One of the things that has bothered me over the last several years is the tax-exempt status of US churches. It’s true that it’s helpful, but it’s also true that once the government has its hooks in you by conferring a special status, it then has leverage over you. The government can make demands or restrict the activities of the church as the price you pay for their indulgence.
Covid-19 anyone?
I have thought several times that there may come a day when the church will have to give up its tax-exempt status in order to stay true to its calling. That may mean going back to house churches, small gatherings without a formal organizational structure.
That’s the topic of the introduction to the following sermon that pastor Gary Hamrick of Cornerstone Chapel delivered on September 8. He mentions the 1954 Johnson amendment which, on the surface, is unconstitutional.
The Johnson Amendment is a provision in the U.S. tax code, since 1954, that prohibits all 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates.
The Johnson amendment is currently being challenged in court and Cornerstone Chapel is a party to the proceedings.
Hamrick takes us back to the early years of the founding era and observes that pastors freely spoke of politics in their sermons. He mentions a two-volume series called “Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805” (which I have on my shelf and recommend if you’re interested in that era). His point is that pastors used to be able to freely speak on what was happening politically in the colonies and then in the newly formed United States of America.
After his introduction he goes on to make three points about our responsibility to vote and why it’s important that we do. I post his sermon here because I think it’s worth listening to as we approach November 5.
I’ve cued it to the second point of his message, which is that we should “vote policies over personalities,” and he then goes on to discuss seven policies that a candidate will influence. I strongly urge you to listen to at least the 15 minutes devoted to those issues.
I know not all readers of this blog are Christians, but I think the majority of us are conservative. Even if you’re not a believer, you can better understand why someone of the faith thinks the way we do about these issues.
If you have the time, I’d encourage you to listen to the whole thing.
A belated Happy Father’s Day to those readers who are blessed with children. I had a nice day with the Mrs. and a couple of the littles.
So conservatives and other Normals have held that the 2020 election was stolen, that the Democrats rigged the voting and that thousands of ballots were invalid. We later discovered that the election was “fortified” by “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” Read: to prevent the people’s choice from becoming president. We saw the trucks pull up and unload boxes of ballots; we saw Democrats kick out poll watchers of the opposition party; we saw ballot collection boxes being stuffed.
And now in states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin, the truth is starting to come out and people are starting to be prosecuted for voting irregularities. Here’s just one example of what is being found and reported:
REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. DATA ANALYSIS FINDS 221,000 PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN. 941,000 TRUMP VOTES DELETED. STATES USING DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN. pic.twitter.com/YcZiUSxTiF
The truth is, we were right. The 2020 election was a fraud and we ended up with a withered, mean old man who can barely function on his own and is implementing policies that are destroying the United States of America, the worst of which is allowing the flood of unvetted foreigners over the southern border.
President Biden has hinted that more liberal moves on immigration could be coming in the weeks ahead, and reports suggest that, in response to left-wing pressure on the issue, he is considering a deportation shield for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants already in the U.S.
[…]
“Today, I have spoken about what we need to do to secure the border. In the weeks ahead — and I mean the weeks ahead — I will speak to how we can make our immigration system more fair and more just,” he said on Tuesday.
Multiple outlets have since reported that the White House is considering a “parole in place” move to apply for illegal immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens. Parole in place is already being used in one year increments for family members of U.S. military members and protects them from deportation and grants them a work permit. The New York Times reported that the program for spouses could include the ability for some spouses to gain a pathway to citizenship, but those details are still not clear.
This is just a step closer to what the Democrats really want with the open border: new Democrat voters who can provide a voter-proof majority to keep the anti-American Marxists perpetually in power. And now we find that these foreigners who have crashed our border and live illegally among us have been being given voter registration forms across the U.S.
Welfare offices and other agencies in 49 US states are providing voter registration forms to migrants without requiring proof of citizenship, leading Republicans and conservatives to call for swift federal action to stop the handouts.
Every state but Arizona — which recently passed a law barring the practice on state but not federal forms — gives applicants for either welfare benefits, driver’s licenses, or in some cases, mail-in ballots voter registration forms without demanding proof of citizenship.
There is currently no requirement on federal voting forms to provide proof of US citizenship, though it is illegal to falsely claim one is a citizen or for a non-citizen to cast a ballot in a federal election.
But millions of migrants with humanitarian parole, refugee or asylum status are eligible for benefits that would bring them to the offices where voter registration takes place.
See how this works? In case it isn’t obvious enough … the Biden junta leaves the border open and anyone from anywhere in the world can just walk in (or, in hundreds of thousands of cases, are deliberately flown in by the junta). Once here, they are given a voter registration form which is illegal to fill out if you’re a non-citizen. However, the junta will figure out a way to grant you amnesty, and perhaps citizenship, and voilà, you’re now a voting member of this late republic.
I’m not sure why they bother, because the Democrats find ways to cheat. Ballot harvesting, ballot stuffing, rigging the voting machines to transfer votes. They just need the millions of new voters to make it impossible for the opposition to win, to keep the margin of victory out of reach for conservatives, Normals, and other like-minded patriots and true Americans.
My advice: vote this fall to keep it close and pray that enough Democrats and Independents defect to Trump that even with cheating, the Dems can’t overcome the margin of victory.
John Eastman represented president Donald Trump in the wake of the 2020 election, challenging the election’s integrity. It’s wound up costing him personally, and The Epoch Times just published a feature about his experience. (If you have a subscription, you can read it here; otherwise I think it’s paywalled.)
Last summer, the State Bar charged Mr. Eastman, the former Dean of Chapman University Law School, with 11 counts of misconduct related to his role in representing former President Donald Trump after the 2020 presidential election.
But, Mr. Eastman told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview on April 5, he has no regrets about representing President Trump nor for alleging fraud and questioning the election results.
“No. Absolutely not,” he said bluntly. “What I saw at the time raised real serious questions in my mind about the validity of the election.”
Since then, Mr. Eastman said his investigation has confirmed his suspicions “tenfold.”
Funny how, given enough time, anyone who looks at the evidence with an open mind comes away convinced that there are serious questions about how Brandon won that election.
Mr. Eastman, who was accused of not having the evidence to back up those allegations, said he will appeal Judge Yvette Roland’s March 27 ruling recommending disbarment, but in the meantime his law license has been suspended on “involuntary inactive enrollment,” which means he can’t practice law in California.
[…]
Democrat-appointed Judge Roland ruled that Mr. Eastman broke ethics rules by advancing President Trump’s challenges to the integrity of the 2020 election.
The judge stated in her ruling that “despite compelling evidence against him … Eastman remains defiant, refusing to acknowledge any impropriety whatsoever in his actions surrounding his efforts to dispute the 2020 presidential election results.”
“His lack of insight into the wrongfulness of his misconduct is deeply troubling,” she wrote.
“Eastman continues to hold the view that his statements were factually and legally justified. He demonstrated disdain for these proceedings by characterizing them as a political persecution, claiming that the disciplinary charges against him contained false and misleading statements, and that those who brought them should themselves be disbarred,” Judge Roland wrote in her ruling.
His “complete denial of wrongdoing, coupled with his attempts to discredit legitimate disciplinary proceedings are concerning,” she wrote.
We don’t live in a free society anymore. The Marxists are going after the professional classes who represent the opposition. When they’re either jailed, disbarred or otherwise removed, they can more easily go after the armchair opinionists (like me).
Did Eastman have any compelling evidence?
Mr. Eastman drew from evidence provided by Garland Favorito, a retired information technology professional and founder of VoterGA, a nonpartisan, nonprofit election integrity group.
Mr. Favorito, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed on Dec. 23, 2020, that challenged the authenticity of 147,000 absentee ballots cast in Georgia’s Fulton County.
“He’s an independent, and he is an expert on election integrity issues, who discovered “thousands of ballots that were duplicated and counted multiple times,” in deep blue areas of Atlanta in violation of state law, Mr. Eastman said.
“We also had Michael Gableman, former Supreme Court justice of Wisconsin … who was retained by the legislature to conduct an investigation, and they discovered hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots,” he said.
Mr. Gableman uncovered alleged nursing home fraud, which Mr. Eastman said accounts for much more than the 20,000-vote margin of victory for Joe Biden, and voter turnout rates in nursing homes went from 20 to 30 percent historically to nearly 100 percent, including from within memory care wings.
“Many of the ballots are in the same handwriting, so the illegality opened the door for fraud, which Gableman proved … and it affected way more than 20,000 ballots,” he said.
“There’s no question Wisconsin was stolen. To this day, there are 120,000 more ballots than voters in Pennsylvania, a state where the margin was 80,000.”
Americans used to go to a local polling place such as a neighborhood community room at the library or the local church to vote, but in 2020 mail-in ballots were counted in much larger facilities in big cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, and Philadelphia where it would be “much easier to sneak in a pallet of ballots,” he said.
I believe that the 2020 election was stolen and that Joe Biden’s “presidency” is fraudulent. It’s the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people, even beyond the presidency of B. Hussein Obama.
It will take all of us hanging together in refusing to concede that the election was stolen. The evidence is there—you’re just not allowed to see that it is. Noticing is verboten.
I was planning to write about something else but I go off on a tangent here. I’ll offer it up tomorrow and I guarantee it will have you seeing red. It will leave you gobsmacked.
Tricky Nikki dropped out of the presidential race yesterday, leaving the field to Trump. She left the contest without endorsing the presumptive nominee, although she did wish him well. As Ace said, “Her pointless Ego Ride is over.”
Now that that is out of the way, let’s focus on turning out the vote so that it’s not close enough to cheat. Speaking of which, Rassmussen Reports posted on X yesterday that “Joe Biden didn’t ‘win’ Georgia in Nov 2020” because they DIDN’T DO ANY SIGNATURE VERIFICATION. None.
Good Morning !
Georgia 2020: Court testimony below (from the REAL Fani Willis RICO case) and this sworn affidavit indicate NO SIGNATURE VERIFICATION was done for 148,000 mail-in ballots. https://t.co/0jMPiwouSm
They didn’t use the signature verification machines in Fulton County, GA, nor in Maricope County, AZ, where officials DID NOT VERIFY 1.9 MILLION SIGNATURES.
Pre-printed ballots were positioned in trucks outside and used where needed.
Maricopa officials didn't validate ANY of the mail-in ballots or signatures. ALL 1.9 million of them. pic.twitter.com/ajlOddpUpC
Trump won the 2020 election; we know it, they know it, and yet “they” pointed at all the judges who refused to take any of the cases and said, “See! Even ‘Trump’ judges are refusing to take the cases.” The whole system is fraudulent.
Massive voter fraud allegations that marred the 2020 election spurred a political and grassroots movement from coast to coast to pursue an array of election reforms designed to increase election integrity.
However, with just months left ahead of the 2024 election, Republicans say little was mended, especially in contested states where they thought fixes were needed most.
Much concern is centered around five key swing states that became the focus of 2020: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Of course. Of course.
Democrats recoil from any election reforms that make voting more secure so that they can continue to rig the system and flood results with fake ballots. Republicans say they want more secure elections, but how will they influence states where the Democrats hold power?
Election reforms tend to follow party lines. Democrats commonly castigate increased election security measures as voter suppression, while Republicans often condemn laws and directives that loosen security as aiding and abetting voter fraud.
According to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice, a left leaning, non-profit, law and research foundation, 23 states enacted 53 laws relaxing election security restrictions in 2023, while 14 states enacted 17 laws tightening them.
The statistics suggest that Democrats are still winning the nationwide battle, as they have for the past several years. The report found the states that took the most actions to tighten election security are the places that already had security measures in place.
So, basically, nothing has changed.
Georgia state Sen. Colton Moore, a Republican, said that although improvements have been made since 2020, much meaningful work is still needed.
“Nothing of substance has changed since 2020. Every mechanism to facilitate a steal is still in place,” he told The Epoch Times. “We must work to eliminate the vulnerabilities still in place today.”
Mr. Moore also highlighted the “ridiculous” number of absentee ballots still used in Georgia elections and said they ought to be restricted to military personnel and medically disabled citizens. He said he was also worried about the institutionalization of the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, which he believes should be done away with altogether.
Democrats have learned how to rig the system so that they can cheat as necessary to secure a win. Nobody except the most die-hard Leftists and uninformed progressives believe that Brandon won the 2020 presidential election with 81 million legitimate votes.
Unfortunately, it looks as though we’re about to suffer the same fate again this November, no matter who the candidate is.
In the run-up to the presidential election of 2016, I was NOT a fan of Donald J. Trump. I didn’t like him because he was loud, abrasive, mean, and had a habit of running his stream-of-consciousness mouth off and boasting about all the winning we would do and how he’d get Mexico to pay for his big, beautiful wall without explaining any of it.
But I also had some private admiration for the man. He had the cojones to raise his hand when Bret Baier asked if any of the Republican candidates for president wouldn’t commit to supporting the eventual nominee. Remember that?
Like him or not, Trump was his own man and completely shook up the establishment in 2016.
After watching him for four years and waking up to the deep state and the vile Obiden team, I enthusiastically voted for Trump, only to watch the election be stolen from me and the other millions of Americans who voted for him.
I’ll never forget the comment that someone wrote at me (yes, “at me”) when I expressed my disbelief that our current administration had legitimately won with “81 million” votes for a guy that campaigned from his basement while Trump was hosting packed stadiums.
She wrote, “That many people hated Trump so much that they voted for Biden.”
No way. No way am I believing that. There were so many credible reports of fraud, not to mention all those votes counted after polling closed as reams of ballots were pulled out from under tables and fed into tabulation machines.
I watched as courts, which should have known better, refuse to hear the lawsuits filed as evidence piled up. I was told that “even judges appointed by Republicans” were refusing to take the cases, as if a judge appointed by a Republican was somehow an unimpeachable fact.
With the 2024 election season in full swing, and a Trump-Biden rematch appearing likely, Americans deserve to know that mail-in voting fraud likely changed the outcome of the 2020 election. In recent years, mail-in voting has become more commonplace. However, in 2020, mail-in voting reached an all-time record due to pandemic policies encouraging mail-in voting.
These abrupt and capricious changes to voting procedures in the months before the 2020 election occurred despite the fact that ample evidence showed that mass mail-in voting, unsecure ballot drop boxes, ballot harvesting, and lack of signature verification would result in a flood of fraudulent ballots that would undermine the accuracy of the election results.
A groundbreaking poll conducted by The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports in November/December 2023 attempted to assess the degree of fraudulent voting that may have taken place. The results were stunning. Some of the most important findings from the poll include:
21% of mail-in voters admitted that in 2020 they voted in a state where they are “no longer a permanent resident.”
21% of mail-in voters admitted that they filled out a ballot for a friend or family member
17% of mail-in voters said they signed a ballot for a friend or family member “with or without his or her permission.”
19% of mail-in voters said that a friend or family member filled out their ballot, in part or in full, on their behalf.
Cleanest, fairest, most transparent election in history!
After examining the raw survey data provided by Rasmussen, we found that 28.2% of all mail-in respondents admitted to committing at least one of the four types of fraud asked in the survey, meaning that more than one-in-four ballots cast by mail in 2020 were likely cast fraudulently, and thus should not have been counted.
This policy study takes the results of the Heartland/Rasmussen survey and applies them directly to the six swing states that Biden won by razor-thin margins in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Because Biden voters cast mail-in ballots at a much higher rate than Trump voters, any level of fraud almost certainly benefited Biden to a significantly greater degree than Trump.
In addition to the 28.2% fraud scenario, the study analyzes the electoral results for every fraud integer from 27% down to 1%. In every instance except the 3%, 2%, and 1% fraud scenarios, our results indicate that Trump would have won the Electoral College in the 2020 U.S. presidential election had fraudulent mail-in ballots not been counted. Hence, even if the level of fraud detected in the Heartland/Rasmussen survey (28.2% of all mail-in ballots) substantially overstated voter fraud by multiple orders of magnitude, Trump would likely still have won the 2020 election.
Ultimately, our study clearly shows that if the 2020 election had been as free, fair, and secure as past elections have been, Donald Trump would almost certainly have been re-elected to a second term. As the country braces for a Trump-Biden rematch, it is imperative that state legislatures do all that they can to ensure the next election is as secure as possible, primarily by severely limiting mail-in voting and instituting other commonsense policies to prevent mail-in voter fraud. If state lawmakers do not pass measures to thwart the possibility of extensive voter fraud occurring again, more Americans will question the legitimacy of future elections, further eroding the American people’s trust in our nation’s democratic institutions.
Trump had been riding a wave of a great economy, no new wars, peace agreements in the Middle East, low gas prices because we were drilling our own oil, and illegal aliens had been brought under some sort of control. And we’re supposed to think that Handsy Joe, patriarch of the Biden Crime Family, ginned up enough energy among the people to get the most votes ever recorded?
As if.
Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist testifies before Congress about the harm being done by the types of election “interference” that cost Republicans the 2020 election and threaten the 2024 election.
WATCH: In four minutes of testimony before Congress, @MZHemingway sums up everything wrong with America's elections from mail in ballots, to Zuckerbucks, to censorship, to Big Tech censorship, to Democrats trying to put Trump in jail. pic.twitter.com/lXAJJxFp7n
So…Trump won in 2020, as we all knew he did. And it will be the same in 2024 if the spineless GOP doesn’t start playing hardball with state legislatures. Fortunately, fake conservative Mitt Romney’s niece, Ronna McDaniel, who was appointed by Trump, is finally stepping down as chair of the RNC, which has consistently lost elections under her “leadership”—all while grifting off the unsuspecting, well-intentioned, good conservatives who expect Republicans to be fighting for us.
Most of us who supported Trump in 2020, and plenty of those who opposed him, believe that there’s enough evidence of voter fraud to invalidate that election, but we’re constantly told that there’s NO EVIDENCE of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
REPORT: Trump White House Official Confirms Knowledge of Muskegon, Michigan Voter Fraud Report in 2020 – CLAIMS THERE WAS AN ARREST and that BILL BARR Allegedly Killed the Investigation
On Thursday, former Trump administration General Counsel Personnel Police Operations Andrew Kloster joined Steve Bannon on The War Room to discuss the Muskegon, Michigan 2020 voter fraud scandal.
Andrew Kloster said he notified Bill Barr’s DOJ – and Barr and his cronies smacked him down and killed the investigation.
The investigation had been buried by politicians, government investigators and the press.
On October 8, 2020, only one month before the 2020 general election, Muskegon, MI City Clerk Ann Meisch noticed a black female, whose name was later redacted from the police report, dropping off between 8,000-10,000 completed voter registration applications at the city clerk’s office. Clerk Meisch immediately noticed that the stacks of registrations included the same handwriting, non-existent addresses, and incorrect phone numbers.
The Muskegon Police Department was contacted and asked to investigate. On 10/21/20 First Lieutenant Mike Anderson was contacted by Tom Fabus, Chief of Investigations for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s Office. According to the MI State Police report, Fabus asked for Michigan State Police assistance with a joint investigation of alleged voter fraud being conducted by the Muskegon Police Department and the AG.
An investigative task force was formed, and an investigation was initiated.
During their investigation, the state police discovered the women worked for GBI Strategies. This was included in their police report. The group had temporary offices in numerous Michigan locations. The police also identified Gary Bell as the head of the organization.
You know why there’s no evidence of fraud? Because most of it has gotten ignored or swept aside for long enough that people have lost interest or think it no longer makes any difference.
What ended up happening is my understanding, I reached out and spoke with some local law enforcement. What happened was there was a woman, my understanding is basically loitering outside of a dropbox all day, and she gets picked up by a junior guy and arrested because he’s like, what are you doing? You’re stuffing this box. What’s going on? So they arrest her, and she basically spills the beans. She’s a democratic operative. She’s got filled-out ballots, like 7000 is what I was hearing, and they arrested her. Now, the senior guy, my understanding was off at the time. So the junior guy who picked her up, got her statement and released her, and she went back to Detroit… She went back to Detroit. The senior guy comes back in the next day or later in the day and says, what the know? You had her dead to rights. Why did you release her? And starts trying to get an extradition order from Detroit, because this is before the election. We’re hearing there could be voter fraud. And here you’ve got someone basically copping to it and caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
If you have time, I encourage you to listen to the entire conversation, and especially Andrew Kloster’s comment about Bill Barr. Barr was supposed to be this paragon of integrity and experience who would lend great credibility to Trump’s administration.
The signals I got both through the White House and through the Department of Justice and through the careers at the Department of Justice, was, it was the same story over and over and over again: “Leadership is not interested in this. We’re not even going to make a phone call.”
There’s plenty of evidence; there’s just no will to pursue it.