Author Archives: Dave Olsson

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Daily Broadside | How Much Do You Know About the Bible?

I will be traveling over the long weekend, so there will be no posts Monday or Tuesday next week.

How about ending this week on a lighter note? Even though this blog is meant to examine the intersection of faith, culture and politics, I tend to get bogged down in the circus that is our current political state of affairs—amirite?

Some time ago I mentioned that I was developing a “bible basics” class for people who are either new to the Christian faith or who want to fill in the gaps of what they know about the Bible. I’m now planning to turn that material into a book and have been doing some further research to supplement what I originally did for the class.

When I talk about “bible basics” I make no assumptions about what people do or don’t know about the Bible. For instance, if I asked you why we call the Bible, “the Bible,” would you know? Do you know where that word came from?

No?

Well, it’s your lucky day, because I’m going to tell you.

Papyrus

The story starts around 3000 BC, when the Egyptians developed the use of papyrus as a primative form of paper (the word “paper” comes from the word papyrus), which offered advantages over materials like clay tablets and animal skins. The earliest archaeological evidence of papyrus use dates back to mid-2500 BC.

For those of you keeping track, that’s some 4,500-5,000 years ago.

As the Egyptians perfected the manufacture of papyrus, their product became well known and demand for “Egyptian papyrus” was high. They kept the method of production secret, guaranteeing a monopoly on the papyrus market.

One of the most important cities to the papyrus trade was Gebal, a port city on the coast of ancient Phoenicia, located about twenty miles north of the city of Beruit in modern-day Lebanon. Gebal, which played a unique role as an intermediary between Egypt and the rest of the ancient world, imported the famed Egyptian papyrus and then exported it to the Aegean region (the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey and south to the island of Crete).

And there is where we begin to pick up hints of the ancient roots of the word “Bible.”

Byblos

Papyrus was adopted by and used extensively by the Greeks. They got their papyrus from the Phoenician traders and called the city of Gebal, “Byblos” (βίβλος)—pronounced BIB-loss, their word for papyrus. More specifically, “biblos” referred to the inner fibers of the stalk of the papyrus reed, from which the rolls (or sheets) of papyrus were made.

Byblion

Once a scroll had been made from papyrus, the Greeks called it a “biblion” (βιβλίον), a diminutive of Byblos meaning “little scroll” (similar to how we say “booklet,” the diminutive of “book”). Eventually it came to refer to any written work (almost always scrolls at that time) and meant “scroll.”

Biblia

“Biblia” (βιβλία) was the plural of biblion, meaning “scrolls.” Greek speaking (Hellenistic) Jews called their scriptures ta biblia (τὰ βιβλία), “the scrolls.” Ta biblia gradually came to mean “the books” as the codex, precursor to the modern book, began to replace scrolls as the favored form of written works.

The earliest Christian use of ta biblia (the books) is said to be 2 Clement 2:14 (c. 150 AD): “The books and the apostles declare that the church . . . has existed from the beginning.” The earliest known use of “ta biblia” to refer to both the Old and New Testaments together was by John Chrysostom in the late fourth century AD.

Note that the word “biblia” is plural, so when it is used by Clement to refer to “the books” he is talking about multiple books, e.g. the individual books that were considered scripture (the canon of scripture that we know today was not fully formed). The sense of a singular “book” when referring to the scriptures had not yet developed, until …

… the Greek phrase was adopted into Latin, where it gradually lost its plural sense became biblia sacra (“holy book”). The word “biblia” was then loaned as a singular into the languages of Western Europe, including Old French.*

Bible

In Old French, the word “biblia” became bible (pronounced BEEB-leh), and was eventually adopted by Old English, replacing biblioðece as the ordinary word for “the Scriptures” in the early 14th century.

The sense of a “book” once associated with the etymology of the word Bible has become obsolete, and instead is now understood to mean any authoritative work (e.g. The Hunter’s Bible; The Football Fitness Bible), but specifically about the Christian scriptures.

And that’s why the Bible is called “the Bible.” The English word comes to us via the Old French “bible” from the Medieval Latin biblia, from the Greek βιβλία (biblia), the plural of βιβλίον (biblíon), originally a diminutive of βίβλος (bíblos), meaning “papyrus” because the Greeks got their rolls of papyrus from the Phoenician city of Gebal (Byblos).

Now you know something basic about the Bible that you didn’t know before. Impress your friends at church this weekend!

See you next week.

* The image is of a German Bible published in 1894 that I own. It has the word “Biblia” on the spine.

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Daily Broadside | I Live In A Foreign Country Now

Oh sure, we still mostly speak English and I don’t have any problem driving on the right side of the road, and I can still go out to a restaurant and understand the waitress. But it’s obvious to anyone who’s paying attention that the America of the last generation is gone. You may think that I’m being overly dramatic, but I assure you—it’s gone.

We are being overrun by foreigners, an act that is being enabled by an elite ruling class that hates America and is comfortably ensconced in their positions of power, prestige and wealth, far away from the effects of their ruinous decisions that are wreaking havoc on the rest of us.

2K migrants evacuated from Floyd Bennett Field ahead of storm: officials

BROOKLYN, N.Y. (PIX11) — Thousands of migrants were evacuated from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn to ride out a potential rainstorm on Tuesday night, officials said.

Approximately 2.000 migrants were moved from Floyd Bennett Field in Flatbush to James Madison High School on Tuesday afternoon, according to the Office of Emergency Management. Roughly 40 Department of Education buses were in the evacuation, according to the OEM.

The asylum seekers spent the night in the school’s gymnasium before returning to Floyd Bennett Field on Wednesday morning, officials said. The field began housing about 2,000 migrants last year.

Officials said the move comes over concerns of high winds and flooding that are expected to hit the area.

“The health and safety of migrants in our care is always a top priority, which is why we are currently overseeing the relocation of 1,900 guests from the humanitarian emergency response and relief center at Floyd Bennett Field due to an updated forecast with increased wind speeds estimated to be at over 70 MPH tonight,” a City Hall spokesperson said in a statement.

A strong storm system moved through the area later Tuesday, bringing heavy rain and damaging winds to portions of the tri-state area.

I notice the article doesn’t say anything about the 3,000 students at James Madison High School. Aren’t Tuesday and Wednesday school days?

Students at a Brooklyn high school were kicked out of the classroom to make room for nearly 2,000 migrants who were evacuated from a controversial tent shelter due to a monster storm closing in on the Big Apple.

The city made the move amid concerns that a massive migrant tent at Floyd Bennett Field would collapse from torrential rains and gusting winds — packing them instead into the second-floor gym at James Madison High School five miles away. 

The school’s neighbors were not keen on the last-minute decision.

“This is f—ed up,” said a local resident who identified himself only as Rob. “It’s a litmus test. They are using a storm, a legitimate situation, where they are testing this out. I guarantee you they’ll be here for the entire summer.

“There’s 1,900 people getting thrown into my neighborhood, half a block from where I live and we don’t know who they are,” he said.

“They’re not vetted. A lot of them have criminal records and backgrounds and we don’t even know.”

Sounds like “Rob” is a raging racist xenophobe! Doesn’t he know that “the health and safety of migrants in our care is always a top priority”? Foreigners are being prioritized over native citizens, “Rob.”

Plus, learning remotely worked so well during the Covid lockdowns!

One irate mom even went off on the migrants as they pulled up in a line of school buses in the pouring rain shortly before 6 p.m.

“How do you feel? Does it feel good?” the woman, who only identified herself as Michelle, screamed at the buses.

“How does it feel that you kicked all the kids out of school tomorrow? Does it feel good? I hope you feel good. I hope you will sleep very well tonight!”

Said a local man, “How do you feel stealing American tax money?”

Whoa! So much white supremacy and hatred of brown and black bodies!

Getting the children who were in that field into a shelter that offered more protection is basic human decency, but this is a great example of how our ruling class is burdening us, the American citizens, with the influx of foreign nationals.

If there weren’t 3.8 MILLION foreigners illegally waltzing into our country since Bradon illegitmately took office, this wouldn’t be a problem.

One of my readers commented yesterday on my article about the Xfinity bill I posted two days ago:

Our grandson’s middle school in Elmhurst has decided this year to make English as a second language. They let the principal (who had been there for years and everyone loved) go because she didn’t speak Spanish and brought in a new person who does. At our Granddaughter’s 8th grade graduation in May (from the same middle school) over half the class was Hispanic. They bus kids in from lower income areas so they can please the diversity squad. The liberals in town love it. Sara said there were fights everyday mostly among the Hispanic girls. Makes me very, very sad that this is what we’ve come to.

My response:

Dave Olsson says:
January 10, 2024 at 2:28 pm Edit

Your grandson and granddaughter will grow up in a foreign country. Not that they will move to one, but one will be force-fit onto this one.

I should have said they will live in a foreign country but, whatever, I’m not kidding.

The majority of Americans will not be white by 2045, according to data that highlights the US’ increasingly diverse population.

An analysis of census data by the think-tank Brookings Institution estimates that white people will comprise less than 50 percent of the US population for the first time in history in little over two decades.

The majority of the population will be made up of minority ethnicities: 24.6 percent for Hispanics, 13.1 percent for blacks, 7.9 percent for Asians, and 3.8 percent for multiracial populations, the analysis claims.

What could possibly be driving this monumental shift?

The shrinking white population can be explained both by higher levels of immigration among people in working age, as well as an influx of immigrant women of childbearing age.

Following a dip during the Covid pandemic, immigration through the southern border is up. The US Border Patrol reported more than 1.6 million encounters with migrants along the border with Mexico in the 2021 fiscal year, more than quadruple the number of the prior fiscal year and the highest annual total on record. 

By 2060, the census projects whites will comprise only 36 percent of the under-18 population, with Hispanics accounting for 32 percent.

You don’t say.

You. Don’t. Say.

I could handle this if the change was coming because of legal immigration. But this is an intentional sabotage of the white American majority with a plan to make all of these foreigners Democrat voters.

But Mr. Chairman, that’s the whole point. This is what’s going on, folks, at home. If you’re trying to figure this out, if you’re scratching your heads, you’ve seen the video, you see droves of people, 2.4 million people coming over the border illegally, the president allowing, the Democrats in charge of Congress are allowing it, the deal is they’re going to turn them into voters. You just heard it. They don’t have any problem with that. They celebrate it. Here’s the deal. We have a problem with it. The Constitution has a problem with it. American elections should be decided by American citizens.

That’s it. That’s what this is about. That’s why we’re jumping up and down and screaming, my friends on the video who are commenting about this. That’s why we’re so upset, because our constituents are frightened that we are losing our country. We’re losing our security, we’re losing our sovereignty, because we’re going to allow people from 160 different countries around the world to come in here and decide our elections. That’s it. Here it is on record. You all heard it.”

If you’re white, you’re not allowed to have a country of your own because you’re a hateful colonizer, bigot! Only black and brown bodies are allowed to colonize now.

Welcome to North Central America.

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Daily Broadside | A Recent Mailer Tells Me All I Need to Know About Immigration

We continue to be overrun by an invasion of foreigners who aren’t coming here because they want to be part of the Great American Experiment.

Aside from tax cuts and a tireless bloodlust for forever wars, there’s one thing Republicans of the bygone Bush era never tire of — the mass importing of destitute foreigners who neocons swear are nothing less than patriotic Americans at heart, just itching for a chance to make a meaningful contribution to a country they so dearly love.

It’s beyond childish. What we’ve learned over the course of decades, but particularly in recent months, is that a substantial portion, if not the vast majority of Central and South American migrants thrusting themselves into U.S. taxpayer care is that they view this country as little more than an apartment upgrade.

They’ve switched neighborhoods, not lifestyles.

The problem of immigration has been going on for decades but, with the current junta in power, it’s being exacerbated beyond what anyone would have dreamed. You may have noticed that neither the Democrats NOR THE REPUBLICANS have made any serious attempt at stanching the flow of illegals. Where are the bills to overhaul our immigration system? Where are the calls to immediately close our borders to any trespassers?

Their collaboration on illegal immigration is a perfect example of the Uniparty, which exists to keep its members in power.

With that in mind, take a look at the piece of mail I received this past week from Xfinity, the Internet provider who connects me to this blog. They want to get more of their customers to join their mobile services.

Notice anything about it that might present an issue for me?

I don’t speak Spanish. I mean, un poco, but only the bit I learned in seventh grade Spanish class, like “arroz con pollo.” Other than that, this bulk advertisement is mostly indecipherable to me. Fortunately for me, Xfinity included an English version of the advertisement on the other side.

Let me point out a couple of more things about this mailer, and then explain why I’m making this an issue. First, when I took the mailer out of the envelope, it was folded so that the Spanish language side was up.

Normally I get advertisements in English. If there’s another language, it’s treated as secondary, as a translation of the primary language, usually on the back. This was reversed.

At first I thought it was a mistake. But, no, it was intentional.

You know how I know? Because my name and address are printed on the Spanish language side of the advertisement. You know how else I know? Because the envelope in which the advertisement was delivered is also printed with a promo in Spanish on the envelope:

I also know that this was intentional because Xfinity cannot know who reads English and who reads Spanish and who reads both. That’s why Xfinity included both English and Spanish versions. It’s not like my name was accidently added to the “Spanish-speakers” mail file.

And it can’t be that Xfinity is just throwing thousands of mailers to the wind and hoping to catch some new customers. The fine print says that the offer is for, “Existing Xfinity customers with a plan that has been active more than 90 days only.”

Xfinity is clearly not assuming English as the primary language. So here’s my question: why did Xfinity choose to bulk mail an advertisement to who-knows-how-many customers that is clearly targeting Spanish-speaking people?

I can only think of three reasons:

  1. My region is now majority Central American and I’m a minority. That would be news to me but, given the open border over the last three years, unsurprising.
  2. Xfinity has gone woke and they are now prioritizing “brown and black bodies” over white ones, no matter the racial make up of my region. How racist of them.
  3. Spanish-speakers have more money to spend than I do.

Maybe it’s a combination of all three. Whatever the strategy, it underscores the changing demographics of the United States, and that’s why I’m calling your attention to it.

The United States was founded as an English-speaking nation. Even as we grew in size and population, we remained a largely European-immigrant, English-speaking country. When other immigrants arrived, they either had to know English or learn English to thrive in their new home. We didn’t cater to every newcomer and print foreign languages on our signs or our products. If you wanted to “be an American,” you learned the primary language of your adopted home.

But the cultural Marxists and anti-Americans don’t want us to be a homogenus nation that is bound together by a common language or creed. They tell us that being “American” is racist and full of white supremacy. When anyone has tried to pass legislation that would make English the official language of the United States, it is often opposed,

“as a veiled attempt to promote racism and bigotry, rather than an attempt to unify a country. They argue that English-only legislation creates a negative image of non-English speakers, and increases intolerance and hostility toward cultural diversity.”

Ah, yes. Cultural diversity, the Marxist trope that for us to be a moral force for good in this world, we have to be “diverse.” Nothing says unity so clearly as diversity does.

Efforts to make English the official language of the US have been going on for decades. As recently as March 2023, U.S. Senators Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and JD Vance (R-OH) introduced a bill to to establish English as the official language of the United States. The bill is intended:

To declare English as the official language of the United States, to establish a uniform English language rule for naturalization, and to avoid mis-constructions of the English language texts of the laws of the United States, pursuant to Congress’ powers to provide for the general welfare of the United States and to establish a uniform rule of naturalization under article I, section 8, of the Constitution.

But have you heard that such a bill was being considered? You haven’t?

You don’t say.

I guess Mitch McConnell is too busy keeping his pals in Ukraine swimming in cash, squashing true conservative candidates at the polls, and bankrupting the country to worry about a little ol’ thing like national unity.

Getting that Xfinity bill in the mail surprised me because it’s direct evidence that I’m being displaced. I have to flip the page to get a translation, not the immigrant, because it’s not written with me in mind. I’m secondary.

That’s the goal of progressives—and the fact that they’re succeeding makes me a little sad and a little angry.

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Daily Broadside | The Big Question is Who You Will Vote for in 2024

The big, fat, hairy, looming anxiety everyone has coming into 2024 is the question of whether Donald J. Trump will regain the presidency. Joe Biden is doing his best to demonize Trump and all of his supporters.

BLUE BELL, Pa. — BLUE BELL, Pa. (AP) — President Joe Biden warned Friday that Donald Trump’s efforts to retake the White House in 2024 pose a grave threat to the country, the day before the third anniversary of the violent riot at the U.S. Capitol by then-President Trump’s supporters aiming to keep him in power.

Speaking near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington and the Continental Army spent a bleak winter nearly 250 years ago, Biden said that Jan. 6 2021, marked a moment where “we nearly lost America — lost it all.” He said the presidential race — a likely rematch with Trump, who is the far and away GOP frontrunner — is “all about” whether American democracy will survive.

The speech, the president’s first political event of the election year, was intended to clarify the expected choice for voters this fall. Biden, who reentered political life because he felt he was best capable of defeating Trump in 2020, believes focusing on defending democracy to be central to persuading voters to reject Trump once again.

Full of hyperbole and fear-mongering, the speech packed plenty of disinformation malinformation. We didn’t “nearly lose America” on January 6. But we’ve nearly lost it—”lost it all”—in the years since, as the Biden DOJ, FBI and Garland’s Gestapo have hounded, imprisoned, tried and sentenced protestors to outrageous sentences, who were doing nothing but walking through the Capitol building that day. Did you know that they’re now pursuing protestors who were merely wandering around outside the Capitol on January 6? Not those who went inside, but those were merely present? We’re becoming subject to a tyrannical surveillance state that protects the powerful and abuses the patriotic.

And while this election IS all about “whether American democracy will survive,” it’s not in the way Brandon means it. He means that if Trump is elected, “American democracy” won’t survive. First and foremost, the United States is a representative republic, not a democracy. As Jay McConville writes,

We do not have pure democracy or “rule by the majority” because we have constitutionally protected rights that cannot be voted away, [we] operate under rule of law, and have, till recently, limited government with limited powers.

The Founders rejected a pure democracy. They were aware of what a tyranny of the majority would exact from the people. The word “democracy” is never used in our Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights. Any time a Democrat uses the term “democracy” you can be sure it is their own ignorance being used in the service of perpetuating a lie.

Second, the true threat to our “democracy” is Brandon and his ilk, not Donald Trump. They are waging a PR campaign against Trump, trying to dissuade the American public from supporting him. The Russia! Russia! Russia! lies, the two impeachments, the raid on his house over “stolen” documents, the 91 criminal charges levied against him, the attempts to remove him from the ballot in Colorado, Maine, Michigan and Illinois, and now smearing him and “MAGA Republicans” as the biggest threat to our “democracy” is all a psyop to persuade Americans to abandon Trump.

Trump isn’t the one allowing hordes of illegal aliens to swarm over our border, bringing crime and disease with them. Trump isn’t the one who sent our economy into a tail spin. Trump isn’t the one who has shut down domestic drilling, which would provide cheap fuel, and free us of Middle East oil and the whims of the Saudis. Trump isn’t the one who has depleted our strategic oil reserves, our supply of ammunition and bombs, and has turned our military into a woke joke. Trump isn’t the one trying to regulate which kitchen appliances you can use or what kind of car you can drive. Trump isn’t the one who allowed the world to blow up on his watch in eastern Europe, the Middle East, or the Far East.

That’s all courtesy of Brandon and his administration that is hell-bent on destroying this country as founded. Yet he has the temerity to suggest that the real threat to America is Trump.

Biden has made the preservation of the American democratic system a central theme of his reelection effort, characterizing Trump’s supporters as members of an “extremist movement.”

“The choice is clear: Donald Trump’s campaign is about him. Not America, not you,” Biden said, according to Politico. “Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”

“Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time. It is what the 2024 election is all about,” he also said. Biden further recalled the events of the Capitol riot and highlighted the participants’ wielding of Trump flags and Confederate flags.

“It was among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history,” he added.

This is pure, unadulterated BS. Biden’s puppet-masters are hyping a non-story. They’re the ones who are trying to keep themselves in power. They’re the ones willing to sacrifice our “democracy” on the altar of progressive Marxist dogma to make the US just another country that will be reliant on the elites in Davos and Brussels and New York to keep them fed and employed.

Here’s Dark Brandon’s latest campaign ad.

Trump is having none of it.

In his Valley Forge speech on Friday, Biden stated that “[w]hether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time. It is what the 2024 election is all about.”

Trump, for his part, called Biden’s speech a “pathetic fearmongering campaign event” while addressing supporters in Iowa on Friday, The Hill reported. He went on to criticize Biden’s official tenure, saying “Joe Biden’s record is an unbroken streak of weakness, incompetence, corruption and failure.”

“[I]f you take a look at what he’s doing on the border or inflation, or our military, that horrible day in Afghanistan, you look at what he’s done with energy… All throughout the world, we’re an embarrassment as a country,” Trump lamented. “We’ve become an embarrassment as a country.”

Trump made his remarks in Sioux Center, Iowa, weeks ahead of the Iowa Caucus, the first nominating contest in the Republican primary.

You better be sure who you want in the White House, because it will most likely be one of these two. And one of them is wrecking our country right now.

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Daily Broadside | Pile On! Illinois Joins the States Trying to Kick Trump Off the Ballot

Anti-Trump Coloradoans have appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to remove Trump from the GOP’s presidential primary ballot, pending review of SCOTUS.

Colorado voters seeking to remove former President Trump from their state’s GOP primary ballot responded Thursday to the former president’s appeal, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to disqualify him from appearing on the ballot for another term.

“The Court should decline Trump’s invitation to second-guess the Colorado Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Colorado Election Code,” the court filing said.

Trump isn’t second-guessing their interpretation of the election code; he’s challenging their conclusion that he led an insurrection and therefore could be removed from the ballot.

On Wednesday, Trump asked the justices to reverse the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling to disqualify him from the Republican primary ballot for engaging in an insurrection.

In our country, a person is innocent until proven guilty unless they’re a bitter clinger MAGA Republican deplorable. Then a group of judges can determine innocence or guilt based not on a trial with evidence and witnesses before a jury of peers, but on whatever they claim an “insurrection” is.

Of course, the Colorado Supreme Court’s fevered decision is catching on in other states. It’s like the Chinese Lung Pox, but it’s a virus of the mind rather than the body.

Amid ongoing legal battles over his removal from the Republican primary ballots in Maine and Colorado, former President Donald Trump faces a new challenge to his eligibility for high office, this time in Illinois.

A group [sic] five Illinois voters, represented by Free Speech for People, has filed a challenge to Trump’s eligibility under the 14th Amendment, contending that his actions related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot constituted “insurrection” and disqualified him from the presidency, The Hill reported.

“Trump gave aid and comfort to enemies of the Constitution by, among other things: encouraging and counseling the insurrectionists; deliberately failing to exercise his authority and responsibility as President to quell the insurrection; praising the insurrectionists, including calling them ‘very special,’ ‘good persons,’ and ‘patriots’; and promising or suggesting that he would pardon many of the insurrectionists if reelected to the presidency,” the filing claimed.

These kind of hysterical denunciations are the Left’s specialty—long on impressive sounding accusations, short on actual evidence. To wit, not one of the 1,069 J6 political prisoners in the Garland Archipelago has been charged with the crime of sedition or insurrection.

Not one.

But here we have five—count them, FIVE—Illinois voters who have, again, decided without evidence or a trial or a jury, that Trump is an insurrectionist and is disqualified from the presidency. (The five objectors are all men. Where is the diversity I was promised?!)

Again, the irony here is that they represent “Free Speech for People” which, judging by it’s grotesquely colored website that promotes abolishing the Electoral College and replacing it with a national popular vote, is a progressive non-profit that wants to “restore our democracy.” (Funny—when I think of “restoring” something, I think of taking it back to how it originally was, not breaking it from it’s foundational design. But I’m sure that’s just me.)

In their Petition, the Objectors rely on the decisions of Colorado and of Maine, both of which determined that Trump engaged in insurrection. But they also cite “multiple judges and government officials” who claim that January 6 was an insurrection (p. 60).

Again, just because “multiple judges and government officials” have claimed it was an insurrection doesn’t make it one. Frankly, the fact that “multiple judges and government officials” have claimed it was an insurrection makes me all the more suspicious that it was the farthest thing from an insurrection.

I’m not claiming that there was no violence or that things didn’t get broken. But I am claiming that there is actually no evidence whatsoever that Trump engaged in an insurrection, except as claimed by people who defined what happened as “an insurrection.” It was a march on the Capitol that got out of hand and, as we’ve come to learn, was facilitated by the Capitol Police and, most likely, by the FBI.

If it had truly been an insurrection, there would have been an organized assault with guns and a lot of people would’ve died on both sides. Not one of the protestors has been charged with having a firearm on them. As it stands, the only people to die were protestors who were shot or beaten to death by the Capitol Police. It was a Reichstag moment, and the progressives have milked it for all it’s worth.

But the smart people who rule us have all decided that Trump is guilty of “engaging in” an insurrection. He’s the only one. Must’ve been quite a feat, Trump pulling that off all by himself.

The activist judges in Colorado got the ball rolling and now the rest of the states are piling on. Our country is beginning to turn yellow, like a banana republic.

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | Progressive Agitator Alejandro Mayorkas Projects His Massive “Failure of Governance” Onto Greg Abbott

The cultural Marxists, Leftists, racialists, Democrats, progressives, diversity enthusiasts and far left activists are all good at one thing: projection. You can be sure that anything they accuse you of or criticize you for is exactly what they are guilty of.

Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has just provided a clear cut case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called out Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday, labeling his migrant bussing policy “a remarkable failure of governance.” 

Mayorkas, who faces impeachment proceedings in the House for his handling of the illegal immigration crisis, blamed Abbott, a Republican, for failing to cooperate with officials in Democrat-led cities that have been overwhelmed by migrant arrivals. 

“Let me identify one fundamental problem here, and that is the fact that we have one governor in the state of Texas who is refusing to cooperate with other governors and other local officials,” Mayorkas said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”  

Emphasizing the need for the country to “stand united” on immigration, Mayorkas said that “it’s a remarkable failure of governance to refuse to cooperate with one’s fellow local and state officials.” 

My mind is simply reeling with an avalanche of thoughts — so many that my brain is sputtering. I mean, the audacity!

Mayorkas is being impeached because of his massive “failure of governance” to secure the border. Not only has he not secured the border, he has facilitated the invasion of a horde of foreigners, which is at the root of Abbott’s bussing tactic.

House Republicans have blamed Mayorkas as the border crisis has worsened under his leadership. The Homeland Security Committee will hold its first impeachment hearing into the secretary on Jan. 10 as Republicans accuse Mayorkas of refusing to enforce immigration laws.

For years Texas and other border states have borne the brunt of our government’s intentional, criminal, unconstitutional and anti-American policies that allow foreigners to simply walk over the border and traipse into America without discrimination, investigation, examination, prosecution or follow up. In fact, not only do they not prevent them from entering, they facilitate their journey by ferrying these foreigners all over the country in the dead of night and dropping them off in unsuspecting communities.

For Mayorkas to accuse Greg Abbott of “a remarkable failure of governance” is simply beyond the pale. You want “cooperation”? Then cooperate with the border states by keeping illegals out. You want to bail out your buddies in Democrat-led cities? Then tell them to quit showboating as “sanctuary cities” in defiance of our laws.

Greg Abbott has called the Democrats’ bluff, basically saying, “You boasted about what a compassionate city you were, offering sanctuary to foreigners who are here illegally. Well, since you claim the moral high ground, we’ve got plenty of illegals here to send you. Have at it.”

He’s forcing the progressive Democrats (are there any other kind these days?) and cultural Marxists (but I repeat myself) to live up to their own rules.

“4.  ‘Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.’  You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.“
(Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals)

Apart from a fundamental misunderstanding of Christianity, which is not about rule-keeping, this Alinsky tactic is quite effective at undermining confidence and creating a hot seat of hypocrisy. Abbott is forcing mayors like Brandon Johnson (Chicago) and Eric Adams (New York City) to obey their own rules. If Alinsky is right, they won’t be able to. Both of them are complaining about the busloads of immigrants, they claim to have no place to put them, and they’re impounding busses from Texas.

Racists! Xenophobes!

Mayorkas and his ilk are seeding our destruction by widely dispersing foreigners among us to dilute and then replace the founding Anglo-Saxon culture that built America into the greatest economic, political and military power the world has ever seen. And they have made great progress.

Abbott is one of the few who understand this and is fighting fire with true governance.

Progressives are shameless hacks who accuse others of doing what they themselves are doing. And they do it with absolutely no sense of irony or self-awareness.

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Daily Broadside | Super Smart Woman Of Color Claudine Gay Resigns As President of Harvard, Blames Racism

So Claudine Gay, the embattled president of Harvard University, has resigned. This is appropriate given her less-than-stellar academic “accomplishments,” in which she has been accused of being a serial plagerizer, and her moral equivocation about whether calls for the genocide of the Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct, saying, in essence, “it depends” in her testimony before Congress.

Gay was clearly not hired because she is a first rate scholar and has the chops to lead an elite institution like Harvard. She was hired because she checks important “diversity” boxes, like being a woman, being black, being the child of immigrants, and being a useful tool to destroy a venerable institution. Plus, as Kurt Schlichter observed, she’s a “ridiculous mid-wit with smart girl glasses and a shaved head.”

She was hit with six new allegations of plagerism, which you can see here, implicating half of Gay’s published works.

Harvard University president Claudine Gay was hit with six additional allegations of plagiarism on Monday in a complaint filed with the university, breathing fresh life into a scandal that has embroiled her nascent presidency and pushing the total number of allegations near 50.

Seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been impacted by the scandal, but the new charges, which have not been previously reported, extend into an eighth: In a 2001 article, Gay lifts nearly half a page of material verbatim from another scholar, David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Harvard students who plagerize are threatened with dismissal, as described in their “Harvard University Plagiarism Policy.”

It is expected that all homework assignments, projects, lab reports, papers, theses, and examinations and any other work submitted for academic credit will be the student’s own. Students should always take great care to distinguish their own ideas and knowledge from information derived from sources. The term “sources” includes not only primary and secondary material published in print or online, but also information and opinions gained directly from other people. Quotations must be placed properly within quotation marks and must be cited fully. In addition, all paraphrased material must be acknowledged completely. Whenever ideas or facts are derived from a student’s reading and research or from a student’s own writings, the sources must be indicated (see also “Submission of the Same Work to More Than One Course” below.)

[…]

Students who, for whatever reason, submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to its sources will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including requirement to withdraw from the College. Students who have been found responsible for any violation of these standards will not be permitted to submit course evaluation of the course in which the infraction occurred.

When she was hired, she said,

“Today, we are in a moment of remarkable and accelerating change — socially, politically, economically, and technologically,” said Gay. “So many fundamental assumptions about how the world works and how we should relate to one another are being tested.”

Like applauding Hamas and persecuting the Jews! How’s that for testing “how we should relate to one another”? Did you know that the student body at Harvard includes 3,200 Jewish undergraduate and graduate students — nearly 27 percent of the student population?

When she was inaugurated, she said,

“The courage of this University — our resolve, against all odds — to question the world as it is and imagine and make a better one: It is what Harvard was made to do,” Gay said Friday. “By continually recommitting ourselves to our central purpose, with renewed vision and vigor, we advance the prospects of humankind.”

She sounds like a female Barack Hussein Obama spouting typical cultural Marxist pablum. Was she hired to “question the world as it is”? Was she hired to change the world? Or was she hired to run the university and turn out genuine thinkers who will each find a way to make a difference in the world?

We all know the answer to that.

Frankly, that’s not “what Harvard was made to do.” Harvard, if it was “made” to do anything, was to raise up new and competent clergy. Founded in 1636 and named after its first benefactor (the Puritan clergyman John Harvard) it is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States of America.

The founders of Harvard recorded their reasons for establishing this center of learning:

After God had carried us safe to New England and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government: One of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.

That’s a long way from questioning the world “as it is” and imagining and making a new and better one.

Jerry Newcombe writes,

The original motto of Harvard was (in Latin): “Truth for Christ and the Church.” In the twentieth century, when Harvard became more secularized, they cut the last part of the phrase, so the motto is only “Truth” (Veritas). Of course, it was not secularism that produced Harvard, but Christianity.

Gay will remain as a professor at Harvard, probably with her $970,000 annual salary intact. But before stepping down, she made it clear that she hasn’t learned anything.

Fortunately, Gay becomes the shortest tenured president in Harvard’s history — just six months.

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Daily Broadside | Surprise! Hyper-Partisan Maine Democrat Blocks Trump from Ballot

2024 is a presidential election year and it’s going to be one for the history books. It’s already gone south because Donald Trump lives rent-free in the heads of the progressive Marxists who make up half our country. We’ve descended into flat-out brazen and legally questionable tactics in the political sphere when it comes to the Left’s attempts to keep Trump off the ballot in this year’s presidential election.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, announced Thursday evening that she is blocking Trump from appearing on the state’s ballot based on false claims that Trump incited an insurrection against the United States.

She’s a Democrat? You don’t say.

“I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Bellows wrote in her decision. “I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection. The oath I swore to uphold the Constitution comes first above all, and my duty under Maine’s election laws, when presented with a Section 336 challenge, is to ensure that candidates who appear on the primary ballot are qualified for the office they seek.”

This deeply partisan political hack wraps herself in her “duty” to “uphold the constitution” by deciding on her own that Trump engaged in insurrection, even though he’s not been accused, tried or convicted of such. Who could have imagined that a Democrat would abuse her authority to engage in a partisan smear tactic while shielding herself from criticism with the noble intentions of her office? Not me!

“The events of January 6, 2021 were unprecedented and tragic,” Bellows continued. “They were an attack not only upon the Capitol and government officials, but also an attack on the rule of law. The evidence here demonstrates that they occurred at the behest of, and with the knowledge and support of, the outgoing President. The U.S. Constitution does not tolerate an assault on the foundations of our government, and [Maine law] requires me to act in response.”

What “evidence” is she referring to? Is she now judge, jury and executioner?

This is naked election interference that we saw first in Colorado when their Supreme Court barred Trump from the ballot, then in Michigan where their Supreme Court rejected that effort, and now in Maine.

Bellows is right that this is unprecedented—it’s unprecedented lawlessness.

And it should be overturned in the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Daily Broadside | Foreign Hordes Crashing Our Shores Bring Disease and Crime With Them

I hope that you and yours had a wonderful Christmas. I sure did, as all the littles were home and spent several days with us. I received a few nice gifts, including three books that have been on my wish list. In no particular order, they are:

I’m a part time writer, and sentences are foundational to the written word. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle defined much of Western thought, which in our day is being corrupted by corrupt ideologies. The destructive nature of one of those ideologies, Marxism, is obvious, and I want to better understand it.

What do you read?

2023 is ending not with a bang, but with a whimper. The United States is being overrun by invading hordes of foreigners. They are not the tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free that the Leftists insist they are. They are not the “exiles” of the “Mother of Exiles,” or as we better know her, the Statue of Liberty.

They are thieving, greedy third-world grifters who have no respect for the United States or for the American people. If they did have respect, they wouldn’t be breaking the law to enter the country. They see a weak country and a craven, corrupt administration that will not defend its borders or its people and have decided that if they’re going to come, now is the time, when they can get money and health insurance and housing assistance and phones and free transportation to anywhere in the country, and its citizens can do nothing about it.

And with them come the criminals.

Every year, an estimated 2,000 Americans are killed by illegal aliens. In 2023, Breitbart News reported on several cases in which illegal aliens are accused of killing American citizens, as well as legal immigrants – many including young children.

Below, Breitbart News details the cases of 14 Americans and legal immigrants who were allegedly killed by illegal aliens this year.

Not only do these freeloading hordes bring crimimal elements with them, but they bring diseases that we had essentially eliminated from our country.

Leprosy, Polio, Malaria, TB, Measles… and Massive Unscreened Illegal Immigration

Successful public health campaigns and medical advances have enabled the United States to conquer a range of disfiguring and damaging diseases. Polio, which paralyzed thousands of Americans annually, was wiped out by widespread vaccinations. In 1999 the nation’s last hospital for lepers closed its doors in Louisiana. A global campaign eradicated smallpox, while lethal tuberculosis, the “consumption” that stalked characters in decades of literature, seemed beaten by antibiotics. Measles outbreaks still occur from time to time, but they are small, local, and easily contained.

Recently, however, some of these forgotten but still formidable infectious diseases have begun to reappear in the United States. For two years running, polio has been detected in some New York water samples, and this fall, leprosy re-emerged in Florida, where cases of malaria have also been recorded.

Gosh, you guys, what could possibly be causing the reemergence of these long-defeated illnesses?

Health officials say they are not sure why these and other infectious diseases are resurfacing. One distinct possibility, which officials are loath to discuss, is that the millions of migrants who have crossed into the country in recent years could be bringing the scourges with them, since many are from countries where such rare diseases persist and vaccination programs are not robust.

“The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, one of the most outspoken critics of official COVID-19 narratives in the last pandemic that later proved flawed.

Yes, yes, let’s make sure that US citizens are shamed and coerced into taking a “mandatory” vaccine to keep everyone safe, but don’t erect any barriers to entry for foreigners illegally storming our shores because that would be racist and xenophobic!

Neither the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) nor the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would discuss the issue with RealClearInvestigations (RCI). Legal immigrants are required to receive vaccinations for a host of diseases, but the DHS acknowledged it does not have vaccination records for the millions who have entered the United States since the Biden administration relaxed border controls upon taking office in January 2021.

LOL. What “border controls”?

The situation in the United States is further complicated by the fact that DHS officials don’t know where all of the more than 7.5 million migrants who’ve arrived since Joe Biden took office are living. Those whom Border Patrol agents have encountered and processed have immigration court dates, but those dates are years in advance. Many people with uncertain immigration status lack health insurance and stay off the grid as much as possible, meaning even if the U.S. launched some kind of vaccination program it would not know where to concentrate its efforts.

In addition, the historic flood of illegal immigration during the Biden administration has also featured a much more global population. DHS uses the term “historically atypical countries” to describe the panoply of countries outside of Mexico and Central America from which illegal immigration has soared. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of annual encounters involving immigrants from historically atypical countries soared from fewer than 8,000 to almost 1 million. The first six months of 2023 saw more than half of official encounters—these numbers do not include what Border Patrol calls “gotaways” for whom little information is available—from historically atypical countries. But infectious diseases largely forgotten in the United States remain public health issues in both hemispheres, and many of those nations have much less robust vaccination programs than most modern Western nations.

How is this not a treasonous dereliction of duty? The colonists fought the British for much, much less than the criminal Biden family and its mobs of enforcers throughout the government have done.

Herb Stein once said that, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” He said it in response to fears over America’s trade and budget deficits in the 1980s. In essence, it meant that we shouldn’t worry about things that we know can’t go on forever, because they will eventually stop of their own accord. It was also “a reminder that knowing if and when to act is never easy.“

Illegal immigration cannot go on forever. Or can it?

See you in the New Year.