Breakfast For The Brain Weekend Edition

Happy Easter!

Stand Up to Tyranny: How to Respond to the Evils of Our Age

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”—Martin Luther King Jr. (A Knock at Midnight, June 11, 1967)

In every age, we find ourselves wrestling with the question of how Jesus Christ—the itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist who died challenging the police state of his time, namely, the Roman Empire—would respond to the moral questions of our day.

For instance, would Jesus advocate, as so many evangelical Christian leaders have done in recent years, for congregants to “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” which in the American police state translates to complying, conforming, submitting, obeying orders, deferring to authority and generally doing whatever a government official tells you to do?

What would Jesus do?

Study the life and teachings of Jesus, and you may be surprised at how relevant he is to our modern age.

A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire, and providing a blueprint for standing up to tyranny that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

Those living through this present age of government lockdowns, immunity passports, militarized police, SWAT team raids, police shootings of unarmed citizens, roadside strip searches, invasive surveillance and the like might feel as if these events are unprecedented. However, the characteristics of a police state and its reasons for being are no different today than they were in Jesus’ lifetime: control, power and money.

Much like the American Empire today, the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day was characterized by secrecy, surveillance, a widespread police presence, a citizenry treated like suspects with little recourse against the police state, perpetual wars, a military empire, martial law, and political retribution against those who dared to challenge the power of the state.

A police state extends far beyond the actions of law enforcement. In fact, a police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”

Indeed, the police state in which Jesus lived (and died) and its striking similarities to modern-day America are beyond troubling.

Read the entire article HERE.

The Capitol Attack Suspect Praised Louis Farrakhan, Just Like Many Prominent Democrats

Via The National File

Keith Ellison, the Minnesota AG, used to work for the Nation of Islam itself

Noah Green, the black Muslim radical behind Friday’s attack on the Capitol, was a member of the Nation of Islam, led by Louis Farrakhan, who many prominent Democrats have praised.
As National File reported, the now-deceased 25-year-old Green was identified as the suspect behind the car ramming and knife attack on Capitol Police which left one dead on Friday afternoon:

Green is a black male who has reportedly made inflammatory posts about politics and religion on Facebook… One post on the Facebook profile reportedly contains an excerpt from nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad titled “Lull before the Storm”… Another post from Green talks about the “end times” and “facing death.”

On the Facebook page, which has now been removed, Green describes himself as a “follower of Farrakhan.” Louis Farrakhan is the current leader of the Nation of Islam, the radical black nationalist Islamic group. The Capitol attacker is not the only person who admires Farrakhan of course – many prominent Democrats have also praised the notorious anti-white racist in the past.

In 2013, Raphael Warnock, the recently elected Democrat Senator for Georgia, said that the Nation of Islam has been an “important voice” in developing black theology. “It was the black Muslims who challenged black preachers and said ‘you’re promulgating the white man’s religion. That’s a slave religion,’” Warnock said.

While in Congress, Keith Ellison, the current Minnesota Attorney General, attended multiple meetings with Farrakhan. Ellison had admitted to the Washington Post in 2006 that he had previously worked for the Nation of Islam for 18 months before Farrakhan’s 1995 “Million Man March,” but claimed that he had cut ties with Farrakhan and the group.

Danny Davis, the current Representative for Illinois’s 7th District, confirmed to the Daily Caller in 2018 that he has a “personal relationship” with Farrakhan. Davis, one of the 5 members of the Democratic Socialists of America currently sitting in Congress, said that Farrakhan, who has said that white people “deserve to die,” is an “outstanding human being” who is simply being misquoted and misrepresented by the media.

In 2002, California Democrat Maxine Waters attended a Nation of Islam conference, where Farrakhan defended Islamic suicide bombers, and praised Waters during his speech, with the audience members applauding.

President Obama, then a Senator from Illinois, was pictured with Farrakhan at a meeting held by the Congressional Black Caucus in 2005, but the photo, taken by a Nation of Islam photographer, was suppressed at the request of the Democrats, who wanted to ensure that Obama had a future shot at the presidency.

Despite the Capitol attacker’s praise for Farrakhan, the idea that the attack that left one Capitol Police officer dead and one injured on Easter Friday, one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar, could be terrorism related, was dismissed by Robert Contee of DC Metro Police during a press conference.

Read the entire article HERE.

America’s Cities Are Being Turned Into Crime-Ridden War-Zones; Murder Rates Are Way Up Again In 2021

Via Economic Collapse

The wealthy are reveling in their giant mountains of money, but meanwhile our society is literally coming apart at the seams all around us. The stock market has been hovering near all-time record highs, and for those at the very top of the economic pyramid these may seem like the best of times. But for most Americans, the “good old days” are a long distant memory. More than 70 million new claims for unemployment benefits have been filed over the past year, poverty is absolutely exploding all around us, and crime rates are shooting higher at an unprecedented rate. In fact, one study of 34 big U.S. cities found that their murder rates rose by an average of 30 percent in 2020…

A study by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice found that murders increased by 30% across 34 large U.S. cities.

In some areas, carjackings, robberies, shootings, sexual assaults and violence have become so common that it seems like the crime literally never stops.

Unless you have a death wish, there are certain parts of Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore that you should never enter night or day. If you doubt me, just go wander the streets of the worst neighborhoods of those cities and see what happens to you.

This was supposed to be a year when crime rates began to return to normal, but instead they are on the rise again. One study that looked at 37 large U.S. cities found that murder rates are up by an average of 18 percent so far in 2021…

The big increase in the murder rate in the United States in 2020 has carried over to 2021.

A sample of 37 cities with data available for the first three months of this year shows murder up 18 percent relative to the same period last year.

What is truly frightening is that this is about as good as things are going to get in America from here on out.

So if murder rates are spiking this much under relatively good conditions, what will our cities look like when things get really crazy?

Some of the crimes that we are witnessing are almost too horrible for words. For example, just consider what just happened to a 12-year-old boy in Miami…

A suspect in a black car kidnapped the boy at about 2 a.m. early Saturday morning from a Miami street, according to the Miami-Dade Police Department.

He drove a few blocks, raped the boy, and then shoved him out of the car and drove off, police said.

A good Samaritan on a bike near the scene of the crime came to the boy’s rescue. He was bleeding from the head and said he had been shot.

How sick do you have to be in order to do something like that?

Read the entire article HERE.

Silicon Valley and WEF-Backed Foundation Announce Global Initiative for COVID-19 Vaccine Records

By Whitney Webb

Silicon Valley’s most influential companies, alongside healthcare companies, US intelligence contractors and the Commons Project Foundation, recently launched the Vaccination Credential Initiative. The initiative’s ambitions reach far beyond vaccines and will have major implications for civil liberties.

On Thursday, tech giants with deep ties to the US national-security state—Microsoft, Oracle, and the MITRE Corporation—announced that they had partnered with several health-care companies to create the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) to advance the implementation of digital COVID-19 vaccination records.

According to a Reuters report, the VCI “aims to help people get encrypted digital copies of their immunization records stored in a digital wallet of their choice” because the “current system [of vaccination records] does not readily support convenient access and sharing of verifiable vaccination records.”

The initiative, on its website, notes that the VCI is a public-private partnership “committed to empowering individuals with digital vaccination records” so that participants can “protect and improve their health” and “demonstrate their health status to safely return to travel, work, school and life while protecting their data privacy.” The initiative is essentially built on a common framework of digital vaccination “wallets” called SMART Health Cards that are meant to “work across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries” as part of a new global vaccination-record infrastructure.

The host of the VCI website and one the initiative’s key backers is the Commons Project Foundation. That foundation, in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF), runs the Common Trust Network, which has three goals that are analogous to those of VCI. As listed on the WEF website, the network’s goals are (1) to empower individuals by providing digital access to their health information; (2) to make it easier for individuals to understand and comply with each destination’s requirements; and (3) to help ensure that only verifiable lab results and vaccination records from trusted sources are presented for the purposes of cross-border travel and commerce.

To advance these goals, the Common Trust Network is powered by “a global registry of trusted laboratory and vaccination data sources” as well as “standard formats for lab results and vaccination records and standard tools to make those results and records digitally accessible.”

Another, and related, Commons Project Foundation and WEF partnership is CommonPass. CommonPass, which is also supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, is both a framework and an app that “will allow individuals to access their lab results and vaccination records, and consent to have that information used to validate their COVID status without revealing any other underlying personal health information.” Current members of CommonPass, including JetBlue, Lufthansa, Swiss International Airlines, United Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic, are also members of the Common Trust Network.

This overlap between the Commons Project Foundation/WEF partnerships and the VCI illustrates that the WEF itself is involved with the VCI, albeit indirectly through their partners at the Commons Project Foundation. The Commons Project Foundation itself is worth exploring, as its cofounders, Paul Meyer and Bradley Perkins, have long-standing ties to the RAND Corporation, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the International Rescue Committee, as noted in this article published last year by MintPress News. The IRC, currently run by Tony Blair protégé David Milliband, is developing a biometric ID and vaccination-record system for refugees in Myanmar in cooperation with the ID2020 Alliance, which is partnered with CommonPass backer, the Rockefeller Foundation. In addition, the ID2020 Alliance funds the Commons Project Foundation and is also backed by Microsoft, one of the key companies behind the VCI.

Read the entire article HERE.

Filibuster Conveniently Revealed To Be Racist The Moment It Stands In Way Of Dems’ Agenda

Via The Babylon Bee

WASHINGTON D.C.—In the daily list of brand new things suddenly thought to be racist, the Senate’s filibuster has been added, making it the 83,456,718,514th thing to recently be revealed as racist that no one gave even two thoughts about mere months ago.

“The filibuster is as bad as Jim Crow,” said left-wing pundit Matthew Cook. “No, it’s worse than that. It’s as bad as a box of Uncle Ben’s rice. Maybe even as bad as the white supremacist concept of punctuality.”

Not that long ago, Democrats constantly used the filibuster, and both President Biden and President Barack Obama gave impassioned speeches in defense of the filibuster, but this week it has been revealed to be super-duper racist, as it wound up on the daily list of “Things We Now Consider Racist But Also Always Considered Racist But Just Didn’t Say Anything Until Now” next to Scrappy from Scooby-Doo, the word “thrombosis,” and the color aquamarine.

“The filibuster has always felt so racist and so oppressive,” said woke activist Keith Martin. “We just hadn’t alerted anyone about it until recently because of all the other really racist things we had to tell everyone about, like the Dr. Seuss book Beyond Zebras and, you know, that syrup and jumping jacks.” Martin looked confused for a moment. “I think jumping jacks are on the racist list.” Martin started going through the printed-out list of racist things, and the paper was large enough to fill a room. “I’m sure I saw that in here somewhere.”

Activists are urging the Senate to move against the filibuster immediately, as there will be at least five million more things declared racist tomorrow that will also need to be handled.

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on a world gone made HERE.

Be sure to stop by at Def-Con News to get our morning started off right.