WALZ UNIFIES BY DIVIDING? Well now, it appears Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, held racially segregated meetings for teachers and veterans, according to the Washington Free Beacon’s Peter Hasson.

So, ever since Brown v Board of Education in 1954 and passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the American consensus has been that racial segregation in public places is llegal. How did Walz and his prospective boss, Democratic presidential nominee and incumbent Vice-President Kamala Harris, miss these two historic milestones?

Would it be possible for somebody — I don’t know, maybe an investigative journalist in the Mainstream Media? — to ask Harris and Walz both about this? And then insist in a followup question on a straight answer? I’m not holding my breath.

INFANTICIDE IS NOW OFFICIAL DEM POSITION: Stella Morabito, writing in The Federalist, points to, for example, the ABC News debate “fact-checking” Trump on infanticide as the latest evidence Democrats and the Mainstream Media elite have no problem with abortion any time and infanticide if the baby survives the procedure.

“We can see this in their repeated and overwhelming votes against legislation that would allow infants to live if they survive an attempted abortion. One such roll call took place as recently as January 2023, when a whopping 210 Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.

“On top of that we now have pro-abortion initiatives, such as Amendment 4 on this year’s Florida ballot, that serve as Orwellian word salads that officially open the door to unrestricted infanticide. For more on the Florida measure, read Margot Cleveland’s legal analysis.”

IS IVF ETHICAL? It comes as a bit of a surprise in this corner, but there are serious people with well-informed, credible ethical and moral objections, including those behind the Colson Center’s “What Would You Say” videos on HillFaith. My own mind is not yet made up one way or the other but I am very interested in how Instapunditeers view it.

IF THEY DIDN’T HAVE DOUBLE STANDARDS: They wouldn’t have any standards at all. The Democrats’ legion of allies in the Mainstream Media, that is. Issues & Insights takes on this hypocrisy and makes the fundamental point.

The incivility and demagoguery that has poisoned American politics originated with a TV spot that was only broadcast once during the 1964 campaign. It told voters nuclear catastrophe would result if Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater was elected instead of  LBJ, who succeeded to the Oval Office when JFK was assassinated.

A TASTE OF WHAT’S AHEAD FOR U.S. JOURNALISTS: Matt Taibbi at Racket News recalls a lunch gathering in Moscow back when being a journalist in Russia could be a fatal attraction. Now, the signs of something not unlike those days in Moscow are appearing here.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK OVERSEAS: Somebody in the U.S. Department of State approved spending $20,000 to stage a play in Macedonia to stage a stage play in which God is bisexual, depicts former President Ronald Reagan as a crazy homophobic, Marxists are the good guys and LGBTQ+ are glorified.

“Earlier in September, the State Department greenlit funding for a showing of Tony Kushner’s 1991 play ‘Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes’ in North Macedonia, with the agency claiming the production will raise awareness about ‘LGBTQ+ issues’ in the country, federal grant records reveal, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Robert Schmad reports.

“The play follows multiple storylines, among them the ghost of convicted communist spy Ethel Rosenberg antagonizing dying conservative lawyer Roy Cohn and a gay man having sexually explicit visions of heaven as he struggles with AIDS,” Schmad writes.

Don’t know about you but, boy, I feel better knowing State Department political appointees and career activists in the American Foreign Service are so generous with our tax dollars overseas!

OLD-SCHOOL LIBERALS AND ‘EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM:’ If that term, Expressive Individualism (EI), doesn’t sound familiar, it’s from back in the day of the 1950s and 1960s when folks we know today as classical liberals held sway.

Robert P. George makes an important point in an AEI essay that, while such folks were clearly right on issues like civil rights and freedom of expression, they made what he calls “a grave error” in adapting the analysis of sociologist Robert Bellah’s EI.

“Thus was ushered in what I have termed the ‘Age of Feeling.’ Faith and reason as the objective arbiters of truth and goodness were essentially abandoned by liberals in the 1960s,” George explains.

“While lip service continued to be paid to ‘reason’ and, in mainline churches, even to some loose conception of ‘faith,’ for many people feeling became the standard of judgment — the ultimate measure of right and wrong, and of whether to perform (or approve of) an action or not,” George continues.

What Bellah called EI was not a new thing, of course, just a modern term for a very old problem among we humans — the desire to be subject to no rules, no limits and no laws, otherwise known as the idolatry of self.

ILLEGALS VOTING: Democrats and their media allies constantly claim voter fraud is a non-existent problem, but that’s not the view of experts interviewed by Ben Johnson of The Washington Stand.

“’A 2014 academic journal found that 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted in 2008,’ Kerri Toloczko, executive director of Election Integrity Network and senior advisor to the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, told The Washington Stand. ‘There are about 24 million noncitizens in the U.S. right now. If they voted only at the same rate of 6.4 percent this year as they did in 2008, they would account for 1.5 million votes,’ Johnson reports.

“That ponderous number of unlawful votes may just be the tip of the iceberg. ‘Based on the increased noncitizen activity at state DMVs, and the work of left-wing voter registration activists, this 6.4 percent could be much higher than it was in 2008. We could be looking at over two million unlawful noncitizen votes,’ she told TWS.”

THE VOID: That’s the title of a forthcoming Prager U documentary that digs into what may well prove to be the defining characteristic of Gen Z – depression, despondency and destruction. Check out the trailer here.

GROWING SCIENCE OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: Near and After-Death Experiences are no longer the stuff of hucksters, medical science fiction and folk tales, thanks to physician-researchers like Dr. Jeffrey Long.

He explains this morning on HillFaith’s Myth-Busters II what he has found in his investigations of more than 4,000 such experiences. And don’t miss the link to yesterday’s Myth-Busters I, which features Oxford Mathematics Professor John Lennox making his case that David Hume got it wrong on the impossibility of miracles.

WILL AI PUT US HUMANS OUT TO PASTURE? There are lots of folks, including most notably the ineffable Elon Musk, who are pretty sure Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to replace human intelligence in the not-so-distant future.

Not so fast, declares the Colson Center in its latest “What Would You Say” video on HillFaith. For one thing, AI is not even intelligence, at least as it is commonly understood these days. Of course, that could change ….

YALE STUDY FINDS LIBS PATRONIZE MINORITIES: New study highlighted by Yale School of Management finds that white liberals use significantly fewer competence-related words when speaking with minorities, according to Wintery Knight.

The study found no difference in how white conservatives talk to minorities, using the competence-related words metric. I’m sure the New York Times and Washington Post have already created reporting task forces to dig further into these findings!

IS CONGRESS UP TO ITS POST-CHEVRON CHALLENGE? When the Supreme Court nullified the Chevron Deference doctrine earlier this year, it threw down the gauntlet to Congress. Under Chevron, courts were required to defer to executive branch bureaucrats whenever there was confusion about congressional intent on a regulation.

Now, as I explain in my latest Epoch Special Report, with that deference no longer required, the monkey is on the back of Congress to tighten up the way it writes legislative authorizations to make its intent clearer and more precise as to what the bureaucrats can and cannot do.

But is Congress up for that challenge? Liberals love Chevron because it puts the bureaucrats in control. A lot of senators and representatives from both parties also love Chevron because it supposedly gets Congress off the hook for bad regulations.

But the Founders made Congress the First Branch for a multitude of reasons, the most important of which being to ensure the executive branch bureaucracy doesn’t become too powerful.

In recent decades, with the growth of the Administrative State, however, the bureaucrats are in control and Congress seems unable and/or uninterested in calling a halt and putting the executive branch back in its place.

They don’t like to talk about it, but responding to Chevron is among the most important challenges that will confront senators and representatives alike in the new Congress  come January 2025.

WHAT? HOUSE GOP, DEMS AGREE? Well, they both say the government has got to do a better job of combating waste, fraud and mismanagement. But … they don’t agree on how to do it.

STILL TRUST YOUR LOCAL NEWS? If you are following Maryland Matters, NC Newsline, Michigan Advance or another of the multiple local “news” outlets associated with States Newsroom, you need to watch this brief video from Capital Research Center (CRC). The cash funding these folks all comes from the Left.

HOW THE SWAMP TAKES CARE OF ITS OWN: Daily Caller News Foundation’s Robert Schmad has the goods on a controversial ethics waiver granted to the benefit of a nephew of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

The waiver concerns the Restore Utah Project which benefits significantly from the Section 8 program of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Turns out one of the key HUD officials involved in the project just happens to be Alexis Pelosi, the wife of Laurence Pelosi.

APPEARANCES CAN DECEIVE: Just ask former Newsboys lead singer and co-founder John James. He explains it all this morning on HillFaith, including why fame and fortune can be the worst (and best, but not like you’d think!) thing to ever happen to you.

YOU WON’T GET A CHARGE OUT OF THIS: Campaign staffers are walking back Vice-President Kamala Harris’ support for an EV mandate. And, according to the Washington Free Beacon, they won’t even say if she would as President sign the 2019 EV mandate she introduced as a U.S. Senator from California.

CUNY FIRES EMPLOYEE FOR BEING A CHRISTIAN: The last shred of doubt that America’s elite campuses are bastions of Far Left intolerance and hate was erased when City University of New York (CUNY) fired a highly touted program coordinator after she became a follower of Jesus Christ, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Katelynn Richardson.

“Teona Pagan, who worked at CUNY’s Research Foundation as the Fellowships and Public Service Program Coordinator, alleges she was denied a religious accommodation for an aspect of her job that required her to recruit students for a fellowship focused on the promotion of LGBT ‘rights and causes,’ according to the complaint filed Aug. 28.

“When Pagan converted to Christianity in April 2022 — months after beginning her job in November 2021 — she suddenly found her duties related to the fellowship in conflict with her sincerely held religious beliefs.

“’After my hire, I was told that the committee was particularly drawn to me because of my youthful maturity and willingness to stand boldly for issues plaguing our generation,’ Pagan told the Daily Caller News Foundation. ‘Ironically, when I decided to finally stand for the Truth, who is Jesus Christ, they chose to terminate my employment.’”

One wonders how many CUNY staffers are professing Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists and if they receive religious accommodations?

YES, THERE REALLY ARE MODERATE IMAMS: Richard Pollock lauds the courage of the Global Imams Council for its forthright condemnation of Hamas’ cold-blooded murder of six more of its October 7 hostages.

HERE’S WHY NO HARRIS NEWS CONFERENCE: It’s because Democrats know they have the Mainstream Media in their hip pocket, so there is no downside to minimizing Vice President Kamala Harris’ exposure to journalists. There’s more about this in my latest PJMedia column.

WHAT’S DOJ HIDING ABOUT ITS SPYING ON HILL STAFF? Great question and one to which Empower Oversight (EO) has been trying for more than a year to get some answers. After filing five Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests without getting anything from DOJ but a proforma acknowledgement of receipt, EO is asking a federal judge to order the government to cough up the documents. I think it’s all about that quaint notion known as “accountability.”

ABOUT ‘THE AFTER PARTY CURRICULUM:’ Unless you travel in evangelical circles, you may not have heard of the “The After Party Curriculum” (TAP) authored by Curtiss Chang and Nancy French, based on a project by Russell Moore, David French and Chang.

But you should know about it if you aren’t familiar with conservative Christian doings because, according to evangelical blogger/author/podcaster Natasha Crain, TAP is being “heavily promoted this election year to individuals, churches, and Christian institutions (such as colleges) to counter the ‘dangerous trend’ of evangelicals having their political identity formed by ‘partisan forces, not by true Biblical faith.’” One suspects, particularly in the case of David French, that voting for Kamala Harris for president would be a result of “true Biblical faith.”

Readers familiar with Moore and David French will not be surprised to discover this fact about TAP, but Crain’s lengthy and devastating analysis points to much, much more evidence — including TAP’s funding coming from Far-Left foundations — that TAP is another illustration of the growing inroads being made by the secular, anti-Christian Left into evangelical Christianity.

I rate Crain’s TAP analysis as a must-read, especially for anybody who claims to be a follower of Jesus Christ and an independent or conservative in your politics.

FACT-CHECKERS FACT-CHECKED: Issues & Insights digs into the claim of Vice-President Kamala Harris that she worked her way through undergraduate college by working for McDonald’s. Also, check out how during a recent Pittsburgh photo op at a local restaurant “Harris shoved aside real working-class folks so she could pretend to rub elbows with the hoi palloi.”

And while we’re on the subject of fact-checkers, Wintery Knight takes a deep-dive into Politifact’s record and what he found isn’t pretty

MISSING BOUNCE: Vice-President Kamala Harris was supposed to get a big bounce in the polls as a result of the DNC Lovefest in Chicago. The Issues & Insights guys say they are having a hard time finding that bounce.