Americans’ Generous Spirit Only Grew During the Pandemic
Despite a global pandemic that precipitated an economic lockdown resulting in millions of people losing their jobs, Americans and their generosity did not likewise take a downturn. Instead, because of the pandemic, the American people became even more generous. According to a newly released report, Americans’ charitable giving in 2020 increased over the year prior by more than 5%.
“Total charitable giving grew 5.1% measured in current dollars over the revised total of $448.66 billion contributed in 2019,” the Annual Report on Philanthropy for 2020 found. “Adjusted for inflation, total giving increased 3.8%.” Individual giving increased by 2.2% to $324.1 billion, setting a record for the highest dollar amount.
Interestingly, giving to churches only rose 1% over 2019 levels. Una Osili, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University associate dean for research and international programs, attributed this to physical restrictions imposed during the pandemic. Osili noted, “Reduced attendance often leads to less contributions.”
However, Osili also identified the rising number of so-called “nones” — individuals without any religious affiliations — as having a future impact on charitable giving as well. “Younger households are less likely to attend services and affiliate,” Osili points out. “A very large [part] of charitable giving overall is correlated with attending services frequently, and also [with religious] affiliation.” That could mean American charity wanes in the coming years.
Yet it’s refreshing to learn that Americans are still by and large very generous folks who are concerned with helping those in need. Even the growing numbers of irreligious Americans should serve as a motivating factor for religious ones, especially Christians, to reach out and share not only their wealth but more importantly their faith. That’s not so much to ensure that America’s generous spirit continues, but rather because the truest generosity is found in a willingness to love people, and especially those who may be the hardest to love.
~The Patriot Post
The Democrats’ Woke Postmortem
After scumbag/rino-Mitt Romney squandered the opportunity to oust Barack scumbag/liar-nObama in 2012, losing despite scumbag/liar-nObama’s “jobless recovery” and because of the less-than-enthusiastic backing of a Tea Party movement determined to overturn the still-nascent scumbag/liar-nObamaCare, Republicans commissioned a navel-gazing report in early 2013 to find out what happened. It told them, among other things, that they needed to moderate on immigration and social issues and improve their outreach to minority voters. The report was so effective that the party’s next presidential nominee ran on a get-tough border security platform and embraced the pro-life movement … while increasing the GOP share of both black and Latino voters.
Far be it from the Democrat Party to consider such a move after the ultimate party man won the 2020 presidential election, but three Democrat-allied groups scratched their collective heads enough about the lack of results at the congressional level that they commissioned a report of their own, asking why the success at the top of the ticket didn’t translate down.
In worrying about the 2022 midterms, the trio — the Third Way think tank, The Collective PAC, and Latino Victory — spent over 70 pages (and thousands of dollars) to learn that the Democrats had an excessively “woke” message that really didn’t sell and they were overly optimistic after success in the 2018 midterms. Heck, longtime Democrat consultant James Carville could have told them that for free. In fact, he did so about a month ago.
One key complaint in the report’s narrative was that Republicans (read: Donald Trump) effectively messaged them into a defensive posture, having to argue they really didn’t mean what they said about defunding the police and of course more lives mattered than just black lives. As political analyst Steven Hayward helpfully pointed out, “I am guessing many Hispanics, who endlessly hear Democratic leaders chant ‘black lives matter,’ rightly wonder — what about us? I doubt they are impressed by being ‘included’ in the broad BIPOC banner the left is offering them as a consolation prize.”
The report goes on to note, “Our assumptions about Dem support among voters of color — and the lack of differentiation in our messaging and outreach within demographic groups — cost us support in key races. … We heard that there were substantial Party and campaign misfires for engaging key demographic groups as a monolith — most notably Latino and Hispanic voters.”
Yet while the report concedes that the GOP is making inroads against “their” Latino vote, Democrats aren’t changing their stance on immigration. Moreover, blue states and cities are only grudgingly opening up their economies, which negatively affects the working class that’s most populated by minority groups.
On the other hand, the authors were pleased with an increase in black voter turnout, albeit this news came with a caveat that their support of Democrats dropped to some degree. Still, they determined that getting a slightly less overwhelming percentage of thousands more blacks to the polls was how they won the Georgia Senate runoffs.
Despite that resounding success, the progressive angst has continued past the election. As one major Democrat donor quoted in the report said, “The primary problem with Defund was not Defund, but the lack of an economic message. We became the party of shutting down the economy, the party of wearing masks, the party of taking kids out of school — not the party of solutions and science.” (And they still aren't at that party.)
And Defund is a problem because it tells the truth about the Left. Elites can afford their own private security, but a party that simultaneously tries to disarm the law-abiding while coddling the law-breaking will not appeal to those suburban voters who still turn out the most. Political analyst Rick Moran may have summed it up best: “[The report] was a waste. All they had to do was ask any Republican who didn’t live in New York or Los Angeles.”
“It’s doubtful that Democrats will learn anything,” concludes Moran. “Activists are already whining that the report blames them for the disaster. It’s true, but party leadership can’t point the finger at them and upset them even more. They need the activists to have any hope of winning in 2022.”
It turned out Republicans were correct in ignoring their 2013 report, but it took the right candidate to forcefully seize the narrative and those don’t come along every day. So it’s a sure bet that the Democrats — who think they’re smarter than all the rest of us — will be convinced that they can fool enough voters to stay in power for another two years despite ignoring any sound advice the report authors dished out. ~The Patriot Post
Texas Border Wall a Long Way Off
Texas wants to do what socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden and his administration refuse to do — put a stop to the nearly unchecked massive numbers of migrants illegally surging across the U.S. southern border. In that vein, Governor Greg Abbott last week declared that the Lone Star State “will immediately begin building border barriers in areas where migrants can easily cross the Rio Grande border with Mexico.”
Abbott further justified the decision by noting that “the influx cross the border is out of control, and the socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden administration has shown that [it] is not going to step up and do its job.” So, he continued, “Amidst reports of even more people coming in across the border, we know we have to step up and do more.”
Abbott’s concern is legitimate and his commitment to action is admirable, yet the “how” of the matter may prove to be very difficult. The crux of the issue is the long-running back and forth inherent within a federalist system, which has plagued U.S. immigration enforcement over the last two administrations.
Immigration enforcement has rightly been regarded as under the purview of the federal government — with notable exceptions. State and local governments reacted against the federal government when Donald Trump was president with the whole sanctuary city business. Before that, with Barack scumbag/liar-nObama and now with socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden, red states like Texas pushed to unilaterally enforce U.S. immigration laws within their own states due to the feds’ lack of response.
Even with those examples, there is simply no precedent for Texas’s action here. Furthermore, there’s the question of funding, as Texas would have to acquire private and public property along the border in order to build — a prospect that has both private property implications as well as financial considerations. As the Washington Examiner notes, “Part of the delay with building a wall in Texas under Trump was due to unforeseen difficulties in obtaining privately owned and protected federal land in the Rio Grande Valley and Laredo.”
Indeed, Texas would not be purchasing most of this land from private citizens; rather, the owner of most U.S. border land is actually the federal government. In other words, Texas would be having to purchase land from the federal government, currently operating under the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration. Just how eager would socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden be to sell land to Texas for the express purpose of building the very border wall Biden campaigned against as immoral and cruel?
Finally, if Texas is successful in acquiring the property, how will it fund the cost of building a wall? The most recent border wall construction cost was roughly $20 million per mile. By the time even the first post was set, years will have likely passed, due to legal wrangling and funding concerns. So, while we’re in complete agreement with Governor Abbott’s desires, the likelihood of border wall construction beginning anytime soon seems highly unlikely.
(Footnotes: Remember all those Hispanic-heavy border county elections Republicans just won? Border security is popular. Second, former President Donald Trump is set to visit the border at Abbott’s invitation later this month. What’s the over-under on him beating scumbag/liar-Kamala Harris there?) ~The Patriot Post
Exposing Michigan’s Thuggish Attorney General
Marlena Pavlos-Hackney knows statist tyranny when she sees it. As a teenager, she fled Polish communism to start a new life in a foreign land, the United States. That’s in large part why she has more guts, more moxy, and more Liberty-loving spirit than most of her fellow Americans.
It’s also why she was arrested before 6 a.m. on March 19 and taken to jail in ankle shackles and wrist cuffs. She’s the proprietor of a small business — Marlena’s Bistro and Pizzeria — in the West Michigan town of Holland, and she’d had the nerve to defy the draconian lockdown orders of Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer. Worse yet, she’d decided two days earlier, on March 17, to tell her story of resistance to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.
Hackney’s defiance was clearly too much for the state’s leftist attorney general, Dana Nessel, who, after learning of her plans to appear on Carlson’s show, wrote in a March 12 email to her staff, “Do we know her whereabouts? We should just have her picked up before she goes on. This is outrageous.”
It is outrageous, because Nessel is a purveyor of precisely the kind of authoritarianism that Hackney warns us about. And were it not for a Freedom of Information Act request sought by The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, we’d never have known about the AG’s thuggery, even after three months. “Should I be prepared to respond to this?” asked Nessel in an email thread that followed. “I hope she gets the full 93 days [in jail] for this.” And in another exchange, she showed just how obsessed she was with this single private citizen in a state of 10 million: “Does [the Michigan State Police] intend to go find her? Or are they planning to wait until next week?”
Much to Nessel’s chagrin, Hackney was released a few days later. But that’s neither here nor there. Kelly Rossman-McKinney, a spokeswoman for Nessel’s office, released the following statement in response to the revelation of her boss’s brutish email exchange:
Ms. Pavlos-Hackney willfully violated the state’s food laws, public health orders and orders of the court — a dangerous act that may have exposed dozens of diners and employees to the virus following the discovery that one of Marlena’s customers tested positive for the virus within two days of eating there. Ms. Pavlos-Hackney’s decision to then go on national television and flaunt her noncompliance compromised the state’s ability to protect public safety during a global pandemic and likely emboldened others to break the law.
Someone should’ve told Nessel that arbitrary lockdowns and onerous masking requirements don’t work and aren’t legitimate — that all they do is crush law-abiding, Constitution-loving citizens and small business owners like Hackney.
Indeed, there’s a small sign that’s posted on the front window of Hackney’s bistro. It reads, “Welcome. We are a Constitutionally Compliant Business. We are not infringing on anyone’s inalienable rights. By law, we do not follow any of the governor’s, mayor’s, health department’s, or other government agency orders or suggestions pertaining to social distancing or mask-wearing.”
Dana Nessel will claim otherwise, but Hackney was thrown in jail for daring to speak out against what she saw as an oppressive and overreaching government. “This was never going to end with censorship on social media,” Carlson noted recently. “If they can control what you write, why can’t they control what you say and think and do? Why can’t they throw you behind bars if you disagree with them or criticize their policies? They can — and as Dana Nessel proved — they will.”
Leave it to Marlena Pavlos-Hackney, a grateful immigrant who fled communist tyranny and came to our shores as a child, to remind us that we have a Constitution and individual liberties well worth fighting for.
~The Patriot Post
In Brief: Critical Race Theory Is Repackaged Marxism
Political analyst Liz Wheeler explains how CRT infiltrated American society. First, the history:
Critical race theory isn’t a theory at all. Nor is it a “perspective” of teaching history. It is racism and bigotry, and not only that — it’s an attempt to revive a failed Marxist agenda.
Critical race theory is an offshoot of critical theory, the brainchild of the Frankfurt School, a group of 20th-century Marxists associated with the Institute for Social Research. …
In 1937, Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School wrote a manifesto about “critical theory,” in which he claimed that when examining society, people cannot reason objectively. In classic Marxist fashion, critical theory divides everyone in society into classes of oppressed and oppressors, but posits that the so-called oppressed stand in the way of revolution when they adhere to the societal belief systems and cultural norms of their so-called oppressors. Therefore, the cultural institutions that stand in the way of the Marxist revolution must be destroyed through relentless criticism (hence the name: critical theory).
Then the implementation. The Marxists thought that their ideology was failing in the West because Western workers still couldn’t really let go of “institutions of the ruling class like the family, religion and country.” Real re-education was needed, as was a new oppressed class.
When Horkheimer and his fellow Marxists fled Germany to escape the Nazis, they found refuge at Columbia University. Horkheimer returned to Germany after the world defeated the Nazis, but left behind his associate, Herbert Marcuse. It was Marcuse who helped morph critical theory into critical race theory in the United States, by identifying a new “worker” for the revolution who could be re-educated to overthrow societal norms: racial minorities.
In the words of Marcuse, “Underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors.” According to Marcuse, “their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not.”
Since a worker-led revolution wasn’t happening, they needed another “oppressed” class to serve their purpose. That purpose was to tear down Western institutions that stood in the way of revolt and stage a Marxist revolution. Using racial minorities as their new vanguard would be brilliant. Who better to re-educate than a demographic of people whose ancestors had suffered oppression in America based on their skin color? Who better to paint as victims of a belief system of the “oppressors” and to claim the only way to liberation was to demolish the institutions of the oppressors?
In other words, the designers and adherents of critical theory admitted their true intent. Not equality under the law. Not civil rights. Not freedom, liberty and justice for all. Not a better life for racial minorities. Critical theorists admit their intent is to use racial minorities as the vanguard for a Marxist revolution.
Now, Wheeler says, CRT is “creeping into every aspect of American life.” Unless and until the American people truly understand this ideology for what it is, we will continue to suffer because of it. She concludes, “It’s a tool with a dangerously clear purpose: to impose simple, unadulterated Marxism in the United States of America. We must overwhelmingly reject it in its entirety on the basis of what it really is.”
Read the whole thing here. ~The Patriot Post
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