-Brains pull off the next step in their Marxist insurrection while accusing the right of the worst crisis since the Civil War.

The first day was full of grown men crying or, as Ace over at Ace of Spades put it, “Testicrying.” Seriously, it was like a group therapy session.

Here’s Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who the ringleaders of this joke of an inquiry think lends credibility to the commission because he has an “R” next to his name. As we all know, these days the only letter that means anything is the letter “D” and, if you are smart, you stay away from it.

He totally loses any credibility with his final sentences that get cut off right at the end. He says,

“And for all the overheated rhetoric surrounding this committee, our mission is very simple. It’s to find the truth and it’s to insure accountability. Like most Americans, I’m frustrated that six months after a deadly insurrection breached the United S —”

Both here and in his statement accepting the position on the committee, he labels the breach of the capitol a “deadly insurrection.” He’s already arrived at the conclusion that it was an insurrection. He can’t possibly be in a position to objectively weigh the evidence and reach his own conclusion. Hopefully this guy is ousted from his seat in 2022.

Declaring the committee a “partisan commission” or a “kangaroo court” isn’t overheated rhetoric, by the way. He just proved that by labeling it an insurrection, meaning that the commission is looking for evidence to support it’s pre-conceived conclusion. It’s going to be a nationally-televised propaganda campaign that leans on heavy emotions to win in the court of public opinion. The junior commies running the country know that we’re an emotionally fragile people who need safe spaces and think words are literally violence and do emotional harm. That’s what resonates with the Lefty electorate.

This commission is a joke. It was an unarmed mob, there are hints it was planned not by Donald Trump but by the FBI or another alphabet agency, there is video of uninformed officers inviting the “mob” in, officers standing by while the “mob” wanders through the Capitol like lost tourists, and only one person was killed during the breach and it was an unarmed female Trump supporter who was shot to death by a still-unnamed Capitol Hill police officer.

Whatever else it was, it was not an insurrection.

Normal Americans should brace themselves for the gross mischaracterizations that are coming as the Leninites reinforce the perception that we are all white supremacists and terrorists who want to overthrow the government. That will become a pretext for taking further steps toward removing us from the public square.

Just watch.

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Daily Broadside | Are You Ready to Take a Stand?

Daily Verse | Isaiah 10:1-2
Woe to those who make unjust laws,
to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights
and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
and robbing the fatherless.

Happy Tuesday Broadsiders! I’m having my sheer curtain collection dry cleaned today.

Here’s a problem: we are living in a nascent totalitarian state. It’s definitely not full-grown yet, but the signs that it’s there are many and troubling:

Dozens, if not hundreds, of American citizens, mostly Trump supporters, are being held, without charges, in solitary confinement in horrible conditions, without due process and are being referred to as white supremacists and terrorists. Their crime? Entering the nation’s Capitol on January 6 and now — jailed as political prisoners.

The theft of the November 2020 election. Joe Biden is a Resident, and not a very good one. There is no way that he got 81 million votes against Trump’s 75 million, and the results of audits in states like Arizona and Georgia are finding evidence of widespread fraud.

The demonization of conservative Americans is newer. “Normals” are being called the greatest threat to America as a form of “domestic extremism.” By that they mean American citizens who believe in God, go to church, love their families, resist big government, own firearms and think government is only a necessary evil.

In the U.S. right now it’s ordinary patriots and everyone on the Right who are being demonized, labeled as ‘white supremacists’ and ‘domestic terrorists’.  And it seems many of those who still support the Left are in denial about the implications for their own freedom and civil rights.

The deep state concocting the lies about Trump colluding with Russia and now, the kidnapping plot against Gov. Gretchen Witmer of Michigan, which is being revealed as having been conceived and led by members of the FBI.

Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 “bi-partisan” commission is anything but, with the two “Republicans” she appointed being RINOs Rep. Liz Cheney and and Rep. Adam Kinzinger who already support Pelosi’s position. It’s a show trial, not a meaningful contribution to learning what happened on January 6.

Those are just a few examples of totalitarian behaviors that we never thought we’d see. The bigger question is, “What do we do about it?”

That’s where it gets tricky. Some reports suggest that the government is trying to instigate a response from those being demonized. I’m sure that there are some people who are beginning to wonder what they can do to “punch back” against this unholy government abuse.

But should conservative Americans “punch back,” that will, in essence, “prove” the accusation that we’re the greatest threat to American democracy. Plus, there’s no organization for patriots to “enlist” in, so most of us are sitting, isolated in our homes chomping at the bit to “do” something. But something is happening:

It looks as if the silent majority is finally seeing the writing on the wall.  We are realizing that if we do nothing when the government comes for our neighbor, then there will be no one left to help when the government comes for us.

The left’s control of the media, social media, and the government has allowed them to go after pretty much everything that is American, starting with every tenet of our Bill of Rights.

It’s quite unsettling. In a thematically-related piece, Brent Hamachek writes,

The actual, and slightly allegorical, story was that of the event organizer, known to attendees as Felisa@PatriotParty.Rocks, having to literally run barefoot over gravel, and at full speed, while chasing down an automobile filled with a family who had just been turned away at the event gate.  They were told they “were not on the list.”  The family was, in fact, “on the list” and were being denied entrance in what can only be considered a deliberate act of sabotage.  It is exactly the sort of thing that we dissidents need to expect and be prepared to deal with as we continue our fight to alter the current trajectory of America.

Felisa caught the family, got them admitted into the event, and tore up both feet in the process.  In the moment, she thought there was nothing significant about what she had done.  Later that day when she shared what had happened, someone asked her why she did what she did, run across gravel barefoot to chase down a car while showing no regard for her own personal well-being. She simply responded, “What else was I supposed to do?  They are patriots.  I had to do something.”

The metaphor from the story was clear.  Given the current state of our country, for those who wish to join in the struggle to restore individual liberty, we are going to have to be willing to take off our shoes and run on the rocks.  We are going to have to take risks.  We are going to have to expose ourselves to the potential to suffer both personal pain and loss.

That’s what this is coming down to, I think. Many of us are going to have to decide what freedom is worth .. and whether we are ready to sacrifice to preserve our liberties.

You don’t have a lot of time to decide.

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Daily Broadside | “Every Town is Now a Border Town”

Daily Verse | Isaiah 1:18
“Come now, le us reason together,” says the Lord.
“Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool.”

Happy Monday and welcome to the last week of July. This year is moving faster than a greased pig on a wet shower curtain. No offense to anyone identifying as a greased pig this morning.

Do you want to know how outrageous the so-called Democrat-Biden alliance is? Not only have they locked up, in solitary confinement, dozens of American citizens, without any kind of due process, for whatever role the government thinks they may have played in the January 6 breach of the Capitol; not only did they cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline, throwing hundreds of Americans out of work, and then green-light Putin’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany, leaving us dependent once again on foreign oil with higher prices; not only are they pressuring social media companies to censor wrongthink over Covid-19 and introduced a bill to remove the immunities that Section 290 offers to further pressure them to censor so-called “misinformation” — not only has the illegally installed grifter, groper and intellectual midget who fathered a whoring, cocaine-addled, talentless and bribe-inducing criminal son erased our southern border, but his administration is now moving “unaccompanied [foreign] children” around the country and delivering them in the middle of the night to pedophiles in states that refused to take them when originally asked.

Lawmakers from Tennessee are sounding the alarm after reports that the Biden administration has been flying unaccompanied minors into the state in the middle of the night without their knowledge.

The White House is transporting migrants into an airport in Chattanooga from where they are bused to cities within the Southeast, as first reported by local news outlet WRCB-TV Channel 3.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said in a statement to Fox News that the transportation of migrants is taking place in “the dead of night without the knowledge or permission of the communities involved.”

This after Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee specifically denied the foreign-invasion-facilitator’s request to send unaccompanied children to them.

Lawmakers in the state are characterizing the situation as a symptom of the Biden administration’s policies and pursuant failure to control the flow of migrants at the border, which has now put their communities at risk.

Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., said in a statement to Fox News that his residents deserve answers from the administration.

“I have warned for months that President Biden’s failure at the border would result in a systematic resettling of migrants in our communities, burdening our schools, hospitals, and law enforcement agencies, and bringing an increase in drug trafficking and human smuggling,” Hagerty said. “A new reality is happening in our country—every town is now a border town.”

This is pure evil.

“The Biden Administration refuses to secure the border and is instead scattering unaccompanied kids all over the country with no regard for the consequences,” Lee said in a statement to Fox News. “When we push back and demand answers, they cut off transparency and embolden one of the worst human trafficking crises we’ve seen at our border in the last 20 years.”

What in the name of all that is right and good are these people doing? They aren’t enforcing our laws and have unilaterally decided to deposit foreign children across our country and leave them at the mercy of whom? Why are they doing this? What are they hiding?

And why are we allowing this to happen?

The Chattanooga Police Department (CPD) announced Tuesday night that 22-year-old Florencia Guadalupe Renderos Morales has been charged with sexual battery by an authority figure. They say the victim was a child at La Casa de Sidney, a facility operated in Chattanooga by the Baptiste Group.

CPD says Morales, a former employee at the facility, is in custody in Harris County, Texas, and will be extradited to Hamilton County, Tennessee, at a later date that has not yet been determined.

CPD says the victim in this case is not the same teen who was allegedly abused by a former employee, Randi Duarte.

The progressive Left, cultural Marxists and NeverTrumpers all told me how immoral and corrupt president-in-exile Donald J. Trump and his children were. They self-righteously told me that once Joe Biden was ‘president’ that we’d be getting back to our “norms” and “standards.”

Is anybody convinced that we’re now back to America’s “norms and standards”?

All a bunch of lies. If anything, these last six months have showed us that Joseph Robinette Biden is so corrupt that he makes a rusted tin can look strong enough to hold up an aircraft carrier. Give me mean tweets and clean hands any day.

The abuse these children are suffering should make everyone who hears about it angry. The government is not only abusing foreign children, but also its power and the People’s trust. It is getting late, and the junior commies are consolidating their gains so that they will never, ever lose power again.

Who’s going to stop them?

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Daily Broadside | Please God and Don’t Care What Others Think

Daily Verse | Song of Solomon 8:4

Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you:
Do not arouse or awaken love
until it so desires.

Friday and the end of another week in Joe Biden’s America. I hope green peppers are going out of style.

Every day I get caught up on the news and there’s so much crazy going on that it’s hard to focus on just one thing. Should it be Resident Biden and his moronic attempt to sound intelligent during a CNN town hall? How about Nancy Pelosi’s decision to cut two conservative Republicans from her January 6 investigative commission, leading Kevin McCarthy to pull all five of his nominations from the joke of a commission? What about Hunter Biden’s new passion for selling his “art” for half-a-million bucks a pop to unknown buyers who want access to the White House? Or his father’s secret email account used during his time as Obama’s VP? Then there’s the release of terrorists from Guantánamo Bay so that — maybe — there’s room for all the white supremacist terrorists the government will arrest? What about the invasion of more than a million illegal aliens across our southern border — with the current administration not only refusing to enforce our laws, but actually helping illegals get settled across the country? Or how about Fauci’s lying to Congress?

All good topics, but how about this one: Pastor Joe Wright’s powerful prayer 25 years later.

Twenty-five years ago, a courageous, concerned pastor from Kansas stood up and shared a powerful prayer before the opening session of the Kansas House of Representatives. Pastor Joe Wright obviously loved freedom, understood its importance and the necessity of repentance God calls for in order for Him to heal our nation.

Pastor Joe didn’t mince words and didn’t pull any punches. Here’s what he prayed.

“Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says: ‘Woe to those who call evil good,’ but that is exactly what we have done.

We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and inverted our values.
We have worshipped other gods and called it multi-culturalism.
We have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.
We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.
We have neglected the needy and called it self-preservation.
We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.
We have killed our unborn and called it choice.
We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building esteem.
We have abused power and called it political savvy.
We have coveted our neighbors’ possessions and called it ambition.
We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.
We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our fore-fathers and called it enlightenment.

“Search us, Oh GOD, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free.

“Amen.”

Several legislators walked out while he was praying.

Everything he prayed that day is still relevant today; if anything, the situation has only gotten worse. But what I like about Pastor Joe Wright is that he stood up in a room of the most powerful politicians in Kansas and told the truth. He wasn’t concerned about being invited to the best dinner parties or making sure he had friends in high places. He humbly stood and recited the ways in which his state (and our nation) was sinning.

It reminds me of when Mother Teresa of Calcutta spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast about the violence of abortion. She was honest and blunt, even though president Bill Clinton and vice president Al Gore were both there with their wives.

Then the sister said something that made everyone very uncomfortable: “But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because Jesus said, ‘If you receive a little child, you receive me.’ So every abortion is the denial of receiving Jesus, the neglect of receiving Jesus.”

Here’s the point of sharing these two accounts: both shared inconvenient truths, but neither Pastor Joe nor Mother Teresa cared what anybody thought of them. They didn’t care.

For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. (Galatians 1:10)

We need to be more like Pastor Joe and Mother Teresa, speaking the truth without fear. It will become more and more important as the culture goes to hell around us.

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | You Embarrassed Us. Now You’ve Embarrassed Yourselves.

Daily Verse | Ecclesiastes 10:2
The heart of the wise inclines to the right,
but the heart of the fool to the left.

Happy Thursday! It’s all downhill from here to the weekend.

Our US women’s soccer team (USWNT) got shut out by Sweden 3-0 in their opening match of the 2020 Olympics the other day. They came into the game with a 44-game winning streak stretching back to January 2019, and are arguably the favorites to win gold.

All my kids played soccer, so there was a time when I enjoyed watching the national women’s team play and followed their games. But not any more. In fact, I don’t actually care whether they win or not and I probably don’t have to tell you why. But I will.

They’ve become woke.

Just like a lot of other sports — the NFL, NBA and MLB, to name the most prominent — women’s soccer has been infected with cultural Marxism in the guise of ‘social justice.’

The U.S. women’s soccer team was among the squads on Wednesday to kneel before their matches in protest of racism, discrimination and inequality as the Olympics officially got underway.

A “protest of racism, discrimination and inequality.” In other words, they’re kneeling in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, the radical leftist group founded by self-identified Marxists. That alone is reason enough to ignore them.

But there’s more. The purple-haired Karen known as Megan Rapinoe has complained non-stop about the women’s team’s pay as compared to the men’s team’s pay. She even testified in front of Congress about the so-called “pay gap.”

“If it can happen to us and it can happen to me with the brightest lights shining on us at all times, it can and it does happen to every person who is marginalized by gender,” Rapinoe said. “But we don’t have to wait. We don’t have to continue to be patient for decades on end.”

The only problem is that while the raw numbers show a gap — “a women’s national soccer team player earns a base salary of $3,600 per game while a men’s player earns $5,000″ — women actually make more than men as a percentage of the revenue the sport brings in.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “USSF also says the men’s team generates more revenue. The women’s team generated $101.3 million over the course of 238 games between 2009 and 2019 while the men generated $185.7 million over 191 games, according to the federation.” In an article at The Federalist, John Glynn agrees.

One of the major factors that separate men’s sports and women’s is a not so little thing called revenue. To put it bluntly, female soccer players, just like female basketball players and female hockey players, are paid less because their respective sports make less. The total prize money for the Women’s World Cup in France this July was $30 million; the total prize money for the men’s 2022 World Cup in Qatar will be $440 million.

This gap is criminal, right? It’s not. When viewed objectively—based on how much money each competition generates—women actually make more than men. How so?

Well, there is a sizable difference in the revenue available to pay the male and female teams. According to Mike Oznian, a writer for Forbes, the 2015 Women’s World Cup “brought in almost $73 million, of which the players got 13%. The 2010 men’s World Cup in South Africa made almost $4 billion, of which 9% went to the players.”

Last year, the men’s World Cup in Russia generated more than $6 billion in revenue; the participating teams shared about $400 million. That is less than 7 percent of overall revenue. Meanwhile, the 2019 Women’s World Cup made somewhere in the region of $131 million, doling out $30 million, well more than 20 percent of collected revenue, to the participating teams. It seems a pay gap does exist, after all.

The women’s soccer team has some exceptional players and has been the most successful women’s team to ever compete. So many of the women are stars in their own right, like Julie Ertz, Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, Christen Press and, yes, even Megan Rapinoe—and they’ve won four Women’s World Cup titles, four Olympic gold medals and eight CONCACAF Gold Cups. The U.S. men’s team boasts no such record.

So, yes, the US Women’s National Team is a powerhouse in women’s soccer, but the fact remains that they don’t generate the revenue that the men’s team does. That fact seems lost on them because it doesn’t stop them from complaining about it on their international platform.

It’s a disgrace.

A few years ago in response to LeBron James’s remarks about President Trump, Laura Ingraham told him to “shut up and dribble.” No one wants to hear athletes make political comments because sports was an event that brought us all together, no matter your politics.

Same with women’s soccer. Their whining and complaining about pay and being “marginalized by gender” ruins the sport for so many of us. Maybe instead of virtue-signaling and insulting your country and its people, you could stop ignorantly embarrassing yourselves and concentrate on doing the one thing you are being paid for: winning soccer games.

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DAILY BROADSIDE | Has CRT Already Peaked? Don’t bank on it.

Daily Verse | Ecclesiastes 2:24
A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God.

Wednesday and because my day job is demanding more of me this week, this morning’s offer is going to be quick.

Victor Davis Hanson wrote a solid piece last week that’s been making the rounds in which he examines The American Descent into Madness. He writes,

In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.

He then addresses Citizenship as Mere Residency, Crime as Construct, The Campus Con, Commissars and Jacobins, Inflation Is a Mere Construct, Our People’s Military, Keep Cuba Castroite? and The United Nations Über Alles. While I encourage you to read the whole thing, the one I want to call attention to is the fourth: Commissars and Jacobins. Here’s what VDH writes (with my emphasis):

The critical race theory craze is reaching peak woke, or is already on the downslope. No complex and sophisticated society is sustainable with a Maoist creed of cannibalizing citizens for thought crimes. Commissars do not produce anything or serve anybody, but only monitor thoughts and speech to ascertain the purity of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are not just a drain on the productive sector but will insidiously destroy it, since their currency is to ensure a timid, obsequiousness and banal orthodoxy.

We know from the failed Soviet system and from the French Revolution that the most mediocre in society became its most eager auditors of correct behavior. The arbiters of proper thought—the self-righteous paid toady, the perpetual victim employed in service to government payback, the freelancing snitch—were always the villains of freedom, productivity, and humanity, whether we read of the killing off of Alexander the Great’s inner circle, the forced suicides of the Neronian circle, the Jacobin murder spree, or the nightmarish world described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

That the Biden Administration has now joined with Silicon Valley to hunt down on social media any dissenters from this month’s official policy on vaccinations and mask-wearing was not so shocking as to be expected from a media that banned coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In Cuban-fashion, millions of judge-jury-executioner online snitches, with government encouragement, will help root out incorrect thoughts at light speed.

I hope he’s right about CRT. But knowing the Left, once CRT has outlived its usefulness to them, they’ll find something else to push on us and scream about. In my opinion, the way to defeat these jackals is to stand up to them by saying, “No.” As in, “No, I don’t accept your premise that I’m racist or that a man can be a woman. And you’re nuts to believe those things.”

I strongly encourage you to study up on CRT and its Marxist roots. You need to know your enemy.

And, if you don’t regularly read VDH, you should.

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Daily Broadside | The Latest Victim of Cultural Marxism: Human Dignity

Daily Verse | Proverbs 31:30
Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;
but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.

Tuesday and the beat goes on, especially the crazed society previously known as “America.” Earlier this month I wrote a series of posts on the roots of Critical Theory, which is a philosophy dedicated to tearing down a capitalist society to make way for communism.

The latest target of woke criticism is Anthropocentrism, the view that human beings are the centerpiece of creation. According to Ellie Gardey in The American Spectator,

The nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, held its annual meeting last week, and suffice it to say that the measures the delegates passed were radical.

One measure passed by the delegates warrants special attention.

The measure called on the union to issue a study criticizing “empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”

This is the group of busybodies who, instead of teaching reading, writing and arithmetic, are preoccupied with undermining our society by first, studying these nonsense issues, then incorporating them into the classroom. If you haven’t pulled your kids out of the public schools yet, you still have about about six weeks.

The inclusion of “anthropocentrism” on their list is a direct attack on the the biblical teaching that mankind was God’s crowning achievement during creation.

The National Education Association’s inclusion of anthropocentrism as an oppressive ideology to be done away with marks a turning point in the success of radical animal rights activists. The movement to disrupt the fundamental Western principle that humans should be treated with dignity because we are made in the image and likeness of God is going mainstream.

The principle of the Imago Dei is the foundation of our society. It’s inherent in the Declaration of Independence’s statement that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

What the author calls “the fundamental Western principle” is grounded in Judeo-Christian values and teaching. Ultimately, that’s what the progressive Left is after. They are undermining our society, but our society was built on Judeo-Christian principles, which means they have to destroy the roots, i.e. Christianity.

Thus, to dismantle anthropocentrism would be to dismantle the basis for our rights. The focus of government and society would no longer be the dignity of man — that would be replaced with a plan to prioritize leftists’ views of what’s best for nature at all costs. To achieve that vision, climate policy will trump human flourishing and efforts to decrease the human population, whether by euthanasia or abortion, will be central.

It’s ludicrous, but where is it all coming from? To understand the basis for Critical Theory is to understand the system that we’re facing, which wants to replace everything distinctive about America with something diametrically opposed to it.

Why does it matter? A nation is to a large extent defined by its symbols and associations, the holidays, rituals, heroes, and history — the mystic chords of memory — that constitute its collective self-understanding. This is how a nation tells itself what it is and what its priorities should be.

As the 20th-century liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger explained with regard to accounts of the past in particular, “as the means of defining national identity, history becomes a means of shaping history.”

“We need to know who our enemy is,” says Mark Levin, and his new book, “American Marxism,” is the first resource I recommend. Below I’ve embedded a couple of discussions of his book. He calls attention to the danger we’re in by educating us on Marxism in the U.S. Watch them both.

If you’re interested in hearing about Christianity and Wokeness, listen to this podcast of “In the Marketplace with Janet Parshall,” in which theologian Owen Strachan discusses his book of the same title.

I strongly encourage you to educate yourself so we can better stand against the enemies of freedom we face.

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Daily Broadside | What Would Jesus Do? Not That.

Daily Verse | Proverbs 22:2
Rich and poor have this in common:
The Lord is the Maker of them all.

Happy Monday everyone!

I wonder how many of us get discouraged by our lack of faith at times. We wonder if God is really there, if He really loves us, if He will really provide for us. We know that we should trust Him, but our doubts and fears get the best of us and we try to control our circumstances, and then we feel guilty about not trusting Him and that creates tension inside of us that needs to be resolved somehow and suddenly we decide to do something drastic to prove to ourselves — and to God! — that we really do have faith.

An Ohio woman reportedly crashed her car into two other vehicles and a house after taking her hands of [sic] the wheel and letting God take control at a speed of 120 mph (190km/h), as a way to test her faith.

Authorities claim that the unnamed 31-year-old was driving a car with her daughter, aged 11, down the streets of Beachwood, Ohio, at around midnight on June 15. Security footage shows her car running a red light and eventually spin out of control, hit a utility pole and two other vehicles before stopping into a house. Luckily, neither the driver nor her child were seriously hurt, and the house they crashed into, which was empty at the time, suffered only minor damage. Upon questioning the driver about the accident, police officers were shocked to hear that she had been going through trials and tribulations lately, and simply decided to “let go and let God take the wheel”.

Make sure you click through and see the video of the car blazing through a red light and clipping another car that was in the intersection. It was an act of God’s mercy that prevented any serious injuries or death in the situation.

This is pop theology taken literally. While I don’t know where she got the idea, I can imagine that she had been listening to “Jesus Take the Wheel.”

She was driving last Friday on her way to Cincinnati on a snow white Christmas Eve
Going home to see her mama and her daddy with the baby in the backseat
Fifty miles to go, and she was running low on faith and gasoline
It’d been a long hard year
She had a lot on her mind, and she didn’t pay attention
She was going way too fast
Before she knew it she was spinning on a thin black sheet of glass
She saw both their lives flash before her eyes
She didn’t even have time to cry
She was so scared
She threw her hands up in the air

Jesus, take the wheel
Take it from my hands
‘Cause I can’t do this on my own
I’m letting go
So give me one more chance
And save me from this road I’m on
Jesus, take the wheel

Now, I don’t know anything other than what the report says. The woman had been “going through trials and tribulations,” having lost her job, and decided to take her hands off of the steering wheel to “test her faith” in God. She was obviously in doubt about whether she had enough faith to trust God to provide for her.

There’s a lot wrong with this scenario, starting with her stated purpose: to test her faith in God. It seems that if she literally put her physical life (and that of her daughter’s) in God’s hands, that would confirm to her and to God how full of faith she was — or was willing to be.

The danger here is that she was forcing God’s hand to act, as it were, putting Him to the test to see if He was faithful. And that’s a big no-no.

At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Israel, we read that he “was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil” (Matthew 4:1). “The tempter,” a.k.a. Satan, or Lucifer, came to Jesus and tempted him three times and each time, Jesus responded with scripture. The second temptation is relevant for the news we just read.

Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written,

“‘He will command his angels concerning you,
and they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'”

Jesus answered him, “It is also written: Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
— Matthew 4:5-7

Satan knows the scriptures as well or better than we do (see James 2:19), and he used a couple of verses from Psalm 91 to tempt Jesus. But Jesus responds with scripture to refuse what would amount to a manufactured crisis, not a crisis that came about naturally in the course of His life.

“Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” This is a reference to when the Israelites grumbled against Moses and against God when they were thirsty and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses named that place Massah and Meribah because “they tested the Lord saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?'” (Exodus 17:7).

That’s what this woman did in letting God “take the wheel.” Instead living in a relationship of trust in the midst of the circumstances she was in, she decided to manufacture a crisis in which she hoped God would approve of her faith and steer her to some kind of a safe conclusion. It did not, of course, work out that way.

The woman has now been charged with felony assault, endangering a child and driving under suspension, and a grand jury is expected to consider the case later this week. Local media reports that, despite the charges against her, the young mother continues to claim that she did the right thing by letting God take the wheel to see if it would put her on the ‘right path’

“Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” Knowing that she was going through “trials and tribulations,” perhaps she could have read James 1:2-4.

Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

Did you notice the reversal of the testing there? “The testing of your faith.” I think the poor woman missed that God was already testing her faith in the midst of the jobless situation she was in. That was the test she needed to pass, not the one she created for God to address.

You may not be going through anything severe right now, like the loss of a job, but where are you tempted to “test God”? When do you feel the tension mounting between your degree of faith and your life’s circumstances? Instead of trying to force God’s hand, stay the course and live in a trusting relationship with Him. Let Him (metaphorically!) “take the wheel” and provide for you in His time and in His way.