Watchmen Ministry North Idaho

(Idaho Freedom Foundation) Many parents objected to public school mask mandates and poor virtual learning environments during the pandemic, according to new data suggesting homeschooling is on the rise in Idaho — and the nation.

New data from the United States Census Bureau shows that 11.1% of K-12 students across America are now being privately homeschooled. That’s nearly double the only 5.4% at the start of school shutdowns last spring and 3.3% in years preceding the pandemic.

Homeschooling in the Gem State went from 8% in the spring of 2020 to 10.3% by the fall, a 28.8% increase.

In its Household Pulse Survey, the Census Bureau counted homeschoolers as students whose parents had officially removed them from or never enrolled them in a public school. This distinguishes independent homeschoolers from home-based students enrolled in virtual learning programs.  (Read More)

(Daily Signal) “Universal pre-K, I love that because it’s children learning, parents earning,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at an April 29 press conference.

That was the day after President Joe Biden had presented Congress with his euphemistically titled “American Families Plan,” which calls “for free universal pre-school for all three- and four-year-olds.”

Pelosi’s professed “love” for having parents leave their preschool children in government custody has not diminished since then.

At a press conference last week, she once again spoke about “universal pre-K, which I love.”  (Read More)

(RedState) As a former public high school teacher, I am absolutely shocked and appalled that Oregon has abandoned its statewide math, reading, and writing proficiency standards for high school graduates.

On July 14, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown signed a bill that suspends the proficiency standards for high school graduates for three years.

According to Charles Boyle, a spokesman for the governor, “SB 744 gives us an opportunity to review our graduation requirements and make sure our assessments can truly assess all students’ learning.”

Boyle added, “In the meantime, it gives Oregon students and the education community a chance to regroup after a year and a half of disruption caused by the pandemic.”

That is a rather ridiculous defense of the bill.  (Read More)

(Creators) The enabling tool of what we call “cancel culture” or “wokeness” is language.

People are put in categories to which names are assigned, and this supposedly captures who they are and what should be done with them politically.

Unfortunately, the whole business of racial identification and categorization is not about advancing the quality of the human condition and human dignity but about progressive politics.

The left puts people in racial categories as instruments toward their political agenda.

The strangest part of the emergence of this movement as a political force is that it constitutes everything that supposedly is undesirable that we want to eliminate. Racism.

Is it any less racism if I conclude who a person is and what they are about based on whether they are white or Black?  (Read More)

(The Federalist) It’s looking to be a miserable fall for school children, at least in the nation’s blue states.

Sure, they’ll finally be back for in-person classes, but thanks to the heroic stupidity of our Centers for Disease Control and local health departments, millions of kids will be forced to wear masks — all day and every day — to protect themselves from coronavirus. That’s a disease we all know children are at virtually zero risk from. We’ve known this from nearly the very beginning of this, and that’s still the case, as a study from John Hopkins proved just last month.

What does this mean for kids? You were a child once. Try to remember how long every day felt; how even a few minutes of unpleasantness felt like an eternity. Even as an adult, wearing a mask literally all day is deeply unpleasant. For millions of kids, it’s torture. And now it’s entering its second year for no reason except that our leaders are too weak to let life return to normal — and they’re too cowardly to admit that COVID-19 won’t vanish with the perfect combo of health policy.  (Read More)

(FRC) St. George Coptic Orthodox Church in Surrey, British Columbia, was the latest house of worship victimized by a rash of attacks against Canadian churches this summer. Attacks on church buildings is something one might expect to occur in a third-world country, not Canada. And yet, it’s become a shockingly common occurrence there over the past few months.

By one count, 57 Canadian churches have been targeted—21 of those churches were set on fire.

The Lady of Lourdes Chopaka Church in British Columbia burned to the ground. St. Gregory Mission Church on Osoyoos Indian Band land was similarly reduced to ashes. The doors of Grace Presbyterian Church in Calgary, Alberta, were splattered with red paint. And these are just a few examples.

Investigations by Canadian police are ongoing, and the fires are being treated as “suspicious.” Many speculate the attacks are in response to reports this summer that hundreds of graves have been unearthed on some Canadian church grounds. These graves are thought to belong to indigenous children who died of disease in residential schools run by churches as part of a government-mandated assimilation program.  (Read More)

(Townhall) Gun rights are the linchpin protecting citizens from the loss of all rights. Now, President Joe Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi are advancing a gun grab.

Modern history provides troubling proof that loss of liberty is preceded by the disarmament of citizens. This week, the most obvious example is right before our eyes as we watch the Cuban people pleading for freedom.

Fidel Castro took control of Cuba in 1959 and immediately called for removing all guns from citizens. His new communist regime sent agents door to door to coerce citizens into turning over their firearms. If you think it could not happen here, recall the confiscation of thousands of home-defense firearms during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Local and “imported” law enforcement officers from outside states went door to door to take firearms from U.S. citizens at a time when the citizens needed them most.  (Read More)

(Daily Signal) As cybersecurity technology becomes more powerful, so has the technology that is used to hack phones, computers, and other devices. When this technology falls into the wrong hands—for example, a totalitarian government—it can be exploited to create a nightmare scenario for millions of people.

Unfortunately, such a scenario recently occurred in multiple countries using Pegasus, a spyware technology created by the Israeli company NSO Group.

The company states that its technology is supposedly meant for preventing crime and terrorism. NSO has claimed to closely observe the human rights-related behavior of whom it gives its technology, but recent news negates this claim.

Mexico, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, and Saudi Arabia, among many other unstable and repressive governments, have purchased this technology.  (Read More)

(The Federalist) U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi chastised the Republican Party on Wednesday for being “delinquent in embracing the science that people need be vaccinated.” Answering a follow-up question of whether Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, is a “moron,” she added, “I said in my earlier comments, ‘science, science, science, and science.’ On almost any subject you can name, science is the answer.”

While the speaker’s second answer failed to exactly answer the question asked, her comments are troubling on a couple of levels. One of them is the absence of specific scientific data, derived from substantive research, to back up her pronouncements. Of course, her lack of data does not mean there necessarily is none available, but it’s troubling the speaker didn’t feel any apparent need to include data in order to speak authoritatively about “the Science.”

This is the second — and more important — way her comments are troubling. “The Science,” regardless of the fact that it is so vaguely defined, apparently speaks with such universal authority (“on almost any subject you can name”) that we can deduce all manner of national policy from its ineffable pronouncements.  (Read More)

(Faith & Freedom) The Chinese were the first in the world to invent paper money back in the 7th Century. After encountering paper money on his journey to China in the 13th Century, Marco Polo observed that the Mongol emperor “had a more extensive command of treasure than any sovereign in the universe.”

Today, China is apparently at the forefront of monetary innovation and is on the cusp of eliminating cash and pushing the world toward total government surveillance.

This is significant as it relates to our own United States.

It is particularly significant to Bible-believing Christians and the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

Bloomberg says China is on the cusp of launching a digital-only currency. Coins will also disappear.  (Read More)

(OneNewsNow) The tech-savvy, hipster city of Seattle has turned into a Third World dump of drug use, rampant crime, and an exploding homeless population, but a local radio host says the city’s slide toward destruction is not a mistake — it’s the cure.

“The end game here seems to be to destroy capitalism,” Ari Hoffman says of his adopted city, “and if you destroy capitalism, you end up with socialism.”

If taxpayers and businesses qualify as capitalism, then both are on the decline. In a March story, The Seattle Times looked at 2020 change-of-address requests to the U.S. Postal Service to measure families leaving. Those figures showed 69,432 families moving out in 2020, a potential drop of 7% in just a year.  (Read More)

(Redoubt News) Most Americans were as indifferent to the unexpected loss of our Olympic women’s soccer team as they were once excited about their World Cup win.

In between was the team’s nonstop politicking, from whining about compensation to virtue signaling their disrespect for the United States. The celebrity face of the team, perennial scold Megan Rapinoe, is going the way of teenage grouch Greta Thunberg—becoming more pinched and scowling the more she is tuned out.

BLM co-founder and self-avowed Marxist Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac used her corporate grifting to buy four homes. The last in Topanga Canyon, surrounded by a new $35,000 security fence.

Critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi offers virtual, one-hour workshops for $20,000 a pop. He is franchising woke reeducation kits—in between bouts of damning capitalism as a catalyst of racism.  (Read More)

(OneNewsNow) Transgender and race-conscious wokeness are spreading among America’s medical schools like a malignant tumor, where the far-left demand to cite personal pronouns and use terms such as “pregnant person” have devolved to the point that professors are being punished by their own “woke” students and are meeting in secret to discuss how to survive.

Thanks to audio recorded by a medical school student, journalist Katie Herzog reports in a July story that a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for two normal words – “pregnant woman” – that he had said earlier in front of the class.

“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything,” the professor tells the class, “and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it.”  (Read More)

(Faith & Freedom) Lawyers for Mississippi asked the Supreme Court last Thursday to overturn Roe v Wade and give state legislators the authority to outlaw all abortions.

In May the Justices agreed to hear the state’s appeal of a lower court’s invalidation of a Mississippi law that would forbid abortions after 15 weeks.

In their brief filed with the Court last week, the state’s lawmakers raised the stakes and argued that the right to abortion set in 1973 should be repealed entirely.

They said that Roe v Wade was “egregiously wrong” as a matter of constitutional law and that it has proved to be hopelessly “unworkable” in practice. They point out that, in fact, more than a dozen conservative states like Mississippi want to outlaw almost all abortions.

State Attorney General Lynn Fitch asked, “Under the Constitution, may a state prohibit elective abortions before viability?”

“Yes,” the A/G answered. “Why? Because nothing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion.”  (Read More)

(The Federalist) A Big Tech-led group is using its influence and power to broaden its shared censorship database to curb “extremist content” and collect video and images deemed white supremacist, according to Reuters. The expansion comes after the group “took on renewed urgency” after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which Democrats and tech giants continue to use as an excuse to justify suppression.

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube, tech oligarchs trigger-happy to deplatform political dissidents, founded the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism in 2017 in what they labeled “a new collective effort to prevent the spread of terrorist and violent extremist content online.” Initially, the organization claimed to focus its efforts on rounding up content from terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State and the Taliban as designated by the United Nations, but now the monopolies running GIFCT are using their oligarch power to crack down on dissidents of their elitist agenda.  (Read More)

(FRC) If someone told me 18 months ago that homeschooling American households would triple in a year, I would hardly have thought it possible. Nor would I have believed the Associated Press and the Washington Post could report positively on something as beneficial as homeschooling. As it turns out, nearly anything can change in a pandemic. By the fall of 2020, 11 percent of U.S. households were homeschooling their children, up from 5.4 percent in the spring of 2020, and 3.3 percent in the years before that, according to the Household Pulse Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. “A lot of parents and guardians are going to keep on with home schooling, or at the very least, give it another semester or two,” said education researcher Ellen Dundas.

“Even more remarkable are where those gains came from,” reported the Washington Post. “Even though home schooling has often been considered the domain of religious White families, the most significant increases were seen among Black, Latino and Asian households.” The Post reported that while white families homeschooling doubled from 4 to 8 percent between 2019 and May 2021, black families homeschooling increased from about one percent to eight percent, and Hispanic families homeschooling increased from two percent to nine percent. Asian families homeschooling have increased from one percent in 2016 to five percent in 2021.  (Read More)

(Gem State Patriot) Not long ago I wrote about a new radio program on KIDO radio on Saturday mornings featuring two of my favorite RINOs, Tom “Common Core” Luna and Victor Miller. Unfortunately, I was right about this show it is a sham to promote any and all RINOs who will be running for office in next year’s primaries in our state. Yes, ladies and gentleman, this program was the prelude to the attack on any and all entities that might present a problem for any of these lobbyists sucking politicians who have had way too many years in our legislature.

The recent attack by Jim Jones and Fred Martin in articles presented by our favorite liberal rag the Idaho Statesman denigrating the Idaho Freedom Foundation were first rate garbage suitable for any dump you might want to drop them in. It seems only proper that we give them a little of their own medicine.  (Read More)

(The Federalist) Last Friday, a six-year-old girl was shot down in a drive-by in Washington, D.C. while she walked with her parents and her younger sister by a park that hadn’t been taken care of — hadn’t been trimmed, hadn’t even been cleaned up or properly patrolled — by the city in a very long time. Authorities had surrendered the park to addicts and criminals, but the morning after the shooting you can bet the cleaning crews were there. It wasn’t worth salvaging the park for normal citizens who lived there, but it was for the news cameras.

This past Thursday was the six-month anniversary of the Biden administration, and by extension, the six-month anniversary of the demise of the Keystone Pipeline. The Austin American-Statesman fact-checked complaints from now-unemployed workers, claiming the jobs weren’t actually lost — they were just temporarily lost. Forever.  (Read More)

(OneNewsNow) During a sermon he gave last Sunday to his congregation at Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, Calif., Jeremiah pointed out that cancel culture’s goal of punishing and ostracizing people in society is in direct conflict with the commands of Jesus Christ to love God and others.

“Cancel culture is laser-focused on judgment and accusation and punishment, and the goal of those who cancel others is to broadcast their sins from pillar to post, and never allow them to be removed or forgotten,” Jeremiah explained, according to Christian Headlines. “Christ’s goal, on the other hand, is love, mercy and grace.”

The Southern California pastor addressed cancel culture’s detrimental effects on society in his sermon series focusing on current events, which are discussed in his upcoming book, Where Do We Go from Here? How Tomorrow’s Prophesies Foreshadow Today’s Problems – slated for October.  (Read More)

(FRC) Every once in a while, the Biden administration likes to pretend that it’s listening to reason. Don’t buy it. That’s the message from conservatives, who are trying to keep parents from falling for the White House’s line that it’s backing away from critical race theory in the classroom. That’s the impression Education Secretary Miguel Cardona was going for when he said that the department made an “error” promoting a radical group’s CRT theories. Some people cheered, thinking the White House had finally seen the light. But if it sounds too good to be true, experts warn, that’s because it is.

Cardona put up a convincing façade. In a statement to Fox News, his office said that it was a mistake to include a handbook from the controversial Abolitionist Teaching Network in the DOE’s resources for public schools. “The Department does not endorse the recommendations of this group, nor do they reflect our policy positions. It was an error in a lengthy document to include this citation,” a spokesperson said. (Read More)

(Standing For Freedom Center) With the balance of the Supreme Court shifted fully right for the first time in decades, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch has filed a brief requesting that the Court overturn Roe v. Wade.

Amid an appeal to the Supreme Court regarding a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks, Fitch is calling into question the very foundations of abortion rights in America.

“On a sound understanding of the Constitution,” she wrote in her brief, “the answer to the question presented in this case is clear and the path to that answer is straight. Under the Constitution, may a State prohibit elective abortions before viability? Yes. Why? Because nothing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion. A prohibition on elective abortions is therefore constitutional if it satisfies the rational basis review that applies to all laws.”

Fitch added, “The only workable approach to accommodating the competing interests here is to return the matter to ‘legislators, not judges.’  (Read More)

(PJ Media) In the Francis Howell School District about 35 miles west of St. Louis, Missouri, teachers met in September 2020 to determine the curriculum the students would follow for the coming year. Advising them was equity consultant LaGarrett J. King, an associate professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri.

In addition to discussing the curriculum, King tried to impress on the teachers the importance of teaching history the “right way.”

“This is not a safe space,” but rather a ‘racialized space,’” King said. “In many ways, a safe space is a space where white people tell us how not racist they are. And this is not that space.”  (Read More)

(FRC) Most people were shocked when the president wanted to go door-to-door with his vaccine campaign — but that’s only the half of it. According to a Pentagon spokesman, the White House is also planning to go barracks to barracks — requiring the men and women of our voluntary military to involuntarily surrender their freedom and take an unproven shot some of them don’t want.

Frankly, Obama Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told CNN, “I think the president ought to issue an order requiring everybody in the military to get a COVID-19 shot — period. That’s an issue involving our national security,” he argued. “The last … thing you need is to have those in the military that are our warriors unable to respond to a mission because they’ve gotten COVID-19. There’s no excuse for that.” Interesting, considering that the same military leadership has been cheerleading the troops’ gender reassignment surgery, which renders patients completely undeployable for months.  (Read More)

(Christian Post) A political activist art group hung a 45-foot banner reading “God Bless Abortions” on the 65-foot tall Christ of the Ozarks statue that “stands as a symbol of hope” in northwest Arkansas on Thursday night.

Members of the activist art collective called Indecline disguised themselves as construction workers to sneak onto the property and used pulleys and climbing gear to hang the banner on the Christ of the Ozarks statue in Eureka Springs that was erected in 1966.

Kent Butler, director of operations at The Great Passion Play, the Christian organization that manages the Christ of the Ozarks statue, told The Christian Post that he hopes the political message Indecline tried to portray will instead turn people’s attention to Jesus.

“It was all about [Indecline] getting attention to expand their platform, but our pivot really is to our mission,” Butler told CP on Saturday. “This whole place exists to lift up Jesus. And at times what was intended for evil, in Genesis 50, it says ‘what was intended for evil God used for good.’  (Read More)

(Standing For Freedom Center) Critics of the LGBT movement have long warned that conceding ground on issues such as gay marriage would not stem the lobby’s push for more, and a song by a gay choir from San Francisco shows they are correct.

“You think we’re sinful, you fight against our right, you say we all lead lives you can’t respect. But you’re just frightened, you think that we’ll corrupt your kids if our agenda goes unchecked. Funny, just this once, you’re correct,” the song says, and then continues,

“We’ll convert your children, happens bit by bit,

quietly and subtlety and you will barely notice it.

You can keep them from disco, warn about San Francisco,

make ’em wear pleated pants, we don’t care.  (Read More)