Several congregations throughout the U.S. have recently been targeted by vandals, some of whom defaced churches with satanic graffiti. Authorities are also investigating whether an arsonist started a fire that caused a church building to burn down in Florida.
“It was somewhat alarming because it has never happened before,” said First Lady Jennifer Washington of Temple of Greater Works in Shreveport, La. “But at the same time, it kinda reinforced my faith, the stand we are making for truth today in spite of everything that is going on, the expression of hatred. We just want to [make] sure our expression of love is greater.”
On Monday at 8:30 a.m., Washington and her husband, Pastor Richard Washington, discovered that the doors of their church building had been spray-painted with the number “666” and a pentagram.
If you know anything about the vandalism, please call the Shreveport Police Department. https://t.co/5U1lyKjHni
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg topped the list of the 15 billionaires with the greatest growth in absolute wealth since pandemic lockdowns began in March 2020.
A year ago, the Institute for Policy Studies published “Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes and Pandemic Profiteers,” and began tracking billionaire wealth gains as unemployment surged. We teamed up with Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) to track the wealth growth of America’s billionaires over the last year. This report summarizes the extraordinary growth in wealth of those now 657 billionaires based on real-time data from Forbes on March 18.
Here are highlights from the last 12 months of billionaire wealth growth:
The combined wealth of the nation’s 657 billionaires increased more than $1.3 trillion, or 44.6%, since the pandemic lockdowns began. [Master Table] Over those same 12 months, more than 29 million Americans contracted the virus and more than 535,000 died from it. As billionaire wealth soared over, almost 80 million lost work between March 21, 2020, and Feb. 20, 2021, and 18 million were collecting unemployment on Feb. 27, 2021.
There are 43 newly minted billionaires since the beginning of the pandemic, when there were 614. A number of new billionaires joined the list after initial public offerings (IPOs) of stock in companies such as Airbnb, DoorDash and Snowflake.
The increase in the combined wealth of the 15 billionaires with the greatest growth in absolute wealth was $563 billion or 82%. [See Table 1] The wealth growth of just these 15 represents over 40% of the wealth growth among all billionaires. Topping the list are Elon Musk ($137.5 billion richer, 559%), Jeff Bezos ($65 billion, 58%) and Mark Zuckerberg ($47 billion, 86%).
The 10 biggest “Pandemic Profiteers” saw the greatest percentage increase in their wealth — at least 300%
They mostly multiplied their fortunes in the world of online goods, services and entertainment, as forcibly homebound Americans shopped, invested and diverted themselves in isolation. They include the owners of ecommerce leaders Quicken Loans, Square, Carvana, and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase; social media sites Snapchat and Twitter; online streaming platform Roku; and digital ad agency Trade Desk. Nineteen other billionaires experienced increases of over 200% while 48 others more than doubled their fortunes with 100% + gains.
Bom Kim (670%/$7.7 billion): A U.S. citizen and founder of the e-commerce giant Coupang, the Amazon of South Korea. Kim’s fortune surged as high as $11 billion after the company’s IPO in early March.
Dan Gilbert (642%/$41.7 billion): Owner of Quicken Loans, which capitalized on cloistered citizens tapping online financing. Lives in Michigan.
Ernest Garcia II (567%/$13.6 billion): Biggest shareholder of Carvana, the online car sales and auto-financing giant. Arizona.
Elon Musk (559%/$137.5 billion): Musk is now the second wealthiest American — at nearly $138 billion — as his shares in Tesla, Space-X and other companies that he owns continue to climb. Lives in Texas.
Brian Armstrong (550%/$5.5 billion): Chief executive of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the country. California resident.
Bobby Murphy (531%/$10.1 billion): Co-founder of Snapchat, with his Stanford fraternity brother, Evan Spiegel. California resident.
Evan Spiegel (490%/$9.3 billion): Co-founder of Snapchat with his other billionaire super-gainer, Bobby Murphy. California resident.
Jack Dorsey (396%/$10.3 billion): Co-founder and CEO of both Twitter and Square, the small business payment app. Lives in California.
Anthony Wood (331%/$5.3 billion): Founder of Roku, which enables online TV video streaming. California resident.
Jeff Green (300%/$3 billion): Californian founder and chairman of The Trade Desk, a digital advertising firm.
China’s military ban on Tesla vehicles could be part of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s recent tough diplomatic stance against the United States, and can also be used to limit Tesla’s expansion in China to boost local brands, according to two China experts.
A March 19 notice about Tesla vehicles being banned by China’s army was circulated on Chinese social media, but soon got deleted.
It says, “Upon inspection and actual testing, Tesla brand vehicles are found to be equipped with a series of technical devices such as omnidirectional cameras, ultrasonic sensors, etc. These devices can expose the location of the target. In order to ensure the absolute safety of military secrets, and to prevent potential threats, vehicles of this brand are prohibited from being driven into or parking at the [military] staff and family building compounds. We will also conduct routine inspection of vehicles inside the compounds and hope that every household will cooperate.”
The Wall Street Journal confirmed that the Chinese regime is restricting the use of Tesla vehicles by military staff and employees of important state-owned enterprises. The data collection ability of the vehicles is the main concern and was reviewed as a national security threat, according to unnamed people familiar with the matter.
The source told The Wall Street Journal that Chinese officials believe that cameras in Tesla vehicles can record images and obtain data including when, how, and where the vehicles are being used, as well as the contact lists of mobile phones synced to them. Beijing is concerned that some data could be sent back to the United States.
A Tesla representative told Bloomberg that none of the in-car cameras in Teslas sold in China are turned on or part of the Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta trial and that Tesla’s privacy policies comply with national laws and local regulations in China.
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk also responded to the security concern on March 20 at the China Development Forum. He said, “If Tesla uses its cars to spy in China, we’re going to have to shut down and go out of business. So we have a strong motivation to ensure users’ privacy.”
Current affairs commentator Shi Shan told The Epoch Times that the security concerns about Tesla are just an excuse for the CCP.
“These Tesla features did not just become available now, and the so-called ‘threat’ did not just emerge today. Why wasn’t the Chinese Communist Party worried before? Why did the CCP only raise this issue now? It is obviously part of the CCP’s recent tough diplomacy on display.”
Industrial Copycats
Mike Sun, a private investment consultant in the United States, told The Epoch Times that the purpose of the CCP bringing in Tesla is just like what they did to the iPhone. They will use Tesla and Apple technology and industrial chains to support China’s local manufacturing industry.
Tesla entering into the Chinese market has driven the development of China’s local electric vehicle brands such as NIO, Li Xiang One, and XPeng (also Xiaopeng Motors). Now that these manufacturers have matured, the CCP does not want Tesla to continue to grow and expand.
The bad news is that business is the new battlefield: the woke have set their sights on corporate America.
This is invariably the problem with anything the left ever tries: Che Guevara’s Nuevo Hombre, the New Man, just never shows up. Human nature is unchangeable.
Much of what corporations do now is illegal, or should be, especially the new emphasis on subdividing along racial lines.
That all cultural institutions in America have been taken over by the Left is beyond question. The media, the academy, Hollywood—all are now in its clutches. Conservatives still cling to talk radio, just as tightly as they do to their guns and bibles, as President Obama so dismissively put it, but that is about the only redoubt of the “sense-making” institutions they still have.
This was no accident. Those who have studied the genesis of this annexation know that it was a deliberate “long march through the institutions.” That campaign was conceived in the late 1960s by the violent German activist Rudi Dutschke, a disciple of the non-violent but much more dangerous Frankfurt School academic Herbert Marcuse, who approved of Dutschke’s plan.
Today, this strategy manifests in the demand that institutions be “woke.” The term, borrowed from African-American slang for being awake, has come to mean not just any type of liberalism, but one denoted by an obsequious obsession with social issues, denunciations of “whiteness,” the insistence that the freest and most prosperous society today is hopelessly racist and in need of deep change, and the intolerant resolve to censor any deviation from any of these concepts through cancel culture. Other American institutions are teetering on the verge of a woke takeover.
The Churches—as in the institutionalized Abrahamic faiths—have long been bastions of conservatism by their very nature, but they are now in danger of seeing their commitment to true justice and the care for the poor and the stranger hijacked in the name of Social Justice, a concept that undermines religion. Social Justice abandons forgiveness and concentrates on punishment—especially, but not only, through forced redistribution of resources according to membership in categories of the supposedly oppressed and marginalized. Forgetting past sins, which the Bible repeatedly tells us is what God routinely does, is verboten.
Professional sports, too, have turned into pageants for ritualistic woke denunciations of the country and its history, the white race, etc. Despite being one of the most integrated areas of American life, the NBA, the NFL, and now MLB constantly remind viewers in need of escapism that our country is uniquely, structurally, institutionally, and systemically racist, sexist, and homophobic.
Still, all these areas—the media, the academy, the churches, sports—are basically volitional. You don’t have to watch Monday Night Football; you can cancel your newspaper subscription; if your rabbi is too much of a social justice warrior, you simply switch synagogues. Most of us, however, have to do one thing every weekday: go to work. Ever since Adam bit the apple and God told him that henceforth “by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread,” we have gotten up almost daily, put on overalls, a uniform, or a tie, and set forth to make a living.
Joe Biden is gearing up to go over Congress’s head to promote his agenda on gun control measures. On Friday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced Biden is planning to sign a series of gun control executive orders.
We can ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
We can close loopholes in our gun background check system.
This is not a partisan issue — it’s an American issue that will save lives. Congress needs to act.
Biden has become increasingly aggressive in his anti-gun rhetoric after the recent acts of gun violence in Colorado and Atlanta.
Psaki did not give a timeline of when Biden would sign the orders.
“I can’t give you an exact timeframe, in part because they have to go through a review process which is something that we do from here. You know, I will note that, you know, when we – when the president was the vice president in the Obama/Biden Administration, he helped put in place 23 executive actions to combat gun violence,” Psaki stated. “It’s one of the levers that we can use that any federal government, any president can use to help address the prevalence of gun violence and address community safety around the country.”
Every time Biden is asked about gun control measures he adds a suggestion, recently naming 3D-printed and imported weapons bans.
Honduran migrant Fernando Sanchez paid a trafficker $7,000 to smuggle him to the United States with his three-year-old daughter, but they spent just days on US soil before being deported.
For many undocumented migrants, particularly adult men, what they hoped would be an open door thanks to US President Joe Biden has turned out to be a revolving door back to Mexico.
Sanchez was deported to the Mexican border city Ciudad Juarez along with dozens of other migrants under a rule known as Title 42 that was introduced a year ago to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Now in debt to friends who loaned him money to pay the trafficker, the 38-year-old still clings to hope that Biden, who he calls “our president,” will help him.
“I know that Joe Biden, our president, can open the door for us and say ‘come in everyone who is suffering,'” he said.
Sanchez, now staying with his daughter at a shelter in Ciudad Juarez, asked AFP to change his name to avoid potential problems with the US authorities in the future.
While some migrants, notably unaccompanied minors and women with small children, are now being allowed to stay, men who are caught by US border patrols are usually sent back quickly.
In February, the US Customs and Border Protection agency detained about 100,000 people at the southern border — a 28 percent increase over January.
Most came from Central American nations Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, which are wracked by poverty and gang-related violence.
New York is the first state to formally launch a “vaccine passport” program, allowing New Yorkers to pull up a code on their phones to prove they have received a vaccine for the Chinese coronavirus or have tested negative.
The vaccine passport, called the Excelsior Pass, is what USA Todaydescribes as a “first-in-the-nation certification,” which will be used at large-scale events and entertainment venues. It became available to New Yorkers on Friday, and the venues that accept it are expected to expand in the coming days and weeks.
This month, the Cuomo administration announced the Excelsior Pass, developed in partnership with IBM, would be tested at Madison Square Garden and Barclays Center.
“We’re doing everything we can to vaccinate as many New Yorkers as possible, as quickly as possible, while keeping the infection rate down and reenergizing our economy in a safe, smart way,” Cuomo said in a statement.
“As we begin reopening the valves on different sectors of our economy, we are putting guidelines in place to ensure individuals attending events involving larger gatherings have tested negative for COVID or have been vaccinated to avoid an outbreak of the virus,” he continued.
“The Excelsior Pass will play a critical role in getting information to venues and sites in a secure and streamlined way, allowing us to fast-track the reopening of these businesses and getting us one step closer to reaching a new normal,” he added.
Florida and Texas continue to report fewer new cases of the Chinese coronavirus than Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) New York, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data shows.
Breitbart News has continued to track the seven-day totals of new cases in New York and states such as Florida and Texas, which do not have mask mandates or other heavy pro-lockdown restrictions in place. March 26 CDC data shows both states continuing to fare better than the blue state in terms of new cases of the virus, despite an absence of significant restrictions and statewide mask mandates.
According to the CDC’s March 26 data, Florida reported 151.8 new cases of the virus per 100,000 in the last seven days, or 32,608 cases in that time period, total. Texas reported just 83 cases per capita, or 24,055 total in the last seven days.
In contrast, New York has reported 225.3 cases per 100,000 in the last seven days, or 24,909 total. Notably, this total does not include New York City’s data, as the CDC counts the two separately. New York City has reported 420.6 new cases per 100,000 in the last week, or 35,325 cases total. Combined, New York State, including the city, has reported 60,234 cases of the virus in the last seven days — over 27,000 more cases than Florida and over 36,000 more than Texas, both of which do not have statewide mask mandates.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) became the establishment media’s target of scrutiny last year after refusing to continue to implement arduous lockdown orders throughout the pandemic. Instead, DeSantis largely left restrictions to localities. Then in September, the Republican governor lifted key restrictions across the state, allowing businesses to reopen at a greater capacity at the state level and putting the burden of challenges on local governments rather than business owners. At the time, DeSantis also extended an act of “executive grace,” suspending mask-related fines and penalties imposed by local governments. DeSantis never issued a statewide mask mandate and, weeks ago, signed an executive order canceling coronavirus-related fines imposed by local governments in the Sunshine State issued between March 1, 2020, and March 10, 2021.
As justification for abolishing or debilitating the Senate filibuster, President Joe Biden said Thursday that the practice was grossly overused last year – but, he didn’t mention that it was almost exclusively Democrats who used it.
“It’s being abused in a gigantic way,” Biden declared in his first press conference since taking office, claiming that, last year, there were five times as many motions to break a filibuster as there were in the 54-year period from 1917-1971:
“I was going to give you the statistics, but you probably know them – that it used to be that, that from between 1917 to 1971 – the filibuster existed – there was a total of 58 motions to break a filibuster that whole time. Last year alone, there were five times that many. So it’s being abused in a gigantic way.”
But, as Fox News’ John Roberts reported the next day, Democrats used the filibuster 327 times, while Republicans used it only once. Roberts took to Twitter on Friday to reveal the results of Fox News’ research:
“After @POTUS@JoeBiden denounced the rampant abuse of the filibuster last year, we did some digging. Republicans used it once. Democrats used it 327 times. @FoxNews”
“There has not been one, single Republican filibuster since Joe Biden took office,” American Enterprise Institute’s Marc Thiessen told Fox News on Thursday, following Biden’s speech:
“Well, first of all he said his justification for possibly getting rid of the filibuster is that it was abused last year in a gigantic way. Who was filibustering last year? It was Democrats. So he’s saying, just for the record, so viewers know, there has not been one single Republican filibuster since Joe Biden took office. There have been no filibusters.”
“So, all of the filibusters in the last four years have been Democratic filibusters. What are they filibustering?” Thiessen asked rhetorically. He then listed off a host of Pres. Donald Trump’s initiatives that Democrats blocked, or threatened to block, with the filibuster:
Border wall funding,
COVID relief,
Police reform,
Legislation on sanctuary cities,
Restrictions on abortion,
Entitlement reform,
Immigration reform,
Lawsuit reform,
Health care reform,
Budget cuts,
Expanded Gun rights,
Defunding Planned Parenthood.
“All those things were blocked, either by an actual filibuster or the threat of filibuster – by Democrats. And, that is now justification, once they have become in power, for getting rid of it, when the Republicans haven’t even filibustered, yet,” Thiessen said.
New York lawmakers need to realize that people respond to incentives, and that punitive taxation inevitably backfires.
Thanks to the recently-passed $1.9 trillion spending package, the state of New York is set to receive a whopping $23.5 billion in federal bailout money. This is more than enough to make up for any revenue gaps incurred over the last year. But progressive lawmakers are nonetheless considering a slew of new business and personal taxes—prompting 250 top business leaders to pen an open letter this week warning that these punitive tax hikes could have drastic ramifications.
“Significant corporate and individual tax increases will make it far more difficult to restart the economic engine and reassemble the deep and diverse talent pool that makes New York the greatest city in the world,” wrote the leaders, whose ranks include the CEOs of JP Morgan Chase, Blackrock, and Goldman Sachs. “Many members of our workforce have resettled their families in other locations, generally with far lower taxes than New York, and the proposed tax increases will make it harder to get them to return.”
“This is not about companies threatening to leave the state; this is simply about our people voting with their feet,” the letter continues. “Ultimately, these new taxes may trigger a major loss of economic activity and revenues as companies are pressured to relocate operations to where the talent wants to live and work.”
What specific proposals have these business leaders so concerned? Well, here are the tax changes up for consideration in the Empire State, according to Fox Business:
