In 2020, President Joe Biden declared war on oil and gas in America. In a Democratic primary debate, Biden declared, &#8220;No more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. No more drilling including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. It ends.&#8221; High gas prices are all part of his plan.
The other day, Biden declared that there was nothing his administration had done to raise prices or restrict drilling. Actually, there have been plenty of regulatory measures taken and offshore leases curtailed. More importantly, Biden declared war on fossil fuels.
If you were an investor, would you invest in a company the president of the United States declared he would end? The Biden administration&#8217;s entire posture has been against the oil and gas industry, which has fostered uncertainty in the market and disincentivized further investment. They have coupled this with regulatory gusto. They have additionally refused to fight activist Obama-appointed judges using climate change as an excuse to shut down offshore oil drilling.
In a strange bit of optics, as the president was suspending Russian oil imports last week, he requested $2.6 billion for &#8220;gender equality&#8221; globally. He&#8217;s causing American energy price increases and wasting billions on nonsense. Now, he wants to blame the Russian oil imports for high gas prices, which were high before the ban. In doing so, Biden noted American oil producers produced more oil in his first year than in President Donald Trump&#8217;s first year.
That is a sleight of hand that highlights just how disingenuous Biden is being. Trump&#8217;s first year had been preceded by the oil-hostile Obama administration. Trump got oil flowing again onshore and offshore. Trump&#8217;s second year outpaced Biden&#8217;s first year. In fact, years two through four of Trump&#8217;s tenure each saw more oil produced than Biden&#8217;s first year. In other words, the truth is that oil production fell once Biden got in office.
But there is something else. Oil hit $147.90 on July 14, 2008. That was and remains the record high. But oil plunged the next day. By the end of that week, oil prices were down 12%. By November, oil was back to $30 a barrel.
What caused the plunge on July 15, 2008? President George W. Bush announced he was authorizing offshore oil exploration. That&#8217;s it. That&#8217;s the only thing that happened. News outlets said it would amount to nothing. The Obama campaign team dismissed it as a stunt. It directly caused the price of oil to start declining.
Why? Because oil is bought in a futures market, not a present market. The market responded to the information that more American oil would be coming online by sending prices down.
The United States now has larger oil reserves than either Russia or Saudi Arabia. According to a Los Angeles Times report, &#8220;The U.S. is sitting on 264 billion barrels, 8 billion barrels more than Russia and 52 billion more than Saudi Arabia, the dominant member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), according to the report by Rystad Energy, a respected oil and gas consulting firm based in Oslo. Three years ago, the U.S. was behind Russia, Saudi Arabia and Canada in Rystad&#8217;s estimates of recoverable oil — barrels that are technologically and economically feasible to extract.&#8221;
If Biden were to commit to tapping our oil reserves and expanding domestic energy production, oil markets would respond rapidly, just as they did in 2008.
Instead, even now, his administration dogmatically demands Americans switch to electric vehicles and get off fossil fuels. His administration continually signals that they will put the fossil fuel industry out of business. They thereby disincentivize investments in oil and gas, driving up costs on the American people.
Decline is a choice, and it is one Biden&#8217;s administration is making on the backs of the American middle class. Their Marie Antoinette moment of &#8220;let them have electric vehicles&#8221; is going to provoke a backlash. They can blame Russian President Vladimir Putin all they want. Banning imports of Russian oil was the right thing to do — but it should responsibly be done by expanding American energy production instead of relying on Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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ERICKSON: Basic Truths About Oil

Biden Administration

Oil and Gas

By now you may have forgotten President Joe Biden gave his State of the Union address last week. On Monday, Biden walked across the White House lawn alone and in a mask. On Tuesday, he walked into a crowd of House members rejoicing that no more masks were needed. It was the perfect metaphor for Biden at governance and Biden at speech.
First, forgive Biden for his flubs and twisted words. He is almost 80 and has a stuttering problem. As someone who grew up with a stuttering problem, I&#8217;m sympathetic. He is neither Cicero nor Churchill, King nor Kennedy. He is Joe from Scranton. The problem was not the words or delivery. The problem was the message.
The State of the Union address was not for you or for me unless you are a moderate, Democrat-leaning voter who is frustrated with Biden and looking at the GOP for November. Despite all the talk about multiple audiences, Biden is trying to keep wavering moderate voters on board.
He hit on, for example, securing the border. That&#8217;s an issue he has done nothing with, but it shows up in the polling as a problem for Democrats, so he mentioned it. He mentioned funding police too. That is another area in which polls show voters trust Republicans more than Democrats. He needs to reassure suburban voters that he is not the radical the loudest Democratic representatives are.
He called Afghanistan an &#8220;extraordinary success,&#8221; but it polls terribly for him, so he chose not to spend time on it. The whole of the speech after opening about Ukraine sounded like it was written by pollsters panicked by the GOP&#8217;s current numbers.
The problem for Biden and the Democrats is simple. This speech is going to be forgotten — if it&#8217;s not already forgotten — but the public will still see empty store shelves, high prices and the cost of filling up their cars. The president offered nothing to address these issues. In fact, it is now widely accepted his COVID-19 relief package sparked inflation; the president not only defended it but called for even more spending.
Biden started with a unifying moment about Ukraine. He had applause from both the Republicans and Democrats. He then pivoted straight into an attack on the Trump tax cuts with a lie about those cuts benefiting the top 1%. Even the supposed fact-checkers rebut that.
He continued to call on Congress to pass an agenda Congress has repeatedly failed to pass and to advocate for positions most Americans reject. There was no reset. He doubled down on progressivism. He doubled down on growing government. He refused to offer gas price relief but instead announced he wants to expand the Green New Deal.
Forget the flubs. Forget the rhetorical stumbles over &#8220;Iranians&#8221; instead of &#8220;Ukrainians,&#8221; etc. This is Biden. He is not the best orator. Forgive him those things.
The problem with the speech is that Biden offered Americans a vision of what they&#8217;ve already rejected and bookended it with calls for unity after pushing policies that led to firing Americans for not taking a vaccine.
It is really hard to tell Americans we need to get past our differences after spending two years maligning those who wouldn&#8217;t go along with his agenda. A few months ago, Biden said Americans who opposed his agenda were on the side of Jefferson Davis and those who did not get the vaccine were in for a winter of death. Now, at 40% in some polls, he is calling for unity and urging people to stop politicizing COVID-19. But he never offered an apology for his own harsh words and his turn comes only after leaked Democrat polling showing the public is ready to get on with life.
This speech offered no reset. It offered no new vision. It offered no olive branches. It was patently designed to rally Democrats and hopefully get moderates back into the camp.
The president may get a bump in the polls over Ukraine, but the polling will get trumped by gas prices and bare shelves.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

SOTU

ERICKSON: The State Of Disunion

Joe Biden

State of the Union

Call Russian President Vladimir Putin a dictator. Call him an autocrat. Call him a totalitarian. Call him whatever you want, but make sure you understand he is serious. He also knows the West is not. He has brought war to the West&#8217;s doorstep.
On Dec. 5, 1989, Putin was running a KGB office for the Soviet Union in Dresden, Germany. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and East German mobs were ransacking Stasi headquarters. They came for the KGB in Dresden. Putin called out to the approaching mob that he and his men would open fire. The mob held off. Putin called a Soviet military unit for help. The military could not come, reported the general, because &#8220;Moscow is silent.&#8221; It was a defining moment for Putin. He has prepared for years and now Moscow will no longer be silent.
Over the last two decades, Putin has taken advantage of the Western world&#8217;s grievous fixation with climate change. European nations have reduced their dependence on both fossil fuels and nuclear power. As they expanded wind and solar power, their ability to generate a sustainable base load of power declined. This fostered their dependence on Russian natural gas.
In the United States, Democrat politicians and judges have ended drilling permits and leases on federal land, curtailed and canceled pipelines, and reduced our capacity to be energy independent. Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas notes we have gone from providing all our oil domestically a few years ago to importing 595,000 barrels of Russian oil a day. The Keystone XL pipeline, which President Joe Biden killed, would have generated 830,000 barrels of oil a day. Concurrently, Biden got rid of former President Donald Trump&#8217;s sanctions placed on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a Russian project to supply even more gas to Europe.
Under former President Barack Obama, the United States got rid of its Two War Doctrine. The doctrine had sustained the United States military since World War II. It merely stated that the United States must have the defense capabilities to fight two wars on two fronts at the same time. The Obama administration shortsightedly concluded it was no longer needed and, by downsizing the military, the United States would save costs and reduce the military&#8217;s carbon footprint. After all, according to the Obama administration, climate change was a bigger national security issue than Russia or China.
The West focused on climate change and Putin knew he could use energy as a national security issue against Western powers. Additionally, Putin viewed his time in Germany as a lesson on the destabilizing power of populist movements. For decades, Putin has fueled populist movements in countries that oppose him, including the United States, in order to get those nations to stop focusing on him.
Putin did, in fact, interfere in the American election in 2020. Contrary to Democrat mythology, it was not about helping Trump, but about generating a rising hatred between Americans and their fellow citizens. It worked like a charm to the extent the United States is now going through a significant political realignment.
Putin has assassinated his opponents, jailed dissidents, confiscated his rivals&#8217; money and invaded his neighbors all while loudly saying he wanted to upend NATO and restore Russia&#8217;s sphere of influence. All the while, the West has relied on experts and diplomats who believe papers and signatures and sanctions could govern foreign affairs and contain Russia&#8217;s ambitions. Putin has capitalized on the naivete of Western powers and is now going to war.
Europe is too dependent on Putin&#8217;s natural gas to stop him. The United States imports oil and fertilizer from Russia. To actually fight him would mean to give that up and force up prices as inflation is already out of control. But none of those things will actually stop Putin. The only thing that will stop Putin is guns and ammo. Neither the United States nor Europe have the will to truly arm the Ukrainians.
Ukraine is just the first domino to fall. Many Americans see no reason to be concerned, but no living American remembers a world in which the United States was not a superpower. Putin intends to show us that world.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Putin

ERICKSON: An Unserious People Confront A Serious Man

Russia

Ukraine

Vladimir Putin

I&#8217;m not really a protester, but I support the right to protest. I just tend not to show up at those events. I&#8217;m glad others do. I don&#8217;t like crowds. I supported the protests of small business owners during COVID-19. I supported the George Floyd protests.
I do not support the violence, looting and rioting within protests. I condemned the violence at former President Donald Trump&#8217;s inauguration. I condemned the violence during the George Floyd protests.
Too many people deploy situational ethics. When rioters stormed the Wisconsin State Capitol to stop the legislature in 2011, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended the people who smashed the windows and stormed the building. Now she wants the people who did the same in the U.S. Capitol to go to prison. I wanted them all in jail.
When rioters burned down various cities in America, many of the talking heads in the press defended them. Now they&#8217;re assailing the truckers of Canada for impeding the flow of traffic and commerce.
I think the truckers have every right to protest, but I don&#8217;t see a difference between them blocking everything and the climate alarmists super-gluing themselves to the highway in Europe to stop the flow of traffic. I support all of their rights to protest. I do not support them obstructing others. I&#8217;m not a situational ethicist.
Instead of creating traffic jams, the truckers should stop driving and protest through their unwillingness to participate in commerce. Show how needed they are. Take themselves out of the flow of commerce and watch the flow of goods cease.
That said, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau&#8217;s Liberal Party was only supported by one-third of the public in the 2021 federal election in Canada. The Conservative Party actually got more votes. But because Canada has six parties represented in Parliament, the Liberal Party was able to build a coalition to keep power.
The parties ratified Trudeau&#8217;s vaccine mandate during the course of COVID-19 restrictions, and Trudeau has the emotional stability of a toddler, unable to ever admit he is wrong or change course. Canadians get the prime minister they didn&#8217;t vote for. Again, only a third of Canadians voted for his party, and he remains prime minister because of a coalition that might be fraying over his heavy-handed refusal to admit COVID-19 has changed and he can, too. Now, Trudeau is threatening to take the protesters&#8217; children and even their pets. He is freezing not just their bank accounts, but those of donors who support the truckers. More than one donor has been publicly harassed and the government has done nothing to protect those people.
This all makes me proud to be an American.
It makes me proud our Founding Fathers were smart enough not to create a central government with police and health care powers that could overwhelm the states. It makes me proud of our constitutional system with checks and balances. It makes me proud we have a 10th Amendment, a First Amendment and a Second Amendment. It makes me proud we are not a multiparty coalition style parliamentary system.
The Canadian system is a parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy. The people have the rights given to them by their Parliament, and their prime minister intends to take a great many away.
It would not be possible in the United States.
So much policy in the United States, from health care policy to gun control, is viewed through the lens of what other nations do. But other nations do not have the horizontal and vertical federalism of the United States based on a Constitution in which limited enumerated powers — not including the police, health care and education powers — are ceded to a federal government. Other nations do not have a Second Amendment that conveys an individual right to gun ownership to citizens.
The American vaccine mandate for businesses got stopped by the United States Supreme Court. There is no court in Canada that can stop the prime minister.
Thank God I am an American. Our nation is not perfect. But it sure is better than every other nation, including Canada.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
The Daily Wire’s first original film, Shut In, has made its cinematic debut, being met with rave reviews. The Daily Wire is building an alternative to the leftist entertainment industry, one gripping movie at a time. Join us in this mission and stream Shut In today by becoming a Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Freedom Convoy

ERICKSON: The Land Of The Free

Canada

In 2018, researchers at the University of Edinburgh published a study looking at the use of race-based emoji, the digital characters people use in texting. For the longest time, emoji were all uniformly yellow. In 2015, software updates across platforms allowed individuals to choose their color preference to match one of five skin tones in addition to the default yellow.
It is important to get the timeline right here. The emoji changes came in 2015. The Atlantic published a short piece in 2016 on white people sticking with the yellow defaults. The Edinburgh research study came in 2018. The American presidential election came in 2020. National Public Radio, which bragged about ignoring the Hunter Biden story in 2020, only just decided to report on the 2018 research and linked to the 2016 Atlantic piece. Perhaps sometime in 2040, they will get around to reporting on Hunter Biden&#8217;s deals with China and use of crack cocaine.
According to NPR&#8217;s report, &#8220;some white people may stick with the yellow emoji because they don&#8217;t want to assert their privilege by adding a light-skinned emoji to a text, or to take advantage of something that was created to represent diversity.&#8221; One of the researchers involved in the 2018 study told NPR, &#8220;There was a default in society to associate whiteness with being raceless, and the emojis gave white people an option to make their race explicit.&#8221;
The entirety of National Public Radio&#8217;s story, the original research, and the outrage is the height of self-centered ridiculousness. People in the present age quest for things about which to judge others and criticize. Now, keeping the default emoji color is a sign of white privilege. It could just be a sign of not caring.
The presumption in the piece is that nonwhite people embraced the use of racial emoji. Ironically, in the actual research paper, the researchers note that &#8220;T6,&#8221; which is the darkest skin tone, is the least used emoji color, even in African nations. Also, the United States has the most even distribution between skin tones. It is important to note that the researchers only used Twitter and its tweets, so they have no actual idea how many people use race-based emoji in their private text messages. Most importantly, most people still use the default yellow, regardless of race.
People who obsess over race-based emoji are uniquely parasitic on society. They glom on to the outrage machine and find race and racial issues wherever they can. They, based on their own biases and presuppositions, assume others must care as much about race as they do and a choice to stick to a default is a presumption of privilege. It could be that most people do not care.
Unfortunately, to say people do not care is, for the parasitic racial grifters of America, a presumption of privilege. It is an unfalsifiable notion that only people who care deeply about race believe. But not only do they believe it dearly, they expect everyone else to believe it too. They have invaded so many aspects of society and polluted major media outlets with a race-based obsession not seen outside Alabama in the mid-1960s.
These Neo-racists who see race everywhere, obsess about race and condemn those not obsessed about race are the very same people who tend to oppose allowing black children to leave public schools. They are the same people who push critical race theory in schools to indoctrinate minority students that they are oppressed and the white students are oppressors. Instead of seeking racial reconciliation, they seek division. Without the division they could not profit nor generate silly clickbait.
In 2020, National Public Radio not only bragged about refusing to cover the story of President Joe Biden&#8217;s son Hunter, but the network also criticized those outlets that chose to cover the story. The story turned out to be true. Two years later, NPR can find the time to engage in racial grifting off a four-year-old story. Why must my tax dollars pay for NPR&#8217;s racial obsessions?
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
The Daily Wire’s first original film, Shut In, has made its cinematic debut, being met with rave reviews. The Daily Wire is building an alternative to the leftist entertainment industry, one gripping movie at a time. Join us in this mission and stream Shut In today by <a class="gmail-c-link" tabindex="-1" href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe-shutin?utm_campaign=shutin&amp;utm_medium=editorial&amp;utm_source=facebook&amp;utm_content=subscribe_shutin&amp;utm_talent=dailywire" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">becoming a Daily Wire member</a>.

Emojis

ERICKSON: NPR’s Strange Race Obsession Leads It To Old News

National Public Radio (NPR)

In 1936, Adolf Hitler presided over the Summer Olympics. It was a coming-out party for the Nazis. They put their best foot forward to show their recovery after World War I. They intended to wow the crowd with Nazi grandeur. The international press and much of the world ate it up. Two years later, Germany annexed Austria. World War II began less than a year later.
Now, in 2022, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), a hive of scum and villainy more at home on Tatooine than Earth, is gathering with athletes from around the world in Beijing, China, for the Winter Olympics. The IOC has given Beijing the honor of being the only city to host both a summer and winter games. Xi Jinping, China&#8217;s dictator, intends to use this Olympic Games as a coming-out party for Chinese grandeur just like Hitler did before World War II. Within three years, Xi will most likely invade Taiwan. History echoes and, like with Hitler, much of the international press prefers glamorization to truth-telling.
Many American networks will not send reporters to Beijing, allegedly because of COVID-19. One might hope they would be more public in their criticisms of China, particularly NBC, which will profit from the games. NBC News regularly lectures Americans on social justice but hopes to make a nice profit off Beijing&#8217;s games. CNN is one of the few documenting China&#8217;s human rights abuses.
The IOC is notoriously corrupt. Its members have accepted bribes and advanced their families&#8217; personal and financial interests as cities around the world have pursued Olympic Games. The IOC leaders have frequently turned a blind eye to corruption and totalitarian behavior of nations. The Olympic Games themselves have been used as a platform for those corrupt, despotic regimes to seek international praise.
China&#8217;s corruption is equally legendary, and its human rights abuses are becoming more open and notorious. China has allowed its companies to engage in intellectual property theft, digital piracy, espionage against other companies and more. There are no &#8220;alleged&#8221; or &#8220;accused&#8221; weasel words here. It is well documented.
Likewise, the Chinese are engaged in human rights abuses. In Hong Kong, they have broken their word to the international community on Hong Kong governance. They have now begun systematically rounding up protesters and dissidents. Some get executed and others get carted off to be reeducated.
China tears down churches and persecutes Christians. It bullies small home churches and even the Catholic Church. It jails priests and executes missionaries. China has forcibly aborted children to maintain its previous one-child policy, going so far as to operate mobile abortion facilities that could be driven to rural towns.
Slave labor is another well-documented human rights abuse in China. American corporations have benefited from Chinese slave and forced labor camps. In the Xinjiang province, China uses internment camps. The nation separates children from their parents and seeks to exterminate the ethnically Muslim Uyghur population. China&#8217;s internment camps are modern versions of the Nazis&#8217; concentration camps.
Around the world, China is bullying nations into giving China land. Often, China makes predatory loans to poor countries with onerous property ownership terms should the nations default. In other cases, China spreads money around to other despotic regimes to expand China&#8217;s military and diplomatic muscle. In the South China Sea, China has tried to claim the territorial waters of the Philippines and Vietnam. Both countries are increasingly begging the United States for help against China. That does not even begin to touch on China&#8217;s treatment of Taiwan and relentless bullying of nations that recognize Taiwan&#8217;s independence.
China is a threat to freedom. The communist regime is a threat to the three values the IOC claims the Olympics uphold: excellence, friendship and respect. The Chinese government is no one&#8217;s friend and shows no one respect. Xi is a bully and tyrant who is making the world more illiberal and far less safe.
President Joe Biden should have ordered a boycott of the entire Beijing Games and not just a diplomatic boycott. Regardless, I will not watch the Olympics. I prefer not to participate in coming-out parties for murderous regimes.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Olympic torch Beijing

ERICKSON: Snuff Out The Torch

Beijing Olympics

Communist China

The American press corps has been on a tear over the past year about the death of democracy. They share the talking point with Democrats. In the runup to and aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021, pretty much every news outlet has lamented Republican lies, disinformation, misinformation and assaults on democracy.
What the press refuses to acknowledge is their complicity in that death. When anyone suggests it, the press gets defensive and demands a naming of names. The press views itself as above the fray and while individual reporters may play a role, collectively the press thinks itself the champion of democracy and freedom. Unfortunately, the press corps&#8217; collective elitism and lack of both self-awareness and self-reflection is dragging our republic into the grave.
Consider two very recent incidents. In the first, Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio set off a firestorm by reporting that Chief Justice John Roberts asked members of the Supreme Court to wear face masks due to Justice Sonia Sotomayor&#8217;s health. Totenberg reported Justice Neil Gorsuch refused. Gorsuch sits next to Sotomayor on the Court.
Ruth Marcus, editor of the Washington Post editorial page and a serial Cassandra about the state of American democracy, used Totenberg&#8217;s reporting to amplify her own criticisms of Gorsuch maskless at a recent hearing. Marcus failed to note other justices took off their masks during the hearing to ask questions. Sotomayor participated by phone.
CNBC and MSNBC both ran stories about Totenberg&#8217;s report. &#8220;When something like this bleeds over, and this reporting from Nina Totenberg is just replete with different instances of discord on the Court, that tells you what&#8217;s going on in reality is probably a whole lot worse,&#8221; Joyce Vance commented on MSNBC about Gorsuch. MSNBC&#8217;s Chris Hayes repeated the story, as did other MSNBC employees including Mehdi Hasan, Kyle Griffin and Joy Reid.
USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo News and New York magazine all ran with Totenberg&#8217;s story. The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Al-Jazeera, and other outlets did too. CNN&#8217;s Jim Sciutto and Ed Lavandera circulated the story. Politico&#8217;s Jonathan Lemire did too. NPR&#8217;s David Gura backed up his colleague Nina Totenberg. Jemele Hill at the Atlantic; Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times; Eddie Glaude, a serial television talking head; Elie Mystal, the &#8220;justice&#8221; correspondent for The Nation, and others all weighed in.
Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy, CNN&#8217;s &#8220;media reporters,&#8221; sent out a newsletter, writing that &#8220;NPR&#8217;s incredibly well-sourced Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg published a scoop on Tuesday&#8221; and describing said &#8220;scoop.&#8221; They noted &#8220;Fox&#8217;s Shannon Bream cited her own source and disputed NPR&#8217;s story. In essence, Bream was absolving Gorsuch.&#8221; They then added &#8220;the NPR audience comes away believing one thing and the Fox audience comes away believing the opposite.&#8221; They helpfully added &#8220;CNN&#8217;s Ariane de Vogue, meantime, matched key parts of NPR&#8217;s reporting.&#8221;
Less than 24 hours later, Sotomayor and Gorsuch released a rare joint statement calling the report false. But reporters, including David Gura of NPR, claimed their statement was a non-denial denial. Other reporters refused to acknowledge Totenberg had gotten it wrong. Some tried to parse the Sotomayor and Gorsuch statement to note Totenberg had referenced the chief justice, but Sotomayor and Gorsuch merely said Sotomayor did not request Gorsuch wear a mask.
Later that day, Roberts himself said Totenberg&#8217;s story was false. Many of the very same reporters and pundits referenced above have failed to retract their statements. NPR stands by Totenberg&#8217;s report.
The second story happened a few hours after Roberts&#8217; statement. President Joe Biden held a press conference and claimed if his election reforms did not pass Congress, he could not guarantee the upcoming November election would be legitimate. Much of the press corps that has screamed about the Republicans&#8217; &#8220;stolen election&#8221; nonsense have either been quiet or given license to Biden&#8217;s claims. MSNBC is already a hotbed of &#8220;end of democracy&#8221; nonsense.
An Edelman survey of 30,000 people shows trust in the media has cratered more than trust in any other institution. Too few in the press are willing to be self-reflective on that. In so doing, they are complicit in democracy&#8217;s death.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Media

ERICKSON: The American Press Corps Helped Kill Democracy

Legacy Media

Media Bias

The truth is Jan. 6 was a dark day in the history of our republic. Fueled by repeated lies from President Donald Trump, a group of men and women stormed the United States Capitol to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote. Along with those men and women were many more who wandered in, curious, thinking they were allowed to be there. We should not lump them all in together, but we should not give the veneer of patriotism to the criminal trespassers.
Ashli Babbitt was one of those with malicious intent. The Air Force veteran thought she was a hero saving the republic when really, she was a trespasser seeking to stop the lawful operations of Congress. She is no martyr. The security cameras that captured her death at the hands of a Capitol Hill police officer show she was trying to break through glass to open a door for the mob. Behind the door, House members were fleeing for their lives. Outside, the crowd had erected a gallows and some roamed the halls of Congress to find Vice President Mike Pence to hang him.
The truth is a lot of Republicans who condemned the activities of the day have now tried to claim it was something worth celebrating or was not bad. Cowards like Kevin McCarthy, the would-be Speaker of the House, condemned the day, then reversed himself like a supine sycophant to Trump. Now, some Republicans even think Jan. 6 is a cause for celebration like the storming of the Bastille that set off the French Revolution. These would-be Robespierres will lose their heads in the process of trying to take others&#8217;. No conservative should ever celebrate the French Revolution.
But there are other truths, too. These truths the press and Democrats would prefer not to talk about. They&#8217;d prefer to scream &#8220;whataboutism&#8221; or claim bringing them up is to excuse or mitigate Jan. 6. Unfortunately for them, to truly understand Jan. 6, we must understand other events and how those were handled.
In 2009, progressive activists stormed the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. The Wisconsin State Journal reported it in eerily similar language to Jan. 6. &#8220;Thousands of protesters rushed to the state Capitol Wednesday night, forcing their way through doors, crawling through windows and jamming corridors,&#8221; reported the paper. Progressives were trying to stop a vote making Wisconsin a right-to-work state, which would undermine labor union powers. Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it an &#8220;impressive show of democracy&#8221; and said she stood with the protesters. The media was mostly matter-of-fact about it and by no means condemnatory.
In Texas, protesters stormed the State Capitol in Austin to stop Republicans from passing a pro-life measure. News anchors and reporters who covered it for the national press almost all explicitly excused the protesters and made Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis a national figure and heroine for feminism. She rode the fame to several electoral defeats in Texas and talking-head gigs on CNN and MSNBC.
In Washington, D.C., progressive activists stormed the United States Capitol to stop the vote on Brett Kavanaugh and to intimidate United States senators. Major news outlets were almost all uniformly on the side of the protesters. Some reporters explicitly cheered on the protesters on their social media accounts.
This does not even include the coordinated and concerted Democratic efforts starting in 2000 to treat any election they lose as illegitimate. Bush was &#8220;selected not elected,&#8221; and Trump was fraudulently accused of being bought and paid for by the Russians. Stacey Abrams still denies her loss with press complicity, but Republicans are bullied and denounced for denying the legitimacy of 2020.
The bottom line is all of these should be condemned, but we should not be surprised some Republicans got tired of playing by the rules after two decades of Democrats breaking them without consequence. Few in the press or among the Democrats will own up to that. Instead, they will scream at me for telling the whole truth, not just the part they want to hear. Undoubtedly, in November, the press and Democrats will scream voter suppression if Republicans win, ratcheting things further.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Capitol

ERICKSON: The Real Truth Of Jan. 6

Capitol Riot

January 6

Sometime just over 2,000 years ago, contrary to the song, it was not a silent night. In Bethlehem, a young woman gave birth to a baby in a stable. The story went exactly as one would tell a story if one did not want the story taken seriously.
The first witnesses were shepherds, men so unreliable that their testimony was inadmissible in court. Key eyewitnesses were women, also seen as unreliable. The father of the child fell out of the historic record. Eventually, Roman imperial forces would exterminate the baby&#8217;s entire earthly bloodline. His brothers and sisters and their children, the historic record records, were all killed. Two of his brothers, James and Jude, would write books that became canonized as part of the New Testament. Ironically, these same brothers rejected their oldest brother in life, refusing even to go to his execution to comfort their mother. Then they became leaders in the early Christian Church, dying proclaiming their brother was, in fact, Yahweh.
While you, like I, most likely grew up believing Christians co-opted a Roman holiday on which to celebrate Christ&#8217;s birth, there is plenty of modern archeological evidence to suggest it was Emperor Aurelian who aligned Sol Invictus on December 25th to stop the growth of an irascible atheist cult springing up in the empire. The more Christians were slaughtered, the faster the religion grew — the pruning made the faith stronger. Christians were viewed as atheists because they claimed to worship a living God. All right-thinking religious people in Rome knew someone had to die to become a god. So, Christians were considered atheists and atheists were enemies of humanity. They just could not be stopped.
Christianity grew and dominated Rome. It spread across the planet. For the longest time, Christianity&#8217;s spread in Asia was slow. But just as it took over 1,000 years for Christianity to jump from Europe and Africa to the Americas, it took another thousand to fully penetrate into Asia. Now, in China, there are estimated to be more Christians quietly living their faith than there are total Americans. It is a thoroughly unique religion anchored in a man, not a place. Muslims have Mecca. Jews have Jerusalem. Hindus have Badrinath. The Christian has Christ. He flows, unmoored from geography, disrupting civilization. The communists feared the Pope. The Chinese fear the quiet Christian.
When the world co-opts Christianity, the faith dies. The Christian denominations that have rejected biblical sexual ethics and the authenticity of the physical resurrection of Christ are all in decline. Statistically, based on its rate of decline, the last Episcopalian has already been born in the United States. Other progressive mainline denominations are not far behind. Liberal theology has become a gateway to atheism, allowing the weak in faith a soft landing into the world on their way to Judgment Day. The believers who stay inevitably leave the dying churches and help build stronger Christian institutions. The thriving conservative Anglican Church in America, with its refugees from the liberal Episcopal Church, is proof of this. So too are the new conservative Methodists fleeing the progressive bishops of the United Methodist Church. Instead of man pruning the church through persecution making it stronger, God uses liberal theology to prune the church of heresy.
Christianity is a funny thing. The secular world continually bets against the religion. Even as it fades in the Western world, it grows ever stronger within its existing congregations and spreads to developing countries. From there, it picks up and blends into the faith traditions and the cultures of those lands. It makes a religion that is neither Greek nor Jewish, but fully a reflection of God in the diversity of His people committed to a common, shared, 2,000-year-old orthodoxy.
That orthodoxy is premised on this promise. History is at an end. Light broke forth in Bethlehem. It cannot be contained. It is in the world now, shaping the world, and will be made more full and real soon. Christ came and will return. It is the promise of this season, and every tear will be dried and all things will be made new. Merry Christmas.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Nativity

ERICKSON: The Beginning Of The End

Christianity

Christmas

A suicide just happened. Somewhere out there, maybe down the street or across town or in the next state, someone just took their own life. By the time you finish reading this, someone else will be in their final moments before taking their life. One hundred thirty-two times today, someone in the United States is going to commit suicide.
Someone will hang himself. Someone will shoot himself. Someone will cut himself. Someone will swallow pills or drown or swerve into oncoming traffic or jump or end their own precious life in a variety of ways. Each of them will take permanent, irreversible action to solve a temporary problem. Most will do so out of despair.
The pandemic has not helped. There is a striking moment in the second chapter of Genesis that narrates the Judeo-Christian creation account. The God of the Universe has made all things except humanity, then turns to create us. In His image and likeness He makes man. This man, Adam, the first of us, gets the pleasure of walking with the God of all creation. The very eternal will hang out with the man, walk with him, answer his questions and commune with him. Still, though, God says, &#8220;It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.&#8221; Genesis 2:18.
The God of all things knew it was not good for man to be alone, even though man could have a direct, tactile relationship with God Himself. People need people. If only our public health officials and politicians had God&#8217;s wisdom. For two years now, we have isolated ourselves from one another. Families argue amongst themselves over holidays and vaccines and masks. All of us are finding excuses to dislike or judge one another and to keep ourselves from one another. We are not meant to be that way.
In our isolation, we have dwelled on the void, the nihilistic age, and the perfection we see on social media — the well-curated lives of others designed with the frozen smile and wink of perfection that masks the misery, dread and despair of that life. I had a friend who had that well curated life. She had a high-end legal job. She drove the fancy car and lived in the fancy house and wore the fancy clothes and knew all the fashionable ins. She had a cool factor that lit up a room. She drove into a crowded parking lot one day, swallowed pills, and the police found her body a few days later. The veneer of perfection masked the struggles and brokenness inside.
This time of year makes it worse. Our days are shorter and colder and darker. We wake up now with a sunrise and as we set out after work to enjoy time with friends, we head into darkness. Seasonal affective disorder is a real thing. Then there is the pressure of Christmas — financial and mental baggage held together with a desire to please others.
Social media is a great enabler of envy, covetousness, jealousy and depression. Far less appreciated and more pernicious, social media helps enable our isolation. We become digital friends with those we really do not know. We commune with them and relate to them. We shut out real people for digital figments. We were not meant to be alone. We are not meant to commune alone with our phones. We are to be physically with others to see, smell and feel.
In this darkness and despair, we have hope, though. A child is coming. He will be born in squalor. Flee for his life. Grow up in wisdom. And die innocent in a shameful, painful way. But he will conquer death because he wants a relationship with you. And you can turn to Him and find peace in Him. He can dry eyes, mend spirits, and comfort the afflicted. The real Christmas is coming, the one that needs no present because it is the gift. The world brings despair. God brings light. If you are broken or in despair, cry out to Jesus. In the darkness, there you will find light.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a free hotline for individuals in crisis or distress or for those looking to help someone else. It is available 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Candle

ERICKSON: Darkness Into Light

Suicide

This past Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women&#8217;s Health Organization. In the case, Mississippi is seeking Court approval on a law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks, but Mississippi also argues Roe v. Wade itself should be reversed by the Court. It appears there are six votes on the Court for gutting Roe and five for reversing it altogether. One must remember that in major cases like this, the justices of the Court need no persuasion from the lawyers. Instead, it is through the lawyers that the justices have an initial conversation with each other about the case.
Chief Justice Roberts, who is pro-life but also the chief justice, takes a restrained view of reversals. He sees it as his duty to protect the Court. He wants to end the so-called &#8220;viability standard&#8221; the Court maintains that prohibits banning abortion prior to the nebulous point of fetal viability. Roberts seemed to argue that 15 weeks is fine as a standard. Justices Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch suggested such a standard would not work. Gorsuch, along with Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas seem fully prepared to end Roe. The newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, was more obtuse, but seemed inclined to end Roe, though possibly inclined to just gut it with Roberts.
The chief problem with Roe v. Wade is that no one can find it in the Constitution. In fact, Roe is not just one degree removed from the Constitution, but two degrees away from the Constitution. To get to Roe, one must first get through Griswold v. Connecticut, which found that within the right to privacy was a marital right of privacy. It removed privacy to the penumbras of the constitution. Only from there can one get to Roe.
One can fairly well gather from the Constitution&#8217;s Fourth and Fifth Amendments that there is a right to privacy of some kind. Griswold finds an explicit right to marital privacy related to, for example, the use of contraception, within that right to privacy. Roe then goes a step further to find, as a right to privacy, a woman&#8217;s right to kill her unborn child.
No reasonable reading of the Constitution suggests that right exists within the Constitution and almost all states had bans on abortion when those states ratified the 14th Amendment. The plain reading of the Constitution suggests no abortion right at all, let alone one broken down into trimesters: no state can ban abortion in the first; states can impose restrictions during the second; states can prohibit in the third with reasonable exceptions. The subsequent case of Casey v. Planned Parenthood moved the standard from trimesters to viability.
Where the Constitution is silent, the 50 states are supposed to speak. Each state should be able to set its own laws regulating abortion. Seven men on the United States Supreme Court, in 1973, conjured up a right to an abortion within the penumbras of other penumbras of various amendments to the Constitution. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg acknowledged the shoddiness of the decision even as she supported the right to kill children.
Roe takes the Constitution, a document written so American citizens could understand their rights and government, and hands it over to a professional class of life-tenured judges and lawyers who can conjure at will their coveted requests from the constitutional framework. We are, with Roe, a nation of judges and lawyers, not men and women. It began a series of cases that separate citizens from the Constitution, requiring a near-divine and always infallible intermediary in a black robe to tell the citizen what his Constitution actually says.
With the Second Amendment, the average citizen can ascertain the right of gun ownership in America. With abortion, no citizens not trained in the dark arts of liberal legal interpretation and how to read the breath of a living piece of paper can even understand and so can never truly respect the rule of law. The law becomes not the compact of governance, but the possession of the great &#8220;Says Who&#8221; — who says what the law is, regardless of what the law plainly means.
It is time to reverse Roe.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Pro-life sign

ERICKSON: Reversing Roe

Abortion

Roe v. Wade's Long And Brutal Legacy

Supreme Court

If you are a longtime reader, you will know my wife has lung cancer. It is not from smoking or radon or any environmental cause. When we first got married, due to my wife&#8217;s family history of breast cancer, she had a prophylactic mastectomy. Sixteen years later, having thought we dodged a bullet, doctors diagnosed her with a genetic form of lung cancer.
In fact, the day the Mayo Clinic called my wife, at roughly the same time, doctors were wheeling me into a cardiac ICU unit not expecting me to live. If I ever hear &#8220;the next 24 hours&#8221; again it will be too soon. What I thought was the downside of joining CrossFit and then presumed were allergies making it difficult to breathe turned out to be an incursion of small blood clots into my lungs.
We had a head-spinning 24 hours in 2016. But that is all in the rearview mirror now. My wife takes a small pill every day that keeps the tumors in her lungs from spreading. Last week, she had a lung scan showing no growth. They cannot remove the tumors because they are so small and so numerous, but this miracle pill keeps them from growing. We know a day will come that the pill stops working, but this is not that day. With metronomic regularity, my wife goes for quarterly scans. We hold our breath. We get a bit stressed. So far, we then breathe a sigh of relief.
Last year, due to COVID-19 and my wife&#8217;s condition, we lived a fairly isolated existence for a time. I did all the grocery shopping. Some weeks, I would visit three or four grocery stores to get everything. Some weeks, some things were never in stock anywhere. We did no travel for Thanksgiving. When I had to travel, I masked up, washed up, sanitized, and avoided everyone possible. I did not want to bring home a virus that could be fatal to my wife.
This year, we had the vaccine. My wife, children and I all got vaccinated. We know the vaccine worked. Our children, it turns out, got mild cases of COVID-19 before they were vaccinated, and my wife and I never got sick. Only after antibody testing did we realize COVID-19 explained odd symptoms from our kids. In August, my father got COVID-19, and I shared a hotel room with him. I never got it. My wife and I got the booster shot a month ago.
All of this gets to this point — three weeks ago, my wife ventured out of the house to a quilting conference in Nashville, Tennessee. She had not taken a road trip without me since COVID-19 and even then, not far from home. At the same time, I took my kids to Louisiana for my father&#8217;s 82nd birthday. Then, last week, we gathered around a table with my wife&#8217;s whole family for an early Thanksgiving.
The world is healing. Certainly, it heals more slowly than we like. But after a year of relative isolation, we can be with each other face to face now. Some people never gave that up. Because of our health, we had to. Some still live in perpetual and never ending fear of COVID-19. We no longer do. We do not hide behind masks. We smile. We gather with family and friends. We are so thankful for modern medicine, for family, for friends and for our country.
The country itself is bitterly divided these days. People, mostly on social media, want to be perpetually angry, always drawing more dividing lines, boxing one another in and never willing to try empathy or grace. A world without empathy and grace is a world with less to be thankful for. But truly hard times and words like &#8220;cancer&#8221; and &#8220;the next 24 hours&#8221; tend to shake your perspective and make your life so much more.
The country is divided, but it is your choice whether to embrace division or union. The protocols related to COVID-19 have made it easy to divide and isolate. My family has chosen to gather and to be thankful.
The views expressed in this piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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Erick Erickson