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TUCKER CARLSON: Why no one in Martha’s Vineyard – including the Obamas – celebrated the migrants

TUCKER CARLSON: Why no one in Martha’s Vineyard – including the Obamas – celebrated the migrants

Tucker reacts to Ron DeSantis sending illegal migrants to Martha’s Vineyard

Tucker Carlson

  By Tucker Carlson | Fox News

Finally, a happy story for once. Outbursts of irrepressible joy erupted throughout the exclusive island community of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, last night. For hundreds of years, Martha’s Vineyard has suffered from the soul crushing effects of its own Whiteness. Island residents understood there was only one cure. They badly needed diversity. In fact, they often said so, but despite their very best efforts over many years, diversity never came to Martha’s Vineyard. It was tragic.  

Imagine an 18th century British frigate adrift on the high seas with no lines, sailors slowly going mad, convulsing, dying, excruciating deaths from scurvy. That was Martha’s Vineyard, except it wasn’t lime juice they lacked. They had plenty of that because you can’t make a gin and tonic without it. What Martha’s Vineyard lacked was diversity, which is to say strength. Martha’s Vineyard was a very weak place. As of yesterday morning, that island was 89% White, monochromatic and utterly homogenous. Nearly everybody there was a rich Democrat. 80% voted for Joe Biden. The median home price was over $1,000,000. And then in a single blessed moment, everything changed. Relief arrived for an unlikely source.  

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, having made his own state a paradise, decided to help other states desperately in need. So yesterday, the center sent 50 illegal aliens, most of them from Venezuela, to the Martha’s Vineyard Airport. They traveled from San Antonio to the Florida Panhandle and filing to their new home on Martha’s Vineyard. CBS Boston reports that after landing, the group wandered about three and a half miles from the airport into town, thereby instantly improving it. You can imagine the unrestrained jubilation on Martha’s Vineyard tonight, long-suffering islanders finally rescued from their own oppressive Whiteness. In fact, let’s go there now to check in on the celebrations. 


Well, that’s not expected. Obviously, there has been a mistake. No, our producers are telling us there are no technical problems. That is, in fact, a live shot from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, right now, but where were the weeping, joyful crowds? Where was the champagne and the ticker tape? We expected Times Square and V-J Day. What we got was a cemetery at midnight. What? But maybe it’s not so confusing. Maybe things aren’t as they seem. Our first clue is Barack Obama. Barack Obama is a part-time resident of Martha’s Vineyard. Obama is also, of course, as you know, the country’s greatest proponent of diversity. For years, Obama earnestly told us that immigrants were better than Americans. They were holy. They make our country strong.  

Barack Obama speaks during the premiere of Netflix's Descendant during the Martha's Vineyard African-American Film Festival at MV Performing Arts Center on August 05, 2022 in Edgartown, Massachusetts. 

Barack Obama speaks during the premiere of Netflix’s Descendant during the Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival at MV Performing Arts Center on August 05, 2022 in Edgartown, Massachusetts.  (Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for Netflix)

BARACK OBAMA: America is—and always has been—a nation of immigrants. Throughout our history, immigrants have come to our shores in wave after wave from every corner of the globe. Every one of us, unless we’re Native American, has an ancestor who was born somewhere else. That’s what makes America special. That’s what makes a strong. The basic idea of welcoming immigrants to our shores is central to our way of life. It is in our DNA.  

So, that was basically the whole presidency right there for eight years. Obama hectoring us about diversity, but he didn’t just talk about it. He spent his two years in office making certain that places like Des Moines, Iowa and Portland, Maine became much less White than they previously had been because, as he so often told us, Whiteness is bad. It’s a disease. So, we recall being a little confused when we read that Barack Obama had spent $12 million to buy an eight-bathroom oceanfront property on Martha’s Vineyard, which is one of the Whitest places on Earth. Really, Martha’s Vineyard? Why not Baltimore or Gary, Indiana? Is there really no real estate left in Detroit for the Obama family compound? There’s got to be. What’s going on here? We didn’t know.

And then in 2019, Michelle Obama explained it to us. Listen to this.  

MICHELLE OBAMA: We grew up in the period, as I write, called “White flight.” That is families like ours, upstanding families like ours, you know, who were doing everything we were supposed to do and better, as we moved in, White folks moved out because they were afraid of what our families represented, and I always stop there when I talk about this out in the world, because, you know, I want to remind White folks that y’all were running from us. And you’re still running because we’re no different than the immigrant families that are moving in, the families in Pilsen, the families that are coming from other places to try to do better and so, yeah, I feel a sense of injustice.  

So, there she was, reminding White folks who badly needed reminding that the Obamas are “no different from the immigrant families moving in” because White people hate them, too. They’re still running, as she just said. So that explained it to us. The Obamas were, in fact, despised immigrants. So, when they moved to a $12 million seaside compound on Martha’s Vineyard, the point is not to live in luxury with other rich people. No, obviously. The point is to diversify Martha’s Vineyard, to strike a blow for justice. That makes sense to us and we felt better.

But then last night happened and we started to rethink our assumptions about the Obamas, about a lot of things, because a planeload of highly diverse immigrants arrived on Martha’s Vineyard to join the Obamas, but the Obamas didn’t welcome them. There was not a word from Barack or Michelle Obama. Barack wasn’t waiting at the airport to greet the diversifiers with flowers. He didn’t issue a statement of congratulations. He didn’t invite a single Venezuelan to his home. How come? 

Could it be that Barack Obama isn’t really actually in real life in favor of diversity at all? Could it be that Barack Obama strongly prefers blond SoulCycle moms and Lululemon to sweaty Third World campesinos and dirty work pants? Could it be? We can’t say. But we can tell you that if you want to find out what people really think, go ahead and ignore what they say and watch how they live and by that measure, the one that matters, Barack and Michelle Obama are every bit as bigoted as any board member in any restricted country club in the Deep South, assuming those still exist. “Those people? They’re not dating my daughter. I could tell you that.” 

So, the words we learned this week that Barack Obama really is a racist and not in the way you’ve always assumed. Obama may hate White people. He certainly seems to, but he also demands to live around them and only them. But the Obamas, to be fair, are not alone in this. His friends at the news networks in Washington, New York and Los Angeles feel exactly the same way because they’re exactly the same sort of people. CNN, for example, spent the day interviewing people connected in some way to Martha’s Vineyard. Turns out that precisely none of them were excited about the planeload of Venezuelans. One of them, the state rep for the island, even blamed this show for the sudden blessed surge in diversity. Watch this.  

DESANTIS WAS RIGHT TO SEND MIGRANTS TO MARTHA’S VINEYARD. WE NEED TO BRING BORDER CRISIS TO DEMOCRATS 

 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announces that he wants to raise the minimum starting salary for teachers during a press conference held at Bayview Elementary School on October 07, 2019 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 

 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announces that he wants to raise the minimum starting salary for teachers during a press conference held at Bayview Elementary School on October 07, 2019 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

DYLAN FERNANDES: Ron DeSantis and Republicans might want to play political games with people’s lives. I believe that’s incredibly inhumane to be using women and children and families as a political pawn that you’re going to talk about on “Tucker Carlson” and pretend to be tough on immigration.  

Wow. So, see if you can follow the argument here. When penniless illegal aliens show up in Brownsville, Texas, one of the poorest cities in the United States, they are noble strivers. They’re looking for a better life in this country, and we applaud them. “Good luck in Brownsville, newly arrived immigrants,” but when these very same people jump the moat and get a free flight to Martha’s Vineyard, it’s something else entirely. It is, as the state rep just told you, “playing political games with people’s lives” because it’s dangerous. These immigrants could wander into a clambake by accident or worse, much worse.  

Earlier today, CNN anchor John Berman (who just got fired, by the way, this morning. This morning!) John Berman interviewed noted filmmaker Ken Burns. Burns is famous, but sad, exactly the kind of middle-aged prestige hound who spends an awful lot of time looming around Martha’s Vineyard looking for other famous people. Burns has a new film out that blames the United States, of all countries on Earth, for the Holocaust.  

Now that the World War II generation has passed, Ken Burns can do that. There’s no chance angry veterans will show up at his house and beat him with their canes for besmirching the memory of their closest friends who died in the early twenties fighting the Nazis. So, Ken Burns can say whatever he wants, and he will believe him. So, this morning, Burns played the role of Holocaust expert on CNN and you know what Ken Burns has discovered? Ken Burns has discovered that Ron DeSantis sending illegal aliens to Martha’s Vineyard is pretty much exactly what Hitler did, pretty much exactly. Watch this.  

DEMOCRATS’ HYPOCRISY OVER MIGRANT FLIGHTS CALLED OUT BY GOP LAWMAKER: IT’S OK IF THEY DO IT 

JOHN BERMAN: All of your documentaries are about history, but all of them also make you think about where we are now and we woke up to the news this morning that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida sent two plane loads of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts and kids and whatnot and I’m not saying this is not a one-for-one. This is not a parallel here in any way, but it does address some of the same themes.  

KEN BURNS: This is coming straight out of the authoritarian playbook. This is what’s so disturbing about DeSantis is to use human beings, to weaponize human beings for a political purpose.  

Do you hear that, ladies and gentlemen? It’s literally – literally – just like the Holocaust. Edgartown is Dachau. Oak Bluffs is Treblinka. The horrors! This is genocide and it may be, but of course, everything is relative. Martha’s Vineyard may be a modern-day death camp, but compared to where illegal aliens usually go, it doesn’t look that bad. Let’s compare just for fun. On your screen, you will see images recently shot in America’s border towns, which are now completely overrun under Joe Biden’s immigration policy. You will know this if you look carefully chaos, violence and filth.  

Now we will take you to Martha’s Vineyard. It’s hellish, perhaps, but in a very different way—families eating together on balconies overlooking the water, women doing their shopping in a quaint little town on bicycles, couples strolling along the boardwalk, sailboats. It doesn’t look that bad. Oh, but that’s exactly the problem the media told us today. Martha’s Vineyard may seem like one of the richest places on the planet, but somehow – somehow – there aren’t enough social services there. It’s bereft of social services, unlike Brownsville.  

‘CBS MORNINGS’ ANCHORS FRET OVER FLORIDA MIGRANTS BEING RELOCATED TO MARTHA’S VINEYARD: ‘INHUMANE’ 

CBS News put it “Martha’s Vineyard is not an urban metropolitan area with a robust social services infrastructure. There’s no Justice Department immigration court where the migrants can attend asylum hearings. There’s no ICE field office for migrants can check in” now, but you see, Martha’s Vineyard is in “an urban area” with a “robust social services infrastructure” that other people get to deal with and honestly, that’s true and it’s kind of the whole idea. 

That’s why DeSantis sent the illegal aliens to Martha’s Vineyard. People who make and advocate for certain policies should at some point have to live with those policies, but until now, they haven’t had to. Bill Gates goes to Martha’s Vineyard. So does Oprah, James Taylor, Spike Lee, Amy Schumer, and many more and all of them. Every one is a much better person than you are because they support diversity and now for the first time, they’re going to have some diversity.

But it’s just the beginning. Martha’s Vineyard will need many, many more illegal aliens, tens of housands more, until the island is no longer majority White. Only then can it be a good place. Yet, at the same time, the people who currently go to Martha’s Vineyard are going to have to keep going there. They can’t run away to somewhere else. That would be immoral. It would be, as Michelle Obama has told us, “White flight.” Now massive demographic change will obviously make Martha’s Vineyard a very different sort of place, but that’s okay. Change is good. Anyone who fears change is racist. We know that for sure because they told us that for years.

CBP CHIEF ANNOUNCES PROBE OF OFFICIAL TWITTER ACCOUNT THAT RETWEETED CRITICISM OF BIDEN’S BORDER ‘ERADICATION’ 

“Where,” you may ask, “will all these new people live on such a small island?” Simple. First, they can occupy Barack Obama’s compound. There is no reason Obama needs that much space. Nobody needs that much space. You could probably fit a dozen immigrant families in Barack Obama’s pool house and another five or six in the pantry. Keep going. Build a soccer field on the lawn, an outdoor goat barbecue by the back door and bingo, you’ve got affordable housing, but it won’t be enough.  

The vineyard is going to need to construct shantytowns for all these new people, but we can’t call them shantytowns. Obviously, that’s demeaning. So, we’re going to call them townships after Obama’s favorite country and they’re going to give them dignified names that suggest some kind of victory over adversity: Mandela, Cesar Chavezville, Kamala-apolis. 

Now, inside each one we will put a plaque with that famous Emma Lazarus poem, just so that everybody knows that these are not ordinary favelas. These are moral victories. As the signs say in Martha’s Vineyard to this day, “No human is illegal. Love is love.” That’s just science.

But speaking of science, what will the environmental impact of all this new development be? That’s a massive concern of Martha’s Vineyard and for good reason, but in this case, it’s not a concern. None of these new townships will have running water or electricity. So, by definition, they will be carbon-neutral. It’ll be part of the Green Revolution.  

CLAY TRAVIS CALLS FOR TAKING WARREN’S MARTHA VINEYARD TWEET LITERALLY: ‘SEND EVERY’ MIGRANT TO MASSACHUSETTS 

Local law enforcement services won’t be strained either because they won’t be needed. None of these new arrivals will be bound by local laws. Why would they be? They ignored federal law to get here. There’s no reason that they should have to observe the vineyard’s ordinances against, say, drunk driving or defecating in public and just in case, there are still vineyarders who think they have the right to protect what they own, think again, people. We refer you to the case of the fascist McCloskey family in St. Louis who once tried that, tried to defend what’s theirs, and they got indicted for it, so that’s not allowed. But we can’t fully trust you. Somebody’s going to have to go door to door to make sure that not one person on Martha’s Vineyard keeps a gun at home because self-defense can be tempting even for Democratic voters. 

There’s a lot of change for the Vineyard and they’re going to start work soon. The summer season begins on Memorial Day. So, when Amy Schumer shows up to her place in June, she better be ready to find an illegal alien family using her bath towels. Yes, she will and let’s hope she doesn’t complain about it, because as Joe Biden often reminds us, illegal immigration is a gift.  

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during an event to celebrate passage of the "Safer Communities Act," on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, U.S., July 11, 2022.

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during an event to celebrate passage of the “Safer Communities Act,” on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, U.S., July 11, 2022. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo)

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Guess what? They’re the reason why, the legal as well as undocumented, they’re the reason why our society is functioning, the reason why our economy is growing. We don’t talk about that. We stand up and act like it’s a burden. It is not a burden. It’s a gift. 

Hear that? Hear that? Illegal immigration is not a burden. It’s a gift, dumbo. So, Martha’s Vineyard received an enormous gift last night. Think of it like a perpetual Christmas, but noisier. And you can’t beat the timing. As Karine Jean-Pierre just reminded us today at the White House, it’s Hispanic Heritage Month. Perfect, so roll with it, Martha’s Vineyard. Things are about to change a lot for you, but that’s OK.

Radical, destructive change is the essence of anti-racism, and as you’ve told us so many times, you support anti-racism, lest we need to remind you and, in any case, pretty soon you’ll have no memory of the way things were before. Martha’s Vineyard will feel and look just like El Paso and that will all seem normal to you. “What’s El Paso like?” you wonder. Haven’t been there lately? OK. Well, here’s some recent pictures.  

ABC CORRESPONDENT SAYS WHITE HOUSE WANTS TO BE ‘TALKING ABOUT LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE’ BESIDES IMMIGRATION

REPORTER LIANNA GOLDEN: I want to show you an exact look of what we’re seeing out here. We’re right next to the Greyhound bus station where, as we’ve been telling you for days now, migrants, mostly a large group of Venezuelans, have been using this area as a temporary camp and a home. Now, take a look at this video from earlier this morning and overnight where you can see migrants have set up sleeping arrangements on cardboard and mattresses in this same spot here outside the bus station. Dagostino and other city leaders, said their number one priority is to avoid people on the streets, but since CBP has been so overwhelmed with the large numbers coming in, they have been forced to release as such. As more and more people have been on the streets in recent days, sanitation and cleanliness have become a concern out here. We’re not seeing any porta potties or temporary toilet showers or sinks and as you can imagine, the smell is beginning to add up.  

Oh, wow. Look, El Paso has Venezuelans, too, and that’s why tonight it’s redolent of diversity, brimming with the gift of illegal immigration. That’ll be Edgartown, Massachusetts soon but we can’t stop there. Why would we? If we’re really going to make Martha’s Vineyard look like the world, the people who vacation on Martha’s Vineyard have created for the rest of us, we’re going to need to import graffiti artists, armed robbers and subway rapists and the drug addicted homeless community, many, many of those and their tents.  


Why should they be living outside your house when they could be camped on Barack Obama’s $12 million lawn? That seems fair. Why isn’t it fair? Well, unfortunately, don’t expect Obama to see it the same way. He is a racist as we’ve established, and so apparently are his fellow liberals. They are outraged by the idea of illegal aliens near their island vacation homes. Before long, they’ll be tweeting in solidarity with the Vineyard’s White community. “Hashtag, I stand with Martha’s Vineyard.” Little Island emojis in their bios. Hilarious. That could actually happen, by the way, because in the end, liberals really do stand with Martha’s Vineyard against everyone else and honestly, on some level, we can kind of understand why.  

If we’re being honest, we don’t want to see Martha’s Vineyard trashed. We’re Americans and Martha’s Vineyard is a beautiful place. It’s a sin to destroy beautiful things always. Unfortunately, and this really is the point, Martha’s Vineyard is one of a dwindling number of beautiful places left in our country. Martha’s Vineyard is what most of America once was not all that long ago—small, socially cohesive, orderly, safe with traditional human-centered architecture and big stretches of nature, unspoiled by industrial wind farms and dollar stores. 

The people who live in Martha’s Vineyard now didn’t build any of that. The people who did build it are long gone, along with the attitudes and values that made it possible. The people who live there now just came for the nostalgia and all that’s left really are the buildings and the beaches, but still you’d hate to see them wrecked. 

On the other hand, at this point, we may have no choice. No sane country would allow millions of foreign nationals to walk across its borders illegally and then immediately give them government benefits in exchange for mocking our rule of law. No one would ever do that. It is suicide. Over time, it will destroy the United States. Everyone can see that, no matter what they say, but the people who vacation on Martha’s Vineyard don’t care. They are making this possible. They support it. They vote for it. They fund it, and they can do all of that because they are so insulated from the effects of Joe Biden’s lunatic immigration policies that none of it matters to them. The country collapses? Big deal. They live on an island. but to the rest of us, it is a big deal. This is our country. We were born here. We planned to die here. We have nowhere else to go, and we don’t want to live in a slum. Maybe Martha’s Vineyard will finally understand. 

Tucker Carlson currently serves as the host of FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Tucker Carlson Tonight (weekdays 8PM/ET). He joined the network in 2009 as a contributor.

Power of the Market – Immigration

The ‘Secure Border’ of Kamala Harris

Terence Jeffrey  @TerryJeffrey / September 14, 2022

“The border is secure,” Vice President Kamala Harris told NBC’s Chuck Todd last weekend. Pictured: Harris speaks Aug. 12 during a visit to a science center in Oakland, California. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Terence Jeffrey@TerryJeffrey

Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSNews.com.

When Donald Trump was president, the Border Patrol in fiscal year 2019 did not encounter a single individual on the terrorist watchlist trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border between legal ports of entry.

In the first 10 months of this fiscal year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol encountered 66 of them.

These include individuals, as Customs and Border Protection explains on its website, who are “known or suspected terrorists” or “individuals who represent a potential threat to the United States, including known affiliates of watchlisted individuals.”

Did CBP fail to encounter any individuals on the watchlist in 2019 because the Trump administration was less aggressive about securing that border?

Or have 66 been caught this year because the Biden administration has sent a signal to the world that the border is not as secure now as it was three years ago and, thus, has inspired watchlisted individuals to try to sneak in?

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that the U.S.-Mexico border has indeed been secured and argued that illegal aliens already inside the United States should be rewarded with U.S. citizenship.

“Would you call the border secure?” host Chuck Todd asked Harris.

“I think that there is no question that we have to do what the president and I asked Congress to do—the first request we made, pass a bill to create a pathway to citizenship,” Harris responded.

“The border is secure,” she continued.

“But we also have a broken immigration system, in particular over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed,” Harris added.

“We’re going to have 2 million people cross this border for the first time ever,” Todd said. “You’re confident this border is secure?”

“We have a secure border,” Harris repeated, “in that that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration. But there are still a lot of problems that we are trying to fix, given the deterioration that happened over the last four years.”

“We also have to put in place a law and a plan for a pathway to citizenship for the millions of people who are here and are prepared to do what is legally required to gain citizenship,” she said.

This is nonsense.

People who were “prepared to do what is legally required to gain citizenship” legally applied for immigrant visas before they came to the United States, came here legally, and now are living here legally on a legal path to citizenship.

Harris is talking about people who have violated the law, either by overstaying a visa or by illegally sneaking across our southern border.

America has the most generous legal immigration policies of any nation on Earth.

In 2019, the same year that the Border Patrol did not encounter a single person on the terrorist watchlist at the U.S.-Mexico border, the United States naturalized 843,593 foreign-born citizens.

These new Americans came from all across the globe, according to data published by the Department of Homeland Security.

The total included 5% from Central America, 8.1% from South America, 9.6% from Europe, 10.1% from Africa, 12% from the Caribbean, 15.8% from other regions in North America, and 38.8% from Asia.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic started, the number of naturalized U.S. citizens dropped to 628,254. In 2021, however, it climbed back up to 813,861.

The 813,861 people who became naturalized U.S. citizens in 2021 almost equaled the entire population of San Francisco, which the Census Bureau says was 815,201 that year.

Indeed, the number of people who became naturalized U.S. citizens in 2021 exceeded the populations of many major U.S. cities, including Seattle (733,919), Denver (711,463), Washington, D.C. (670,050), Boston (654,776), Detroit (632,464), and Baltimore (576,498).

Clearly, the United States has not closed its doors to law-abiding people who immigrate here in keeping with our laws.

What has happened along our border in the past three years? In fiscal 2020, Trump’s last full year in office, Customs and Border Protection reported that it encountered 458,088 people trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border into the United States.

In fiscal 2021, the year Joe Biden succeeded Trump, the number of people CBP encountered trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border jumped to 1,734,686.

“Migrants were encountered 1.7 million times in the last 12 months, the highest number of illegal crossings recorded since at least 1960,” The New York Times said Oct. 22, 2021.

“It was the highest number of illegal crossings recorded since at least 1960, when the government first began tracking such entries,” the Times said.

The Washington Post reported on April 2, 2021—more than two months after Biden took office—that the number of illegal border crossers who successfully evaded the Border Patrol was surging. The Post reported:

Nearly 1,000 people per day are sneaking into the United States without being identified or taken into custody because U.S. border agents are busy attending to migrant families and unaccompanied children while also trying to stop soaring numbers of male adults, according to three U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials familiar with the data.

While CBP has never claimed to interdict every border-crosser, the number of ‘gotaways’ recorded in recent weeks is the highest in recent memory, said two of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the data.

In just the first 10 months of this fiscal year (October 2021 through July 2022), CBP has encountered 1,946,780 illegal border crossers.

The Biden administration is setting another record for the number of illegal border crossers encountered by Customs and Border Protection.

This is what Harris calls a “secure border.”

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Immigration, Part II: Turning America into a Welfare Magnet

In Part I of this series, I explained why it’s absurd to think illegal immigration can be stopped by sending foreign aid to less-developed countries, such as many of those in Central America.

Simply stated, government-to-government handouts have never been a successful strategy for turning poor nations into rich nations. Indeed, aid actually discourages countries from following the recipe that does deliver prosperity.

In today’s column, let’s address Milton Friedman’s famous dilemma about the incompatibility of open borders and welfare.

Like most libertarians, I want to solve the problem by getting rid of the welfare state.

Immigrants are a big net plus so long as they are coming to work and be productive.

Indeed, because of their entrepreneurial skills and work ethic, immigrants from many nations wind up earning more than native-born Americans.

That’s something to celebrate. The American Dream in action!

But will that story of success continue if the welfare state is expanded?

Two advocates of increased immigration are worried. First, Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal recently explained that Biden’s agenda is a recipe for immigrant dependency.

…it is a growing belief on the political left that people should be allowed to enter the U.S. on their terms rather than ours, and that it is our collective responsibility to take care of them if they can’t take care of themselves. Milton Friedman said that open immigration and large welfare states are incompatible, and today’s progressives in Congress and the White House are eager to test that proposition.…Another concern is the left’s determination to sever any connection between work and benefits, something all the more worrisome since it is occurring while destitute foreign nationals with little education are being lured here en masse. …Earlier this month, the Biden administration quietly announced that it would no longer enforce a policy that limited the admission of immigrants who were deemed likely to become overly dependent on government benefits. What could go wrong? …In countries like Italy and France, generous aid programs have attracted poor migrants who are more likely than natives to be heavy users of welfare and less likely to be working. It’s a mistake to think it can’t happen here.

In a column last year for Reason, Shikha Dalmia warned that welfare programs undermine support for immigration.

…economists Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva…administered online questionnaires to 24,000 respondents in six countries: U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden. The explicit aim was to study attitudes toward legal, not illegal, immigration. …restrictionists have succeeded most spectacularly is in depicting immigrants as welfare queens. …In America, over 25 percent of respondents said the person with the  ..immigrant-sounding name would pay less in taxes than he collected in welfare… The study’s findings pose a particular dilemma for Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who wants to combine grandiose welfare schemes like free health care, pre-K, and college for everyone with generous immigration policies, because the mere mention of immigration reduces support for such schemes. Respondents who were asked about immigration became less concerned about inequality and less supportive of soak-the-rich schemes. …as long as immigrants are seen as succeeding through their own grit, natives may have no real objection to them. What is most likely to sour the public on immigration are the grandiose universal freebies… Immigrants should be wary of Democrats bearing gifts.

Both Riley and Dalmia raise good points.

My modest contribution to this discussion is to provide a practical example.

In his so-called American Rescue Plan, Joe Biden included a huge giveaway program that will shower $3,000-$3,600 to non-rich households for every kid they have.

This is a one-year, one-time handout, but many Democrats (and some Republicans!) want to make these enormous per-child payments a permanent part of America’s welfare state.

If that happens, the incentive to move to the United States almost surely will skyrocket.

Here’s a map I made, showing the annual handout for two children in the United States and the average per-capita incomein some nearby nations.

At the risk of stating the obvious, there will be a huge incentive to migrate to America – but not for the right reasons. And my little example doesn’t include the value of any of the dozens of other redistribution programs in Washington.

The bottom line is that we shouldn’t have a welfare system that rewards dependency, whether for people in the country legally or illegally.

And if you like immigration in theory, you should be especially opposed to handouts that will undermine public support for newcomers in practice.

P.S. It’s much better to have immigration policies such as the ones proposed by former Congressman Jared Polis and current George Mason University Professor Tyler Cowen.

Milton Friedman in 2004

Portrait of Milton Friedman.jpg

Power of the Market – Immigration

MILTON FRIEDMAN ON IMMIGRATION

MILTON FRIEDMAN ON IMMIGRATION PART 2

March 18, 2021

Office of Barack and Michelle Obama
P.O. Box 91000
Washington, DC 20066

Dear President Obama,

I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters. 

There are several issues raised in your book that I would like to discuss with you such as the minimum wage law, the liberal press, the cause of 2007 financial meltdown, and especially your pro-choice (what I call pro-abortion) view which I strongly object to on both religious and scientific grounds, Two of the most impressive things in your book were your dedication to both the National Prayer Breakfast (which spoke at 8 times and your many visits to the sides of wounded warriors!!

I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it. 

Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:

WHEN IT CAME to immigration, everyone agreed that the system was broken. The process of immigrating legally to the United States could take a decade or longer, often depending on what country you were coming from and how much money you had.Meanwhile, the economic gulf between us and our southern neighbors drove hundreds of thousands of people to illegally cross the 1,933-mile U.S.-Mexico border each year, searching for work and a better life. Congress had spent billions to harden the border, with fencing, cameras, drones, and an expanded and increasingly militarized border patrol. But rather than stop the flow of immigrants, these steps had spurred an industry of smugglers—coyotes—who made big money transporting human cargo in barbaric and sometimes deadly fashion. And although border crossings by poor Mexican and Central American migrants received most of the attention from politicians and the press, about 40 percent of America’s unauthorized immigrants arrived through airports or other legal ports of entry and then overstayed their visas.
By 2010, an estimated eleven million undocumented persons were living in the United States, in large part thoroughly woven into the fabric of American life.Many were longtime residents, with children who either were U.S. citizens by virtue of having been born on American soil or had been brought to the United States at such an early age that they were American in every respect except for a piece of paper. Entire sectors of the U.S. economy relied on their labor, as undocumented immigrants were often willing to do the toughest, dirtiest work for meager pay—picking the fruits and vegetables that stocked our grocery stores, mopping the floors of offices, washing dishes at restaurants, and providing care to the elderly. But although American consumers benefited from this invisible workforce, many feared that immigrants were taking jobs from citizens, burdening social services programs, and changing the nation’s racial and cultural makeup, which led to demands for the government to crack down on illegal immigration. This sentiment was strongest among Republican constituencies, egged on by an increasingly nativist right-wing press. However, the politics didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines: The traditionally Democratic trade union rank and file, for example, saw the growing presence of undocumented workers on co
    nstruction sites as threatening their livelihoods, while Republican-leaning business groups interested in maintaining a steady supply of cheap labor (or, in the case of Silicon Valley, foreign-born computer programmers and engineers) often took pro-immigration positions.

     Back in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes, indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I’d pledged during the campaign to resurrect similar legislation once elected, and I’d appointed former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security—the agency that oversaw U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection—partly because of her knowledge of border issues and her reputation for having previously managed immigration in a way that was both compassionate and tough.
My hopes for a bill had thus far been dashed. With the economy in crisis and Americans losing jobs,few in Congress had any appetite to take on a hot-button issue like immigration. Kennedy was gone. McCain, having been criticized by the right flank for his relatively moderate immigration stance, showed little interest in taking up the banner again. Worse yet, my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate. This wasn’t a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE’s budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records. My team and I had made a strategic choice not to immediately try to reverse the policies we’d inherited in large part because we didn’t want to provide ammunition to critics who claimed that Democrats weren’t willing to enforce existing immigration laws—a perception that we thought could torpedo our chances of passing a future reform bill. But by 2010, immigrant-rights and Latino advocacy groups were criticizing our lack of progress..And although I continued to urge Congress to pass immigration reform, I had no realistic path for delivering a new comprehensive law before the midterms.

Milton Friedman wisely noted,  “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” 
Is it prudent to allow illegal immigrants (60 percent of whom are high-school dropouts) access to Social Security, Medicare, and, over time, to 60 federal means-tested welfare programs? I don’t think so either!


FREE TO CHOOSE “Who protects the worker?” Video and Transcript Part 

In 1980 I read the book FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman and it really enlightened me a tremendous amount.  I suggest checking out these episodes and transcripts of Milton Friedman’s film series FREE TO CHOOSE: “The Failure of Socialism” and “What is wrong with our schools?”  and “Created Equal”  and  From Cradle to Grave, and – Power of the Market. Milton Friedman shows in this episode how the worker is best protected and it is not by the government!!!!!!!

The essence of what Milton Friedman is saying in this episode is found in this statement:

“The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.”

L. WILLIAMS: Dr. Friedman and Walter Williams go back in history and they take a look at a situation where America was empty, where we didn’t have anything like the sophisticated industrial economy we have today, but had a much more agricultural and rural kind of economy and of course when the __ when the impoverished peasants of Europe, my ancestors and most of our ancestors, except for the slaves, which is another situation, but when these people came from Europe and came to a wide open continent with the most fertile soil then available to anyone in the world, naturally there was progress; and I or any of us would be mad to deny progress. But as that developed and as population increased and as we moved into a much more sophisticated industrial economy, we moved then into the situation in the 1930s, or earlier than that , at the end of the century. As some of the more skilled jobs came along, the labor movement didn’t happen by accident. Didn’t happen because there wasn’t a need there. The results of this development, even with all the wealth available in America, the results of this development was that many working people were not having anything like, by standards of civilization or whatever, anything like their fair share in this progress.

MCKENZIE: Now you’re arguing that in a free market, for labor, everyone benefits. Does that mean that you would favor abolition of all immigration restrictions?

FRIEDMAN: The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.

MCKENZIE: But this is true of every western industrialized country.

FRIEDMAN: That’s right and that’s why today __

MCKENZIE: Yeah.

FRIEDMAN: __ under current circumstances you cannot, unfortunately have free immigration. Not because there’s anything wrong with free immigration, but because we have other policies which make it impossible to adopt free immigration.

MCKENZIE: Well I’d like other reactions. Is it at all feasible to open the door of the labor market internationally now? Bill Brady?

BRADY: I would __ I would say yes providing they open the door to us. I think that the door to not only the labor market, the door to all markets should be __ should be open. That is the product markets.

W. WILLIAMS: My feelings about the undocumented workers of Mexican-Americans are inscribed at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. I think that the people should have the right to come to this country. Now, those who would say, you know, I hear a number of people saying that, well the immigrants are contributing to our unemployment problem. And I point this out to some people, I said, “look, you know, this is the same rhetoric that the Irish used when the blacks were coming up from the north, ” you know, they’re using blacks as scapegoats. They’re saying, “get those people back where they came from so that our members can get jobs, ” you know. Unions were as well doing this, you know, they called them scabs, strikebreakers, etcetera, etcetera. So I do not wish for Mexican-Americans to become the new scapegoats of our particular national problems. They are not the problem, and our nation benefits to the extent that these people come here and work. And to that extent __ to that extent__ so it’s kind of good for them to remain illegal aliens as opposed to being legal aliens where they’re subject to our welfare programs, so that we don’t want them to come here to __

(Several people talking at once.)

GREEN: I think that this country cannot have a group of workers to remain outside the framework of our laws and our protection. And as long as we have workers who are attracted to the United States because of the standards of living; and I think minimum wages play a part in that as part of that attraction. But it seems to me to have undocumented workers without providing either a means of protection for them and it seems to me that we’ve got to go to the question of providing the amnesty for those generations of workers who have come here over a period of time, now two, three, maybe four generations. We have to see that they have the same rights and protection of all other workers. And as it stands now, large numbers of them live outside the framework of the laws and statutes that we have on the __ on our books.

MCKENZIE: Comment Milton.

FRIEDMAN: They do and the tragedy of the situation, as what Walter Williams point out, that as long as they are undocumented and illegal they are a clear net gain, the nation benefits and they benefit. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t. The tragedy is that we’ve adopted all these other policies so that if we convert them into legal residents it’s no longer clear that we benefit. They may benefit, but it’s no longer clear that we do. What Lynn Williams said before is again a travesty on what was actually going on. The real boost to the trade union movement came after the Great Depression of the 1930s; that Great Depression was not a failure of capitalism; it was not a failure of the private market system as we pointed out in another one of the programs in this series; it was a failure of government. It was not the case that somehow or other there was a decline in the conditions of the working class that produced a great surge of unionism. On the contrary __ unions have never accounted for more than one out of four or one out of five of American workers. The American worker benefited not out of unions, he benefited in spite of unions. He benefited because there was greater opportunity because there were people who were willing to invest their money because there was an opportunity for people to work, to save, to invest. That’s still the case today. You say, we have to provide them with something or other Ernest. Who are the “we”?

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com

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“You can’t simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state” MILTON FRIEDMAN

Power of the Market – Immigration

The ‘Secure Border’ of Kamala Harris

Terence Jeffrey  @TerryJeffrey / September 14, 2022

“The border is secure,” Vice President Kamala Harris told NBC’s Chuck Todd last weekend. Pictured: Harris speaks Aug. 12 during a visit to a science center in Oakland, California. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Terence Jeffrey@TerryJeffrey

Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSNews.com.

When Donald Trump was president, the Border Patrol in fiscal year 2019 did not encounter a single individual on the terrorist watchlist trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border between legal ports of entry.

In the first 10 months of this fiscal year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol encountered 66 of them.

These include individuals, as Customs and Border Protection explains on its website, who are “known or suspected terrorists” or “individuals who represent a potential threat to the United States, including known affiliates of watchlisted individuals.”

Did CBP fail to encounter any individuals on the watchlist in 2019 because the Trump administration was less aggressive about securing that border?

Or have 66 been caught this year because the Biden administration has sent a signal to the world that the border is not as secure now as it was three years ago and, thus, has inspired watchlisted individuals to try to sneak in?

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that the U.S.-Mexico border has indeed been secured and argued that illegal aliens already inside the United States should be rewarded with U.S. citizenship.

“Would you call the border secure?” host Chuck Todd asked Harris.

“I think that there is no question that we have to do what the president and I asked Congress to do—the first request we made, pass a bill to create a pathway to citizenship,” Harris responded.

“The border is secure,” she continued.

“But we also have a broken immigration system, in particular over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed,” Harris added.

“We’re going to have 2 million people cross this border for the first time ever,” Todd said. “You’re confident this border is secure?”

“We have a secure border,” Harris repeated, “in that that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration. But there are still a lot of problems that we are trying to fix, given the deterioration that happened over the last four years.”

“We also have to put in place a law and a plan for a pathway to citizenship for the millions of people who are here and are prepared to do what is legally required to gain citizenship,” she said.

This is nonsense.

People who were “prepared to do what is legally required to gain citizenship” legally applied for immigrant visas before they came to the United States, came here legally, and now are living here legally on a legal path to citizenship.

Harris is talking about people who have violated the law, either by overstaying a visa or by illegally sneaking across our southern border.

America has the most generous legal immigration policies of any nation on Earth.

In 2019, the same year that the Border Patrol did not encounter a single person on the terrorist watchlist at the U.S.-Mexico border, the United States naturalized 843,593 foreign-born citizens.

These new Americans came from all across the globe, according to data published by the Department of Homeland Security.

The total included 5% from Central America, 8.1% from South America, 9.6% from Europe, 10.1% from Africa, 12% from the Caribbean, 15.8% from other regions in North America, and 38.8% from Asia.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic started, the number of naturalized U.S. citizens dropped to 628,254. In 2021, however, it climbed back up to 813,861.

The 813,861 people who became naturalized U.S. citizens in 2021 almost equaled the entire population of San Francisco, which the Census Bureau says was 815,201 that year.

Indeed, the number of people who became naturalized U.S. citizens in 2021 exceeded the populations of many major U.S. cities, including Seattle (733,919), Denver (711,463), Washington, D.C. (670,050), Boston (654,776), Detroit (632,464), and Baltimore (576,498).

Clearly, the United States has not closed its doors to law-abiding people who immigrate here in keeping with our laws.

What has happened along our border in the past three years? In fiscal 2020, Trump’s last full year in office, Customs and Border Protection reported that it encountered 458,088 people trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border into the United States.

In fiscal 2021, the year Joe Biden succeeded Trump, the number of people CBP encountered trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border jumped to 1,734,686.

“Migrants were encountered 1.7 million times in the last 12 months, the highest number of illegal crossings recorded since at least 1960,” The New York Times said Oct. 22, 2021.

“It was the highest number of illegal crossings recorded since at least 1960, when the government first began tracking such entries,” the Times said.

The Washington Post reported on April 2, 2021—more than two months after Biden took office—that the number of illegal border crossers who successfully evaded the Border Patrol was surging. The Post reported:

Nearly 1,000 people per day are sneaking into the United States without being identified or taken into custody because U.S. border agents are busy attending to migrant families and unaccompanied children while also trying to stop soaring numbers of male adults, according to three U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials familiar with the data.

While CBP has never claimed to interdict every border-crosser, the number of ‘gotaways’ recorded in recent weeks is the highest in recent memory, said two of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the data.

In just the first 10 months of this fiscal year (October 2021 through July 2022), CBP has encountered 1,946,780 illegal border crossers.

The Biden administration is setting another record for the number of illegal border crossers encountered by Customs and Border Protection.

This is what Harris calls a “secure border.”

COPYRIGHT 2022 CREATORS.COM

Immigration, Part II: Turning America into a Welfare Magnet

In Part I of this series, I explained why it’s absurd to think illegal immigration can be stopped by sending foreign aid to less-developed countries, such as many of those in Central America.

Simply stated, government-to-government handouts have never been a successful strategy for turning poor nations into rich nations. Indeed, aid actually discourages countries from following the recipe that does deliver prosperity.

In today’s column, let’s address Milton Friedman’s famous dilemma about the incompatibility of open borders and welfare.

Like most libertarians, I want to solve the problem by getting rid of the welfare state.

Immigrants are a big net plus so long as they are coming to work and be productive.

Indeed, because of their entrepreneurial skills and work ethic, immigrants from many nations wind up earning more than native-born Americans.

That’s something to celebrate. The American Dream in action!

But will that story of success continue if the welfare state is expanded?

Two advocates of increased immigration are worried. First, Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal recently explained that Biden’s agenda is a recipe for immigrant dependency.

…it is a growing belief on the political left that people should be allowed to enter the U.S. on their terms rather than ours, and that it is our collective responsibility to take care of them if they can’t take care of themselves. Milton Friedman said that open immigration and large welfare states are incompatible, and today’s progressives in Congress and the White House are eager to test that proposition.…Another concern is the left’s determination to sever any connection between work and benefits, something all the more worrisome since it is occurring while destitute foreign nationals with little education are being lured here en masse. …Earlier this month, the Biden administration quietly announced that it would no longer enforce a policy that limited the admission of immigrants who were deemed likely to become overly dependent on government benefits. What could go wrong? …In countries like Italy and France, generous aid programs have attracted poor migrants who are more likely than natives to be heavy users of welfare and less likely to be working. It’s a mistake to think it can’t happen here.

In a column last year for Reason, Shikha Dalmia warned that welfare programs undermine support for immigration.

…economists Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva…administered online questionnaires to 24,000 respondents in six countries: U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden. The explicit aim was to study attitudes toward legal, not illegal, immigration. …restrictionists have succeeded most spectacularly is in depicting immigrants as welfare queens. …In America, over 25 percent of respondents said the person with the  ..immigrant-sounding name would pay less in taxes than he collected in welfare… The study’s findings pose a particular dilemma for Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who wants to combine grandiose welfare schemes like free health care, pre-K, and college for everyone with generous immigration policies, because the mere mention of immigration reduces support for such schemes. Respondents who were asked about immigration became less concerned about inequality and less supportive of soak-the-rich schemes. …as long as immigrants are seen as succeeding through their own grit, natives may have no real objection to them. What is most likely to sour the public on immigration are the grandiose universal freebies… Immigrants should be wary of Democrats bearing gifts.

Both Riley and Dalmia raise good points.

My modest contribution to this discussion is to provide a practical example.

In his so-called American Rescue Plan, Joe Biden included a huge giveaway program that will shower $3,000-$3,600 to non-rich households for every kid they have.

This is a one-year, one-time handout, but many Democrats (and some Republicans!) want to make these enormous per-child payments a permanent part of America’s welfare state.

If that happens, the incentive to move to the United States almost surely will skyrocket.

Here’s a map I made, showing the annual handout for two children in the United States and the average per-capita incomein some nearby nations.

At the risk of stating the obvious, there will be a huge incentive to migrate to America – but not for the right reasons. And my little example doesn’t include the value of any of the dozens of other redistribution programs in Washington.

The bottom line is that we shouldn’t have a welfare system that rewards dependency, whether for people in the country legally or illegally.

And if you like immigration in theory, you should be especially opposed to handouts that will undermine public support for newcomers in practice.

P.S. It’s much better to have immigration policies such as the ones proposed by former Congressman Jared Polis and current George Mason University Professor Tyler Cowen.

Milton Friedman in 2004

Portrait of Milton Friedman.jpg

Power of the Market – Immigration

MILTON FRIEDMAN ON IMMIGRATION

MILTON FRIEDMAN ON IMMIGRATION PART 2

March 18, 2021

Office of Barack and Michelle Obama
P.O. Box 91000
Washington, DC 20066

Dear President Obama,

I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters. 

There are several issues raised in your book that I would like to discuss with you such as the minimum wage law, the liberal press, the cause of 2007 financial meltdown, and especially your pro-choice (what I call pro-abortion) view which I strongly object to on both religious and scientific grounds, Two of the most impressive things in your book were your dedication to both the National Prayer Breakfast (which spoke at 8 times and your many visits to the sides of wounded warriors!!

I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it. 

Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:

WHEN IT CAME to immigration, everyone agreed that the system was broken. The process of immigrating legally to the United States could take a decade or longer, often depending on what country you were coming from and how much money you had.Meanwhile, the economic gulf between us and our southern neighbors drove hundreds of thousands of people to illegally cross the 1,933-mile U.S.-Mexico border each year, searching for work and a better life. Congress had spent billions to harden the border, with fencing, cameras, drones, and an expanded and increasingly militarized border patrol. But rather than stop the flow of immigrants, these steps had spurred an industry of smugglers—coyotes—who made big money transporting human cargo in barbaric and sometimes deadly fashion. And although border crossings by poor Mexican and Central American migrants received most of the attention from politicians and the press, about 40 percent of America’s unauthorized immigrants arrived through airports or other legal ports of entry and then overstayed their visas.
By 2010, an estimated eleven million undocumented persons were living in the United States, in large part thoroughly woven into the fabric of American life.Many were longtime residents, with children who either were U.S. citizens by virtue of having been born on American soil or had been brought to the United States at such an early age that they were American in every respect except for a piece of paper. Entire sectors of the U.S. economy relied on their labor, as undocumented immigrants were often willing to do the toughest, dirtiest work for meager pay—picking the fruits and vegetables that stocked our grocery stores, mopping the floors of offices, washing dishes at restaurants, and providing care to the elderly. But although American consumers benefited from this invisible workforce, many feared that immigrants were taking jobs from citizens, burdening social services programs, and changing the nation’s racial and cultural makeup, which led to demands for the government to crack down on illegal immigration. This sentiment was strongest among Republican constituencies, egged on by an increasingly nativist right-wing press. However, the politics didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines: The traditionally Democratic trade union rank and file, for example, saw the growing presence of undocumented workers on co
    nstruction sites as threatening their livelihoods, while Republican-leaning business groups interested in maintaining a steady supply of cheap labor (or, in the case of Silicon Valley, foreign-born computer programmers and engineers) often took pro-immigration positions.

     Back in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes, indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I’d pledged during the campaign to resurrect similar legislation once elected, and I’d appointed former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security—the agency that oversaw U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection—partly because of her knowledge of border issues and her reputation for having previously managed immigration in a way that was both compassionate and tough.
My hopes for a bill had thus far been dashed. With the economy in crisis and Americans losing jobs,few in Congress had any appetite to take on a hot-button issue like immigration. Kennedy was gone. McCain, having been criticized by the right flank for his relatively moderate immigration stance, showed little interest in taking up the banner again. Worse yet, my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate. This wasn’t a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE’s budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records. My team and I had made a strategic choice not to immediately try to reverse the policies we’d inherited in large part because we didn’t want to provide ammunition to critics who claimed that Democrats weren’t willing to enforce existing immigration laws—a perception that we thought could torpedo our chances of passing a future reform bill. But by 2010, immigrant-rights and Latino advocacy groups were criticizing our lack of progress..And although I continued to urge Congress to pass immigration reform, I had no realistic path for delivering a new comprehensive law before the midterms.

Milton Friedman wisely noted,  “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” 
Is it prudent to allow illegal immigrants (60 percent of whom are high-school dropouts) access to Social Security, Medicare, and, over time, to 60 federal means-tested welfare programs? I don’t think so either!


FREE TO CHOOSE “Who protects the worker?” Video and Transcript Part 

In 1980 I read the book FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman and it really enlightened me a tremendous amount.  I suggest checking out these episodes and transcripts of Milton Friedman’s film series FREE TO CHOOSE: “The Failure of Socialism” and “What is wrong with our schools?”  and “Created Equal”  and  From Cradle to Grave, and – Power of the Market. Milton Friedman shows in this episode how the worker is best protected and it is not by the government!!!!!!!

The essence of what Milton Friedman is saying in this episode is found in this statement:

“The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.”

L. WILLIAMS: Dr. Friedman and Walter Williams go back in history and they take a look at a situation where America was empty, where we didn’t have anything like the sophisticated industrial economy we have today, but had a much more agricultural and rural kind of economy and of course when the __ when the impoverished peasants of Europe, my ancestors and most of our ancestors, except for the slaves, which is another situation, but when these people came from Europe and came to a wide open continent with the most fertile soil then available to anyone in the world, naturally there was progress; and I or any of us would be mad to deny progress. But as that developed and as population increased and as we moved into a much more sophisticated industrial economy, we moved then into the situation in the 1930s, or earlier than that , at the end of the century. As some of the more skilled jobs came along, the labor movement didn’t happen by accident. Didn’t happen because there wasn’t a need there. The results of this development, even with all the wealth available in America, the results of this development was that many working people were not having anything like, by standards of civilization or whatever, anything like their fair share in this progress.

MCKENZIE: Now you’re arguing that in a free market, for labor, everyone benefits. Does that mean that you would favor abolition of all immigration restrictions?

FRIEDMAN: The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.

MCKENZIE: But this is true of every western industrialized country.

FRIEDMAN: That’s right and that’s why today __

MCKENZIE: Yeah.

FRIEDMAN: __ under current circumstances you cannot, unfortunately have free immigration. Not because there’s anything wrong with free immigration, but because we have other policies which make it impossible to adopt free immigration.

MCKENZIE: Well I’d like other reactions. Is it at all feasible to open the door of the labor market internationally now? Bill Brady?

BRADY: I would __ I would say yes providing they open the door to us. I think that the door to not only the labor market, the door to all markets should be __ should be open. That is the product markets.

W. WILLIAMS: My feelings about the undocumented workers of Mexican-Americans are inscribed at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. I think that the people should have the right to come to this country. Now, those who would say, you know, I hear a number of people saying that, well the immigrants are contributing to our unemployment problem. And I point this out to some people, I said, “look, you know, this is the same rhetoric that the Irish used when the blacks were coming up from the north, ” you know, they’re using blacks as scapegoats. They’re saying, “get those people back where they came from so that our members can get jobs, ” you know. Unions were as well doing this, you know, they called them scabs, strikebreakers, etcetera, etcetera. So I do not wish for Mexican-Americans to become the new scapegoats of our particular national problems. They are not the problem, and our nation benefits to the extent that these people come here and work. And to that extent __ to that extent__ so it’s kind of good for them to remain illegal aliens as opposed to being legal aliens where they’re subject to our welfare programs, so that we don’t want them to come here to __

(Several people talking at once.)

GREEN: I think that this country cannot have a group of workers to remain outside the framework of our laws and our protection. And as long as we have workers who are attracted to the United States because of the standards of living; and I think minimum wages play a part in that as part of that attraction. But it seems to me to have undocumented workers without providing either a means of protection for them and it seems to me that we’ve got to go to the question of providing the amnesty for those generations of workers who have come here over a period of time, now two, three, maybe four generations. We have to see that they have the same rights and protection of all other workers. And as it stands now, large numbers of them live outside the framework of the laws and statutes that we have on the __ on our books.

MCKENZIE: Comment Milton.

FRIEDMAN: They do and the tragedy of the situation, as what Walter Williams point out, that as long as they are undocumented and illegal they are a clear net gain, the nation benefits and they benefit. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t. The tragedy is that we’ve adopted all these other policies so that if we convert them into legal residents it’s no longer clear that we benefit. They may benefit, but it’s no longer clear that we do. What Lynn Williams said before is again a travesty on what was actually going on. The real boost to the trade union movement came after the Great Depression of the 1930s; that Great Depression was not a failure of capitalism; it was not a failure of the private market system as we pointed out in another one of the programs in this series; it was a failure of government. It was not the case that somehow or other there was a decline in the conditions of the working class that produced a great surge of unionism. On the contrary __ unions have never accounted for more than one out of four or one out of five of American workers. The American worker benefited not out of unions, he benefited in spite of unions. He benefited because there was greater opportunity because there were people who were willing to invest their money because there was an opportunity for people to work, to save, to invest. That’s still the case today. You say, we have to provide them with something or other Ernest. Who are the “we”?

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com

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How Can You Befriend a ‘Semi-Fascist’?


How Can You Befriend a ‘Semi-Fascist’?

Larry Elder  @larryelder / September 15, 2022

Despite ideological differences with fellow Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, center, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, right, is effusive in her praise of his personal kindness and warmth. The two are seen here following the oath of office at the presidential Inauguration ceremonial swearing-in of President Barack Obama at the Capitol on Jan. 21, 2013. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Larry Elder@larryelder

Larry Elder is a bestselling author and nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. His latest book is “The New Trump Standard.”

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, at a recent event with a liberal audience, praised Justice Clarence Thomas, her ideological adversary. 

Sotomayor said, “He is a man who cares deeply about the court as an institution.” She added that while the two often disagree over judicial decisions, “We share a common understanding about people and kindness towards them.” 

As to Thomas’ “kindness,” Sotomayor elaborated: “Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee’s name, every one of them. And not only does he know their names, he remembers their families’ names and histories. … He’s the first one who will go up to someone when you’re walking with him and say, ‘Is your son OK? How’s your daughter doing in college?’ He’s the first one that, when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida.”

Daniel R. Suhr, managing attorney at the Liberty Justice Center, a conservative public interest law firm, praised Sotomayor’s “courage.” He said, “I will give her deserved plaudits for saying something nice about her colleague when it would have been easy to keep her head down. That’s a good example for us all.”

Describing a simple statement of kindness about a Supreme Court colleague, with whom one has ideological differences, as an act of “courage” says a lot about where we stand today as a nation.

The now-deceased Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a liberal, and Antonin Scalia, a conservative, often attacked each other in court decisions, yet they became close personal friends, sharing a love for opera. They also often traveled and shopped for souvenirs together.

In the ’80s, conservative President Ronald Reagan battled over policy against House Speaker Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neill, D-Mass. Reagan once compared O’Neill to Pac-Man, calling O’Neill “a round thing that gobbles up money.” O’Neill called Reagan “Herbert Hoover with a smile” and “a cheerleader for selfishness.” 

There is some dispute about whether they personally liked each other, but in O’Neill’s memoir, he wrote that he advised Reagan that Democrats and Republicans “were always friends after 6 o’clock and on weekends.” O’Neill said: “Reagan would often begin our telephone discussions by saying, ‘Hello, Tip, is it after 6 o’clock?’ ‘Absolutely, Mr. President,’ I would respond.” 

O’Neill’s son said, “While neither man embraced the other’s worldview, each respected the other’s right to hold it. Each respected the other as a man.” Chris Matthews, later an MSNBC host, served as O’Neill’s press secretary. Matthews said: “Reagan was fond of Tip and completely believed that Tip wanted to help the little people. He just disagreed about how to do it.”

This brings us to today. Matthews, on his TV show, analyzed why then-President Donald Trump invited rapper Kanye West to the White House. Matthews said Trump did it to challenge the charge that Trump is “racist.” Matthews said, “White people won’t vote for a guy—most of them—if they think they’re racist.” So, it would be counterproductive for Trump to use, as critics claimed, “a racist dog whistle” to encourage whites to vote for him. America would never vote for a racist for president. And it would not be in Trump’s best interest to be perceived as one.

Yet a 2018 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that “85%” of Democratic adults considered Trump “racist.” Later that same year, an Axios poll found that 61% of Democrats consider Republicans “racist/bigoted/sexist,” while 31% of Republicans feel that way about Democrats.

President Joe Biden recently accused Trump voters of embracing “semi-fascism.” Semi-fascism?! But Joan Walsh, national affairs correspondent for hard-left the Nation magazine, said, “If people aren’t talking about you, then don’t answer. … If you’re not a fascist, he’s not talking about you. So, lighten up. But don’t take it personally.”

Pundits did not applaud Ginsburg and Scalia or Reagan and O’Neill for their “courageous” friendships. Why would they? Isn’t it—or wasn’t it—possible to have firmly held beliefs yet maintain friendships with those who strongly disagree?

But it’s rather difficult to befriend a “semi-fascist,” isn’t it?

——-

The January 6 Insurrection Hoax

 • Volume 50, Number 9 • Roger Kimball

Roger Kimball
Editor and Publisher, The New Criterion


Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterionand publisher of Encounter Books. He earned his B.A. from Bennington College and his M.A. and M.Phil. in philosophy from Yale University. He has written for numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times Book Review, and is a columnist for The Spectator WorldAmerican Greatness, and The Epoch Times. He is editor or author of several books, including The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed AmericaThe Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages ArtTenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, and Vox Populi: The Perils and Promises of Populism.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on September 20, 2021, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “Critical American Elections.”

Notwithstanding all the hysterical rhetoric surrounding the events of January 6, 2021, two critical things stand out. The first is that what happened was much more hoax than insurrection. In fact, in my judgment, it wasn’t an insurrection at all.

An “insurrection,” as the dictionary will tell you, is a violent uprising against a government or other established authority. Unlike the violent riots that swept the country in the summer of 2020—riots that caused some $2 billion in property damage and claimed more than 20 lives—the January 6 protest at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. lasted a few hours, caused minimal damage, and the only person directly killed was an unarmed female Trump supporter who was shot by a Capitol Police officer. It was, as Tucker Carlson said shortly after the event, a political protest that “got out of hand.”

At the rally preceding the events in question, Donald Trump had suggested that people march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically”—these were his exact words—in order to make their voices heard. He did not incite a riot; he stirred up a crowd. Was that, given the circumstances, imprudent? Probably. Was it an effort to overthrow the government? Hardly.

I know this is not the narrative that we have all been instructed to parrot. Indeed, to listen to the establishment media and our political masters, the January 6 protest was a dire threat to the very fabric of our nation: the worst assault on “our democracy” since 9/11, since Pearl Harbor, and even—according to Joe Biden last April—since the Civil War! 

Note that phrase “our democracy”: Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and various talking heads have repeated it ad nauseam. But you do not need an advanced degree in hermeneutics to understand that what they mean by “our democracy” is their oligarchy. Similarly, when Pelosi talks about “the people’s house,” she doesn’t mean a house that welcomes riff-raff like you and me.

I just alluded to Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed supporter of Donald Trump who was shot and killed on January 6. Her fate brings me to the second critical thing to understand about the January 6 insurrection hoax. Namely, that it was not a stand-alone event. 

On the contrary, what happened that afternoon, and what happened afterwards, is only intelligible when seen as a chapter in the long-running effort to discredit and, ultimately, to dispose of Donald Trump—as well as what Hillary Clinton might call the “deplorable” populist sentiment that brought Trump to power. 

In other words, to understand the January 6 insurrection hoax, you also have to understand that other long-running hoax, the Russia collusion hoax. The story of that hoax begins back in 2015, when the resources of the federal government were first mobilized to spy on the Trump campaign, to frame various people close to Trump, and eventually to launch a full-throated criminal investigation of the Trump administration. 

From before Trump took office, the Russia collusion hoax was used as a pretext to create a parallel administration shadowing the elected administration. Remember the Steele dossier, the fantastical document confected by the “well-regarded” former British spy Christopher Steele? We know now that it was the only relevant predicate for ordering FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page and other American citizens. 

But in truth, the Steele dossier was just opposition dirt covertly paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. From beginning to end, it was a tissue of lies and fabrications. Everyone involved knew all along it was garbage—rumors and fantasies fed to a gullible Steele by shady Russian sources. But it was nonetheless used to deploy, illegally, the awesome coercive power of the state against a presidential candidate of whom the ruling bureaucracy and its favored candidate disapproved. 

The public learned that the Democratic National Committee paid for the manufactured evidence only because of a court order. James Comey, the disgraced former director of the FBI, publicly denied knowing who paid for it, but emails from a year earlier prove that he knew all along. And what was the penalty for lying in Comey’s case? He got a huge book deal and toured the country denouncing Trump to the gleeful satisfaction of his anti-Trump audiences. 

What was true of Comey was also true of the entire intelligence apparat, from former CIA Director John Brennan to Congressman Adam Schiff and other Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee to senior members of the FBI. All these people said publicly that they had seen clear evidence of collusion with Russia. But they admitted under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t.

General Michael Flynn, Trump’s original National Security Advisor, had his career ruined and was bankrupted as part of this political vendetta. Meanwhile James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, John Brennan, Peter Strzok, and all the rest of the crew at the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies suffered nothing. When it came to light that an FBI lawyer altered an email in order to help get a FISA warrant—in other words, that he doctored evidence to spy on a political opponent, which is a felony—he got probation.

The recent news that Special Counsel John Durham is indicting Michael Sussman, a lawyer who covertly worked for the Clinton campaign and lied to the FBI, is welcome news. But it seems like small beer given the rampant higher-level corruption that saturated the Russia collusion hoax.

At least 74 million citizens voted for Donald Trump in 2020, which is at least 11 million more than voted for him in 2016. Many of those voters are profoundly disillusioned and increasingly angry about this entire story—the years-long Robert Mueller “investigation,” the two impeachments of President Trump, the cloud of unknowing that surrounds the 2020 election, and the many questions that have emerged not only from the January 6 protest at the Capitol, but even more from the government’s response to that protest.

Which brings me back to Ashli Babbitt, the long-serving Air Force veteran who was shot and killed by a nervous Capitol Police officer. Babbitt was a useful prop when the media was in overdrive describing the January 6 events as an “armed insurrection” in which wild Trump supporters, supposedly at Trump’s instigation, attacked the Capitol with the intention of overturning the 2020 election.

According to that narrative, five people, including Babbitt, died in the skirmish. Moreover, it was said, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was bludgeoned to death by a raging Trump supporter wielding a fire extinguisher. That gem of a story about the fire extinguisher, reported in our former paper of record, The New York Times, was instantly picked up by other media outlets and spread like a Chinese virus. 

Of course, it is absolutely critical to the Democratic Party narrative that the January 6 incident be made to seem as violent and crazed as possible. Hence the comparisons to 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Civil War. Only thus can pro-Trump Americans be excluded from “our democracy” by being branded as “domestic extremists” if not, indeed, “domestic terrorists.”

The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution accords American citizens the right to a speedy trial. But most of the political prisoners of January 6—many of whom have been kept in solitary confinement—are still waiting to be brought to trial. And although the media was full of predictions that they would be found guilty of criminal sedition, none has. 

Indeed, the prosecution’s cases seem to be falling apart. Most of the hundreds who have been arrested are being charged with trespassing. Another charge being leveled against them is “disrupting an official proceeding.” This is a felony charge designed not for ceremonial procedures like the January 6 certification of the vote, but rather for disrupting Congressional inquiries—for example, by shredding documents relevant to a Congressional investigation. It originated during the George W. Bush administration to deal with the Enron case.

The indisputable fact about January 6 is that although five people died at or near the Capitol on that day or soon thereafter, none of these deaths was brought about by the protesters. The shot fired by Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd that hit Ashli Babbitt in the neck and killed her was the only shot fired at the Capitol that day. No guns were recovered from the Capitol on January 6. Zero.

The liberal commentator Glenn Greenwald further diminished the “armed insurrection” narrative in an important column last February titled “The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot.” The title says it all. Kevin Greeson, Greenwald notes, was killed not by the protesters but died of a heart attack outside the Capitol. Benjamin Philips, the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo, died of a stroke that day. Rosanne Boyland, another Trump supporter, was reported by The New York Times to have been inadvertently “killed in a crush of fellow rioters during their attempt to fight through a police line.” But later video shows that, far from that, the police pushed protesters on top of Boyland and would not allow other protesters to pull her out.

Four of the five who died, then, were pro-Trump protesters. And the fifth? Well, that was Officer Sicknick—also a Trump supporter, as it turned out—who, contrary to the false report gone viral of The New York Times, went home, told his family he felt fine, but died a day later from, as The Washington Post eventually and grudgingly reported, “natural causes.” No fire extinguishers were involved in his demise.

***

The January 6 insurrection hoax prompts lots of questions.

Why, for example, did the government mobilize 26,000 federal troops from all across the country to surround “the people’s house” following January 6? Why were those troops subjected to FBI vetting, with some of them sent packing? 

Why is there some 14,000 hours of video footage of the event on January 6 that the government refuses to release? What are they afraid of letting the public see? More scenes of security guards actually opening doors and politely ushering in protesters? More pictures of FBI informants covertly salted among the crowd?

My own view is that turning Washington into an armed camp was mostly theater. There was no threat that the Washington police could not have handled. But it was also a show of force and an act of intimidation. The message was: “We’re in charge now, rubes, and don’t you forget it.”

In truth, there is little threat of domestic terror in this country. But there is plenty of domestic conservatism. And that conservatism is the real focus of the establishment’s ire.

It is important to note that while the government provides the muscle for this war on dissent, the elite culture at large is a willing accomplice. Consider, for example, the open letter, signed by more than 500 “publishing professionals” (authors, editors, designers, and so on), calling on the industry to reject books written by anyone who had anything to do with the Trump administration. 

These paragons pledged to do whatever they could to stop “enriching the monsters among us.” But here’s their problem: over 74 million people voted for Trump. That’s a lot of monsters. 

Many people have been quoting Benjamin Franklin’s famous response when asked what sort of government they had come up with at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. “A republic,” Franklin said, “if you can keep it.” Right now, it looks like we can’t. It looks as if the American constitutional republic has given way, as least temporarily, to an American oligarchy. 

As the years go by, historians, if the censors allow them access to the documents and give them leave to publish their findings, may well count the 2016 presidential election as the last fair and open democratic election in U.S. history. I know we are not supposed to say that. I know that the heads of Twitter and Facebook and other woke guardians of the status quo call this view “The Big Lie” and do all they can to suppress it. But every honest person knows that the 2020 election was tainted.

The forces responsible for the taint had tried before. Hitherto, their efforts had met with only limited success. But a perfect storm of forces conspired to make 2020 the first oligarchic installation of a president. It would not have happened, I think, absent the panic over the Chinese virus. But that panic, folded in a lover’s embrace by the Democratic establishment, was not only a splendid pretext to clamp down on civil liberties; it also provided an inarguable excuse to alter the rules for elections in several key states.

“Inarguable” is not quite the right word. There could have been plenty of arguments, and many lawsuits, against the way the executive branches in these states usurped the constitutionally guaranteed prerogative of state legislatures to set the election rules when they intervened to allow massive mail-in voting. But the Trump administration, though foreseeing and complaining about the executive interventions, did too little too late to make a difference. 

Among the many sobering realities that the 2020 election brought home is that in our current and particular form of oligarchy, the people do have a voice, but it is a voice that is everywhere pressured, cajoled, shaped, and bullied. The people also have a choice, but only among a roster of candidates approved by the elite consensus. 

The central fact to appreciate about Donald Trump is that he was elected president without the permission, and over the incredulous objections, of the bipartisan oligarchy that governs us. That was his unforgivable offense. Trump was the greatest threat in history to the credentialed class and the globalist administrative state upon which they feed. Representatives of that oligarchy tried for four years to destroy Trump. Remember that the first mention of impeachment came 19 minutes after his inauguration, an event that was met not only by a widespread Democratic boycott and hysterical claims by Nancy Pelosi and others that the election had been hijacked, but also by riots in Washington, D.C. that saw at least six policemen injured, numerous cars torched, and other property destroyed. 

You will search in vain for media or other ruling class denunciations of that violence, or for bulletins from corporate America advising their customers of their solidarity with the newly-installed Trump administration. As the commentator Howie Carr noted, some riots are more equal than others. Some get you the approval of people like Nancy Pelosi and at least the grudging acceptance of oligarchs of the other party. Others get the FBI sweeping the country for “domestic terrorists” and the lords of Big Tech canceling people who defend the protesters’ cause.

Someday—maybe someday soon—this witches’ sabbath, this festival of scapegoating, and what George Orwell called the “hideous ecstasy” of hate will be at an end. Perhaps someday people will be aghast, and some will be ashamed, of what they did to the President of the United States and people who supported him: the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, for instance, proposing to put Senator Ted Cruz on a “no fly” list, and Simon & Schuster canceling Senator Josh Hawley’s book contract. 

Donald Trump is the Emmanuel Goldstein (the designated principal enemy of the totalitarian state Oceania in Orwell’s 1984) of the movement. But minor public enemies are legion. Anyone harboring “Trumpist” inclinations is suspect, hence the widespread calls for “deprogramming” Trump’s supporters, who are routinely said to be “marching toward sedition.”

Michael Barone, one of our most perceptive political commentators, got it right when he wrote of the rapid movement “from impeaching incitement to canceling conservatism.” That is the path our oligarchs are inviting us to travel now, criminalizing political dissent and transforming policy differences into a species of heresy. You don’t debate heretics, after all. You seek to destroy them.

Donald Trump’s accomplishments as president were nothing less than stunning. Trump was, and is, a rude force of nature. He accomplished an immense amount. But he lacked one thing. Some say it was self-discipline or finesse. I agree with a friend of mine who suggested that Trump’s critical flaw was a deficit in guile. That sounds odd, no doubt, since Trump is supposed to be the tough guy who mastered “the art of the deal.” But I think my friend is probably right. Trump seems never to have discerned what a viper’s nest our politics has become for anyone who is not a paid-up member of The Club. 

Maybe Trump understands this now. I have no insight into that question. I am pretty confident, though, that the 74 plus million people who voted for him understand it deeply. It’s another reason that The Club should be wary of celebrating its victory too expansively. 

Friedrich Hayek took one of the two epigraphs for his book, The Road to Serfdom, from the philosopher David Hume. “It is seldom,” Hume wrote, “that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Much as I admire Hume, I wonder whether he got this quite right. Sometimes, I would argue, liberty is erased almost instantaneously.

I’d be willing to wager that Joseph Hackett, confronted with Hume’s observation, would express similar doubts. I would be happy to ask Mr. Hackett myself, but he is inaccessible. If the ironically titled “Department of Justice” has its way, he will be inaccessible for a long, long time—perhaps as long as 20 years. 

Joseph Hackett, you see, is a 51-year-old Trump supporter and member of an organization called the Oath Keepers, a group whose members have pledged to “defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” The FBI does not like the Oath Keepers—agents arrested its leader in January and have picked up many other members in the months since. Hackett traveled to Washington from his home in Florida to join the January 6 rally. According to court documents, he entered the Capitol at 2:45 that afternoon and left some nine minutes later, at 2:54. The next day, he went home. On May 28, he was apprehended by the FBI and indicted on a long list of charges, including conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, destruction of government property, and illegally entering a restricted building. 

As far as I have been able to determine, no evidence of Hackett destroying property has come to light. According to his wife, it is not even clear that he entered the Capitol. But he certainly was in the environs. He was a member of the Oath Keepers. He was a supporter of Donald Trump. Therefore, he must be neutralized.

Joseph Hackett is only one of hundreds of citizens who have been branded as “domestic terrorists” trying to “overthrow the government” and who are now languishing, in appalling conditions, jailed as political prisoners of an angry state apparat.

Hayek’s overriding concern in The Road to Serfdomwas to combat the forces that were pushing people further along that road to servitude. His chief concern was unchecked state power. In a new preface to the book’s 1956 edition, Hayek noted that one of its “main points” was to document how “extensive government control produces a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people.”

 “This means,” Hayek wrote, “that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.”

 This dismal situation, Hayek continues, can be averted, but only if the spirit of liberty “reasserts itself in time and the people not only throw out the party which has been leading them further and further in the dangerous direction but also recognize the nature of the danger and resolutely change their course.”

Note the power of that little word “if.” It was not so long ago that an American could contemplate totalitarian regimes and say, “Thank God we’ve escaped that.” It’s not at all clear that we can entertain that happy conviction any longer. 

That’s one melancholy lesson of the January 6 insurrection hoax: that America is fast mutating from a republic, in which individual liberty is paramount, into an oligarchy, in which conformity is increasingly demanded and enforced.

Another lesson was perfectly expressed by Donald Trump when he reflected on the unremitting tsunami of hostility that he faced as President. “They’re after you,” he more than once told his supporters. “I’m just in the way.”

Bingo.

Dershowitz Warns Against ‘New McCarthyism’ of Left

alan dershowitz walks downs the steps of the capitol with the dome lit behind him.Attorney Alan Dershowitz, in 2020 when he was a member of President Donald Trump’s legal team. (Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)By Newsmax Wires 
Sunday, 14 Feb 2021 1:56 PM

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Former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz on Sunday blasted the “new McCarthyism” of the Democrats’ “hard left.”

In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Dershowitz, a constitutional law expert, said some liberals have become radical censors of free speech.

“Common Cause, which purports to be a liberal, not a radical organization, has now demanded that Facebook keep Donald Trump off its platform,” he said. “We are getting liberals… [calling for] Fox News [to be] taken off the networks. I hated communism but I defended the rights of lawyers to defend accused communists.”

“If any lawyer is the subject of this kind of McCarthyism, I will represent you pro bono, in front of universities and bar associations,” he added. “I will dedicate myself that the new McCarthyism of the hard left doesn’t become American culture.”

Dershowitz called the Senate trial acquittal of former President Donald Trump a “great day” for the Constitution and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., — but “not such a good day” for Trump himself.

“McConnell “taught us a civic’s lesson: You don’t have to support President Trump or Donald Trump, you don’t have to agree with the speech, but support the First Amendment and the Constitution’s limitations on the power of the Senate to put a former president on trial,” he said.

“McConnell accepted the constitutional argument I’ve been making from the very beginning — that Congress has no power to put on trial Citizen Trump.”

On the flip side, Dershowitz said, Saturday was “not such a good day for Donald Trump because McConnell and others criticized him.”

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Tucker Carlson Tonight 2/10/21 | Tucker Carlson Tonight February 10, 2021

Alan Dershowitz to Newsmax TV: Dems Making Trump’s Case

By Eric Mack 
Wednesday, 10 Feb 2021 5:35 PM


In laying out a long-running objection to election fraud by former President Donald Trump, House impeachment managers are effectively making the case for the defense because the speech under the microscope is protected, even if they disagree with it, according to constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz on Newsmax TV.

“Very good theater, terrible constitutional law,” Dershowitz told “The Chris Salcedo Show” of the House Democrats’ opening statements Wednesday.

“The videos make good theater; they’re very riveting,” the noted legal scholar said. “”But they prove President Trump’s constitutional defense.”

House Democrats are emphasizing that Trump had long argued the election was stolen, but then they show how the president challenged it “by all lawful means and all political means,” Dershowitz told host Chris Salcedo.

“The Constitution protects a person that says the Earth is flat as much as a person who says it’s round,” Dershowitz said. “The Constitution protects a Holocaust denier as much as it does a historian who can prove that 6 million Jews were killed.

“And the Constitution, the First Amendment, protects a president who’s wrong about the election as much as a president who’s right.”

Instead of tying the lone article of impeachment — incitement of insurrection — solely on Trump’s Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally speech, which was delivered at a rally just before the Capitol siege, House Democrat impeachment managers are making a case that he’d long objected to a stolen election as a predicate to inciting the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building.

“Matters of opinion cannot be disputed or taken outside of constitutional protections,” Dershowitz said. “So I think the House managers were actually helping the Trump defense by trying to prove that what he said was false.”

Dershowitz did suggest that Democrats’ gaffe might be part of a plan to “lay a trap” for Trump defense lawyers — getting them to argue the validity of a stolen-election claim, which could derail the president’s case.

“That would be a serious mistake, because it would lose a number of senators who are now on their side,” Dershowitz concluded.

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I have read several books by Alan Dershowitz and he is a liberal but he does look at the constitution honestly and here he has made some very insightful observations that I am sure will upset Democrats but nonetheless will not slow them down from impeaching the President a second time because of their hate of all things Trump!

Dershowitz: Senate Rules Would Prevent Impeachment Trial Of Trump

Dershowitz: Senate Rules Would Prevent Impeachment Trial Of TrumpAn image from video of Alan Dershowitz, an attorney for President Donald Trump, walking from the podium after speaking on behalf of the president during the impeachment trial in the Senate on Jan. 27, 2020. (Senate Television via AP)By Newsmax Wires 
Sunday, 10 Jan 2021 2:42 PM

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Harvard law professor and constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz on Sunday warned an impeachment of President Donald Trump won’t go to trial — but could “lie around like a loaded weapon” for both parties in the future.

In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Dershowitz said a Senate trial of citizen Trump would be unconstitutional.

“It will not go to trial,” he said. “All Democrats can do is impeach the president in House of Representatives, for that you only need a majority vote. 

“The case cannot come to trial in the Senate” because of rules that do no allow it until, “according to the Majority Leader [Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.), until 1 p.m. on Jan. 20” — an hour after Trump leaves office.

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“Congress has no power to impeach or try a private citizen, whether it’d be a private citizen in Donald Trump or …. Barack Obama or anyone else,” he said. “The jurisdiction is limited to a sitting president and so there won’t be a trial.”

But Dershowitz said he worried more about  is“the impact of impeachment on the First Amendment.”

“For 100 years the Supreme Court and other courts have struggled to develop a juris prudence which distinguishes between advocacy and incitement.”

“To impeach a president for having exercised his First Amendment rights would be so dangerous to the Constitution, it would lie around like a loaded weapon ready to be used by either party against the other party and that’s not what impeachment nor the 25th amendment were intended to be,” Dershowitz said.

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Mark Levin Podcast * Mark’s radio show | 08 January 2021

Levin: Media ‘exploiting’ Capitol riot to ‘silence conservatives’ as Democrats work to ‘choke the system’

‘The media have played a huge, huge role in what’s going on in this country,’ says ‘Life, Liberty & Levin’ host

By Charles Creitz | Fox News

The mainstream media is “exploiting” Wednesday’s riot at the U.S. Capitol building in an effort to “silence” conservatives and Republicans, Mark Levin says on this week’s episode of “Life, Liberty & Levin.”

The host emphasizes that “we should be furious about what happened on Capitol Hill,” but adds that “the media have played a huge, huge role in what’s going on in this country.”

“We need to reject all this violence, but what about the media?” asks Levin before displaying front pages of various newspapers from around the country. 

“The New York Times: ‘Trump Incites Mob’. This is projection,” Levin contends. “This is projection. He never did that. Or The Washington Post: ‘Trump mob storms Capitol’. There were hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people there … That’s an awfully broad brush. Or the [New York] Daily News: ‘President Incites Insurrection’ … or USA Today: ‘Pro-Trump Mobs Storm US [sic] Capitol’. How about ‘Thugs Storm U.S. Capitol’? How about ‘Lawbreakers Storm U.S. Capitol’?”

Levin then calls out politicians like Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who he says are also “exploiting the situation.”

“They’re talking about impeaching the president of the United States or [invoking] the 25th Amendment nine days before he leaves office,” the host says. “Do they even know what’s involved in the 25th Amendment?

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“So they double down, they triple down, they quadruple down. They’re not going to change at all. On one side of their mouth, they talk about unity. Out of the other side of their mouth, they spit on people,” he goes on. “Seventy-four million [Trump-voting] people and more, they’re not going away. Their concerns still exist.”

Meanwhile, Levin says, House Democrats are working toward their goal to “choke the system even further” by passing a rules package for the 117th Congressthat makes it “virtually impossible for Republicans to even propose legislation or amend legislation, even though [they] only has a 10- or 11-person majority in the House.”

“Nancy Pelosi … eliminated 100 years of tradition …”, the host argues, “and the media are trying to intimidate conservatives and constitutionalists by projecting onto them the violence that occurred by reprobates and others who need to be tracked down and punished.

“So it seems that the lessons have not been learned,” Levin concludes. “They certainly haven’t been learned by the left, they certainly haven’t been learned by the media, and they certainly haven’t been learned by the Never Trumpers.”

—-

December 13, 2020

Office of Barack and Michelle Obama
P.O. Box 91000
Washington, DC 20066

Dear President Obama,

I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters. 

I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it. 

Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:

The story of how this postwar consensus broke down—starting with LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his prediction that it would lead to the South’s wholesale abandonment of the Democratic Party—has been told many times before. The realignment Johnson foresaw ended up taking longer than he had expected. But steadily, year by year—through Vietnam, RIOTS…and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union busting, and Robert Bork; through assault weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich…and the Clinton impeachment—America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.

During 2020 I have noticed lots of riots and looting across the USA and I wanted to ask you why it is always the liberals doing that? AND WHY DIDN’T ANYONE CONDEMN THESE ACTIONS AT THE 2020 CONVENTION AND DIDN’T YOU SPEAK AT THE CONVENTION TOO?

Philadelphia Riots Another Case of Street Violence Used to Advance Radical Political Agendas

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/10/28/philadelphia-riots-are-another-case-of-street-violence-used-to-advance-radical-political-agendas/embed/#?secret=TeMODTeKco

Philadelphia Riots Are Another Case of Street Violence Used to Advance Radical Political Agendas

James Carafano @JJCarafano / October 28, 2020 / 4 Comments

Philadelphia Riots

In Kenosha, Portland, Seattle, and Chicago, city officials have tolerated criminal activity performed by mobs for politically motivated reasons. Philadelphia appears to be the next hotspot for mob violence to go unchecked. Pictured: A barricade is set on fire during a night of looting and violence in Philadelphia on Oct. 27. (Photo: Gabriella Audi/AFP/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

James Carafano@JJCarafano

James Jay Carafano, a leading expert in national security and foreign policy challenges, is The Heritage Foundation’s vice president for foreign and defense policy studies, E. W. Richardson fellow, and director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies. Read his research.

Like the replay of a bad movie, a law enforcement incident in Philadelphia triggered an excuse for violence and looting. It remains to be seen whether the City of Brotherly Love will become the next “Kenosha,” where city officials moved quickly to restore order and seek state and federal support—though sadly after 48 hours of opportunistic looting, violence, and destruction devastated the city.

Or perhaps Philadelphia will be the next PortlandSeattle, or Chicago, where systemic attacks seem to be a daily occurrence.

Police in Philadelphia are fully capable of restoring peace. The open question is whether the mayor and Larry Krasner, the former defense attorney-turned elected rogue prosecutor, will do their job and hold people accountable for their crimes.

When local, state, and federal governments work together, act quickly, and demonstrate no tolerance for organized violence to advance radical agendas, communities are kept safe and equal protection under the law is afforded for all citizens.

The left is actively working to undermine the integrity of our elections. Read the plan to stop them now. Learn more now >>

On the other hand, when local officials, the media, and politicians ignore, excuse, normalize, and enable violence, everyday Americans pay the price.

There is a plague sweeping this country that many don’t want to talk about: The deliberate use of street violence to advance radical political agendas, often under a smoke screen of campaigning for civil liberties. The evidence of organized criminal activity at the root of the outbreaks in American cities is mounting.

The list of people enabling this violence sadly includes some public officials, who are principally responsible for ensuring public safety. For example, a growing threat to peaceful communities is “rogue prosecutors,” former criminal defense attorneys recruited and funded by liberal billionaire backers, who—once elected—abuse their office by refusing to prosecute entire categories of crimes.

These rogue prosecutors are usurping the power of the legislature in the process, and ignoring victim’s rights—all to advance their politics.

Baltimore is a perfect  example. Since being sworn into office, under the watch of Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby.

Rogue prosecutors fuel street violence by refusing to prosecute rioters and looters. When confronted with the rising crimes rates, Mosby called the statistics “rhetoric.”

The only way to break the cycle of violence is for local and state officials to work with each other, and if necessary, the federal government. They need to stop enabling the destruction of property and lives on their streets, and start investigating and prosecuting the individuals (and organizations) behind the riots.

It’s time to start shaming and calling out the media, politicians, and advocates who excuse and normalize the violence.

There is a proven action plan for making our streets safe. It is past time for officials to start following this blueprint.

There is no time—zero time to waste. There are already fears of more violence in our streets, regardless of the outcome of the national elections.

In my hometown of Washington, D.C., downtown buildings are already boarding up in anticipation of violence on our streets after the election. If Trump wins, violence. If Biden wins, violence. This makes no sense, and it’s time for it to stop.

It is time for every official and public figure, every political party, in every part of the country to publically reject violence on American streets as a legitimate form of protected speech. Violence is not protected speech, period.

The notion of deliberately destroying the lives and property of our neighbors to advance a radical political agenda is abhorrent. American leaders—of all stripes—should stand up now as one and reject these violent acts. It has gone on for too long, well before the death of George Floyd.

Leaders in Philadelphia and across America must take a principled stand to demand the end to this violence, and they need to do it before the election. In one voice, they should demand: “Leave our streets alone.”

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com

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April 10, 2013 – 7:02 am

President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. There have […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David BartonFounding FathersPresident Obama | Edit |Comments (0)

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May 8, 2012 – 1:48 am

There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David BartonFounding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)

The Founding Fathers views concerning Jesus, Christianity and the Bible (Part 4, Elbridge Gerry)

May 7, 2012 – 1:46 am

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May 4, 2012 – 1:45 am

There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David BartonFounding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)

The Founding Fathers views concerning Jesus, Christianity and the Bible (Part 2, John Quincy Adams)

May 3, 2012 – 1:42 am

There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David BartonFounding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)

The Founding Fathers views concerning Jesus, Christianity and the Bible (Part 1, John Adams)

May 2, 2012 – 1:13 am

There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)

President Obama and the Founding Fathers

May 8, 2013 – 9:20 am

President Obama Speaks at The Ohio State University Commencement Ceremony Published on May 5, 2013 President Obama delivers the commencement address at The Ohio State University. May 5, 2013. You can learn a lot about what President Obama thinks the founding fathers were all about from his recent speech at Ohio State. May 7, 2013, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding FathersPresident Obama | Edit | Comments (0)

Francis Schaeffer’s own words concerning the founding fathers and their belief in inalienable rights

December 5, 2012 – 12:38 am

Dr. C. Everett Koop with Bill Graham. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding FathersFrancis SchaefferProlife | Edit |Comments (1)

David Barton: In their words, did the Founding Fathers put their faith in Christ? (Part 4)

May 30, 2012 – 1:35 am

America’s Founding Fathers Deist or Christian? – David Barton 4/6 There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David BartonFounding Fathers | Tagged governor of connecticutjohn witherspoonjonathan trumbull | Edit | Comments (1)

Were the founding fathers christian?

May 23, 2012 – 7:04 am

3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton There were 55 gentlemen who put together the constitution and their church affliation is of public record. Greg Koukl notes: Members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)

John Quincy Adams a founding father?

June 29, 2011 – 3:58 pm

I do  not think that John Quincy Adams was a founding father in the same sense that his  father was. However, I do think he was involved in the  early days of our government working with many of the founding fathers. Michele Bachmann got into another history-related tussle on ABC’s “Good  Morning America” today, standing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David BartonFounding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)

“Sanctity of Life Saturday” Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part E “Moral absolutes and abortion” Francis Schaeffer Quotes part 5(includes the film SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS) (editorial cartoon)

July 6, 2013 – 1:26 am

I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control  and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas TimesFrancis SchaefferProlife | Edit |Comments (0)

Article from Adrian Rogers, “Bring back the glory”

June 11, 2013 – 12:34 am

I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersFrancis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)

“Schaeffer Sundays” Francis Schaeffer’s own words concerning the possibility that minorities may be mistreated under 51% rule

June 9, 2013 – 1:21 am

Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ____________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book  really helped develop my political […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 441 Responding to Dan Barker’s book LIFE DRIVEN PURPOSE ( “I think the probability of the existence of a historical person named Jesus…is very low”) FEATURED ARTIST IS Church

Life Driven Purpose: How an Atheist Finds Meaning

I have read articles for years from Dan Barker, but recently I just finished the book Barker wrote entitled LIFE DRIVEN PURPOSE which was prompted by Rick Warren’s book PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE which I also read several years ago.

Dan Barker is the  Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, And co-host of Freethought Radio and co-founder of The Clergy Project.

On March 19, 2022, I got an email back from Dan Barker that said:

Thanks for the insights.

Have you read my book Life Driven Purpose? To say there is no purpose OF life is not to say there is no purpose IN life. Life is immensely meaningful when you stop looking for external purpose.

Ukraine … we’ll, we can no longer blame Russian aggression on “godless communism.” The Russian church, as far as I know, has not denounced the war.

db

In the next few weeks I will be discussing the book LIFE DRIVEN PURPOSE which I did enjoy reading. Here is an assertion that Barker makes that I want to discuss:

The same is true with the existence of the historical Jesus. As I write in Godless, I think the probability of the existence of a historical person named Jesus, the founder of Christianity, is very low. I don’t think it is zero, but I definitely think it is below 50 percent—maybe I would put it around 20 percent or 30 percent. Although I might be wrong, I am comfortable calling Jesus a myth.

Dan you don’t think the Bible is historically accurate if you don’t even think Jesus existed! The critic Farrell Till like you was a Christian minister who later became a critic. I wonder if you ever a chance to cross paths with him. I had the privilege of debating him on the 6th century B.C. authorship of the Book of Daniel, and like you he tended to make assertions that he couldn’t back up. Jesus is considered a historical figure by the majority of historians. In my debate with Farrell Till he made the assertion that the Aramaic of Daniel MUST BE DATED to the 2nd century B.C. but I was unable to find the critics he cited actually said that. Here our response article on that:

Does Daniel’s Aramaic have a 2nd century Linguistic Style? (Co-authored by Everette Hatcher and Dr. Stephen R. Miller)

Steve Miller
Dr Miller

Skeptic Farrell Till (pictured below) graduated from Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas.

Farrell Till obituary


The skeptic Farrell Till started this discussion because he made the dogmatic assertion that scholars cite Daniel’s linguistic style (especially the sections written in Aramaic) “as evidence that the book was written at the extreme end of the Old Testament (no sooner than the second century)” (THE SKEPTICAL REVIEW {TSR}, Vol.4.3, p. 13, emphasis mine). Then later Till wrote the article “Primary Colors of the Bible, (TSR, Vol. 9.4,pp. 1, 5) where he observed: 
Till needs to follow his own advice. First, he should examine the evidence provided by scholars instead of attacking their motivation if they happen to work for evangelical seminaries (TSR, Vol. 12.3, p. 10). Second, Till needs to examine more closely the documentation from the works of scholars who have challenged the views about the authorship of Daniel because of, at least in part, linguistic studies. For instance, Till has said that H. H. Rowley, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, John J. Collins, Norman Porteous, Walter Baumgartner, and Samuel Driver will back up his assertion that Daniel’s Aramaic is in the 2nd century linguistic style (TSR, Vol. 12.3, p. 10). However, Rowley, Fizmyer, and Collins have no such statement. Norman Porteous did make the assertion that Daniel’s Aramaic may be “perhaps second century,” but he gave no evidence to back up his claim (Porteous, p. 13). Walter Baumgartner originally said that Daniel’s Aramaic required a 2nd century date (“Das Aramaische im Buche Daniel,” Zeitschrift fur die alsttestamentlich Vol. 45, [1927], p. 119), but he later retreated from this position (“ein vier teljahrhundert Danielforschung,” Theologische Rundzchau Vol. 11, [1939], p. 69). 
Samuel Driver held the view that the Greek words demand, the Hebrew supports, and the Aramaic permits a date after 330 B. C. The conservative Zdravko Stefanovic of Walla Walla College, College Place, Washington, noted:Notice the force of his arguments in the verdict decreasing down to the level at which Aramaic only ‘permits’ this conclusion, in contrast to demanding and supporting it. It seems that, for Driver, the argument coming out of Daniel’s Aramaic was the last and weakest one. This leaves the impression that it may be the “Achilles heel” in his dictum (Zdravko Stefanovic, “The Aramaic of Daniel in the Light of Old Aramaic, Scheffield Academic Press, 1992, p. 18). In fact, the conservative Charles Boutflower reported:Before his lamented death this dictum, or at any rate the latter part of it respecting the Aramaic, was considerably modified by its author, owing to a remarkable discovery [i.e., the Elephantine papryi]…In his letter to The Guardian of November 6, 1907, Professor Driver admits that the Aramaic spoken in Egypt in 408 B. C. “bears many points of resemblance to that found in the Old Testament –in Ezra, Daniel, and Jeremiah 10:11” (Charles Doutflower, In and Around the Book of Daniel, London, [1923], p. 226).  Kenneth A. Kitchen, professor in the School of Archaeology and Oriental Studies at the University of Liverpool, confirmed that Daniel’s Aramaic could not be used for evidence of second century authorship in his excellent essay, “The Aramaic of Daniel,” Notes on Some Problems in the Book of Daniel, pp. 31-79). Kitchen concluded:

The result is that nine-tenths of the vocabulary is attested in texts of the fifth century B.C. or earlier. The slender one-tenth remaining consists of words so far found only in sources later than the fifth century B.C. (e.g. Nabatacan Palmyrene, or later Aramaic dialects), or so far not attested externally at all…Where nine-tenths of the vocabulary is clearly old-established (fifth century B.C. and earlier), it is a fair assumption that the lack of attestation of the odd tenth represents nothing more than the gaps in our present knowledge–gaps liable to be filled by new material in the course of time The Aramaic of Daniel (and of Ezra) is simply a part of Imperial [Official] Aramaic–in itself, practically undateable with any conviction within c. 600 to 300 B.C.” (pp. 32,34,75). 
H.H.Rowley did contest Kitchen’s findings (H.H.Rowley, Review of D.J. Wiseman, et al, “Notes on Some Problems in the Book of Daniel,” Journal of Semitic Studies, Vol. 11, [1966], pp. 112-116), but the criticisms of Rowley were scrutinized by the leading Israeli Aramaist E. Y. Kutcsher and were roundly refuted (E.Y. Krutscher, “Aramaic,” Current Trends in Linguistics; Vol. 6, ed. T.A. Sebock, The Hague, [1970], pp. 400-403).
 Furthermore, Kitchen’s paper has been favorably received by many critical scholars (Collins, pp. 14-15, L. Dequeker, The Saints of the Most High in Qumran and Daniel, Leiden, [1973], p. 131, M. Delcor, Le Livre de Daniel, [1971], pp. 31-33; M. Sokoloff, The Targum of Job from Qumran Cave XL, Rumat Gan, [1974], p. 9, note 1; John Goldingay, Daniel, p. xxv.), and Kitchen’s linguistic qualifications are very impressive. For instance, his command of ancient languages in research-work includes Ancient Egyptian, Biblical Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew, Old North-Arabian (Lihyanite, Dedanite), Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, Eblaite, Elamite, Urartian, & Old Persian, Sumerian, Moabite, Edomite and Ammonite (& Hasaean in E. Arabia). Kitchen was given the honor of both opening and closing the 2nd International Congress of Biblical Archaeology in Jerusalem in 1990. Almost one thousand scholars and students were in attendance, and his addresses from this meeting were published in Biblical Archaeology Today 1990, pp. 34-52.
Farrell Till should backtrack in light of the fact that none of the scholars he has named so far are willing to agree with the dogmatic assertion he made that the Aramaic of Daniel should be dated to the second century B.C. (TSR, Vol 4.3, p. 13), but instead he stood by his claim (TSR, Vol. 12.3, pl 10, column 2). Furthermore, he has even attempted to give evidence to bolster his claim (“Daniel and the Watchers, TSR, Vol. 12.3, p. 1; Notice that the above quote from Kenneth Kitchen exposed the tremendous weakness of Till’s linguistic argument in this article.). 
Later Farrell Till brought up another linguistic argument concerning Daniel 12:2 in his article “Daniel and the Resurrection,” (TSR, Vol. 12.4, p. 1, 16). Daniel states, “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” 

Farrell Till notes: 

Zoroastrianism taught the concept of a general resurrection, and this religion flourished in Persia at the time of the Jewish exile. After the Jews had been repatriated, this concept, which had been unknown prior to the exile, because a widely held belief in post exilic Judaism. The Fact that Daniel is the only book in the Jewish canon to make such a clear reference to a general resurrection, although not conclusive, is certainly  one more indication that this book was compiled some time after the captivity (TSR, Vol. 12.4, p. 16). 
Many critics do hold to this view. Alexander DiLella has asserted that the author of Daniel “must be credited with giving the first sure teaching on life beyond the grave (DiLella, p. 109, Montgomery, p. 471; Heaton, p. 219). Yet the critic Lococque states that “the faith ‘in resurrection, immortality, and eternal life’ is very old in Israel” (Lococque, pp. 235-36). He explains that the position that these were late doctrines has now been overturned, particularly by the work of the critic M. Dahood, which was based on “linguistic parallels in the mythic texts from Ugarit (dating from about the thirteenth century BCE” (p. 236). 
Other Old Testament scriptures also teach this same doctrine of the resurrection of the individual. Many regard Job as the oldest book in the Bible. Job said, “And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God” (Job 19:26). Isaish said, “But your dead will live, their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning, the earth will give birth to her dead” (Isaiah 26:19). 
Farrell Till’s last two hearline articles concerning Daniel 4:13 and Daniel 12:2 were weak (TSR, Vol. 12.3, p. 1: TSR, Vol. 12.4, p. 1, 16). Both articles are attempts to bolster Till’s assertion that the evidence points to a 2nd century author, but Till needs to give up totally on these two particular arguments. Also Till will have great difficulty finding agreement with his radical assertion concerning the linguistic style of the Aramaic in any of the writings of the scholars he has named so far. Again  the question must be asked: Who are the scholars that cite Daniel’s linguistic style [especially the section written in Aramaic] as evidence that the book was written in the extreme end of the Old Testament (no sooner than the second century). 
Summary
During this entire debate on the date and authorship of Daniel, Farrell Till has not presented one solid argument that necessitates a late date for the Book of Daniel. Furthermore, Till has refused to abandon arguments that have been clearly refuted. For instance, I refuted Till’s observation that the statue in Daniel 3:1 was solid gold, but Till would not accept the evidence I presented (TSR, Vol. 12.2, p. 7) even though critics such as Collins, Hartman, DiLella, Montgomery, Jeffery, and Driver all point to other Old Testament passages that refer to images as “golden” though they were only gold plated (TSR. Vol. 12.2, p. 2-3). 
Will Till continue to defend refuted arguments” First, will Till or Matson provide us with an ancient source that backs up their dogmatic statement that history indicates that Belshazzar was not in command when Babylon fell? Second, will Till accept Samuel Driver’s reasonable explanation concerning Daniel’s training period? Third, will Till continue to insist that he can cite reputable scholars that will back up his claim that the Aramaic of Daniel is wirtrtne in the linguistic style of the 2nd century B. C.? Fourth, will Till, Matson, Wildish and Sieriches continue to insist that Belshazzar was not the ruling King of Bablyon Fifth, will till continue to insist that Daniel 3:1 is talking about a solid gold statue? Sixth, will Till continue to insist that the reference to the afterlife in Daniel 12:2 is evidence that the Book of Daniel is late? I predict that Farrell Till will not accept the evidence on these points that has been presented to him during this long running debate, but it is my hope that many of the subscribers of The Skeptical Review will take Till’s arguments and compare them to the details of history, archaeology, linguistics, and the tesxt. A closer study will shed light on the flaws that exist in even Thill’s strongest arguments. 
Everette Hatcher, Little Rock ArkansasDr. Stephen R. Miller, Mid-America Seminary, Cordova, Tennessee, (Dr. Miller is the author of Daniel, New American  Commentary Series, 1994).

_

Francis Schaeffer

Image result for francis schaeffer roman bridge

How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 7 | The Age of Non-Reason


How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 8 | The Age of Fragmentation

Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 1 | Abortion of the Human…

Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 4 | The Basis for Human D…

Frederic Edwin Church: A collection of 206 paintings (HD)

https://youtu.be/pE9N9yn3Jo8

1984 SOUNDWORD LABRI CONFERENCE VIDEO – Q&A With Francis & Edith Schaefer

Frederic Edwin Church - 1826-1900

FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH (1826-1900)

Church represents the culmination of the Hudson River School: he had Thomas Cole’s love for the landscape, Asher Brown Durand’s romantic lyricism, and Albert Bierstadt’s grandiloquence, but he was braver and technically more gifted than anyone of them. Church is without any doubt one of the greatest landscape painters of all time, perhaps only surpassed by Turner and some impressionists and postimpressionists like Monet or Cézanne.


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Carl Sagan v. Nancy Pearcey

March 18, 2013 – 9:11 am

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April 25, 2014 – 8:26 am

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Was Antony Flew the most prominent atheist of the 20th century?

April 25, 2014 – 1:59 am

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September 15, 2022 READING A PROVERB A DAY ( PROVERBS 15) Bill Elliff on Proverbs 15

Proverbs 15 New Living Translation

Proverbs 15New Living Translation

15 A gentle answer deflects anger,
    but harsh words make tempers flare.

The tongue of the wise makes knowledge appealing,
    but the mouth of a fool belches out foolishness.

The Lord is watching everywhere,
    keeping his eye on both the evil and the good.

Gentle words are a tree of life;
    a deceitful tongue crushes the spirit.

Only a fool despises a parent’s[a] discipline;
    whoever learns from correction is wise.

There is treasure in the house of the godly,
    but the earnings of the wicked bring trouble.

The lips of the wise give good advice;
    the heart of a fool has none to give.

The Lord detests the sacrifice of the wicked,
    but he delights in the prayers of the upright.

The Lord detests the way of the wicked,
    but he loves those who pursue godliness.

10 Whoever abandons the right path will be severely disciplined;
    whoever hates correction will die.

11 Even Death and Destruction[b] hold no secrets from the Lord.
    How much more does he know the human heart!

12 Mockers hate to be corrected,
    so they stay away from the wise.

13 A glad heart makes a happy face;
    a broken heart crushes the spirit.

14 A wise person is hungry for knowledge,
    while the fool feeds on trash.

15 For the despondent, every day brings trouble;
    for the happy heart, life is a continual feast.

16 Better to have little, with fear for the Lord,
    than to have great treasure and inner turmoil.

17 A bowl of vegetables with someone you love
    is better than steak with someone you hate.

18 A hot-tempered person starts fights;
    a cool-tempered person stops them.

19 A lazy person’s way is blocked with briers,
    but the path of the upright is an open highway.

20 Sensible children bring joy to their father;
    foolish children despise their mother.

21 Foolishness brings joy to those with no sense;
    a sensible person stays on the right path.

22 Plans go wrong for lack of advice;
    many advisers bring success.

23 Everyone enjoys a fitting reply;
    it is wonderful to say the right thing at the right time!

24 The path of life leads upward for the wise;
    they leave the grave[c] behind.

25 The Lord tears down the house of the proud,
    but he protects the property of widows.

26 The Lord detests evil plans,
    but he delights in pure words.

27 Greed brings grief to the whole family,
    but those who hate bribes will live.

28 The heart of the godly thinks carefully before speaking;
    the mouth of the wicked overflows with evil words.

29 The Lord is far from the wicked,
    but he hears the prayers of the righteous.

30 A cheerful look brings joy to the heart;
    good news makes for good health.

31 If you listen to constructive criticism,
    you will be at home among the wise.

32 If you reject discipline, you only harm yourself;
    but if you listen to correction, you grow in understanding.

33 Fear of the Lord teaches wisdom;
    humility precedes honor.

PRoverbs 15

THE POWER OF YOUR TONGUE

June 06, 2022

THE POWER OF YOUR TONGUE

What you say today will have effects far beyond your imagination. Your words carry the power of life or death, good or evil, blessing or cursing. All through the Scripture, God instructs us about the use of the tongue. His tool for motivation is by showing us the tongue’s effects—for good or evil. Each phrase of Proverbs 15 is sobering as it outlines speech’s power.

GOOD WORDS …

  • A gentle answer turns away wrath (Vs. 1)
  • The tongue of the wise makes knowledge acceptable (Vs. 2)
  • A soothing tongue is a tree of life (Vs. 4)
  • The lips of the wise spread knowledge (Vs 7)
  • The slow to anger calms a dispute (Vs. 18)
  • A timely answer brings joy and delight(Vs. 23)
  • Pleasant words are pure (Vs. 26)

BAD WORDS

  • Harsh words stir up anger (Vs. 1)
  • The mouth of fools spouts folly (Vs. 2)
  • Perversion in your words crushes the spirit (Vs. 4)
  • Foolish words do not spread knowledge (Vs. 7)
  • Hot-tempered (words) stir up strife (Vs. 18)

Your words are not neutral. Everything you say will either advance joy, life, harmony, knowledge, life, peace, joy and delight or they will stir up anger, folly, lies, foolishness, and strife. You may not think you have that power, but you do. If you look around you and see the trail of those evil effects, don’t blame your circumstances or others. The guilt lies squarely at the feet of your own choices with your words.

And remember, Jesus said your mouth speaks out of that which fills your heart. If your heart is surrendered to Christ and filled with His grace and truth, life-giving words will come out. But the reverse is also true.

Father, fill me with Your Holy Spirit today. Take complete control. Let me carefully, wisely listen to Your Spirit before a word comes out of my mouth. Let my words be God-initiated. Protect me from the sudden foolish word that will harm everyone around me and abort the advance of Your kingdom.

When the String Snaps

Love Worth Finding

Adrian Rogers

Proverbs 15:13-22

Did you know that when a violin string is not tight enough, the music will be flat and dull? And if the string is too tight, the music will be shrill and high-pitched. But if it is tightened even more, that string can snap!

It’s the same with tension in the home. Stress and strife raise tension in our homes. The string can get mighty tight, and sometimes, it can snap.

However, not all stress is bad. It takes a certain tension just to make the violin play at all. But I’m telling you that too much stress is dangerous to our happiness, our health, and our homes. I want to give you four instructions taken from this passage in Proverbs to help relieve stress in your home.
Learn to Laugh

“A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance: but by sorrow of the heart the spirit is broken” (Proverbs 15:13). When it says “the spirit is broken,” that means the string has snapped. Have you ever noticed you don’t have to teach children to laugh; you have to teach them when not to laugh? You see, laughter comes innately. And if you have the joy of the Lord in your heart, it’s going to show on your face! In Luke 6:21, Jesus is looking at people who are down-trodden and sorrowful; and He says, “Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.” He tells us to laugh!

Oh, there’s a time to weep, but you better put some laughter in your home — especially when times get tough. Laughter is God’s way to break the tension when the string gets too tight.
Cultivate Contentment

“Better is little with the fear of the LORD than great treasure and trouble therewith. Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith” (Proverbs 15:16-17). Many of us are uptight because our value system is all wrong. We think if we have more, then these things will bring us happiness. But many times the striving for things is what brings tension into the home. 1 Timothy 6:6-8 says, “But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.”

That doesn’t mean that you can’t strive for more or that God doesn’t want you to prosper. The Bible says God takes pleasure in the prosperity of His servants (Psalm 35:27). But you must learn to be content with whatever you have and praise God. If you don’t, before long, the string is going to snap. And that big house, or whatever you’ve been working for, won’t mean anything to you, not a thing.
Alleviate Anger

“A wrathful man stirreth up strife: but he that is slow to anger appeaseth strife” (Proverbs 15:18). This Scripture shows us that anger brings stress and strife. We need to be peacemakers in our homes. We also see in Proverbs 15:1 that “A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.” The way to control your anger is to control your words — your speech. Perhaps, you might say, “I just can’t control it.” Oh yes you can! You know, sometimes in a home the husband and wife are just snarling, fighting, snapping, down one another’s throat, and their voices are full of hostility. Then, right in the middle, the phone rings. They go to the phone and say, “Hello,” so sweet and nice. You can control it! And you’d better learn to because if you don’t, you’ll be out of control — and the string will snap. 

Walk in Wisdom
“Folly is joy to him that is destitute of wisdom: but a man of understanding walketh uprightly. Without counsel purposes are disappointed: but in the multitude of counsellors they are established” (Proverbs 15:21-22). Stress in the home is just simply a sign that you have forsaken the wisdom of God. God is not the author of confusion. He gives wisdom.

Now, in order for your family to have wisdom, I would suggest that you come together in a family counsel. Notice in verse twenty-two, “in the multitude of counsellors” this wisdom is established. You need, as a family, to come together. The reason there is strife is not because you have problems. Every family has problems. But you see, families that deal with problems the right way, learn to attack the problem and not one another. Now, that’s wisdom!

When all else has failed, shouldn’t we just read the instructions? God, through His Word, instructs us to laugh, to be content, and to be happy and wise. If we don’t, the string is going to snap, and the music will be over.

Related posts:

Seeing Jesus in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job

July 16, 2013 – 1:28 am

Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 10) Summing up Proverbs study

May 30, 2013 – 1:06 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 9) “Love your neighbor”

May 28, 2013 – 1:23 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 8) “Manage your money”

May 23, 2013 – 1:35 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 7) “Pursue your work”

May 21, 2013 – 1:05 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 6) “Enjoy your wife and watch your words”

May 16, 2013 – 1:23 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 5) “Control your body”

May 14, 2013 – 1:44 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 4) “Bad company corrupts…”

May 9, 2013 – 1:10 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 3) “Guard your mind and obey your parents!!”

May 7, 2013 – 1:43 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. It is tough to guard your […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 2) What does it mean to fear the Lord?

May 2, 2013 – 1:13 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. What does it mean to fear […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current EventsUncategorized | Edit|Comments (0)

The Wisdom of Solomon and the Book of Ecclesiastes

July 8, 2013 – 12:01 am

Ecclesiastes 6-8 | Solomon Turns Over a New Leaf Published on Oct 2, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 30, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Why is Solomon so depressed in Ecclesiastes? by Brent Cunningham

July 3, 2013 – 7:00 am

Ecclesiastes 1 Published on Sep 4, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Robert Leroe on Ecclesiastes (Mentions Thomas Aquinas, Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, King Solomon, King Rehoboam, Eugene Peterson, Chuck Swindoll, and John Newton.)

June 19, 2013 – 1:30 am

Ecclesiastes 1 Published on Sep 4, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Solomon was the author of Ecclesiastes

June 11, 2013 – 1:55 am

Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Ecclesiastes: Solomon with Life in the Fast Lane

June 3, 2013 – 1:19 am

Ecclesiastes 6-8 | Solomon Turns Over a New Leaf Published on Oct 2, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 30, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Ecclesiastes a scathing and self-deprecating attack on hedonism and secular humanism by Solomon

May 31, 2013 – 1:17 am

Ecclesiastes 4-6 | Solomon’s Dissatisfaction Published on Sep 24, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 23, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider ___________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope […]

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Solomon was right in his cynicism–unless……unless there is a God who created us and cares about us

May 22, 2013 – 1:34 am

Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

The Humanist takes on Solomon and the Book of Ecclesiastes

May 20, 2013 – 1:13 pm

Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Tom Brady , Coldplay, Kansas, Solomon and the search for satisfaction (part 3)

December 23, 2011 – 11:12 am

Tom Brady “More than this…” Uploaded by EdenWorshipCenter on Jan 22, 2008 EWC sermon illustration showing a clip from the 2005 Tom Brady 60 minutes interview. _______________________ Tom Brady ESPN Interview Tom Brady has famous wife earned over 76 million dollars last year. However, has Brady found lasting satifaction in his life? It does not […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Adrian Rogers on gambling

July 18, 2013 – 12:44 am

Adrian Rogers: How to Be a Child of a Happy Mother Published on Nov 13, 2012 Series: Fortifying Your Family (To read along turn on the annotations.) Adrian Rogers looks at the 5th commandment and the relationship of motherhood in the commandment to honor your father and mother, because the faith that doesn’t begin at home, […]

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Book of Ecclesiastes

July 17, 2013 – 1:40 am

Ecclesiastes 1 Published on Sep 4, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how secular humanist man […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Adrian Rogers: Are fathers necessary?

July 16, 2013 – 12:43 am

Adrian Rogers – How to Cultivate a Marriage Another great article from Adrian Rogers. Are fathers necessary? “Artificial insemination is the ideal method of producing a pregnancy, and a lesbian partner should have the same parenting rights accorded historically to biological fathers.” Quoted from the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, summer of 1995. […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Tom Brady, Coldplay, Kansas, Solomon and the search for satisfaction (part 2)

December 22, 2011 – 11:56 am

Tom Brady “More than this…” Uploaded by EdenWorshipCenter on Jan 22, 2008 EWC sermon illustration showing a clip from the 2005 Tom Brady 60 minutes interview. To Download this video copy the URL to http://www.vixy.net ________________ Obviously from the video clip above, Tom Brady has realized that even though he has won many Super Bowls […]

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit |Comments (0)

September 14, 2022 READING A PROVERB A DAY (PROVERBS 14) Bill Elliff on Proverbs 14

Proverbs 14New Living Translation

14 A wise woman builds her home,
    but a foolish woman tears it down with her own hands.

Those who follow the right path fear the Lord;
    those who take the wrong path despise him.

A fool’s proud talk becomes a rod that beats him,
    but the words of the wise keep them safe.

Without oxen a stable stays clean,
    but you need a strong ox for a large harvest.

An honest witness does not lie;
    a false witness breathes lies.

A mocker seeks wisdom and never finds it,
    but knowledge comes easily to those with understanding.

Stay away from fools,
    for you won’t find knowledge on their lips.

The prudent understand where they are going,
    but fools deceive themselves.

Fools make fun of guilt,
    but the godly acknowledge it and seek reconciliation.

10 Each heart knows its own bitterness,
    and no one else can fully share its joy.

11 The house of the wicked will be destroyed,
    but the tent of the godly will flourish.

12 There is a path before each person that seems right,
    but it ends in death.

13 Laughter can conceal a heavy heart,
    but when the laughter ends, the grief remains.

14 Backsliders get what they deserve;
    good people receive their reward.

15 Only simpletons believe everything they’re told!
    The prudent carefully consider their steps.

16 The wise are cautious[a] and avoid danger;
    fools plunge ahead with reckless confidence.

17 Short-tempered people do foolish things,
    and schemers are hated.

18 Simpletons are clothed with foolishness,[b]
    but the prudent are crowned with knowledge.

19 Evil people will bow before good people;
    the wicked will bow at the gates of the godly.

20 The poor are despised even by their neighbors,
    while the rich have many “friends.”

21 It is a sin to belittle one’s neighbor;
    blessed are those who help the poor.

22 If you plan to do evil, you will be lost;
    if you plan to do good, you will receive unfailing love and faithfulness.

23 Work brings profit,
    but mere talk leads to poverty!

24 Wealth is a crown for the wise;
    the effort of fools yields only foolishness.

25 A truthful witness saves lives,
    but a false witness is a traitor.

26 Those who fear the Lord are secure;
    he will be a refuge for their children.

27 Fear of the Lord is a life-giving fountain;
    it offers escape from the snares of death.

28 A growing population is a king’s glory;
    a prince without subjects has nothing.

29 People with understanding control their anger;
    a hot temper shows great foolishness.

30 A peaceful heart leads to a healthy body;
    jealousy is like cancer in the bones.

31 Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker,
    but helping the poor honors him.

32 The wicked are crushed by disaster,
    but the godly have a refuge when they die.

33 Wisdom is enshrined in an understanding heart;
    wisdom is not[c] found among fools.

34 Godliness makes a nation great,
    but sin is a disgrace to any people.

35 A king rejoices in wise servants
    but is angry with those who disgrace him.


Proverbs 14, 16, 19

SLOW TO ANGER

July 15, 2019

SLOW TO ANGER

A man’s discretion makes him slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook a transgression. (Proverbs 19:11)

We’ve all experienced it. Some of us have a harder time with this than others. And, there are certain people that we have a greater struggle with in this age-old problem. Sometimes it’s those that we are closest too and love the most.

It is easy to explode. To fly off the handle. To let our anger erupt before we’ve even thought about what is happening.

DISCRETION

The writer of Proverbs says that one of the things that slows anger down is discretion. Other translations use the word “sensible.” The Hebrew word can also be translated and defined as “insight, understanding, prudence, i.e., the capacity to understand and as a result act.”

Slowness to anger is a thinking response. In other words, the man who is wise, who has understanding, who has insight, controls himself. He realizes the fruitless and even destructive nature of a quick temper and restrains himself. He understands that it accomplishes nothing of value and merely complicates the problem.

TAMING THE EMOTIONS

The fool doesn’t think. He lets his emotions totally control his response. “He who is quick-tempered exalts folly” (Proverbs 14:29). If we want to overcome this, we must grow in understanding of what explosive anger is and does. We must realize how foolish it is. By letting the Holy Spirit fill us and control our lives, we must think before we respond.

The Spirit is the One who can produce the self-control we need, but we must place ourselves–intentionally and continually–under His leadership.

OUR GREATEST GLORY

… is to overlook a transgression. To be willing to suffer in order to achieve God’s righteous responses. The one who overcomes this is seen as a great man for “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit, than he who captures a city” (Proverbs 16:32).

We should be willing to be wronged and not take offense. When we are tempted to anger, we must take a long look at the cross. No one suffered more unjustly and forgave more unconditionally.

IT’S POSSIBLE!

We can overcome this! God could not give us these admonitions if it were not possible by His grace and the power of the Spirit within us. This should give us hope and the urgency to move intentionally to see this as a “such were some of you” issue in our lives.

We must study anger throughout the Bible. Look what it accomplishes and how destructive it can be. Become sensible and wise. Let the Spirit take greater control and when we feel anger rising (which is usually because we think someone has stepped on our rights or misunderstood or falsely accused us), we should think and pray deeply before we let any words come out of our mouths.

Uncontrolled anger is never helpful. It will do nothing but further complicate the problem. Every time we respond in anger, we are not promoting God’s righteousness, but aborting it, for the “anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God” (James 1:19-20).

Friends Proverbs 17:17 #2059
We are grateful for the opportunity to provide this outline produced from a sermon preached by Adrian Rogers while serving as pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee.
This outline is intended for your personal, non-commercial use.
In order to ensure our ability to be good stewards of Adrian Rogers’ messages, Love Worth Finding has reserved all rights to this content.
Except for your personal, non-commercial use and except for brief quotations in printed reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means —electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— without the prior permission of the publisher.
Copyright ©2021 Love Worth Finding Ministries, Inc.

FRIENDS | PROVERBS 17:17 | #2059
1) INTRODUCTION
a) Teenagersaremoreaffectedbyfriendsthanalmostanythingelse,including
sometimes parents and pastors combined.
b) Thedeepestneedofallofus,whetheryoungorold,isforenduring
friendships.
i) The deepest longing of the human heart is for a friend who loves us.
(1) Someone we can share with and commune with.
(2) Someone who truly understands our deepest needs, highest
aspirations and our worst fears.
c) Atruefriendisagreattreasure,butthewrongkindoffriendisthegreatest
danger that a teenager can possibly have.
d) Proverbs17:17
e) Today’smessagewillexplaintwodifferentcategoriesoffriends,three
different categories of teenagers, and will give practical advice to parents as they help their children choose friends wisely.
2) TWOCATEGORIESOFFRIENDS
PAGE 2
Copyright ©2021 Love Worth Finding Ministries, Inc.
a) b)
c)
d)
e) f)
Wehavecasualfriendsthatweministerto.
i) We all have casual friends.
ii) Theseareacquaintancesthatincludeunsavedfriends. Weneedtomakeacquaintanceswiththeunsaved.
i) The Lord Jesus did.
(1) Luke 7:34
(a) Jesus was crucified for being a friend to sinners.
Therearecertaincasualfriendsthatwearetohave.
i) As Christians, we are to be the salt of the Earth.
ii) Wearetobeseparate,butseparationisnotisolation.
(1) We’re to be separated from the sin but not the sinner.
iii) We are to have these casual friends so that we can bring them to Christ. 1Corinthians9:20-23
i) The Apostle Paul is saying in this passage that he knew how to
accommodate unsaved people without making them angry and without compromising his convictions.
(1) This does not mean that those casual friends are to become intimate
friends.
(2) This does not mean that we are to have fellowship with them so that
they are to become our companions. 2Corinthians6:14,17-18
i) The word for “fellowship” in this passage means “intimacy.”
ii) Wearenottohavefellowshipandcommunionwithunsavedpeople. With casual friends, we are making friends for Jesus.
i) Accommodation without compromise
ii) Weinvitethemtochurch.
iii) We show love and friendship.

FRIENDS | PROVERBS 17:17 | #2059
iv) But we have no communion, fellowship or intimacy with casual friends. g) Therearecasualfriendswhomwewitnessto,andthenthereareintimate
friends that we fellowship with.
i) Parents should know who their children’s intimate friends are.
(1) Children will be made or broken by their companions. h) Proverbs13:20
i) This passage is not referring to casual acquaintances but is talking about companionship and fellowship.
ii) Ifwehaveungodlypeopleforourcompanions,thenwewillbedestroyed. i) 2 Samuel 13:1-29, 2 Samuel 18:9
i) This is one of the saddest stories in the Bible.
ii) Thiswholetragic,sordidmessbeganbecauseAmnonhadafriend.
(1) Amnon’s friend made a devilish suggestion. j) We will be like our friends.
i) It is not uncommon for teenagers to begin drug habits or drinking because of a friend.
ii) Kidsgethookedonpornographybecausetheywereatsomeone’shouse watching R-rated or X-rated movies.
k) Parentscanevaluatethespiritualconditionoftheirchildrenbytheirfriends.
i) Kids who don’t want to serve God will find other kids just like them.
ii) Godlykidswillalsofindoneanother.
iii) You can learn the spiritual state of your children by watching their
friends.
(1) Listen to their conversation.
(2) See how they are dressed.
(3) Pay attention to the music they listen to.
3) THREECATEGORIESOFYOUNGPEOPLE(PROVERBS1:20-22) a) Proverbs1:20-22
PAGE 3
Copyright ©2021 Love Worth Finding Ministries, Inc.
b)
i) This passage contains the three categories of young people. ii) Everyteenagerisinoneofthesecategories. Thefirstcategoryisthesimple.
i) If your child is simple, it does not mean that he isn’t intelligent or smart.
ii) Theword“simple”means“open.”
iii) Proverbs 1:22
(1) The simple one loves simplicity.
(a) This means that he loves the easy way.
(b) He wants to go through life without any restraint or discipline.
iv) The simple also lacks understanding.
(1) Proverbs 9:1-4
v) A simple person is easily led into sin and error.
(1) Proverbs 14:15
(2) If the simple does not believe God’s Word, then he will believe
anything.

FRIENDS | PROVERBS 17:17 | #2059
(a) He will believe Madison Avenue. (b) He will believe false cults.
(c) He will believe sinful friends.
(d) The simple is living in danger.
vi) By nature, all teenagers are simple.
vii) Proverbs 22:3
viii) Simple teenagers think that they are indestructible.
ix) Being simple doesn’t mean that they don’t have character, but they just
don’t understand until they get wisdom from God.
c) Everyteenagerstartsoutassimple,buthecanbecomeascorner.
i) Proverbs 1:22
(1) The simple one loves simplicity, but the scorner delights in scorning.
(a) The scorner has a warped character.
(b) He’s an evil person.
ii) Youcan’ttellhimanything.
(1) You can instruct the simple, but you can’t instruct the scorner.
(2) Proverbs 13:1
iii) He refuses instructions, and he despises godly people.
iv) Proverbs 15:12
(1) Rebuke a scorner, and he will insult you to your face.
v) Proverbs 9:7-8
vi) Proverbs 13:1
vii) Proverbs 13:13

(1) This is referring to everlasting destruction.
viii) A synonym for “scorner” is “smart-aleck.”
d) Thethirdcategoryisthefool.
i) Proverbs 1:22
(1) Fools hate knowledge.
ii) Proverbs1:7
iii) A fool will ridicule righteousness.
(1) Proverbs 14:9
(2) He will laugh at ungodliness, such as immorality, homosexuality,
drunkenness, etc.
iv) He rejoices in sin.
(1) Proverbs 15:21
(2) His moral sense has been perverted.
(a) He doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong.
(b) Isaiah 5:20
v) Proverbs 26:11
vi) Proverbs 17:10

vii) His heart is hard, his conscience is seared, and his mind is defiled. (1) Punishment will not change him.
(2) His moral sensibilities have been destroyed.
viii) Don’t let your children hang around scorners or fools.
PAGE 4 Copyright ©2021 Love Worth Finding Ministries, Inc.

FRIENDS | PROVERBS 17:17 | #2059
4) WHATCANPARENTSDOTOHELPTHEIRCHILDREN?
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Copyright ©2021 Love Worth Finding Ministries, Inc.
a)
Helpthemunderstandthedangersthatareinvolved. i) They do not understand the dangers.
ii) Proverbs19:25
(1) Young people do not see the consequences of sin because we have so dumbed down those consequences.
(2) Young people need to understand that there are consequences to sin. iii) Parents should take their children to the rescue mission so that they can
see the other side of addictions.
(1) The advertising that kids see for alcoholic beverages will never show
this other side.
iv) Your children need to understand that sin has repercussions. Carefullyguardtheircompany.
i) Proverbs 13:20
ii) Proverbs22:10

iii) Don’t allow your kids to hang around a scorner or fool.
iv) Parents should meet any boy who wants to date their daughter. Teachthemtheimportanceoftheirchoices.
i) Life is the sum total of our choices.
ii) Everychoicechangesus.
iii) We are free to choose, but we’re not free to choose the consequences of
our choice.
(1) After we choose, then our choice chooses for us. Helpyourchildrenselecttheirfriends.
i) One of the best things you can do is to make your home the most fun
place in town.
ii) Haveyourchildrenandtheirfriendsinyourhomesothatyoucanwatch
them and see what they’re like. Refusetohonorfools.
i) Proverbs 26:1
(1) Don’t get your entertainment from a fool.
ii) Don’tletyourchildrengotoconcertsorotherentertainmentvenues
where they will be entertained by those who have set themselves against
God and against wisdom.
There are additional things that parents need to do:
i) Have a positive attitude.
(1) Don’t talk down to your kids. (a) Words can hurt children.
(2) Don’t use words that belittle or put them down.
(3) Use words that build them up.
ii) Learntolistentothem.
iii) Try to see life from their point of view.
(1) Kids today are facing things that their parents never had to face.
b)
c)
d)
e)
f)

FRIENDS | PROVERBS 17:17 | #2059
iv) Be gentle with them.
(1) Psalm 18:35
(2) Fathers whose children adore them are strong and wise, but gentle.
(a) They are not harsh, and they don’t yell. v) Learn to touch and hug your teenager.
(1) Learn to show non-verbal expression.
(2) Be gentle with your kids. vi) Be transparent.
(1) Let them know your faults.
(a) They already know that you’re not perfect.
(2) Your kids don’t necessarily want you to be perfect; they just don’t want you to be a phony.
vii) Be available to your kids.
(1) A lack of a close relationship with a father is one of the biggest factors
to encouraging promiscuity in young girls, even more so than poverty. (a) Promiscuity is much less likely when there is a close relationship to
the father.
5) CONCLUSION
a) Itisokaytohavecasualfriendships.
PAGE 6
Copyright ©2021 Love Worth Finding Ministries, Inc.
b) c)
d)
e) f)
g) h)
i) Invite them to church.
ii) Befriendly.
iii) Go out to eat together after the church service.
iv) But your teenagers should not make these kids their companions.
(1) Proverbs 13:20
Atruefriendissomeonewhoisfaithful.
i) Proverbs 17:17 Atruefriendissomeonewhoencouragesyouandmakesyoubetter.
i) They will sharpen you.
ii) Proverbs27:17 Oneofthemarksastowhetherornotyourfriendisatrue,godlyfriendis are you a better person for having been with that friend, or is he or she a better person for having been with you?
i) A true friend will challenge you.
ii) Proverbs27:6
Chooseyourfriendscarefully.
One of the greatest joys of your life or one of the greatest disappointments will be your friends. Thereisonefriendwhostickscloserthanabrother,andHisnameisJesus. i) Proverbs 18:24
ii) He’stheonewhowillguideyoutotherightfriendships. DoyouknowJesuspersonally?Ifnot,youcanpraytoHimtodaybyasking Him to come into your life.

FRIENDS | PROVERBS 17:17 | #2059
PAGE 7
Copyright ©2021 Love Worth Finding Ministries, Inc.
i)
Call upon Jesus today. Repent (turn) from your sins, and turn to Jesus. Ask Him to forgive you of your sins, and acknowledge Him as Lord of your life.
i) Romans 3:23
ii) Romans10:9-10
iii) Romans 10:13
iv) Acts 16:31
v) John 3:16

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September 13, 2022 READING A PROVERB A DAY (PROVERBS 13) Adrian Rogers Fathers Who Teach Their Children to Be Wise Proverbs 1,3, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 24


Proverbs 13New Living Translation

13 A wise child accepts a parent’s discipline;[a]
    a mocker refuses to listen to correction.

Wise words will win you a good meal,
    but treacherous people have an appetite for violence.

Those who control their tongue will have a long life;
    opening your mouth can ruin everything.

Lazy people want much but get little,
    but those who work hard will prosper.

The godly hate lies;
    the wicked cause shame and disgrace.

Godliness guards the path of the blameless,
    but the evil are misled by sin.

Some who are poor pretend to be rich;
    others who are rich pretend to be poor.

The rich can pay a ransom for their lives,
    but the poor won’t even get threatened.

The life of the godly is full of light and joy,
    but the light of the wicked will be snuffed out.

10 Pride leads to conflict;
    those who take advice are wise.

11 Wealth from get-rich-quick schemes quickly disappears;
    wealth from hard work grows over time.

12 Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
    but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life.

13 People who despise advice are asking for trouble;
    those who respect a command will succeed.

14 The instruction of the wise is like a life-giving fountain;
    those who accept it avoid the snares of death.

15 A person with good sense is respected;
    a treacherous person is headed for destruction.[b]

16 Wise people think before they act;
    fools don’t—and even brag about their foolishness.

17 An unreliable messenger stumbles into trouble,
    but a reliable messenger brings healing.

18 If you ignore criticism, you will end in poverty and disgrace;
    if you accept correction, you will be honored.

19 It is pleasant to see dreams come true,
    but fools refuse to turn from evil to attain them.

20 Walk with the wise and become wise;
    associate with fools and get in trouble.

21 Trouble chases sinners,
    while blessings reward the righteous.

22 Good people leave an inheritance to their grandchildren,
    but the sinner’s wealth passes to the godly.

23 A poor person’s farm may produce much food,
    but injustice sweeps it all away.

24 Those who spare the rod of discipline hate their children.
    Those who love their children care enough to discipline them.

25 The godly eat to their hearts’ content,
    but the belly of the wicked goes hungry

Adrian Rogers: How to Be the Father of a Wise Child (1932)

Fathers Who Teach Their Children to Be Wise

June 20, 2021 Save Article

Proverbs

Why do some children adore their fathers and others hate them? What’s the difference between fathers? Sometimes children are caught up in the mistakes and mindset of fathers who won’t do what they should to guide those children into a safe, secure haven. The fathers’ own pride and arrogance make shipwreck both of their own lives and their children’s. It doesn’t have to be this way. 

I’ve observed one characteristic in almost all fathers whose children love and follow them. I’ll tell you what it is in a moment. 

The book of Proverbs is a veritable owner’s manual on how to raise a wise child. From the first chapter, it says the proverbs were written, in large part, so we would come… 

…to know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding, to receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, judgment, and equity; to give prudence to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion—A wise man will hear and increase learning, and a man of understanding will attain wise counsel…. Wisdom calls aloud outside; she raises her voice in the open squares. She cries out in the chief concourses, at the openings of the gates in the city she speaks her words: “How long, you simple [naïve, immature] ones, will you love simplicity? For scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge. (Proverbs 1:2-5; 20-22)

Underline three words in this passage: simple, scorners, and fools. A child isn’t born a scorner or a fool. A long road leads to the evolution of a fool. 

Children need your guidance and protection.

They’re easily molded. “Simple” in verse 22 means open and naïve; children’s minds and hearts are plastic—easily shaped, innocent. 

They lack understanding. There comes a time when the child must be guided from innocence into wisdom and maturity.

They can be quickly led into error. A child is an easy target for Hollywood, false religions, and sinful friends. They’re so open, they’ll believe anything. They’re like a sponge. They can be tricked and misled; they’re living in constant danger, sitting ducks for bad influences.

“The simple believes every word…” (Proverbs 24:15). “A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself: but the simple pass on and are punished” (Proverbs 22:3). 

The young tend to think they’re indestructible, not weighing the future, easy to mislead. 

The older child needs godly correction.

Look at the word “scorner.” Little children aren’t scorners yet but heads up, dads: the older children, if not guided by dad and mom, take the next step down—they become the scorners/scoffers. 

They get their jollies from being the smart-alecky kids, the teenage cynics, the mockers at the university. It breaks my heart to say it, but most teenagers in America now are scorners. Scorners can break a parent’s heart.

They defy instruction because “scorners delight in their scorning” (Proverbs 1:22). 
“A wise son heeds his father’s instruction, but a scoffer does not listen to rebuke” (Proverbs 13:1). 

Scorners will fire back at you. (See Proverbs 9:8.) They won’t listen. It’s like talking to a brick wall—they’ll tune you out. “A scoffer does not love one who corrects him, nor will he go to the wise” (Proverbs 15:12).

He’ll never come and say, “Dad, I need help. Will you help me out?” When you try to correct the scorner, he’ll look at you and say with his eyes, “I hate your guts.”

They’re on a track for destruction
“He who despises the Word will be destroyed” (Proverbs 13:13).

If they laugh at the Word of God, they may laugh their way right into Hell. Scorners are very hard to reach, but there is yet hope; they can still be reclaimed.

Catch them before they self-destruct.

First, there was the simple—naïve, open, carefree. But if he’s not taught, he will become a scorner. We all carry that fallen nature. Then the scorner, if not restrained by parents, becomes a person the Bible designates “a fool.” The scorner is insolent, but the fool is immovable—rebellious, arrogant, and wicked. 

A fool will reject wisdom
“And fools hate knowledge” (Proverbs 1:22).

“The heart of him who has understanding seeks knowledge, but the mouth of fools feeds on foolishness” (Proverbs 15:14).

He ridicules righteousness
“Fools mock at sin” (Proverbs 14:9). 

This is why we have sitcoms that laugh at drunkenness, glorify adultery, mock marriage, promote homosexuality and relish perversion. Who does that? Fools. 

He rejoices in iniquity
“Folly is joy to him who is destitute of discernment…” (Proverbs 15:21).

His moral sense is so perverted, he calls good evil and evil good. His heart is hardened, his conscience is seared, and his mind is defiled.

He rejects reproof
God will chasten those who are His own. “For whom the Lord loves, He chastens…” (Hebrews 12:6). But reproof and correction are lost on a fool. “Rebuke is more effective for a wise man than a hundred blows on a fool” (Proverbs 17:10).

Trying to reprove the fool will get you nowhere. Don’t even try. He won’t hear you. He is intransigent. If he were wise, he would repent when God chastised him.

God gives us little children who begin life innocent and open. But if you’re not careful, society will turn them into smart alecks. 

Dad, if they’re not rescued when they become scorners or smart alecks, they’ll become fools. The fool is on the fast track to Hell.

We’re in serious trouble in America. In 1962, prayer in public schools was declared unconstitutional. In 1963, Bible reading in schools was deemed “unconstitutional,” but in 1973 the killing of pre-born children somehow became a Constitutional “right.” Then in 1980, the Ten Commandments had to be removed from where they were posted on school walls because, they said, “The child might be tempted to follow them.” 

Secular humanists have proven to be great strategists. They latched onto the one segment of life almost every child will pass through—public school—and targeted it to become their “Sunday School” for humanist philosophy. To do that, they had to purge any vestige of Christian influence.

In light of this attack on your children, how can you be the father of a wise child and keep from raising a fool?

Dads, with everything in modern culture fighting against you, you must gear up for this battle. 

7 Ways to Be the Father of Wise Children:

1. Expound truth.

Saturate them in the Proverbs. Emblazon the Ten Commandments onto their consciousness. Teach them the Beatitudes, that they might learn these simple, basic truths. It’s your God-given responsibility (See Deuteronomy 6:6-9.) to teach these commandments to your sons, daughters, and grandsons, that your family will survive and your home endure.

The battle is for the mind. As the child thinks, so is he. Get a memorization plan going and make it fun, with rewards when children commit scheduled verses to memory. Get the Word down into their hearts early.

2. Expose sin

The young and innocent will learn by example when they see discipline fall upon the scornerChildren need to see what happens when sin is exposed and consequences are suffered. 

“When the scoffer is punished, the simple is made wise” (Proverbs 21:11). 

The worst thing would be for your child to live in a sinful society where he never sees the repercussions of sin. Our children today are insulated; often they don’t see the result of sin. Help them understand. Don’t just expound truth, but expose sin. Take your child down to skid row. Take him to the prisons. Let him see the end result of bad choices. 

“Strike a scoffer, and the simple will become wary; Rebuke one who has  understanding, and he will discern knowledge” (Proverbs 19:25).

The young think they’re indestructible. You need to pull back the veil.

3. Expel scorners. 

Do not let your children hang around with scorners and fools. Just don’t do it. Help them select their friends. That means you may have to be firm and “cast out the scorner.” Show them the door. Impressionable children will succumb to peer pressure. 

Open up your house to your child’s friends. Make your home the headquarters for fun. And while they’re there, you can monitor those friends. Peer pressure is not bad if the peers are good. If there’s a smart aleck or a fool, say, “Son, there’s the sidewalk.” 

“Cast out the scoffer, and contention will leave; Yes, strife and reproach will cease” (Proverbs 22:10). 

Moms and dads, underline this, a good verse for memorization: 

“He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will be destroyed” (Proverbs 13:20).

4. Express love

Love your children! Delight in them. 

“For whom the Lord loves He corrects, just as a father the son in whom he  delights” (Proverbs 3:12). 

Be positive. Avoid negativism. Words can hurt your children more than a slap in the face. Learn to listen. Try to see life from their point of view. They’re facing things you never faced.

5. Be gentle

This is that one characteristic I mentioned at the beginning, which I’ve seen in all dads whose children love and follow them: They are gentle. That’s what children want out of their dad. Yes, they want a dad they can look up to, who’s the strongest, wisest, smartest, fastest, best dad in the world…but they want him to be gentle! Touch them, hug them, give them non-verbal affection.

6. Be transparent

Let them know your fears, joys, disappointments, failures, and goals. They already know you’re not perfect; they don’t want you to be a phony.

7. Be available

Make it a priority that you’re available to your child.

If you feel inadequate—so do I. None of us has what it takes to be this kind of dad. That’s why we need Jesus.

We’ve got to have Christ in our hearts! The Christian life is not difficult, it’s impossible. Only one who can do it, and that’s Jesus. 

But He will do it, in and through us, if we’ll let Him. The best thing you can do for your children is to love God with all your heart. Give your heart to Jesus.

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Seeing Jesus in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job

July 16, 2013 – 1:28 am

Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 10) Summing up Proverbs study

May 30, 2013 – 1:06 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit | Comments (0)

John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 9) “Love your neighbor”

May 28, 2013 – 1:23 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 8) “Manage your money”

May 23, 2013 – 1:35 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit | Comments (0)

John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 7) “Pursue your work”

May 21, 2013 – 1:05 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit | Comments (0)

John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 6) “Enjoy your wife and watch your words”

May 16, 2013 – 1:23 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 5) “Control your body”

May 14, 2013 – 1:44 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit | Comments (0)

John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 4) “Bad company corrupts…”

May 9, 2013 – 1:10 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 3) “Guard your mind and obey your parents!!”

May 7, 2013 – 1:43 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 2) What does it mean to fear the Lord?

May 2, 2013 – 1:13 am

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The Wisdom of Solomon and the Book of Ecclesiastes

July 8, 2013 – 12:01 am

https://bidding-test.devops.iponweb.net/automattic/dio-passback.html

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Why is Solomon so depressed in Ecclesiastes? by Brent Cunningham

July 3, 2013 – 7:00 am

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Robert Leroe on Ecclesiastes (Mentions Thomas Aquinas, Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, King Solomon, King Rehoboam, Eugene Peterson, Chuck Swindoll, and John Newton.)

June 19, 2013 – 1:30 am

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Solomon was the author of Ecclesiastes

June 11, 2013 – 1:55 am

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Ecclesiastes: Solomon with Life in the Fast Lane

June 3, 2013 – 1:19 am

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Ecclesiastes a scathing and self-deprecating attack on hedonism and secular humanism by Solomon

May 31, 2013 – 1:17 am

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Solomon was right in his cynicism–unless……unless there is a God who created us and cares about us

May 22, 2013 – 1:34 am

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The Humanist takes on Solomon and the Book of Ecclesiastes

May 20, 2013 – 1:13 pm

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Tom Brady , Coldplay, Kansas, Solomon and the search for satisfaction (part 3)

December 23, 2011 – 11:12 am

Tom Brady “More than this…” Uploaded by EdenWorshipCenter on Jan 22, 2008 EWC sermon illustration showing a clip from the 2005 Tom Brady 60 minutes interview. _______________________ Tom Brady ESPN Interview Tom Brady has famous wife earned over 76 million dollars last year. However, has Brady found lasting satifaction in his life? It does not […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

Adrian Rogers on gambling

July 18, 2013 – 12:44 am

Adrian Rogers: How to Be a Child of a Happy Mother Published on Nov 13, 2012 Series: Fortifying Your Family (To read along turn on the annotations.) Adrian Rogers looks at the 5th commandment and the relationship of motherhood in the commandment to honor your father and mother, because the faith that doesn’t begin at home, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit | Comments (0)

Book of Ecclesiastes

July 17, 2013 – 1:40 am

https://bidding-test.devops.iponweb.net/automattic/dio-passback.html

Ecclesiastes 1 Published on Sep 4, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how secular humanist man […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

Adrian Rogers: Are fathers necessary?

July 16, 2013 – 12:43 am

Adrian Rogers – How to Cultivate a Marriage Another great article from Adrian Rogers. Are fathers necessary? “Artificial insemination is the ideal method of producing a pregnancy, and a lesbian partner should have the same parenting rights accorded historically to biological fathers.” Quoted from the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, summer of 1995. […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit | Comments (0)

Tom Brady, Coldplay, Kansas, Solomon and the search for satisfaction (part 2)

December 22, 2011 – 11:56 am

Tom Brady “More than this…” Uploaded by EdenWorshipCenter on Jan 22, 2008 EWC sermon illustration showing a clip from the 2005 Tom Brady 60 minutes interview. To Download this video copy the URL to http://www.vixy.net ________________ Obviously from the video clip above, Tom Brady has realized that even though he has won many Super Bowls […]

DOJ Subpoenas Conservative Group for Documents in Alabama Transgender Case

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DOJ Subpoenas Conservative Group for Documents in Alabama Transgender Case

Fred Lucas  @FredLucasWH / September 12, 2022

After intervening in a court case challenging Alabama’s prohibiting sex-change treatments for minors, the Justice Department subpoenas five years of information from Eagle Forum of Alabama. Pictured: DaQuon Allen, who identifies as a woman and is peer navigator of The Knights and Orchids Society, poses March 9 in Montgomery, Alabama. (Photo: Joshua Lott/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

The Justice Department is pursuing a coservative group’s documents going back five years as part of a lawsuit challenging an Alabama law that prohibits sex change treatments for minors. 

The group, Eagle Forum of Alabama, had been a public supporter of the state’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act. The organization filed a motion in federal court last week to quash the Justice Department’s subpoena demanding all information related to the legislation since 2017. 

Neither the state affiliate nor the national Eagle Forum, founded by conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, is a party to the lawsuit. The state of Alabama is the only defendant. 

“This is a huge issue that groups on the right and the left should be concerned about,” Kristen Ullman, president of Eagle Forum, which has chapters across the United States, told The Daily Signal. “Think about the impact.”

Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act took effect May 8. The law bans puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, castration, and other sex-change surgeries for minors, providing penalties of up to 10 years behind bars for medical providers and up to $15,000 in fines. Proponents of such treatment call it “gender-affirming care.”

After the Alabama Legislature passed the measure but before it went into effect, the Justice Department joined as an intervenor in the case of Eknes-Tucker, et al. v. Marshall, et al., challenging the constitutionality of the law. The defendant is Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=dailysignal&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=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&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1567596031033876481&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailysignal.com%2F2022%2F09%2F12%2Fdoj-subpoenas-conservative-group-for-documents-in-alabama-transgender-case%2F&sessionId=863589a51d96c22da6149737cb456faeb8740cf2&siteScreenName=dailysignal&theme=light&widgetsVersion=1bfeb5c3714e8%3A1661975971032&width=500px

The Biden administration supports allowing sex-change operations for children. 

After joining the case, the Justice Department subpoenaed five and a half years of information from Eagle Forum of Alabama, including all private communications with legislators or anyone else regarding the transgender law; every note, meeting minutes, letter, policy goals and strategy effort, speech, presentation materials, research, and polling; drafts of the bill or its amendments; and documents pertaining to publicly posted social media and webpages and other communications.

Ullman, Eagle Forum’s national president, said the Alabama chapter is challenging the subpoena on grounds that the subpoena isn’t relevant to the case; that it places an undue burden on Eagle Forum of Alabama; and that it requires disclosure of private material.

Moreover, Ullman said, the Justice Department’s action treads on First Amendment rights regarding freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and free exercise of religion. The subpoena by the Biden administration is “harassment must be stopped,” she said.

“It’s not like we were trying to hide our position,” she said. “Our position was public and everything we did was legal. Imagine if a Republican administration sued Organizing for America for all of its communications with Congress even if it isn’t relevant to the case.”

Justice Department spokeswoman Aryele Bradford told The Daily Signal in an email that the department has no comment about the subpoena of Eagle Forum of Alabama. 

Under President Joe Biden, the Justice Department has launched probes of potential political opponents of the administration, including parents speaking out at school board meetings, and the Southern Baptist Convention, and, more recently, it authorized an FBI raid at the Mar-a-Lago home of former President Donald Trump.

The Justice Department, in an April press release announcing it was intervening in the Alabama case, claims that the state law “discriminates against transgender youth by barring them from accessing particular procedures while allowing non-transgender minors to access the same or similar procedures.” This, it said, violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. 

In March, the Justice Deprtment’s Civil Rights Division issued a letter to state attorneys general warning that constitutional and statutory provisions protect transgender youth from discrimination.

After hearing from citizens in Alabama, including parents, doctors, lawyers, and guidance counselors, about their concerns for otherwise healthy children who want to transition to the opposite sex, we decided to undertake the protection of these vulnerable children and have done so publicly and ardently. Eagle Forum of Alabama operates primarily by volunteer Alabama citizens. The right to engage in these activities, free of compulsion and harassment, must be preserved.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

Want to keep up with the 24/7 news cycle? Want to know the most important stories of the day for conservatives? Need news you can trust? Subscribe to The Daily Signal’s email newsletter. Learn more >>

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A.F. Branco for Jan 12, 2022

A Proclamation on Transgender Day Of Visibility, 2022

MARCH 30, 2022PRESIDENTIAL ACTIONS

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

In the past year, hundreds of anti-transgender bills in States were proposed across America, most of them targeting transgender kids.  The onslaught has continued this year.  These bills are wrong.  Efforts to criminalize supportive medical care for transgender kids, to ban transgender children from playing sports, and to outlaw discussing LGBTQI+ people in schools undermine their humanity and corrode our Nation’s values.  Studies have shown that these political attacks are damaging to the mental health and well-being of transgender youth, putting children and their families at greater risk of bullying and discrimination.

Transgenderism: Why Stop There?

Deroy Murdock  / April 01, 2022

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LGBT activists rally on the steps of New York City Hall in support of transgender people on Oct. 24, 2018. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Deroy Murdock

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.

“Identifying” as someone who one is not has become all the rage. If you think you’re somebody you’re not, the whole world is expected to nod its collective head, if not stand up and cheer.

This is especially true for gender identity, as William “Lia” Thomas has demonstrated so vividly in collegiate swimming pools. Unheralded male swimmer William Thomas became NCAA champion female swimmer Lia Thomas—Shazam!—just by saying so.

What a cool magic trick.

Gone are the days when a guy had to put some skin in the game to pull this off. Or, more accurately, pull something off to get some skin out of the game; namely, his penis. The old carving-station requirement for gender transition has gone the way of the rotary telephone. Today, mere affirmations will suffice.

“Hey, I’m a girl!” And you are.

As Yogi Berra might say, if he were alive and not in shock: “Only in America.”

Since simple declarations of identity can change people more swiftly than scalpels, what’s next after the triumph of transgenderism?

Why not transnationalism?

Visualize Lupita Martinez. She lives in poverty in Honduras. The mean streets of Tegucigalpa keep her at wits’ end. A crime surge on public transportation is the last macaw that breaks the branch of her patience.

So, Martinez joins a caravan and heads north, to the U.S.-Mexican frontier.

When she comes face to face with a Border Patrol agent, Martinez says the magic words: “I identify as an American.”

“Welcome home, Lupita!” the federal agent says with a warm smile, as he waves this Honduran American citizen back where she belongs.

And why not transracialism?

Picture Ludwig Von Thannhausen, age 18. He lives in suburban Chicago with his native German parents who brought him to America as a baby. He has blond hair, blue eyes, and looks like a young man born in Oberpfaffenhofen who also happens to be white.

But Von Thannhausen can’t get enough of things black.

He is obsessed with the Harlem Renaissance. He knows the literature of Langston Hughes better than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the paintings of Aaron Douglas more than Max Ernst, and the music of Duke Ellington deeper than Richard Wagner.

His heroes stretch from Frederick Douglass to the Tuskegee Airmen to Denzel Washington. He listens to everything from Motown to Parliament Funkadelic to Prince to Kanye West.

He dreams of majoring in black studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically black college. In fact, he’s applying as a black student and seeks scholarships intended for black applicants.

Von Thannhausen resembles a recruit for the Aryan Nation, but he said the secret words: “I identify as black.”

Who are we to disagree? If that’s his identity, that’s his identity.

And if his good grades, decent SAT scores, and impressive baseball record land him a spot at Howard, plus a $50,000 minority scholarship, then who are we to say that he is not really black?

But what would we say to the kid who actually is black (you know: dark skin, dark hair, etc.), applies to Howard, and misses out on admission, a scholarship, or both? If not for Von Thannhausen, those blessings would be hers.

Why not transindividualism?

Imagine that Bob Glenwood has multiple-personality disorder. He identifies as Bob Glenwood, but also as Steve Jones, Myron Shapiro, Jackie Washington, and Concepcion Gomez.

So, he fills out five voter registration applications and requests five absentee ballots.

Who are we to say that Glenwood deserves just one ballot? How dare we disenfranchise the other four people who live inside his brain? That would be Jim Crow 3.0.

As these (for now) fictional scenarios show, America will plunge into ever deeper chaos if we simply let people “identify” as those they are not and then deprive others of goods and benefits meant for people who legitimately embody those identities.

I identify as Walter Cronkite, and that’s the way it is.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

SOCIETYNEWS

The Equal Rights of Female Athletes Are Being Infringed’: Women’s Group Files Civil Rights Complaint Over Transgender Swimmer

Maggie Hroncich  / March 18, 2022

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Female swimmers (from left) Emma Weyant, Erica Sullivan, and Brooke Forde place behind Lia Thomas (left), the biologically male transgender swimmer who won the NCAA Division 1 women’s 500-yard freestyle on Thursday. (Photo: Justin Casterline/Getty Images)

Concerned Women for America filed a formal civil rights complaint against the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday, contending the school is violating Title IX requirements designed to protect the rights of female student athletes. 

The complaint came the same day transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male, won the 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA’s Division 1 Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships in Atlanta. Thomas is set to compete in the 100-yard and 200-yard freestyles today and tomorrow.

Thomas, who had previously competed on the men’s team, has been dominating women’s competitions and shattering records since switching to the women’s team in 2020.

“Thomas is anatomically and biologically a male with physical capacities that are different from anatomically and biologically female athletes, which extends an unfair advantage and strips female student athletes of opportunities afforded to them by law,” according to a statement from Concerned Women for America, a Christian conservative public policy organization. 

The complaint cites federal Title IX requirements for schools to provide equal educational opportunities, including in athletics, to receive federal funding. 

The future of women’s sports is at risk, and the equal rights of female athletes are being infringed,” said Penny Nance, CEO and president of Concerned Women for America. “Any school that defies federal civil rights law by denying women equal opportunities in athletic programs, forcing women to compete against athletes who are biologically male, must be held accountable.”

Jay Richards, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, expressed support for Concerned Women for America’s complaint against the University of Pennsylvania. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“The case of Lia (formerly Will) Thomas at the University of Pennsylvania is a highly visible example of how gender ideology is already wreaking havoc in our schools,” Richards said. “And it’s clearly a violation of the spirit and letter of Title IX. I just hope that courts have the courage to recognize that. If justice is to be served, then CWA should prevail.” 

Before I show the clip from AFTER LIFE let me show you how inconsistent humanists can be with this article below. Humanist claim to be the biggest supporters of women’s rights!!

A.F. Branco for Jan 12, 2022

By Canceling Richard Dawkins, the American Humanist Association Has Betrayed Its Values

The drive to punish dissenters from various orthodoxies is itself illiberal.

ROBBY SOAVE | 4.26.2021 1:00 PM

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(Katja Ogrin/Empics Entertainment/ZUMA Press/Newscom)

Last week, the American Humanist Association (AHA) stripped British author Richard Dawkins of his 1996 Humanist of the Year award after he made a comment on Twitter that offended some in the transgender community.

“Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values,” said the AHA. “His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient.”

This is nonsense: Dawkins had raised a point that it is perfectly worthy of discussion, in accordance with the rationalist philosophy of the humanist movement. But it would also have been ridiculous for the organization to punish Dawkins even if the remark had been offensive, given that many of its past awardees have espoused controversial views, and even said insensitive things on Twitter.

Here was Dawkins’ tweet, which concerned Rachel Dolezal, a chapter president of the NAACP who engendered controversy for identifying as black even though she was a white woman:

If it’s disqualifying to express confusion about progressives’ simultaneous embrace of transgender people and vehement rejection of transracial people, I suppose that I will never win a Humanist of the Year award. I wrote the following in my 2019 book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump:

If we accept, as many on the left do, that people can identify as female even though they were born male, why is it unthinkable for people to identify as black when they were born white? How can the left embrace transgender people without even considering the possibility that there could be transracial people? (Race, after all, is more obviously socially constructed than gender. While our conception of gender is at least partly based on biological differences between the sexes, the same is not true for race.)

The point is not to demean transgender people, but to question why people like Dolezal instantly warranted pariah status. Dawkins subsequently clarified that it was not his intention “to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue.”

But according to the AHA, this clarification evinced “neither sensitivity nor sincerity.” Dawkins’ name is no longer listed on the website’s awardees page.

Perusing this page reveals something interesting: There are far more controversial past winners than Dawkins. The AHA gave Humanist of the Year awards to the author and activist Alice Walker—who promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—and also to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood who promoted eugenics and white supremacy. Sanger’s legacy is so complicated that her own organization is currently disowning her.

The AHA has also given lesser awards to several individuals with a history of provocative statements and bad tweets: Jessica ValentiCenk Uygur, and others. To be clear, the AHA is within its rights to give or rescind awards to anyone it wishes, for any reason. But people who support the organization’s mission have the same right to criticize it for hypocrisy.

Two such critics are Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker, who won the Humanist of the Year award in 2011 and 2006, respectively. Goldstein and Pinker wrote an open letter to the AHA calling on it to reverse course:

Dawkins did not call for discrimination against or marginalization of any individual or group. And he explicitly denied any intention to disparage anyone or to lend support to transphobic or racist political movements.  Now, it would still be completely appropriate for those of you who objected to the substance of his tweets to criticize them in The Humanist or other forums, explaining the nature of their objections. But to seek to punish, dishonor, or humiliate a writer rather than engage with his words is a betrayal of humanism.

The Humanist Manifesto III declares that “the lifestance of humanism [is] guided by reason.” Since no one is infallible, reason requires that a diverse range of ideas be expressed and debated openly, including ones that some people find unfamiliar or uncomfortable. To demonize a writer rather than address the writer’s arguments is a confession that one has no rational response to them.

This illiberal response is all the more damaging to an organization that claims to repudiate the repressive practices of religion. It has not been lost on commentators that an association of “freethinkers” has deemed certain thoughts unthinkable, nor that it is enforcing dogmas and catechisms by excommunicating a heretic. The AHA is turning itself into a laughingstock.

Goldstein and Pinker are quite right. The AHA’s own values require tolerance of difficult conversations around public policy subjects, rather than a knee-jerk drive to punish dissenters from orthodoxies.

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After Life #1 Trailer

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I listened to this question and answer session at Harvard in 1992 on cassette tapes and was captivated with Ravi Zacharias. His responses were so much better than Kath’s responses to Tony in AFTER LIFE. I have referenced work by Ravi many times in the past and Especially moving was Ravi’s own spiritual search which started in a hospital bed after a failed suicide attempt. I also want you to check out his talk at Princeton and the question and answer time afterwards which are both on YOU TUBEat these two links: Link for talk, Link for Q/A.

After Life 2 Trailer

On Saturday April 18, 2020 at 6pm in London and noon in Arkansas, I had a chance to ask Ricky Gervais a question on his Twitter Live broadcast which was  “Is Tony a Nihilist?” At the 20:51 mark Ricky answers my question. Below is the video:

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If Death is the end then what is the point Kath asks below:

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Francis Schaeffer passed away on May 15, 1984 and on the 10th anniversary of that date I wrote many skeptics such as Carl Sagan and corresponded with them on the big questions covered by the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Kath: You are an atheist?

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Adrian Rogers on Evolution

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Ravi Zacharias  (March 26, 1946 – May 19, 2020) 

Francis Schaeffer (January 30, 1912 – May 15, 1984[1]

Francis Schaeffer.jpg


I grew up at Bellevue Baptist Church under the leadership of our pastor Adrian Rogers and I read many books by the Evangelical Philosopher Francis Schaeffer and in 1992 I heard cassette tapes of Ravi Zacharias in all his brilliance in his sessions at Harvard and have had the opportunity to contact many of the evolutionists or humanistic academics that they have mentioned in their works. Many of these scholars have taken the time to respond back to me in the last 20 years and some of the names  included are  Ernest Mayr (1904-2005), George Wald (1906-1997), Carl Sagan (1934-1996),  Robert Shapiro (1935-2011), Nicolaas Bloembergen (1920-),  Brian Charlesworth (1945-),  Francisco J. Ayala (1934-) Elliott Sober (1948-), Kevin Padian (1951-), Matt Cartmill (1943-) , Milton Fingerman (1928-), John J. Shea (1969-), , Michael A. Crawford (1938-), Paul Kurtz (1925-2012), Sol Gordon (1923-2008), Albert Ellis (1913-2007), Barbara Marie Tabler (1915-1996), Renate Vambery (1916-2005), Archie J. Bahm (1907-1996), Aron S “Gil” Martin ( 1910-1997), Matthew I. Spetter (1921-2012), H. J. Eysenck (1916-1997), Robert L. Erdmann (1929-2006), Mary Morain (1911-1999), Lloyd Morain (1917-2010),  Warren Allen Smith (1921-), Bette Chambers (1930-),  Gordon Stein (1941-1996) , Milton Friedman (1912-2006), John Hospers (1918-2011), Michael Martin (1932-).Harry Kroto (1939-), Marty E. Martin (1928-), Richard Rubenstein (1924-), James Terry McCollum (1936-), Edward O. WIlson (1929-), Lewis Wolpert (1929), Gerald Holton(1922-), Martin Rees (1942-), Alan Macfarlane (1941-),  Roald Hoffmann (1937-), Herbert Kroemer (1928-), Thomas H. Jukes(1906-1999) and  Ray T. Cragun (1976-).

 Adrian Rogers (September 12, 1931 – November 15, 2005) 

Adrian Rogers.jpg

Charles Darwin Autobiography


Francis Schaeffer “The Age of NONREASON”

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(Above) Tony and Anne on the bench at the graveyard where their spouses are buried.

July 9, 2020 
Ricky Gervais 


Dear Ricky,  

This is the 83rd day in a row that I have written another open letter to you to comment on some of your episodes of AFTER LIFE, and then I wanted to pass along some evidence that indicates the Bible is historically accurate from Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop Book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?

In the 6th episode of the second season of AFTERLIFE Tony and Lenny interview a 50 year old person who pretends to be a 8 year old little girl when everyone in his family knows this person has been around for 50 years. 

Just pretending something is true does not make it true. This was true too for Jean Paul Sartre. The atheist Sartre said that this Godless universe has no meaning but “Let’s pretend the universe has meaning.” But this is just fooling ourselves. 

Let me share a portion of an article by William Lane Craig with you.

The Absurdity of Life without God

William Lane Craig

SUMMARY

Why on atheism life has no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose, and why this view is unlivable.

Francis Schaeffer has explained this point well. Modern man, says Schaeffer, resides in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God; here life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God. But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God.

Let’s look again, then, at each of the three areas in which we saw life was absurd without God, to show how man cannot live consistently and happily with his atheism.

Meaning of Life

First, the area of meaning. We saw that without God, life has no meaning. Yet philosophers continue to live as though life does have meaning. For example, Sartre argued that one may create meaning for his life by freely choosing to follow a certain course of action. Sartre himself chose Marxism.

Now this is utterly inconsistent. It is inconsistent to say life is objectively absurd and then to say one may create meaning for his life. If life is really absurd, then man is trapped in the lower story. To try to create meaning in life represents a leap to the upper story. But Sartre has no basis for this leap. Without God, there can be no objective meaning in life. Sartre’s program is actually an exercise in self-delusion. Sartre is really saying, “Let’s pretend the universe has meaning.” And this is just fooling ourselves.

The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends life has meaning. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent—for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance.

Value of Life

Turn now to the problem of value. Here is where the most blatant inconsistencies occur. First of all, atheistic humanists are totally inconsistent in affirming the traditional values of love and brotherhood. Camus has been rightly criticized for inconsistently holding both to the absurdity of life and the ethics of human love and brotherhood. The two are logically incompatible. Bertrand Russell, too, was inconsistent. For though he was an atheist, he was an outspoken social critic, denouncing war and restrictions on sexual freedom. Russell admitted that he could not live as though ethical values were simply a matter of personal taste, and that he therefore found his own views “incredible.” “I do not know the solution,” he confessed.” [7] The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong cannot exist. As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.”

But Dostoyevsky also showed that man cannot live this way. He cannot live as though it is perfectly all right for soldiers to slaughter innocent children. He cannot live as though it is all right for dictators like Pol Pot to exterminate millions of their own countrymen. Everything in him cries out to say these acts are wrong—really wrong. But if there is no God, he cannot. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.

The horror of a world devoid of value was brought home to me with new intensity a few years ago as I viewed a BBC television documentary called “The Gathering.” It concerned the reunion of survivors of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, where they rediscovered lost friendships and shared their experiences. One woman prisoner, a nurse, told of how she was made the gynecologist at Auschwitz. She observed that pregnant women were grouped together by the soldiers under the direction of Dr. Mengele and housed in the same barracks. Some time passed, and she noted that she no longer saw any of these women. She made inquiries. “Where are the pregnant women who were housed in that barracks?” “Haven’t you heard?” came the reply. “Dr. Mengele used them for vivisection.”

Another woman told of how Mengele had bound up her breasts so that she could not suckle her infant. The doctor wanted to learn how long an infant could survive without nourishment. Desperately this poor woman tried to keep her baby alive by giving it pieces of bread soaked in coffee, but to no avail. Each day the baby lost weight, a fact that was eagerly monitored by Dr. Mengele. A nurse then came secretly to this woman and told her, “I have arranged a way for you to get out of here, but you cannot take your baby with you. I have brought a morphine injection that you can give to your child to end its life.” When the woman protested, the nurse was insistent: “Look, your baby is going to die anyway. At least save yourself.” And so this mother took the life of her own baby. Dr. Mengele was furious when he learned of it because he had lost his experimental specimen, and he searched among the dead to find the baby’s discarded corpse so that he could have one last weighing.

My heart was torn by these stories. One rabbi who survived the camp summed it up well when he said that at Auschwitz it was as though there existed a world in which all the Ten Commandments were reversed. Mankind had never seen such a hell.

And yet, if God does not exist, then in a sense, our world is Auschwitz: there is no absolute right and wrong; all things are permitted. But no atheist, no agnostic, can live consistently with such a view. Nietzsche himself, who proclaimed the necessity of living beyond good and evil, broke with his mentor Richard Wagner precisely over the issue of the composer’s anti-Semitism and strident German nationalism. Similarly Sartre, writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, condemned anti-Semitism, declaring that a doctrine that leads to extermination is not merely an opinion or matter of personal taste, of equal value with its opposite. [8] In his important essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre struggles vainly to elude the contradiction between his denial of divinely pre-established values and his urgent desire to affirm the value of human persons. Like Russell, he could not live with the implications of his own denial of ethical absolutes.

A second problem is that if God does not exist and there is no immortality, then all the evil acts of men go unpunished and all the sacrifices of good men go unrewarded. But who can live with such a view? Richard Wurmbrand, who has been tortured for his faith in communist prisons, says,

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no Hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.’ I have heard one torturer even say, ‘I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.’ He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners. [9]

And the same applies to acts of self-sacrifice. A number of years ago, a terrible mid-winter air disaster occurred in which a plane leaving the Washington, D.C., airport smashed into a bridge spanning the Potomac River, plunging its passengers into the icy waters. As the rescue helicopters came, attention was focused on one man who again and again pushed the dangling rope ladder to other passengers rather than be pulled to safety himself. Six times he passed the ladder by. When they came again, he was gone. He had freely given his life that others might live. The whole nation turned its eyes to this man in respect and admiration for the selfless and good act he had performed. And yet, if the atheist is right, that man was not noble—he did the stupidest thing possible. He should have gone for the ladder first, pushed others away if necessary in order to survive. But to die for others he did not even know, to give up all the brief existence he would ever have—what for? For the atheist there can be no reason. And yet the atheist, like the rest of us, instinctively reacts with praise for this man’s selfless action. Indeed, one will probably never find an atheist who lives consistently with his system. For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.

The Success of Biblical Christianity

But if atheism fails in this regard, what about biblical Christianity? According to the Christian world view, God does exist, and man’s life does not end at the grave. In the resurrection body man may enjoy eternal life and fellowship with God. Biblical Christianity therefore provides the two conditions necessary for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life for man: God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily. Thus, biblical Christianity succeeds precisely where atheism breaks down.

Conclusion

Now I want to make it clear that I have not yet shown biblical Christianity to be true. But what I have done is clearly spell out the alternatives. If God does not exist, then life is futile. If the God of the Bible does exist, then life is meaningful. Only the second of these two alternatives enables us to live happily and consistently. Therefore, it seems to me that even if the evidence for these two options were absolutely equal, a rational person ought to choose biblical Christianity. It seems to me positively irrational to prefer death, futility, and destruction to life, meaningfulness, and happiness. As Pascal said, we have nothing to lose and infinity to gain.

  • [1]Kai Nielsen, “Why Should I Be Moral?” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984): 90.
  • [2]Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1985), 90, 84.
  • [3]H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (New York: Berkeley, 1957), chap. 11.
  • [4]W.E. Hocking, Types of Philosophy (New York: Scribner’s, 1959), 27.
  • [5]Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 95.
  • [6]Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Why I Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 107.
  • [7]Bertrand Russell, Letter to the Observer, 6 October, 1957.
  • [8]Jean Paul Sartre, “Portrait of the Antisemite,” in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Satre, rev. ed., ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: New Meridian Library, 1975), p. 330.
  • [9]Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967), 34.
  • [10]Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1959), 2:360-1.
  • [11]Loyal D. Rue, “The Saving Grace of Noble Lies,” address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, February, 1991.

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This reminds me of an illustration from Francis Schaeffer of what existentialism means: 

When we speak of irrationalism or existentialism or the existential methodology, we are pointing to a quite simple idea. It may have been expressed in a variety of complicated ways by philosophers, but it is not a difficult concept.
Imagine that you are at the movies watching a suspense film. As the story unfolds, the tension increases until finally the hero is trapped in some impossible situation and everyone is groaning inwardly, wondering how he is going to get out of the mess. The suspense is heightened by the knowledge (of the audience, not the hero) that help is on the way in the form of the good guys. The only question is: will the good guys arrive in time?
Now imagine for a moment that the audience is slipped the information that there are no good guys, that the situation of the hero is not just desperate, but completely hopeless. Obviously, the first thing that would happen is that the suspense would be gone. You and the entire audience would simply be waiting for the axe to fall.
If the hero faced the end with courage, this would be morally edifying, but the situation itself would be tragic. If, however, the hero acted as if help were around the corner and kept buoying himself up with this thought (“Someone is on the way!” – “Help is at hand!”), all you could feel for him would be pity. It would be a means to keep hope alive within a hopeless situation. The hero’s hope would change nothing on the outside; it would be unable to manufacture, out of nothing, good guys coming to the rescue. All it would achieve would the hero’s own mental state of hopefulness rather than hopelessness.
The hopefulness itself would rest on a lie or an illusion and thus, viewed objectively, would be finally absurd. And if the hero really knew what the situation was, but consciously used the falsehood to buoy up his feelings and go whistling along, we would either say, “Poor guy!” or “He’s a fool.” It is this kind of conscious deceit that someone like Woody Allen has looked full in the face and will have none of.
Now this is what the existential methodology is about. If the universe we are living in is what the materialistic humanists say it is, then with our reason (when we stop to think about it) we could find absolutely no way to have meaning or morality or hope or beauty. This would plunge us into despair. We would have to take seriously the challenge of Albert Camus (1913-1960) in the first sentence of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”92 Why stay alive in an absurd universe? Ah! But that is not where we stop. We say to ourselves – “There is hope!” (even though there is no help). “We shall overcome!” (even though nothing is more certain than that we shall be destroyed, both individually at death and cosmically with the end of all conscious life). This is what confronts us on all sides today: the modern irrationalism.

Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:

The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there. 

Instead of making a leap into the area of nonreason the better choice would be to investigate the claims that the Bible is a historically accurate book and that God created the universe and reached out to humankind with the Bible. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer concerning the accuracy of the Bible.

TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?)

We now take a jump back in time to the middle of the ninth century before Christ, that is, about 850 B.C. Most people have heard of Jezebel. She was the wife of Ahab, the king of the northern kingdom of Israel. Her wickedness has become so proverbial that we talk about someone as a “Jezebel.” She urged her husband to have Naboth killed, simply because Ahab had expressed his liking for a piece of land owned by Naboth, who would not sell it. The Bible tells us also that she introduced into Israel the worship of her homeland, the Baal worship of Tyre. This led to the opposition of Elijah the Prophet and to the famous conflict on Mount Carmel between Elijah and the priests of Baal.

Here again one finds archaeological confirmations of what the Bible says. Take for example: “As for the other events of Ahab’s reign, including all he did, the palace he built and inlaid with ivory, and the cities he fortified, are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Israel?” (I Kings 22:39).

This is a very brief reference in the Bible to events which must have taken a long time: building projects which probably spanned decades. Archaeological excavations at the site of Samaria, the capital, reveal something of the former splendor of the royal citadel. Remnants of the “ivory house” were found and attracted special attention (Palestinian Archaeological Museum, Jerusalem). This appears to have been a treasure pavilion in which the walls and furnishings had been adorned with colored ivory work set with inlays giving a brilliant too, with the denunciations revealed by the prophet Amos:

“I will tear down the winter house along with the summer house; the houses adorned with ivory will be destroyed and the mansions will be demolished,” declares the Lord. (Amos 3:15)

Other archaeological confirmation exists for the time of Ahab. Excavations at Hazor and Megiddo have given evidence of the the extent of fortifications carried out by Ahab. At Megiddo, in particular, Ahab’s works were very extensive including a large series of stables formerly assigned to Solomon’s time.

On the political front, Ahab had to contend with danger from the Aramacaus king of Syria who besieged Samaria, Ahab’s capital. Ben-hadad’s existence is attested by a stela (a column with writing on it) which has been discovered with his name written on it (Melquart Stela, Aleppo Museum, Syria). Again, a detail of history given in the Bible is shown to be correct.

This brings me to the message of Solomon in ECCLESIASTES and below are comments by Francis Schaeffer:

Ecclesiastes 9:7-12

Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.

Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head.

Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, (DOES IT SOUND OPTIMISTIC? NOW COMES THE BACKLASH) all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. 10 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

11 Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. 12 For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.

Solomon when at work takes off his hat and he stands by the grave of man and he says, “ALAS. ALAS. ALAS.”

But interestingly enough the story of Ecclesiastes does not end its message here because in two places in the New Testament it is picked up and carried along and put in its proper perspective.

Luke 12:16-21

16 And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, 17 and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ 18 And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax,eat, drink, be merry.”’ [ALMOST EVERYONE WHO HAS PROCEEDED HERE HAS FELT CERTAINLY THAT JESUS IS DELIBERATELY REFERRING TO SOLOMON’S SOLUTION.]20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21 So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

Christ here points out the reason for the failure of the logic that is involved. He points out why it fails in logic and then why it fails in reality. This view of Solomon must end in failure philosophically and also in emotional desperation.

We are not made to live in the shortened environment of UNDER THE SUN in this life only!!! Neither are we made to live only in the environment of a bare concept of afterlife [ignoring trying to make this life better]. We are made to live in the environment of a God who exists and who is the judge. This is the difference and that is what Jesus is setting forth here.

I Corinthians 15:32

32 What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

There is no doubt here he is reaching back to Solomon again and he is just saying if there isn’t a resurrection of the dead then let’s just follow Solomon and let’s just eat and drink for tomorrow we die!!!! If there isn’t this full structure [including the resurrection of the dead] then just have the courage to follow Solomon and we can eat and drink because tomorrow we die and that is all we have. If the full structure isn’t there then pick up the cup and drink it dry! You can say it a different way in the 20th century: If the full structure is not there then go ahead and be an EXISTENTIALIST, but don’t cheat. Drink the cup to the end. Drink it dry! That is what Paul says. Paul  the educated man. Paul the man who knew his Greek philosophy. Paul the man who understood Solomon and the dilemma. Paul said it one way or the other. There is no room for a middle ground. IF CHRISTIANS AREN’T RAISED FROM THE DEAD THEN SOLOMON IS RIGHT IN ECCLESIASTES, BUT ONLY THEN. But if he is right then you should accept all of Solomon’s despair and his conclusions. 


The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.comhttp://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002

PS: What is the meaning of life? Find it in the end of the open letter I wrote to you on April 23, 2020. 

Below is the workforce of THE TAMBURY GAZETTE 

Seen below is the third episode of AFTERLIFE (season 1) when Matt takes Tony to a comedy club with front row seats to cheer him up but it turns into disaster!!!

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Part 1 “Why have integrity in Godless Darwinian Universe where Might makes Right?”

Part 2 “My April 14, 2016 Letter to Ricky mentioned Book of Ecclesiastes and the Meaninglessness of Life”

Part 3 Letter about Brandon Burlsworth concerning suffering and pain and evil in the world.  “Why didn’t Jesus save her [from cancer]?” (Tony’s 10 year old nephew George in episode 2)

Part 4 Letter on Solomon on Death Tony in episode one, “It should be everyone’s moral duty to kill themselves.”

Part 5 Letter on subject of Learning in Ecclesiastes “I don’t read books of fiction but mainly science and philosophy”

Part 6 Letter on Luxuries in Ecclesiastes Part 6, The Music of AFTERLIFE (Part A)

Part 7 Letter on Labor in Ecclesiastes My Letter to Ricky on Easter in 2017 concerning Book of Ecclesiastes and the legacy of a person’s life work

Part 8 Letter on Liquor in Ecclesiastes Tony’s late wife Lisa told him, “Don’t get drunk all the time alright? It will only make you feel worse in the log run!”

Part 9 Letter on Laughter in Ecclesiastes , I said of laughter, “It is foolishness;” and of mirth, “What does it accomplish?” Ecclesiastes 2:2

Part 10 Final letter to Ricky on Ladies in Ecclesiastes “I gathered a chorus of singers to entertain me with song, and—most exquisite of all pleasures— voluptuous maidens for my bed…behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” Ecclesiastes 2:8-11.

Part 11 Letter about Daniel Stanhope and optimistic humanism  “If man has been kicked up out of that which is only impersonal by chance , then those things that make him man-hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication-are ultimately unfulfillable and thus meaningless.” (Francis Schaeffer)

Part 12 Letter on how pursuit of God is only way to get Satisfaction Dan Jarrell “[In Ecclesiastes] if one seeks satisfaction they will never find it. In fact, every pleasure will be fleeting and can not be sustained, BUT IF ONE SEEKS GOD THEN ONE FINDS SATISFACTION”

Part 13 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon realizing he will die just as a dog will die “For men and animals both breathe the same air, and both die. So mankind has no real advantage over the beasts; what an absurdity!” Ecclesiastes

Part 14 Letter to Stephen Hawking on 3 conclusions of humanism and Bertrand Russell destruction of optimistic humanism. “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms—no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”(Bertrand Russell, Free Man’s Worship)

Part 15 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Leonardo da Vinci and Solomon and Meaningless of life “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes Book of Ecclesiastes Part 15 “I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It’s smoke—and spitting into the wind” Ecclesiastes 2:17

Part 16 Letter to Stephen Hawking on Solomon’s longing for death but still fear of death and 5 conclusions of humanism on life UNDER THE SUN. Francis Schaeffer “Life is just a series of continual and unending cycles and man is stuck in the middle of the cycle. Youth, old age, Death. Does Solomon at this point embrace nihilism? Yes!!! He exclaims that the hates life (Ecclesiastes 2:17), he longs for death (4:2-3) Yet he stills has a fear of death (2:14-16)”

Mandeep Dhillon as Sandy on her first assignment in ‘After Life’. (Twitter)

A still from ‘After Life’ that captures the vibe of the Tambury Gazette. (Twitter)

Michael Scott of THE OFFICE (USA) with Ricky Gervais 

After Life on Netflix

After Life on Netflix stars Ricky Gervais as a bereaved husband (Image: Netflix)

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Psychiatrist played by Paul Kaye seen below.

The sandy beach walk

Tony Johnson with his dog Brandi seen below:

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Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part I “Old Testament Bible Prophecy” includes the film TRUTH AND HISTORY and article ” Jane Roe became pro-life”

April 12, 2013 – 5:45 am

I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control  and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical ArchaeologyFrancis SchaefferProlife | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on fulfilled prophecy from the Bible Part 2

August 8, 2013 – 1:28 am

I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on fulfilled prophecy from the Bible Part 1

August 6, 2013 – 1:24 am

I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersCurrent Events |Tagged Bible Prophecyjohn macarthur | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur: Fulfilled prophecy in the Bible? (Ezekiel 26-28 and the story of Tyre, video clips)

April 5, 2012 – 10:39 am

Prophecy–The Biblical Prophesy About Tyre.mp4 Uploaded by TruthIsLife7 on Dec 5, 2010 A short summary of the prophecy about Tyre and it’s precise fulfillment. Go to this link and watch the whole series for the amazing fulfillment from secular sources. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvt4mDZUefo________________ John MacArthur on the amazing fulfilled prophecy on Tyre and how it was fulfilled […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | Edit|Comments (1)

John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 2)

August 1, 2013 – 12:10 am

John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 2) I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 1)

July 30, 2013 – 1:32 am

John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 1) I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too.  I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Adrian Rogers: “Why I believe the Bible is true”

July 9, 2013 – 8:38 am

Adrian Rogers – How you can be certain the Bible is the word of God Great article by Adrian Rogers. What evidence is there that the Bible is in fact God’s Word? I want to give you five reasons to affirm the Bible is the Word of God. First, I believe the Bible is the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian RogersBiblical Archaeology | Edit|Comments (0)

The Old Testament is Filled with Fulfilled Prophecy by Jim Wallace

June 24, 2013 – 9:47 am

Is there any evidence the Bible is true? Articles By PleaseConvinceMe Apologetics Radio The Old Testament is Filled with Fulfilled Prophecy Jim Wallace A Simple Litmus Test There are many ways to verify the reliability of scripture from both internal evidences of transmission and agreement, to external confirmation through archeology and science. But perhaps the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical ArchaeologyCurrent Events | Edit|Comments (0)

Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part M “Old Testament prophecy fulfilled?”Part 3(includes film DEATH BY SOMEONE’S CHOICE)

April 19, 2013 – 1:52 am

  I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control  and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis SchaefferProlife | Edit|Comments (0)

Evidence for the Bible

March 27, 2013 – 9:43 pm

Here is some very convincing evidence that points to the view that the Bible is historically accurate. Archaeological and External Evidence for the Bible Archeology consistently confirms the Bible! Archaeology and the Old Testament Ebla tablets—discovered in 1970s in Northern Syria. Documents written on clay tablets from around 2300 B.C. demonstrate that personal and place […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | E

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September 12, 2022 READING A PROVERB A DAY (PROVERBS 12) Bill Elliff on Proverbs 12


  Proverbs 12:16: A fool’s anger is known at once, but a prudent man conceals dishonor. 

Proverbs 12New Living Translation

12 To learn, you must love discipline;
    it is stupid to hate correction.

The Lord approves of those who are good,
    but he condemns those who plan wickedness.

Wickedness never brings stability,
    but the godly have deep roots.

A worthy wife is a crown for her husband,
    but a disgraceful woman is like cancer in his bones.

The plans of the godly are just;
    the advice of the wicked is treacherous.

The words of the wicked are like a murderous ambush,
    but the words of the godly save lives.

The wicked die and disappear,
    but the family of the godly stands firm.

A sensible person wins admiration,
    but a warped mind is despised.

Better to be an ordinary person with a servant
    than to be self-important but have no food.

10 The godly care for their animals,
    but the wicked are always cruel.

11 A hard worker has plenty of food,
    but a person who chases fantasies has no sense.

12 Thieves are jealous of each other’s loot,
    but the godly are well rooted and bear their own fruit.

13 The wicked are trapped by their own words,
    but the godly escape such trouble.

14 Wise words bring many benefits,
    and hard work brings rewards.

15 Fools think their own way is right,
    but the wise listen to others.

16 A fool is quick-tempered,
    but a wise person stays calm when insulted.

17 An honest witness tells the truth;
    a false witness tells lies.

18 Some people make cutting remarks,
    but the words of the wise bring healing.

19 Truthful words stand the test of time,
    but lies are soon exposed.

20 Deceit fills hearts that are plotting evil;
    joy fills hearts that are planning peace!

21 No harm comes to the godly,
    but the wicked have their fill of trouble.

22 The Lord detests lying lips,
    but he delights in those who tell the truth.

23 The wise don’t make a show of their knowledge,
    but fools broadcast their foolishness.

24 Work hard and become a leader;
    be lazy and become a slave.

25 Worry weighs a person down;
    an encouraging word cheers a person up.

26 The godly give good advice to their friends;[a]
    the wicked lead them astray.

27 Lazy people don’t even cook the game they catch,
    but the diligent make use of everything they find.

28 The way of the godly leads to life;
    that path does not lead to death.


God’s Miracle Medicine


Proverbs 1, 

20 WAYS TO DEAL WITH A FOOLISH PERSON

November 05, 2019

20 WAYS TO DEAL WITH A FOOLISH PERSON

The writer of Proverbs divides the world into two types of people: wise and foolish. He has much to say about both. A man is made wise by listening to the Lord and living His life in surrender to God’s will and way.

God IS wisdom and the source of all wisdom in this earth. “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God,’” David said. When we reject Him, we reject the process of receiving the wisdom we need. We become foolish, vainly thinking that our mere humanistic thinking is sufficient for life.

And, fools will hurt you. They ruin relationships, cloud decision making, and lead others astray. If you are a man who is seeking wisdom, you will find that dealing with foolish people is a great burden.

I have recently been helping a pastor work through an issue with a very foolish person in his church. This individual is proud and believes their opinion is more important than anyone’s. They are creating strife and discord in the church and there is a very clear unwillingness to submit to godly spiritual leaders. A foolish person, wrapped in religious clothing, is even harder to deal with because they approach others under the guise of spirituality.

Their anger and issues are hard to deal with, which the writer of Proverbs points out. It is a very heavy weight for a leader to bear.

“A stone is heavy and the sand weighty, but the provocation of a fool is heavier than both of them.” (Proverbs 27:4)

Here are twenty instructions from Proverbs about how to recognize and deal with foolish people … some things a wise leader needs to understand.

1. They will not accept instruction

 Proverbs 1:7: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.

2.They will not honor others

 Proverbs 3:35: The wise will inherit honor, but fools display dishonor.

3. They will quickly gossip and slander others

  Proverbs 10:18: He who conceals hatred has lying lips, and he who spreads slander is a fool.

4. They do not have real, spiritual understanding

Proverbs 10:21: The lips of the righteous feed many, but fools die for lack of understanding.

 Proverbs 16:22: Understanding is a fountain of life to one who has it, but the discipline of fools is folly.

5.They always think they’re right and will not listen to nor accept humbly the counsel of others

  Proverbs 12:15: The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man is he who listens to counsel.

6. They are quick to anger

  Proverbs 12:16: A fool’s anger is known at once, but a prudent man conceals dishonor. 

  Proverbs 29:11: A fool always loses his temper, but a wise man holds it back.

7. They will always, ultimately display their foolishness. It cannot be hidden for long.

  Proverbs 13:16: Every prudent man acts with knowledge, but a fool displays folly.

8. If you associate with them, it will lead to harm

  Proverbs 13:20: He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.

9. They are deceitful, often not even realizing their deception. They are full of self-deception.

  Proverbs 14:8: The wisdom of the sensible is to understand his way, but the foolishness of fools is deceit.

10. They are arrogant and careless, particularly about walking into evil.

  Proverbs 14:16: A wise man is cautious and turns away from evil, but a fool is arrogant and careless.

11. They are quick to tell everyone what they think, but it’s folly. They have an opinion on everything, that they believe is right.

  Proverbs 15:2: The tongue of the wise makes knowledge acceptable, but the mouth of fools spouts folly.

12. They reject discipline

  Proverbs 15:5: A fool rejects his father’s discipline, but he who regards reproof is sensible.

13. They do not spread real knowledge (although they think they do)

  Proverbs 15:7: The lips of the wise spread knowledge, but the hearts of fools are not so.

14. Don’t give them position or honor

  Proverbs 26:8: Like one who binds a stone in a sling, so is he who gives honor to a fool.

  Proverbs 26:10: Like an archer who wounds everyone, so is he who hires a fool or who hires those who pass by.

15. They will not receive a healthy rebuke (because they always think they’re right)

  Proverbs 17:10: A rebuke goes deeper into one who has understanding than a hundred blows into a fool.

16. They are dangerously protective when you deal with them. They will hurt you to protect their way.

  Proverbs 17:12: Let a man meet a bear robbed of her cubs, rather than a fool in his folly.

17. They don’t want understanding, but they love to tell you what they think.

  Proverbs 18:2: A fool does not delight in understanding, but only in revealing his own mind.

18. They create strife

  Proverbs 18:6: A fool’s lips bring strife, and his mouth calls for blows.

19. They love to quarrel

  Proverbs 20:3: Keeping away from strife is an honor for a man, but any fool will quarrel.

20. It’s useless to try to reason with them

  Proverbs 23:9: Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the wisdom of your words.

  Proverbs 26:4: Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will also be like him. 

  Proverbs 26:5: Answer a fool as his folly deserves, that he not be wise in his own eyes.

All of us are foolish at times, and we’re all capable of becoming foolish. Every leader must evaluate first his own life, to see if he is acting or living foolishly. A wise leader pursues God fervently and humbly, which is to pursue wisdom. But also, a wise leader must know how to recognize and deal with foolish people, particularly those who are causing discord, contention, and strife.

Sermon Overview

Scripture Passage: Proverbs 12:25

A heavy heart is the beginning of misery, and we were never meant to carry the load.

A burdened soul breaks the spirit. A broken spirit thins the immunity of the body. The body then begins to wither, and we get ill. In fact, studies have shown that emotions largely contribute to one’s overall state of health. Doctors call it Emotionally Induced Illness (E.I.I.), and it is the idea that physical sickness can be a result of emotional illness.

The entire body is affected by a heavy heart. But God has given us a remedy for the soul, the spirit, and the body. And it is good medicine…Joy!

Not mere laughter, not mere joking, not mere fun and games, but deep, abiding joy is our strongest medicine and greatest weapon. Joy doesn’t depend upon material things or circumstances. It doesn’t depend upon thrills. It comes straight from the heart.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus spoke of the joy in His own heart, and He promised to give us a dose of it; not just some cheap imitation… He wants to give us the real thing. “My joy have I given unto you.” Jesus said, “I want that joy to remain in you.” 

We don’t root our happiness in circumstances, because those can change in an instant and leave us emotionally stranded. We root our joy in Christ alone, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Hebrews 13:8

“Without joy, life is meaningless!” Acclaimed pastor and teacher, Adrian Rogers says, “That joy is found only in Jesus. And we ought to share the secret, the source of our joy —the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Apply it to your life

Joy is something freely given, but it must be received, day by day. Today, seek it out through prayer and in Scripture. Let it be seen in your countenance as you go about your day, and share it with someone else.

This message is a part of this audio series.

September 11, 2022 READING A PROVERB A DAY (PROVERBS 11) Bill Elliff on Proverbs 11


Proverbs 11 New Living Translation

Proverbs 11New Living Translation

11 The Lord detests the use of dishonest scales,
    but he delights in accurate weights.

Pride leads to disgrace,
    but with humility comes wisdom.

Honesty guides good people;
    dishonesty destroys treacherous people.

Riches won’t help on the day of judgment,
    but right living can save you from death.

The godly are directed by honesty;
    the wicked fall beneath their load of sin.

The godliness of good people rescues them;
    the ambition of treacherous people traps them.

When the wicked die, their hopes die with them,
    for they rely on their own feeble strength.

The godly are rescued from trouble,
    and it falls on the wicked instead.

With their words, the godless destroy their friends,
    but knowledge will rescue the righteous.

10 The whole city celebrates when the godly succeed;
    they shout for joy when the wicked die.

11 Upright citizens are good for a city and make it prosper,
    but the talk of the wicked tears it apart.

12 It is foolish to belittle one’s neighbor;
    a sensible person keeps quiet.

13 A gossip goes around telling secrets,
    but those who are trustworthy can keep a confidence.

14 Without wise leadership, a nation falls;
    there is safety in having many advisers.

15 There’s danger in putting up security for a stranger’s debt;
    it’s safer not to guarantee another person’s debt.

16 A gracious woman gains respect,
    but ruthless men gain only wealth.

17 Your kindness will reward you,
    but your cruelty will destroy you.

18 Evil people get rich for the moment,
    but the reward of the godly will last.

19 Godly people find life;
    evil people find death.

20 The Lord detests people with crooked hearts,
    but he delights in those with integrity.

21 Evil people will surely be punished,
    but the children of the godly will go free.

22 A beautiful woman who lacks discretion
    is like a gold ring in a pig’s snout.

23 The godly can look forward to a reward,
    while the wicked can expect only judgment.

24 Give freely and become more wealthy;
    be stingy and lose everything.

25 The generous will prosper;
    those who refresh others will themselves be refreshed.

26 People curse those who hoard their grain,
    but they bless the one who sells in time of need.

27 If you search for good, you will find favor;
    but if you search for evil, it will find you!

28 Trust in your money and down you go!
    But the godly flourish like leaves in spring.

29 Those who bring trouble on their families inherit the wind.
    The fool will be a servant to the wise.

30 The seeds of good deeds become a tree of life;
    a wise person wins friends.[a]

31 If the righteous are rewarded here on earth,
    what will happen to wicked sinners?[b]

Proverbs 11

MAKING DECISIONS GOD’S WAY

March 16, 2019

MAKING DECISIONS GOD'S WAY

Life is a series of decisions. One after another, beginning in childhood, we are called upon to make choices. Some of these are minor and not harmful (“What shirt will I wear today?”), but others are life-altering (“Who will I marry?”). Our life is determined by these decisions. Even seemingly small decisions can determine the trajectory of our lives.

There is a truth for us that is repeated continually in the Bible. One of the means that God uses to help guide us in life is the counsel of godly men and women.

Where there is no guidance the people fall, but in abundance of counselors there is victory. 

(Proverbs 11:14)

MAKING DECISIONS

… is hard. You can either “lean on your own understanding” solely or, “in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths” (Prov 3:5-6). In other words, you can try to make that decision yourself or bring God into the equation.

THREE LIGHTS

God does not play games with us. He wants us to know His will more than we want to know it and has everything to gain by helping us make wise, God-honoring decisions.

Therefore, He has given us three wonderful lights to guide us: The Word of God before us, the Spirit of God within us, and the people of God (the church) around us. Every decision should be tested on these anvils:

  • Do I have clear direction from God’s Word? Is there a principle or promise that applies to this decision?
  • Do I have a peace and confidence that the Spirit of God is directing this? An inner sense of rightness, with no hesitation? 
  • Do the godly counselors around me agree or do they have reservations? 

When each of these are aligned, we can have good confidence that we have found the will of God. If, however, one of these is not in sync, there is always cause for hesitation. George Mueller operated by this principle saying, “Continued uncertainty as to a matter is always cause for continued waiting.” God wants us to operate in faith, which is a confidence that we are being led by Him and following His direction. These three lights are designed to bring us to such spiritual confidence.

EVERY STRUCTURE

… that God has designed has this plurality of leadership. The home is designed to be led by a husband and wife in spiritual union and counsel with each other, for instance. We are everywhere counseled in Scripture to make decisions by the aid of wise counselors.

The church is to be led by a plurality of Elders. Such a plurality is to be men who meet the 22 character qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. I have operated with such a group for the last 20 years at The Summit Church. It is impossible to describe the beauty and protection of this group. According to Biblical direction, we operate as an Elder team in total unanimity. We have never made a decision in 20 years that we were not in complete agreement with and could say, “It seemed good to us, having become of one mind,” and “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:25,27). 

Don’t make any important decision in a vacuum! This is not weakness, it is humble strength and godly wisdom to utilize the tools God has put in place to lead you. Your decisions matter to you and all those around you and God has designed a wonderful, accessible way to lead you in this life.

Only The Righteous Have a Secure Future – Proverbs 11:26 – 11:31

Adrian Rogers – Going Through Security

There are certain things when your in a foreign country that you can’t bring back into the United States. Adrian Rogers tells of a time when he was coming back into this country and he was going thru security. Their was a man in front of Adrian Rogers who had some gourmet cheese. The inspector said, “I’m sorry sir, you cannot bring this cheese into this country.” The man and the inspector argued for a few minutes, until finally the man said, ‘oh yes, I am going to bring it into this country you just watch.” Walked to the back of the line and ate the cheese then walked right on thru. They may say we can’t take Jesus into the public schools but as long as He is in us we’re taking Him everywhere we go. (Source Unknown, Lou Nicholes – Missionary/Author).