'DEI would’ve ruined our country — and now it’s DEAD'

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Americans who believe the Fourth Amendment protects them from warrantless government searches may be surprised to learn that this protection only applies to about 4% of privately owned land in the United States. A 1924 ruling by the Supreme Court in Hester v. United States established what is known as the “Open Fields Doctrine,” which states that Constitutional protections regarding real estate only apply to a person’s home and “curtilage” (meaning a yard or garden), but did not apply to “open fields” (meaning any other property a person owns). In 2024, the nonprofit Institute for Justice conducted a study to determine how much of Americans’ private land fell into the “open fields” category that government could search without a warrant.  The answer, it found, was 96%. “The ‘Open Fields Doctrine’ blows a massive hole in Fourth Amendment protections for Americans,” Joshua Windham, an Institute for Justice senior attorney, told The Daily Signal. “What that means is that the government can enter and roam around and surveil all of the property entirely without Constitutional limits, and that presents a grave threat to our most basic Fourth Amendment rights–our right to be secure in our property, our right to privacy from unreasonable government intrusion.” This is not simply a question of legal theory, he said, it affects “everyday Americans who are going about their lives, running farms, walking nature trails on their properties, camping on their properties, doing all sorts of things that Americans across the country do every day on their private land, and all of that is subject, not just to government intrusion, but unlimited government intrusion.” One case involves Tom Manuel, who owns timberland in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, and says he was hunting on his property in 2023 when a game warden approached him, looking for violations. “I asked him if he’d wait for me at the [roadside] gate, and he didn’t want to do that,” Manuel said. “He said that would make their job harder and they’d never catch anybody.” The official asked Manuel to hand over his rifle, which he refused. He was questioned but no charges were filed and no citation was issued. Weeks later two state game wardens entered and searched his property again. “I told them a good bit about private lands, about getting warrants, but that kind of fell on deaf ears,” Manuel said. “None of them particularly liked having their authority questioned.” Represented by Institute for Justice attorneys, Manuel brought suit in Louisiana courts, where state law offers more protection for private land than federal law–at least regarding what state officials can do without a warrant. In addition, the Institute for Justice currently has cases moving through the courts in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Virginia, but these cases also only apply to state agencies. Federal agents continue to have free rein on private lands due to the ruling in Hester and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that reaffirmed it. The Supreme Court decisions focus on the specific items listed as protected under the Fourth Amendment. These include “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” for which court warrants and probable cause of a crime are required for government searches to occur. “The Supreme Court has always looked at that phrasing and said, ‘Well, land is not a person; land is not a house; land is not a paper; land is not an effect,’” Windham said. For this reason, many states, like Tennessee, have replaced the word “effects” with “possessions” in their state constitutions, to also protect land from warrantless searches. The Institute for Justice won a case in Tennessee last year against state wildlife officials putting surveillance cameras on private land without probable cause. Windham argues that America’s Founders always intended for land to be protected under the Fourth Amendment. “When the country was founded, it was illegal for any individual to trespass on closed private land, which is private land that is marked or fenced so as to exclude intruders,” he said. “That was true of government officials as well, and the only way that government officials could indemnify themselves against trespass liability was to have a valid warrant to enter the property.” The Institute for Justice calculated that the percentage of private land considered “open fields” and subject to warrantless searches was about 1.2 billion acres across the United States. Using sophisticated mapping software, the Institute for Justice analyzed the number of acres of land in each state that is privately owned and not in the immediate “curtilage” of a home or building. “We made very conservative assumptions and just assumed that 100 feet in every direction from every building in that data set would be afforded protection from warrantless searches,” David Warren, who conducted the analysis for the nonprofit public interest law firm, told The Daily Signal. “That’s where we came up with the figure that just 4% of private land is afforded these protections.” Because what the government deems curtilage might not actually extend that far from homes, he said, the amount of land protected from government surveillance is likely less than 4%. Beyond the physical possessions that courts have decided are not protected by the Fourth Amendment, Americans’ personal data have also been ruled to be outside the scope of constitutional protection. In addition to the “Open Fields Doctrine,” another Supreme Court decision spawned the “Third Party Doctrine,” which ruled that when Americans share information with a third party such as a bank, they surrender their Constitutional right to privacy from warrantless government searches. Under the Third Party Doctrine, “the government has essentially unfettered access to all your financial information that is shared with your bank and your other financial services providers,” Jennifer Schulp, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, told The Daily Signal. The 1970 Bank Secrecy Act and subsequent financial surveillance laws effectively eliminated Americans’ rights against warrantless searches of their bank accounts by requiring banks to routinely report to a Treasury Department agency called FinCEN any transactions over $10,000 or any other activity they deem “suspicious.” These laws were challenged for violating the Fourth Amendment, but the Supreme Court upheld the Bank Secrecy Act in 1976 in the case of United States v. Miller, which established the Third Party Doctrine as precedent. Initially enacted to fight money laundering and detect particularly large money transfers, the Bank Secrecy Act now tracks fairly routine financial activity by everyday Americans. A 2023 study by Thomson Reuters reported that banks delivered more than 3.6 million “Suspicious Activity Reports” to the government in 2022 under the Bank Secrecy Act. Americans who are among these millions would not know it, however, because federal regulations prohibit banks from informing customers that their information has been handed over to the government. Those who advocate for allowing law enforcement to search without warrants say the cumbersome process of showing probable cause and getting court approvals impedes their ability to fight crime and makes Americans less safe. But critics of this point of view argue that the Fourth Amendment strikes a proper compromise between fighting crime and protecting citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” “Law enforcement is an important interest, but so is protection of peoples’ information from the government, and the Fourth Amendment balances that by requiring law enforcement to have a warrant in order to access that information,” Schulp said. “That’s how the framers determined we would be protected from crime.” More recently, courts are beginning to show more support for the Fourth Amendment. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that the government should not have unfettered access to Americans’ cell phone activity. Despite the courts’ view that handing over personal data to a third party is voluntary and therefore not entitled to Fourth Amendment protections, many legal experts are now coming around to the realization that it is virtually impossible to function in modern society without sharing personal information with a bank, a stock broker, a phone company, a credit card company, an internet service provider, or any number of apps, Schulp said. In his opinion on the Carpenter case, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that “the use of technology is functionally compelled by the demands of modern life,” and  “just because you haveto entrust a third party with your data doesn’t necessarily mean that you should lose all Fourth Amendment protections in it.” This potential reevaluation of Fourth Amendment decisions comes at a time when government officials are increasingly intent on surveilling ever more aspects of peoples’ private lives. In addition to government’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ banking activity under the Bank Secrecy Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 ordered stock brokerages to hand over “every order, cancellation, modification and trade execution for all exchange-listed equities and options across all U.S. markets,” allowing it to collect data on Americans’ stock investments. In 2024, credit card companies Visa, Mastercard, and American Express jointly agreed to track firearm and ammunition purchases and report them to law enforcement, in order to comply with a newly enacted California law. Previously the card companies had announced they would do so nationwide, but paused the effort when numerous Republican-led state legislatures banned it. In addition, federal intelligence agencies were recently found to be buying Americans’ private online data from data brokers–companies that comb the internet and assemble databases on peoples’ online activity. “This data also finds its way into exhaustive dossiers, compiled by data brokers, that reveal the most intimate details of our lives: our movements, habits, associations, health conditions, and ideologies,” Emile Ayoub and Elizabeth Goitein, attorneys with New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, stated in a 2024 report. Asked why the government should be so fixated on gathering information on its citizens’ most intimate activities, Windham said, “I think it probably goes back to the old adage of knowledge is power; the more the government knows about us, the more power it has over us.” The post Precious Little Remains of Americans’ Fourth Amendment Protections, Studies Find appeared first on The Daily Signal.

There was a time, not all that long ago, that CBS’ “60 Minutes” was widely regarded as the gold standard of broadcast journalism. Regrettably, not so much anymore. With the luxury of being able to do long-form, in-depth reporting, rather than the typical mainstream media hit-and-run headline-and-sound bite journalism, “60 Minutes” could and did present thorough, thoughtful, and evenhanded reports on controversial topics. It still does from time to time, notably just two months ago on Dec. 15, when it aired a pair of riveting reports: One about life in post-Assad Syria, now that it’s no longer under the boot of deposed dictator Bashar Assad; the other exposing how artificial intelligence-powered dark-web sites are enabling the deepfake “pornification” of photos of teenage girls. Those reports represent what journalism could be—and should be. But in the past several years, “60 Minutes” has all-too-often aired reports with a left-wing bias nearly indistinguishable from what you would find on MSNBC. This past Sunday night, for example, correspondent Scott Pelley narrated a 13-minute segment, titled “28 Days,” about the first four weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term. The show’s opening tease—with its trademark stopwatch ticking, in this case almost as if it was a time bomb—previewed the ominous tone of the report this way: “It’s too soon to tell how serious President [Donald] Trump is in defiance of the Constitution, but in just 28 days, he’s reinterpreted the 14th Amendment and closed agencies that Congress mandated by law.” It was all downhill from there, beginning with two federal contractors lamenting how they had been dismissed with little notice from their jobs at the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID was the first federal department to be targeted for downsizing and ridding of waste by Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. But Pelley devoted not so much as a single word to the widely publicized list of USAID programs that have squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on wasteful and fraudulent programs abroad, many of them promoting radical DEI and LGBTQ+ agendas. He then doubled down by letting leftist Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck dismiss what he called Trump and Musk’s “claims of fraud” to be just “fig leafs” to mask a power grab on their part. Pelley, a former “CBS Evening News” anchor also failed to identify one of the two distraught, dismissed USAID consultants he interviewed as Kristina Drye. Drye was a speechwriter for President Joe Biden’s USAID chief, Samantha Power—hardly an objective source. “Twelve days ago, people knew where their next paycheck was coming from. They knew how they were going to pay for their kids' daycare, their medical bills. And then, all gone overnight,” says Kristina Drye, who was fired in the USAID shutdown. https://t.co/cysOqteb8p pic.twitter.com/bUcOAnhMjs— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) February 17, 2025 Both were examples of blatant bias by omission. It was clear that the “60 Minutes” producers and CBS had learned nothing from the lawsuit filed against them in late October by Trump, who sued over the program’s deceptive editing of its preelection interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Required by the Federal Communications Commission to release an unedited transcript and the raw footage of the Oct. 7 interview after Trump’s complaint, it was revealed it had been edited in such a way as to make Harris’ answers to correspondent Bill Whitaker’s questions sound more concise and coherent than they actually were. Trump has sued CBS for $20 billion, accusing it of “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of the Nov. 5 presidential election in Harris’ favor—albeit unsuccessfully. All of that called to mind a masterstroke move by Trump four years earlier, when on Oct. 22, 2020, he released on Facebook his own 37-minute videotaped version of a highly contentious “60 Minutes” preelection interview ahead of its network airing three days later. That presumably was intended to preempt any chance of correspondent Lesley Stahl excerpting and presenting questions and answers out of context to make him look bad. And that was hot on the heels of Stahl’s “60 Minutes” report two weeks earlier on Oct. 11, 2020, “Inside the Lincoln Project’s Campaign Against President Trump,” which portrayed the rabidly anti-Trump group of Republican-in-Name-Only (RINO) grifters in the most favorable light possible. CBS should have been required to file a report with the Federal Election Commission for what amounted to an in-kind contribution to Joe Biden’s campaign a little more than three weeks before the presidential election. Then, on Nov. 8, 2020, just five days after Biden’s election, Whitaker’s report dismissive of Republican charges of voter fraud in Philadelphia was shameless in its one-sidedness and anti-Trump bias. The liberal, pro-Democrat slant of “60 Minutes” has not been directed solely at Trump, however. On April 5, 2021, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi presented a hit piece on Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, pointedly accusing him of a “pay for play” campaign contribution scheme involving state COVID-19 vaccination contracts. The report was deceptively edited to omit almost all of DeSantis’ lengthy, detailed explanation at a news conference attended by Alfonsi, in which he thoroughly refuted the specifics of her accusation. That detailed explanation wound up on the cutting-room floor at “60 Minutes,” but conservative podcaster Dave Rubin used video footage from The Florida Channel, which had carried the news conference live, to show how egregiously misleading Alfonsi’s report was. It was another case of bias by omission. Alfonsi’s attempted takedown of DeSantis contrasted sharply with a 12-and-a-half-minute glowing puff-piece profile of Sen. Angus King of Maine by correspondent Jon Wertheim that aired three months earlier on Jan. 10, 2021. King, now in his third term, claims to be an independent, but caucuses with Democrats and votes almost invariably in lockstep with the ultraliberal Democratic Party line, as I documented in great detail in this space on Feb. 5. Nor is the liberal bias of “60 Minutes” limited to politicians it favors or disfavors. Pelley’s Jan. 2, 2023, report on global warming (aka climate change) was apocalyptic in its hand-wringing. But he made no mention at all of the innumerable times the climate alarmists have been completely wrong in their prior doomsday predictions dating back to 1967, as Zerohedge.com painstakingly detailed in a report just two days earlier on Dec. 31, 2022: “2022, Same Sh**, Different Year: 55 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions.” There are several other examples of the liberal bias of “60 Minutes” that I could have included here, but won’t, mostly for fear of belaboring the point. But we shouldn’t fail to mention then-correspondent Steve Kroft’s Dec. 11, 2011, softball interview with then-President Barack Obama. It was Kroft’s seventh “60 Minutes” interview of the liberal Illinois Democrat in less than three years, and the program’s (at least) 11th since Obama first emerged on the national political scene in 2004. No other president has enjoyed that kind of “man crush” from Kroft or “60 Minutes” in its 57 seasons on the air. It’s regrettable that “60 Minutes,” once the gold standard of broadcast news, has become liberal fool’s gold. The public’s trust in the legacy media as a whole has cratered, with an October 2024 Gallup poll showing just 31% of respondents expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.” Some 36% of U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media, and 33% of Americans expressed “not very much” confidence. As a result, more people than ever are getting their news from other sources, and that’s due in no small part to “60 Minutes.” Originally published at The Washington Times The post The One-Sidedness of ‘60 Minutes’: Liberal Bias Taints What Once Was Gold Standard of Broadcast Journalism appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The firing of federal bureaucrats from an agency a congressional panel accused of engaging in a broad censorship effort may be too light a punishment, says the former No. 2 at the Department of Homeland Security.  The Trump administration slashed the workforces of several agencies last week, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as the CISA, by about 130 employees after accusations of censorship and election meddling there. Meanwhile, the DHS is pausing election activities for the CISA , pending a review of the agency, The Associated Press reported.  The CISA was established in 2018 under the first Trump administration’s DHS and was originally intended to protect oil and natural gas pipelines and other critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. But agency bureaucrats quickly expanded the mission to elections. A congressional investigation concluded the CISA worked with big tech firms to censor political speech in the name of combating election-related “misinformation.” “Employees there were actively censoring their fellow Americans. They were violating their civil rights and should be prosecuted,” Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told The Daily Signal. “Bureaucrats in the future who want to abuse their power and violate the civil rights of their fellow Americans are less likely to do so if those who did so before were prosecuted. Not only is it a deterrence, but it’s also justice for people who were harmed.” In June 2023, the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a report that found the CISA considered creating an anti-misinformation “rapid response team” to physically deploy across the United States.  The report also said the CISA moved its censorship operation to a CISA-funded nonprofit to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda” after the Biden administration was sued in federal court. The House panel also reported the CISA scrubbed its website of references to its domestic surveillance and censorship activities. Additionally, the Twitter Files report, an investigation launched after Elon Musk bought the social media giant, found government agencies—including the CISA—working with Twitter to block content such as the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and other news.  However, Jen Easterly, CISA director during the Biden administration, said last year, “CISA does not censor, has never censored.”  It’s not clear how many of the 130 employees worked on elections or were involved in censorship. The CISA referred questions to DHS, which did not respond to questions about details of the situation. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are making sweeping cuts and reform across the federal government to eliminate egregious waste and incompetence that has been happening for decades at the expense of the American taxpayer,” a DHS spokesperson said in an email response, adding the actions would save taxpayers about $50 million on top of an “incalculable” amount in increased accountability. “DHS component leads identified non-mission critical personnel in probationary status. We are actively identifying other wasteful positions and offices that [do not] fulfill DHS’ mission,” the DHS spokesperson said.   During the waning days of the Obama administration in early January 2017, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security designated the election system as “critical infrastructure.” Cuccinelli, now the national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative and a former Virginia attorney general, said “elections were not part of the original mission” of the CISA.  “The tradeoff to allowing a government agency to get involved in election security is that if you do, it opens the door to abuse and weaponization,” Cuccinelli said. “In this particular time of government cost-benefit analysis, it isn’t worth it.” The CISA’s duties of protecting infrastructure such as roads, pipelines, and bridges on the cyber level could be easily transferred to the Department of Transportation, Cuccinelli said, while the Department of Energy could address cyber concerns regarding the electric grid.  “The only legitimate role for the federal government in elections is to determine if there has been foreign hacking,” he said, noting divisions within the DHS could already address that while the Justice Department could prosecute such cases. Still, many of the Left were upset over the cuts.  The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal think tank at New York University known for opposing election integrity laws such as voter ID, blasted the staffing cuts, asserting in an X post, “The Trump administration is taking aim at our free, fair, and secure elections.” The Trump administration is taking aim at our free, fair, and secure elections. Read: https://t.co/LSIrjx0NK7 pic.twitter.com/aAAbz2IgFr— Brennan Center (@BrennanCenter) February 19, 2025 Politico published a piece sympathetic to anonymously quoted federal employees who said some of the CISA’s most experienced national security staff were there on a probationary status because the agency hired personnel under a special workforce retention program started in 2021. In some cases, people with national security IT experience—including government employees from other agencies—were lured to the CISA with higher pay but in exchange for probationary status.  The CISA did not prevent or detect a 2020 cyber attack on federal and corporate computer systems in the United States that were suspected to have been linked to the Russian government, Cuccinelli added.  As my book, “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” noted, about a year after then-CISA chief Christopher Krebs said the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and that there was “no indication or evidence that there was any sort of hacking,” federal prosecutors in New York unsealed an indictment that charged two Iranians with hacking the New York state computer election system and stealing voter registration data with the intent to carry out a cyber-intimidation campaign against Republican members of Congress and Trump campaign officials as well as Democrat voters in the November 2020 election.  Absent the hacking, Trump would have still lost the heavily blue blue New York state, but it does indicate that the CISA didn’t catch the hacking.  The post After Censorship Scandal, Are CISA Staffers Off the Hook After 130 Were Fired? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

OXON HILL, Md.—Ric Grenell, former ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence in the first Trump administration, said he might run for governor of California, but only under one condition. Dasha Burns, the White House bureau chief for Politico, interviewed Grenell on the main stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday. “While we’re on California, since you have so many ideas for the state, are we going to see Richard Grenell run for governor of California?” Burns asked. Grenell, who now serves as president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, said he likely won’t run. “Honestly, it’s not in my plan unless Kamala Harris runs for governor,” he replied. “I mean, here’s the thing: We already know who she is,” Grenell explained. “We’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars to define who Kamala Harris is. If she thinks that she’s going to run for governor of California, a Republican is going to win, and I might not be able to resist trying to run against her.” ?ON ONE CONDITIONOnstage at @CPAC, @RichardGrenell lays out the one scenario in which he would run for governor of California.It all boils down to which candidate he would be running against. pic.twitter.com/WVIa8Q59Ik— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) February 21, 2025 Grenell, who became the first openly gay Cabinet-level official when he became acting director of national intelligence, had previously been floated as a California gubernatorial candidate. He expressed interest in running in the 2021 recall election against Gov. Gavin Newsom, but he announced he would not do so on July 15 that year. California has many conservatives, but it is typically considered a deep blue state. Newsom, a Democrat, won reelection in 2022 with 59.2% of the vote, beating his Republican opponent by nearly 20 points. Celebrating Jesus’ Birth Grenell now leads the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.’s arts center. He announced that the Kennedy Center will celebrate Jesus’ birth at Christmastime, and the crowd applauded loudly. “We are doing a big huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas,” he announced. “How crazy is it to think that we’re going to celebrate Christ at Christmas with a big traditional production to celebrate what we are all celebrating in the world during Christmastime?” ?BIDEN HANDED US WAR@RichardGrenell explains to @CPAC why Trump is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. "We handed Joe Biden total peace in the Middle East and total peace in Europe. He handed us a war in the Middle East and a war in Europe, and we can never forget… pic.twitter.com/RGccSNFoOA— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) February 21, 2025 Trump Meeting With Putin Burns asked Grenell about President Donald Trump’s recent meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Grenell emphasized that while Trump left the world safer as he exited office, former President Joe Biden left his successor a more dangerous world, and Trump has to deal with the world as it is. “Remember that we handed Joe Biden total peace in the Middle East and total peace in Europe,” he said. “He handed us a war in the Middle East and a war in Europe, and we can never forget that. So, I do get a little bit frustrated with reporters when they say, ‘Your decision now isn’t perfect,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, we were put in a hole, we were put in a terrible situation.’” He also insisted that Trump has met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his team up to 10 times. “I never once heard from the media an outrage that the Russians weren’t invited to those talks,” he said. “However, the one time that the Trump team reaches out to say, ‘How about we talk to the Russians?’ there’s this hue and cry from the Europeans and everybody to say, ‘Why aren’t the Ukrainians involved?’” ????CELEBRATING CHRIST AT CHRISTMAS@RichardGrenell gets loud applause at @CPAC when announcing that @kencen will celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ at Christmas pic.twitter.com/xJtxoL90Y2— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) February 21, 2025 The post Ric Grenell Says He Will Run for Governor of California on Only One Condition appeared first on The Daily Signal.

BBC Pulls Hamas Propaganda Documentary

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) ripped search giant Google for abusing its power to exert influence over the minds of Americans.  Schmitt discussed how platforms like Google get away with their rampant bias with Article III Project Founder and President Mike Davis at a Thursday CPAC appearance. Both speakers made plain that a lack of real free market competition lay at the root of Google’s ability and willingness to censor and write off a significant portion of the country, conservatives. Schmitt called for transparency and competition.  [Story Continues on MRC Free Speech America] 

Gentle parenting is a style of child-rearing that’s gained a huge following in the last decade. The practice emphasizes empathy, rejects traditional punishment, and puts the parent in the role of guide rather than authority. Proponents of gentle parenting argue that it helps children develop empathy and emotional intelligence and strengthens the bond between parents and children. While gentle parenting may sound nice in theory, it poses many theological issues. When you look closely at the pillars of the movement, it’s clear that the Bible stands in opposition to almost every principle. To gain clarity on how Christians are to navigate this modern wave of gentle parenting, Allie Beth Stuckey invites homeschooling mom of 10 Abbie Halberstadt onto “Relatable” to discuss what it looks like to be “a godly yet gentle authority figure in your home.” “Directness and firmness is not contrary to gentleness. Gentleness is not weakness; it’s not getting trod on. It is a willingness to temper strength with kindness,” says Halberstadt. This, she says, is what it looks like to be gentle in the biblical sense. Proponents of gentle parenting, however, argue that gentleness must acknowledge the “inner perfection of a child.” According to gentle parenting philosophy, children only act out due to adverse external circumstances and are therefore never directly at fault. But the Bible is clear that there is no such thing as inner perfection and that we are all born into this world sinful and in need of a Savior. “One of the things that gentle parenting robs parents and children of is the opportunity to seek their Savior, because if we truly believe that we're dealing with a sinless being and that it's only the circumstances or something beyond their control that's going to force them into sinful behavior, then there's really nothing to be saved from,” says Halberstadt. One argument from Christians who prescribe gentle parenting is that telling children that they’re sinful and need a Savior invites shame into their hearts and paints a picture of an angry God. To these individuals, Halberstadt says, teaching children that “we are all desperately in need of a Savior” but that “we can boldly approach the throne of grace because of the mercy of our Savior, who has already covered our sins with his blood” is not only the truth, it’s “good news.” Not only does this communicate God’s kindness, love, and mercy, but the message itself is the antithesis of shame. “To see children begin to grasp [the gospel message] and to see the joy spread across their face of like, ‘Jesus loves me this much!’ I would never want to rob a child of that,” she says. “It’s truly the best gift we can offer them.” As for the gentle parenting claim that emotions — specifically how a child feels when something happens — are pre-eminent, Halberstadt reminds us that “the Bible focuses more on the truth of how we are to be regardless of what our emotions tell us.” While emotions are “given to us rightly from God,” gentle parenting’s insistence on “[valorizing emotions] as being something that should then control our actions” and “control our motives” ultimately communicates that we “have a right to mistreat others.” Where gentle parenting lauds “this bubble of autonomy, this bubble of how you feel in this exact moment, Philippians 2:4 says we're to look not only to our own needs but to the needs of others and to consider others as more important than ourselves,” says Halberstadt. “The gentle parenting secular philosophy flips that on its head.” To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above. Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

President Donald Trump confronted a Democratic governor in front of other governors over her refusal to enforce a federal order forbidding men in women's sports. Trump was speaking to a meeting of governors at the White House on Friday when he singled out Maine Gov. Janet Mills for refusing to follow the order and berated her over it. Mills fired back, and the two got into a brief shouting match. 'And enjoy your life after, Governor, 'cause I don't think you'll be in elected politics.' "I understand Maine — is Maine here? The governor of Maine?" asked Trump. "Yeah, I'm here," said Mills. "Are you not going to comply with that?" he asked, in reference to his order. "I'm going to comply with state and federal law," she responded. "Well, I am — we are the federal law. Well, you better do it. You better do it, because you're not going to get any federal funding at all if you don't," he added. "And by the way, your population, even though it's somewhat liberal, although I did very well there, your population doesn't want men playing in women's sports." The president made the same threat to cut federal funding from Maine on Thursday evening. "So you better comply — because otherwise you're not getting any federal funding," Trump continued Friday. "I'll see you in court," Mills retorted. "Good, I'll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one," he said. "And enjoy your life after, Governor, 'cause I don't think you'll be in elected politics." The exchange was posted to social media, where it quickly went viral. Mills had responded to the threat in a statement she posted prior to the interaction at the White House. “If the president attempts to unilaterally deprive Maine schoolchildren of the benefit of federal funding, my administration and the attorney general will take all appropriate and necessary legal action to restore that funding and the academic opportunity it provides,” she wrote. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!