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During the United States presidential election last year, then Libertarian Party Chairman Angela McArdle spoke openly of her desire to use the Libertarian Party to help elect Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump. She even arranged for Trump to make a campaign speech at the Libertarian Party’s national convention and released through the party, around a week before election day, a video promoting Trump.

Via a Thursday post at Twitter, McArdle suggested to fellow Trump campaign supporter Elon Musk, who went on to become a Trump administration official leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), that Musk “should just take over the Libertarian Party.” Doing so is “not hard,” McArdle added. McArdle was replying to a post in which Musk had brought up the possibility of starting a new political party.

McArdle, who resigned her party chairmanship less than three months after the presidential election, apparently knows a thing or two about taking over the Libertarian Party. But, if Musk wants to take over the party, he may have to act quickly. Last month, Steven Nekhaila, who became chairman of the Libertarian Party after McArdle’s resignation, warned the Libertarian National Committee, which oversees the party, that the party is on the verge of a “full collapse.”

Pressure is growing on federal agencies to regulate the abortion drug mifepristone, following publication of a series of alarming reports. The latest report, published last week by the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), analyzed Medicare and Medicaid data and discovered that the vast majority (over 80%) of women who visited an emergency room with complications from the abortion drug had their abortions miscoded as miscarriages.

The study examined nearly 30,000 emergency room visits and found that between 2016 and 2021, a period of five years, miscodes of emergency room visits following surgical abortions increased in prevalence from a rate of 26.8% to 73.9%, while miscodes of ER visits following mifepristone abortions increased in prevalence from a rate of 45.5% to 83.5%. Additionally, acuity — that is, the measure of the severity and complexity of a patient’s condition — was significantly higher (at a rate of 50%) among miscoded cases than correctly-coded cases.

“When abortion-related emergencies are disguised as miscarriages, it impairs a doctor’s ability to make informed, evidence-based decisions. That isn’t just a documentation error — it’s a public health crisis,” said Dr. James Studnicki, vice president and director of data analytics at CLI and one of the authors of the study, in a statement obtained by The Washington Stand. He added, “The abortion industry’s push for concealment is unethical and dangerous. Women deserve honest guidance and proper medical care, not advice that jeopardizes their health.”

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Another of the study’s authors, CLI Vice President and Director of Medical Affairs Dr. Ingrid Skop, told TWS, “As a board-certified OB-GYN practicing in Texas, I’ve seen firsthand the devastating effects abortion drugs have on women, as I have been called to care for them in the ER regularly.” She explained, “This study exposes the abortion industry’s reckless advice for women to hide their abortion drug use from doctors, delaying proper care and risking their health.”

Skop continued, “Doctors are disadvantaged when they are unaware of a patient’s abortion history. They may need to intervene more quickly to remove retained pregnancy tissue and/or the dead baby to prevent serious infection when abortion drugs fail.” The veteran medical practitioner added, “No other area of medicine tolerates such dangerous misinformation — it’s a direct threat to women’s safety.”

Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, told TWS, “The miscoding of a mifepristone abortion as a miscarriage can lead to a delay in care for a mom whose life may be in danger as the result of the use of the abortion drug mifepristone.” She clarified, “Miscarriage and abortion are not the same thing — and they do not have the same impact on a woman’s body. Planned Parenthood even records miscarriage and abortion as separate occurrences; but, at the same time, Planned Parenthood advises women it’s ‘up to them’ whether they tell their doctor about their use of mifepristone.”

Szoch concluded, “Unfortunately, they leave out that a decision not to tell their doctor they took mifepristone might result in severe bodily harm. Mifepristone is an incredibly dangerous drug. It kills unborn children and maims moms physically and emotionally as it does so.”

Another recent study, this one from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, found that serious complications related to the use of mifepristone are 22 times more common than claimed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), prompting widespread calls for the health agency to reexamine mifepristone and restore stringent regulations surrounding its prescription and use.

A subsequent CLI report debunked the “baseless claim that ‘abortion drugs are safer than Tylenol’ because it lacks scientific credibility and evidence.” The report found that the claim must be based on “a controlled, scientifically appropriate study comparing abortion drugs to Tylenol,” which does not exist and “would be impossible to do [conduct] because these drugs are used for entirely different purposes.”

When the FDA first approved mifepristone for use in 2000, three in-person physician visits were required before the drug could be prescribed, the drug could only be prescribed by a physician, it had to be dispensed and consumed in the physician’s office, and a follow-up visit was required, as was reporting of any complications.

In 2016, then-President Barack Obama eliminated many of those provisions, including the requirement that the abortion drug be prescribed by a physician and consumed in-office, as well as the mandatory follow-up visit and reporting of complications. The Obama FDA also lowered the number of required in-person physician visits prior to prescription from three to only one and increased the “maximum gestational age” for prescribing the drug from seven weeks to 10.

In 2023, the Biden administration further weakened the remaining safeguards, requiring no in-person physician visits, no physician to prescribe the drug, no dispensing or consuming the drug in-office, no follow-up visit, and no reporting of complications.

Earlier this week, newly-minted FDA Commissioner Marty Makary pledged to conduct “a review of mifepristone and work … with the professional career scientists at the Agency who review this data.” As TWS documented, his new promise to reassess the abortion drug is a shift from his previous positions on the subject, refusing to commit to reviewing mifepristone.

LifeNews Note: S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

The post Abortion Pill Coverup: Injuries to Women are Falsely Classified as Miscarriages appeared first on LifeNews.com.

The Trump administration sharply criticized the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) during a recent Executive Board meeting, accusing the agency of complicity in China’s coercive population control policies.

The critic comes after recently announcing the complete withdrawal of U.S. funding, totaling $335 million, under the Kemp-Kasten Amendment.

In remarks delivered on June 3 at the UNFPA segment of the 2025 Annual Session of the UNDP/UNOPS/UNFPA Executive Board, Acting U.S. Representative to ECOSOC Jonathan Shrier condemned UNFPA’s long-standing partnership with Chinese government agencies responsible for implementing forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations.

“Millions of families suffered under China’s abhorrent population control,” Shrier said, highlighting the “barbaric” legacy of these policies and questioning UNFPA’s silence on the ongoing suffering of affected women.

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“Where is their justice?” he asked.

The administration’s decision to defund UNFPA, first reported by LifeNews on May 9, 2025, marks a continuation of President Donald Trump’s pro-life policies from his previous term. In 2017, Trump similarly cut funding to UNFPA, citing its role in supporting China’s population control regime, which has been linked to human rights abuses, including forced abortions and sterilizations.

The recent move terminates over 40 existing projects, redirecting $335 million in taxpayer funds away from the pro-abortion UN agency.

Critics of UNFPA, including pro-life advocates, argue that the agency’s collaboration with China’s government undermines its stated mission to promote reproductive health and rights.

The Trump administration’s stance aligns with the reinstatement and expansion of the Mexico City Policy, renamed the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy, which prohibits U.S. funding to foreign organizations that perform or promote abortions. The policy, initially introduced by President Ronald Reagan, has been a cornerstone of pro-life foreign policy under Republican administrations.

UNFPA expressed regret over the funding cut, stating on May 8, 2025, that it “notes with deep regret” the U.S. decision to invoke the Kemp-Kasten Amendment. The agency denied claims of supporting coercive practices, asserting that its work promotes voluntary family planning and human rights. “Over the past four years alone, with the U.S. Government’s life-saving investments, we prevented more than 17,000 maternal deaths,” UNFPA said, urging the U.S. to reconsider its position.

Shrier’s remarks also called on the UNFPA Executive Board to scrutinize the agency’s financial ties to China, questioning why UNFPA continues to subsidize technical assistance for a country with the world’s second-largest economy.

“UNFPA should not be complicit in China’s population control,” he said, reinforcing the administration’s commitment to prioritizing human rights in U.S. foreign aid.

The post Trump Admin Slams UNFPA for Supporting Population Control in China appeared first on LifeNews.com.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oADHdNwrpc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRsHuvqBJAc

The following is a rough transcript of a video by Academic Agent (AKA, Neema Parvini) with a few minor editorial additions and editing for clarity.

Recently, James Lindsay made a video on elite theory. As the author of the bestselling book The Populist Illusion, which is a primer on elite theory, and since I am a modern purveyor of elite theory, when somebody critiques it like James Lindsay, I take that seriously.

Lindsay’s 20-minute video on the topic was, unfortunately, quite disappointing. It was obvious to me that Lindsay had not engaged with any of the material. He had not read The Populist Delusion.  It was obvious to me that he had not really read Mosca or Pareto or Robert Michels. This is understandable in the case of Pareto. The Mind and Society is a big thick book. It is quite complicated. However, The Ruling Class by Mosca is not particularly long. And neither is Political Parties by Michels. The Populist Delusion is an even shorter book, so it is not really that difficult, I think, to get some of the core propositions of elite theory correct.

One of the things that you are meant to do as an intellectual is to show your interlocutors some intellectual charity. Ideally, what you should be able to do is to summarize their positions as strongly if not stronger than they are able to do and unfortunately Lindsay just did not do that. He did not give an accurate summary of what elite theory is, so in this video I’m going to give a couple of quick pointers as to what elite theory is, and what it isn’t, and why Lindsay’s entire video fell flat as a result of getting these things wrong.

The first thing to mention is that elite theory simply says that the disorganized mass is always ruled over by an organized minority. It says that in politics the organized minority tends to win over the disorganized mass.

The organized minority is called the ruling class; the rulers, and the disorganized majority is the ruled.

In his video, James Lindsay did not really come up with this formulation. He said something like “In every society, elites rule.” And then he said that that is a tautology; that it is true by definition. Or, it is just saying in every society there is an elite class.

At some level, that is right, but elite theory makes a much stronger claim. It says that regardless of what you call the system; whether you call it monarchy, or whether you call it a communist state, whether you call it social democratic or liberal democratic, a merchant republic, whatever you want to call your system of government, an aristocracy, feudalism, you name it, they all basically have the same structure and the same principles apply to power no matter what you call the system; namely that the organized minority rule over the disorganized mass.

The truth of this is hard to dispute and most people when confronted with it will concur. To get anywhere in this world you need to get together with some friends and plan and work together, in order to bring about some outcome. The problem is that the people who are in power right now, have an absolute advantage over everybody else who is trying to organize. They have a knowledge advantage. They have a communications advantage. They have technical expertise and skills managerialism that coalesce to make their rule quite difficult to overcome.

Overthrowing a government is something that only a handful of people have managed in history and the set of conditions that keep the ruling class in place and make them extremely difficult to dislodge is known as “the iron law of oligarchy,” and that is what Michel’s Political Parties is about. So, what James Lindsay did in his video is that he said, well there is a difference between elite theory as a descriptive set of tools and a prescriptive elite theory.

First of all, none of the elite theorists have any prescriptions. Elite theory is a value-free. It pretends to be a scientific way of trying to approach power and politics. Elite theory resembles economics. Economics is what they call a wertfrei science. It is value free. It does not try to smuggle in any other value. It just describes what is and elite theory is the same. Pareto, who was one of the elite theorists, was of course more famous as an economist, so it is using some of those tools that you would use in economics and applying a similar framework to politics and power.  If you want a political science, that is what it was trying to do. That is what all of them said that they were doing, in the tradition of somebody like Nicolo Machiavelli who was also trying to give an ABCs of power; a set of laws of power that are true pretty much regardless of who is in the system. It is not really concerned with this system or that system; democracy or monarchy or whatever, it is concerned with the actual mechanics of power, regardless of what you call it.  

Now one of the things that Lindsay did is he said, well the thing is that the descriptive part is fine but the danger comes when it becomes proscriptive; when people take elite theory and they say this the way things ought to be. He says it goes over the is/ought gap that David Hume talked about. This is an issue because, as far as I know, none of the elite theorists did that. That is not the point of their work. In my book the Populist Delusion which is a work of elite theory, I also do not advocate for any particular system of government.

James Lindsay went on to make a more moral, normative argument where he says that the problem occurs once you start saying that rule by an organized minority is the way things should be. Lindsay takes Curtis Yarvin’s advocation of monarchy as though that were an example of prescriptive elite theory, with monarchy being a particularly clear example of elite rule. However, when Curtis Yarvin advocates for monarchy, that is monarchism, not elite theory. That is, he is just making pro-monarchy arguments. That has nothing to do with elite theory. That is just him favoring that system over the other available systems. Elite theory does not do that. If anything, the elite theorists, to the extent that they advocate for anything at all, talk about an aristocracy of the talents. In other words, a meritocracy; a system which allows the most talented people into the ruling class. They argue that that system would be superior to systems that artificially lock out people of talent from the ruling class. And in fact, if you read Mosca, he says that if you look at the old Chinese system, they had a way of accepting talented people into the ruling class, even though there was an emperor. Elite theorists also argue that it is a weakness in hereditary systems that they do not do this. In a hereditary system, you can have an idiot king and things like that, and this is a problem.

So to the extent that elite theorists advocate for anything, they just say that if you look historically, these systems tend to have a problem of having a too restricted ruling class. So, the ruling class needs to be adaptive enough to absorb talent from the pool of the ruled.

[The Ottoman Empire, which ruled Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia from 1459 until the early 19th century would take promising young Christian men from all conquered regions back to Constantinople to serve in the administration or the Ottoman military. This practice was called the Devshirme. It involved forced conversion to Islam.

Daniel, from Daniel and the Lion’s Den fame, was a talented Jew recruited by the Achaemenid Persian regime under King Darius. Jealousy about this foreigner and non-coreligionist being given an important role in the administration was the reason King Darius was tricked into having to put Daniel in the lion’s den overnight. When Daniel survived this ordeal by divine intervention, Darius then took his revenge on those who had wanted to get rid of Daniel by throwing them and their families to the lions who immediately ate them.]

Lindsay, having falsely attributed a prescriptive element to elite theory, then goes on to claim that those who talk about elite theory are really trying to promote themselves as the new elite:

that the whole purpose of elite theory is to say that we need to be the new elite. That is just not the case at all. Elite theory is a descriptive, quasi-scientific empirical method of looking at the mechanics of power; the logic of power, and then using that as a way of looking at politics and power today. Elite theory can also be used to look at politics and power historically as well, and it does provide all sorts of illuminating insights, but it is a descriptive and analytical tool. It is not prescriptive or proscriptive (what should be done and what should not be done).

Machiavelli’s number one maxim was, “I write as things are, not as they ought to be.” Then we get to the crux of where Lindsay’s video falls flat for me which was when he was talking about America and the American Constitution and the founding fathers and saying, “Well elite theory is anti-American.” To talk about elite theory; that the organized minority rule over the disorganized mass, goes against the ideology of the American experiment as he calls it. Now this gets to the crux of the matter, because if you understand elite theory properly they are making a much stronger claim. They say essentially that democracy is impossible. Those who claim to rule in the name of the people are lying. This a delusion. That is the populist delusion. The idea that the people are actually ruling rather than the ruling class is a lie, and what Mosca, Pareto and Michels do in their books is they show you all of the ways in which the iron law of oligarchy tends to prevail. They show you the ways in which dissident energies are contained by the system. They show you the ways in which capital P power generally is able to outmaneuver the rival castles as I call them, as do the later works, like James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution and Machiavelli’s The Prince and Bertrand de Jouvenel is another person I talk about. Burnham and Jouvenel are not typically thought of as the classical elite theorists, but they built on those ideas later on. There is Sam Francis as well. What they are showing is that any system that claims that it is ruling in the name of the people tends to be lying about that fact.

At the start of The Populist Delusion, I cite a statistic from a Chicago quantitative study across 1779 different laws passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate, which showed zero correlation whatsoever with the wishes of the people. Voters seldom, if ever, get truly what they voted for. What Mosca says is that it is not really accurate to say that the people voted a certain person into power. It is more accurate to say that that person has themselves put into power by their friends and when it comes to big mass democracies, power is concentrated in the media, in newspapers, in the people who are able to fund campaigns, in moneymen, in lobby groups and so on.

So, when people talk about the ruling class in America, we need to look at things like banking groups. Lindsay refers to the Clintons and the Bushes, and people like Klaus Schwab and Davos. But, there is a whole cluster of people constituting a ruling class. There are these individuals in Davos, but there are those also in investment banks and elsewhere; the funders of the Democratic party and the Republican party. They are not “the people.” They are the organized minority. They are the ruling class, and they are the ones who have a habit of getting their own way; groups like the defense contractors and the military-industrial complex. The American people did not want any of these things and yet they got them.

A lot of the things that have happened in American history were not voted for. They were either passed by judicial activism by various different judges, or Supreme Court rulings, or Congress passing these massive pork stuffed bills; a lot of other things, like Woke. All of these things come from organized minorities. It is not always the same organized minority. There can be different ones at different times and places who are getting their way over the disorganized mass. So, what the elite theorists are saying is that the fundamental dream of the American Constitution is just a line. Saying “the will of the people” is no different from a medieval king saying, “I rule in the name of divine right.” It is just what Mosca calls a political formula. “BS BS BS therefore I rule.” This is fundamentally what all those lines are and what democracy is. Democracy is particularly good at hiding this fact. It is particularly good at allowing enough quote unquote “normal” people into the ruling class to renew the ruling class and to give a semblance of upwards mobility.

You could say this is an advantage of democracy. Another advantage of democracy is the fact that so many people believe that when they cast a vote there is a genuine link between that vote and an actual outcome. But, we have seen so many times politicians just openly lie in this country [the UK]. The people voted for Boris Johnson. They voted to take back control of the borders with Brexit. However, Boris Johnson promptly flooded the country with more immigrants than in the entire history of England from 1066 to now. Boris Johnson let in more than six million people in five years, or something ridiculous. [The UK has 68 million people]. Nobody voted for that and yet this is what the ruling class did.

So, Lindsay’s point misses the mark because he has not grasped what elite theory is saying. Elite theory is not saying it is bad to have the desire of the interests of the ruled registered by the ruling class. It is not saying that the dream of democracy is bad per se. Just that it is impossible, due to the mechanics of power, for true mass rule to prevail. Even if people rise up as an inchoate mob, sooner or later a leader must emerge for any progress to be made. Consider the analogy of an army: a rabble of a thousand people against one hundred well-trained men led by a captain. Who wins? The hundred trained men win ten times out of ten. Elite theorists argue that, with the best will in the world, power always consolidates around an organized minority. Robert Michels, who was part of the German Social Democrats—a democratic party opposed to World War I—witnessed this firsthand. As soon as his party gained power, they betrayed their base and supported the war, demonstrating the “iron law of oligarchy” once again.

James Lindsay gave a superficial summary of elite theory and ended with a warning: anyone discussing elite theory should be treated with caution. In his video, he spent most of his time talking about Marxism, Lenin, and Vanguardism. While Marxists recognized the need for an organized minority to rule over the disorganized mass, it is inaccurate to equate Marxist vanguardism with elite theory. In fact, Marxists explicitly rejected elite theory for several reasons.

First, classic Marxism is centered on class struggle, identifying the capitalists as the ruling class because they own the means of production. Marxists critiqued elite theory for being too universal; elite theorists sought a single theory for all systems, while Marxists offered a specific critique of capitalism and the capitalist class. They argued that elite theorists failed to focus on ownership of the means of production, which is central to Marxism. Elite theorists, on the other hand, argued that all systems gravitate towards rule by an organized minority, regardless of ownership.

James Burnham’s “Managerial Revolution” introduced the idea that power could be severed from ownership. In modern capitalism, asset managers or the expert class like BlackRock control vast resources without owning them. Larry Fink does not personally own BlackRock’s trillions in assets; he manages them. The same elite theory principles apply: passive shareholders are ruled by the organized minority of asset managers. Decisions about those assets—such as funding ESG initiatives and the Woke agenda—are made on behalf of shareholders, just as politicians make decisions on behalf of voters. Thus, democracy in practice functions like any other system: a top-down triangle with elites at the top.

Previously, tycoons like Henry Ford or J.P. Morgan held concentrated power as sole owners. Now, when companies go public and many people own shares, power shifts to the managers—the CEO and the managerial class. This is applied elite theory, updated for the twentieth century. James Lindsay overlooks this crucial point.

The second Marxist objection to elite theory is that it draws attention to the power of Marxists themselves when they are in charge. Marxists claim that capitalist rule is bad, but their own rule is good. Elite theory, however, highlights that Marxist regimes are also governed by an organized minority. Communist states often styled themselves as “people’s republics” or “democracies,” claiming to rule in the name of the people. In reality, decisions were made by a small group, just as in any other system. Elite theorists argue that this is not unique to the USSR; it is equally true of liberal democracies like the USA, Britain, or France. They are as totalitarian, top-down, and undemocratic as the USSR. James Lindsay might not be happy with this claim, given his support for liberal democracy, but he knows that much of what we have witnessed concerning wokery and global governance is against the quote unquote “will” of the people from his own work. So, I do not know why he would be against the idea.

Despite ideals set by the US Constitution, it is difficult to argue that the American experiment delivered true democracy for the people, given how often unpopular decisions are made by organized minorities. We have seen this in our own lifetimes. So many things that were retconned after the fact and things that were unpopular at the time, were brought about by an organized minority. Things that were later written up as if they have the support of everybody. (I believe AA has in mind things like school busing and the forced desegregation of schools).

The third Marxist critique, articulated by Antonio Gramsci in his “Prison Notebooks,” is that elite theory does not sufficiently account for ideology. Gramsci and later theorists like Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, Louis Althusser, and Noam Chomsky explored how consent is manufactured in mass democracies through media manipulation and propaganda. (See Edward Bernay’s book “Propaganda.”) While Mosca, Pareto, and Michels mentioned newspapers, they wrote before the rise of mass media, television, and radio. Updating elite theory for the twentieth century requires considering the role of ideology and consent manufacturing.

In summary, it is inaccurate to claim that Marxists accepted elite theory. They explicitly rejected it for the reasons outlined above and never recognized Mosca, Pareto, or Michels as their own. After World War II, the liberal establishment also sought to reject elite theory in the name of liberal democracy, though many critiques failed to address its core arguments. Interestingly, some elements of the “deep state,” such as the Rand Corporation, Hoover Institute, and neoconservatives, adopted aspects of elite theory, as well as Carl Schmidt, as did some leftists at various times. So, it is not as though there was a blanket rejection of elite theory after World War II. People were writing on elite theory in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and even into the ‘90s and basically accepting its basic tenants. This is because elite theory is almost impossible to deny; its principles are as fundamental as the law of supply and demand in economics. The theory is morally neutral and descriptive, not prescriptive. Most elite theorists have not advocated for specific systems based on elite theory. James Lindsay conflates different ideas, such as Curtis Yarvin’s pro-monarchy arguments, which are not rooted in classic elite theory. And neither is Hans-Hermann Hoppe – the German-American economist associated with the Austrian school of economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism and opposition to democracy.

When people discuss elite theory, they are not necessarily advocating for themselves to become the new elite. While some, like Vivek Ramaswamy, have claimed to represent a new elite, following James Burnham’s concept of new elites being cycled in, almost nobody has come to power as a self-identified elite theorist. Tony Blair is one example of a member of the elite who understood elite theory. Possibly Mussolini did. He read the elite theorists. But, this is somewhat incidental because whether they knew elite theory or did not know elite theory, they are still going to be engaging in those ABCs of power. Understanding elite theory is not required to participate in power dynamics, just as one does not need to understand economics to buy a sandwich. Elite theorists simply describe the mechanics of power, which often go unrecognized by those involved.

The concept of the organized minority is not controversial; it is simply how politics works. Mancur Olson, an excellent American economist and political scientist, wrote “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups,” (1965) detailing how organized minorities can prevail in democracies because they are focused on a single issue, while the masses are dispersed and less organized. Throughout history, single-issue groups have often succeeded because the general public is too fragmented to oppose them effectively. This explains why organized minorities tend to get their way in democracies.

In this country, you could say there is currently a Pakistani organized minority who have managed to get their way on all sorts of issues because they are focused on that one thing and everybody else has got hundred different things that they care about. And none of them are organized enough to do anything about it. Another example would be Nigel Farage who really cared about leaving the EU and actually managed to get his way in the long run. And he did it by being part of an organized minority who cared about that one thing. The public is seldom, if ever, all united on one thing, so that is why the organized minority tends to get its own way, especially in a democracy.

For more on this topic, the author recommends his book, “The Populist Delusion.”

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From another video, Parvini states that Socrates represents the end of the Athenian hegemony. Asking questions that challenge the most fundamental Athenian beliefs; demanding justifications for basic ideas, spells the end of the regime. Homer marks the beginning and Socrates and Plato represent what Vico calls the Barbarism of Reflection.

Religion starts out as tribal. For instance, Jews, and no one else, are the Chosen People and God has a special interest in them alone. Barbarian tribes have “asabiya” – a strong group identity and self-belief – a fanaticism and a local religion. The Muslims defeated the Byzantine empire and the Persians through frightening conviction. They were violent and determined. But, once the barbarians have won, if they are too successful, they now have an empire to run. They need an administration. Lions who rule by force and fear are supplanted by foxes who use cunning. Since the empire covers multiple cultures and religions, a new universalist religion arises with a moralizing god who is watching you at all times. Universal religion does not generate the conquering culture. The conquering culture gives rise to the universalist religion. All civilizations become a victim of their successes. They become soft and used to luxury. They become liberal and humanitarian. Towards the end, you get the reign of quantity in the shape of egalitarianism, democracy (maybe), and utilitarianism. Each stage of the cycle generates its own types of people. If you are born in the Winter of civilization, then you cannot have the characteristics of the Spring. Nobody goes from playing their Xbox to becoming Genghis Khan.

Conservatives always lose because either an empire is expanding, or it and its associated civilization is in the process of collapse. The existence of “conservatives” at all, indicate that the end is nigh. Genghis Khan’s barbarians have no intellectuals and they have no conservatives. Neither do they have liberals. Conservatism arises in response to liberalism and liberalism is the inevitable product of soft living, money and luxury. We can be sentimental and soft-hearted. Women and children are especially protected, but we also lose our taste for violence.

Conservatives want to preserve the universalist religion and think this will save us, but they are mistaken. The universalist religion is not what got the civilization started in the first place. It was a necessary feature of a certain stage of civilization and it marks the beginning of the end. The civilization has become so large and complex that it needs fox-like bureaucrats running the show. At a certain point, intellectuals start questioning everything and we slide into decadence with the best people lacking all conviction. We lose our self-belief. Women stop having children as a result of their “emancipation” and access to jobs and education and in an acceleration of decline, softness, femininity, looking out for the lost lamb supplants manly virtues of strength, courage, and ambition.

The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was privately revealed to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, a 17th-century French nun.

Through her mystical encounters with Jesus, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque received a message of divine love that would transform the lives of countless faithful and ignite a worldwide movement of devotion to the Sacred Heart.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus devotion is a powerful reminder of God's boundless love and mercy.

The private revelations granted to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque provide a powerful invitation to all believers to encounter Jesus's compassionate heart and respond with love and devotion.

Below are the promises privately revealed to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque by Jesus:

1) I will give them all the graces necessary in their state of life.

2) I will establish peace in their homes.

3) I will comfort them in all their afflictions.

4) I will be their secure refuge during life, and above all, in death.

5) I will bestow abundant blessings upon all their undertakings.

6) Sinners will find in my Heart the source and infinite ocean of mercy.

7) Lukewarm souls shall become fervent.

8) Fervent souls shall quickly mount to high perfection.

9) I will bless every place in which an image of my Heart is exposed and honored.

10) I will give to priests the gift of touching the most hardened hearts.

11) Those who shall promote this devotion shall have their names written in my Heart.

12) I promise you in the excessive mercy of my Heart that my all-powerful love will grant to all those who receive Holy Communion on the First Fridays in nine consecutive months the grace of final perseverance; they shall not die in my disgrace, nor without receiving their sacraments. My divine Heart shall be their safe refuge in this last moment.

There was a court case that challenged the approval by the Food and Drug Administration of the use of mifepristone, the abortion drug that is widely used as a replacement for surgical abortions.

The Supreme Court ruled that the drug should be available, but the ruling was on very narrow grounds, and was based only on the court’s claim the pro-life physicians who brought to challenge didn’t show they had been harmed personally because it would be others who actually used the drug.

Now there’s going to be a new review of the drug by the FDA itself.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who has advocated for tighter controls over the use of such chemicals, posted on social media that the FDA chief, Marty Makary, “just committed to me to do a full review of the chemical abortion drug’s safety.”

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Makary said, in fact, the FDA “continues to closely monitor the postmarketing safety data on mifepristone for the medical termination of early pregnancy.”

“I am committed to conducting a review of mifepristone and working with the professional career scientists at the agency who review this data,” Makary said. He explained mifepristone remains the subject of “pending litigation,” and the FDA doesn’t comment on such matters, so he cannot provide more details now.

A report in the Washington Examiner said Hawley has been pushing for the FDA to take such action.

“The review comes after Hawley and anti-abortion groups slammed Makary in April after he said he had ‘no plans to take action’ regarding FDA regulations on mifepristone that have allowed healthcare providers to ship the abortifacient to patients in other states, irrespective of state laws prohibiting elective abortions,” the report explained.

Those actions, by abortion businesses who sell and ship drugs even to states which have abortion limits following the Supreme Court’s rejection of the faulty Roe abortion standard that was used for years, have been exploding.

There have been problems because drugs shipped into a state with those limits don’t always comply with that state’s abortion restrictions.

In chemical abortions, mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone, causing the death of the unborn child.

The FDA in 2016 made its rules on the drug lax, allowing its use for chemical abortions and no longer requiring abortionists involved to report complications.

Then Joe Biden removed in-person screening requirements for patients to obtain the medication, allowing healthcare providers to ship mifepristone to patients in other states without a physical consultation.

But the report noted a study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center pointing out that “severe complications” from the abortion drug use is “22 times higher than FDA data indicate.”

When the Supreme Court ruled on the dispute over the lethal drug regarding the physician plaintiffs, several state attorneys general said they would continue the case on their own.

LifeNews Note: This column originally appeared at WorldNetDaily.

The post FDA Review of Abortion Drug Could Save Thousands of Babies From Abortions appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Editor’s note: under the new pontificate of Pope Leo, we will now publish this monthly reminder of the proven, time-tested method to end heresy and the responsibility of every bishop for this, the “greatest act of charity.” Back in 2023, all orthodox Catholics of good will heard the news of His Excellency, Bishop Paprocki’s condemnation of heresy in one of the most prominent American journals…

Source

Remember when Taylor Swift’s last-minute endorsement of Kamala Harris won her the presidential election? Or remember how just calling something “brat” (inspired by singer Charli XCX) was enough to catapult voters into liking and voting for Democrats?

Yeah, I don’t remember that happening either.

That is why it is so maddening and confounding when the Left pulls celebrities out of a hole. Because it almost never works.

Enter the latest tone-deaf Leftist experiment.

Last week, 250 rich, elite celebrities, alongside Planned Parenthood, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times insisting we plebeians forcibly fund Planned Parenthood through our federal tax dollars. How is that for freedom?

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This has all the awareness of the peak cringe COVID-19 Imagine celebrity sing-along.

According to Planned Parenthood’s exclusive Rolling Stone write-up, the celebrity campaign includes the following slogans: “I’m for Planned Parenthood. For Freedom. For Healthcare. For You and Me.”

Here is why all that sloganeering is a load of rubbish.

Planned Parenthood would not be paying tens of thousands of dollars and calling on over 200 celebrities for a New York Times ad, if they weren’t nervous about something. That nervousness stems from the fact that Democrats no longer oversee the federal purse. Rightfully so. The current administration and Congress recognize that Americans cannot sustain giving another $800 million to fund the largest abortion giant in the country.

LifeNews Note: Emily Davis is the vice president of communications at the non-profit organization, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

The post We Don’t Care What a Bunch of Hollywood Liberals Say, Defund Planned Parenthood appeared first on LifeNews.com.

For years, Jake Tapper, the leading newsreader for CNN, has been very unfair to and very biased against Republicans in general, and to President Trump in particular.

Now, in an attempt to restore some of his lost credibility, he has written a new book with Alex Thompson of Axios about the Biden health cover-up.

He apparently is embarrassed and/or feels guilty about all he did in a very partisan way to try to keep a very unhealthy Joe Biden in office as president, but I will give him credit for now admitting to some extent how wrong he was. Of course, he is putting most of the blame on the White House staff.

I will not try to help Tapper in this personal campaign of his by buying his book. However, I have read and heard many things he has said and I have read some of the reviews.

He said: “Alex and I are here to say that conservative media was right and conservative media was correct and that there should be a lot of soul-searching, not just among me, but among the legacy media.”

In an interview with Piers Morgan, Tapper said the cover-up of Biden’s health by the White House, aided by Tapper and most of the national media, was “maybe even worse” than the Watergate scandal. In fact, he used those words three times in the interview.

He added: “It is without question and maybe even worse than Watergate in some ways because Richard Nixon was in control of his faculties when he was not drinking.”

In its story about Tapper’s book, the U.S. edition of the Daily Mail (a British newspaper), led this way: “CNN star Jake Tapper has been branded a ‘fraud’ and a ‘phony’ over his self-righteous rants about former President Joe Biden’s health cover up.”

The story said “many believe the journalist was complicit in Biden’s cover up” and added that early reviews “were quickly overshadowed by allegations that Tapper himself was part of the cover up and is now seemingly trying to rewrite history.”

The national media hated Trump so much that reporters were eager to jump on and exaggerate anything unfavorable to him and to emphasize anything favorable to Biden.

Tapper’s book apparently says that Biden’s inner circle “couldn’t believe how easily (the media) swallowed campaign lies” and how eager reporters were to say something Trump said was false.

Much of the mainstream media was doing everything it could to protect and promote Biden. They would never ask him tough questions or criticize him for not holding press conferences and for not having anything on his schedule.

In the summer of 2023, the New York Times reported that “people who deal with him regularly, including some of his adversaries, say he remains sharp and commanding in private meetings” and “he has at times exerted striking stamina.”

His two young press secretaries said at different times they were having trouble keeping up with him and that videos shown by Fox News and other conservative media were “deep fake.”

Yet, several months before the election, the Biden campaign tried to film a town hall meeting to use on TV ads, but they couldn’t use it because, according to the Tapper book, Biden “couldn’t put together coherent thoughts.” The book also said Hunter Biden was “effectively chief of staff.”

In a survey released on Dec. 30, 2023, Syracuse University’s School of Public Communications said the number of journalists identifying themselves as Republicans fell from 18% in 2002 and 7.1% in 2013 to only 3.4% in 2022.

I received my journalism degree in 1969 and worked as a full-time reporter for the Knoxville Journal, our morning daily newspaper, during my senior year at U.T. in 1968-69. I taught journalism for one year. In those years, newspapers felt it was important to have a separation between the news pages and the editorial pages.

They never would have allowed a reporter to use words like “obviously false” in what were supposed to be news stories unless some official made the accusation. Reporters were supposed to be reporters, not editorial writers, and especially not flunkies for one political party.

Finally, not only did they hide the truth about Biden’s health, but Tapper and the national media also pushed the story that Russia had aided the 2016 Trump campaign. After paying 18 very anti-Trump lawyers for two years and spending many millions of taxpayer dollars, they found no proof at all of this Russian hoax.

Reprinted with permission from Knoxville Focus.

Last week, the Trump administration announced the streamlining of access to illegally seized personal data from unsuspecting Americans, thereby making warrantless domestic spying easier for the spies.

Here is the backstory.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to privacy. Like other amendments in the Bill of Rights, it doesn’t create the right; it limits government interference with it. President Joe Biden often misquoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia suggesting that Justice Scalia believed that the Bill of Rights creates rights. As Justice Scalia wrote, referring to the right to keep and bear arms but reflecting his view on the origins of all personal liberty, the Bill of Rights secures rights; it doesn’t create them. It secures preexisting rights from interference by the government.

Those who drafted the Bill of Rights recognized that human rights are pre-political. They preceded the existence of the government. They come from our humanity, and in the case of privacy, they are reinforced by our ownership or legal occupancy of property.

The idea that rights come from our humanity is Natural Law theory, which was first articulated by Aristotle in 360 B.C. The natural law teaches that there are aspects of human existence and thus areas of human behavior that are not subject to the government. Aristotle’s views would later be refined by Cicero, codified by St. Thomas Aquinas, explained by John Locke, and woven into Anglo-American jurisprudence by British jurists and American revolutionaries and constitutional framers.

Thus, our rights to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, to worship or not, to associate or not, to defend ourselves from crazies and tyrants, to own property, and to be left alone are all hard-wired into our human nature by God, the uncaused cause. Nature is the means through which God passes along His gifts to us. We come about by a biological act of nature, every step of which was ordained by God.

His greatest gift to us is life, and He tied that gift to free will. Just as He is perfectly free, so are we.

In exercising our free wills, we employ rights. Rights are claims against the whole world. They don’t require approval of a government or neighbors or colleagues. The same human rights exist in everyone no matter their place of birth, and each person exercises them as she or he sees fit. The government should only come into the picture when someone violates another’s natural rights. So, if someone builds a house in your backyard, you can knock it down and expel the builders or you can ask the government to do so.

Suppose the builders haven’t consented to the existence of the government? That does not absolve them. Though government is only moral and legal in a society in which all persons have consented to it — this is Thomas Jefferson’s “consent of the governed” argument in the Declaration of Independence — the poignant exception to actual consent is the use of government to remedy a violation of natural rights.

Professor Murray Rothbard examined all this under his non-aggression principle (NAP): Initiating or threatening force or deception against a person or his rights is always morally illicit. This applies to all aggression, even — and especially — from the government. The folks building a house in your backyard have either used force or deception to get there. Both violate your natural rights and the NAP.

Now, back to the Fourth Amendment and privacy. In a famous dissent in 1928, which two generations later became the law of the land, the late Justice Louis Brandeis argued that government surveillance constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment and thus, per the express language of the amendment, cannot be conducted by the government without a warrant issued by a judge. He famously called privacy the right most valued by civilized persons and described it as “the right to be let alone.”

Today, this is the most violated of personal rights; not by judges signing search warrants for surveillance, but by government officials — local, state and federal — ignoring and evading the natural right to privacy and pretending that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to them. The linchpin of the amendment is the judicial determination of the existence of probable cause — meaning that it is more likely than not that a crime has been committed, and that there is evidence of that crime in the place to be searched and in the things to be seized.

Today, the feds, and this has been picked up and mimicked by local and state police, have told themselves that so long as they are not looking for evidence of crimes, they needn’t follow the Fourth Amendment.

Today, the government rarely bothers to obtain a search warrant for surveillance because it is cumbersome to do so and because it is so easy to surveil folks on a massive scale without one.

Today, the National Security Agency — America’s 60,000-person strong domestic spying apparatus — captures every keystroke on every desktop and mobile device, and every conversation on every landline and mobile device, and all data transmitted into, out of or within the United States.

Moreover, you’d be hard-pressed to find a geographic area that is not covered by police using hardware that tracks the movement and use of mobile phones. When Edward Snowden passed on to journalists the facts of massive warrantless spying in the Bush and Obama administrations, he had the journalists put their mobile devices where his was — in his refrigerator in his hotel room, as anywhere else would have alerted his former colleagues of their collective whereabouts.

The government spends hundreds of billions of dollars annually just to watch and follow us. Who authorized this? Why do we tolerate it? Whatever the answers to these questions, warrantless spying on Americans just got a lot worse.

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
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