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The following paragraph, courtesy of Amazon, reviews the book Death of the Dollar by William Rickenbacker.

Death of the Dollar by William F. Rickenbacker is a critical examination of the economic policies and monetary mismanagement that the author argues are eroding the value of the U.S. dollar and threatening financial stability. Rickenbacker contends that the actions of money managers, including excessive government spending, inflationary policies, and the detachment of the dollar from the gold standard, are systematically devaluing the currency. The book warns of an impending monetary disaster, highlighting how these policies disproportionately harm everyday citizens who rely on the dollar’s stability for savings and investments. Through a blend of economic analysis and historical context, Rickenbacker underscores the dangers of unchecked financial intervention and the potential for a collapse of the dollar’s purchasing power.

Plenty of books, articles, and social media posts herald the same grim forecast as Rickenbacker. For the most part, they rely on similar reasoning. Essentially, lax monetary policy and gross fiscal spending, both deemed to be inflationary, will result in dollar devaluation and ultimately the death of the dollar.

The difference between Rickenbacker’s book and other dollar demise forecasts is that  Death of the Dollar was written in 1968! Fifty-seven years later, despite, or possibly because of Rickenbacker’s justifications, the dollar is still the world's reserve currency, and no other sovereign currency, cryptocurrency, or precious metal will replace it anytime soon.

Given the topic's importance and the gross misinformation spread about the dollar’s imminent demise, we review Rickenbacker’s thesis to highlight that today’s warnings have been around for decades and why the odds of them coming to fruition this time are very low, as they were decades ago.

Removal Of The Gold Standard

Rickenbacker’s book was published in 1968, three years before President Nixon closed the gold window, essentially making the dollar a fiat currency. While his book accurately predicted that ground-shaking event, it did not correctly anticipate its impact.

He reasoned that without gold regulating the supply of dollars, unchecked monetary policy would result in reckless “money printing.”

He was correct that the Fed would have more flexibility in managing the money supply. Furthermore, with this added power, we have seen reckless behavior, as he theorized. However, Rickenbacker erred on the money printing allegation.

The Fed doesn’t print money. All money is lent into creation by banks. The Fed prints bank reserves, which allow banks to make loans, i.e., print money, if they choose. More importantly, even if the money supply increases due to Fed incentives to lend, it's unclear whether such activity is good or bad for the economy and how it impacts inflation and ultimately the dollar’s value. That is a function of the productivity of debt.

Simply, productive debt drives economic growth, increases the nation's prosperity, and reduces deficits as a percentage of economic activity. Unproductive debt detracts from economic growth and prosperity and worsens deficits. Weaker growth from unproductive debt tends to be disinflationary.

As judged by an increasing debt-to-GDP ratio, aggregate debt has been unproductive, leading to lower inflation growth rates. Thus, if the concern is that “money printing” would lead to inflation, it may lead to disinflation.

Fed Flexibility

In one respect, Rickenbacker correctly said that giving the Fed more flexibility was a curse. Easy money policy has led to periods of gross speculation and crises, such as in 2008.

However, without the gold shackles, the Fed has incredible power to manage economic crises and avoid a currency collapse. In fact, despite the 2008 crisis having roots in the US mortgage market and the prospect of the collapse of the US banking system, the world flocked to dollars during the crisis, as shown below.  

Most crises have been accompanied by a stronger dollar, proving that the dollar is the port in the storm foreign investors seek when economic confidence is lacking, and liquidity is paramount.

Excessive Government Spending

The book criticizes massive federal expenditures, particularly on social programs and military efforts, which create budget deficits, drive up inflation, and ultimately devalue the dollar. The book was written while Lyndon Johnson spent heavily on the Vietnam War and domestic programs. Again, Rickenbacker was correct in worrying about inflation, a big problem throughout the 1970s.

Despite ever-increasing government spending and an increasing debt-to-GDP ratio, the globalization of trade has expanded rapidly since his book was published. With it, foreigners' demand for dollars has been growing, and in mirror fashion, so is their need to invest the dollars, which helps us fund our deficits.

Even today, with “runaway” deficits making headlines daily, the dollar remains in the upper range of the last 35 years.

Dollar Devaluation In Context

Rickenbacker believed that easy money Federal Reserve policies, such as low interest rates and expanding the money supply, would fuel inflation that would erode the dollar’s purchasing power. He was right, as evidenced by comparing what a dollar buys today versus yesteryear. However, the argument provides little context.

For instance, in the 1950s, a hamburger (15 cents), fries (10 cents), and a Coke (10 cents) at McDonald's cost less than 50 cents. Today, the same meal could run nearly $10.

Although decades of inflation have drastically eroded the dollar's value, our standard of living has risen appreciably. To wit, the purchasing power of one dollar in 1947 has eroded to 7 cents. However, as shown below, inflation-adjusted incomes have risen fivefold since 1947. The dollar buys less, but our incomes buy more!

Trade and Balance of Payments Deficits

Rickenbacker points to persistent U.S. trade deficits and dollar outflows abroad, which weaken the currency’s global standing. He is correct that trade deficits have steadily increased, resulting in more dollars flowing abroad. However, more dollar outflows are a result of more demand for dollars. Furthermore, those dollars ultimately return to the US through investments and loans to the government and corporations. The larger the global economy, the greater the need for dollars, and the more dollars that need to be invested in the US economy.

Rickenbacker Was Right

The author’s concerns are valid and, in many cases, have proven true. However, the victim has not been the dollar. The victims are larger deficits, lower productivity growth, hollowing out of manufacturing, and a growing wealth divide, to name a few.

While these are big problems, they do not necessarily threaten the dollar's status. As we wrote in Four Reasons The Dollar Is Here To Stay:

The pundits will be right someday. The dollar’s death as the reserve currency will come, and some other nation’s currency, cryptocurrency, gold, shells, or something else will take its place. However, that day is not coming anytime soon. The four reasons we describe in the article leave the world with no alternative.

While China is rapidly growing its economy and global trade footprint, it lacks the rule of law and liquid capital markets to sustain a global currency. It’s difficult to see how a communist country can overcome those challenges.

The Euro is the most viable competitor. They have the rule of law, but their capital markets are not nearly liquid enough to facilitate global trade. They also lack the military might to force the usage of the Euro. Let us also remember its finances are in equally bad or even worse shape than the U.S. There is no reason to suspect the euro could overtake the dollar.

Bitcoin? Forget about it! The government will never relinquish its control over the currency because, with that, they lose control of the nation.

Summary

Had Rickenbacker’s Death of the Dollar book solely focused on monetary and fiscal imprudence and its negative implications for the country, he would have been proven a seer. Unfortunately, he was wrong to insist that the dollar would lose its status as the world’s reserve currency.

The graph below, courtesy of the Federal Reserve, shows how the dollar's usage in global transactions has been stable for the last two decades. The index calculation, as detailed at the bottom of the graphic, is based on the primary uses of currencies.

The post Death Of The Dollar: An Eternal Tale appeared first on RIA.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The response to her social media was phenomenal but it also elicited a response from some euthanasia lobby leaders who accused Sheren of fear mongering and not getting her facts straight.

Sheren responded with a link to a Global news story from February 16, 2023 reporting on the Canadian government Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying (AMAD) released a report calling for the expansion of euthanasia (MAiD) to include mature minors.

I responded to the February 15, 2023 (AMAD) report by stating:

The report by the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying (AMAD) was tabled in the House of Commons on February 15, 2023 calling for a drastic expansion of euthanasia (MAiD) in Canada. Among the recommendations, the report recommended that euthanasia be expanded to include children "mature minors."

Recommendation 19 in the report stated:

This means that parents or guardians may or may not be consulted, in the euthanasia death of a child that is deemed to have decision-making capacity.

To understand Recommendation 19 better we need to go back to the draft policy developed by the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto on euthanasia for "mature minors" that was published as a report in the Journal of Medical Ethics in September 2018.

• Article: Sick Kids Hospital Toronto will euthanize children with or without parental consent (Link).

If you have not yet read the recent First Things essay by the popular writer Freya India, The Right Has Forgotten Feeling, you should. 

Twenty-four-year-old India grew up in the dominant, secular culture of the UK without so much as a nominal religious bulwark against its amoral norms. Her female peers, she maintains, desperately need to know the right-coded truths that she now accepts: casual sex is a bad deal for women; religion organized around the traditional family is a good one.  

But according to India, the right’s attempts to persuade young women of these realities by way of intellectual argument are mostly futile and sometimes destructive. She counsels those who want to help girls eschew today’s amoral norms in favor of something better to embrace and fulfill—not ignore or condemn—the emotional and spiritual needs that are leading young women to uncritically embrace the secular left’s now-hegemonic lies in the first place. “The left,” India observes, “hears [young women’s] pain.” It “often has the wrong answers,” but “at least it listens.”  

I confess that I was skeptical when first saw India’s piece, with its provocative thesis of a title, pop up in my Substack feed. After all, it is one of my foundational contentions that women should eschew both mainstream feminism and “trad” antifeminism precisely because, far from forgetting feeling, each has essentially infantilized and patronized women by elevating emotion and identity to the vaunted place that we should reserve for truth and virtue.  

But India has convinced me that for all my harping on reality principles, I have largely failed to notice the only reality that matters here: the young women who most need to imbibe traditional values are constitutionally unable to do so. They cannot keep emotion in perspective, because they have no perspective. And they are not rejecting truth or virtue. A person cannot reject what she’s never seen, learned, or heard about.  

The hollow remains of an already amoral, leftist culture are all that today’s young women know. There is nothing left to push back on in youthful rebellion, and nothing left to embrace on the other side. India writes: 

Few try to understand what young women might be searching for in therapy culture, finding in liberal feminism, hearing from the left—what needs are being met that aren’t met elsewhere. Don’t we see that this world offers them no other sanctuary? Don’t we see that many young women haven’t “abandoned” faith, haven’t turned their backs on the sacred, but were born into a world already desecrated? That they haven’t forgotten their worth but were never taught it?  

India suggests a remedy: that we talk about and argue from feelings rather than statistics, research, and texts. Talk about, for example, “the wound of growing up between two homes” and “help young women see that there are things in this life that should be held sacred, and that includes young women themselves.” And maybe she’s right about how we should relate to today’s twenty-something women. Maybe we should create the equivalent of a Federalist Society for therapists to attract more people with conservative values to psychological counseling. Maybe we should flood the social media zone with as many charismatic traditionalist influencers as we can and see who catches on. For India’s peers, it might be too late for anything else; and these tactics might do some good, as far as they go. 

We have much more opportunity to steep the next generation of girls, the ones in preschool and grade school today, in truth, goodness, beauty, and wisdom before the culture lays sole claim on their attention.  We don’t want them to grow up amid this same desecration, such that we’re once again trying to find balm for their broken souls a decade from now. We don’t want to be always on the defensive, helping individuals heal from a lifetime of dashed hopes and nonexistent morals by out-emoting the left (which we’ll never be able to do). We want to prevent the souls of the next generation from being broken in the first place, even as they encounter this broken world.  

We may not know exactly how, but we can start by trying to fill the souls of today’s girls with worthy art, specifically, the kinds of great stories that address female formation in ways that subtly, and therefore deeply, steep girls in truth and virtue.  

The Power of Great Stories 

I am thirty-seven years old. I grew up in the dominant, secular culture of the US in the Sex and the City era. Things then were about as morally desecrated—though not as inhumanly pornified—as they are now.   

When I have considered why I was invulnerable to the mainstream feminist ideas about work, sex, family, and more while so many of my equally (and more) intelligent peers were felled by them, I have thought mostly of my dad. A Catholic university professor and nonpartisan public intellectual, he has made a career of dispelling popular myths and replacing them with hard truths. At his hands, as a tween and a teen, I received lasting inoculation against ideological illogic. So, when I breathed in the culture’s regnant feminism with everyone else—first the popular kind, as a girl coming of age among mainstream peers, and then the academic iteration, as an undergraduate and graduate student in the humanities—I was already inured to its flaws because I was disposed to question supposedly incontrovertible dogma.  

But India’s essay made me see that credit for my own invulnerability to the dominant culture around women’s issues goes not to my dad, but to my mom. Long before I was intellectually capable of his reason, I was emotionally and spiritually formed by her stories. Certainly, the books and ideas my dad provided taught me, on an intellectual level, how marriage and family formation benefit society. But more immediately important to me when I was India’s age was that, thanks to the books and films my mom introduced, I knew how falling in the kind of love that is likely to result in a happy, lasting marriage should (and shouldn’t) feel.  

This is the emotional and spiritual formation that today’s right needs to encourage for today’s young women. Arguments will not reach people who are fundamentally unaware that there is anything left to argue about. We need to seize any opportunity to plant the emotional and spiritual seeds that could help girls to see and long for a world before—and maybe after—these ruins.  

Here, in order of first publication or release, are five formational (sets of) stories that might help, or at least, serve as a starting point. 

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Eight Cousins (1875), and Rose in Bloom (1876): For men and women alike (I read Little Women to my sons, too), self-mastery and self-sacrifice constitute responsible maturation, not intolerable oppression. Unfettered freedom is empty. Seek in potential romantic partners the steady friendship and loyal devotion that make a good husband, not the fickle infatuation that often leads to a broken heart. (The 1994 Little Women movie captures the book well, but there’s no substitute for reading it, along with the other two.) 

L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Anne of Avonlea (1909): Imagination and passion are best deployed not to fantasize about a dream world that doesn’t exist, but to appreciate and improve the corner of the actual world that you inhabit. Perhaps more relevant than ever today: don’t be so intent on hooking some unattainable Prince Charming who checks all your predetermined requirements (or on living exactly the life that you conjured for yourself without the compromises that inevitably attend coupledom) that you overlook a more suitable match. (The 1987 miniseries is as good as or better than the books). 

Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968): True love does not set you free; it does the opposite. The idea of love and sex as separate from commitment and responsibility is now a technical possibility, but it is nevertheless an eternal lie. Real love looks outward, to a life filled with as much chosen obligation to others as a given couple can handle.  

American Girl’s original Felicity, Kirsten, Addy, Samantha, and Molly story sets (1986-1994): The timeless qualities of strength, bravery, and responsibility are for girls, too. The self-expression that we valorize today is actually infantilization, not empowerment. Growing up means growing past absolute beliefs about what should be, and into nuanced understanding about how to make the best of what is.  

Disney’s Mulan (1998) and The Princess and the Frog (2009): Your ambition, intelligence, and drive do not militate against marriage; the men worth marrying find women who demonstrate these Tocquevillian virtues attractive. Moreover, prioritizing and/or achieving romantic partnership does not make you any less ambitious, intelligent, or driven. But women and men do not typically express ambition, intelligence, and drive in the same ways or to the same ends, nor should they be expected to.  

This admittedly idiosyncratic set of stories is not didactic, moralistic, or antiquated. In fact, these stories are poised to fulfill the distinctly female craving for emotional authenticity and psychological intimacy with other women, fictional or otherwise. They do so in a way that militates toward truth and virtue, rather than against them. This—not argument, and not high art—is one powerful way that young women can establish a foundational sense of how a female life well-lived should feel.  

Right now, the dominant version of womanhood ostensibly well-lived is constructed by Tik Tok influencers and flimsily feminist-coded cartoon heroines with all the hollowness of Sleeping Beauty and (remarkably) even less worthy ambition. Most girls will encounter this content, and most of them will be influenced by it, and many of them will influence one another accordingly. This is doubly true in an era when ideas about what being a woman looks and feels like are transmitted ever more entirely by popular culture and peers, due to ever fewer intergenerational family and community ties.  

But if we believe in the sanctity of the human spirit—and we must, if we are to have any hope at all—then we have to bet that exposure to all the nonsense will damage a young woman far less if she is also exposed to quality stories that provide her with a deeper, broader, less presentist and more universal perspective. Imbibing quality art despite living in a decadent age is the mental and spiritual equivalent of eating nutritious meals despite also consuming junk. If the alternative is eating only junk, even some nutritious meals make a big difference to your general health.  

There are many possible ways to increase adolescent girls’ exposure to such healthy content. Perhaps a reprint of the original American Girl books by a conservative publishing house with deep pockets is in order, or a prefab book club to encourage reading them in schools and libraries. Or, we might benefit from excellent live action films of Mulan and The Princess and the Frog or new film adaptations of those other old books—ones that honor rather than undermine their life lessons. These are all mere starting points, but they are a start, nonetheless. None of these measures, standing alone, will restore our fallen culture on any scale. But repeated exposure to spiritually gripping, emotionally evocative stories of female formation in truth and virtue might at least open the eyes of some girls to the possibility of creating something better over their own horizons. Then those girls may encounter the dominant culture with at least the knowledge that alternatives—including ones providing different ways of accessing similar kinds of girl-coded emotional succor—can and do exist. And if, for even one woman, that seed of knowledge blossoms into a tree of truth and virtue, we’ll already be doing better by tomorrow’s young women than we are today.  

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.

LifeNews Note: Congressman Chris Smith gave the following remarks during his address at Catholic University of America, which bestowed on him an honorary degree.

Thank you, Dr. Kilpatrick, for this honorary degree.

Thank you for offering students a world-class education here at the Catholic University of America that is faithful to, and centered on, the teachings of Jesus.

Great to be in Father O’Connell’s Hall—named for the former President of CUA—the extraordinarily effective, wise and holy Bishop David O’Connell of my Trenton, NJ diocese whom you honored right here in mid-March.

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Special thanks to my multi-decades long friend Bill Saunders for his amazing leadership at the Center for Human Rights as well as the Masters in Human Rights—initiatives that enlighten and empower women and men to strive to protect the weakest and most vulnerable.

The world needs their voices and commitment now more than ever.

Thank you for your commitment to heroic human rights defenders like Chen Guangcheng—who, along with his wife, endured and overcame torture and gross mistreatment by Xi Jinping for exposing and combatting the Chinese Communist Party’s draconian one-child policy with its reliance on forced abortion and coercive sterilization to achieve its nefarious goals.

And of course, we absolutely celebrate our new American Pope, Leo XIV.  The renewed hope and well-founded expectations are remarkable.  Apart from the Holy Spirit, who saw that coming?

Protection of human rights is the core motivator for my service in Congress and it begins with the right to life. Stopping the violence of abortion is what led me to run for the House, with the complete support of my dear wife Marie.

As a college student, I met Marie at a campus Mass at then Trenton State College, now College of New Jersey, more than fifty years ago. She joined me and Marty Dannenfelser— best known now as the husband of the president of Susan B Anthony Pro-life America Majorie Dannenfelser— in the pro-life group we established on campus as part of the National Pro-Life Youth Coalition—the forerunner of Students for Life.

Marie chaired the group until her graduation in 1977, the same year that now Pope Leo XIV graduated from neighboring Villanova where he had established a student pro-life group.

She has been a powerful, talented and incredibly wise, faith-filled pro-life leader, especially in the battle to defend human life around the world serving on Holy See delegations at the United Nations and through an organization she founded two decades ago called the Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues (PNCI).

Words are inadequate to express my love, respect, admiration and gratitude for Marie. She couldn’t join us this evening because she is recovering from a serious illness.

Like you, we know that the cruel injustice of abortion need not be forever and that each day, despite setbacks, many unborn children and their mothers have been and are being protected.  We have hope.

We are a people of indomitable hope—we absolutely refuse to entertain discouragement or defeat.

One such man of hope is Bishop Su—a leader of the Underground Catholic Church—who I met in Beijing in 1994.

Despite decades of incarceration and torture, Bishop Su told me that he earnestly prayed for his persecutors and harbored no malice for his tormentors—an awe-inspiring example of faithfulness to Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel from Luke: “To you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

Women and men of faith around the world are facing unspeakable violence as religious persecution explodes throughout the world—from Nicaragua, to Nigeria to the Middle East to China to  North Korea and elsewhere..

The scrouge of modern-day slavery, sex and labor trafficking, is denying millions of people their human rights.  Twenty five years ago, the U.S. Congress approved and the President signed historic legislation that I authored—the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000—a comprehensive  whole-of-government initiative to combat sex and labor trafficking in the United States and around the world.

The TVPA created a new, well-funded whole-of-government domestic and international strategy and established numerous new programs to protect victims, prosecute traffickers and to the extent possible, prevent human trafficking in the first place—the three Ps. (This week in New York, the trial of P. Diddy Combs is underway. Like Jeffrey Epstein, Diddy has been charged for allegedly committing heinous sex trafficking crimes and the U.S. Attorney is using the the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000—to prosecute. To date more than 2,225 convictions with very long jail sentences have been rendered using the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.)

Forced organ removal is another horrific human rights violation.

Last week, the House of Representatives passed legislation I sponsored entitled the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025 that targets the worldwide barbaric practice of murdering victims to steal their vital organs.  Special thanks to the Chief of

Staff of the Congressional-Executive China Commission Piero Tozzi for his research and work in passing the bill.

The Chinese Communist Party is committing this trafficking abuse like no other—and Xi Jinping is making billions.

Each year, tens of thousands of young victims, perhaps more—average age 28— are slaughtered by the Chinese Communist Party for their organs. Ethnic groups targeted for mass harvesting include Muslim Uyghurs—who suffer from Xi Jinping’s ongoing genocide—and the Falun Gong, whose peaceful meditation and exercise practices—and exceptional good health—make their organs highly desirable. The Chinese Communist Party has declared them to be an ‘evil cult’—fit for butchering.

Under my bill, anyone complicit with these crimes would face both civil and criminal penalties including up to 20 years in prison.

Human rights violations need warriors to stop the practices and protect the victims. I pray that Catholic U, especially the Center for Human Rights, will create such warriors.

Jesus implored us in Matthew 25:45, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”

We must never quit nor grow weary in the defense of human rights.  Injustice need not be forever. Many are depending on us.

The post Congressman Chris Smith: We Must “Stop the Violence of Abortion” appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Delaware Governor Matt Meyer tragically signed the state’s assisted suicide bill into law. Delaware’s law passed in the legislature by one vote after ten years of public opposition.

The legislature narrowly passed the dangerous bill legalizing assisted suicide for terminally ill adults, despite strong opposition from medical and disability rights groups.

Carol Tobias of National Right to Life condemned Meyer’s signing in a statement to Lifenews:

Delaware’s new law puts lives at risk. Assisted suicide laws offer no compassion, no hope, and no help for vulnerable members of our society.

End-of-life discussions should focus on palliative care, hospice, and support options. Assisted suicide shifts the focus from life-affirming care to premature death and erodes the public trust in healthcare and medical doctors.

So-called safeguards do not work. No safeguard can fully prevent subtle pressures, as evidenced by Dutch Alzheimer’s cases where patients were euthanized despite earlier expressions of doubt or resistance, including a widely reported case in which a woman was euthanized against her will while being physically restrained by her family and doctor.

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The horror of assisted suicide is that many of the most vulnerable in our society are pressured to “choose” assisted suicide which normalizes a culture of death—devaluing the lives of the disabled, elderly, and chronically ill. As society attitudes shift, legalization creates a “duty to die” mindset and puts our most vulnerable members of society at risk.

The legislation, which allows mentally capable adults with a prognosis of six months or less to request and self-administer lethal medication, passed the House on March 18 with a 21-16 vote and cleared the Senate on June 24 by an 11-10 margin, mirroring its passage in 2024 before being vetoed by then-Gov. John Carney.

The bill faced fierce resistance from the Delaware Academy of Family Physicians, the Psychiatric Society of Delaware, and the Delaware Chapter of the American College of Physicians, alongside disability advocates and faith-based organizations.

Jessica Rodgers, coalitions director for the Patients’ Rights Action Fund, condemned the legislature’s decision, telling LifeNews, “The legislature chose to disregard the opposition of the Delaware Academy of Family Physicians, the Psychiatric Society of Delaware, and the Delaware Chapter of the American College of Physicians in their actions today, as well as countless other medical and disability rights organizations.”

Critics argue the bill undermines medical ethics and risks coercion, particularly for vulnerable populations.

Ellen Barrosse, in an opinion piece for The Dialog, wrote, “Physician-assisted suicide sends a message to those who are disabled, elderly, or ill that their lives are not worth living. … Any law that encourages people to end their lives prematurely ignores the reality that prognoses are often wrong.

The Diocese of Wilmington, led by Bishop William E. Koenig, has also opposed the bill, citing the sanctity of life.

Disability advocates, like Daniese McMullin Powell, former chair of the State Council for Persons with Disabilities, warned that normalizing assisted suicide could pressure patients into feeling they have no other choice, stating, “When such laws take the stigma off of having assistance or even doing it yourself that it’s okay, it makes it more common.”

The post Delaware Governor Matt Meyer Signs Bill Legalizing Assisted Suicide appeared first on LifeNews.com.

 This Tuesday afternoon at The Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls:

An anti-Christian, anti-life terrorist detonated a car bomb outside a California fertility clinic, blowing up the media narrative that pro-life Christians have been waging a “war on IVF.” His actions reveal the blind eye the Biden-Harris administration turned to violent leftists. Yet his actions and the media response, especially the triumphant announcement that no embryos had been harmed, can teach us all a great deal about the value of every life.

The tragedy began around 11 a.m. local time last Saturday, May 17, when police say 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus detonated his 2010 silver Ford Fusion outside the American Reproductive Centers in Palm Springs. The FBI called the explosion “probably the largest bombing scene that we’ve had in Southern California.” The blast, which injured four others and damaged buildings as far as 250 feet away, left only one casualty: Bartkus.

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Those seeking answers heard FBI Assistant Director Akil Davis of the Los Angeles Field Office say Sunday that Bartkus expressed “nihilistic ideations” while carrying out “an intentional act of terrorism.” In fact, Bartkus expounded an all-encompassing anti-life philosophy known as Efilism, longed to initiate “a war against pro-lifers,” and once vowed “I’d choose Satan” over Jesus Christ.

Bomber: ‘I’d Choose Satan’ over the Christian God

Bartkus reportedly left behind recordings and a manifesto on a website describing himself as a “pro-mortalist”: He believed life brings pain and should be ended as quickly as possible. To further his philosophy, Bartkus wanted to start “a war against pro-lifers” and “begin the process of sterilizing this planet of the disease of life.”

When someone raised the possibility of his spending eternity in Hell, Bartkus responded: “Your [G]od definitely doesn’t exist, but if [H]e did, I’d choose [S]atan over your evil [G]od. Did you ever think that maybe the [B]ible is just slander against [S]atan, and that [S]atan just realized what a f****** creep your [G]od is?”

“[R]eligion is retarded,” he concluded.

At a minimum, the fact that a pro-Satanic, anti-life radical perpetrated the first IVF facility bombing (of which we’re aware) should quell Democratic claims that pro-life Christians are waging a “war on IVF.”

Democrats: Pro-life Republicans Waging ‘War on IVF’

Ever since an Alabama Supreme Court ruled that a couple could sue for the loss of an embryo, the Left has fear-mongered about a purported war on IVF. Joe Biden fibbed in his 2024 State of the Union Address, “The Alabama Supreme Court shut down IVF treatments across the state, unleashed by a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.” Kamala Harris repeatedly tried to insert the issue into the 2024 presidential campaign. The Democrat-to-legacy-media pipeline fed the narrative all year:

• “Remember the war on IVF, abortion, reproductive care is really a war on women’s rights,” lectured Ohio State Rep. Anita Somani (D-8) last February.
• Arwa Mahdawi, a columnist for the far-Left U.K. website The Guardian, wrote about “the holy war on IVF” last February.
• “The Conservative War on IVF Means More Stigma for People Like Me,” claimed Natalie Albaran in Cosmopolitan last December.
• “As someone who went through nine rounds of IVF, saw 10 fertility doctors and underwent treatment in both the U.S. and Israel over four years to create embryos that resulted in our daughter in 2015, I have been sounding the alarm bells for years about the religious right’s war on IVF,” wrote Amy Klein, condemning a position taken by the Southern Baptist Convention and the Roman Catholic Magisterium, in a column for The Forward last June.
• “Katie Britt Keeps Trying to Distance the GOP From Its War on IVF,” asseverated Kylie Cheung of the website Jezebel.

In reality, the IVF facility bombing was the work of another odd, left-wing movement espousing violence which the Biden administration apparently left untroubled — much like the murder of Border Patrol Agent David “Chris” Maland on January 20, allegedly by members of a transgender cult known as the “Zizians.”

Rather than investigate them, during the Biden-Harris-autopen administration, “the FBI singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction as potential domestic terrorists,” explained a 17,019-page report from the House subcommittee on weaponization of the government. Biden’s DHS awarded federal grants to organizations that linked Christian broadcasters to neo-Nazis. Biden’s targets were pro-life counselors, “violent extremists in radical-traditionalist Catholic” churches, alleged Russian infiltration of the growing Eastern Orthodox Church, and January 6 suspects. “Terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today,” said Biden. (Ditto Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray.) For all his myopic emphasis, we still know remarkably little, publicly, about President Trump’s two would-be assassins (although the second, Ryan Routh, spouted Trump-hating clichés while repeatedly claiming he visited Ukraine to recruit soldiers for its military). “He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” said President Trump of Routh.

The Democrats, in turn, have internalized the broader points of anti-natalism and evangelized for the cause at every opportunity.

Liberals Worried America Will ‘Return to Being a Christian Nation’ and ‘Producing a Lot of Children’

In a recently aired video from May 1, Hillary Clinton warned darkly that the second Trump administration wants America to “return to the family — the nuclear family — return to being a Christian nation, return to producing a lot of children.” (The horrors.) Nor is her view an outlier in her party, deeply mired in environmental pessimism bleeding over into Malthusianism. In 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) cited an elusive “scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” which allegedly raised a “basic moral question” for every U.S. citizen: “Is it okay to still have children?” Similarly, Bernie Sanders promised Democratic primary voters in 2019 that reducing the number of babies born, “especially in poor countries,” is “something I very, very strongly support.” (At roughly the same time, Elon Musk forecast more accurately, “The biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse.”)

The climate-driven anti-natalist hysteria got so bad that a leading United Nations climate scientist lamented, “The atmosphere created by the media has been provoking anxiety. The latest idea is that children are a negative thing.” Petteri Taalas, then-secretary-general of the U.N.’s special agency on weather and climate, the World Meteorological Organization, asked liberals to stop reading climate change statements “in a similar way to the Bible” (good advice!), seeking to “try to find certain pieces or sections from which you try to justify your extreme views.” He encouraged young people, in essence, to stop worrying and have babies.

The greatest threat to safety is palpable disregard for the sanctity of human life ingrained in federal law since January 1973 and embraced as the only meaningful policy articulated in the Democrats’ last presidential campaign. The second greatest threat is the decision to ignore a growing terrorist threat on the Left while weaponizing the government against every politically disfavored segment of the American Right. U.S. citizens should rejoice they now have a government seeking their physical safety, not the president’s political advantage. The ultimate end of President Trump’s alleged “revenge tour” has stanched the Left’s instrumentalization of the federal police force in a four-year cycle of vengeance.

Sadly, IVF Clinics Kill More Embryos than Bartkus

It is not at all clear Republicans will rise to the challenge of defending life. The GOP, always eager to flee the Democrats’ evolving calumnies, have positioned themselves as inventors of IVF. The president issued an executive order asking for policy proposals within 90 days — which elapsed Monday. IVF carries deep, ethical challenges.

Ironically, had Bartkus waited, the IVF facility would have done most of his work for him. There are a panoply of ethical and moral issues with IVF, not least the fact that parents intentionally end the lives of most embryos and stand at high risk of miscarriage. Even the media response reveals some of this.

What a Life-Hating Bomber, First Responders, and the Bible Can Teach Us about Life

One silver lining shone through all the coverage of the IVF bombing: “We were able to save all of the embryos at this facility,” beamed Davis. “Good guys: one. Bad guys: zero.”

Why announce this if embryos hold no value in themselves? The legacy media’s (usually) unspoken assumption holds that unborn babies’ worth is entirely contingent on the value imputed by their parents (read: mother). If their parents (read: mother) wants the child to live, the embryo’s loss represents a tragedy; if their parents (read: mother) do not want the child to live, the child’s death or abandonment is a neutral, or positive, development.

The people who teach the most about the value of life may well be the first responders and the perpetrator himself.

Local media reported that the moment Deputy Fire Chief Greg Lyle arrived at the site of the blast, he began “saying saving the embryos was non-negotiable.” He rushed into the facility, although it had suffered structural damage, and realized he had to restore the power to maintain the temperature of the tanks that stored the frozen embryos at -321 degrees Fahrenheit. KQED reported Lyle and his team “put their lives on the line to make sure the embryos survived.” In the process, they won a public commendation from Palm Springs Fire Chief Paul Alvarado, who said, “Despite the building suffering structural collapse, this was nothing short of heroic, and I’m so proud of our firefighters.”

No one asked why the force should risk multiple lives to rescue so many “clumps of cells.”

Ironically, Bartkus’s immediate motivation apparently came from the pain death inflicts. In his online manifesto, Bartkus wrote that 27-year-old Sophie Tinney of Fox Island, Washington, apparently convinced her boyfriend (29-year-old Lars Eugene Nelson) to “shoot her in her sleep.” “Recently my best friend Sophie killed herself (she got the guy she was living with to shoot her while she was sleeping, her preferred method),” he wrote. “I’ve never related to someone so much, and can’t imagine I ever would again. It’s just too much of a loss when there’s nobody else you really relate to significantly.” One personality trait that bound them was their shared borderline personality disorder.

Even Bartkus, in his grief-ridden (and likely demon-possessed) state, recognized the value and impact of a human life. For Christians, the thoughts that should guide us include:

• “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them” (Psalm 127:3-5).
• “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you” (Jeremiah 1:5).
• “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7).
• “I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works” (Psalm 139:14).
• “There is no God besides Me; I kill, and I make alive” (Deuteronomy 32:39).
• “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

We must take every legislative and administrative means to save unborn children. And one day, like the first responders in Palm Springs, justly go down in history as the heroes and champions of life.

LifeNews Note: Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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