Aslan is on the Move: Revival Breaking Out on Multiple Campuses Right Now

Aslan is on the Move: 

Revival Breaking Out on Multiple Campuses Right Now

Donald McLaughlin for The Stream

[This article was written on Saturday, February 11. Much has happened since then, and it’s good. The revival is going strong as of Monday morning, reaching many more schools and colleges, and even as far as China, Indonesia and the Philippines via social media. We will post updates. — The Editors]

In a scene from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, one of the tales of C.S. Lewis’s classic Chronicles of Narnia, the four children, Lucy, Edmond, Susan, and Peter find themselves at the dwelling of Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. As Mr. Beaver begins explaining events to the children, he tells them in a low whisper, “They say Aslan is on the move — perhaps has already landed.”

Aslan is the Great Lion in the Narnia stories, the God or Christ figure. After nearly one hundred years of the cruel rule of the White Witch, who had kept it always Winter those 100 years, it brought great hope to all of Narnia to think that Aslan might indeed be on the move, and that he might already be among them. “Aslan is on the move” were words of great hope.

As great as that story is, suddenly we are seeing something far better: Unexpectedly, powerfully, even globally, God is on the move.

God is on the Move

“God is on the move” can bring us much hope, too. So often it seems the darkness is increasing. Just last week, though, on Wednesday February 8, 2023, God showed up at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky. The same Asbury where back in 1970 He showed up and sparked a revival that impacted the entire world for months and years to follow.

For those old enough to remember, the great Asbury Revival was a truly remarkable outpouring of the Holy Spirit that spread around the world. And now God has showed up again. Reports are pouring in (see here, here, and here) from what is beginning to look like yet another great revival starting at Asbury. It is now in its 3rd day, with no signs of abating.

Another Asbury Revival

Asbury student and editor for the college newspaper, Alexandra Presta, has written multiple reports from inside Hugh’s Auditorium where the revival is taking place. She writes, “Peers, professors, local church leaders and seminary students surround me — all of them praying, worshiping, and praising God together. Voices are ringing out. People are bowing at the altar, arms stretched wide. A pair of friends cling to each other in a hug, one with tears in her eyes. A diverse group of individuals crowd the piano and flawlessly switch from song to song. Some even sit like me, with laptops open. No one wants to leave.”

Other Universities Experience God’s Outpouring

Students from at least two  nearby universities have been bussed over to experience God’s outpouring as well. This may well be only the beginning. When the revival of 1970 took place we only heard about it in the days afterwards from family and friends of students who were there, two of my cousins included. There was some mention of it in newspapers. Now we have the internet. This week’s revival is already gaining international attention and may well spark other revivals in many other places.

Many Christians have been praying a long time for revival, myself among them. We know in our hearts that most of the problems we face in our culture can only be addressed spiritually, by people having a close, personal encounter with the living God. What happens in our culture if thousands upon thousands of Christians catch the revival fire, and many more thousands turn to Christ? Be ready! “Aslan is on the move!” Christ is on the move!

It Continues!

[Saturday evening update follows:]

A professor at Asbury reported this Saturday night:

83 hours later and still going strong! EVERY parking space within a few hundred yards of Hughes is packed, and what you can’t see in the video is the standing room only in the back and into the foyer and stairwells. May the fire marshal have a special anointing of patience. Alumni and pastors and seekers are showing up from everywhere, including buses of students from:

• Anderson University
• Bethel University (Mishawaka)
• Campbellsville University
• Eastern Kentucky University
• Georgetown University
• God’s Bible School (Cincinnati)
• Indiana Wesleyan University
• Lee University
• Midway University
• Mt. Vernon University
• Ohio Christian University
• Olivet University
• Oral Roberts University
• Ohio State University
• Purdue University
• Southern Wesleyan University
• Spring Arbor University
• Taylor University
• Trevecca Nazarene University
• University of Kentucky
• United (OH)
• University of Cumberlands

Speaking very soberly —  yet joyfully! — this could turn out to be the single most important event of our lifetimes. So pray for revival. Pray for it to grow, deepen, and spread. Pray for revival in your own heart, your family, your church. And thank God for what He is bringing to pass!

What’s Wrong With Nationalism?

It is a mark of piety to love the place of your birth,

 to prefer it above other places, to want it to be itself 

and not just like everywhere else.

by Anthony Esolen for American Greatness

Pope Francis, along with many other commentators on current affairs, has condemned nationalism. I might join these commentators, if I knew just what they were talking about. What is a nation?

When I was backpacking through Italy in 1985, I found myself having dinner with another young fellow in Assisi, and we got to talking about Italians and their loyalty to the paese, the village or town or, to stretch things a little, the general region where they were born. You are a paesano not if you speak Italian, and not if you are a friendly sort, but if you come from the same place. He was a Florentine, and I, of course, was and remain an American.

You will notice an imbalance in that last sentence. Florence is a city, 2,000 years old—Florentia, in Latin. It is not a whole country. The United States is a whole country. But in terms of age, by comparison, the United States is still wearing short pants and playing in the sandbox. That’s if you go by years. If you go by youth, maturity, or senescence, I don’t know how to answer. For when the newly independent Americans were debating in public about the wisdom of the proposed Constitution, many a broadside was published to be read by farmers and their wives, by craftsmen and merchants, by clergymen and schoolteachers, which would now be hard slogging for college graduates. Nor do I think that Publius, Junius, and the Pennsylvania Farmer have anything to fear, when it comes to subtle thought, the organization of an argument, and a broad and penetrating reading of history, from our current Supreme Court. Intellectually, we may be hunched over, leaning on a cane, with hands a-tremble.

In any case, I asked my Florentine friend why he did not consider himself first as an Italian, and only second as a Florentine. I did know that the unification of the Italian states occurred by fits and starts in the 19th century, with much bloodshed, and that as late as World War II, people in southern Italy resented their far richer countrymen in the north. I also knew that not everybody in Italy could speak the standard language, derived from the Tuscan dialect. My great-aunt Concetta, who lived her whole life in a mountaintop village in Calabria, could not. Still, I wanted to hear his reply.

He told me not only that his allegiance lay with Florence, but that as a good Florentine he was obliged to hate other towns in Tuscany. “We hate the Sienese,” he said, complacently, “the Sienese hate us, and both of us hate the Pisans.” That was hard for me to understand. I was a Pennsylvania boy, and though it was incumbent on me to poke fun at people from New Jersey, I never took it seriously. Then again, Pennsylvania has never been at war with New Jersey, as Florence often was with Pisa. Michelangelo’s David itself commemorates a victory over Florence’s long-established rival.

Yet there is also, among the Italians, a kind of national pride that extends beyond the paese, though it has almost nothing to do with any national governmental structure. When I asked a close friend of mine at Princeton, who was at that time a nonobservant Jew, what he considered to be a sacred text, he replied, “The Constitution.” It stunned me. A set of by-laws, sacred? 

I hold the Constitution in honor, but it does not replace the Bible. As for the Italians, I doubt you could find anyone from the Dolomites to the slopes of Mount Aetna who holds the Italian Constitution as anything but makeshift, apt to produce governments that are inefficient and easy to topple. That may be a good thing, too, as the Italians retain their liberties by habit and by a blithe refusal to truckle to Rome. I was once in a cab in Rome, and the driver asked me to buckle my seat belt because the carabinieri were out in force, stopping cars and handing out fines. “When they get enough money from it,” he said with a laugh, “they’ll stop, and we’ll just go back to doing what we did before.”

If Italian pride has nothing to do with the government in Rome, or with politics, or with wealth (much of Italy is rather poor), far less with Italian fortunes at war in the last 100 years, what can it have to do with? That is what an American would ask. I got a fair answer, I think, when I was with my family in Florence in 1998, and we were having lunch on the grounds outside of Santa Maria Novella. I was talking to a young Italian visitor to Florence, and we must have gotten into a conversation about my job, which involved, in part, teaching young Americans about the art and architecture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. That included the glorious cathedrals in France.

“The French!” he cried. “The French are all thieves! We’re the ones who produce the greatest art, and the French come and steal it.” He was wrong about that, at least as regards the medieval cathedrals. For the Italians never went in for the stained-glass windows that grace the cathedrals at Chartres and Rouen and so many other cities in France; nor for such architectural innovations as made those great windows possible, such as the flying buttress. But I wasn’t going to argue the point.

It is a mark of piety to love the place of your birth, to prefer it above other places, to want it to be itself and not just like everywhere else. Globalism is not simply the enemy of nationalism. It is the enemy of the distinctness of human cultures, and of the local loyalties that bind us to place, kinship, stories, forms of art and music and poetry, even the particularities of language and dialect that give us characteristic ways of looking at the world. 

If nationalism means that you must believe that your nation is the best of all, and that it should spread its ways worldwide, then nationalism is a sort of globalism with a flag, and sometimes with guns. If opposition to nationalism means that you roll a bulldozer over nations and their ways, especially if it means that, in the name of human rights, you infect everyone with the ultimate venereal disease, namely the abrogation of sexual mores that has characterized the West for 60 to 100 years, then it seems to me that you have the soul of a National Socialist, perhaps without the cruelty, but certainly without the patriotism.

If I love the United States as my nation, my country, without making a god of it, and without seeking to make the whole world like a strip mall outside of a newly sprouted non-city in Arizona, I will be glad to see other nations continue to be nations in reality, and not just political machines or geographical fictions.

What, then, explains the allergic reaction to Hungarians who want to be Hungarians, and Poles who want to be Poles? Is it that their national identities are bound up with religious faith? Is that it? 

To what extent you can have a nation without a common or dominant religious faith is an anthropological question that Pope Francis, as far as I can gather, has not specifically asked, nor have Americans asked it in my lifetime. Some would gladly do away with both nationhood and religious faith, at one stroke, thinking to bring peace thereby. That would be a blank peace, in which no one fights because no one believes in anything anymore, or loves anything enough to fight for it; the peace of spiritual and cultural death. No true friend of man can desire it.

X22, And we Know, and more- Feb 14

 

Hope you all had a wonderful V day. Here's tonight's news:

Calvin Coolidge: Freedom Works Best

Calvin Coolidge: Freedom Works Best 

With his emphasis on tax and spending cuts, the president created the modern conservative movement.

Bob Luddy for Spectator.org

Calvin Coolidge was the 30th American president, starting in 1923, 100 years ago. His tenure, 1923–29, provides a stellar example of the Founding Fathers’ dreams and aspirations for America. He was one of the greatest successors to founding principles, including adherence to the Constitution, economic freedom, and frugal spending.

Coolidge grew up in Vermont and realized how difficult it was for most citizens to make a living. His formative years taught him respect for free markets. He believed in the inherent right of citizens to spend their hard-earned money in the best interest of their families.

Coolidge knew that freedom, liberty, the right to worship, and entrepreneurship were the foundations of prosperity and peace. He was countercultural, implementing these values during the “Progressive Era.” Economic growth is fueled by private initiatives, not government programs. The freedom of private creation is the core of American exceptionalism.

Coolidge respected human dignity by fostering stability and limited government.

Calvin Coolidge knew that entrepreneurs are the heroes, the good guys, not the villains. Their efforts resulted in a booming economy known as the Roaring Twenties. Coolidge understood Say’s Law, coined by Jean Baptiste-Say in 1803: Supply creates demand, positively impacting every family. Innovation, which improves quality and reduces cost, is the only way to increase the standard of living for all citizens.

Coolidge respected human dignity by fostering stability and limited government, and by avoiding government interventions and intrusions. He knew that special interests would always demand more money and programs from Congress, and as a result he practiced and perfected the art of saying no.

The 16th Amendment to the Constitution authorizing income taxes was ratified in 1913. Woodrow Wilson was president. The Revenue Act of 1913 established a 1 percent tax on income above $3,000 per year. By 1920, the Wilson administration had implemented a marginal (highest) tax rate of 73 percent. It rose that high that fast.

Coolidge referred to over-taxation as “legalized larceny.” His excellent treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, was an important advocate of reducing marginal tax rates. They believed that the rich would pay a higher percent of taxes collected if the marginal tax rate was lower. Together they worked on what came to be known as a “scientific tax rate.” The dilemma was to achieve the lowest marginal rate, which produced the highest revenue.

Coolidge and Mellon worked to achieve the best outcomes for the continuity of government with the least burden for all citizens. Keep in mind, during this era most citizens paid little or no taxes.  At a much later date, our 40th president, Ronald Reagan, was inspired by the Coolidge tax cuts. Reagan ultimately took the upper marginal tax rate down from 70 percent to 28 percent.

In 1924, Coolidge was able to lower marginal tax rates to 46 percent, and, the following year, 1925, he achieved the ultimate goal of a 25 percentmarginal tax rate, enacted retroactively.

In 1924, the first year of lower marginal rates, tax revenue was $3.9 billion and only declined slightly in 1925 to $3.6 billion. In 1928, Coolidge’s last year in office, revenue was $3.9 billion, proving that a lower marginal tax rate could generate the same amount of revenue for the government. Spending under Coolidge averaged $2.9 billion during his tenure because of his frugality and strong leadership.

Subsequent presidents, including Herbert Hoover and especially Franklin D. Roosevelt, would hike the marginal rates again, but Coolidge had done his best to keep them down.

Coolidge’s tenure was marked not only by major tax reductions but also by increases in gross domestic product per capita. In 1921, income per capita was $5,758. By 1928, his final year, income per capita grew to $7,439, an increase of 23 percent in just eight years.

Coolidge, with the help of Mellon, definitively proved what economist Julian Simon described as “the ultimate resource,” the power of human beings to create and solve virtually every problem.

The Founding Fathers had it correct, and Calvin Coolidge proved how well America can work when its citizens and leaders follow a philosophy of limited government and freedom for all citizens. The greatest freedom leads to the most innovation and the highest standard of living in the world. Conservatives understand that. Calvin Coolidge created the modern conservative movement, and he proved that freedom works best.

The Debate over the Origins of the War in Ukraine

All wars are like car accidents, and all car accidents have causes.  Trouble is, conflicting testimony will often produce different explanations of the cause.

posted by James Soriano at American Thinker

The conventional view on the Russo-Ukraine War holds that Russia's invasion constitutes a grave act of injustice, amounting to an open-and-shut case of unprovoked aggression.  War guilt rests solely on the shoulders of Russian president Vladimir Putin.  "One man chose this war," American secretary of state Antony Blinken has said, "and one man can end it," echoing a widely shared view by foreign policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic.  Variations of this version would add that Putin’s past words and deeds show that he had long planned for war, that he is bent on conquest, and that he wants to recreate the Russian Empire.  In any case, the key point in all this is that the war stemmed from an act of Putin's will, nothing more.

The anti-war view is in the minority; it has no standing among foreign policy elites.  Generally, the war critics see two principal chains of events leading up to the conflict.  The primary one is the prospect of Ukraine joining the NATO alliance and Russia's well publicized record of warnings against that development.  Over the years, Russia had repeatedly signaled that it would consider such a move a threat to its security.  A full diplomatic history of the run-up to the war — of who said what to whom and when — lies in the future, but enough is now known to say that the first move was taken by NATO in 2008, when it formally invited Ukraine to become a member of the alliance.  War critics say the U.S. had the influence to change this policy but chose not to do so.  To them, the U.S. is the one who started the quarrel. 

The other thread is about the destabilizing changes that took place in Ukraine after a stridently anti-Russia nationalist movement took power there in 2014.  That event sparked a civil war between the government and the Russian-speaking population in the eastern, or Donbas, part of the country.  Russia provided the rebels with military support, and the war in the Donbas settled into years of artillery duels, causing an estimated fourteen thousand civilian deaths.  The record does not show that the government sought to win the hearts and minds of the pro-Russia separatists; its tone toward them was one of mocking hostility.  The war critics make a great fuss over the fact that the Western media has largely ignored this piece of the story.  Meanwhile, NATO boosted military aid to Ukraine, and, with the passage of time, the country gradually became a de facto NATO ally.  The Kremlin looked upon these developments with alarm.

It is pointless arguing whether withdrawing NATO's invitation to Ukraine or resolving the civil war could have avoided war, for conjectures like these are debatable, but it is fair to say that the failure to perform on them — keeping the invitation active and allowing the civil war to fester — contributed much to the current catastrophe.  These failures amounted to the piling up of dry kindling, which awaited an agent for ignition: Vladimir Putin chose war.  The conventional view would say he was aiming for war all along and was looking for the pretext to start one.  The war critics say he was not looking for war so much as he had concluded that a collision was inevitable.  In either case, no party in the West was willing or able to accommodate Russia's security "asks."  No negotiated solutions materialized.

This debate over war origins exists on two levels.  There is first of all the debate over the facts, with the conventional view emphasizing Putin's personal culpability as well as the legal and ethical aspects of Russia's invasion, while the war critics place Putin in a secondary role and emphasize the security environment faced by the Kremlin.  On another level, there is a kind of meta-debate, or a dispute over the debate itself.  The conventional view holds that there is a simple and final explanation for the war, and one need not do discovery much beyond the Kremlin walls to find it.  The war critics, on the other hand, see large areas open to doubt and questioning and assert that the matter of war origins is not settled.

An analogy to the origins of two world wars is apt.

There was a great debate after the First World War about its origins and causes.  Volumes have been written on the topic.  Some books look at the various crises that broke over Europe in the ten years before the guns of August, while others trace the war's origins deeper into the nineteenth century.  A reappraisal of the events emerged, along with a feeling that responsibility for the war did not rest solely on Germany, but was distributed among the other combatants.

Nothing like this exists about the Second World War.  The consensus view has long held fast: the war stemmed from an act of Adolf Hitler's will, nothing more.  Today's defenders of U.S. and NATO policy in Ukraine are like this.  Their explanation of the war does not admit of shared responsibility.  The anti-war camp, on the other hand, takes the First World War as its explanatory model.

The conventional view also keeps to a restricted understanding of the idea of "aggression."  To those who hold that view, Russia is the aggressor because it attacked Ukraine, and not the other way around.  But the aggressor is not always the one who attacks; he can also be the one who starts the quarrel.  The anti-war camp insists that the United States started the quarrel and thus either shares or bears responsibility for the war.

In ancient Greece, a great war was fought between the cities of Athens and Sparta over which was to lead the Greek world.  For generations prior to the war, Athens had become a formidable naval power, acquired great wealth, and collected a following of other Greek cities, which looked to it for commercial and cultural stimulation.  Sparta looked upon these developments with fear and saw the power balance shift against it.  After much delay, Sparta declared war on Athens and attacked.  But Sparta was not the aggressor, according to the Greek historian who chronicled the events.  Thucydides took part in the war as an admiral in the Athenian fleet, but he fingered his own country for war guilt.  The real cause, he said, "was kept out of sight."  It was "the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired" in Sparta.  Here is the familiar combination of the relentless expansion of the one power and the fear it provokes in another.  Sparta's attack was not unforeseen; it was the result of the accumulation of unresolved tension. 

It is tempting to find in this an allegory for the Russo-Ukraine War, with America cast as democratic Athens against Russia's Sparta.  After 27 years of fighting, the Peloponnesian War came to an end in 404 B.C.  Sparta won. 

3 Warning Signs The FBI Might Label You A ‘Radical Traditionalist’ Christian

Federal agencies have long targeted social conservatives, so of course Latin Mass Catholics are on their bad-guy list. So are all serious Christians.

Matt Lamb reporting for The Federalist

Intelligence analysts and the chief counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Richmond, Virginia field office are concerned “radical-traditionalist Catholics” are a threat to our democracy and could be ripe for recruitment by white supremacists.

Although FBI headquarters has tried to distance itself from the memo, that does not change the fact that multiple staffers, including a senior attorney, signed off on the intelligence bulletin. That bulletin relied on an Atlantic article about rosary prayer beads being a “weapon” and the grifting hate group called the Southern Poverty Law Center. The retraction does not remove the attitude within the Richmond field office that Catholics who like the Latin Mass or hold conservative views are threats.

Given how the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, and federal government in general have repeatedly targeted conservatives for their speech and beliefs, it might be good to consider some warning signs that possibly landed traditional, faithful Catholics on the radar of law enforcement.

As someone who attends the traditional Latin Mass and knows many traditional Catholics across the country, I think I know several things that prompted the memo.

1. Interest in Homeschooling

A common interest in Latin Mass parishes and among traditional Catholics is homeschooling. This should not be surprising given the degeneracy and filth in U.S. public schools. Of course, another reason is that many Latin Mass Catholics take seriously the biblical directive that parents are the primary educators of their children.

“Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children. They bear witness to this responsibility first by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church states. “The home is well suited for education in the virtues. This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery—the preconditions of all true freedom.”

It just drips with radicalism. “Forgiveness” and “self-denial” are obvious codewords for white supremacy, I assume the FBI would say.

Given that faithful Christians are concerned about the moral upbringing of their children, it makes sense they would gravitate to flexible educational options that put parents and kids in charge. But we already know that the Department of Justice views parents who want more say in what their kids are taught as similar to domestic terrorists.

That is why U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered federal law enforcement to look for ways to prosecute parents and other citizens who spoke out at public school board meetings against critical race theory, sexualized curricula, and lockdown policies. People who opt out of the government system are usually seen as a threat by those in charge.

So it makes sense the FBI would be concerned about parents who have opted out of the public school program. After all, the federal government has lost control over what those kids learn and can’t make those kids wear masks and accept state-mandated medical treatments.

2. Meeting Every Sunday with Other People Who Want Good Lives

The FBI, U.S. Department of Defense, and other national security entities have gone woke and embraced critical race theory and LGBT sexual ideology, so it’s no wonder institutions that have held fast to traditional principles would be their target.

It also makes sense, then, that faithful Catholics who spend their Sundays not on drag shows but at church would threaten such a regime. Also, in contrast to the many churches that are dying out, the Latin Mass remains popular, and many churches that celebrate it are bursting at the seams. It is not that people who attend the Latin Mass are somehow inherently more virtuous, but most at least want to embrace virtue and try to grow closer to God.

The message of traditional priests goes against the libertine attitude of LGBT activists who have greatly influenced our federal government. Also, the Christian idea that individuals are responsible for their actions and people should be judged as individuals, not as a collective group responsible for past wrongs, is a threat to critical race theory.

After all, CRT supporters do not want Catholics going to the sacrament of Confession to share how they have failed to live virtuously. Instead, they should pay hundreds of dollars to go to a white privilege talk.

3. Valuing Life, Organic Marriage, and the Sexes

It is well established that federal government entities have it out for pro-life, biblical marriage, anti-gender ideology individuals and groups. After all, the DOJ just lost a case against Mark Houck, a Catholic pro-life dad who stopped an aggressive abortion escort from harassing his 12-year-old son. Couple that with the IRS targeting of Tea Party and conservative Christian groups, and it only follows that churches that hold similar views are on the radar.

According to one popular survey, Catholics who attend the Latin Mass almost exclusively reject abortion and same-sex “marriage.” Even worse for the leftists in the FBI, these Catholics tend to have more kids, given their openness to life. That means even more traditional Catholics are born each day, amplifying the threat. These Christians raise their kids to stay true to the faith, support biblical marriage, and turn to God and their faith, not government and political ideology, in times of trouble.

Even to those who are not Catholic but believe in the sanctity of life or homeschool their kids, the FBI memo should be concerning. An already politicized and weaponized Department of Justice was caught once again targeting innocent Americans for their beliefs.

Conservatives Need Not Apply’ Under Biden Administration’s Proposed Hiring Rules

 Conservatives Need Not Apply’ Under Biden Administration’s Proposed Hiring Rules

Hans von Spakovsky  February 12, 2023 for The Daily Signal

The vague, nebulous changes to existing government hiring regulations could be exploited and virtually allow biased government managers to put up a sign saying, “Conservatives Need Not Apply.” Pictured: OPM Director Kiran Ahuja listens during a roundtable Oct. 20, 2021, with Vice President Kamala Harris and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh at the Executive Office Building in Washington. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

In a move that has gotten little notice in the press, the Biden administration is proposing federal hiring rules that easily could be abused to deny employment to anyone who questions liberal, woke policies, criticizes the government, or belongs to a politically incorrect organization.

The vague, nebulous language of the proposed changes in existing government hiring regulations could be exploited and allow biased government managers to put up a virtual “Conservatives Need Not Apply” sign when it comes to the federal civil service, leaving rejected applicants with little recourse.

The Office of Personnel Management, the human resources department of the federal government, proposed amendments Jan. 31 in the Federal Register to the “personnel vetting investigative and adjudicative processes for determining suitability and fitness” for government employment (88 FR 6192).

The public now has until April 3 to file comments on the proposed “Suitability and Fitness Vetting” amendments.

As the proposal explains, the term “suitability and fitness” refers to “a decision by an agency that an individual does or does not have the required level of character and conduct necessary” to work in a federal agency. This assessment has nothing to do with someone’s qualifications for a job and everything to do with a subjective assessment of a prospective employee.

Under the current regulation, 731.202(b)(7), an applicant is disqualified from employment by the federal government for “knowing and willful engagement in acts or activities designed to overthrow the U.S. Government.” 

Certainly, no one disagrees with that standard, since no one should be a federal employee who has engaged in such behavior. It’s a standard question that background investigators ask a prospective employee’s listed references.

The Biden administration, however, is proposing to replace that straightforward standard with four enigmatic standards:

• Knowing engagement in acts or activities with the purpose of overthrowing Federal, State, local, or tribal government.
• Acts of force, violence, intimidation, or coercion with the purpose of denying others the free exercise of their rights under the U.S. Constitution or any state constitution.
• Attempting to indoctrinate others or to incite them to action in furtherance of illegal acts.
• Active membership or leadership in a group with knowledge of its unlawful aims, or participation in such a group with specific intent to further its unlawful aims.

The first standard above is similar to the current standard. It is not controversial. But the problem with the other three proposed standards is that they are so broad and so vague—“nuanced,” in the words of OPM’s proposal—that they will give ideologues who predominate the civil service’s ranks the ability to reject almost anyone who is critical of government policies.

Managers also could reject anyone who questions the acts and behavior of government officials or who voices opinions that don’t fit with the accepted political orthodoxy of the times, such as viewing racial preferences in hiring or college admissions as unacceptable, immoral discrimination.

Do you doubt that? Members of the progressive Left long have claimed that words and free speech are a literal form of violence, that they amount to intimidation and coercion.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., notably claims that criticism of her is “not tone, it’s violence,” and in 2018, former Vice President Joe Biden linked the rhetoric of then-President Donald Trump to mass shootings and terror bombings.

After all, if words are “venom and violence,” the Left never needs to engage in a real debate.

These are the same people who canceled “Harry Potter” novelist J.K. Rowling by arguing that her opinions on Twitter represent a violent threat to the trans community. The Left is pushing to classify as criminal hate speech any opinions with which it disagrees on issues such as illegal immigration, racial preferences, and abortion, claiming such speech “marginalizes” certain social groups. 

Is expressing the opinion that there is no constitutional right to abortion an act of “intimidation” or “coercion” that denies others “the free exercise of their rights under the U.S. Constitution” under the second new character and fitness standard that the Office of Personnel Management wants to apply?

That’s probably the view of those, including the current president of the United States, who have harshly condemned the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case and claiming the high court is absolutely wrong when it says there is no right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution.

Ask yourself this: Can you imagine a government bureaucrat in charge of hiring ever claiming that opposition to liberal state abortion laws is an attempt “to indoctrinate others or to incite them to action in furtherance of illegal acts,” thereby allowing the applicant to be rejected under OPM’s third proposed standard?

It’s not hard to imagine, is it? If you’re a member or leader of a pro-life group trying to change the law in a state such as California that legalizes abortion up through birth, is that “active membership or leadership in a group” with “unlawful aims” under the fourth proposed OPM standard?

And the same is true if you express an opinion adverse to illegal immigration and illegal aliens in a sanctuary state, or object in a state that has legalized racial discrimination in admissions to state colleges and universities. You could be considered to be attempting to deny such illegal aliens or beneficiaries of discriminatory admissions policies “their rights” under state law.

If the Office of Personnel Management wants to do something to help protect “the free exercise of rights” by the public under the Constitution, it could start by investigating every federal employee within the FBI, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies that have been involved in directing social media companies to censor the opinions and views of American citizens. 

Or, if OPM leaders don’t have the backbone to do that, how about investigating every federal government employee who labeled as domestic terrorists the parents who showed up at local school board meetings to complain about the racist propaganda being fed to their children? Or every government employee who targeted Catholics for their traditional views on marriage, abortion, and other issues? Or every government employee who contributed to the political persecutions of pro-life advocates through abuse of the FACE Act?

Don’t count on that happening.

So, rather than do the hard work of holding its current workforce to appropriate standards, the Office of Personnel Management wants to make it even easier on the front end for the federal government to unfairly discriminate in its hiring practices.

Nikki Haley Picks a Risky Lane as She Prepares to Formally Announce Her 2024 Presidential Candidacy

Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under then-President Donald Trump and former South Carolina governor, is expected to officially announce her 2024 presidential candidacy on Wednesday, Feb. 15, in Charleston, according to two South Carolina Republicans familiar with her plans.

Haley will become the first Republican to announce a White House run after Trump’s announcement on November 15, 2022, in an hour-long speech at Mar-a-Lago.

Meanwhile, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis waits in the wings. Any way you slice it, the Republican primary season is going to make the 2016 GOP primaries look like a Sunday walk in the park.

Challenging Trump on anything is a sobering prospect for the faint of heart, given the former president’s wont for burning challengers to the ground. That said, Haley’s strong performances in United Nations Security Council proved she’s likely up to the task, and she’s smart enough to know what’s coming from her former boss. The problem for Haley is would be DeSantis, but we’ll get the Florida governor in a bit.

The first reality is this: Love him, loathe him, or indifferent, Donald Trump is still the Republican King of the Hill until and if someone knocks him off his throne. If a 2024 challenger is able to accomplish the job, he or she must differentiate himself or herself from Trump, which is generally true in any election when running against a frontrunner. Running on the same issues in the same way as the frontrunner doesn’t give voters a reason to vote for the challenger. Unless they’ve had enough of the king, that is.

With that reality in mind, Haley has chosen a different lane than Trump’s, and a risky lane at that.

As reported by The Hill, Katon Dawson, a former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party who’s backing Haley, laid it out thusly:

Nikki’s had some tough races, and she’s used to running against the gold standard. There’s a lane in there for an anti-Trump. There’s a lane in there to be successful. And I think there’s a lane in there for Nikki Haley. She’s always been able to deliver a message and raise the money to have it heard.

Dawson’s observation was mostly correct, but that said, Haley’s never run against a “gold standard” like Ron DeSantis, and she’s sure as hell never run against Donald Trump. Speaking of whom, the former president earlier this month taunted his former UN ambassador in a Truth Social post of a video clip of her saying that she wouldn’t challenge him after preliminary news of her announcement broke, and above the video, he wrote:

Nikki has to follow her heart, not her honor. She should definitely run!

The operative word here is “honor.” 

When I first read the Truth Social post, I thought for a nanosecond that Trump might have been gracious. Until the honor jab nonsense. Needless to say, I was reminded of his scathing attack on “Ron DeSanctimonious” for his “disloyalty” after the former president — he claimed — brought the Florida governor back from the “dead.” Never mind that DeSantis blistered Democrat Charlie Crist by double digits in 2022 to win re-election.

And there will likely be another formidable opponent for Haley in the 2024 GOP race: fellow South Carolinian, Sen. Tim Scott.

Danielle Vinson, a professor of politics and international affairs at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., weighed in on a possible face-off between the two:

I think Nikki Haley and Tim Scott will be vying for the same set of voters in a lot of ways. Both of them are less volatile than the Trump-DeSantis sort of candidates. They’re much more diplomatic, polite people — both of them. I think they’d be competing primarily for those folks that were not happy with the drama of the Trump years [who] want to do something besides just fight culture wars.

Conversely, DeSantis has built a national reputation by fearlessly going after everyone from federal health officials to the liberal lapdog media to the “woke,” and of course the Disney Corp. As reported by The Hill, one prominent Republican strategist who’s supporting Haley’s presidential bid conceded it might be difficult for her to stand out in the GOP primaries.

She’s somebody that wants to study and understand an issue. She’s not really flashy like some of the others. And look, for me, I love that about her. But I still think there’s the question of how to break through when there are people like Trump and DeSantis sucking up all the oxygen in the room.

This brings us to the most important issue — in my not-so-humble opinion, at least.

While I’m in general agreement with most of the above quotes, I can’t see Haley winning the 2024 nomination. That said, she’d be a wise choice for the VP slot if DeSantis is able to oust Trump. The contrast between the two would be effective, and in 21st-century America, intentionally choosing a woman or person of color would take away that issue from the hypocritical Democrats.

However, if Trump prevails, Haley — like all other potential 2024 candidates “disloyal” to Trump — will have been burned to the ground along the way. Skewer away, those so inclined, but mark my words.