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The graph below provides a clearer understanding of the US fiscal deficit. First, focus on the red line below, graphing the ratio of federal debt to GDP. Note that it is at the same level today as it was in […]

The post The Deficit Crisis Is Really A Recession Problem appeared first on RIA.

Marshall quickly deleted pre-conclave episode critical of Leo XIV…

Taylor Marshall’s About-Face on Robert Prevost:
From Worst-Choice Candidate to Hope for the Church?

Imagine you’re a ‘trusted Catholic influencer’ with a huge following and you publish a video about who in your opinion would be among the worst possible candidates for Pope.

For Dr. Taylor Marshall that distinction belonged to ‘Cardinal’ Pietro Parolin, but since his chances had tanked in the days just before the 2025 conclave due to alleged involvement in a financial scandal, among other things, Marshall wasn’t terribly worried about him anymore. The next in line for worst candidate in his estimation was — wait for it — ‘Cardinal’ Robert Francis Prevost.… READ MORE

The SpaceX CEO said he would decommission the only US spacecraft certified to fly American astronauts, before changing his mind hours later

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has claimed that his company “will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” a move that would effectively paralyze the US space program. Musk made the claim after US President Donald Trump threatened to terminate all government subsidies and contracts with the billionaire’s firms.

Trump and Musk engaged in a dramatic exchange on social media on Thursday over the US president’s “Big and Beautiful” federal tax and spending bill, which the former White House government efficiency czar had blasted as a “pork-filled, disgusting abomination” that would push the US into “debt slavery.”

“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump stated on Truth Social, arguing that the only reason the Tesla CEO “went CRAZY” about the legislation was because it would cut tax credits for purchasers of his electric vehicles.

“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk responded in a post on X just minutes later.

In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately pic.twitter.com/NG9sijjkgW

Hours later, the billionaire appeared to walk back the threat, after one X user urged Musk to “cool off and take a step back for a couple days,” noting that both he and Trump were “better than this.”

“Good advice. Ok, we won’t decommission Dragon,” Musk replied in a follow-up post. However, unlike his original statement, the reversal was not visible on his public timeline.

Good advice.

Ok, we won’t decommission Dragon.

It remains unclear whether Musk seriously intended to halt operations of the spacecraft, a move that would significantly disrupt the US space program.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule is the only US spacecraft currently certified and capable of sending American astronauts to space. NASA has relied on it to deliver cargo and crew to the International Space Station since 2020, following a long hiatus after the retirement of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.

Boeing’s competing Starliner project suffered years of delays and technical malfunctions. Its first crewed flight last June – originally scheduled for 2017 – ended with two NASA astronauts stranded aboard the ISS, after the spacecraft was deemed unsafe for return. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams safely returned to Earth only in March, aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, after Trump urged Musk to help rescue the duo, while criticizing his predecessor Joe Biden for leaving them “stranded.”

Earlier this year, NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos extended their seat-sharing agreement, which allows Americans to travel to the ISS aboard Soyuz spacecraft, through 2027.

READ MORE: Musk agrees ‘Trump should be impeached’

SpaceX has secured more than $20 billion in contracts from NASA, the US Air Force, and other government agencies since 2008, making it one of the country’s largest federal contractors. Trump has yet to clarify whether the US government will cancel any contracts with Musk and his companies.

Editors’ Note: This is Part II of a two-part essay on Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.

Rauch presents his proposal of his “Gospel of Compromise,” we have noted, as a recovery of a “thick Christianity,” as opposed to the “sharp,” that is, conservatively accented version. He regards his favored version as “thick” because he thinks it offers a way of reconciling human and divine law, a way of seeing liberalism’s “permanent process of public negotiation” as a core value of Christianity. It is in this context that Rauch offers his surprising proposal, namely that the teachings of the LDS Church offer the most perfect specimen of the “thick theology” he is looking for.  

The “thick” theology that thrilled Rauch comes down essentially to placing “good-faith negotiation at the very center of the Constitution’s meaning.” This approach, Rauch argues, goes far beyond mere mechanical difference-splitting to foster a “creative, generative, pro-social endeavor,” one allows the parties to develop “peaceful habits of collaboration, and feelings of goodwill and fellowship.” At the same time, Rauch observes, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues to make rigorous demands on the personal lives of its members, thus “combining high personal investment with high communal returns.” Thus, although Rauch recognizes that Latter-day Saints continue to affirm a teaching on homosexuality that is “repugnant and harmful,” as well as a view of gender roles that is “discriminatory and archaic,” he finds the church’s ideas about “pluralism” “compelling.”

Rauch’s proposal of an LDS–liberal alliance does not address only immediate and practical concerns. The author ventures briefly but suggestively into a properly theological engagement with LDS beliefs. This engagement centers on the idea of “agency,” which he rightly understands to be a central idea of LDS theology and anthropology. Rauch highlights the distinctive interpretation of Adam’s fall, certainly a very unorthodox or heretical doctrine from the standpoint of the mainstream Augustinian tradition of Western Christianity, namely, that Adam’s “transgression” was gloriously good news. Rauch cites LDS scholars Terryl and Fiona Givens: “Instead of deploring Eve’s and Adam’s transgression, one might find in it a cause for rejoicing.” 

This is not the place for a full or even adequate account of LDS doctrine, which is surely no more free of paradox and mystery (how can it be good to transgress God’s law?) than the traditional Augustinian view.  But Rauch is certainly right that there is something distinctive in the foundations of LDS belief that grounds the goodness of human choice and practical action in an understanding of ultimate reality and a “great plan of happiness” laid down before the foundation of the world. Rauch writes that, for the Latter-day Saints, “[l]ife is not a process of moral repair or atonement under the oppressive curse of original sin; it is a process of moral development under the tutelage of experience.”  

To be sure, Rauch is mistaken to sever “moral repair” from “moral development,” and his argument approaches self-refutation when he extends it to claim that, for the LDS, “we cannot develop morally unless we confront all kinds of choices.” From this he thinks there is “but a short step to Madisonian pluralism.” If what Rauch calls Madisonian pluralism is equivalent to the view that a political community can somehow be morally neutral and boundlessly pluralist, yet based on materialistic science, then this small step is in fact a gigantic leap across an unseen abyss. Let us grant, all the same, that Rauch has put his finger on a distinctive feature of LDS belief that is relevant to the question of Christianity and liberalism.

Rauch skillfully, though in the end preposterously, appeals to Latter-day Saints with the heady possibility that they might provide the model of a new interpretation of Christianity centered on those teachings or dispositions he elevates as truly Christian (as well as “Madisonian”): the disposition to forgive and to have no fear of secularism, and the readiness to “negotiate” all the way down to our very understanding of the human good. The effectual truth of this appeal to his truncated version of LDS belief is that the acceptance of political exile and complacency in negotiation on liberal terms will continue to rise to ascendancy over those substantive LDS beliefs that he regards as “discriminatory and archaic.” This is the hand of friendship that Jonathan Rauch has extended, no doubt in all sincerity, to American members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Certainly it does more credit to the obliging good will of his LDS audience than to their intellectual discretion that not a few seem inclined to accept the invitation, or, at least, to praise the gesture.

Rauch is not wrong to place “agency” at the heart of LDS belief.  But he distorts it beyond recognition by reducing this rich concept, deeply embedded in a moral and cosmological vision, to the idea that the best social framework for the development of our humanity is one with the least encumbrance of moral authority, that more “choice” is always better, and, finally that the act of choosing can be considered the essence of human meaning, without reference to the reality of good and evil that is thought to guide our choices. Rauch does not even pause to consider the question whether the ideal of limitless choice is in any way practicable, or even thinkable as an ethical principle. His understanding of “agency” is neither a remotely adequate phenomenology of human choice nor a serious rendering of LDS belief. In fact, LDS leaders have generally qualified the word “agency” with the word “moral,” precisely to avoid the nonsensical proposition that more freedom, a freedom divorced from moral accountability, is always better.  

LDS agency is very clearly a moral and lawful agency, an understanding of active human choice as central to man’s eternal vocation, but emphatically within a divine plan and a morally meaningful cosmos. Inconveniently for Rauch, this divine plan affirms the centrality of the procreative family. This is the great irony in Rauch’s attempt to cement a deep alliance with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in forging a liberal future unimpeded by any enduring moral contents that cannot be generated from within the purely scientific-constitutional framework that he proposes: Latter-day Saints are arguably the most fundamentally irreconcilable of all religious groupings to his post-Obergefell liberal settlement. Latter-day Saints believe, not only that the highest meaning of marriage is both natural (heterosexual) and sacramental, but also, and perhaps uniquely, that the marriage between man and woman is eternal and grounded in the eternal significance of sexual difference and complementarity. 

More generally, the LDS concept of agency is inseparable from a belief in eternal standards of righteousness and in a rigorously normative “plan of salvation.” That said, Rauch is not wrong to point to a distinct break in LDS teachings with the anthropology of creedal Christianity. The second of our thirteen “Articles of Faith” (formulated by Joseph Smith in response to a Chicago newspaper reporter) is as plain as can be about the rupture with all things Augustinian: “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.” Thus, the LDS idea of “agency” is bound up with a Christian concept of “sin,” or the recognition of the orientation of human freedom by permanent principles of right and wrong, good and evil. 

To be clear, this is not to say that the LDS understanding of human freedom falls into the category of a Pelagian reliance on works as opposed to grace. The Third Article of Faith makes clear the dependence of human agency on divine redemption: “We believe that, through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.” Agency, for Latter-day Saints, is inseparable from the “infinite atonement” effected by the Savior’s ultimate sacrifice.

A Time for Compromise?

It is precisely in order to guard against the potential antinomian tendencies of the concept of “agency” when elevated to the status of a leading principle that LDS authorities routinely favor the expression “moral agency” to indicate the profound difference with a purely secular and liberal understanding of individual freedom. Rauch’s appropriation of the LDS term “agency” is thus tendentious at best. This is not to deny that Rauch’s spin on agency has found some resonance among Latter-day Saints eager to make peace with mainstream liberalism. This readiness to entertain Rauch’s liberal politics of negotiation must be understood against the background of recent LDS experience in the political realm. Some church leaders were apparently surprised by the negative publicity and violent acts of discrimination and anti-religious hatred that resulted from its institutional support in 2008 for California’s Proposition 8 against homosexual marriage. It might be argued as well that some LDS church members have been insufficiently appreciative of the positive cultural and evangelical effects of the church’s alliance in this cause with Roman Catholics and others committed to the defense of marriage. The Church’s outward-facing posture since the struggle in California and the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell has been to look for opportunities to make peace with advocates of homosexual rights and to participate in the fashioning of legislative compromises.  

The trade-offs of these compromises and their long-term effects are certainly debatable, but it is important to note that the church has made very clear in the case of every political compromise that no changes are intended to its fundamental moral and religious doctrines. The church’s position has clearly been that the religious meaning of “marriage” has not changed, even though we must learn the uses of political pragmatism, so it is argued, in order to secure the protection of our religious freedom. To be sure, the path of pragmatism can prove to be a slippery slope, and this slipperiness appears in the very rhetoric that seems necessary to justify compromise.  

Rather than simply acknowledging the necessity to accommodate political circumstances unfavorable to certain basic teachings of the church, defenders of compromise almost irresistibly slip into a vocabulary of “fairness” and “respect” that all but explicitly concedes moral equivalence to opinions fundamentally opposed to what are held to be sacred truths. In a democratic system, it is hard to address pragmatic political necessities without adopting language that goes well beyond the strictly pragmatic. The “respect” inherent in the process of coming to terms with a political rival is almost irresistibly defended, in the relativistic language of equal respect for all opinions (which of course does not follow from respect for persons as such). It is hard to make a democratic bargain on the basis of a rhetoric that says: “You are profoundly and disastrously wrong, but I see for now that your view must to some degree prevail.”  

Even more concerning is the apparently irresistible temptation to cover political necessity with the Christian language of love: I compromise with you because I have been commanded to love you. Here the bond between the first part of the Great Commandment, to love God absolutely, is at risk of being absorbed by the second part, the love of fellow human beings. The Christian commitment to “peacemaking” comes perilously close to endorsing not only the fundamental dignity of all God’s children, but even the ideological self-understanding of those with whom we find that we must compromise. Christian love thus risks losing its vertical orientation, its moral and religious substance, as it embraces the rhetoric inherent in democratic political compromise. It is one thing to submit obediently to a post-Obergefell political and legal regime; it is another step, a fateful one, to deny that at some fundamental level the new regime is based on a mistaken view of reality, not to say on a lie, and thus can only have disastrous consequences in the long term. If the metaphysical demand for human autonomy that underlies the radical redefinition of marriage is wrong, even evil, then it would be wrong to “respect” it, even when we must accommodate it legally and politically.

It is precisely the audacity of the secular liberal project, the imprudence of a liberalism that declares its independence from all traditional and religious morality, that is apparently inaudible to Jonathan Rauch and those who celebrate his proposed “Christian”–liberal alliance. The secular prophets of a pure and autonomous liberalism simply assume as true the false liberal proposition that opinions may be regarded as equally worthy of “respect,” and thus as equally subject to negotiation and compromise, regardless of their bearing on the realities of human nature and the human condition. When truth is defined in terms of democratic negotiation, then propositions of the public good that appeal to natural or divine truths not subject to human mastery are disqualified in principle. Democratic process is no longer the negotiation of serious, substantive truth-claims, but itself advanced as a substitute for truth. In Rauch’s view of liberalism, “love” no longer implies concern for the natural happiness or the eternal soul of one’s neighbor, but equal “respect” for all opinions, lifestyles, and identities.

But again, although some LDS advocates of “Fairness for All” have shown a weakness for rhetoric that tends to slip toward progressive relativism, the substance of LDS teaching is very clearly on the side of permanent moral and anthropological truths, especially where sexuality and procreation are concerned. Rauch and others who hopefully await the LDS church’s renegotiating of the religious understanding of marriage to include a same-sex version will be disappointed. The church’s authoritative (and not at all innovative) 1995 statement on the matter, its Proclamation to the World on the Family, clearly states: “We [the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles] warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.” This bold and clear proclamation, which church leaders have emphatically endorsed throughout the recent period of political pragmatism, is hardly compatible with the rhetoric of “equal respect” for all politically powerful viewpoints. 

Moral Agency and Sustainable Liberalism

More characteristic of LDS social teaching addressed to the faithful as religious teaching (as opposed to pragmatic accommodation) is an official General Conference address by Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on “Sustainable Societies” (2020). The question of sustainability necessarily points beyond the immediate necessities of negotiation and compromise to the deeper problem of the enduring parameters of human nature and thus to the ineluctable preconditions of a healthy society. Christofferson plainly states: “when people turn from a sense of accountability to God and begin to trust instead in the ‘arm of flesh,’ disaster lurks. Trusting in the arm of flesh is to ignore the divine Author of human rights and human dignity and to give highest priority to riches, power, and the praise of the world (while often mocking and persecuting those who follow a different standard).” 

He continues:

A society . . . in which individual consent is the only constraint on sexual activity is a society in decay . . . Follow-on consequences that work against sustainability of a healthy society include growing numbers of children raised in poverty and without the positive influence of fathers, sometimes through multiple generations; women bearing alone what should be shared responsibilities; and seriously deficient education as schools, like other institutions, are tasked to compensate for failure in the home.

These reflections and authoritative teachings are in a register wholly unlike the view of religion at work in Rauch’s search for a religion that might provide a moral backstop for his autonomous liberalism. The point is not so much that Christofferson gives answers to social and political problems that are different from Rauch’s. What we cannot fail to notice is that he asks questions that Rauch (and his temporarily enthralled LDS audience) have altogether forgotten to ask. Beginning from a pseudo-Madisonian perspective of individual rights as the most fundamental concept of political theory, Rauch is not even aware of the problem of sustainability, or, therefore, of the question of the human good or of the common good of the political body. 

We may choose, or not, like Rauch, to consider all rights as, at bottom, assertions of our autonomous humanity and thus ultimately matters of social and political compromise, but the natural conditions of happiness and sustainability, including the essential role of the natural reproductive family, will not be subject to our negotiation. Rauch would do well to consult, on the question of compromise and its limits, a classic address by Elder Dallin Oaks:

Our tolerance and respect for others and their beliefs does not cause us to abandon our commitment to the truths we understand and the covenants we have made. . . .  We are cast as combatants in the war between truth and error.  There is no middle ground.  We must stand up for truth, even while we practice tolerance and respect for beliefs and ideas different from our own and for the people who hold them.

If moral principle is not only an accident of religious belief but grounded in the truth of human nature and the human vocation, it follows that any peace based on Rauch’s violent stretching of the LDS theology of “agency” must be ill-founded and by nature unsustainable. Without undertaking a presentation of this theology, let me conclude with a suggestion of its real value and bearing on our present political circumstances, that is, on the present stage of the crisis of liberalism. If there is a contemporary political lesson to be drawn from the LDS idea of the eternal significance of moral agency, this insight would not at all be aligned with Rauch’s fundamentally secular and ostensibly neutral and pseudo-scientific liberalism.  

Instead, one might find in a certain “moral agency” the outlines of a view of humanity and eternity that would resonate with a kind of conservative liberalism, a practical yet deeply moral liberalism equipped to avoid the pitfalls of integralism, both left and right. The LDS understanding of moral agency is in the spirit of Tocqueville’s praise of “liberty under God and the laws”; it weaves together eternal law and personal choice in a practically meaningful way that resonates at the deepest, ontological level. The touchstone of this moral agency is neither the supposedly pre-modern attitude of “heteronomy,” nor the chimera of liberal “autonomy,” but the reality of productive, creative action under a personal God and Savior within an orderly and meaningful cosmos.  

Image by Seadog81 and licensed via Adobe Stock.

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.