Monthly Archives: June 2023

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Daily Broadside | SCOTUS Rulings Offer Mixed Bag of Results

Last day of June and we’ve completed half of 2023. About 18 months left for the sock puppet in the White House to finish off America. Unless he’s re-elected, you understand. And by “re-elected,” I mean “re-installed.” Nobody in their right mind would vote for the Resident again. And those who would vote for him again only make my point.

The Supreme Court of the United States is issuing its decisions this week, a couple of which have substantial implications for our life together as citizens. The first was a 6-3 decision in the case of Moore v. Harper which examined who has the power to set elections rules.

In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that limited state courts’ ability to wrest control of elections law from state legislatures in a North Carolina redistricting case. The ruling does not, however, entirely stymie activist attempts to use courts to override elected legislators’ decisions about election law.

In Tuesday’s Moore v. Harper decision, SCOTUS held that the U.S. Constitution’s elections clause “does not vest exclusive and independent authority in state legislatures to set the rules regarding federal elections.” But it also failed to defend state legislatures’ constitutional right to control elections law, including redistricting, as shielded from court review.

In essence, SCOTUS ruled that state legislatures do not control policies around federal elections in spite of the clear language of the Constitution. Constitutional lawyer Mark Levin was apoplectic.

“[Republican Justices] Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett are truly pathetic,” a frustrated Levin tweeted. He added two long tweets arguing that the SCOTUS decision undermined the Constitution of our besieged republic. The decision seems to be in direct conflict with Article 1, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators.

Only the states and Congress can regulate elections, according to the Constitution. But not according to SCOTUS.

Levin called out the Supreme Court for flouting the Constitution. “So, now the Framers’ and ratifiers’ clear language in the Constitution about state legislatures (not state governors or state courts) having the final say on electoral matters is the interpretation of right-wing kooks,” he asked sarcastically. Only Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito dissented from the majority opinion. So much for the “conservative” Supreme Court.

”[T]he Supreme Court just ruled that those who wrote the Constitution, adopted it, and ratified it really didn’t mean for final authority to rest with the state legislatures,” Levin explained. “They [supposedly] intended absolutely nothing by that language.  The lawlessness continues, and the Court has opened even further the interference in our elections by activist bureaucrats and courts, and the controversy that will continue to ensue, for as long as this unraveling republic exists.”

Given the 2024 election, this is a terrible decision. Poorly decided with especially poor timing.

The second significant decision is that in a 6-3 decision, SCOTUS outlawed affirmative action, which began under President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s.

The Supreme Court has ruled that it is unlawful for colleges and universities to use race as a factor in admissions, overturning rulings from as far back as 1978 that claimed institutions of higher education had a valid interest in promoting racial diversity on campus and could thus give favorable consideration to black and Latino applicants in their admissions process.

Two separate decisions were reached in which the nation’s highest court ruled that Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill engaged in unlawful discriminatory practices based on race that violated the Constitution. “[T]he Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause,” the opinion read. “Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”

All the liberal justices dissented, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts joined with the conservative court members, writing for the majority. 

From where I sit, this is a long-needed decision. Affirmative action policies used in college admissions — let’s just call them what they are: quotas — violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But because progressives live and die by the myth that institutionalized racism is still a thing, they believe minorities can’t succeed on merit alone and need the state to step in to give them a hand up.

Maybe 50 years ago there was a need for affirmative action, but affirmative action at its core is unfair and discriminatory. How many qualified students, ie., based on merit, were rejected from schools they wanted to attend because of an affirmative action admission that was based not on merit, but on the color of the student’s skin?

Equality, not equity.

This principle holds true in God’s kingdom, too. No one gets into heaven based on the color of their skin. God doesn’t look at the masses in heaven and say, “there’s not enough diversity here. I need some affirmative action policies.” No, we all, no matter tribe, nation, color or creed, are saved only by the merit of Jesus Christ.

No exceptions.

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | No Joke: They Really Are Coming For Your Children

So over the last couple of days I’ve been chronicling the filthy behavior of the Alphabet mafia during their so-called “Pride” events across the US and Canada. I’ve noted that barely clothed and fully naked men have been gyrating or bicycling or twerking in public with children present.

And the children are present with parents who either don’t care about the psychological damage such exposure will do to their kids or are simply too weak to resist being carried along by the open sewer running down the middle of our culture.

Worst of all, the sexual anarchists aren’t hiding that they are targeting our children.

LGBTQ activists participating in New York City’s annual Drag March on Friday sparked outrage for chanting “we’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children” in a Manhattan park.

The marchers, many wearing flamboyant dresses and clothing, walked through Tompkins Square Park in the East Village Friday night as part of the city’s Pride Month celebrations.

Video of the march shows people laughing and joining in with the cheeky chant — including one dancing topless woman.

C’mon, guys. It’s just a “cheeky chant.”

Seriously.

A little naughty nothing to worry about. No big deal.

Many online users pointed out that the chant was more than likely a joke in response to accusations of pedophilia among the drag community from the right.

We’re just joking. LOL!

We’re not really coming for your children. We’re just mocking the totally unjustified stereotype you conservatives have of us. It’s your fault H8er!

What the reaction to the declaration that “we’re coming for your children” tells me is that there’s still a wide swath of the American public that does not accept homosexuality and transgenderism as “normal.” They only “accept” it because the state has told them to accept it. They only “accept” it because they no longer have the cultural weight to oppose it.

Another part of it is that no one wants someone else usurping the role of parent in a child’s life. Atheists and the irreligious don’t want Christians telling their kids about Jesus. Christians don’t want secular humanists telling their kids about evolution. And nobody wants sexual deviants telling their kids about fisting or tucking and binding.

Especially a stranger.

Any parent would feel offended when someone else undermines their authority by teaching their children something the parent wouldn’t. It’s a shocking loss of control that threatens the parent. That’s why parents are showing up to school board meetings to express their outrage about middle school teachers groomers.

But it’s more than that.

It’s that parents don’t accept homosexuality and transgenderism personally. They don’t accept it morally. And they sure as heck don’t want some godless hedonist influencing or molesting their children. They don’t want someone screwing up their kid’s moral center or their emotional stability.

Most of us have accepted that homosexuality has been mainstreamed. We’ve had our misgivings about where such integration into the culture would lead and warned that once we gave an inch, we could expect that other dominoes would fall. And now here we are with transgenderism already forcing itself toward normalization while drawing p3d0philia in its wake.

Disturbing details in the arrest of the nation’s first elected transgender legislator and a Massachusetts preschool worker on child exploitation and pornography charges have been released by the United States Department of Homeland Security.

Former New Hampshire State Rep. Stacie-Marie Laughton, a Democrat from Nashua and Lindsay Groves, a caregiver at the Creative Minds Learning Center in Tyngsboro, were both arrested and charged last week with multiple counts of child exploitation and distribution of child pornography. 

Laughton made history back in 2012 when she was elected as the first transgender lawmaker in the United States. She was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives.

The arrests of Laughton and Groves were initiated by the Nashua Police Department, but because of the nature of the crimes, it has been transferred to HSI for federal prosecution.

According to a report  based on a preliminary investigation into the case by a Homeland Security criminal investigator, Groves bragged in text messages that  she used  “natural bathroom breaks” at the daycare center prior to “naptime” to take photos of children’s genitals.

Special agent Rocco Rauseo said he was able to determine that the children allegedly exploited by Laughton and Groves are between the ages of 3 and 5. 

No joke.

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Daily Broadside | Either Bud Light Hasn’t Learned a Thing or They Just Don’t Care

In my commentary yesterday about all the “Pride” events I didn’t mention Bud Light, but they were part of the story. Before I get to that, here’s the latest on their cratering sales.

Data from Bump Williams Consulting and NielsenIQ show that sales for Bud Light are down 28.5 percent year-over-year for the week ending June 17, according to the New York Post. That’s a decline of about 2 percentage points from the week ending June 10, when sales dropped 26.8 percent, Bump Williams’s data show.

Anheuser-Busch’s other brands, including Budweiser and Michelob Ultra, have also suffered year-over-year losses. Budweiser’s sales are down 12.3 percent, Busch Light is down 8.1 percent, and Michelob Ultra is down 4 percent, according to Bump Williams and Nielsen IQ.

At the same time, competitors like Yuengling Lager went up 25.1 percent, the data show. Coors Light saw a 21.8 percent increase, and Miller Lite went up 16 percent.

And for the month of May, Constellation Brands-owned Modelo Especial was the number one-selling brand in the United States, outpacing Bud Light, which fell to number two, industry data show.

Bump Williams, chief of the eponymous consulting company, told the New York Post on June 21, “This was a tough week for Bud Light and other beer brands” that are owned by Anheuser-Busch, including Budweiser. Sales of Budweiser were down by 10 percent, Natural Light was down by 2.3 percent, and Michelob Ultra was down by 2.4 percent.

Any hope that the consumer backlash would ease up after a spike of disgust has rapidly vanished. 24 percent of Bud Light’s buyers “no longer purchase the brand.”

“We believe recent underperformance implies a permanent reduction in ABI’s U.S. business,” Deutsche Bank analyst Mitch Collett wrote for Barron’s. “Our proprietary survey data suggests these headwinds are likely to fade even if we do not expect the U.S. business ever to fully recover from its current challenges.”

Collett also upgraded shares of AB InBev to “buy” from “hold,” increasing the price target to $65.92 from $64.83, according to the report. Data gathered by Deutsche Bank suggest that 24 percent of Bud Light’s consumers no longer purchase the brand. Another 18 percent are buying less, he said.

[…]

Another analyst said Bud Light could see tough times ahead. Evercore’s Robert Ottenstein said Bud Light will “permanently lose” between 15 and 20 percent of its volume. After that, “declines will resume at about the average rate of the prior 10 years,” he said.

Buy low, sell high.

Has the “fratty” and “out of touch humor” been sufficiently updated yet, Bud?

Apparently.

However, some social media users this week noticed Bud Light is an official sponsor of the Pride Toronto Parade, which promotes the LGBT lifestyle, and will “feature them on our can design.”

“Bud Light Canada has been a proud partner of Pride Toronto for the last 10 years. This year, we’re commemorating this milestone with Pride Toronto by featuring them on our can design, as well as continuing as the official beer sponsor of the festival,” Bud Light’s Canadian website says. “As a brand, Bud Light Canada is excited to once again celebrate and support the LGBTQIA2S+ community through Pride Toronto’s annual pride celebration and parade.”

Is this double down on stupid? Bud Light can’t NOT know that their consumer base has fled and most likely won’t be replaced, precisely because they associated themselves with a trans-influencer, part of the ever-expanding alphabet mafia. They have refused to apologize or even fire anyone involved in that disastrous marketing decision. (Bud Light Marketing Vice President Alissa Heinerscheid and Group Vice President of Marketing Daniel Blake are still on “leave” and Anheuser-Busch denies reports that they were fired.)

Here’s what was on Bud Light’s stage at the Toronto festivities. (Content warning if you click the link.)

They deserve to be not just be boycotted, but abandoned. Leave them to the minority of sexual obsessives’ dollars. That’s who they pander to, so leave them.

They are blind guides.

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Daily Broadside | Smut No Longer Hidden in Brown Paper Wrappers But Presented Live and in Public to Children

I assume that many of you have seen the reports of “Pride” events around the states. All are little more than wicked displays of hedonism. Content warning for links to the following videos.

A nearly naked man in underpants twerks in front of children in Minneapolis.

Fully naked men proudly show their penises to children in Seattle.

An “all ages family-friendly” pride festival in Denver.

Overtly-sexual performances and entertainment with children present at a Pride event in Arlington, TX.

The event above took place “directly next to a big church in Arlington. This, of course, is not a surprise; a frequent strategy of the organizers of these events is to incorporate faith and religion in their blasphemous performances” (emphasis mine).

Here, a street preacher is surrounded, mocked and belittled by members of a “Pride” event who “woof” like dogs and claim they are “born this way.”

Back to the children. It’s clear that these sexually obsessed perverts are determined to force their version of morality on the next generations of children. Listen to this crowd in the annual New York City Drag March chant, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children!”

We all agree they are grooming our children.

Intentionally.

Methodically.

Without apology.

I look at this and think, “How much more can we tolerate?” Seriously. I mean, how low can we allow it to go? We’re at a severe level of deviancy and licentiousness. This is a Sodom-and-Gomorrah kind of wickedness.

Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”

God destroyed that city for its sexual deviancy.

Worst of all, I’m aghast not only with the flaunting of public nudity (isn’t that illegal?), but with the fact that parents are exposing their children to this debauchery. This isn’t about “rights” and a hand wave away because parents “know what’s best” for their children. What has happened to their sense of propriety? How is it that they’ve become accessories to the destruction of the youngest and most innocent of minds and bodies?

The Church cannot be party to this. In fact, the Church should be leading the charge against sexual deviancy. Unfortunately, many churches embrace homosexuality and show up to “Pride” parades to show “love and support” for those who practice homosexuality. It’s “loving,” you see, to support such people. We don’t want to come across as hateful and judge-y now, do we?

I imagine a day when thousands upon thousands of Christians and like-minded Americans show up and outnumber participants and audiences at these crass and tasteless spectacles. Be prepared to be arrested, though, for causing a disturbance or for engaging in “hate” speech.

We should not be afraid to exhibit righteous indignation and, frankly, outrage over the clear degeneracy being displayed. God said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”

It was as bad as the outcry that reached him. And there were consequences.

Do you suppose the outcry against America is currently “so great and our sin so grievous” before a holy God? Why should we think we’re somehow immune to a similar fate?

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Daily Broadside | One Year On From Reversing Roe v. Wade

A new week and the last of June 2023. Thank God “Pride Month” is nearly over.

You know another thing to thank God for? The overturning of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”

One thing to note is that the the SCOTUS ruling did not outlaw abortion. It simply returned the question to the jurisdiction of the individual states. It did, however, undo a grievous judgment of a prior Court that essentially made up a detailed law, far beyond its stated legal power to do so.

Now the decision is back in the hands of state legislatures, meaning that there are 50 fronts for pro- and anti-life forces to fight.

Over the last 12 months, 13 states have enacted near-total bans on abortion, while at least a dozen more have approved new laws curtailing access. In one state, Wisconsin, abortion services are suspended due to uncertainty about the status of an abortion ban from 1849 that remained on the books after the Roe decision. Wisconsin’s top officials are challenging the pre-Roe ban in court, arguing it should be unenforceable.

But we should be gratified with the huge “win” and the downstream impact that it has had.

Another great after-effect of the demise of Roe is that donations to abortion access groups have fallen off.

The “ rage giving ” did not last. Abortion access groups who received a windfall of donations following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade one year ago say those emergency grants have ended and individual and foundation giving has dropped off.

After the Dobbs decision, some major funders of abortion access also have ended or shifted funding from organizations working in states where abortion is now banned, said Naa Amissah-Hammond, senior director of grantmaking with Groundswell Fund, which funds grassroots groups organizing for reproductive justice.

Women’s health and foster care nonprofits, who expected increased demand in areas where access to abortion has been eliminated or restricted, say they also haven’t seen increased support.

What this tells me is that abortion is no longer a front-and-center issue for the culture at large, which is a detriment to Democrats, who fund-raise off of, and get voters to the polls from, the spectre of not having “safe and affordable” abortion services available. If abortion isn’t screaming for attention then there is less for the enemies of life to gin up fear over.

John Zmirak at The Stream wrote a good piece the other day and made these points:

The Unbridgeable Chasm
The point I was making, and which we should all insist on, is that the Life issue finally isn’t negotiable. It’s the Great Divide, the Grand Canyon, as slavery once was. Across it, no lasting rope bridge is possible. Either you think human life is fundamentally good and hence sacred, or you don’t. Either you believe that sexual convenience is a basic human right like life and liberty, or you don’t.

I’ve written here before about how quickly pro-aborts dropped the pretense that “abortion rights” are somehow grounded in the unwritten implications of this or that part of the U.S. Constitution. Justice Samuel Alito’s brilliant, historic majority opinion demolished the rickety, Rube Goldberg constructs of every pro-abortion precedent.

The Pretense Dropped Like a Towel at a Bathhouse
Now leftists have stopped citing “privacy” and “liberty,” which is handy — since they’ve made it clear that they actually believe in neither. If they did, they wouldn’t support secret FISA warrants aimed at Trump supporters and mandates for experimental vaccines. The same people who claimed for decades that “privacy” protected abortions up through nine months were happy to have the hostess at TGI Fridays demand women show their vaccine passports.

Now things are easier for them, in a sense. They can be honest and admit that they don’t care about “choice.” (You can’t choose your vaccine status, your kids’ public school, or what you say on the Internet.) They just care about abortion.

They’re willing to rally with Satanists who claim that it’s their “sacrament.” They don’t want abortions “safe, legal, and rare.” They never did. (When Bill Clinton said that, he was just as sincere as when he promised Hillary that he would “forsake all others.”) They want them easy, plentiful, and profitable — and they want to gaslight women who’ve had them into “shouting” them proudly in public.

To Face the Party of Death, We Need a Party of Life
We should help the left to make this point, that it’s unambiguously the Party of Death. It’s also the party of crime in the streets, child castration, chaotic open borders, racist “diversity” mandates, gun grabs, massive debt, election fraud, censorship, mass indoctrination, torn down statues, Antifa, mob rule, and defunding the police.

I particularly like his cut that the Democrats are “the Party of Death.” It’s true and I long ago came to the conclusion that I’d rather be an American than a Democrat. Their party is nothing but anti-Americanism draped in the red, white and blue.

Abortion may no longer be considered a constitutional right, but that fight, and many others, are far from over.

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Daily Broadside | New Term Tries to Make “Normal” Just Another Brick in the Wall

Not sure if you’ve heard, but there’s a new term being bandied about that applies to me and my sexuality. Straight men are now “gynosexuals” and we’re just another stripe on the Pride flag.

Are You Gynosexual? Here’s What It Means, According to Experts

It isn’t easy being a straight male these days unless maybe you enjoy all the privilege that Hunter Biden does. Everybody else gets their own special color on that increasingly garish flag, gets to bobble their man-boobs on the White House lawn, and has the entire month of June dedicated to whatever naughty thing they’re doing with their private parts — slice it, dice it, even make Julienne fries!

But as a straight white male, I don’t get any of that stuff. I have to make do somehow with my gorgeous wife of 21 years, my two handsome sons, and the rewarding career that I’ve pursued for more than two decades. It’s a daily struggle.

As of today, though, I don’t have to settle for less. Thanks to the experts, I now understand that I’m a total freak with my own special made-up word and everything.

Bite me, normies, because my color just went up on the Pride flag. That’s right: I’m a gynosexual, unlike the rest of you squares.

Stephen Green’s tongue-in-cheek take on the latest development in the dynamic world of ever-evolving sexual freakisms is humorous, but there is something vaguely threatening about it.

Gynosexual, according to sex educator Lilith Fox “refers to being sexually attracted to femininity, irrespective of one’s own gender identity or the gender identity of the femme-presenting person they are attracted to.” In plain English, it means that whether you’re a man or a woman, you are a gynosexual if you’re attracted to femininity in either a male or a female.

It means that you can be a boy and like girls, or you can be a girl and like girls. You can also be a boy and like a girly-boy, or be a girl and like a girly-boy. Up until a minute ago, we’ve known boys who like girls as normal and girls who like girls as “lesbian,” and boys who like boys as “gay” and girls who like boys as normal.

But once the LGBTQWERTY+ mafia began defining every conceivable combination of sexual deviancy, they had to invent labels for the normies.

That’s what I find vaguely threatening. Don’t label me. Don’t add me to your endless list of sex-addled possibilities. Don’t try to force me into some little quadrant of your sexual matrix. Doing that destroys the historic “binary” norm of “men” and “women.”

Which is the point.

One guy has put up a fight on Twitter over being labeled “cis” by the trans-community.

He was, of course, taken to the woodshed by the TransElites, who told him that he had no choice. He was “cis” and that was that, you “cissy.”

That’s when Elon Musk jumped in.

This is a front in the war on cultural norms. Language is powerful; if the trans-activists can change the language, the terms of the debate, they win the culture. And so far they’ve been very successful.

Resist. Refuse to accept the label.

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Daily Broadside | A Short Post On A Long Day About Biden’s Son’s Plea Deals

It’s June 21—the first day of summer and the longest day of the year. All the days get shorter from here on out. If I was in charge of things, I’d make every day the longest of the year and sentence Hunter Biden to serve 12 years of them for his federal tax evasion and gun charges.

Chris Clark, an attorney who represented Hunter Biden in a recent criminal investigation, is insisting that prosecutors were thorough and that the case against the Democratic president’s son didn’t end with an overly lenient plea deal.

On Tuesday, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss notified the U.S. District Court that Biden intended to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts for willful failure to pay his taxes for two years. Weiss said Biden also agreed to enter a pretrial diversion agreement for obtaining a firearm at a time that he was actively using or addicted to a controlled substance, which is illegal.

The tax charges each carry a maximum penalty of 12 months in prison. The firearm charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, but the pretrial diversion agreement could allow him to avoid a criminal conviction and a related criminal punishment.

A couple of thoughts about this development. First, this is merely a slap on the wrist. It’s not even really a slap, more of a light finger tap on his arm saying, “Look, we can’t let you get away with what you’ve done because it’s too obvious that we’re prosecuting Trump on every and any possible charge we can dream up while ignoring the fact that your dad has done most of, if not more, of what we’re accusing Trump of doing. You can help us out by taking a small hit so that we can then say we are even-handed in our application of justice. Waddaya think?”

Tucker Carlson, who is now posting his commentary on Twitter, has thoughts that you should listen to.

“Above all there was no felony. Hunter Biden, who broke federal gun laws, can still carry a gun. It’s like it all never happened. In fact, the Justice Department just baptized Hunter Biden. A lifetime of sins washed away in an instant. It was a secular miracle.”

Second, these charges don’t even touch Hunter’s deals with the Ukrainians, the Russians, and the Chinese. The younger Biden was selling access to his father, who was vice-president of the United States. He was laundering money on behalf of his family. He was taking bribes on behalf of his father. These are the much more serious crimes that seem to have been committed by Hunter, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that by taking the fall for some misdemeanors, the DOJ can wipe its hands of the whole mess and say, “case closed.”

Speaker Kevin McCarthy thinks the “case closed” position makes the House’s investigation into the Biden’s self-dealings stronger.

Talking to reporters after the news that the president’s son plans to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and one felony gun possession charge, McCarthy said the investigation by the House Oversight Committee wouldn’t be swayed by the “sweetheart deal” Hunter Biden received from the Department of Justice, rather, it might help the investigation gather more information.

The Oversight Committee is investigating unverified information that came from a paid FBI informant through an FBI-generated FD-1023 tip sheet. The document alleges that Hunter Biden and President Joe Biden each took $5 million bribes from an executive at the Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, where Hunter sat on the board.

“This does nothing to our investigation,” McCarthy said. “It actually should enhance our investigation because the DOJ should not be able to withhold any information now saying that there’s a pending investigation. They should be able to provide Chairman Comer with any information that he requires.”

David Weiss, the U.S. attorney leading the Hunter Biden investigation, said: “The investigation is ongoing.” So, it will likely still be difficult for Comer to get the information he requests.

When asked about the DOJ saying the investigation is still ongoing, McCarthy said it was a ploy for them to continue withholding information from the House of Representatives under the pretext of an ongoing investigation.

“How can Hunter Biden plead guilty, no jail time, and the DOJ say there’s still an investigation, try to withhold information to the House? That’s unacceptable and will not stand,” McCarthy said. “You cannot plead guilty, say you’re not going to do jail time, and then say you can’t give papers to the U.S. House of Representatives. That’s not going to stand. That’s not going to work.”

Bless your heart. Of course the DOJ will continue stonewalling. Who’s going to make them give up the information? The FBI?

LOL.

Well, maybe Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) knows something we don’t.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) vowed action from her side of the aisle on the matter, saying in a statement: “It’s no coincidence that less than a week after President Trump is arraigned, Hunter Biden is pleading guilty to a sweetheart deal with no jail time. The DOJ is going for the low-hanging fruit by charging Hunter Biden with a gun felony and two tax misdemeanors, after years of slow walking their investigation.”

“For AG Garland to maintain his mantra that there is one standard of justice is pathetic,” she continued. “If the DOJ thinks this dismisses the $5 million alleged bribery scheme or the years of reported Biden family corruption, they are mistaken. We will not allow full accountability to fall by the wayside.”

Maybe. We are watching a two-tiered system of justice being applied in real time.

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Daily Broadside | We’re Witnessing the Use of Unchallenged Institutional Power

It’s Tuesday and I’m back from a little bit of R&R. My thanks to Bruce Gust who filled in for me while I was gone. This is the third year in a row that he’s done that pro bono, and I truly appreciate his contributions. I learned a few things from him about the role that our Founders’ faith played in the days leading up to the Revoltionary War and the role that it played in the early days of our nation. I think some of his meditations can be very helpful in considering how God has guided our country even in its earliest forms (maybe especially in its earliest forms). I’m especially impressed that he’s pulling many of the posts he shared into a book called American Devotional Series: Part One: The Revolutionary War. It’s a great concept and it was Bruce’s gift to give us a sneak peek at his work.

Of course, we’re a long, long way from those “earliest days” of our country. Sometimes it feels like we’re a long, long way from any semblance of faith. I think it’s fair to say that while there still exists a Christian presence in our culture, most of our societal institutions, whether they are political, educational, judicial, medical, technological, business related, scientific or economic, Christianity by and large does not have the cultural influence it once did.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Big Business: Amazon locks a man out of his account and disrupts the function of his entire smart home system that uses Alexa to communicate with Amazon Echo gadgets.

Earlier this month, Amazon locked a man out of his account, disrupting his extensive smart home system. The suspension was driven by a delivery driver who claimed the man used a racial slur through his automated doorbell system. The only problem is that the man captured the entire interaction on his security system — the communication to the worker was an automated greeting of, “Excuse me, can I help you?”

You can read the linked article but I can save you the step by summarizing. The Amazon delivery driver falsely accused the Amazon customer of using a racial slur. Instead of giving both the driver and the customer the benefit of the doubt and thoroughly investigating, Amazon reacted as though the customer was guilty and punished him for it by essentially locking him out of their services.

Not only is that an inversion of our criminal code that protects the rights of the accused—who is presumed innocent until proven guilty—but it completely ignores a biblical principle that undergirds our system of justice.

Any story sounds true until someone tells the other side and sets the record straight. (Proverbs 18:17, LB)

Also, this is one reason I don’t use lots of “smart home” gadgets. Who wants to voluntarily give any unregulated, unelected, unaccountable organization control of their personal environmental systems? I don’t even like that the natural gas companies can read my meter from the comfort of their offices, much less make decisions at their discretion about whether I can continue to use the services I pay for.

What Amazon did borders on leveraging a social credit system in which they are the arbiters of “good” and “bad” social credit. Who gave them this power? They took it unto themselves.

Political: A suspicious raid on a gun seller in Montana by 20 armed IRS agents supported by members of the ATF.

Tom Van Hoose has owned Highwood Creed Outfitters in Great Falls, Montana for 13 years. As he pulled into work Wednesday morning, twenty heavily armed Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division agents swarmed his store. He tells TTAG that the IRS agents, in full battle rattle, had been mustered from as far away as Denver and Idaho to serve a warrant for his financial records.

He told us the IRS claims that he has under-reported and failed to report millions of dollars of income. Mr. Van Hoose denied that categorically and told us that anyone who knows anything about the gun business knows there’s not a lot of extra revenue in running a retail gun store and range.

Highwood Creek Outfitters was closed down Wednesday while the agents rifled through his records. The IRS CID troops took ten hours to copy the information on his computers and download his point of sale software information. But what Van Hoose says really concerns him is the fact that in addition to his accounting and sales records, the agents confiscated 13 years of 4473 forms and copied his firearm acquisition and disposition book.

Later in the article, the reporter writes,

Anyone who’s ever completed a 4473 form knows there’s no revenue or financial data there. That form is a record of a firearm purchase transaction used to facilitate a NICS background check and potentially trace a gun’s ownership down the road if it’s used in a crime. Gun dealers are required to keep those forms for at least 20 years.

The question then is, why would the IRS want customer transaction information? Van Hoose tells us the 4473 forms were not included on the list of financial records specifically listed on the warrant the IRS agents served him during the raid. Yet they took them anyway.

I’m sure I don’t know if Mr. Van Hoose has done anything illegal, but it doesn’t sound like he thinks he has, and we’re well aware that gun laws and tax collection are obsessions with the federal government.

What a coinkydink.

Remember that this administration asked for—and got—funding for 87,000 more IRS agents and that many of them will be armed. What happened in Montanta is exactly what we have to fear from a fully armed IRS; raids on unsuspecting citizens to intimidate and harass them.

You think you’ve seen branches of the government weaponized? I bet we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

There used to be a social contract between we the people and our government. We gave them power and they used that power constitutionally and legally. That contract has been torn up and thrown away by the Marxists because they don’t fear the law anymore and, more to the point, they don’t fear God anymore.

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Driving on the Wrong Side of the Road

How Bizarre is That?

Imagine someone driving on the wrong side of the road and justifying it by saying they have the right to be happy.

How bizarre is that?

Now envision that same situation, only now that person is being pulled from the wreckage that was their automobile after colliding with another car because they were in the wrong lane. But instead of admitting that it was their fault, they insist that it’s all due to an oppressive system that obligates them to conform in ways that make them feel uncomfortable.

The person who wants to see themselves as their own absolute is having to constantly reconfigure the human experience in order to validate their mindset as being beyond reproach. They’re like the middle schooler who turns in their multiple choice exam believing that because they had the freedom to choose how they wanted to answer each question, they’re automatically deserving of a perfect score.

This is the world of the individual who has declared himself as his own bottom line. There are no failing test scores, there are no standards, and anything that could be accurately processed as a consequence of their actions is dismissed by labeling it as a hateful convention coming from either a corrupt institution that needs to be destroyed or an ignorant individual that needs to be silenced.

They shoot themselves in the foot and then blame all the pain they’re in on the one who told them not to pull the trigger to begin with.

When you attempt to reason with this kind of person, you are not being heard as someone who’s questioning their logic as much as you are challenging their authority. It’s not about what’s true, it’s about what works as far as those statistics and testimonies that can be used to make a self serving agenda appear compassionate and preferrable while simultaneously validating themselves as the only one that they’re accountable to.

And yet…

Practical Gravity and Simple Math

The validity of one’s perspective is ultimately proven by what happens when that perspective is put into practice. However convoluted and volatile the debate may be, feelings and beliefs can be readily identified as being either clarifying or distracting simply by observing those things that result from the application of any one methodology.

Should one approach translate to a world of pain and problems, that perspective can then be logically subordinated to a viewpoint that yields better results. At that point, you’re not looking at anything other than pure utility and however passionate you may be about your particular brand of morality, you are no longer able to assert your preferences as principles when all that exists in the aftermath is a mess you expect someone else to clean up.

There has always been an element that wants to push back against those things that remind them that there is such a thing as “practical gravity.” You cannot hope to do certain things and not have to contend with the natural consequences of your actions. If you decide to jump out of an airplane as it’s flying through the sky, you can’t deny the effects of gravity simply because you want to believe that you have the right to be happy or because you believe that gravity is a byproduct of an oppressive hierarchy.

In a similar way, you can’t drive on the wrong side of the road and not risk a head on collision, nor can you embrace what amounts to a perverse or irresponsible lifestyle and not be confronted with the medical and practical realities that characterize the choice that you have made.

There is a natural order in place that transcends whatever it is that drives your resolve and you can’t circumvent that infrastructure simply because it doesn’t coincide with your opinion on the matter.

It’s math, really.

The way you think + the way you act = the price you pay

Wise decisions tend to be very beneficial and cost very little.

On the other hand, foolish choices can be lethal and in that way are very expensive.

And here’s the thing: When that bill arrives, it’s your responsibility. However you want to insist that it’s someone else’s fault or another person’s obligation, you’re the one that has to come up with the functional finances necessary to pay the amount owed which will inevitably include a lack of fulfillment, a substantial amount of wasted time and a collection of physical and emotional scars.

Antiquated Traditions

Some want to try and avoid the “practical gravity” of their situation by insisting that the angst they experience as a result of the way they choose to process themselves and the world around them is due to the unjust and antiquated traditions of the society they live in.

Perhaps.

But then again, if your perspective is revealed as being problematic in terms of what happens when your perspective is put into practice, it’s not the society you live in that’s causing the tension, it’s the organic outcome of your flawed approach.

It’s not the Supreme Court, it’s not a political party, it’s not a cultural trend or a societal norm.

You’re driving on the wrong side of the road and there are consequences to not staying in your lane that are based more so on the laws of Physics and Chemistry then they are the Department of Motor Vehicles.

This is the problem you inevitably encounter when you establish any kind of human agency as your philosophical foundation.

Die, Quit or Change

You have chosen to build your existence on a platform that is destined to either die, quit or change. It is as fluid as it is inconsistent and whatever rights or truisms you want to maintain as givens will resonate as such only when you’ve surrounded yourself with like-minded individuals. Reason being is that you can’t logically condemn another person’s viewpoint if everyone is entitled to their opinion and the universe is nothing more than a lucky mistake.

This is what happens when you remove God from the equation. Bear in mind that there are only two religions in the world: Either God is God or you are. Every religion on the planet empowers the individual with the ability to facilitate their own salvation. Only Christianity maintains that you are not your own deity and the only thing that you contribute to your salvation is the sin that makes it necessary.

When you embrace God as your philosophical starting point and the Substance of the empty tomb as what defines your identity, you’re no longer tasked with having to manufacture a reason for your existence or an enduring Source of fulfillment.

Bear in mind we’re talking about the Person of Jesus Christ – the Son of God and not a corrupted clergyman or a hypocritical layperson. Neither one of those two individuals died for your sins or put the planets in their place.

The Image of God, the Son of God and the Spirit of God

You are made in the Image of God, you have been redeemed by the Son of God and you have access to a Perfect Source of Purpose, Peace and Power because of the Spirit of God who lives in and through you.

Like our Founding Fathers, you can effectively dispute injustice because you’re not limited to a human premise, and unlike those who borrow from God without believing in Him, you can accurately claim an entitlement as a legitimate right because you know that they’re gifts from God He gives to guard your way and not weapons you use in an attempt to get your way.

Moreover, you don’t see His Instructions as “rules” as much as you see them as “tools” that you use to realize a life where you are making a difference and not just an appearance.

Scale That Wall and Dismantle That Strategy

There will always be people who drive on the wrong side of the road. They will justify themselves with compelling sounding arguments framed by a strategy designed to avoid that direct line of questioning that has the capacity to reveal their platform as toxic and self-serving.

But you can scale that wall and dismantle that strategy by focusing on the empirical results of their perspective and allow the logic of how a flawed methodology needs to be subordinated to an approach that yields a better outcome.

When you hear someone say, “That’s your opinion!” or “You can’t force your beliefs on me!” they’re neither proving their point nor are they proving you to be wrong. Rather, they’re attempting to secure the kind of pity that’s awarded to the person who’s been hurt in order to distract from the wreckage caused by their own decision making.

You can’t always change a person’s mind without changing their heart and only God can do that.

But God can use you to make an impact and you want to be ready to do more than argue…

You want to champion the Truth by asking the right questions and letting their responses not only make your point, but more importantly make Him known.

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Grasp the One, Do Not Let the Other Slip From Your Hand

Patrick Henry was speaking to the House of Burgesses and had tasked himself with convincing those who were hesitant to openly oppose King George and commit themselves to America’s quest for liberty.

He began by acknowledging the reality of differing opinions and emphasizing the importance of giving all viewpoints an equal hearing, especially given the magnitude of the subject being discussed.

At one point, he said…

It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country.”1

A common flaw in the way Truth is pursued by some is the way in which a person’s bias inclines them to dismiss any information that has the capacity to undermine the perspective they are most comfortable with. Instead of a conviction characterized by a comprehensive and balanced overview of the issue in question, preferences are substituted for principles and an emotionally charged opinion is submitted as an objective bottom line.

Ecclesiastes 7:16-18 says:

16 Don’t be excessively righteous, and don’t be overly wise. Why should you destroy yourself? 17 Don’t be excessively wicked, and don’t be foolish. Why should you die before your time? 18 It is good that you grasp the one and do not let the other slip from your hand. For the one who fears God will end up with both of them. (Ecc 7:16-18)

Regardless of the topic being discussed, it’s imperative to be balanced in the way you consider the criteria you allow to influence your thinking. It’s more than just a healthy way to ensure a good decision, it’s part of the daily debt you owe to God out of respect for Who He is and what He expects (Ps 32:8-10; Prov 12:22-23; 29:1; Jas 1:5-8).

 

 

1. “Patrick Henry – Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death”, “Yale Law School – Lillian Goldman Law Library”, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/patrick.asp, accessed May 21, 2023