Bloody Hands: The Southern Poverty Law Center by Matt Barber

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Long before homosexual activist Floyd Corkins entered the D.C.-based Family Research Council (FRC) with the intent to commit mass murder, I warned from the rooftops that the hard-left Southern Poverty Law Center’s anti-Christian “hate group” propaganda might spur such bloodshed. With a column headlined, “Liberal violence rising,” I wrote, “The SPLC’s dangerous and irresponsible (‘hate group’) disinformation campaign can embolden and give license to like-minded, though less stable, left-wing extremists, creating a climate of true hate. Such a climate is ripe for violence.”

Tragically, my deepest fears were realized.

Then, in August, days after Corkins was heroically disarmed by FRC employ Leo Johnson, whom Corkins shot in the arm, I penned another column titled “Fanning the flames of left-wing violence.” I plead with the SPLC to end its “dishonest and reprehensible” strategy of “juxtaposing FRC and other Christian organizations with violent extremist groups” in a transparent effort to marginalize them.

“I appeal to your sense of goodwill. This is not a game. Lives are at stake,” I implored. “I know you have good employees (I’ve met some) who believe they’re doing the right thing; so, please, validate that belief. It’s time to remove your metaphorical ‘hate group’ Star of David from mainstream Christian organizations before another of your ideological allies spills blood.”

I no longer believe the SPLC has a sense of goodwill. In fact, based on FBI evidence and the group’s own actions (and inaction), I and many others are left with no other inference but this: The SPLC – a left-wing extremist fundraising behemoth – may be intentionally inciting anti-Christian violence.

Just days ago, Corkins pled guilty to a number of charges, including domestic terrorism. FBI evidence revealed that he was both motivated by and utilized the SPLC’s “anti-gay hate map” to target and locate his intended Christian mass murder victims.

Further evidence reveals that the “hate map” – more accurately labeled “hit map” – even provided the exact location of FRC and other Christian groups found on Corkins’ hit-list with little red dots to helpfully pinpoint their precise locations.

Corkins told the FBI after the shooting that he intended to “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches (which he brought with him) in victims’ faces.” Prosecutors said that he planned to leave FRC after the attack and go to another conservative group to continue his reign of terror. A handwritten list of three other groups was found with his belongings while an investigation of Corkins’ computer revealed that he identified his targets on the SPLC website. The other groups were also maliciously listed by the SPLC as “hate groups.”

Motive to kill? Fomented. Who to kill? Provided. Where to kill? Pinpointed, with easy access to driving directions. The only thing the SPLC did not do was purchase Corkins’ gun and drive him to the crime scene.

Here’s why, to my own aghast bewilderment, I’m left with little choice but to believe the SPLC may be intentionally inciting anti-Christian violence. As noted by the FRC, “Even after an attempted mass murder of the FRC staff, the ‘hate map’ is still prominently featured on the SPLC website today – which shocks most conservative pundits.”

“Shocks” is an understatement.

“When Congresswoman Giffords and several others were shot in Arizona by Jared Loughner, the left went into overdrive blaming Sarah Palin for a map that had a list of political targets on it. After the fact, we learned that Loughner was apolitical and he clearly had not used Sarah Palin’s map of political targets. That did not stop the left from blaming the right,” noted RedState’s Erick Erickson. “By the way, Palin took down her target map after the controversy. The Southern Poverty Law Center? Crickets …”

What other explanation is there? I understand that it’s difficult to admit you’re wrong, especially when the scheme seemed so delicious at the time. But once FBI evidence conclusively proves that you were, to a large degree, responsible for inciting an act of domestic terrorism, most reasonable people would take a deep breath, take a step back, admit fault and hobble forward in an effort to rehabilitate a reputation in ruin.

Is the SPLC a left-wing extremist group? Absolutely. Are they anti-Christian? Without a doubt. But few would have believed, until now, that they might intentionally, with malice aforethought, seek to incite anti-Christian bloodshed.

Scandalously, the Obama administration continues to maintain deep ties with this radical organization.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center has a long history of maliciously slandering pro-family groups with language and labels that incite hatred and undermine civil discourse,” said Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel. “In the issues of family and marriage, Christians are literally in the crosshairs of radical homosexual activists, and the SPLC is fueling the hatred and providing the targets. The SPLC should be held accountable for its reckless acts. Even more disturbing than the SPLC’s irresponsible behavior is the fact that the Obama administration is in bed with this group,” said Staver.

“It is ironic that Christians who believe in natural marriage have been isolated by radical homosexual activists and demonized as ‘homophobes’ and ‘haters,’” he concluded.

Weeks before Corkins pleaded guilty of terrorism and assault with intent to kill, a study from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point entitled “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far Right” said the “violent far right” exhibits an intense fear or dislike of foreign people, “including people with alternative sexual preferences.” The SPLC’s warped view of reality has been adopted by the Obama administration.

“What the SPLC and other homosexual activists are doing is intentional and dangerous,” said Staver. “It is time to end the dangerous rhetoric and resume a civil discourse on the subject of natural marriage and morality.”

Indeed if, God forbid, this SPLC “hate group” propaganda leads to another act of left-wing terrorism like that at FRC, this dangerous group should be held legally – perhaps even criminally liable.

In the meantime, to the media, I say this: If you dare, even for a moment, give any credence whatsoever to this deadly SPLC “hate group” nonsense, you too will have blood on your hands.

SPLC, you’re no longer fooling anyone.

Stop fooling yourselves.

Matt Barber is an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. He serves as vice president of Liberty Counsel Action.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/bloody-hands-the-southern-poverty-law-center/#2jPS9Ygpcg8uJCAw.99

The Real Roots of School Violence by Tom DeWeese

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In the brave new world of the very near future, children will enter their public schools passing police checkpoints, surveillance cameras, metal detectors, X-ray scanners and warrantless physical searches. Parents will relax, knowing their child is now “SAFE.” No violent evil doers will be able to get past that wall of security.

But what none of the checkpoints, scanners and cameras will detect is the child who walks right past, armed to the teeth with a hidden weapon actually enforced on him by the school itself. The weapon comes in many names and varieties: Ritlin, Luvox, Prozac, Zoloft, Cymbalta, Paxil, and more. Each weapon lovingly loaded into their child by concerned parents before they send them off to their “safe” school. And while the child’s backpack and pockets are checked by the armed force on the way in, the pharmaceutical poison is building up in his blood system, racing to the brain like a lit dynamite fuse.

As communities reel from one massive act of student violence after another, most recently in Newtown, Connecticut, the nation looks for answers. How many are looking at the schools themselves as the conduit through which millions of students are drugged with mind-altering drugs?

Some history. In 1965, the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), changed education forever as the seeds for today’s massive restructuring -away from academics to behavior modification – began. It was psychology’s crowning moment. The ESEA allocated massive federal funds and opened school doors to a flood of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and the psychiatric programs and testing needed to validate them. The number of educational psychologists in the U.S. increased from 455 in 1969 to 16,146 in 1992. As of 1994, child psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors and special educators in and around U.S. public schools nearly out-number teachers.

To date, there has never been issued a single peer- reviewed scientific paper officially claiming to prove ADD/ ADHD exists. Nor has there ever been a single bit of physical evidence to confirm the disease exists. So-called experts on the subject have refused to answer the simple question, “is ADD/ ADHD a real disease?” Medical researchers charge that ADHD does not meet the medical definition of a disease or syndrome or anything organic or biologic.

Yet, in 1991, eligibility rules for federal education grants were changed to provide schools with $400 in annual grant money for each child diagnosed with ADHD. That same year the Department of Education formally recognized ADHD as a handicap and directed all state education officers to establish procedures to screen and identify ADHD children and provide them with special education and psychological services. As a result, the number of ADD/ADHD cases soared again.

Today more than 7,000,000 children have been labeled, tamped and registered as permanent patients of the school system. 10 to 12 percent of all boys between the ages of 6 and 14 in the United States have been diagnosed as having ADD. One in every 30 Americans between the ages of 5 and 19 years old has a prescription for Ritalin. And the fuse burns as the “patients” sit in the classroom.

AS THE USE OF PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS RISE – SO TOO DO CHILD SUICIDES

Children are dying. Not just in shootings, but in rising incidents of suicide. Here are some details:

A November 1997 medical report found: “The association between benzodiazephine use and attempted suicide is especially high for…the young, and for males…” In the April 1996 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, a study found that “the older tricyclic antidepressants are a significant cause of suicide” and accounted for the majority of antidepressant deaths studied between 1986 and 1990.

A December 1996 French study entitled, “Suicide and psychotropic drugs,” established that “suicide attempts are more frequent among patients taking antidepressants…”

In Denmark, with a huge usage of psychotropic drugs, the suicide rate is twice the rate of that in the United States…
In the U.S., teen suicides have tripled since 1960; today, suicide is the second leading cause of death…

In Israel, between 1981 and 1994, the estimated suicide rate for 15- to 19-year-old Jewish boys increased by about 183 percent. (Tellingly, the suicide rate dropped 10 percent during a 1997 period when Israel’s psychologists went on strike.)

Australia’s suicide rate increased between 1960 and 1967 when legislation was passed to enable a person to obtain multiple prescriptions for sedatives. When the law was modified in 1967 to restrict the practice, there was a decrease in per capita sedative usage and a decline in suicide rates.

Are we hearing an outcry from that tragedy? Are there calls for stopping, banning, regulating the use of these mind- altering drugs? Is the pharmaceutical industry being called on the carpet? Are there emergency congressional hearings being held to showcase the heads of big pharma as murdering criminals? Not on your life.

As the nation is outraged over the school shootings, demanding that something be done, guns become the target, not the drugs that filled the child’s mind with delusions to take such horrific action. Meanwhile the gun sits innocently in the corner, unmoving, unable to cause damage – until the real loaded weapon – the drugged student – picks it up.

View the full list with detailed information on the connection between drugs and school shootings

© 2013 Tom DeWeese – All Rights Reserved

Tom DeWeese is one of the nation’s leading advocates of individual liberty, free enterprise, private property rights, personal privacy, back-to-basics education and American sovereignty and independence.

A native of Ohio, he’s been a candidate for the Ohio Legislature, served as editor of two newspapers, and has owned several businesses since the age of 23. In 1989 Tom led the only privately-funded election-observation team to the Panamanian elections. In 2006 Tom was invited to Cambridge University to debate the issue of the United Nations before the Cambridge Union, a 200 year old debating society. Today he serves as Founder and President of the American Policy Center and editor of The DeWeese Report

For 40 years Tom DeWeese has been a businessman, grassroots activist, writer and publisher. As such, he has always advocated a firm belief in man’s need to keep moving forward while protecting our Constitutionally-guaranteed rights.

The DeWeese Report , 70 Main Street, Suite 23, Warrenton Virginia. (540) 341-8911

E-Mail: admin@americanpolicy.org

E-Mail: ampolicycenter@hotmail.com

Website: www.americanpolicy.org

Originally published January 21, 2013
NewsWithViews.com

The Radical Polarization of Law Enforcement by Patrick Wood

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Patriots, Christians and concerned cit­i­zens are increasingly in the cross hairs of the U.S. intelligence com­mu­nity, and battle lines are being qui­etly drawn that could soon pit our own law enforce­ment and mil­i­tary forces against us.

A Feb­ruary 20 report enti­tled “The Modern Militia Move­ment [2]” was issued by the Mis­souri Infor­ma­tion Analysis Center (MIAC) that paints main­stream patri­otic Amer­i­cans as dan­gerous threats to law enforce­ment and to the country. Oper­ating under the Mis­souri State Highway Patrol, the MIAC is listed as a Fusion Center [3] that was estab­lished in coop­er­a­tion with the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity and the Depart­ment of Justice.

Because authen­ticity of the report was ques­tioned by some, this writer con­tacted Mis­souri state Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Guest (R-KingCity) who had per­son­ally ver­i­fied that the report had indeed been issued. Rep. Guest is chairman of the Per­sonal Pri­vacy Com­mittee and is a promi­nent leader in the national blow­back against the Real ID Act of 2005 that requires states to issue uni­form driver’s licenses con­taining per­sonal bio­metric data. (See Guest warns against Big Brother, Real ID [4])

Rep. Guest stated that he was “shocked and out­raged” at the report, which clearly paints him and many other elected state leaders, as a poten­tial threats to law enforcement.

Instead of focusing on actual crim­inal inci­dents of “home-grown” ter­rorism, the MAIC report instead lists issues that it believes are common to the threats it per­ceives. Thus, Amer­i­cans involved with the fol­lowing issues are highly suspect:

– “Ammu­ni­tion Account­ability Act” – requiring each bullet to to be seri­al­ized and reg­is­tered to the purchaser.

– “Antic­i­pa­tion of the eco­nomic col­lapse of the US Gov­ern­ment” – Promi­nent scholars and econ­o­mists are openly debating the bank­ruptcy and insol­vency of the United States government.

– “Pos­sible Con­sti­tu­tional Con­ven­tion (Con Con)” – 32 states have called for a Con­sti­tu­tional Con­ven­tion to force Con­gress and the Exec­u­tive Branch into a bal­anced budget, but many are con­cerned that if called, Con Con would be taken over by hos­tile inter­ests who would intro­duce Amend­ments that are harmful to national sovereignty.

– “North Amer­ican Union” – MIAC states that “Con­spiracy the­o­rists claim that this union would link Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The NAU would unify its mon­e­tary system and trade the dollar for the AMERO. Asso­ci­ated with this theory is con­cern over a NAFTA Super­highway, which would fast track trade between the three nations. There is addi­tional con­cern that the NAU would open up the border causing secu­rity risks and free move­ment for immigrants.”

– “Uni­versal Ser­vice Program” – “Statements made by Pres­i­dent Elect Obama and his chief of staff have led extrem­ists to fear the cre­ation of a Civilian Defense Force. This theory requires all cit­i­zens between the age of 18 and 25 to be forced to attend three months of manda­tory training.” (This is exactly what Obama and Rahm Emmanuel have repeat­edly stated on national TV, and thus is hardly a theory.)

– “Radio Fre­quency Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (RFID)” – This includes human implan­ta­tion, but the larger con­cern is uni­versal id cards and per­sonal prop­erty iden­ti­fi­ca­tion that can be read elec­tron­i­cally without the bearer’s knowledge.

Cit­i­zens who are con­cerned about the above issues are then lumped into rad­ical ide­olo­gies such as Chris­tian Iden­tity, White Nation­al­ists (e.g., neo-Nazi, Skin­heads, etc.) and anti-Semites. Tax Resisters and Anti-Immigration advo­cates are thrown into the same category.

The MIAC report then sternly warns law enforce­ment personnel,

“You are the Enemy: The militia sub­scribes to an antigov­ern­ment and NWO mind set, which cre­ates a threat to law enforce­ment offi­cers. They view the mil­i­tary, National Guard, and law enforce­ment as a force that will con­fis­cate their firearms and place them in FEMA con­cen­tra­tion camps.” [Bold emphasis appears in original]

On the last page of the MIAC report, a sec­tion listing Polit­ical Para­pher­nalia (flags and sym­bols) states,

“Militia mem­bers most com­monly asso­ciate with 3rd party polit­ical groups. It is not uncommon for militia mem­bers to dis­play Con­sti­tu­tional Party, Cam­paign for Lib­erty, or Lib­er­tarian mate­rial. These mem­bers are usu­ally sup­porters of former Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date: Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr.

Militia mem­bers com­monly dis­play pic­ture, car­toons, bumper stickers that con­tain anti-government rhetoric. Most of this mate­rial will depict the FRS, IRS, FBI, ATF, CIA, UN, Law Enforce­ment, and the ‘New World Order’ in a deroga­tory manor (sic). Addi­tion­ally, Racial, anti-immigration, and anti-abortion, mate­rial may be dis­played by militia members.”

What was the osten­sible gen­esis of all these “threats” to law enforce­ment? The report explains it this way…

“Aca­d­e­mics con­tend that female and minority empow­er­ment in the 1970s and 1960s caused a blow to white male’s sense of empow­er­ment. This, com­bined with a sense of defeat from the Vietnam War, increased levels of immi­gra­tion, and unem­ploy­ment, spawned a para­mil­i­tary cul­ture. This caught on in the 1980′s with injects such as Tom Clancy novels, Solder of For­tune Mag­a­zine, and movies such as Rambo that glo­ri­fied combat. This cul­ture glo­ri­fied white males and por­trayed them as morally upright heroes who were men­tally and phys­i­cally tough.

“It was during this time­frame that many indi­vid­uals and orga­ni­za­tions began to con­coct con­spiracy the­o­ries to explain their mis­for­tunes. These the­o­ries varied but almost always involved a glob­alist dic­ta­tor­ship the”New World Order (NWO), which con­spired to exploit the working class citizens.”

In other words, these “ridicu­lous NWO the­o­ries” were cre­ated by psy­cho­log­ical deviants who were trying to jus­tify their own self-induced misfortunes.

Fear ye, all troopers

For unsus­pecting law enforce­ment per­sonnel, this MIAC training doc­u­ment polar­izes unsus­pecting offi­cers to fear peaceful, law-abiding cit­i­zens and greatly increases the risk of armed con­fronta­tion. For instance, a rou­tine traffic stop would be esca­lated if the officer observes a Ron Paul or Chuck Baldwin bumper sticker on the rear bumper of the car. The mere pos­ses­sion of printed mate­rial such as the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion or Bill of Rights would be viewed as sub­ver­sive, even though most offi­cers are required to take an oath to “defend and uphold the Con­sti­tu­tion of the United States” as a con­di­tion of their employment.

Addi­tion­ally, troopers are indoc­tri­nated that all such topics are pure fan­tasy and without any fac­tual basis. Even if they had their own con­cerns, they would be ridiculed into accepting the posi­tion that all crit­i­cism of the New World Order is dan­gerous to their well being.

The Columbia Daily Tri­bune (Columbia, Mis­souri) reports this con­cern from local res­i­dent Tim Neal, who appar­ently fits the MIAC’s “Modern Militia” profile:

If a police officer is pulling me over with my family in the car and he sees a bumper sticker on my vehicle that has been specif­i­cally iden­ti­fied as one that an extremist would have in their vehicle, the guy is prob­ably going to be pretty appre­hen­sive and not thinking in a rational manner, and this guy’s walking up to my vehicle with a gun.

MIAC is a Fusion Center

As men­tioned above, the Mis­souriInfor­ma­tionAnalysisCenter is one of a net­work of over 50 Fusion Cen­ters around the country.

According to the National Crim­inal Intel­li­gence Resource Center [5] (NCIRC), a Fusion Center is “a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort of two or more agen­cies that pro­vide resources, exper­tise, and/or infor­ma­tion to the center with the goal of max­i­mizing the ability to detect, pre­vent, appre­hend, and respond to crim­inal and ter­rorist activity.”

As of 2006, the NCIRC listed 50 Fusion Cen­ters [3]in var­ious states.

Most impor­tantly, the Depart­ment of Jus­tice and the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity are the dri­ving forces behind Fusion Cen­ters, having pub­lished “Fusion Center Guide­lines: Devel­oping and Sharing Infor­ma­tion and Intel­li­gence in a New World. [6]” This report head­lines “Fusion” as “Turning Infor­ma­tion and Intel­li­gence Into Action­able Knowledge.”

Fusion Cen­ters are one of five areas of infor­ma­tion sharing under the Infor­ma­tion Sharing Envi­ron­ment (ISE) [7] that was estab­lished by the Intel­li­gence Reform and Ter­rorism Pre­ven­tion Act of 2004 [8].

ISE mem­ber­ship includes the Depart­ment of Com­merce, CIA, Depart­ment of Defense, Director of National Intel­li­gence, Depart­ment of Energy, FBI, Health and Human Ser­vices, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, National Counter-Terrorism Center, Depart­ment of Inte­rior, Office of Man­age­ment and Budget, Depart­ment of Jus­tice, Depart­ment of State, Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion and the Depart­ment of Treasury.

According to one white paper (on the ISE web site) enti­tled The Intel­li­gence Fusion Process for State, Local and Tribal Law Enforce­ment [9], “The most impor­tant output of the intel­li­gence Fusion Center is action­able intel­li­gence. This means that the intel­li­gence pro­duced by the center will drive oper­a­tional responses and strategic aware­ness of threats.” Accordingly,

“The heart of good intel­li­gence analysis is to have a diverse array of valid and reli­able raw infor­ma­tion for analysis. The more robust the raw infor­ma­tion, the more accu­rate the ana­lytic output (i.e., intel­li­gence) will be.”

The above men­tioned MIAC report, issued by an offi­cial Fusion Center, is appar­ently part of this “diverse array of valid and reli­able raw information.”

How­ever, ISE’s under­standing of intel­li­gence is foolish. Any intel­li­gence ana­lyst knows that so-called raw infor­ma­tion is treated as garbage until ver­i­fied from mul­tiple sources to val­i­date accu­racy, com­plete­ness and freedom from bias. Sec­ondly, ana­lytic output depends upon trained and expe­ri­enced human rea­soning and judg­ment, not on the “robust­ness” of the raw infor­ma­tion itself.

Where do Fusion Cen­ters get inputs?

According to their own doc­u­ments, Fusion Cen­ters are “seeded” with ideas for analysis by the FBI and the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity. Although this is prob­lem­atic in itself, atten­tion is better directed to the left-wing non­profit orga­ni­za­tion, Southern Poverty Law Center [10] (SPLC).

Upon careful word and theme com­par­ison between the MIAC report and SPLC lit­er­a­ture, it is apparent that there is a sig­nif­i­cant link between the two. Either MIAC received training or training mate­rial from SPLC or some of its per­sonnel had some pre­vious expo­sure to it.

The SPLC aggres­sively offers training [11] to local, state and fed­eral law enforce­ment agen­cies. According to the SPLC web site, “We focus on the his­tory, back­ground, leaders and activ­i­ties of far-right extrem­ists in the U.S.” and states that it “is inter­na­tion­ally known for its tol­er­ance edu­ca­tion pro­grams, its legal vic­to­ries against white suprema­cists and its tracking of hate groups.”

Hate crimes are essen­tially acts of vil­i­fi­ca­tion of a victim because of his or her mem­ber­ship in a cer­tain social group, such as racial, reli­gious, sexual ori­en­ta­tion, nation­ality, gender, etc. While hate crimes are wrong under any cir­cum­stance, the SPLC sees no con­flict in pro­filing con­ser­v­a­tive whites, Chris­tians, Con­sti­tu­tion­al­ists, and patriots as being asso­ci­ated with, if not respon­sible for, hate crimes in America. This is the pot calling the kettle black.

For instance, con­sider the SPLC state­ment, “…a basic fact about all three move­ments: Patriots, white suprema­cists and anti-abortion mil­i­tants are all fueled by inter­pre­ta­tions of religion.”

Aside from the fact that this sweeping gen­er­al­iza­tion is plainly not true, it is mud-slinging at its best: Patriots are lumped in with white suprema­cists, anti-abortionists are mil­i­tants, and all are driven by an obvi­ously irra­tional and fanat­ical appli­ca­tion of religion.

In another SPLC article about a tragic killing in South Car­olina, enti­tled “The Abbeville Horror [12]“, the writer goes well beyond just the facts of the story and is careful to sprinkle in words and phrases such as:

Patriots, tax pro­tes­tors, sov­er­eign cit­i­zens, antigov­ern­ment extrem­ists, New World Order para­noia, Dis­arming U.S. Cit­i­zens, hard-line Chris­tian Right, con­sti­tu­tional rights, antigov­ern­ment “Patriot” lit­er­a­ture, anti-Semitic con­spiracy, “Live Free or Die,” Ruby Ridge and Waco, Second Amend­ment, extremist orga­nizing, “closet extrem­ists,” para­noid beliefs, “Give me lib­erty or give me death.” [quotes appear in orig­inal text]

These are the same kinds of words and themes that are seen in The Modern Militia Move­ment article, where dis­tinc­tions between good and bad people are blurred and con­fused: All are guilty by asso­ci­a­tion, if nothing else.

Should a pri­vate orga­ni­za­tion like SPLC be allowed to pro­vide offi­cial training to public-entrusted law enforce­ment agen­cies? Most would say, “No.” Even if the training was free, the agency should reject influ­ence from the public sector, and even more so if it presents biased and one-sided infor­ma­tion that is claimed to be factual.

Con­clu­sion

It is crit­ical to under­stand that the legit­i­mate law enforce­ment agen­cies of cities, coun­ties and states are not adver­saries of the people. They are greatly needed for pro­tec­tion against crime and for keeping order in our communities.

They are, how­ever, being method­i­cally seeded with very wrong­headed and dan­gerous infor­ma­tion, the spe­cific intent of which is to polarize law enforce­ment against peaceful cit­i­zens who simply care about the down­fall of their country.

This writer inter­viewed Chuck Baldwin and asked about how he felt when he first saw his good name asso­ci­ated with those who would threaten bodily harm to law enforce­ment agen­cies. “Per­son­ally, I was stunned,” he said, “but my family has taken this very per­son­ally as well. This is more than disturbing.”

When asked about the pos­sible affect of the report on the Con­sti­tu­tion Party, of which he was the 2008 pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, he replied, “I think it will gal­va­nize people and help them to under­stand the nature of the battle we are in. Freedom must be defended.”

In fact, the MIAC report has cre­ated a firestorm all over America. Tens of thou­sands of protests are being called, written, emailed and faxed to author­i­ties and leg­is­la­tors in Mis­souri. It would not be sur­prising to see the report rescinded and an apology given.

Even so, behind-the-scene groups like the SPLC will con­tinue unabated and unde­terred in their effort to mis­in­form and dis­rupt healthy com­mu­nity rela­tions with worthy law enforce­ment agen­cies and personnel.

The mes­sage to every juris­dic­tion: Don’t let it happen!

Final thought

Locate the Fusion Center in your state [3] and keep a close eye on the infor­ma­tion they are releasing. Stay close to as many law enforce­ment per­sonnel as you can, asking them to keep their eyes open for reports sim­ilar to the Mis­souri report. Peti­tion your state leg­is­la­tors to ban law enforce­ment training by pri­vate orga­ni­za­tions such as the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Article printed from August Forecast & Review: http://www.augustforecast.com

URL to article: http://www.augustforecast.com/2009/03/18/the_radical_polarization_of_law_enforcement/

URLs in this post:

[1] Share: http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php

[2] The Modern Militia Move­ment: http://www.augustreview.com/images/stories/miacreport.pdf

[3] listed as a FusionCenter: http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/ise/state.pdf

[4] Guest warns against Big Brother, Real ID: http://www.stjoenews.net/news/2009/feb/11/guest-warns-against-big-brother-real-id/?local

[5] NationalCrim­inalIntel­li­genceResourceCenter: http://www.ncirc.gov/

[6] FusionCenter Guide­lines: Devel­oping and Sharing Infor­ma­tion and Intel­li­gence in a New World.: http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/ise/guidelines.pdf

[7] Infor­ma­tion Sharing Envi­ron­ment (ISE): http://www.ise.gov/index.html

[8] Intel­li­gence Reform and Ter­rorism Pre­ven­tion Act of 2004: http://www.ise.gov/docs/guidance/irtpa.pdf

[9] The Intel­li­gence Fusion Process for State, Local and Tribal Law Enforce­ment: http://www.ise.gov/pages/partner-fc.html

[10] Southern PovertyLawCenter: http://www.splcenter.org/

[11] training: http://www.splcenter.org/intel/law.jsp

[12] The Abbeville Horror: http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=671

[13] FBI nudges state ‘fusion cen­ters’ into the shadows: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9916599-38.html

[14] FusionCen­ters and Pri­vacy: http://epic.org/privacy/fusion/

[15] Back­grounder: Fusion Cen­ters: http://www.cfr.org/publication/12689/

[16] Infor­ma­tion Sharing Envi­ron­ment: http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/ise/index.html

by Patrick Wood, Editor, August Review
March 18, 2009

Obama’s Coercive Utopia by Rael Jean Isaacs

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At a packed town meeting of over 1,000 people hosted by Democrat Sen. Mark Warner in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a woman prefaced her question by expressing a broader concern: “For the first time I don’t believe the President we have is a patriot. I think a lot of the concern and discontent is less about health care than trusting the agenda of this administration.” Sen. Warner harshly rebuked her, calling the remark offensive and declaring Obama “a great patriot.” Yet judging by the storm of applause that greeted her comment, she echoed the feelings of many others in the hall.

What did patriotism mean to the questioner and that wildly applauding audience? Presumably pride in America, its values and institutions, its freedoms, the opportunities it offers the individual, its efforts to act in accordance with those values both domestically and internationally. And what made many in that audience uneasy – including some who must have voted for him – was the growing sense that their President did not look upon the country the way they did, did not look upon his task to preserve what they believed best about America, but sought to transform these United States according to values deeply alien to theirs.

They were worried by manifold signs of this, small and large, some only assuming their significance in hindsight like that pre-inauguration statement: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” There was that surprising deep bow to the Saudi king who represents values as antithetical as imaginable to those of this country. There were the overseas trips with serial apologies for past American behavior to leaders devoid of moral credentials. There was the reaching out to Venezuela’s abhorrent President Chávez. There was the fulsome praise of Islam and its supposed achievements (much of it baseless) in Egypt, the harsh treatment of democratic allies like Israel and Honduras, the indifference to the vicious suppression of Iranians protesting the theft of their election by Ahmadinejad.

Domestically, there was the huge pile-up of debt via the stimulus and de facto nationalizations of much of the housing and automobile industry. Why was Congress pressed to pass literally overnight bills few if any had read? Even more puzzling, why, in a time of economic crisis, did Obama insist on taking over health care? Why the eagerness to ram through a 1,000 page bill prior to the August recess with the potential to turn one seventh of the economy over to the government – and, as the Congressional Budget Office has attested, add trillions in debt – without the normal process of hearings and debate? After all, as Thomas Sowell has noted, the provisions are not designed to go into effect until 2013! Why, with unemployment high and rising, seek to enact a gigantic new tax in the shape of a “cap and trade” bill that all serious studies showed would result in the loss of huge numbers of jobs?

And then there were the czars – Phyllis Schlafly counted 34 of them – paid for by the taxpayer but not subject to Senate confirmation, accountable to no one but the President. Where did they fit in? Were they a species of Commiczars setting policy that the established cabinet members and government bureaucracies would be expected to implement? Even veteran Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd called them a power grab by the executive that violates the constitutional separation of powers. And what a strange lot some of them were. So far out that he had to be thrown overboard was self-styled revolutionary communist “green” Commiczar Van Jones who initially recognized how insane it was for Obama to make him part of his administration. “I burst out laughing because at the time it seemed completely ludicrous that it would even be an option,” he told a reporter in March. (That did not prevent him from portraying himself in his resignation letter six months later as an innocent victim of “a vicious smear campaign” by opponents of health reform.)

To understand Obama and the administration he heads, we have to go back 33 years to the birth of the Carter administration. The ideas and attitudes that animate the current administration go back at least two additional decades, but the significant entry into government positions of acolytes of these notions began with Carter. In 1980, with my husband Erich Isaac, I wrote The Coercive Utopians (published by Regnery). We described the underlying ideas of these utopians, the varying groups from which they sprang (ranging from mainline churches to so-called Naderite public interest groups to environmental groups to select think tanks, notably the Institute for Policy Studies and its spinoffs) and the success they had in obtaining financial backing (initially from a variety of foundations) and, in the Carter years, from government. We said they were utopians because they believed they could create an ideal social order (present evils were the result of a corrupt social system) and coercive because in their zeal for attaining that ideal order they sought to impose their blueprints in ways that went beyond legitimate persuasion.

With their ideological taproot in the New Left of the 1960s, the utopians harbored a bleak view of American domestic institutions and America’s role in the world. They abhorred the American economic system – churchmen because the system fostered competition rather than cooperation; environmentalists because it fostered desire for material goods, polluting the environment; consumer advocates because it produced unsafe goods in the pursuit of profit. As for its actions abroad, many viewed the U.S. as uniquely evil, the chief agent of militarism, imperialism, racism and economic exploitation, the greatest threat to world peace. President of New York City’s Union Theological Seminary John C. Bennett argued that only revolutionary change could remove the U.S. “as a counterrevolutionary force from the backs of the third world countries.” The utopians sought to recast American foreign policy so as to support the societies they believed represented “social justice”- Cuba, Nicaragua (under the Sandinistas), Vietnam, China (under Mao).

The goal, as long-time coercive utopian John Holdren (now Obama’s science Commiczar) put it in 1973, was to “de-develop the United States.” And since the utopians understood that energy was the lifeblood of modern industrial America, their efforts were bent toward putting a tourniquet around centralized energy development. According to utopian Amory Lovins (still going strong although not – yet – in the Obama administration) our energy system was an assault on human dignity. As he wrote in a New York Times op-ed, the ordinary person suffered from a “humiliating dependence on remote bureaucrats who can simply disconnect you.”

The villain, par excellence, was nuclear power, centralized, technologically complex, impossible for the average man to understand. Nuclear energy had been operating safely (with the warm approval of the major environmental organizations) for almost two decades before the utopians discovered that it endangered human survival. And they quickly discovered that they had hit on an issue capable of mobilizing masses to action. Indeed, so successful were they in instilling terror of nuclear power that at the beginning of the 1980s nuclear disarmament proponents were trying to convince the public that nuclear bombs were as dangerous as nuclear energy. Chemist George Kistiakowsky, chairman of The Council for a Livable World, observed in a February 1981 interview: “We have problems in trying to redirect the public fear of nuclear plants into fear of nuclear war.” The utopian campaign against nuclear power was a huge success. Well before Three Mile Island, utilities had thrown in the towel on building new plants.

The utopians were opposed to all traditional energy sources, for they represented what Lovins called “the hard path.” The Natural Resources Defense Council, for example, brought suit against nuclear, coal, oil and hydroelectric projects. And while the utopians advocated what Lovins called the “soft path,” renewable sources of energy like sun and wind, scientist-writer Peter Metzger (from whom we borrowed the term “coercive utopians”) presciently observed that environmentalists are enthusiastic for energy sources as long as they do not exist and predicted the same hostility to solar energy, should it become economically viable. (And indeed, environmentalists are now in the forefront in seeking to block solar energy projects on federal lands – including one in the Mojave Desert announced by Interior Department secretary Salazar on June 29th – on the grounds they threaten endangered species, use vast amounts of water, and require unsightly transmission lines.

The utopians made repeated efforts to take over the Democratic Party, beginning in the 1960s via the so-called “New Politics” that made George McGovern a Presidential candidate. They had their first actual taste of power in the Carter administration when leaders of the coercive utopians were given important posts, in some cases control of government bureaucracies. Writing in Fortune during Carter’s first year, journalist Juan Cameron identified 60 consumer, environmental and public interest activists who immediately moved into sub-cabinet posts and influential White House spots. Posts controlling financial spigots were especially valuable, enabling the utopians to siphon government funds to utopian organizations and programs. ACTION (which in 1993 would be merged into the Corporation for National and Community Service) was handed over to former anti-Vietnam war activist Sam Brown who in turn appointed fellow activist Margery Tabankin as head of VISTA (the largest grantmaker for service and volunteering, now part of Americorps). James Burnley, her successor under Reagan, noted wryly: “If you were a member in good stead of the New Left you were guaranteed help if you had an organization.” ACORN, with its People’s Platform for achieving power (“We will wait no longer for the crumbs at America’s door. We will not be meek, but mighty”) and its Alinsky-style confrontational tactics was the first recipient of a National VISTA grant. A number of training centers for volunteers were funded, all based on Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” (“Give them a taste of blood” said the training manual of the Midwest Academy, one of the grantees.)

But after this confidence-building start (in 1981 Ralph Nader organized a conference bringing together representatives from most utopian groups called hopefully “Taking Charge: the Next 10 Years”) the utopians ran into problems. From Reagan through the second President Bush, no President – including Bill Clinton, who wound up governing from the center – presented them with similar opportunities in their reach for executive power. On the other hand, they extended their grip on the consciousness industry: the universities, the churches and the mass media. And they made steady progress in radicalizing the Democrat Party through think tanks like the Center for American Progress (which replaced the Institute for Policy Studies as chief source of direction for the utopians) and the Institute for America’s Future (Institute for Policy Studies director Robert Borosage became President of this similar but trendier idea factory). For down-and-dirty mobilization in the internet age there was Moveon.org and the Daily Kos. And then, in 2008, the utopians triumphed – one of their own was elected President.

There is a major difference between today and the Carter years. Then, the coercive utopians obtained an important foothold in the bureaucracy. Now they are the government. Obama was marinated in coercive utopian perspectives his entire adult life. In the pews of Reverend Wright for 20 years, the preacher who was to him “like family,” he heard repeatedly that America was the embodiment of racist imperialist evil. Sitting with unrepentant Weather Undergrounder Bill Ayres on the boards of “progressive” foundations like Woods and Joyce, Obama doubtless saw nothing controversial in dispersing money to Rev. Wright’s church, ACORN and the educational enterprises of Ayres and his brother John. Obama himself was a community organizer, a characteristic coercive utopian line of work. He cooperated closely with Chicago ACORN, training its staff.

The Democrat Party now dominates both houses of Congress and the coercive utopians dominate the Democrat Party, despite a few hangdog Blue Dogs. There is no more telling evidence than Alan Colmes’ (formerly of Fox News’ “Hannity and Colmes”) defense of Van Jones, after his forced resignation, as a “mainstream liberal.” Sign a “truther” petition suggesting the U.S. perpetrated 9/11. Describe President Bush’s call for increasing the domestic energy supply as a “crackhead licking the crack pipe for another fix.” Denounce “white environmentalists” for “steering poison into the people-of-color community.” Call for nationwide “resistance” against police. Call for the destruction of Israel. A talk show host who considers himself a standard-bearer for liberalism gives you the kosher stamp as a mainstream liberal.

Controlling the executive and the legislature (and increasingly, the courts), the coercive utopians are able to act on a scale hitherto the stuff of dreams. ACORN’s first government grant in the Carter years was for $470,475. Now despite ongoing investigations of ACORN registration fraud in a dozen states, it is eligible for billions under Obama’s stimulus program. Under Carter, government bureaucracies funded solar energy projects, although typically of the utopians, much of the money intended for solar hardware wound up being used for solar propaganda. Under Obama “green energy” is to receive billions, siphoned off from economically viable energy producers via cap and trade legislation. Van Jones was supposed to be the Commiczar for those billions and he made no secret of what he saw as the real program. “So the green economy will start off as a small subset and we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.”

In global warming today’s coercive utopians have discovered the most potent apocalyptic nightmare thus far devised with which to mobilize masses. Act now to contain greenhouse gases or the earth is doomed. At least the pollution with which the utopians in the 1970s frightened the public (“the generations now on earth may be the last” read the cover of one environmentalist handbook) was real. Man-made global warming is science by “consensus” with the consensus manufactured by the media, which treats dissenters as “flat-earthers.” Anyone interested in going beyond the unscientific fear-mongering should read Climate Change Reconsidered (880 pages, not beach chair reading), describing the findings of hundreds of scientists who are not supposed to exist. It includes a statement signed by 31,478 supposedly non-existent scientists that there is no convincing scientific evidence that man-made global warming will cause a catastrophic disruption of the earth’s climate.

The utopians (as some of them have been honest enough to admit) don’t care if the global warming apocalypse is a scam. It provides grounds to take control of energy and with it the economy. As Van Jones put it shortly before his White House departure: “If all you do is have a clean energy revolution, you won’t have done anything…No, we gonna change the whole system.”

The stakes could not be higher as the Obama administration is poised to take over energy and health care. The coercive utopians can bring us to the point where, as the revered Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley put it, capitalism “will be unable to deliver on its basic promise of a progressively higher standard of living for the less fortunate…” At that point the coercive utopians will have won, for they will be the anointed ones who allocate, ration and dole out to the dependent masses what is deemed their “fair share” of an ever-shrinking state-controlled economy.

And yet, although they currently ride high, the utopians have an Achilles heel – the public is not with them. People do not like the plans the utopians have for them if fully apprised of what they are. At the 1981 Nader “Taking Charge” conference mentioned earlier, the head of the Midwest Academy, one of the training centers for activists, acknowledged that to obtain power “you may have to waffle and be less clear on certain positions.” Obama himself campaigned as a moderate, a centrist, a pragmatist, dedicated to bipartisanship and fiscal responsibility. On energy he was a master of deception. Obama convinced President of the United Mine Workers Cecil Roberts that he was “a tremendous supporter of coal and the future of coal.” At the same time, caught on YouTube, Obama declared: “If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

Exposure is what the utopians have greatest reason to fear – as the outpouring of public protest over Obama’s health care power grab illustrated. And exposure is easier now than it was when we wrote The Coercive Utopians. Then we entitled one chapter “The Media: Shield of the Utopians.” This has not changed. To give just one example of the lengths to which the chief organs of opinion go, it took Van Jones’s resignation for the New York Times and major networks to so much as mention the story. There had been a firestorm of publicity leading to that resignation, but it was on Fox News (spearheaded by Glenn Beck), talk radio, the internet, the blogosphere.

What has changed is that establishment media no longer have the stranglehold on news they once did. Those who were dedicated to getting out information in the 1970s, whether it was on funding of terror support groups through church offerings or the false claims against nuclear energy or the activities of the radical institutes, were forced in many cases to create their own small-scale media outlets – circulating reports, starting newsletters. As long as there was only a paper trail, it was much easier for the utopians to claim quotes were “out of context.” With the rise of alternative media, evasions no longer work. A few minutes of watching Rev. Wright or Van Jones ranting on YouTube and it’s all over. It’s precisely because he is afraid of the power of alternative media that Obama appointed Mark Lloyd as “diversity” Commiczar. Lloyd, an avowed admirer of Chávez and his treatment of the media (which was to shut down stations that criticized him), is perhaps the most dangerous appointment of all, for he has a cornucopia of proposals to constrain alternative media. These range from a prohibitive tax on stations broadcasting the likes of Rush Limbaugh (the money used to fund “alternative viewpoints”) to setting up local committees of activists to control what is broadcast to revoking the license of a station that didn’t abide by the new rules.

So the task is to keep the channels of communication open and to clarify the nature of the broader agenda this administration pursues. The woman who stood up at Sen. Warner’s town meeting to say she was concerned about that agenda as much as about Obama’s specific health care proposals had it right. As long as the issue is this bill or that bill, opponents can be picked off, coalitions assembled. It is essential to understand – and bring to a halt – the entire coercive utopian program.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Rael Jean Isaac is a political sociologist and co-author of The Coercive Utopians published by Regnery in 1983.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.4240/pub_detail.asp

Originally published September 11, 2009.

Resolutions or Regeneration by Pastor Claude Stauffer

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O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! – Romans 7:24-25a

Every year on New Years Eve people make New Year’s Resolutions promising to change themselves for the better. But New Year’s resolutions are doomed to failure. If people want to change they don’t need resolutions, they need regeneration.

How Successful are New year’s Resolutions?

How successful are New Year’s resolutions? Statistics in a study from the Journal of Clinical Psychology showed the following:

  • 40 to 45% of American adult make one or more resolutions each year.
  • Among the top new years resolutions are resolutions about weight loss, exercise, and stopping to smoke. Also popular are resolutions dealing with better money management / debt reduction.
  • The following shows how many of these resolutions are maintained as time goes on:
    – past the first week: 75%
    – past 2 weeks: 71%
    – after one month: 64%
    – after 6 months: 46% [1]

Another study estimated that 97% of New Year’s resolutions do not work. In this study entitled New Years Resolutions: Why Don’t They Work ? Michael York of the Michael York Learning Center theorized the reason why resolutions don’t work is because people expect to fail and that they don’t know how to properly set goals in order to keep their resolutions. But I would say that the reason people don’t expect to keep their resolutions is because they have learned from experience that they can’t keep their resolutions and no amount of proper goal setting is going to change that.

So what’s the answer; how can we change for the better? The answer is that we need regeneration not resolutions.

Why Resolutions Can’t Work

The reason why a resolution can’t work is because it depends on me, myself and I; it depends on my own “strength.” The Bible refers to this self-centered dependence upon self as the flesh. Paul was inspired to speak of the predicament of the flesh when in Romans he writes:

  • Romans 7:18-24 – 18 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. 19 For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. 20 Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. 21 I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. 22 For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. 23 But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. 24 O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Do you see the futility of relying on your own strength to try to do good things? The New Living Translation(more of a paraphrase)of the Bible renders this portion of scripture in the following way:

  • 18 I know I am rotten through and through so far as my old sinful nature is concerned. No matter which way I turn, I can’t make myself do right. I want to, but I can’t. 19 When I want to do good, I don’t. And when I try not to do wrong, I do it anyway. 20 But if I am doing what I don’t want to do, I am not really the one doing it; the sin within me is doing it. 21 It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. 22 I love God’s law with all my heart. 23 But there is another law at work within me that is at war with my mind. This law wins the fight and makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. 24 Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin?[2]

These words express the futility, frustrations and ultimate failure of attempts at self-reformation and that is exactly what a New Year’s resolution is. The reason such attempts at change are doomed to failure is because they depend on an inadequate power source, the sinful self. Read what the Bible says about our self, the me, myself and I of who we are:

  • Genesis 6:5 – 5 Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
  • Job 14:4 – Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? No one!
  • Job 15:14-16 – “What is man, that he could be pure? And he who is born of a woman, that he could be righteous?15 If God puts no trust in His saints, And the heavens are not pure in His sight,16 How much less man, who is abominable and filthy, Who drinks iniquity like water!
  • Psalm 5:9 – For there is no faithfulness in their mouth; Their inward part is destruction; Their throat is an open tomb; They flatter with their tongue.
  • Psalm 51:5 – Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, And in sin my mother conceived me.
  • Isaiah 64:6 – But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, Have taken us away.
  • Jeremiah 17:9 – “The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?
  • Mark 7:21-23 – 21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, 22 thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within and defile a man.”
  • Ephesians 2:1-3 – And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, 2 in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, 3 among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.

These verses are ample evidence that anything that depends on this flesh or us, is doomed to fail to reach its goal.

If that is the case, then how can a person change successfully?

Regeneration: the Way to True Transformation

Sometimes we can have what we believe are the best of intentions, but they are the wrong intentions. Our motives are not always what they ought to be. We may want to change, but if our motive is only to please our self, then we are only compounding our problem and off the mark. What we need is an entirely new way of looking at things and an entirely new way of doing things. What we need is REGENERATION.

What is regeneration? Regeneration is a work of the Spirit wherein He gives spiritual eternal life to a repentant sinner. In Paul’s letter to Titus he is inspired to write:

  • Titus 3:3-7 – 3 For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. 4 But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, 5 not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, 6 whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7 that having been justified by His grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

The term “regeneration” (παλιγγενεσία – paliggĕnĕsia, pal-ing-ghen-es-ee´-ah[3]) means new birth, regeneration, or rebirth. This is a compound word made up of the Greek term palin which means “again” and the Greek term genesis which means “birth.”Regeneration is the work of God to change us from death to life spiritually. God regenerates the person who receives Jesus as Savior. All of this is a work of God offered graciously as a gift to be received by us.

Jesus described regeneration with the following words:

  • John 5:24 – 24 “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.

Regeneration is passing from death to life spiritually. Just as we are physically born, we must be spiritual born again if we are ever to be changed from our present state of sinful futility. Before we are spiritually born again we don’t even understand our true need (1 Corinthians 2:14). We need to be born again, we need to be spiritual born of the Holy Spirit (John 3:3, 5).

How do I get this regeneration?If you want to change for the better you have to realize the following.

First, realize your real problem is sin. Sin is the destructive cancer like thing within you that is keeping you from successfully changing for the better. The Bible says:

  • Romans 3:10, 23 – 10 As it is written: “There is none righteous, no, not one; . . . 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

Sin keeps us from God (Isaiah 59:1-2) and it is God alone who can work true change in us. Sin keep our focus on sinful self where we will wallow in defeat and despair.

Second, realize only spiritual birth or spiritual life can make a true lasting eternal change in you. It is the gospel that is the power of God to save us from sin (Romans 1:16). Jesus told the religious Pharisee Nicodemas that he “must” be born again. Jesus said:

  • John 3:3-7 – 3 Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” 4 Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” 5 Jesus answered, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’

Here we see by way of comparison that Jesus taught Nicodemus just as he had been born physically he needed to experience spiritual birth as well.

This is not something we can work in ourselves, which leads us to the next realization.

Third, realize regeneration is a work of God offered by His grace through faith in His only Son Jesus. The Bible says that salvation is a work of God (John 6:29). The Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin and our need of salvation (John 16:8-11). It is God who draws us out of our sin to Himself (John 6:44). And God draws us to Himself by dealing with our sin through faith in Jesus (John 6:29).

Here is the beauty of how God resolves our sinful predicament. He has sent Jesus to pay for our sinful debt (because we are unable to pay that debt off on our own). And He has done away with our sin as we put our faith in Jesus and His work (2 Corinthians 5:21). This is why at the end of Paul’s passage in Romans 7 he is inspired to proclaim:

  • Romans 7:24-25a – 24 O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!

It is a glorious thing to turn over the reigns of your life to God. We need to stop trying in our own strength (i.e. weakness). We need to turn form our way of doing things and surrender or turn to God and His way. This leads us to our final realization.

Fourth, realize you need to repent or turn humbly to God from your sinful self ways and rely fully on God’s gracious provision and strength. We can’t work our way out of the mire of our sin (Psalm 69). It is only by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ that this regeneration can occur (Ephesians 2:4-9). If we turn from our self efforts and self interests to God then we can expect times of refreshing from the Lord (Acts 2:38-39).

It has been said:

Our lives are fields that primarily contain weeds. We cannot produce strawberries. We can mow the weeds, but that effort alone will never produce acceptable fruit. If we really want that fruit we will have to go deeper. We must plow up the whole field and start again with new plants.[4]

We can’t change by resolution. We need the regenerative work of God to change.

But I’ve Done that and I’m Still Failing and Faltering

Sometimes those who have experienced regeneration continue to have difficulties in their lives; why is that? Those who have received God’s gracious gospel provision in Christ need to realize a few things too.

First, realize transformation is only begun at regeneration and is a life long process. The Bible refers to Christians as “being sanctified” (Hebrews 2:11; 10:14). Change is a process that God works in us over time as we live a life of surrender to Him (Romans 12:1-2). Regeneration is when the Holy Spirit comes to indwell a person (1 Corinthians 3:16; 6:19-20). It is the Holy Spirit that helps us to overcome our weaknesses (Romans 8:26). The work of the Spirit in us is to transform us into the likeness of Jesus (Romans 8:29). This is God’s purpose for us and should be our goal and target in life.

Second, realize the problem is that many who have been regenerated continue to live to please self rather than to please God. There are what are called carnal Christians who live to please themselves rather than to please God. The Christian who lives to please self will only find discord and disruption in their lives much the same as before they were regenerated (1 Corinthians 3:1-4; James 4:1-6). To overcome this problem the Christian must turn their focus on God and seek to please Him by faith (Hebrews 11:6). Paul explains this well when he is inspired to write:

  • Romans 8:1-9 – There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. 3 For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, 4 that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. 6 For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. 7 Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. 8 So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God. 9 But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His.

When we are regenerated through faith in Christ we are called by God to walk no longer after the things of the flesh or to walk in the power of the flesh, but we are called to live in the Spirit (8:1). It is this life in the Spirit that can set us free from our futile fleshly lives (8:2). God does away with the destructive and depressing affects of sin in a person through faith in Christ (8:3-4). This new life of spiritual regeneration is an entirely new way of life and an entirely new way of looking at life (8:5). If we continue to have a fleshly mindset after regeneration we will continue to experience its destructive and depressing ways (8:6). It will hinder our relationship with God (8:7) and prevent us from pleasing God (8:8). In fact that is exactly the issue; in our flesh we seek to please self; in the Spirit we seek to please God. The truth is when we seek to please ourselves no one will be happy. But when we seek to please God everyone benefits. Without the Spirit in your life, you don’t even belong to God (8:9), which leads us to our final realization for the believer.

Third, realize victory comes through abiding in Christ. The closer we come to Jesus the more power we will have over sin in our lives. We are to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:14). In other words, get as close to Jesus as possible, as close as your very clothes, and you will have more and more power over the flesh. Drawing close to Jesus is the way of escape from many a problem issue in the life of the Christian (1 Corinthians 10:13). Jesus put it this way:

  • John 15:4-8 – 4 Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. 5 “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned. 7 If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you. 8 By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples.

We need to “abide” or stick close to Jesus. When we get away from Jesus we shrivel up spiritually like a piece of fruit plucked from a tree. If we stay connected to Jesus, we will grow and become fruitful in Him.

How do we do this? How do we abide in Jesus? The key is in the words “My disciples.” A disciple is a learner who studies the words of Jesus (verse 7 i.e. the Bible) and surrenders to the Spirit to apply those words to their lives (John 8:31-32, 34-36). Disciples also “ask” (verse 7) or pray because prayer is a declaration of dependence on God and a means of relating verbally with God in Christ. A disciple lastly does all they do to bring glory to God which is the culmination of spiritual fruitfulness (verse 8). The more we seek to bring glory to God the further away from self we move. The further away from self we move and the closer we come to God, the more power to live victoriously in life we will experience.

In his book The Power of the Spirit, William Law, writing in the early 1700s, makes the following statement about the church living in the flesh rather than the Spirit:

A letter learned zeal has but one nature wherever it is, and can only do that for Christians which it did for Jews. As in ancient times it brought forth scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, and crucifiers of Christ; as it afterwards brought forth heresies, schisms, popes, papal decrees, images, and anathemas; so in Protestant churches it will do the same things, only under different names. The empty idolatry of Rome will show itself even without crucifixes and indulgences. Images of wood and clay will only be exchanged for images of doctrines. Grace, works, imputed sin, imputed righteousness, and election will all have their worshipping advocates, dividing the body of Christ in their very zeal to defend their own good opinions about Scripture doctrines. And so great will be the blindness thus generated that every kind of gossip, slander, and hatred will be pursued by brother against brother, all of it done in the name of Him who prayed that we might be one. . . . Our divine Master compares the religion of the learned Pharisees to ‘whited sepulchers, outwardly beautiful, but inwardly full of dead men’s bones.’ How was it that a religion so serious in its restraints, so beautiful in its outward form and practices, and commanding such reverence from all that beheld it, was yet charged by Truth itself with being ‘inwardly full of hypocrisy and iniquity’? It was only for this one reasons: because it was a religion of self. Wherever self has power and keeps up its own interests, even in teaching or defending sound Scripture doctrines, there is that very same Pharisee still alive whom Christ with so much severity of language constantly condemned. The reason for such heavy condemnation is that self is the root and sum total of all sin. Every sin that can be named is centered in it. Self is nothing else but the creature broken off from God: the power of Satan living and working in us the sad continuance of that first turning from God, which was the whole fall of our first parents. (Emphasis added.) [5]

Unfortunately what William Law wrote 300 years ago was not heeded by much of the church and today we have a church that is more carnal and centered on its sarx, than it is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit. We cannot afford to allow our flesh to rule us; we need the Spirit to overcome it and empower us to do all that God has wonderfully laid out for us to do. If you are a Christian and have slipped back into the futility of a life lived for self and in the weakness of self, surrender to God anew and He will empower you to victorious Christian living. That would be a great way to start a new year.

 

[1] At http://www.proactive-coach.com/resolutions/research.htm – Auld Lang Syne: Success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year’s resolvers and nonresolvers, by John C. Norcross, Marci S. Mrykalo, Matthew D. Blagys , University of Scranton. Journal of Clinical Psychology, Volume 58, Issue 4 (2002).
John Norcross is a co-author of Changing For Good.

[2]Holy Bible, New Living Translation, (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.) 1996.

[3]Strong, James: The New Strong’s Dictionary of Hebrew and Greek Words. Nashville : Thomas Nelson, 1997, c1996, S. H8674

[4] p. 59. at http://www.higherpraise.com/illustrations/resolution.htm

[5] William Law, The Power of the Spirit, Edited by Dave Hunt (Fort Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade Pubs.) Reprinted 2003 . Pages 28,30.