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Each day at just after midnight Eastern, a post like this one is created for contributors and readers of this site to upload news links and video links on the issues that concern this site. Most notably, Islam and its effects on Classical Civilization, and various forms of leftism from Soviet era communism, to postmodernism and all the flavours of galloping statism and totalitarianism such as Nazism and Fascism which are increasingly snuffing out the classical liberalism which created our near, miraculous civilization the West has been building since the time of Socrates.
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Justice Neil Gorsuch Voices Opposition to Lockdowns and Mandates: “Greatest Intrusion on Civil Liberties”
By Jim Hoft May. 20, 2023 7:45 am61 Comments
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch broke his silence on the subject of lockdowns and mandates during a recent statement made in a case concerning Title 42, calling it the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties.”
As the Covid-19 public health emergency expires, the Supreme Court announced Thursday that it would formally withdraw a case that seeks to preserve the immigration policy known as Title 42 from its schedule, CNN reported.
The court stated in a brief order that it was dismissing an opinion from a federal appeals court in the case Arizona v. Mayorkas “with instructions to dismiss the motion as moot.”
Justice Gorsuch voiced his reservations about the widespread implementation of lockdown measures and government-enforced mandates. He highlighted the importance of protecting individual liberties and expressed concerns about potential overreach by governmental authorities
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/justice-neil-gorsuch-voices-opposition-lockdowns-mandates-offers/
FIVE REVELATIONS IN FIVE DAYS Expose Chris Wray’s FBI as Criminal Enterprise Devoid of Morals and Legitimacy
By Jim Hoft May. 20, 2023 8:00 am118 Comments
Sometimes God works in mysterious ways. Exposing the FBI as an utterly corrupt organization was one of them.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when a vast majority of Americans trusted the FBI, valued its work, and believed in its mission and purpose. A majority of Americans were proud of the FBI.
Then Trump came into office and the FBI was exposed by independent journalists as a crooked, immoral organization.
Whatever credibility the FBI had left was tossed out the window this week.
On Monday – The Durham Report was released – the FBI, Obama, Hillary, and Deep State knew the Trump-Russia collusion was a lie in August 2016.
Special Counsel John Durham released his final report concluding the FBI had no verified intel when it opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump in 2016. Worse yet, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, then CIA Director John Brennan, and others knew that Hillary was behind the Trump-Russia lies since August of 2016!
The FBI and DOJ then opened a Special Counsel investigation of President Trump for three years KNOWING it was all a lie from the beginning. Top FBI officials including Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were all in on the lies. They wanted to get Trump. The 2016 election was rigged against Trump. Then the FBI and Deep State rigged his first three years. They stole the 2018 elections with their Russia lies.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/five-revelations-five-days-expose-chris-wrays-fbi/
Mayor Adams Fumes Over Migrant Influx: 900 Migrants Arrive In NYC In One Day… Illegal Alien Crisis Will Cost Over $4B
By Alicia Powe May. 20, 2023 8:15 am162 Comments
Mayor Eric Adams is railing against the Biden administration’s open border policy, warning New Yorkers don’t want the mass influx of undocumented migrants from the southern border on their block or in their community.
“Last week and a half ago, we got 4,200 people in one week. This week, we got 900 people on one day,” Adams lamented during an appearance on Carribean Power Jam Radio.
“We’ve run out of space, you know, where to put people then whenever we try to find creative ways, people are pushing back and say, ‘Well, we don’t want it on our block. We don’t want it in our community,” he said. “The federal government has now created this crisis and it’s really undermining our whole city. That’s what I needed New Yorkers to understand. This is undermining all of the progress we have made because of the failure of our federal government.”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/mayor-adams-fumes-migrant-influx-900-migrants-arrive/
(Richard: The legalization of drugs is reaching it’s logical conclusion. More people are dying from overdoses and the left ignores this just as they ignore the disasters caused by the failure of all of their problems.)
Suspect Charged After 2 Teens Found Dead in School Parking Lot Hours Before Graduation Ceremony
By Johnathan Jones, The Western Journal May. 20, 2023 8:30 am66 Comments
A Tennessee teenager has been charged with two counts of murder after she allegedly gave two classmates drugs that were laced with fentanyl and both died after ingesting them.
According to police, the suspect also consumed the drugs but survived the incident, which occurred just before high school graduation earlier this week.
Three students who attended the Fayette-Ware Comprehensive High School in Somerville, Tennesse, were found unconscious in a car in the school’s parking lot on Tuesday evening.
WREG-TV reported two female students who were aged 16 and 17 were both found dead in a vehicle at around 4:30 p.m.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/suspect-charged-2-teens-found-dead-school-parking/
DC Prosecutors Ask for Prison Time and $25,000 Fine for J6 Defendant Who Committed NO VIOLENCE But Posted Tweet on Police of “Attacking, Injuring and Murdering Innocent Protesters” on January 6
By Jim Hoft May. 20, 2023 8:51 am25 Comments
The Biden regime is asking for prison time and a $25,000 fine for January 6 political prisoner Richard Bigo Barnett after he posted a tweet accusing police of “attacking, injuring and murdering innocent protesters” on January 6.
Richard Barnett sat in Nancy Pelosi’s office and put his feet up on a desk in a staged photo for a photographer.
Barnett did not commit any violence that day.
Barnett was convicted on ALL CHARGES in a DC Kangaroo Court in January.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/dc-prosecutors-ask-prison-time-25000-fine-j6/
Mayor Adams Fumes Over Migrant Influx: 900 Migrants Arrive In NYC In One Day… Illegal Alien Crisis Will Cost Over $4B
By Alicia Powe May. 20, 2023 8:15 am249 Comments
Mayor Eric Adams is railing against the Biden administration’s open border policy, warning New Yorkers don’t want the mass influx of undocumented migrants from the southern border on their block or in their community.
“Last week and a half ago, we got 4,200 people in one week. This week, we got 900 people on one day,” Adams lamented during an appearance on Carribean Power Jam Radio.
“We’ve run out of space, you know, where to put people then whenever we try to find creative ways, people are pushing back and say, ‘Well, we don’t want it on our block. We don’t want it in our community,” he said. “The federal government has now created this crisis and it’s really undermining our whole city. That’s what I needed New Yorkers to understand. This is undermining all of the progress we have made because of the failure of our federal government.”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/mayor-adams-fumes-migrant-influx-900-migrants-arrive/
(Richard: Translation, they have stopped sexually mutilating adults to protest not being able to sexually mutilate children.
Are they really stupid enough to think sane people are going to get upset that people with mental problems can get they bodies mutilated?)
Florida Health Care Providers and Abortion Clinics — Including Planned Parenthood — Stop Transgender Treatments for Adults
By Cassandra MacDonald May. 20, 2023 9:00 am27 Comments
Florida healthcare providers and abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood, have stopped providing transgender prescriptions and surgeries for adults in response to legislation signed into law on Wednesday.
The legislation prohibits sex change treatments for minors and limits who can provide transgender treatments for patients of any age.
Now, only physicians can treat those who say they are transgender — meaning that physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and certified nurse midwives can no longer offer these services.
The law went into effect immediately upon being signed.
The Hill reports, “Gender-affirming health care for adults, according to the new law, may only be administered once an informed consent form is signed, but the state medical boards tasked with drafting the forms have not yet done so, forcing health care providers across the state into a difficult position.”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/florida-health-care-providers-abortion-clinics-including-planned/
BBC -F-16 fighter jets: Biden to let allies supply warplanes in major boost for Kiev
The US says it will allow its Western allies to supply Ukraine with advanced fighter jets, including American-made F-16s, in a major boost for Kyiv.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said President Joe Biden “informed his G7 counterparts” of the decision at the bloc’s summit in Japan on Friday.
US troops will also train Kyiv’s pilots to use the jets, Mr Sullivan said.
Russia said countries would run “enormous risks” if they supplied F-16s to Ukraine, state media reported.
Deputy foreign minister Alexander Grushko told state-owned news agency Tass that Western countries were “sticking to the scenario of escalation”.
“This will be taken into account in all our plans, and we have all the necessary means to achieve our goals,” he said.
[…]
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65649471
=================================
Sullivan: US to join F-16 coalition, train pilots
The United States will train Ukrainian pilots on F-16 jet fighters and cooperate with its allies to deliver the planes to Ukraine.
The national security advisor Jake Sullivan made the announcement in a press briefing on May 20, confirming the U.S. participation in the “fighter jet coalition” planned by Ukraine’s allies.
Washington did not pledge to provide its own jets, however.
The official confirmation comes after media reports from May 19 that Washington is open to training Ukrainian pilots and aiding with the F-16 transfer.
The training will unfold in the coming months. However, the allies are yet to decide which country will provide the jets, how many, or when.
In the past, U.S. President Joe Biden has rejected the possibility of supplying Ukraine with Western jet fighters such as F-16, indicating they are not necessary for Kyiv’s defense efforts at the moment.
Sullivan explained that the U.S. already helped to equip Ukraine’s military sufficiently for a successful counteroffensive. Now, the partners need to focus on building Kyiv’s future deterrence capabilities, which include F-16 jet fighters.
U.K.’s Rishi Sunak and the Netherlands’ Mark Rutte agreed on May 17 to build the “jet fighter coalition”. On May 20, Portugal and Denmark also declared they will join the initiative.
https://kyivindependent.com/jake-sullivan-us-to-join-f-16-coalition/
F-16s to Ukraine/ More Aid to Ukraine?/ Zelenskyy at G7 – Tony Shaffer
CNN – US to support F-16 training effort for Ukrainians, Biden tells G7 allies
CNN – CIA tries to recruit Russian spies with dramatic new video
Russians trolling the CIA recruitment video
Russia’s Prigozhin claims full control of Bakhmut
Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin claims control of Bakhmut
DEUTSCHE PRAVDA – Russia’s Wagner Group says it has captured all of Bakhmut
With Zelenskyy thousands of kilometers away at the G7, back in Ukraine the head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has claimed a breakthrough on the battlefield.
Yevgeny Prigozhin claims in this video that his forces have fully captured the eastern city of Bakhmut.
Ukraine’s military has been quick to deny the ruined city has fallen. Kyiv says its troops are still defending their positions.
NYT – MAY 20 2023 – – In Bakhmut, the Tides of Battle Are Ever Shifting
Ukraine, this month, pressed ahead with three days of maneuvers that gained ground on the flanks of Bakhmut. But Russian forces still appear to hold the center of the strategic city.
Ukrainian soldiers were waiting for just the right moment to attack. Then they received critical intelligence: Russian mercenaries on the other side of the front line outside Bakhmut were about to rotate out and be replaced by other soldiers.
It was time to go. “We all felt the adrenaline,” said an infantry soldier who identified himself by his call sign, Face, in accordance with military protocols.
Ukrainian soldiers were told to get their kits ready, making sure they had plenty of grenades and full clips of ammunition. “We considered the change of shifts to be the enemy’s biggest weakness,” said Col. Andriy Biletsky, the commander of the brigade.
It was the morning of May 6, the beginning of three days of fighting on the outskirts of Bakhmut that has shifted momentum in the fiercest battle of the war. Soldiers from Ukraine’s 3rd Separate Assault Brigade battled with the Russians across forest belts where the trees rose like scorched matchsticks. They stormed trenches littered with the dead. They followed armored personnel carriers across open fields as the two sides exchanged heavy gunfire.
In the maelstrom of explosions, every yard gained felt like a mile, soldiers said.
But when this three-day clash was over, Ukraine had reclaimed a patch of land about 1.8 miles wide and a mile and a half deep just south of the Ivanivske village, outside Bakhmut.
Though the territory captured was small, the Ukrainians have since built on their success, reclaiming more than 12 square miles to the north and south of the city, according to the military. Those gains represent a striking shift in a place where the Ukrainians had been on the back foot for months, and a potential blow to a Russian war effort that had made Bakhmut the primary strategic prize within its grasp.
But even as Ukrainian forces have fought to take back critical areas around Bakhmut, Russian forces have relentlessly worked for months to occupy the city’s center.
On Saturday, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner paramilitary group, said his mercenaries had seized the remaining ruined blocks of the city itself, blocks they did not already control, a claim the Ukrainians quickly disputed. Even if true, Ukraine’s gains north and south of the city suggest the long battle for Bakhmut would not be over.
Ukrainian and British officials said on Saturday that Moscow was racing to bring in more soldiers to reinforce its lines around the city. Such a redeployment could help Russia reverse recent Ukrainian gains, but it could also benefit Ukraine as it prepares its counteroffensive by weakening Russian forces elsewhere along the front.
This account of a three-day clash early this month on the outskirts of Bakhmut is based on an extended interview with Colonel Biletsky near the front, soldiers who took part in the assault, videos those soldiers recorded in real time with body cameras and more extensive videos the brigade released later.
Russian military bloggers have reported on the retreat in this sector, and military analysts have confirmed the location of the battlefield footage.
Colonel Biletsky said dozens of Russians were killed on the last day of the battle alone and more were taken prisoner. His brigade also lost soldiers over the course of three days, he said. Neither Ukraine nor Russia publicly releases precise casualty counts.
The 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, which was formally established in the fall, was dispatched to Bakhmut this winter to help secure the one remaining road into the city, after Russian forces came close to cutting it off.
It is led by Colonel Biletsky, a former ultranationalist politician and the founder of the Azov regiment, a group that was part of Ukraine’s national guard before the war and is now integrated into the country’s military forces, with little or no political bent.
The number of Ukrainian units engaged in fighting around Bakhmut is kept secret for operational security reasons, but the Ukrainian military said that dozens of clashes were now playing out every day with units from a constellation of brigades. The 3rd Separate Assault Brigade said on Thursday that its soldiers had advanced about a half mile further and would continue to try to advance on Friday.
No two battles in war are identical. They are shaped by the contours of the land, the strength of the opposing forces, the weapons available, the weather and a host of other factors. The fighting outside Ivanivske offers only a small window into the furious fighting in and around Bakhmut, where Russian forces continue to wage a scorched-earth campaign inside the city limits.
But the three-day battle provides a telling example of how Ukraine hopes to exploit the very public divisions among the three principal Russian forces fighting in Bakhmut: the Wagner private military company, loyal to Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, Chechen militias loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov and the regular army.
It is also a reminder that retaking land from a well-entrenched enemy is a brutal affair fought at close quarters. “You need to understand the cost of this advance,” Hanna Maliar, a deputy defense minister, said on Friday. “It is extremely difficult to carry out combat tasks there, because the enemy has concentrated a huge amount of his efforts.”
Colonel Biletsky dismissed notions that the Russians were poorly equipped as “more TikTok propaganda than reality.”
“The enemy is ready,” he said. “They are well personally equipped, armed, they have means of communication, good armored vehicles and a very good system of unmanned aerial vehicles.”
Ukrainian fighters control only a small corner inside the city limits of Bakhmut roughly the size of Central Park, according to Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and officials. They are being attacked in frontal assaults and bombarded with artillery from Russian positions on the high hills flanking the ruins.
The only way to relieve the pressure, Ukrainian officials said, was to drive the Russians from the positions around the city.
“The No. 1 task was to push back the enemy on the flanks of Bakhmut,” Colonel Biletsky said. “We used three types of maneuvers: infiltration, frontal attack and turning movement.”
When Ukrainian commanders noticed the Russians rotating in new units, replacing Wagner mercenary fighters with soldiers from Russia’s 72nd Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade, they decided to try to take the other side by surprise.
“We attack as quickly as possible, immediately trying to advance behind the enemy’s front line,” said Colonel Biletsky.
Before dawn on May 6, unit commanders assembled and were given their orders: Cross a distance of about 500 meters from the Russian front line southwest of the village of Ivanivske to the Russians’ second line of defense. And do it quietly.
This would allow them to avoid the enemy’s principle defensive positions and force the Russians to move their own positions to meet the threat.
To maintain the element of surprise, the Ukrainians decided not to use artillery. Infantry soldiers following armored vehicles moved swiftly to cover the scorched ground, the threat of detection by Russian drones an ever-present risk.
Once Ukrainian soldiers got to the second trench line, the Russians realized what was happening and the fighting was intense and chaotic. Soldiers described having to move quickly to storm trenches, turning corners even as they were unsure what they would find — and often coming face-to-face with the opposing side. They also had to clear out the Russian positions now at their back.
But by the end of the first day, they held the flank.
Then they waited.
Colonel Biletsky said they wanted to make the Russians believe that the small advance on the flank was the goal of the operation, so they did not try to advance on the second day. Instead, the soldiers carried out reconnaissance and artillery attacks aimed at enemy reserves trying to approach.
In the quiet hours, they talked, ate and made sinister jokes.
“Who were you before the war?” one soldier asks another in a video shared by the brigade. “A fireman,” the other soldier replies. “I used to save people, but now I kill them.”
The fighting resumed on the third morning at 5 a.m.
The New York Times viewed video footage that the Ukrainian military said was taken by soldiers in battle that day and confirmed its location. It shows armored vehicles bursting through the first line of defense under a hail of gunfire. Infantry soldiers jump out, firing as they exit the vehicle.
“Go around the left side, you’re the first,” a soldier orders in one video. “Go!”
At this point, soldiers said, the only way to clear out the Russians was to go trench by bloody trench, unsure whether the Russians had fled, were hiding or were still fighting.
“Approaching! Move in!” one soldier shouts as they storm a Russian dugout. Something explodes near the Ukrainians. “Go! Go back!” another soldier yells.
The Ukrainians then approach the Russian dugout again and toss in a grenade, and it goes quiet, according to video footage.
After clearing the first line — a defensive network spread out over an area about two miles across — they had to take out the second line, where even more Russians were positioned, according to soldiers and the commander.
On and on it went like that for hours, they said. Videos taken by Ukrainian soldiers appear to show trenches littered with dead Russian soldiers.
By the end of the third day, they had the surviving Russians surrounded.
“Our guys were yelling at them to surrender,” said the soldier called Face. Some laid down their weapons. Others fled. Still others fought on and were killed.
Face was towing a damaged Ukrainian armored vehicle from the battlefield, smiling as he stopped for coffee a day after the clash ended.
He was most happy that the Ukrainians came away with far fewer soldiers killed.
“According to military doctrine, the army who counterattacks has more casualties,” he said. “But that’s not true. We have the opposite. We have losses, but they have many times more losses.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/20/world/europe/ukraine-bakhmut.html
==========
the sun UK – Ukrainian soldiers say they advance near Bakhmut despite enemy activity
sky news UK – Ukraine War: The battle for Bakhmut
the sun UK – Inside the battle for Bakhmut where Putin’s troops are meeting tanks, guns and their bloody defeat
the sun UK – Ukrainian snipers get ready to ambush Russian troops on the frontlines near Bakhmut
the sun UK – Ukrainian SSO unit shows special forces fighting in Bakhmut
Russians cowardly advance while the Ukrainians bravely retreat.the sun UK – Ukrainian-designed drones fight against Russian forces around Bakhmut
the sun UK – Ukraine launches major new 500-megawatt wind power plant as war with Russia rages
Ukraine’s biggest private energy company, DTEK, has launched the first stage of a 500-megawatt wind power plant in a boost to the country’s energy sector following Russian air strikes.
The Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure caused widespread damage and left millions without electricity and heating over winter.
Ukraine is now racing to repair and strengthen the sector before this year’s winter months.
Once completed, the Tyligul wind farm will be the largest in Ukraine.
For now, 19 wind turbines will generate electricity to support Ukraine’s energy balance.
DTEK started building the plant in 2021 but construction stopped after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The plant is less than 100 km (62 miles) from the frontline.
Work resumed in April last year with engineers and workers building 13 wind turbines since then.
Six turbines were built before the war.
The project will cost 450 million euros ($486 million), said Maxim Timchenko, chief executive officer of DTEK.
DTEK officials said the wind project was a key step forward to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
DTEK also has thermal generation capacity across the country and its plants have suffered from multiple Russian attacks.
DTEK said in a statement it had invested 890 million hryvnias ($24.34 million) to repair thermal power plants in the first four months of the year.
It said a total of nearly 7 billion hryvnias would be needed to restore all the equipment damaged and destroyed at thermal power plants.
This essay is adapted from Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,
by Josh Hawley (Regnery, 256 pages, $29.99.)
The Antidote To Dependence Is Building
Is it really too much to ask that our economy work for men as they are, rather than as the Left wants them to be?
By Josh Hawley
May 19, 2023
My father is one of three boys in his family, the middle son. His older brother is my Uncle Bruce. He and my father are approximately three years apart in age. They had formed a fast bond by the time their third brother came along, and the stories of Bruce and my dad’s childhood antics are legendary in the family.
For example: One of my grandfathers worked as the manager of a small storefront JCPenney in western Kansas during my father’s childhood, back when JCPenney still maintained storefronts in small towns. This was the early 1960s. He put in long hours at the store, and if there was one thing he valued at home above all, it was rest. Sleep. Unfortunately for him, Bruce and my dad shared a room directly above their parents’ room. The house, which they rented, was very modest, and the boys’ room was too small for two beds, so Bruce and my father also shared a bed (until they outgrew that arrangement and one of them moved to a mattress in the basement). Now as any parent of small boys knows, put two of them together in a room and what you do not get much of is quiet. My dad and uncle were no different. Their nighttime laughter and horseplay frequently woke my grandfather in the room below.
On those occasions, Grandpa would reach for a yardstick he kept by his night table and bang the ceiling with it, warning the boys to quiet down. If that did not produce the desired silence, Grandpa took the yardstick up the stairs and converted it to a switch, swatting the boys’ backsides. But without much light, and in his general state of nocturnal confusion, Grandpa often had difficulty seeing just whose backside he was swatting. Bruce took advantage of these circumstances by pulling my father on top of him, or so the story goes, and crying out as if he were being spanked, all while Grandpa was, in fact, spanking my father. Similar stories of pranks and tomfoolery are legion.
Bruce was a smart boy and grew, as an adult, to be one of the most interesting people I know. I remember watching him sit down to the piano and play entire pieces of music that I recognized from the radio or from church by ear, no sheet music in sight. He can still do it. He has what musicians call perfect pitch. If you play a note for him or hum it, he can tell you what note it is, just from listening. He took up the fiddle later in life and the violin and has played the saxophone some as well. There is no instrument I believe he could not play if he wanted to.
He went to college, played football (and shared an apartment with my dad—like old times), and after graduation moved to Arkansas, where my grandparents had gone from western Kansas after JCPenney closed the little store my grandpa managed. There, in Arkansas, Bruce started his own business pouring concrete.
It’s called Hawley Concrete, first incorporated in 1978 and in continuous operation since. He typically has a handful of employees at a given time. Today his oldest son, my cousin, works the business with him. They pour driveways and patios and foundations; they do stamping and staining and concrete repair. You can see some of Bruce’s artistry in what he does: there’s an elegance to it, and precision. It’s hard work, tough work—hot in the humid Arkansas summers and wet in the winter, and they work all year long. But it’s good work too—the kind of work that allowed Bruce to get married and raise a family of six kids, and that has allowed him to live a full life, enjoying his children, pursuing his passions. Contributing. Building.
The truth is that manual work of the kind Bruce does has become less and less valued in our society, not least because the elites who set the cultural tone largely disdain those who work with their hands. The media regularly admonish schoolchildren to go to college precisely to avoid the kind of labor Bruce has been doing for 40 years. The tech start-up wizard and the Wall Street maven are liberal culture’s beau ideals. (Don’t believe me? Just look at the main characters on television sitcoms. You’ll be hard-pressed to find many blue-collar workers.) The “masters of the universe” have advanced degrees and sit in air-conditioned offices and make, in pop culture mythology anyway, massive sums of money. That is what today’s elites tell our children to aspire to.
Those who don’t want that life or don’t have those degrees have watched their work prospects steadily dim over the last five decades, as more and more blue-collar jobs have disappeared overseas or been simply eliminated. In their stead, our political leaders offer government benefits—welfare, dependency.
Dependence is in fact a temptation to every man, in every age. It is the temptation to let someone else do it for you. Let someone else plan your future, let someone else provide, let someone else take the risk. Let someone else take responsibility. It’s a temptation that came to Adam in the garden, to let Eve deal with the serpent rather than to protect her and guard Eden.
The antidote to dependence is building. The antidote to passivity is work. And work is, according to the Bible and the Western tradition it defines, an invitation that speaks to every man. It is an invitation to do what every man wants to do: matter, in the most lasting way possible.
The Bible celebrates the value of work and the character of the men who do it in the story of David, whose life followed some centuries after Joshua and the battle for Canaan. What we learn from David as a builder is this: that a man is born to work and to acquire the character that working brings. This is no small thing. If done humbly and well, work can help make the world what it was meant to be. The man who becomes a builder can help cultivate a little Eden.
Besides being a focal point of the Bible, David’s story is one of the grand dramatic sagas of all ancient literature. You may remember some of it. He was born to an obscure family, the youngest boy and least looked for to succeed. Nevertheless, God sent a prophet to anoint him, when he was still a boy, to be Israel’s future king. Like Abraham, David was called from obscurity to purpose. Like Joshua, David would become a great warrior. And as we meet him, he is about to build and to display for us the promise and power of work. Here is a key part of his story, from the second book of Samuel, once David has become Israel’s king.
The king and his men marched to Jerusalem to attack the Jebusites, who lived there. The Jebusites said to David, ‘You will not get in here; even the blind and the lame can ward you off.’ They thought, ‘David cannot get in here.’ Nevertheless, David captured the fortress of Zion. . . . On that day, David said, ‘Anyone who conquers the Jebusites will have to use the water shaft to reach those ‘lame and blind’ who are David’s enemies.’ That is why they say, ‘The ‘blind and lame’ will not enter the palace.’ David then took up residence in the fortress and called it the City of David. He built up the area around it, from the supporting terraces inward. And he became more and more powerful, because the Lord God Almighty was with him.
The story begins with David clearing the land of evil in the manner of Joshua. The Jebusites, interestingly, were some of the ancient peoples that Joshua and his army had failed to expel. The story suggests that even now, centuries later by the Bible’s reckoning, some sort of evil omen hangs over their stronghold, Jerusalem: it was the home of the “blind and the lame”—symbolism for a dark power that guarded the fortress. David concludes Joshua’s work by confronting and defeating the Jebusites.
And what does he do next? He builds. In particular, he builds a city.
Cities held great significance in the ancient Near East, where they were regarded as the creation of the gods. In both ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, the earliest writers portrayed cities as primordial, existing even before humanity, their foundations laid by the gods as a pattern for the universe as a whole. In fact, ancient peoples believed that the gods maintained order in the cosmos through the cities they made: they ruled from there, their temples were there; the cities were cosmic control centers. The order of the city at once exhibited and helped sustain the order of the universe, an idea one can hear even in Plato.
This was, I say, the prevailing view in the ancient Near East. But not in the Bible. Not in David’s story. David does not come to an ancient city that he reveres to pay homage to its god. He comes to a stronghold of corruption and conquers it, and begins to build something new. And here is perhaps the most interesting element of the story: Jerusalem does indeed become, in the end, a city of the divine. David’s God, Abraham’s God, does indeed take up residence there, famously so.
Zion, the city of David, becomes the city of God—and still is, for millions of worshipers worldwide. But notice, David’s God chooses to take up residence in a city that David has built. The city is not primordial, built by the gods, but by human hands—by David’s hands. That is the point. God honors David by blessing and ultimately dwelling where he builds. God honors David’s work. Indeed, David’s work makes him a partner with God.
The Bible places a premium on work, and on men with the character to work faithfully. From the beginning of the Adam story all the way back in Genesis, the Bible emphasizes that God has called man to be his partner in the divine labor, the making of the world into a temple. Genesis tells of five days in which God subdued the chaos of the universe, then filled it with stars, then with planets and living things. On the sixth day, he created man and charged him to do the same, to “subdue” and “fill” the earth—that is, to continue the work of creation after the pattern of God. Adam’s mission as a man called him to labor and to provide. A man is meant to build, to work.
From his studies across cultures, of Micronesia, Melanesia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Americas, the anthropologist David Gilmore concluded that the “critical threshold” marking the passage from boyhood to manhood was “the point at which the boy produces more than he consumes and gives more than he takes.” In short, manhood begins when a boy ceases to be dependent and becomes someone who can provide and build.
There is something in the character of a man that responds to the character of work. While he labors to shape and manage the world, the labor itself shapes his soul. Studies show that men who work are more confident, more emotionally stable, and, of course, more prosperous. Perhaps this is why the Bible, from Genesis to David, portrays work as godlike—activity after the character of God.
Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
No Work Is Beneath You
What we can take from this is straightforward. Men are meant to work, and they should. Men who work are more likely to be happy, more likely to be married, and more likely to have children. In America, three-fifths of working men considered “prime aged,” that is, between 25 and 54, are married. By contrast, a considerable proportion of those men who are out of the workforce are not only unmarried now, but they have never been married at all.
My advice to young men looking for work is to do whatever honorable work is available. It is the same advice I received as a young man. I grew up hearing many a legend from my dad’s father, whose name was Norm, the one who banged for quiet on the ceiling with the ruler, about his first job. He was born and raised in Smith Center, Kansas, which he always remarked to me was the precise geographic center of the continental United States. His family was poor. His father, my great-grandfather, worked the railroad. My great-grandmother worked at a local five-and-dime. They lived in a small house with a detached garage. When my grandfather Norm was a boy, in the 1940s, the garage caught fire by some mishap. Firefighters saved the house, but not the car. The family couldn’t afford one again until he was well into high school.
As you might imagine given those circumstances, work was highly valued in that family, and every family member was expected to contribute. My grandfather Norm’s first job was as a dishwasher at the Bon Ton Café, a local establishment (long since shuttered). In time, he was promoted to short-order cook. The Bon Ton was a diner, with booths in front, I am told, and an open grill toward the back with a deep fryer on one side. Grandpa took up his station there, grilling burgers and ham n’cheese, chicken sandwiches, and of course French fries—you name it. He would entertain me as a child by rattling through his menu and boasting of his speed on the grill. Once, while standing in the kitchen carrying on in this fashion, he seized a metal spatula, tossed it end over end in the air, and caught it with the other hand. “This is how I used to do it at the Bon Ton,” he said. “I tell you boy, I can still smell the grease on the grill.”
His stories made a point. Work is a good thing. No work is beneath you. “I never had a job I didn’t learn something from,” he would say to me. He urged me to work as young as I could, doing whatever constructive work anyone would pay me to do. (When I asked him why he didn’t make grilled cheese anymore and Grandma did all the cooking, he would demur. “I got all wore out at the Bon Ton,” he would say.)
Contrast that attitude with the line that emerged among the chattering classes in the 1960s, repeated ad nauseam since, that some jobs are simply “dead-end,” not sufficiently stimulating or rewarding to be compelling as work. That notion makes the value of work depend on the job’s social status, which means, in practice, it depends on what the culture’s opinion-makers think of it. And the opinion-makers don’t work blue-collar jobs. This is how we end up with the increasingly widespread idea that manual labor is somehow degrading.
That is not the view from the Bible. God assigned Adam to perform manual labor, as my grandfather did and my uncle Bruce does still, day in, day out. The Bible’s view is that all work is worthwhile if it is performed in service to God and others. As long as it is honest labor, every job has a purpose. Every job provides a service. Every job hones a skill.
The Puritans of old, those fervent Christians who would eventually brave a dark ocean to found a new “city on a hill”—America—had a powerfully robust view of work. They regarded everyday work as a “calling,” and their test for whether work was worth doing was simple: ask whether it is useful to others and offered to God. If it is, it’s meaningful and worthwhile. The social status of the work means nothing. What others think of it is irrelevant. Honest work honestly done dignifies the worker. The 16th-century Puritan Joseph Hall said it like this: “The homeliest service that we doe in an honest calling, though it be but to plow, or digge, if done in obedience, and conscious of God’s Commandment, is crowned with an ample reward. . . .” That’s a view that should be heard in America today.
There is a practical element to all this, too. The sooner you get employed, the more skills you gain. And the more skills you gain, the sooner you advance in the workforce. Studies show the best job training program is, not surprisingly, a job. The best place to learn new skills and cultivate productive habits is in the workforce.
If it is man’s mission to be God’s representative, doing God’s work, restoring and expanding God’s temple, man must be a builder. You could say it like this: To become a man, you must work. You must contribute. You must give more than you take.
The problem in America today is that too many men are not working, and our respect for those who are is waning. Look at the trends of just the last 50 years. It used to be that almost 90 percent of men over 20 worked—or, at a minimum, were looking for work. That was true from the turn of the last century until about the late 1950s. Then began a long, abysmal decline.
By 2015, only 68 percent of men over 20 were in the workforce, or trying to be—meaning that the proportion of men without paid work doubled, from 14 percent to 32 percent. The COVID-19 pandemic made matters even worse. In early 2022, the percentage of prime-age men neither working nor looking for work was three times larger than in 1965. Today, a smaller percentage of prime-age men are working in the labor force than in March 1940, at the tail end of the Great Depression. These numbers are the lowest seen since the military demobilization following the end of World War II.
The sheer magnitude of the decline of work is often masked by the official unemployment statistics, which fluctuate higher or lower each month. But those reports are misleading in one key sense: they include only those who are out of work and actively trying to find a job. In the last 50 years, millions of men have decided not to try for work at all. These are the men the unemployment statistics do not record, the millions of missing men who have disappeared from labor. Here’s another way to get at the size of the problem: if the same percentage of men worked today who did a century ago, there would be 10 million more workers on the job in America right now.
In case you have doubts, life without work is not a good life. It is, for one thing, often an existence bereft of close family or companionship. Men without work are more likely to live alone, less likely to be married, and less likely to have children. When they do have kids, they are less likely to see them: an unemployed father is considerably less likely to live with his children than a father who goes to work every day. That’s only the beginning. Unemployed men are more frequently divorced. Approximately half of men without work are on painkillers. And these same men suffer higher rates of depression and suicide than men in the labor force.
And it’s not as if declining to go to work frees up all sorts of time for productive activities. In fact, men who aren’t working seem to do very little at all. They don’t, on the whole, volunteer or pursue education or take care of children or others in need. They don’t go out much. Most of what they do is sit and watch screens—television, the internet, video games—to the tune of 2,000 hours a year. Those are numbers equivalent to a full-time job. There is also crime. Among unemployed men between 30 and 38 years of age, for example, the majority have been arrested at least once, 40 percent have been convicted once, and fully 20 percent have been to prison.
Why are so many men in this country not working? Economists have fumbled for explanations. Surely one reason is the policy choices made by elected officials in Washington over the span of the last five decades. Both parties have embraced a program of globalization, to include liberalized trade, liberalized immigration laws, and lavishly favorable treatment for multinational corporations. This has exacted a heavy toll on American workers, especially American men.
There was a time in this country when a man could support his family on the wages of blue-collar work, particularly in the manufacturing sector. Most of those jobs have gone overseas now. Some celebrate this development as good for consumers—more cheap stuff to be had—or as a form of “gender justice”: men can no longer rely on their physical strength to get a leg up in the job market, the logic goes.
Many left-wing policymakers argue that blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, farming, and energy are too dirty, too noxious for the climate. They prefer an economy built on white-collar service jobs that produce nothing tangible and require the expensive degrees favored by the leftist intelligentsia. Don’t have one of those degrees? You’ll just have to make do in a lower-end hospitality or administrative job, which, not incidentally, pay considerably below the hourly average a man could earn in manufacturing. The median manufacturing job pays approximately $22.50 an hour. For hospitality, the median is $13.70 an hour; for administrative services, it is $17.50.
Other liberals cluck their tongues and say of course men could improve their station, if they would just change careers—and interests. These liberal “experts” cast the loss of blue-collar work as a necessary evil, a painful stage on the path to a more efficient economy. They tell men to adjust their attitudes, to give up their outdated attachment to physical labor and production and to embrace gentler roles.
One liberal researcher recently argued for pushing men into what he calls “HEAL” professions—Healthcare, Education, Administration, and Literacy. He wants more men to work as home health aides, for example, and as teachers and social workers. There is nothing wrong with those careers, of course. To take just one example, many boys benefit from having male teachers as positive role models. But the fact is, men are historically less interested in these fields and less educationally prepared to take them on. Some liberals find men’s hesitancy on this score vexing. Naturally, they blame traditional “gender role” stereotypes and call for more government spending to get men into so-called HEAL careers.
Change the men, in other words. No surprise, the institutional culture of many of these fields—such as education—is shot through with the notion that men and masculinity are problems that need to be fixed.
To the experts safely ensconced in their think tanks, I would just say this: Is it really too much to ask that our economy work for men as they are, rather than as the Left wants them to be? Is it too much to ask that men be able to find decent work on which they can support a family without having to pay six figures in college tuition to acquire a dubious academic credential, or leave their family home for some distant locale, or take up a career path in which they have no interest? Men who have an aptitude for blue-collar work and enjoy it shouldn’t be pushed by policymakers onto career tracks for which they’re ill-suited. And they shouldn’t have to apologize to anyone. There is more to life, and to a successful economy, than learning to code. And an economy with far more private-sector manufacturers and far fewer public-sector paper-shufflers should be welcomed, not scoffed at.
Let’s tell the truth. The loss of high-paying, blue-collar work for men has been a catastrophe for this nation and for men, robbing them of employment, family, dignity, and hope. We should be doing everything we can to reverse it.
Our work crisis is not only economic, however, but also cultural. It reveals a growing culture of dependency. Researchers report that the number of men who don’t work because they can’t find a job is staggeringly small, a mere 6 percent in one survey. Fully three quarters of men out of the labor force say they do not want a job. That is, they would prefer not to work. Consider this: in 2014, only 12 percent of nonworking but able-bodied men between the ages of 25 and 54 said they were even open to the prospect of working. And indeed, statistics show that men who can’t find jobs account for relatively little of the decline in the labor force over time.
Many men are content, apparently, to be dependent. And our political leaders have encouraged it. The response of the modern Left to the crisis of work is particularly telling in this regard. Leftists have advocated expanding welfare payments and “disability” insurance, to the point one need not actually be disabled to claim government support. More recently, they have championed universal basic income. This latter idea would have the federal government guarantee every adult in America an income stream generous enough to live on, whether he works or not. One liberal candidate for president recently ran an entire campaign on it.
The message is that work is optional, replaceable, that a check is just as good as a job. And what that means in practice is a check is just as good as a man. Because if government can supply everything a father or husband once did by working, what is the point of manhood? The culture of dependence destroys men’s agency and their sense of self-worth.
Dependence also makes men less free. It makes them servile. There is a long tradition of political thought, running back to ancient Rome and Greece but really originating with the Bible, that sees personal independence as a precondition for personal liberty. You can’t be free if someone else pays your bills. You can’t be free if someone else controls your livelihood, especially if that someone else is the government. You can’t be free if you don’t work. Why not? Because if someone else controls your livelihood, he controls you. That is the ancients’ insight, and they were right.
The Bible elucidates this in the story of the Exodus, when God delivered the Israelites from Pharaoh. Egypt was, for the Israelites, a place of bondage, the “house of slavery,” the Bible says. The Israelites worked, indeed—but not for themselves. They worked at the command of another, and the fruits of their labor were taken by others. They subsisted, but not by their labor, only by what they were given. This made them slaves, in a political sense and in a personal one, too. They had no meaningful control over their lives, no real ability to shape their futures or influence their fate. Above all, dependence denied them the ability to follow God, to shoulder the mission he had appointed for them. They could not do what he had created them to do. The only person whom they could obey was Pharaoh, the one who gave them bread.
Depending on others for your needs brings you under their influence. If you look to others for your bread, you serve them. They have power over you. That is servility, not freedom. The Bible makes this point by saying that in the promised land, the new Eden, the Israelites were to serve no human master—but, and this is an important addition, that did not mean they could do whatever they pleased: that would be to trade one form of bondage for another, dependence on Pharaoh for slavery to their flesh and passions. Rather, the Israelites were to serve the purpose God had written into their natures, that is, to be his representatives. For men, that meant—and means—“cultivating” and “guarding,” making gardens in the wilderness. This is true freedom: to realize and live the fullness of one’s humanity, to become God’s servant on earth. If you are going to shoulder that mission, if you are going to realize that freedom, you cannot refuse to work. You cannot depend on someone else. You must have independence of character.
Dependence can take forms other than failing to work, of course. It can mean sitting back at work when you know you could do more. Passivity and mediocrity are, in this sense, forms of dependence. It can mean relying on others financially when you could support yourself. It can mean failing to make plans for your future.
When I was a law professor, I knew a student, let’s call him Brian, who steadfastly refused to make any settled plans beyond graduation. After he got his diploma, he arranged a trip overseas, backpacking and generally goofing around for several months, then drifted back to the university area looking for some sort of employment. But not anything, mind you, that would tie him down for more than a few months. And nothing that would require more than strictly eight hours of his day, five days a week—at most. He was forever talking about “quality of life” and the importance of maintaining work-life balance. I pointed out that one must first work to have a problem with work-life balance, but he was undeterred. I pressed him on what he wanted to do—not just in the next two months or three, but in the next two or three years. Or 10. Or 15. He couldn’t answer. And while he had a poor relationship with his parents and was not, technically, dependent on them, his refusal to take responsibility for his own future was in fact a form of dependence. He depended on chance, if nothing else. He pursued a life of deferred maturity. In his mind, career, marriage, and fatherhood could wait, maybe forever.
Against the temptation to dependence comes the call to work and build. And the Bible invests that call with the most powerful significance possible. It says that God waits upon our work and cooperates with it. There are things he chooses to accomplish only by our working. There is a future he creates only by our building. He uses our work to renew the world.
Michael Nagle/Xinhua via Getty Images
Reject Nihilism
That message sharply contradicts another group of leftists who claim men’s work ruins rather than improves the earth. These are the climate-change fanatics. They equate human production with despoliation, the use of the earth’s resources with environmental rape. For them, environmental fear now stands in for religious commitment. As one observer put it, on the Left “apocalyptic environmentalism is a kind of new Judeo-Christian religion, one that has replaced God with nature.” In the Bible, “human problems stem from our failure to adjust ourselves to God. In the apocalyptic environmental tradition, human problems stem from our failure to adjust ourselves to nature.”
Recall how, in the Genesis story, Adam and Eve are told to exercise dominion and expand the garden—to cultivate the wild world and order it to the glory of their Creator. The religion of environmentalism preaches a very different message: leave the world well enough alone, in all its unformed chaos, or suffer terrible consequences. Human efforts to order creation will only do harm, because humans are the villains.
The Left routinely blames men for our planet’s supposedly imminent climate doom. The climate crisis, leftists say, is born from Western society’s thirst for power, for dominion over the earth. And men run Western culture: it’s “the patriarchy.” So they say. On this telling, men’s assertiveness and desire to build are symptoms of Western imperialism; the idea of taming the wilderness to build a civilization is merely a self-serving argument for pushing aside indigenous peoples. The climate radicals teach that men must accept that their work upon the world nearly always makes things worse, not better; destroys, not builds up; robs and deforms. Merely by being male, men do damage. Truly, men are the problem.
Patricia MacCormack’s recent book, The Ahuman Manifesto, provides the starkest imaginable statement of this bizarre creed. MacCormack, professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University and a self-described “occultist magician,” argues that human beings, and men in particular, have so damaged the nonhuman world that their only ethical responsibility is voluntary self-extinction.
For MacCormack, “the death of the human species is the most life-affirming event that could liberate the natural world from oppression. . . .” To bring about that goal, she calls for “death activism” intended “to end the human and open the world” to the nonhuman. Notice the exact inversion of the Genesis teaching on men and work. Men do not order the creation and help make it all it could be; men only destroy. Rather than the Bible, MacCormack calls for enlisting the support of “Luciferianism”—that is, Satanism—and “modern witchcraft” as intellectual resources. The biblical tradition is far too focused on those noxious humans, she writes, far too oriented to “the self-serving/God-serving subject that oppresses.” Whatever that means.
Credit where it’s due, though: MacCormack, more than most, is perfectly clear about the implications of her claims and how sharply they diverge from the Genesis story. She, at least, understands that the logical end point for much contemporary environmental activism is the abolition of men.
This nihilistic theology is having an effect. A 2020 poll found that fully a quarter of childless American adults said climate-change fears deterred them from having children. That number is likely to keep going up: according to one recent analysis, the choice “to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.”
There’s now an entire genre of “climate fiction” focused on the anxieties of those who foresee total destruction in the near future. “What will be the safest place?” worries the heroine of Jenny Offill’s critically acclaimed novel Weather. “I can’t seem to escape that question.” Not to be outdone, Lydia Millet’s novel A Children’s Bible offers an allegorical retelling of the Old Testament against the backdrop of climate-driven civilizational collapse: “New kinds of animals evolve. Some other creatures come and live here, like we did. And all the old beautiful things will still be in the air. Invisible but there. Like, I don’t know, an expectation that sort of hovers. Even when we’re all gone.”
Some on the left are going beyond mere brooding and acting out their fears. As I write this, environmentalist activists around the world have been conducting a campaign of vandalism against famous works of Western art, such as Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.
In an effort to raise awareness about the stakes of the climate crisis, they’ve been variously gluing their hands to famous paintings or hurling food at them.
What is the message to men in all this? That their work is not only insignificant, but deeply destructive. And if that is true, why bother to work at all? For that matter, why not forgo family and child-rearing and any other act of consequence that expresses some shred of hope for the future, and instead collect a government check? Why not just do nothing? This is where the Left’s anti-human, anti-work climate theology ultimately leads: to nihilism, to nothingness.
But the Bible has something better to offer. A man can be an agent of renewal. His work can matter. He can build.
Working with God
The city of David, Jerusalem, became, in the Bible’s description, a place where heaven touched earth, where God himself took up residence, as in Eden of old, where “silver [was] as common . . . as stones, and cedar as plentiful as sycamore-fig trees in the foothills.” The city was a foreshadowing, a foretaste, of what all the world might be if men would carry the light into all the world. And David became an emblem of what a man might do, what he might amount to, if he lived the mission God gave him. David became an agent of life and renewal.
In the Bible, God charges man to help him build creation into a temple, to make it fully what God intends it to be. There is an illuminating contrast on this score with other creation stories from the ancient world. In most of these, the creating gods—be it Marduk or Baal or others—delegate manual labor to humans because it is beneath a god’s status.
The Bible, however, says nearly the opposite. God appoints Adam to work not so God can be done with working, but to make Adam a partner in temple-building. Adam’s labor, his common, do-it-with-your hands work, is God’s way of bringing his creation into order and fullness. According to the Bible, God designed the earth to respond to man’s labor. When Adam abandoned that task, God did not abandon the world. He delegated the task to other men—to Abraham, to Joshua, to David. To us.
This is the Bible’s answer, by the way, to the myth of the dead-end job. This is the reason work—all kinds of work—is worth doing. No job that is performed with diligence and intention is a dead end, because all diligent, honorable work brings forth something new in the world. Something better. The world is great with potential. But it needs labor to draw it out.
And everywhere we look, man’s labor makes the world come alive. Every discovery, every innovation, every invention and improvement, from the electricity we enjoy to the machines that transport us on the roads or by air, is the product of labor.
The results need not be spectacular for the principle to hold true. My wife, Erin, is a great lover of horses, growing up as she did on a ranch. In that spare, stark country, one needs a horse to move cattle from one place to another. Erin learned to ride almost before she could walk. She has told me many times that a highlight of her youth was a summer she spent working with a horse trainer who lived nearby. He was, she said, a master of his craft. The summer days in the desert are grueling, so the trainer and Erin would ride the horses in the early morning and again in the twilight after sundown, when the creatures could better take the work. In this way, over hours and days, they broke the horses to the saddle and reins. By their work, they made the horses productive beyond their natural instincts, to be of use to the rancher.
Whether it’s horse training, or pouring concrete like my uncle, or working a short-order grill, the labor of man helps sustain creation and make it what it could be. The Bible says this is sacred work because when a man produces something that’s useful to himself and others, he demonstrates the goodness of creation—that it can bring forth good things. And that in turn demonstrates the good character of the God who made it. That is temple-building.
We can see this effect in our own lives, in our own characters. If you work at it, you can bring a measure of order to your life. Maybe not perfect order, maybe not paradise, but improvement. You can get to work on time, you can work diligently while there, you can do something that benefits someone else, even in a small way. Part of the meaning of the Adam stories is that the world responds to this kind of effort. Not perfectly, often not immediately. Genesis says a curse lies on the ground, after all, and much of the time a man’s work brings forth only “thorns and thistles.” And yet. The world still answers a man’s labor, and what that labor can bring forth is remarkable.
When I was 19 and a sophomore in college, I thought I might grow up to be an economist. (That phase quickly passed.) In order to major in economics, I had first to take a particular course in calculus. I found I wasn’t very good at it. I remember waking up in the middle of the night after one of my midterm exams in a disoriented sweat, convinced I had failed. I paced the halls of my dorm in the small hours of the morning, working back through the test in my head, trying to guess my score—and agonizing over what it might mean for my future. Oh, for the travails of a college sophomore! Still, it set me asking a set of questions every man does at one point or another: What will I do with my life that will matter? What will I do that will last?
I have come to see the David story as an answer to those questions. David built a city where God himself came to dwell—and not because it was so grandly done, but because God honored the work that David did. The Bible makes much of the fact that both the idea to build Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city and the idea to construct a temple there belonged to David. The city was his city, the temple was his work. But because David worked for God, God made them his own. And so Jerusalem became great.
A man finds his agency in working. There are many forces in the world, most of them well beyond our control. From the weather to our genetics, we are powerless. Still, the Bible says that when a man works, he moves the world—and this is true whatever the work, whoever the man. When a man works, God comes to aid him. The work he does, his ability to bring forth something good, something beautiful, something new, is an expression of his freedom and his significance. It reflects his likeness to God. The Bible does not teach the rule of fate, that man is the pawn of the gods. It teaches instead that man truly becomes God’s delegate, his representative, his servant, as he works. He becomes more free, not less. More independent. More himself. Maybe that is why the long political tradition our founders inherited, the one that has its roots in the teaching of the Bible, has long insisted that to be free a man must be able to provide for himself. He must give more than he takes. He must be a builder.
Hawley Concrete is not a famous company. It will never be traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Most people have never heard of it, and never will, I suppose. But my uncle’s work has sustained three generations of family—himself, his children, and now his grandchildren. By his honest labor, day in and day out, he has shaped generations of lives and worked upon the fabric of the world. To put it another way, he has built his own Jerusalem, his own Eden, a place where God dwells. That is the legacy of a builder.
https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/19/the-antidote-to-dependence-is-building/
WATCH: Ex-Sheriff Turned Congressman Clay Higgins Saves the Day After Radical Left Protester Ambushes Lauren Boebert with a Nasty Question and Steps Toward Her – Protester Whines Like a Baby Afterwards (VIDEO)
By Cullen Linebarger May. 20, 2023 9:20 am58 Comments
A pajama boy leftist attempted to bully Lauren Boebert (R-CO) during a Wednesday press conference on Capitol Hill and it ended poorly for him.
That is because Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), a former Sheriff turned congressman, stepped up to defend Boebert’s honor and put the man-child in his place.
A group of Republican members of Congress including Higgins, Boebert, and Gosar were holding the press conference to voice their opposition to the Biden regime negotiating a “legally-binding” deal with the Chinese-run World Health Organization to grant them Chinese-backed World Health Organization full authority over U.S. pandemic policies without Senate approval.
The Gateway Pundit has extensively reported on these negotiations over the past year.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/watch-ex-sheriff-turned-congressman-clay-higgins-saves/
Stoltenberg on the International Day Against Homophobia
Speech by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on the International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, 17 May 2023.
In his address on Tuesday (17 May 2023), Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg underscored that NATO’s mission extends beyond protecting territories to safeguarding our diverse populations.
“NATO’s strength is our diversity. So it is important that we reflect and celebrate the extraordinary diversity of our populations,” he said.I value every member of the LGBTQ+ community serving at the NATO headquarters and around the world. You deserve dignity and respect, and I am proud to call myself your ally.
NATO has made some impressive steps when it comes to inclusiveness and inclusion, but we always need to do more: To push forward with ambition, to uphold our values, and to ensure our Alliance truly reflects the one billion people we protect.
redacted –The MOMENT the transgender movement went totally off the rails
The Human Rights Campaign is grading hospitals on their transgender policies.
If they are found not to be all-in on LGBTQ+ issues, they get a bad grade.
The Human Rights Campaign is a far-left organization that promotes transgender ideology.
Not surprisingly, they are funded by big pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
redacted – Controversy Erupts as Canada Pushes Forward with CBDC Plans – Angry Reactions Flood Social Media
A worthy 1 hr on CBDCs.
https://youtu.be/xhnOJ_qLFAo
Not that it matters, but please tell the BoC what you think in their “consultation”!
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/digitaldollar/
john campbell –Excess deaths in Canada
Serbia open to discussing leftist education as possible cause of shooting
Brad Johnson
Brad Johnson
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May 19, 2023
0
https://intelreform.org/school-shooting-in-serbia/
(Richard: The advantage Serbia has is they lived under communism and the adults recognize communism when the see it. Is the US the left has worked hard to prevent people from being taught what communism is, making it harder for us to fight against to attempted communist conquest.)
The Canadian Constitution Foundation
Justine Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Act was illegal.
But his government might get away with it.
Left unchallenged, it will set a precedent that allows the government to abuse these powers again in the future if it isn’t held accountable for its illegal use of them today. The Rouleau Commission failed to hold the government accountable.
That is why the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) launched a court challenge to the government’s innovation of the Emergencies Act, which was just heard in court this past April.
The Emergencies Act is dangerous legislation with a dark and troubled history in Canada.
The Act was originally introduced to replace the War Measures Act, which was used during the Second World War to intern Japanese Canadians and Italian Canadians, and which was abused during the FLQ Crisis in Quebec.
In order to prevent such abuse again, the drafters of the Emergencies Act set out a carefully crafted and demanding set of legally binding conditions to ensure its use would only be possible as an absolute last resort.
The Trudeau government illegally used the law. Its interpretation of a threat to national security was wildly wrong, and the Rouleau inquiry unquestionably accepted the government’s self-serving interpretation.
We need to hold the federal government accountable in court.
The CCF’s legal challenge was launched against the federal government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act on February 17, 2022, and was heard in Federal Court this April. Visit theccf.ca to learn more and keep up to date on this litigation.
Our litigation outlines three reasons why the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act was illegal:
1. The protests did not meet the threshold requirements of “threats to the security of Canada” under sections 16 and 17 of the Emergencies Act.
2. The government has not established that the situation could not be dealt with by another law of Canada under section 3 of the EA.
3. The Regulations enacted under the EA violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The Federal cabinet did not have reasonable grounds to believe there were threats to the security of Canada. Without getting too much into the weeds, the Emergencies Act was purposely drafted to incorporate the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s (CSIS) definition of a national security threat.
However, CSIS’s threat assessment concluded that there was no national security threat. Indeed, the protests were noted as unique for their lack of violence. There were no reports of serious physical harm. And there were no serious property damage. The CSIS conclusion was accurate, yet the government chose a different conclusion based on nebulous information.
The Emergencies Act is only to be invoked as a measure of last resort. The onus is on the government to show that the situation could not be handled by existing law. It did not do so. Indeed the protests were ultimately cleared under existing peacetime laws.
It goes without saying that the orders the Trudeau Cabinet issued after the innovation of the Emergencies Act, like freezing people’s bank accounts or making it a crime to participate in a public assembly that “may” lead to a breach of the peace, violated various sections of the Charter.
Innovation of the Emergencies Act has been and should remain exceedingly rare.
Unless our litigation is successful, the Act will be used again.
Our litigation puts this issue before the courts. Unlike the Rouleau Commission, courts can make binding orders. courts can find wrongdoing and liability. and courts can create legal procedures that guide how the legislation can be used in the future.
But taking the government to court isn’t cheap.
The federal government has unlimited tax dollars at its disposal to litigate. A non-profit charitable organization, dependent on the voluntary generosity of its supports does not.
We need to raise another $50,000 to fund this litigation .
So there you have it sports fans, we need to help fight the good fight. You can donate on line or send a cheque to Canadian Constitution Foundation, 215-6025 12 St. SE, Calgary AB T2H 9Z9.
When making your donations think of the treatment our fellow Canadian citizens endured while standing up for OUR rights, our FREEDOM or perhaps just remember the smirk on Freeland’s face when she announced what this government was going to do to its own people.
Stay strong, stay safe, and never, never submit to tyranny.
Oxford as thousands hit the streets against “15 minute cities”.
A counter demonstration by a handful of Antifa thugs, or government thugs employed as Antifa, tried attacking them, but they were left humiliated and unheard.
Lee – May 20, 2023
https://twitter.com/VictoryDay_Hope/status/1659874038175481856
Swalwell Reports Former San Francisco 49ers Fullback to Capitol Police Over Twitter Message
By Cassandra MacDonald May. 20, 2023 11:00 am203 Comments
Whiny Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell has reported former San Francisco 49ers fullback Bruce Miller to the Capitol Police over a message sent to him on Twitter.
The message from Miller said, “almost time!!! Would you rather Guantanamo or just execution,” with laughing emojis.
Miller also called the congressman, who is rumored to have had a sexual relationship with a Chinese spy, a “f-cking traitor.”
Swalwell tweeted a screenshot of the message asking who Miller was.
Swalwell told a reporter for NBC Bay Area that he reported Miller to the police.
“My family and staff are deeply disturbed by the threat of execution…apparently by former 49er Bruce Miller. Threats of political violence are unacceptable,” Swalwell told the reporter.
Miller responded to Swalwell on Twitter, writing “I was content with trolling corrupt politicians in my dm’s, but since you want to make a story out of it then that’s what we’ll do. That was in no way a threat to you or you family. I missed when a harmless game of “would you rather” Guantanamo or execution (which to my knowledge is the punishment) for the treason you’ve so aggressively participated in trying to frame the sitting president, who was disrupting the corrupt status quo of the parasitic us gov. You Eric, are a traitor to the country, to your state, and to your district.”
“I am not a threat to you or anyone else for that matter. However, you and the uniparty are a threat to the country and to the world. While your busy deflecting to bs and running around screwing Chinese spies while sitting on an intelligence committee, the Bay Area is in decay,” the former football player said.
“Under the leadership of you and the other corrupt leadership. But you’d rather spend the last 7 years committing the biggest fraud in US history, instead of helping people. One that all of you knew from conception was a fraud, and it’s very clear. I never threatened you,” Miller continued. “I asked a simple question which struck a nerve, which I can imagine would since that punishment is in the cards for you and many others! Im not maga, republican or democrat. I’m an American who is sick of watching the corrupt establishment destroy our country.”
The thread concluded with an American flag emoji.
Miller also responded to an incident in 2016 where he was arrested for felony assault, as the media was quick to bring it up after Swalwell’s tweet.
“And while we’re here and so many people are invoking my case as a history of violence. I’d be glad to inform you that my case was dismissed with 0 liability,” Miller wrote. “My record is cleaner than most of you. I had to tell another corrupt destroyer of cities George Gascon to kick rocks and shove his plea. After 4 years, 3 DA’s and a lot of wasted time the incompetent were forced to dismiss. Who charges someone with 50 years worth of felonies and walks away with a pat on the back for effort but it’s prob hard to convict someone after the witness claimed to assault me 1st!”
The California politician said that he was contacted by the San Francisco 49ers.
Swalwell said that a spokesperson for the team “reached out to me this afternoon regarding this threat from a former player. As a lifelong member of The Faithful, I appreciate them sharing their concern.”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/swalwell-reports-former-san-francisco-49ers-fullback-capitol/
Crack Dealer Granted Clemency By Obama Charged With Attempted Murder, Woman Declared Brain Dead
By Anthony Scott May. 20, 2023 10:40 am125 Comments
Alton Mills, 54, a former crack cocaine dealer whose life sentence was commuted by Obama in 2015 has now been charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting a woman in a Chicago expressway.
Mills was charged with three different attempted murder charges after he allegedly shot a woman passenger in a car traveling on the I-57 on-ramp in Illinois.
The woman who was shot is in severe condition and law enforcement officers have already declared her brain dead.
Mills previously served a 22-year sentence on crack cocaine conspiracy charges but was granted clemency by Obama in 2015.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/crack-dealer-granted-clemency-obama-charged-attempted-murder/
Elon Musk Fires Warning Shot at AP – “Either Back Up Your Claims AP with Actual Source Data or Retract Your Story”
By Cullen Linebarger May. 20, 2023 12:20 pm15 Comments
The Associated Press (AP) has completely lost the trust of the American people. An embarrassing post sent out by the formerly great news organization’s Twitter account further illustrates why.
The AP shared a story which claimed that Twitter was failing to stop people from saying the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged.
As the nation prepares for the 2024 elections, false claims that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” continue to thrive on Twitter without being corrected, an analysis shows.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/elon-musk-fires-warning-ap-either-back-up/
Neil Oliver: There’s nothing green about the green agenda…just plain old greed!
Western powers pushing for world war, food shortages, biological warfare, 15-minute concentration camps, world fascism–none can be as bad as this:
https://youtu.be/kMCFYW4dwGg
That was the 60s and 70s, the beginning of the anti patriotic movement. We were fighting to keep freedom alive and the MSM was lying about us. There were still a few people in Hollywood and in the singers who believed in freedom but they have since been blacklisted.
San Jose High School Students Confront Board About Homeless People Leaving Needles in Their Cafeteria and Bathrooms
By Cassandra MacDonald May. 20, 2023 2:00 pm4 Comments
A group of 20 high school students from KIPP San Jose Collegiate in San Jose have confronted their school board over homeless people using drugs and leaving needles lying inside the building.
The students allege that homeless people are in the bathrooms and using drugs at the lunch tables.
“We see them coming into our bathrooms. We have them sleeping in our athletic shred and we also have them breaking fences and doing drugs on the lunch table,” student Alfredo Hernández said during the board meeting, according to a report from NBC News.
The high schoolers said that the problem has been ongoing for roughly a year.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/san-jose-high-school-students-confront-board-about/
Husband of California Democrat Rep. Linda Sanchez, Who Tried to Smear FBI Whistleblower, Sentenced to Prison in Connecticut Fraud Case
By Jim Hoft May. 20, 2023 1:40 pm55 Comments
In a significant turn of events, the estranged husband of California Democrat Representative Linda Sanchez and former board chairperson of a Connecticut energy cooperative has been sentenced to prison in a Connecticut fraud case, AP reported.
James Sullivan, 56, was sentenced Wednesday to six months in prison after being convicted of involvement in a fraudulent scheme. The details of the fraud case reveal that he used public funds to pay for lavish trips to places like the Kentucky Derby and a high-end golf resort.
Sullivan is required to report to prison on July 12.
AP reported:
James Sullivan, 56, a one-time Democratic congressional candidate in Connecticut, was convicted of helping plan trips in 2015 and 2016 for dozens of top staff, board members and family members totaling $800,000. Prosecutors said the trips were unrelated to the business of the Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative, which receives federal funding from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The $800,000 included travel expenses, private chartered airfare, first-class hotel accommodations, meals, tickets to sporting events, golf fees, souvenirs and gifts, federal prosecutors said.
For a trip to the Kentucky Derby trip in 2015, which prosecutors said had an average cost of approximately $9,000 per guest, Sullivan brought his son, brother and sister-in-law, as well as a woman he knew and her friend.
Sullivan is married to Democratic U.S. Rep. Linda Sanchez, who dropped her bid for chair of the House Democratic Caucus after Sullivan’s indictment in 2018. Connecticut court records indicate the couple is going through divorce proceedings.
A second case against Sullivan and the energy cooperative’s former CEO is still pending related to $100,000 of Sullivan’s personal and travel expenses, including several entries that included expenses for Sanchez, such as travel to the Kentucky Derby and to Key West, Florida, in 2014.
Amidst the ongoing fraud case, Rep. Sanchez also faces scrutiny over her alleged attempt to discredit an FBI whistleblower. Reports suggest that she sought to tarnish the whistleblower’s reputation by spreading false information and questioning the veteran’s allegiance to the United States.
Democratic Rep. Linda Sanchez of California is not among those who are happy about the testimony of the FBI whistleblowers.
As one of them testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the weaponization of the federal government Thursday, she resorted to basically pulling names out of a hat in order to trap him into tanking his credibility.
Marcus Allen, whose name just sounds common, found himself in Sanchez’s crosshairs as she tried to pin a random Twitter account on him.
Rep. Matt Gaetz also called her out for calling into question Marcus Allen’s allegiance to the United States.
“We just astonishingly heard a democrat on this committee question your allegiance to the United States,” said Gaetz.
“It seems to me [Allen] your allegiance to the United States is pretty well established over multiple decades wearing the uniform, fighting for our country. And I am proud that you continue to fight for our country,” said Gaetz.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/husband-california-democrat-rep-linda-sanchez-who-tried/
FOUND FOOTAGE: Bud Light Parent AB InBev Commits to Purging White, Male Employees.
BY JAKE WELCH
MAY 18, 2023
Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Bud Light, has pledged to purge its white, male employees in an effort to have a “more diverse and inclusive environment,” according to footage found on the company’s website. The company has seen its sales collapse since the disastrous Dylan Mulvaney advertisement campaign which wiped billions off the firm’s value, and chased millions of customers away
In the video, one employee of Anheuser-Busch explains, “we’re still 40 percent women, and 60 percent men, still predominantly white: so there’s still work to be done.” The “work” to be “done” is apparently replacing white male workers with alternatives.
In doing this, another employee says, “I feel like I finally found my voice as a black woman, and I’m not prepared to lose it.”
Discussing the #CheerstoDiversityAndInclusion campaign, Anheuser-Busch’s European Diversity and Inclusion Manager, Lara Laila Gärber explains, “at AB InBev, what we wanted to do is ensure that diversity and inclusion is fully integrated in our business strategy.”
https://thenationalpulse.com/2023/05/18/found-footage-bud-light-parent-ab-inbev-commits-to-purging-white-male-employees/
https://youtu.be/TYUpsy2PPmo
China’s war on the west goes digital.
https://youtu.be/z3K-S956wj0
I have no idea who this guy is but:
2:42. https://youtu.be/BMKNoJ2In98