Author: Kerby Anderson

Kerby Anderson
Maintaining any semblance of discipline in the public schools is becoming harder and harder each year. Daniel Buck acknowledges that “schools always have had to and always will need to manage misbehavior, and some students will push any boundary you set for them.” But changes in policies along with problems that surfaced after the pandemic lockdown make the current discipline problems greater than ever.
One teachers’ organization reports that their members “have been kicked, hit, scratched, and had objects like globes or furniture thrown at them.” Another educators’ organization reports that incidence of classroom violence has doubled since the pandemic.
But even for teachers who do not face violence and other forms of misbehavior, there is the problem of chaos in the classroom. Students grow impatient with learning simply because they cannot hear their teacher over the classroom noise.
Significant changes in classroom policy began in 2014 when the Obama administration issued a “Dear Colleague” letter that threatened legal action against school districts if their discipline policies resulted in different outcomes. Put simply, if a significant percentage of minority students received punishment for misbehavior, the federal government will sue you.
I believe the bigger issue involves a false view of human nature. Administrators, educators, and bureaucrats often have a liberal, progressive view of human behavior. As Daniel Buck observes, “Misbehavior stems not from sin or human imperfection but from broken systems and root causes.”
To fix this problem we need to begin by recognizing that “misbehavior is inherent to children and to humanity in general.” We will never remove it, but we can demand discipline and institute punishments. We need to hold children and their parents accountable for classroom behavior.

Kerby Anderson
In one of her songs, Carole King asked, “Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” It’s a good question. People in America move around even more than when she wrote that song. I have discussed these national trends in a previous Point of View booklet on “American Realignment.” Americans have been moving from high-tax states to low-tax states. Conservatives and Christians have been having more kids than liberals and secularists.
Those trends continue. For example, the states with the highest personal income growth are Texas, Idaho, Nevada, Florida, North Carolina, and Arkansas. California ranked last along with Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, and Hawaii.
California’s food and accommodation growth was the second lowest in the country, likely due to the creation of a state council that dictates wages and work conditions at fast-food franchises. California employers may be struggling to find workers because so many have moved to lower-cost and low-tax states.
Yesterday, I talked about some global trends and explained that futurists guessed wrong about which nations would be dominant in this century. Those same futurists also suggested that mayors would be more influential in the world and this country because of the significant growth of major cities.
That has not happened. A professor at Columbia University has observed a “doom loop” in New York City. More people work from home, office space is less valuable, and the city gets less revenue from real estate taxes. People with money, whose work no longer requires them to be in the city, move out, taking their tax dollars and retail spending with them. In ten of the largest cities, half of all offices sit empty. America’s big cities lost two million people between 2020 and 2022.
This is not what the world futurists predicted, and we should take note.

Kerby Anderson
Futurists attempting to predict our global future haven’t been very accurate. Last month while talking about the new book by Senator Marco Rubio, I mentioned the fact that a few decades ago various authors predicted the “end of history” where there would be a liberal global order.
Instead, we have a world that looks more like the book, The Clash of Civilizations, written by Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington. These nations do not share the same global worldview. Some are turned inward, while others are working to be the dominant force in the world.
Futurists assumed the world would be run by the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US). But its percentage of global GDP has dropped significantly over the last two decades. And it is unlikely that the woke policies of the current government and corporations are going to reverse that trend any time soon.
By contrast, the greatest percentage increase in global GDP has been among the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). China produces more manufactured goods than Japan, Germany, and the US combined. There are more billionaires in Beijing than in New York City.
As I have mentioned in previous commentaries, China faces significant economic and demographic problems. It has the fastest-aging society in all of human history. Its working age population peaked in 2011 and is declining every year.
On the other hand, India is now the most populous country in the world. It is consistently ranked as the fastest growing large economy in the world. It does have a young population to make the country prosperous.
It is easy to see which nations are rising in influence and which ones are declining in influence. This isn’t what the futurists predicted.

Kerby Anderson
I imagine that every older generation complains about the younger generation. But something is different. The youngest generation in America is desperately worried about themselves. That is the conclusion Mary Wakefield draws from the latest research done by Dr. Jean Twenge in her book, Generations.
She says we are right to be concerned. “Almost 30 percent of American girls have clinical depression and it’s the same across the Anglosphere. The suicide rate for ten-to-24-year-olds has tripled.” These are staggering statistics.
In previous commentaries, I have quoted Jean Twenge, who noticed major shifts in attitudes and behaviors starting in 2012. She wrote about this in her book, iGen, which identified the problems that surfaced due to the smartphone. It is clear, “The more hours a day a teen spends on social media, the more likely it is that he or she is depressed.”
Here is an interesting irony. Young people spend lots of time communicating online, yet they are lonely and isolated. According to her book, Generations, Twenge concluded that “One of the eye-popping facts is that teens are much lonelier now than they were 15 years ago.”
Why is this true? She explains, “Interacting face to face tends to be more co-operative and more emotionally close. It’s more honest but it’s also more agreeable. People have a very strong tendency online to say cruel things that they would never say to someone’s face.”
Mary Wakefield asked Jean Twenge if her kids have social media. Even the oldest of her three daughters does not have social media. They seem to be doing fine without it, believe it would be a waste of time, and consider it like junk food.
We know why teenagers are unhappy. Parents and grandparents should take note.

Kerby Anderson
When we look back at the history of new technologies, we find a similar pattern. First, there are the early adopters, then a majority adopt the technology, finally you have the skeptics, often referred to as the luddites.
Often the biggest problem with technological adoption is the fact that the government or entrenched interests fight the adoption and even engage in scare tactics. Before we look at some current examples, let’s look at some history.
It is hard to imagine now, but there was not only resistance but significant fear about bringing electricity into homes. One headline said: “Man picks up telephone, dies from shock.” You can see sketch drawings of people dying merely by walking near a power pole.
When Karl Benz brought out the first automobile, there wasn’t much of a threat to existing industries. But as more cars were produced in America, you could see ads worrying that the nation was making “sacrifices to the modern Moloch,” which was a reference to the Canaanite deity who demanded child sacrifices. And there were the warnings of an increase in what were called “motor killings.”
More recently, we have had a long list of warnings about the Internet along with so many commentators that dismissed it as a fad. One headline observed that the “Internet may be a just a passing fad as millions give up on it.” Even Wired magazine concluded, “Most things that succeed don’t require retraining 250 million people.”
By the end of this decade, we will see more innovations in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to digital currency. We will need biblical wisdom to evaluate the impact of so many of these and would be wise to learn from lessons from the past about technological adoption.

Kerby Anderson
The latest statistics from the CDC are disturbing. The US suicide rate hit a record high in 2022. That is why many experts are calling it a “silent public health crisis.” Nearly 50,000 Americans committed suicide last year. That is the highest number on record. To put that in context, that amounts to one suicide every ten minutes.
The suicide rate grew fastest among older Americans. The suicide rate for adults 65 and older grew by 8 percent, and the rate for adults 45-64- years old was up 7 percent. In the past, we have talked about suicides among young people affected by social media and the pandemic. That is still the case, but the rising suicide rate among older Americans is also becoming an issue.
Most Americans (9 in 10) believe our country is facing a mental health crisis. These statistics illustrate that this perception is correct. And there are a multitude of factors ranging from genetics to finances to social isolation. As we have discussed in previous commentaries, the latest reports once again link time spent in social media to suicidal thoughts among teenagers, particularly girls.
It is also fair to say that we don’t know all the reasons for the increase in suicides. But if you link suicide to other “deaths of despair” that include drug overdoses and alcohol abuse, you can see a pattern. In our increasingly secular society, people have less to live for. Suicide becomes an option when life is sterile, superficial, and soulless.
We are living amid a suicide epidemic. Families, churches, and social groups can provide a biblical answer. And each of us should be watching people of any age crying for help and attention.

Kerby Anderson
Each year the federal government adds more to the national debt, causing serious concerns about how the president and Congress will deal with it. Many of the social and cultural issues facing us are unprecedented. At least with the national debt, we do have some historical examples provided by economist Kevin Hassett.
When Rome began the First Punic War, its coins contained 12 ounces of metal. After the war, Rome reduced the metal content of its currency to 2 ounces. By the end of the Third Punic War, coins only had a half ounce. This is a classic example of currency debasement.
Sometimes massive debts lead first to debasement and then default. After World War I, the allies extracted heavy reparations from the Germans. Over time the deutschmark dropped in value and eventually was worth a trillionth of its initial value. When Germany was no longer able to pay its debts, it defaulted.
One historical review of 176 sovereign nations found that there have been 248 defaults. But will the US become one of those nations? Kevin Hassett reminds us that has happened in the past and might happen again in the future. If default is not an option, then debasement of the currency is the only other option.
He believes the flight from dollars to other commodities (like gold and bitcoin) illustrates those concerns. He reminds us that, “At the start of the previous administration, the price of gold was about $1,200 per ounce. Today it is closing in on $2,000.” In 2017, Bitcoin “was trading at $1,000 per coin” and now is trading at nearly 30x that amount.
As the US debt continues to climb, the government has the only option that is available to other countries: debasement of the currency.

Kerby Anderson
American families are facing a state of financial fragility that is worse than they have ever experienced. Earlier this year, Bankrate issued its annual report. They found that a sizable majority (57%) of US adults are currently unable to afford a $1,000 emergency expense. They also found that two-thirds (68%) were worried they wouldn’t be able to cover their living expenses for one month if they lost their primary source of income.
Many years ago, the Federal Reserve Board conducted a similar survey of Americans. They found that nearly half of the respondents said that the only way they could cover an unexpected expense would be by borrowing or selling something. They could not come up with the money any other way.
At that time, Neal Gabler, writing in The Atlantic, asked: Who knew? He then answered that he knew because he was one of the people. He knew what it was like to dread going to the mailbox because it usually had more new bills and rarely a check to pay for them. He knew what it was like to tell his daughter that he may not be able to pay for her wedding.
His point was you wouldn’t know this by looking at him. You could look at his resume as a writer and conclude he was doing fine. He is in the middle-class with five books and hundreds of articles to his name. That is why he wrote about what he calls, “the secret shame of middle-class Americans.”
He represents so many US adults who are financially fragile and “living close to the financial edge.” And it is worth mentioning that this is not just a liquidity problem: they don’t have enough ready cash in their checking and savings accounts. They are living in a world where the cost of living is rising faster than their wages.
When we say that American workers are hurting, it is much worse than we might suspect.

Kerby Anderson
Two of the founding fathers that deserve more attention are Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. While the Hamilton musical provides us with some perspective and entertainment, I would recommend the book by Jay Cost, The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy. Jay was on the Point of View radio program to talk about his book.
These two men belonged to a political movement with three fundamental foundations. The first was the commitment to liberal government that emphasized the protection of individual rights. The Declaration of Independence argued that “governments are instituted among men” in order to secure certain “unalienable rights.” That idea, written by Thomas Jefferson, was influenced by the writings of John Locke.
The second foundation was a belief in self-government, often referred to as republicanism. A republic allowed the citizens to be governed by laws that they actually had a hand in creating. A monarch did not hand down these laws. They were established by “we the people.”
The third foundation was nationalism. The 13 separate colonies agreed to bind themselves together in a national union of 13 states. This is where there was the greatest division between the Federalists and the Antifederalists. And they ended up dividing Hamilton from Madison.
Hamilton emphasized national vigor and was eager to promote the Bank of the United States and other programs that would grow the national government. Madison, on the other hand, wanted to pursue what could be called “republican balance.” He feared that Hamilton’s policies favored the wealthy.
In reading this book by Jay Cost, I was struck by the reality that many of the debates in the founding of this country continue to this day. Many of the ideas put forward by Hamilton and Madison are still debated today in the halls of Congress.

Kerby Anderson
Are humans the enemy? Should animals have constitutional rights? Should peas be granted personhood? These questions may sound ludicrous. Nevertheless, professors and leaders in environmental rights groups are asking these questions and providing bizarre answers.
Wesley J. Smith was on Point of View radio talk show to discuss his documentary “The War on Humans.” You can watch it on YouTube and also order the companion e-book. You will quickly see or read that these questions are not satire or science fiction. There are people who believe that humans are the problem, and the only solution is to grant legal rights to animals and plants. Some go so far as to suggest that we find some way to reduce the human population by 90 percent.
Smith documents these claims in his video and e-book. Anti-human activists want to place all our valuable natural resources (from oil to land) off limits for human use. Farmers could be held liable for plowing new fields because it might lead to the death of rodents, snakes, and even weeds.
These ideas do not spring from the biblical concept of having dominion over the earth and being a good steward of God’s creation. Instead, the environmental movement of the 1960s portrays humans as a “disease” or as “parasites” or as a “cancer” hurting Mother Nature. It then evolved into the “nature rights” movement that desires to give fauna and flora “the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles.” We end up with a pantheistic idea that eliminates any distinction between humans and other life forms.
These ideas don’t just surface in academic settings or environmental rallies. They end up in our laws. That is why we need to counter these erroneous ideas and defend the biblical principle of human dignity.

Kerby Anderson
Jonah Goldberg reminded his readers of a famous essay by Tom Wolfe entitled “The Great Relearning.” It was an essay about the Summer of Love in 1968 in San Francisco. It had great significance to me since I grew up in the San Francisco area during that time, but it also has significance to all of us concerned about our culture.
He said that doctors at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic “were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that disappeared so long ago they never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scruff, the rot.” He concluded that this happened because “the hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero.”
They rejected everything from modern society, including basic hygiene. They had lots of sex with each other and shared everything from bedsheets to toothbrushes to food utensils. They were the beneficiaries of centuries of scientific investigation and wise application of sound medical and scientific knowledge. But they decided to tear down some fences and paid a heavy price.
Supposedly G.K. Chesterton warned, “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.” Unfortunately, we had a counterculture in the 1960s that was willing to tear down fences of civilization without giving much thought to why those moral, medical, and sexual guidelines were created in the first place.
Does that sound like our world today? Moral anarchy reigns. Our society mimics Judges 17:6 where “everyone does what is right in his own eyes.” Sexual morality is now based on doing what each person feels is right for them. And marriage has been redefined by divorce and same-sex marriage. All of this suggests that maybe it is time for another “great relearning.”

Kerby Anderson
Will robots destroy jobs and put all of us in the unemployment lines? Some futurists seem to be predicting this scenario. Jay Richards disagrees. He says it is an old argument that is new again. He is the author of the book, The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines.
One report predicts that; “The future of robots appears to be a dystopian march to rising inequality, falling wages, and higher unemployment.” A number of books warn of the “rise of robots” and even suggest this new technology will lead to the death of capitalism.
Jay Richards acknowledges that we have a coming disruption that could be as abrupt as the Industrial Revolution. But looking back, we can see that previous revolutions didn’t lead to the end of employment. They often provided new jobs without the boredom and danger of the past. At the founding of this country nearly 95 percent of Americans got by on farming. Today, the American population is ten times larger while only 1 percent of the US population work on farms.
If it is true that technology leads to permanent unemployment of the masses, the history of the last few centuries would be a history of joblessness. That is not true. But some politicians accept the faulty premise that jobs will be scarce, and therefore have proposed the idea of a universal basic income that would essentially put millions more on welfare.
One obvious problem would be money. The government is going broke right now with various entitlement programs. Expanding that is economically unrealistic. Do we really want to pay millions more in this country to not work?
The lesson for government and education is to stop training kids to do jobs that robots will be doing in a few years. The lesson for parents and their children is to focus on developing skills a robot could never take away from them.

Kerby Anderson
Today is Labor Day. Although this day was set aside to honor trade and labor organizations, I believe it is a day when Christians can also consider how they view work and labor. The Bible has quite a bit to say about how we are to view work, and so I devote part of a chapter in my book, Making the Most of Your Money, to a biblical view of work.
First, we are to work unto the Lord in our labors. Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men.” We may have an earthly master (or boss) but ultimately, we are working for our heavenly Master.
Second, work is valuable. Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12 to “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you, so that you will behave properly toward outsiders and not be in any need.” He also warns in 2 Thessalonians 3:10 that “if anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat, either.”
The Proverbs talk about the importance and benefits of work. Proverbs 12:11 says, “He who tills his land will have plenty of bread, but he who pursues worthless things lacks sense.” Proverbs 13:4 says, “The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the soul of the diligent is made fat.” And Proverbs 14:23 says, “In all labor there is profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.”
The Greeks and Romans looked upon manual work as a menial task that was only for slaves (or else for people of lower classes). The biblical view of work changed that ancient view because work and labor were combined with the idea of vocation and calling.
These ideas were reinforced in the Middle Ages through the gild movement and even expanded during the Reformation. Martin Luther, for example, taught that all work can be done for the glory of God. John Calvin taught that all should work because they were to serve as God’s instruments on earth. This led to what today is called the Protestant work ethic.
Let’s use this Labor Day to teach and reinforce biblical ideas of work.

Kerby Anderson
Does it seem like so many important systems aren’t working the way they are supposed to be working? Just think of the problems associated with airlines, supply chains, and electrical grids.
We live in a complex society where so many interconnected parts need to be working efficiently. And we need competent people running them. Harold Robertson persuasively argues that “Complex systems won’t survive the competence crisis.”
He explains, “America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system.” He concludes that, if one part of this complex system fails, you have cascading consequences for it and all adjacent systems.
The reason for these failures, he believes, is due to the changing political mores of society. We have established a system of promoting unqualified people and sidelining the competent. “By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement.” For many institutions (universities, corporations) diversity is more important than competence, Therefore, we have a competence crisis. Put another way, the weakest link is often the person in charge.
We shouldn’t be surprised that formerly stable systems are having accidents at a rate higher than the system can adapt. Unless we once again select people based on meritocracy rather than diversity, the problem will go from bad to worse.

Kerby Anderson
Are there long-term cycles that affect us? Unless you study history, it is difficult to see them. In a previous commentary, I quoted investor Ray Dalio who explained in his book, The Changing World Order, that he became more aware of long-term trends in the economy and made better financial decisions once he studied history. Here are three cycles that many analysts have been talking about.
The first is a 250-year revolutionary cycle. That last hit in the 1760s with the American Revolution and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and free market capitalism. And 250 years prior to that was Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.
The second cycle is an 80-year financial cycle. Some commentators argue that it used to be a 58-60-year cycle but is now an 80-year cycle. During this cycle, the economy moves through four seasons. These range from innovation to economic growth to an eventual economic correction.
The third cycle is a 50-year technology cycle. From 1870 to 1930, we had the development of electricity and the internal combustion engine. From 1930 to 1980 was a mass production cycle. The 1980 to 2030 cycle involved telecommunications and computer technology.
The interesting thing about these three cycles is they are all converging about now. Each cycle will bring about changes different from what came before it. I am reminded to the famous quote from Mark Twain who observed: “History never repeats itself, but it does rhyme.”
How should we respond? Like the sons of Issachar in the Old Testament we need to understand the times with knowledge of what we should do.”

Kerby Anderson
Alex Berenson recently wrote about the “First Freedom.” He was on my radio program four years ago to talk about stories he was investigating after having left the New York Times. That was before he began reporting on topics related to the pandemic and vaccine that were considered forbidden.
Perhaps now you can see why he writes about free speech. He has faced social media censorship by merely reporting the truth about the clinical trials of the vaccine.
To make his point, he takes us back 82 years to a State of the Union speech given by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The president talked about four essential human freedoms. The second freedom was religious, “the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way.” The third was “freedom from want.” The fourth was “freedom from fear.”
But the most important freedom according to the president was “freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world.” That was the first freedom. That is the First Amendment.
But Alex Berenson goes on to say that “freedom of speech” is really “freedom of thought.” If people can’t say openly what they think, they will be forced into a shadow world. He goes on to explain, “It doesn’t matter whether the speech is right or wrong, objectively true or false. Indeed, the First Amendment makes no reference to the truth or falsity of the speech it protects.”
He is concerned that 70 percent now favor restricting “false information” online and he isn’t even sure the New York Times believes in the First Amendment. Twitter eventually banned him. One of his offenses was accurately reporting on the results of Pfizer’s own clinical trial.
Most Americans, including Democratic presidents, used to believe in free speech. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

Kerby Anderson
The phrase “trust the science” isn’t as popular in the culture as it has been in the past due to the recent revelations about inaccurate scientific statements during the pandemic. And the phrase “trust the science” isn’t as accepted as it was in the scientific community due to so many retractions.
The co-founders of Retraction Watch have been monitoring this problem for years. They found that only 40 scientific papers were retracted in the year 2000. But last year, 5,500 scientific papers were retracted. They concluded that only about a fifth of the retractions have been done due to an “honest error.”
The surge in bogus papers is driven in part by the reality that scientists need to “publish or perish.” But those pressures have been on academics for decades. A larger problem is the fact that many are turning to “paper mills” that sell manuscripts and other research projects to scientists needing to publish.
People are being harmed by these bogus papers. One anesthesiologist falsified data on an ineffective blood substitute that was widely cited in the literature. Patients were harmed by this false research.
Another aspect of this problem is illustrated by the so-called replication crisis. So many of the results published in scientific papers cannot be reproduced by other researchers. The University of Virginia attempted to reproduce five “landmark” cancer studies. It failed in one case and produced inconclusive results in two others. This suggests that “the science” in all these cases might be wrong.
It is becoming more and more difficult to “trust the science” when we discover how many scientific papers and scientific statements are wrong.

Kerby Anderson
China is not only a major threat in the world, but China is dying. Those two observations seem contradictory. But, they reinforce each other. The inevitable decline of China makes it more likely that the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party will act sooner rather than later.
Ben Shapiro pulls together five serious problems for China in a recent video. Here are his arguments, along with a few of my comments.
China’s first problem is demographics. China has become the fastest-aging society in all of human history. Due to its one-child policy, China has millions more adults than children.
Problem number two is a lack of innovation. If it were a free society, it would have a robust and innovative economy. But China has no innovation so it must steal intellectual property from other nations.
Debt is a third major problem for China. In previous commentaries, I have observed that any nation with a debt to GDP ratio over 130 percent eventually defaults. China has a ratio that is approaching 160 percent.
Problem number four is the military. Yes, China is threatening other countries with its military, but it’s falling behind because it is using older, less sophisticated microchips. China’s navy is effective in coastal zones but cannot project power in deep water.
A final problem is the fact that China is a dictatorship. This is a significant reason for the other problems. The country’s leaders do not allow freedom and innovation.
The harsh truth is that China cannot change its demographic reality or its economic reality. And it won’t change its political structure. It is a threat to the world, but it also looks like a nation about to collapse in the future.

Kerby Anderson
The crime wave in the Golden State has been in the news for many reasons, but two events stand out among the many others. Perhaps you have seen the video of robbery at a Nordstroms. Nearly 50 criminals ran off with an estimated $100,000 worth of merchandise, and this was the third robbery of a Nordstroms.
The other event that comes to mind was the protest from the Oakland branch of the NAACP calling out the “failed leadership” including the movement to “defund the police.” The protesters claimed that their crime wave was due to the district attorney’s failure to “prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes.”
Why focus on crime in California? You may not live in the Golden State, but what is happening in California will arrive in your community if you don’t learn vicariously some lessons about criminal justice.
Charles Cooke asks, “Why has this happened? At least in part, it has happened because California decided to let it happen.” Voters passed Proposition 47 which changed felonies into misdemeanors if the amount stolen did not exceed $950. That made theft and shoplifting more profitable for the criminal.
In addition, some in law enforcement don’t want to enforce the law. The Oakland district attorney says she wants to decriminalize kids. Put another way, she wants to be a social worker, not a DA.
I would point out to the protesters and to the citizens of that state that they voted for a policy and put people in office which resulted in the latest crime wave. If you live in California, you have an opportunity to make some necessary changes in the next election. If you live somewhere else in the country, you should learn what not to do. This progressive experiment in criminal justice is not going well, and you don’t need to import it to your state.

Kerby Anderson
The latest tool of those involved in the cancel culture has been the use of “debanking.” This occurs when a prominent individual or organization is informed by their bank that they will no longer be allowed to use banking services.
Nigel Farage faced such a statement from his bank in the UK because he was perceived as a politically exposed person (PEP) due to his previous involvement in Brexit. The bank argued that their decision to close his account was because his bank account fell below is “wealth limit.” Farage admitted that his account was below the limit but said that had never been a problem in the past.
In this country, Dr. Joseph Mercola announced that his business bank accounts along with the accounts of his CEO and CFO and even the bank accounts of his family members were all closed. He has had accounts with the bank for 18 years but was shut down, he believes, because of his previous statements about the Covid vaccine.
The National Committee for Religious Freedom led by former US Ambassador Sam Brownback had its checking account canceled without notice. Although its advisory board includes former US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former Alliance Defending Freedom President Michael Farris, and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, the group was told they must disclose a list of donors and a list of candidates they intended to support if they wanted to the bank to reopen their account.
Perhaps you are noticing a pattern. These banks aren’t closing the accounts of progressive individuals or politically liberal groups. They aren’t prying into the rosters of any other advocacy groups.
That is why some members of Congress are ready to investigate these latest examples of debanking. They pose a threat to free speech and religious liberty.