Kary Mullis, who won a 1993 Nobel Prize for inventing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing process later used to diagnose Coronavirus cases, said that Dr. Anthony Fauci lacks knowledge of medicine and is willing to lie on television. Mullis also admitted in another set of videotaped remarks that a PCR test “doesn’t tell you that you’re sick.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci has served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984 and is currently the highest-paid United States federal government employee. Fauci has run point on the federal government’s response to the Coronavirus outbreak as the national small business economy has suffered massive damage due to oppressive government lockdowns. Mullis, who died in 2019, was on to Fauci’s duplicity years ago.
Kary Mullis stated in a resurfaced video interview: “Guys like Fauci get up there and start talking, you know, he doesn’t know anything really about anything and I’d say that to his face. Nothing. The man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there you’ll know it. He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine and he should not be in a position like he’s in. Most of those guys up there on the top are just total administrative people and they don’t know anything about what’s going on in the body. You know, those guys have got an agenda, which is not what we would like them to have being that we pay for them to take care of our health in some way. They’ve got a personal kind of agenda. They make up their own rules as they go. They change them when they want to. And they smugly, like Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera,” Kary Mullis said.
The Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the PCR Test Kary Mullis on Anthony Fauci pic.twitter.com/duFm2qwD7d
Kary Mullis admitted in separate remarks that with a PCR test “you can find almost anything in anybody” and “It doesn’t tell you that you’re sick.”
In an obscure video resurfaced during the Coronavirus meltdown, Mullis said that “with PCR if you do it well you can find almost anything in anybody. It starts making you believe in the sort of Buddhist notion that everything is contained in everything else, right? Because if you can amplify one single molecule up to something that you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there’s just very few molecules that you don’t have at least one single one of them in your body.”
“PCR is separate from that, it’s just a process that’s used to make a whole lot of something out of something. That’s what it is. It doesn’t tell you that you’re sick and it doesn’t tell you that the thing you ended up with really was going to hurt you or anything like that,” Mullis said.
CNN was forced to admit that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ refusal to impose strict lockdown measures and mask mandates is “paying off,” with the state recording fewer COVID-19 deaths per capita while the economy is booming.
Unlike states run by Democrat politicians, DeSantis consistently refused to impose harsh pandemic restrictions and has been pilloried for it by the media for the best part of a year.
However, compared to those states, which have recorded higher COVID deaths and face massive economic turmoil, Florida is in such a better position that even CNN has been forced to acknowledge it.
“A year into the pandemic, Florida is booming and Republican Gov. DeSantis is taking credit,” writes CNN’s Jeff Zeleny.
“As many parts of the country embark on an uneasy march toward normalcy, Florida is not only back in business — it’s been in business for the better part of the past year. DeSantis’ gamble to take a laissez faire approach appears to be paying off — at least politically, at least for now, as other governors capturing attention in the opening phase of the pandemic now face steeper challenges.”
“Despite far fewer rules and restrictions, Florida lands nearly in the middle of all states on a variety of coronavirus metrics. The state has had about 3% more Covid-19 cases per capita than the US overall, but about 8% fewer deaths per capita.”
Drew Holden pointed out on Twitter how, as recently as December, CNN was amplifying claims that DeSantis was putting politics in front of lives.
Now they’re having to eat those words.
Florida’s unemployment rate stands at just 4.8% compared to 6.8% in Texas, 8.8% in New York and 9% in California.
“DeSantis suddenly appears to be in a position of strength compared to some of his fellow governors, including many of whom took far more restrictive approaches to the fight against coronavirus that caused a trickle-down effect on the economy,” admits CNN.
West Point is requiring students to read textbooks with titles such as Critical Race Theory: An Introduction and A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory.
Critical Theory has a narrow and a broad meaning in philosophy and in the history of the social sciences. “Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School.
The Wall Street Journal estimates Marxism has led to the deaths of 100 million people, making Marxist communism “the greatest catastrophe in human history.”
American philosopher and theologian Norman Geisler puts Marxism’s death toll at a staggering 1 billion. “The implementation of Marx’s ideas and spirit has killed more people than the bubonic plague, the imperialism of Genghis Khan, European colonialism, and both world wars combined,” says Geisler.
But this hasn’t stopped West Point from teaching Critical Theory—the newest strain of Marx’s deadly ideology—to its students.
The Discovery Institute’s Chris Rufo tweeted that Critical Theory is in fact part of the United States Military Academy’s leadership curriculum:
Seems like a good time to remind everyone that West Point military academy is teaching critical race theory as part of its leadership program. https://t.co/joT7JzyFWf
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 17, 2021
Rod Dreher at The American Conservative received the following email from a West Point alumnus, whose identity is being protected:
I hate to pile on to the theme of academics at prominent universities attempting to shut down intellectual inquiry in the name of anti racism, but this is another example of the trend that needs some wider exposure. The Left wing mob is coming for the service academies, and by extension, our nation’s very ability to defend itself from external enemies. As a West Point graduate (class of 2017) and a longtime reader of your blog, I thought I should bring this to your attention as yet another example of the madness that is afflicting our country’s elite classes.
This letter needs some background explanation. It’s not like the Princeton Putsch that you described. The faculty at West Point are probably the most conservative of any public university in the country. I can attest to the academic openness and respect for free debate during my time at the school (2013-2017). The student body is (or was) generally conservative in an institutional sense. They are not right-wing fire-breathers. Cadets were pretty evenly divided about Donald Trump’s election. From what I could observe, so were the faculty. The Academy’s response to the unrest that has torn the United States apart in the last few months–spearheaded, I might add, by Lieutenant General Darryl Williams, the Academy’s first black Superintendent–was measured and appropriate for the amount of division in our country. This is not an attempt by people currently in power to shut down debate by other academics.
It is quite the opposite. It is an effort by young leaders in the United States Army to force the Academy to bow to the Woke Cult and make the Anti-Racism the central feature of the Academy’s curriculum. This policy statement was apparently drafted by a group of recent Academy graduates (classes of 2018 and 2019). These graduates all came from the top tier of the ranks of the Academy’s cadet leaders. Two recent valedictorians and First Captains signed this manifesto. (Other past First Captains include Douglas MacArthur, John J. Pershing, and William C. Westmoreland.) The other cadets all held high-ranking positions within the Corps of Cadets. They are the cream of the crop of the Army’s future leaders, the guys and gals that will become generals one day and will be expected to lead America’s sons and daughters in combat.
Their actions are akin to those of the Red Guards in Maoist China. They are agitating to tear the Academy apart from the ground up and reorient its mission around Anti-Racism. The fact that our country’s future leaders believe in this nonsense is a sign that our military is in trouble, and cannot be relied upon either to defend our country or to safeguard the interests of all Americans in the performance of their duties.I don’t expect you to read this entire document or understand completely what’s going on here, but the plain English of it is easy enough for everyone to understand. Even so, I’ll add in a few notes for context on this document.
I knew some of these cadets personally and professionally in the performance of my duties, but not well enough to be able to speculate about their motives. The document is filled with concrete policy proposals to address what its authors see as a major problem at West Point. The effect of these policy proposals is to cede control of the Academy’s entire curriculum from the ground up to black cadets in the name of Anti-Racism. It is replete with so-called ‘examples’ of racism at the Academy, but most fall apart on close inspection. Minimally they do not substantiate the charge that West Point needs to be fundamentally reformed to address it. I interpret most of these anecdotes as pure innuendo and hearsay, totally devoid of context, and not indicative of an institutional problem (they were nearly all sourced from an online anonymous survey). They would not pass muster for any journalist attempting to investigate them. It is filled with buzzwords about ‘heteronormativity’, ‘Protestants’, ‘imperialism’, ‘Christianity,’ ‘white supremacy’, ‘Black bodies,’ and the like. I doubt that the writers of this document know anything at all about any of these things, but of course that will not abate their righteousness in pursuit of their holy cause.
This document as a whole constitutes wholesale moral blackmail of the Academy, its graduates, and its present-day leadership. It consists almost entirely of a recitation of black grievances against whites, with a few token gestures to ‘Latinx’ and ‘Asian’ minorities, but nothing more, probably because it didn’t occur to the writers of this document that there might be more to American history than their single-minded focus on racism. I should note that the Academy is currently led by a black man (LTG Williams, himself a graduate with many years of honorable service) and that the Corps of Cadets itself has been led by black people (Simone Askew in 2018 and EJ Coleman in 2016) twice in the last five years. Black cadets are represented at the Academy in greater numbers than their proportion of the population. Of course, none of this is enough for the Woke Mob.
Do not take comfort in the security which has hitherto been afforded to our nation by our armed forces. We have not been tested against a real enemy in many generations. When we are, leaders like this will not be able to stand in the field of battle. You have been warned.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki got a slip of the tongue after she called the situation at the border a “crisis.” On Thursday, Psaki used the term when she responded to a question about whether Mexico has any expectations on the Biden administration’s handling of the migrant surge at the border.
“There have been expectations set outside of — unrelated to — any vaccine doses or requests for them that would be partners in dealing with the crisis at the border,” Psaki stated.
The administration has downplayed the problems at the southern border, including the massive migrant influx since Joe Biden took office. When called out for dubbing it a crisis, Psaki claimed she meant to say “challenges” at the border.
Psaki then circles back and clarifies she meant to say "challenges on the border." pic.twitter.com/L5j9WeJnSm
“When you were talking a moment ago, about diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Mexico you said ‘crisis on the border’ was that…?” a reporter questioned.
Psaki attempted to quickly recover by stating “challenges on the border” in response. In the meantime, the Biden administration has repeatedly promised to implement a more humane immigration policy despite growing concerns about the conditions unaccompanied migrant children have faced in border facilities.
Facebook’s drive to register 4.5 million voters swayed the November election to President Joe Biden, a Facebook executive opined in hidden camera footage.
The executive, Benny Thomas, expressed grim views of the giant tech company, but counted the voter drive among its positives while secretly being recorded earlier this year by reporters with Project Veritas, an undercover journalism nonprofit.
“This is the good side of Facebook. … We made a big difference,” he said in a video released by Veritas on March 16, explaining that Facebook exceeded its goal of registering 4 million people and could only accomplish the task because of its “sheer scale and reach.”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure we [Biden] won that way,” the reporter said.
“Yea!” Thomas replied, laughing. “Exactly!”
“What do you think?” the reporter jumped in.
“Exactly. I think so too,” he said.
Thomas’s LinkedIn profile describes his position as Global Planning Lead – Creative & Experiential at Facebook since September 2019.
Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
Thomas suggested to one of the reporters that Facebook needs to do more to control speech on its platforms.
“People are believing whatever they see, and it’s just causing a crisis,” he said in another video published by Veritas on March 15.
When asked about his views on solutions, he said, “The answer is just more controls, more safeguards. … To give people a guide to behavior.”
Behavior needs to be kept in check through surveillance, he suggested.
“That’s called democracy. Somebody is always watching you so that you behave well,” he said.
On the other hand, he acknowledged that Facebook’s judgments are necessarily biased, even when machine-driven.
“There’s always built-in bias because this is the myth that computer programmers told us, which is, ‘Oh, these are computers, computers don’t have bias.’ But guess what? Human beings wrote that code. And that human being has bias.”
Conservatives and some liberals have long complained that Facebook is censoring political speech based on vague, partly secret, ever-changing, and unevenly enforced policies.
Thomas also said Facebook and Google have grown so powerful, they need to be broken up.
“The government needs to step in and break up Google and Facebook. I’ll make less money, but it’s a better thing for the world,” he said.
Facebook needs to be stripped of its major subsidiaries, he suggested.
“Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, Oculus, WhatsApp. They all need to be separate companies. It’s too much power when they’re all one together,” he said.
“It needs to be broken up the way the telecom companies were broken up and the oil companies were broken up. But better than that, because those guys just came back together pretty soon after that. I hope we’ve learned from that. But that’s really the one thing, as you said, I would break it up, and I would remove Zuck [Mark Zuckerberg] as the CEO.”
Facebook’s power ceases to be innocuous, he said, “when you weaponize it as a politician and you go, ‘Tell me, show me people who are racist,’” such as when “a racist politician” is looking to target messaging to “several racists who will vote” for him.
When the reporter asked who would decide what makes one a racist and how would Facebook determine it, Thomas mused, “What would be a proxy for a racist?”
“Lives in all-white town, education, religious preference,” he said. “So you can triangulate three or four data points and say, ‘She’s likely to be racist.’”
Thomas also criticized Zuckerberg’s investment in gene-editing technology.
“It’s eugenics. I don’t know any way to stop it. I think the genie’s out of the bottle,” he said.
He worries the technology would lead to the development of a “superior race” of people and extreme polarization of society into “haves” and “have-nots” that goes beyond mere wealth differences.
“They have a thing that I can never have,” he said, describing the position of the “have-nots.”
When confronted by one of the reporters, Thomas refused to go on record and clarify his comments.
President Biden has explicitly vowed that Democrats will increase taxes on the wealthy, adding fuel to congressional Democrats’ plan to ram through higher taxes on party-line votes.
“Anybody making more than $400,000 will see a small to a significant tax increase,” Mr. Biden said in an interview that aired Wednesday on ABC. “If you make less than $400,000, you won’t see one single penny in additional federal tax.”
He doesn’t necessarily expect to win Republican support.
“I’ll get the Democratic votes for a tax increase,” the president said.
“He’s being blunt. He wants the money to spend,” said Grover Norquist, president of the low-tax, small-government activist group Americans for Tax Reform.
Democrats are rolling out a slew of tax plans now that they control the White House and both chambers of Congress. Whatever measures get pushed to Mr. Biden’s desk are expected to be the biggest tax increases since 1993.
Among other changes to the tax code, Mr. Biden wants to increase the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, lift the top individual tax rate from 37% to 39.6% and increase capital gains taxes on people with more than $1 million in annual income.
“Yet they’re complaining because I’m providing a tax credit for child care? For the poor? For the middle class?” Mr. Biden said.
One problem with Mr. Biden’s tax pledge is that the corporate tax rate increasingly hits the middle class indirectly through consumer prices, 401(k) retirement accounts and other ways, Mr. Norquist said.
“This is not going to be a fun thing to do. This is how he loses the suburbs,” he said. “You go and mess with everyone’s 401(k) and orange man isn’t on the ballot. How do you carry the suburbs with a declaration of war against everybody with a 401(k) as class enemies?”
Senate Republicans want no part in rolling back parts of the 2017 tax law, one of President Trump’s signature legislative achievements. Senate Democrats would have to use a fast-track budget tool to muscle their tax and spending plans through the 50-50 split Senate.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, warned that the Democrats’ infrastructure package would serve as a “Trojan horse” for tax increases.
“That’s exactly what I think they have in mind, is to call it an infrastructure bill,” he said on Fox News. “But, in fact, in it, they will have a massive tax increase to, in effect, reverse the tax reform that we enacted in 2017 when we had an entirely Republican government.”
Mr. Norquist led a group of dozens of conservative leaders who sent a letter to Congress voicing opposition to a carbon tax, which some lawmakers have floated as a way to pay for Mr. Biden’s multitrillion-dollar proposals on infrastructure and climate change.
A carbon tax imposed on the burning of coal, oil and gas would increase the costs of goods, lower take-home pay and increase “the power, cost and intrusiveness of the government in our lives,” the letter said.
Some congressional Republicans have supported a carbon tax in recent years as part of efforts to combat climate change, though the letter signers note that carbon taxes have fallen short in the revenue department and hit poorer people harder.
“Every place it’s been tried, it hasn’t worked. It doesn’t raise the money that they expect,” said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, who also signed the letter. “Any tax or policy that raises the cost of energy has a disproportionate impact on low-income families.”
Even apart from its regressive nature, some liberal Democrats have been critical of carbon taxes. They say the taxes are insufficient for what they see as an existential fight against climate change.
Lawmakers have talked about a “miles driven” tax or fee as another way to offset some of the costs of a far-reaching infrastructure and climate change proposal.
Congressional Democrats signaled that they are on board with Mr. Biden’s proposals and want to take them further.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernard Sanders of Vermont rolled out legislation to tax CEOs if the ratio between their pay and the median employee pay at their company is too high.
“At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, the American people are demanding that large, profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes and treat their employees with the dignity and respect they deserve,” said Mr. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has pushed her own “wealth tax” proposal, which would levy a 2% tax on net worth above $50 million and an additional 1% tax on net worth above $1 billion.
The White House didn’t dismiss Ms. Warren’s proposal out of hand, though press secretary Jen Psaki pointed out that Mr. Biden introduced his own tax proposals on the 2020 campaign trail.
Liberal economists say the Democrats’ upcoming “green infrastructure plan” that could cost up to $4 trillion shouldn’t necessarily be funded anyway.
“If a sizable portion of this plan is deficit-financed, as I believe current macroeconomic conditions warrant, then the green infrastructure plan could also ensure the economy is brought to true full employment,” said Mark Paul, assistant professor of economics at New College of Florida and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.
A group of black pastors and prominent Christian figures, including megachurch pastor A.R. Bernard and former NFL tight end Benjamin Watson, have signed onto a letter sent to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to the Equality Act.
Tuesday’s letter, sent the day before the committee held a hearing on a House-passed bill that would codify discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity into federal law, was spearheaded by the AND Campaign, a progressive civic engagement organization that highlights the voices of urban Christians.
“It’s a danger not just to Christian institutions, but those belonging to our Jewish, Sikh, Buddist, and Muslim neighbors as well,” the letter reads. “We can defend the rights of the LGBT community without threatening religious communities.”
The letter was backed by 57 signatories who include former U.S. Ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom Suzan Johnson-Cook, Pastor Bernard of Brooklyn’s Christian Cultural Center, Bishop Claude Alexander of The Park Church in North Carolina, John Jenkins of First Baptist Church of Glenarden, Maryland and respected public policy strategist Barbara Williams-Skinner.
In addition to the longtime NFL veteran and pro-life advocate Watson, the letter was also backed by former WNBA player Chantelle Anderson.
The signatories began the letter by stating their “support for federal protections for LGBT persons in employment, housing and the like.” However, they maintained that the Equality Act, billed as a necessary measure to achieve that goal, falls “well beneath the standard necessary to cultivate a healthy pluralistic society.”
Referring to the Equality Act as “a reflection of our broken system,” the signatories warned about its implications, specifically that “it would remove many of the basic rights that allow religious organizations to operate according to the tenets of their faith.”
Additionally, they predicted that the Equality Act would “allow LGBT rights to be used as a sword against faith institutions rather than a shield to protect the vulnerable.”
“The Equality Act would likely revoke federal security, disaster relief, and school lunch money from thousands of religious schools, end federal partnerships with thousands of faith-based programs that serve the most vulnerable, revoke the Pell Grant and federal loan eligibility for tens of thousands of students that attend hundreds of religious colleges, [and] convert houses of worship and other religious properties into public accommodations, enmeshing them in constant litigation,” the letter asserts.
“Black and Brown Christians worked too hard for the Civil Rights Act to have it revised in ways that would take away basic rights and funding from our communities. The Equality Act needlessly pits the concerns of diverse communities against each other.”
Justin Giboney of the AND Campaign, an advocacy group that works “to educate and organize Christians for civic and cultural engagement that results in better representation, more just and compassionate policies and a healthier political culture,” was among those who signed the letter.
In addition to outlining the shortcomings of the Equality Act, the signatories highlighted the Fairness for All Act as “a much more thoughtful and just way to protect our LGBT neighbors.”
Describing the legislation as a “product of the faith community and LGBT community coming together and challenging themselves to find ways to co-exist and to promote tolerance” and “proof that religious liberty and LGBT rights are not mutually exclusive,” they urged Congress to hold a debate and vote on the Fairness for All Act.
Introduced in the 116th Congress by Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, and cosponsored by eight additional Republicans, the Fairness for All Act aims to “prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity; and to protect the free exercise of religion.”
The bill never came up for a vote in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, which had already passed the Equality Act. Fairness for All was backed by groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.
Stewart reintroduced the Fairness for All Act on Feb. 26, two days after the House passed the Equality Act. The bill has 20 cosponsors in the 117th Congress, all Republicans.
While the aforementioned group of black pastors and religious leaders support the Fairness for All Act, it has received criticism from both sides of the aisle.
Conservative groups have argued that despite its protections for religious organizations, the Fairness for All Act will still “codify a radical gender ideology” into law. Liberal groups such as the Human Rights Campaign contend that the Fairness for All Act only includes “substandard protections for LGBT people” and features “massive loopholes.”
Although the Equality Act passed the House for a second time last month with relative ease, the legislation faces an uncertain future now that it sits in the Senate.
Unlike when the House passed the Equality Act in 2019, Democrats have a majority in the U.S. Senate, albeit a narrow one. Their 50-50 majority, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote, leaves them far short of the 60 votes required to pass the legislation.
Democrats have threatened to invoke the so-called “nuclear option” that would allow legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority to advance the Equality Act and other progressive legislation.
However, two Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, have expressed their opposition to such a move, likely depriving the party of the votes necessary to abolish the 60-vote rule.
The Equality Act is expected to secure minimal, if any, support from Senate Republicans as Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, was the only member of her party to co-sponsor the legislation when it was unsuccessfully introduced in the upper chamber in 2019. However, Collins indicated that she would not co-sponsor the bill this time because she thought it “needed revision.”
Manchin was the only Democrat who did not co-sponsor the Equality Act in the 116th Congress, alleging that it provides insufficient “guidance to the local officials who will be implementing it, particularly with respect to students transitioning between genders in public schools.” Should both Manchin and Collins oppose the Equality Act, it would lack the necessary votes for passage even if the “nuclear option” was implemented.
Pastor Greg Laurie of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, Calif., has announced that his messages will now air on several major television networks, including Fox Business, Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), and Lifetime. Because of the widespread reach of these networks, Laurie will now be able to reach over 60 million people annually with the gospel.
“Airing on these major networks gives us at Harvest an even greater opportunity to grow the family of God,” Laurie announced in a press release Monday. “God opened this door to share the life-changing message of the Gospel. I am grateful for the privilege and I do not take it lightly.”
Greg Laurie is a movie producer and best-selling author, as well as the senior pastor and founder of Harvest Christian Fellowship. The church started in 1973 when, at age 19, Laurie began leading a Bible study of 30 people. Harvest has since grown to a congregation of 15,000 with campuses in California and Hawaii. Laurie also founded Harvest Crusades, which are “large-scale evangelistic events that create a welcoming environment” for sharing the good news about Jesus. Since their inception in 1990, over 8.8 million people have attended Harvest Crusades, and over 500,000 have made decisions to follow Christ.
In addition to Fox Business, TBN, and Lifetime, Pastor Greg Laurie’s sermons will air on Newsmax, Daystar Television, and KCAL Los Angeles. The air times for each of these networks are as follows:
TBN – 4:30am EST / 1:30am PST Newsmax – 8am EST / 5am PST Fox Business – 1:30pm EST / 10:30am PST Daystar – 6:30pm EST / 3:30am PST Lifetime – 7:30am EST and PST KCAL Los Angeles – 10:30am (PST only)
The combined viewership of these networks is substantial. TBN, which claims to be the largest Christian television network in the world, broadcasts to every continent on the globe in over 12 languages. Enlace, its Spanish-speaking network, reaches over 100 million households worldwide. On July 1, 2020, TBN reportedthat its viewership had increased by 30 percent, with 16 million people tuning in to the network’s programming on Easter Sunday last year.
Daystar Television is another faith-based network that broadcasts internationally. According to its website, Daystar reaches more than 108 million households in the U.S. and over two billion viewers across the globe.
Other networks that will be airing Laurie’s messages have an extensive reach as well. In a list of the most-watched television networks of 2020, Lifetime ranked 27th with 671,000 viewers. Newsmax was 88th with 105,000 viewers, and Fox Business Network was 97th at 103,000 viewers.
Pastor Greg Laurie Is Hopeful
In an article published on Jan. 1, Pastor Greg Laurie said that he had “high hopes” for 2021. The reason he is hopeful, said the pastor, has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with who God is. “I don’t know what 2021 holds, but I know who holds 2021,” he said. “Corrie ten Boom was right when she said, ‘Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.’ I’ve read the last page of the Bible. All is well in the end because God has a future and a hope for us. So, I have hope for this coming year.”
CNN reported Friday that the Defense Department Inspector General had concluded a “long-delayed investigation into Michael Flynn” sending its findings to the Army “in a case that could bring tens of thousands of dollars in financial penalties for President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser.”
The damage we’re inflicting on children is too devastating to be waved away in the name of public health—it’s quickly becoming an emergency in its own right.
Billions of people across the globe continue to live under COVID-19 lockdowns or heavily-restricted life. And for almost all of us, life amid the pandemic in 2020 was an isolating and difficult year. Yet doctors are warning that children in particular are experiencing grave mental health consequences as a result of the lockdowns—leading to an “international epidemic” of child suicide.
If you are ever concerned for your safety or the safety of a child or friend, the #ISDCounselling department is here with resources and support | https://t.co/sPEVenpIAI
— ISD Counselling Department (@ISDCounselling) March 10, 2021
The Associated Pressinterviewed Dr. David Greenhorn on the subject, who works in the emergency department at England’s Bradford Royal Infirmary. The number of mental health crises he has seen, such as suicide attempts, has gone from a couple per week pre-pandemic to now several per day.
“This is an international epidemic, and we are not recognizing it,” Greenhorn said. “In an 8-year-old’s life, a year is a really, really, really long time. They are fed up. They can’t see an end to it.”
Dr. Richard Delorme heads the psychiatric department at one of the largest children’s hospitals in France, and he offered a similar warning to the AP.
Delorme pointed out that it is clearly COVID restrictions and lockdowns taking this toll on children that end up in his hospital: “What they tell you about is a chaotic world, of ‘Yes, I’m not doing my activities any more,’ ‘I’m no longer doing my music,’ ‘Going to school is hard in the mornings,’ ‘I am having difficulty waking up,’ ‘I am fed up with the mask.’”
Delorme’s hospital went from seeing roughly 20 suicide attempts per month involving patients 15 or younger, the AP reports, to more than double that—and, disturbingly, more determination than ever before in the attempts.
“We are very surprised by the intensity of the desire to die among children who may be 12 or 13 years old,” Delorme said. “We sometimes have children of 9 who already want to die. And it’s not simply a provocation or a blackmail via suicide. It is a genuine wish to end their lives.”
This is one of the most painful paragraphs I’ve ever read, let alone had to write about. Merely typing out this story flooded my eyes with tears. But the life-threatening unintended consequences of drastic pandemic measures are too important to overlook.
Government restrictions that would’ve been unthinkable two years ago have been forced through amid the fear and uncertainty that the pandemic’s outbreak understandably wrought. Advocates undoubtedly hoped to save lives. Yet government restrictions have proven dubious in their effectiveness, with both studies and real-world examples demonstrating little clear relationship between lockdown stringency and COVID deaths.
In the meantime, lockdowns and other restrictions have harshly curtailed social interaction and, tragically, catalyzing the aforementioned youth mental health crisis. Here in the US, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 25 percent of young adults considered suicide during the lockdowns, while overall mental health and suicide rates appear to have spiked as well.
The child suicide is only the latest mortifying revelation showing just how big a toll these policies have taken on us. We must factor this human damage into our analysis when it comes to ending pandemic restrictions; not just COVID case counts.
Like any policy, public health orders must be evaluated on their outcomes. As Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” Pandemic lockdowns may have stemmed from an earnest desire to protect the public; but their consequences have done the opposite.
Why? Well, any government action, particularly sweeping mandates, has not just its intended effect, but its second- and third-order unintended consequences.
“Every human action has both intended and unintended consequences,” economist Antony Davies and political scientist James Harrigan explained for FEE.org. “Human beings react to every rule, regulation, and order governments impose, and their reactions result in outcomes that can be quite different than the outcomes lawmakers intended.”
When it comes to lockdowns, we’ve extensively documented the unintended consequences at FEE, including isolation, depression, suicidality, unemployment, drug abuse, domestic violence, and more. Such severe second-order effects offer a painful reminder of why policymakers should be humble in the scope of their actions. Sweeping lockdowns are anything but humble: They presume that bureaucrats in an office somewhere can save society with top-down orders and nothing will go wrong.
Governments the world over must consider more than mere COVID case counts when evaluating current and future lockdown policies. The damage we’re inflicting on children is too devastating to be waved away in the name of public health—it’s an emergency in its own right.
If you or someone you know needs help, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255). You can also text a crisis counselor by messaging the Crisis Text Line at 741741.
The family of a father with a 3-year-old child blamed the struggles caused by the UK’s third COVID-19 lockdown for his tragic suicide.https://t.co/m33cbo4wnp
