A handful of days into this rainbow deluge, the air of LGBT pride is so suffocating that people could choke. It’s plastered across social media, corporate logos, cereal boxes, even big box stores’ pandering displays. This month, fans can’t even go to a San Francisco Giants game without being bombarded with the league’s first Pride-color uniforms. But one place conservatives thought they were safe from all this nonsense was the Republican National Committee. Turns out, their chairwoman is just as happy as anyone to pull on the LGBT jersey.

It wasn’t the smartest thing RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has ever done. At a time when dozens of states are racing to stop LGBT extremism, the last thing any political strategist would advise is pitting yourself against them. And yet, that’s exactly what McDaniel did on Wednesday when she tweeted, “Happy Pride Month! The GOP is proud to have doubled our LGBTQ support over the last four years, and we will continue to grow our big tent by supporting measures that promote fairness and balance protections for LGBTQ Americans and those with deeply-held religious beliefs.”

If McDaniel was looking for a way to end her party’s record-breaking fundraising, she nailed it. Right now, there are few things she – or any Republican – could have said that would have been more tone-deaf and offensive than applauding the woke agenda her base is trying to combat. In case the RNC hasn’t noticed, there’s a wave of red states in line trying to cut off the same gender extremism the RNC is intent on supporting. Most Americans – and that includes a good number of Democrats – are sick of the transgender assault. They’re tired of being force-fed radicalism that denies reality on everything from Blue’s Clues to Fruit Loops. They’re not sitting at home celebrating the movement that’s robbed us of girls’ sports, children’s privacy, women’s rights, and free speech. They’re not sprinting to Twitter to applaud a cause that’s suspending Christian teachers, rewriting the English language, and advancing its agenda on the backs of mutilated teenagers’ bodies.

But what’s even more confounding about McDaniel’s tweet is that the other side is on the run. Ever since the Georgia election law fiasco, conservatives everywhere have decided to rise up and fight back. They’ve gotten the bullies at Coca-Cola off the payroll, humiliated the NCAA, passed a slew of bills, and put the world on notice that they won’t be intimidated out of protecting our sons and daughters. And instead of harnessing that momentum and meeting Republicans where they’re at, the RNC sends out an alienating tweet that irritated everyone.

Of course, the irony is, the Left will never be pleased by these half-baked GOP olive branches – and took to social media to say as much. For once, conservatives probably agreed with Leftists, who fired back at McDaniel, “Re-visit your party’s platform before you open your mouth about Pride.” Most of the Republican base would happily second that notion. According to a new poll by Rasmussen, GOP voters think it’s past time for their leaders to reacquaint themselves with the party’s values. In numbers that ought to chagrin headquarters, half of all Republican voters think the party’s leaders aren’t conservative enough. And wrong-headed tweets like this one aren’t going to persuade them otherwise.

Worse, McDaniel is suggesting that there’s even such a thing as LGBT “compromise.” As anyone who’s been in the movement knows, the Left isn’t interested in co-existence – or even civility. Maybe that would have been possible in a society where everyone is adult enough to put aside their hostility and see the value in different viewpoints. If instead of suing people like Aaron and Melissa Klein out of business, couples simply found another bakery. If instead of jeopardizing care for everyone else, Jesse Hammonds went somewhere other than a Catholic hospital for transgender surgery. If instead of preaching tolerance, the Left actually practiced it.

The reality that McDaniel – and any other Republican tempted to stray on this issue – need to understand is that the idea of “fairness” sounds great in a tweet, but religious freedom is being endangered by extremists who don’t actually want it. They’re demanding forced acceptance (and punishment for the non-conformists) everywhere from elementary classrooms to corporate board rooms and anything in between. And that’s not going to change no matter how many rainbows the Republican Party flies.

So until the RNC gets its act together and decides to represent real conservative values, my advice is this: send your hard-earned dollars directly to candidates who have a track record of fighting for the principles you believe in. Look for men and women who won’t compromise when it comes to free speech, religious freedom, and common sense. We should have no part in supporting organizations that think they can play Eeny, meeny, miny, moe with our First Freedoms.

For more on how Christians should respond to this June rainbow onslaught, don’t miss Joseph Backholm’s new column, “Thinking Biblically about Pride Month.” Also, this Sunday, June 6, I will be preaching at Calvary Chapel San Jose during the 9:00 and 11:00 a.m. services. Looking at Nehemiah 4, we will prepare our hearts and minds for the opposition that comes when we arise and obey God. If you live in the area, you are invited to come worship with us. The services will be livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook.

Originally published here.

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Dr. Fauci and Mr. Hide

For months, Americans were told to do what Dr. Anthony Fauci said. We shut down businesses and churches, locked up schools, and wore masks. Now, 800-pages of redacted emails later, the country’s finding out that the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases hardly believed a word he said. Publicly, they were “following the science.” But privately, were they hiding the culprit?

Republicans seem to think so. After combing through Fauci’s inbox, message after message painted a very different picture of the man that Americans got to know in the early days of the pandemic. Behind closed doors, he thought masks were useless. On camera, he demanded Americans wear them. Under oath before the U.S. Senate, Fauci played dumb on the United States’ role at the Wuhan lab. To his colleagues, he exchanged emails about the $600,000 grant into bat-to-human COVID transmission. “Fauci supported the grotesque and dangerous experiments that appeared to have made COVID possible,” Tucker Carlson argued.

But the most egregious betrayal, the one that makes most Americans’ blood boil, is that Fauci knew very well that the virus could have been leaked from the lab – and yet he joined the Democrats’ chorus in arguing that not only was it impossible, it was conservative-driven conspiracy theory. Then, Big Tech joined the charade, blocking articles that raised the question, even by world-renown scientists. “With Trump accusing China of a coverup, calling it the "China virus” and pulling out of the WHO, Democrats and the media took to calling Trump’s version of events “disinformation,” the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin explains. “Their aim was to blame him and hand the election to Biden.”

The most shocking thing about these emails, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) explained on “Washington Watch,” is that there “were clear references to [Fauci’s] knowledge about the man-made origins of the virus.” While he and others were fabricating this story about the wet market, “he was defending the World Health Organization [and] talking about President Trump as if he was betraying our duty to public health…” All the while, Davidson said, Fauci was providing cover to China. And for that, he argues, he should be fired – if not criminally investigated.

“Every day, there are new revelations that show… not even just incompetence at this point, but dishonesty,” Davidson insisted. “I mean, he came in and spoke to Senator Rand Paul before the United States Senate and made it seem like. ‘What do you mean, gain-of-function [research in Wuhan]? I know nothing about this.’ And then it comes out days later… that he was deceptive about the… manmade origins of the virus and the link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He really should not be on the United States payroll.”

This “gain-of-function” research, as Gordon Chang explained, is extremely troubling. What that means is, scientists were taking a pathogen and trying to make it “more lethal or more transmissible.” At its core, it is biological weapons research, Gordon says. And United States taxpayers, who sent $600,000 in grants to Wuhan from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, may have helped fund it. Fauci denied that in the Senate, but he’s since tried to walk those statements back.

What really matters here, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, is that the Chinese were covering all of this up as early as January of 2020 – and Fauci “certainly would have seen the same intelligence that I saw. We would certainly have known that the risk this came from the laboratory was real. We would have known that the Chinese Communist Party didn’t want any of us to know that…” In May, he explained, the Trump team started to talk about this, because they’d seen “that the evidence was accumulating. It was piling up showing that the theory of the wet market didn’t hold water and that the much more likely scenario was that this had come from the virology lab in Wuhan.”

So why is Joe Biden sitting on such important information? Because a) it would prove Donald Trump was right about the virus; b) it would expose Democrats – and Fauci – for manipulating a deadly pandemic for political gain; and c) it would show that the Left (and Biden especially) is in the tank for China and refuses to hold the country accountable. Even now, in Fauci’s desperate PR situation, he’s urging people: “Don’t be accusatory [of China].”

The American people believe the virus came from the lab. And even if we don’t know that with 100-percent certainty, we know absolutely that China has lied about it. It’s irrefutable, Gordon explained.

“In December 2019 and January 2020 Chinese leaders took steps that they knew would lead to the spread of this disease beyond China. In other words, this was a deliberate spread of the disease beyond China’s borders. We know that Chinese leaders lied about the transmissibility of this disease and they were pressuring other countries to take arrivals from China without restrictions while they were locking down their own country. When they’re locking down their own country, they thought they were stopping the spread of the disease by leaning on other countries to take Chinese passengers, they knew they were spreading the disease. So this was an incident, I believe, of mass murder because as of today, we have more than 3.5 million people around the world have succumbed to this disease, including 596,000 thousand Americans.”

The Biden administration has been backed in a corner by the facts, and their only response is: we’ll have a report in 90 days. “We don’t need to wait 90 days to get a highly politicized report from people who have gotten it wrong on China consistently over decades,” Chang argues. Obviously, this White House isn’t interested in the truth. It never has been. Its only interest is protecting its cozy relationship with China – at the expense of American lives.

Originally published here.

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Honoring Friend and Philanthropist Foster Friess

On Thursday, May 27, the conservative movement lost a dear friend and champion, Foster Friess. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Lynn, his wife of nearly 60 years, and his family.

If you ever wondered what would happen if the rich young ruler in Matthew 19 had chosen to follow Christ, the answer may be found in Foster’s life.

Foster’s story is the quintessential example of the American Dream. After serving in the Army and leaving with only $800 accumulated leave pay, Foster went on to build one of the highest-performing growth mutual funds in America: the Brandywine Fund. Foster received many accolades for his investing prowess, but Forbes magazine said it best in 2018 when they named him one of the ten “greatest investors of this generation” – alongside men like Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, and John Templeton.

But that’s only one side of the story. In 1978, just four years after launching an investment firm with his beloved wife, Foster was beginning to see success from his tireless efforts to build their business. But personally, he realized his life was a wreck and completely empty while “he was steering the ship.” Foster came to the end of himself and as he put it “made Jesus the CEO of my life.”

From that day forward Foster Friess lived a life that hit the mark. No one in America was a stronger advocate for the values we hold most dear: faith, family, and freedom.

Inspired by the charge in Galatians 6:2 to “Bear one another’s burdens,” he became not just a visionary investor but a visionary philanthropist. Foster and Lynn strategically directed over $500 million into “difference making” causes during his lifetime. From humanitarian relief to freshwater wells, medical missions, Americans with disabilities, refugees displaced by the carnage of ISIS, and more, there are scores of ministries and non-profits they have supported over the years.

For example, Foster was an early backer of “Rachel’s Challenge,” a organization named after Rachel Scott, the first student slain in the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. This precious ministry delivers presentations in high schools nationwide to promote compassion and curb school violence, bullying, and suicide. The campaign has been effective in averting countless school shootings over the last 20 years.

In addition to all these good works, he will likely be most remembered for the dozens of conservative organizations that Foster partnered with to advance faith, family, and freedom across America and the world, including Family Research Council.

In 2010, Foster partnered with Tucker Carlson to launch The Daily Caller as “the conservative answer to The Huffington Post.” And seeing the need to combat the rise of Marxism on college campuses, Foster helped Charlie Kirk found Turning Point USA in 2012. And the list goes on and on.

In 2018, Foster ran for governor in the great state of Wyoming. One of his driving mottos was appropriately “Let’s Make America a Philippians 4:8 Land.”

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Philippians 4:8 (ESV)

Although he didn’t win, Foster traversed the state loving on people and unifying them around what mattered most to him, his faith in Christ.

Foster Friess, you fought the good fight, you finished the race, and you kept the faith. (2 Timothy 4:7) America and the world are better because of you. Until we meet up in Glory, we shall miss you, good friend!

Originally published here.

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This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.