Sunday, June 28, 2020

Trump Lawyer Stands Up for Christianity, BLM Leader Says It's All About Her 'Whiteness'

Trump Lawyer Stands Up for Christianity, BLM Leader Says It's All About Her 'Whiteness'

Jesus mosaic in Belgrade, Serbia. AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic.
On Monday, Black Lives Matter leader and Bernie Sanders surrogate Shaun King called for the toppling of statues and destruction of stained-glass windows showing “European Jesus,” which he condemned as “white supremacy.” Jenna Ellis, senior legal advisor to the Trump campaign, responded with a full-throated defense of Christianity. King condemned her response as yet another manifestation of “whiteness.”
“Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been. In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went? EGYPT! Not Denmark. Tear them down,” King tweeted.
“Yes. All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. They are a gross form white supremacy. Created as tools of oppression. Racist propaganda. They should all come down,” the leftist added.
King’s attack on Christian symbols is historically ignorant. While the art depicting Jesus may indeed be whiter than Jesus’s true skin color, that has nothing to do with “white supremacy” — pseudoscientific racism undergirding oppression that did not emerge until the early 1500s at the earliest — and everything to do with early Byzantine iconography dating back to the 500s or 600s. This argument seems little more than an excuse to attack Christianity, and Ellis responded accordingly.
“I’m going on record now: If they try to cancel Christianity, if they try to force me to apologize or recant my Faith, I will not bend, I will not waver, I will not break. On Christ the solid Rock I stand. And I’m proud to be an American,” Ellis tweeted.
This tweet went viral, receiving more than 28,000 “retweets” and 84,000 “likes.” Ellis told PJ Media the tweet received more than 1.5 million impressions.
King, undeterred, fired back. “Again, what she is actually defending here is her whiteness,” the BLM leader tweeted. “Christian whiteness needs white Jesus. It’s not about generosity or kindness. It’s not about protecting the vulnerable. It’s about whiteness itself. Attack white Jesus to her, and you attack her faith.”
Imagine if someone leveled this kind of racist accusation against black Christianity. If Barack Obama were to insist on black statues of Jesus — many of which exist — and a white person said his religion wasn’t Christianity but “blackness,” that person would rightly be condemned as racist.
Yet Jenna Ellis was not even insisting on a “white Jesus.” She merely took the opportunity to stand for her faith. She did not once mention race in the tweet, but defended Christianity, which arguably forms the bedrock for the unprecedented freedom and prosperity enjoyed by Americans and others across the globe. Christianity inspired the creation of the first hospitals, the first orphanages, and the first modern universities.
Some of the first settlers in what became the United States fled religious persecution in order to practice their faith in the New World. The struggle for religious freedom is central to America’s history and identity, and the Constitution enshrines this liberty in the First Amendment.
Yet The New York Times‘s “1619 Project” aims to redefine America, brushing aside religious freedom, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence in order to focus on the importation of slaves in 1619 as the true founding of America. This ideology supports a radical upheaval of American society in the name of racial justice, and it has arguably inspired the lootingvandalism, and arson across America that destroyed black livesblack livelihoods, and black monuments.
This attack on Christianity as “whiteness” also erases many black champions of the Gospel, from Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King Jr., from former slave-turned Methodist preacher Richard Allen to early civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune. In recent years, the Rev. Anthony B. Thompson, pastor of the Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal Church of Charleston, S.C., stood out when he echoed Jesus Christ by forgiving the white supremacist who murdered his wife. Is their Christianity another form of “whiteness” to Shaun King?
This redefinition of biblical Christianity as somehow “white” or “white supremacy” fits into the larger “1619 Project” narrative and justifies targeting churches for violence and destruction. Like the other excesses of the 1619 riots, it won’t just target the hated white people and their legacies but will spill over to harm the very black people it is supposedly intended to help.

Saturday, June 27, 2020

TRUMP EXTENDS BAN ON FOREIGN WORKERS

TRUMP EXTENDS BAN ON FOREIGN WORKERS

Yesterday, President Trump renewed and broadened the immigration suspension he issued in April. The updated order keeps in place until the end of the year his limited suspension of immigrant visas. In addition, it suspends a number of foreign work-visa programs.
Trump’s latest measure makes great sense. As Mark Krikorian points out, there are 20 million unemployed Americans, and the jobless rate is more than triple what it was before the Wuhan coronavirus virus hit our shores, and quadruple for immigrants.
Yet, industry lobbyists have pushed for the continued importation of foreign labor. Trump did well to resist their entreaties. His proclamation states:
American workers compete against foreign nationals for jobs in every sector of our economy, including against millions of aliens who enter the United States to perform temporary work. Under ordinary circumstances, properly administered temporary worker programs can provide benefits to the economy. But under the extraordinary circumstances of the economic contraction resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak, certain nonimmigrant visa programs authorizing such employment pose an unusual threat to the employment of American workers.
Trump’s order suspends entry of people on H-1B (“skilled” workers) and L (intra-company transferee) visas, plus most of those admitted on J (cultural exchange) and H-2B (unskilled seasonal non-farm workers) visas. The administration estimates that this will mean a reduction of perhaps half a million work visas.
There are exceptions to the guest worker suspension, but Krikorian says they are narrow. For instance, he notes, “the only exceptions to the suspension of the H-2B visa (which the president’s own resorts often use to import housekeepers and the like) will be for those who ‘provide temporary labor or services essential to the United States food supply chain.’” This exception only covers 10 to 15 percent of the H-2B visas.
Trump also made an exception for health care workers, but only those caring for coronavirus patients or doing COVID-19 research.
There is no exemption for au pairs (they gain entry as “cultural exchange” under the J visa). Their inclusion in the suspension “is a small but important signal that the system isn’t entirely rigged in favor of the well-off,” says Krikorian.
He concludes that “given the powerful moneyed interests demanding continued importation of foreign workers — and the many influential administration officials who share those views — Monday’s announcement was a real win” for American workers.
Robert VerBruggen offers his thoughts on the president’s order here.

Barack Obama Lies About H1N1, Claims He Prevented It From Being A Pandemic

Barack Obama Lies About H1N1, Claims He Prevented It From Being A Pandemic

AP Photo/Michael Sohn
During his virtual grassroots fundraiser on Tuesday, Barack Obama falsely claimed that the 2009 swine flu (H1N1) wasn’t a pandemic at all, and tried to take credit for it not becoming one. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, who looked like he was just trying to stay awake, just sat there and nodded as if it were true.
Below you can watch the clip of Barack Obama lying when he stated, “…and dealing with issues like H1N1 that we feared could be a pandemic if it wasn’t handled properly…”
For starters, H1N1 was classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization on June 11, 2009. Two weeks later, the CDC estimated there were at least 1 million cases in the United States. So, where Obama got the notion that it wasn’t a pandemic is beyond comprehension.
The CDC estimates that in the United States alone there were nearly 61 million cases of H1N1, 274,304 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths between April 12, 2009, and April 10, 2010.
Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff at the time and is currently advising his campaign, says it was mere luck that H1N1 wasn’t more deadly.
“It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history,” Klain said of H1N1 in 2019. “It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck. If anyone thinks that this can’t happen again, they don’t have to go back to 1918, they just have to go back to 2009, 2010, and imagine a virus with a different lethality, and you can just do the math on that.”
But Obama wants you to forget that. What Barack Obama was trying to do was take a page right out of George Orwell’s 1984 and rewrite history, because the Obama administration’s handling of the H1N1 pandemic was, completely botched. Based on these numbers, H1N1 had a mortality rate of .02 percent. According to the CDC’s latest estimate, the coronavirus has an overall mortality rate of .4 percent for symptomatic cases (or .26 percent if you include asymptomatic cases) meaning that the coronavirus is 13-20 times more deadly than H1N1.
The coronavirus is not only magnitudes more deadly than H1N1, but also more infectious. According to a study from Emerging Infectious Diseases, COVID-19 has a median R0 value (a mathematical term for how contagious a disease is) of 5.7, while H1N1 had an R0 value between 1.4 and 1.6. So, COVID-19 is nearly 4 times more infectious and 13-20 times more deadly than H1N1. So, yes, Obama and Biden were, as Ron Klain put it, lucky.
If H1N1 was as infectious as the coronavirus and had the same mortality rate as the coronavirus, there would have been 231 million infections (that’s 70 percent of the country) and 600,704 deaths.
But remember, Obama said they feared H1N1 could be a pandemic “if it wasn’t handled properly.”
It wasn’t handled properly. Not by a longshot. He just hopes you’ll forget the facts just because H1N1 was significantly less infectious and less fatal than COVID-19.
Obama also doesn’t want you to remember the fact that his administration had predicted in the summer of 2009 that they would have 160 million H1N1 vaccine doses by late October but ended up with fewer than 30 million. According to a study by Purdue University scholars, this failure cost lives because the H1N1 vaccine would arrive “too late to help most Americans who will be infected during this flu season.” The study determined that the CDC’s planned vaccination campaign would “likely not have a large effect on the total number of people ultimately infected by the pandemic H1N1 influenza virus.”
So, as much as Obama and Biden were lucky, their incompetence resulted in vaccine shortages that lead to more infections, and ultimately, more deaths. Obama is telling lies because the data proves that Trump’s response to the coronavirus was far superior to his response to the H1N1 pandemic.

VIDEO: Young Venezuelan Woman Warns America Where Destroying Statues Leads

VIDEO: Young Venezuelan Woman Warns America Where Destroying Statues Leads

Venezuelan Elizabeth Rogliani warns Americans about statue removals. Screenshot from video.
Just in the past few weeks, demonstrators — mobs, really — have destroyed or defaced the following statues across the United States. Or, unelected bodies have decided to remove them with no input from the public.
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
Philip Schuyler
Caesar Rodney
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses S. Grant
Theodore Roosevelt
Junipero Serra
Juan de Oñate
William McKinley
Robert E. Lee
Christopher Columbus
Stand Watie
Miguel Cervantes
Queen Isabella of Castile
Diego de Vargas
Francis Scott Key
Frank Rizzo
The Texas Rangers
Orville Hubbard
Jerry Richardson
The Richmond, Virginia, police
Delaware law enforcement
Oregonian pioneers
Oregonian pioneer mothers
John Sutter
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses S. Grant
Theodore Roosevelt
I’m sure this isn’t a complete list, and these are just the recent ones. Statue removal has become a growth industry on the left.
You may not have heard about a couple of them. In Dallas, an unelected board decided on one day to remove a generic Texas Rangers statue from a local airport, and on the very next day, they removed it. No debate. No public comment period. Nothing. The little dictators removed it to who knows where. The media dutifully and uncritically reported it.
The Natural Museum of History in New York, following no public debate or input, is removing the statue of Teddy Roosevelt.
Cities are allowing mobs to pull down, vandalize, and destroy statues depicting all manner of historic figures. Yes, cities are allowing this. They could stop it if they choose to. No one in the mainstream media is asking any of them a simple question: Why?
TV networks have canceled two shows that show police officers in action, COPS and Live PD.
HBO removed, and will restore with disclaimers, the iconic film Gone With The Wind. That film earned Hattie McDaniel the first-ever Oscar won by a black woman. Like most of history, the film is too complex to be summed up in a tweet.
Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s Rice, and the Land O Lakes butter maiden have all been removed, despite the fact that the families connected to Aunt Jemima and Land O Lakes do not see them as racist at all.
This young Venezuelan woman says she has seen all of this before and is warning Americans where it leads.
Her name is Elizabeth Rogliani.
She points to several steps Venezuela went through on its way from being one of the most prosperous countries in the Americas to a socialist police state and economic disaster:
  1. Statues came down because socialist dictator Hugo Chavez wanted the history erased.
  2. He changed street names for the same reason.
  3. He changed the educational curriculum to erase history and substitute his version.
  4. Some movies were banned, presumably for the same reason.
We’ve seen all of these happen in America just in the past few weeks, with statue destruction happening in blue cities and states from coast to coast, as city leaders choose not to defend them. There’s a petition to change the name of Columbus, Ohio because it’s named after explorer Christopher Columbus.
Without Columbus, America would not exist.
“You guys think it can’t happen to you, I’ve heard this so many times,” Rogliani says. “But always be on guard. Never believe something can’t happen to you. You need to guard your country and your society or it will be destroyed.”
She also notes that Cuban exiles tried to warn Venezuelans that they were seeing similar patterns and events they had suffered, but Venezuelans brushed them off saying they knew what freedom is and they would never surrender it.
That sounds familiar too.