It’s one thing to read about voter fraud in a news article. It is quite another to read about it in a court document or legal opinion. Three judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked an attempt to allow all voters in the state to vote by mail because of the pandemic. In his concurring opinion, Judge James Ho took the time to cite other judges and legal opinions warning about the dangers of voting by mail.

Many citations seemed to be making a case against voter IDs by suggesting that in-person voting is much safer than voting by mail. By focusing on the importance of in-person voting, they also were making the case against voting by mail.

For example, judges in one case cited “Indiana’s own experience with fraudulent voting in the 2003 Democratic primary” was a fraud “perpetrated using absentee ballots.” The legal opinion went on to explain that “much of the fraud” that has occurred in various elections nationwide “was actually absentee ballot fraud or voter registration fraud.”

One brief found “extensive problems with absentee ballot fraud” in various elections including one election that “was overturned on the basis of absentee ballot fraud.” Another brief by the Brennan Center argued that when voter fraud was detected, “it generally takes the form of organized fraud,” including “use of fraudulent absentee or mail-in ballots.”

Judge Ho even cited their court opinions that concluded that “mail-in ballot fraud is a significant threat” so much so that “the potential and reality of fraud is much greater in the mail-in ballot context than with in-person voting.”

After reading many of these citations in legal opinions, it is easy to see why the court ruled against attempts to expand mail-in voting.

While the world is waiting for a coronavirus vaccine it’s worth taking a moment to ask some important questions. Dr. Francis Collins (director of NIH) believes we could have 100 million doses of a vaccine ready in early 2021. Is that possible?

Normally it takes more than a decade to produce a vaccine and get it approved. And usually there is a 90 percent failure rate.

Researchers are pursuing three different paths to a vaccine. Moderna has developed an RNA vaccine. AstraZeneca has produced a viral vaccine. A French pharmaceutical company has developed an antigen vaccine. Many are going through human trials.

Usually there are three phases to these trials. Phase one determines the safety and immune response. Phase two uses a randomized trial that employs hundreds of participants. Phase three tests for efficacy and safety with thousands of people to learn about side effects.

In an attempt to speed up the process, animal and human tests were often done at the same time. Some vaccines might even be mass produced before we know the vaccine even works. If the vaccine is not effective, the stockpile would be destroyed.

One obvious question is whether speeding the process would be dangerous. Three years ago, a rushed campaign to vaccinate children in the Philippines was stopped for safety reasons. In 1976, President Gerald Ford rushed the Swine Flu vaccine program and a number of Americans developed a rare disorder where the body’s immune system attacks the nerves.

Another question is, how many Americans will be willing to be vaccinated? A recent poll indicates that only half of the country will take the vaccine when produced. Should Americans be forced to take the vaccine? These are important questions that need to be asked now.

The phrase “white privilege” has been used in the universities for years, but now the phrase is everywhere in our society. But what does it mean exactly? I suspect that more than 95 percent of the people who use the phrase don’t even know where it originated nor what it was trying to convey.

Professor Peggy McIntosh (Wellesley College) wrote a paper in 1988 about male privilege and white privilege. As a feminist author, she argued that men don’t recognize male privilege and then expanded it to argue that whites don’t recognize white privilege.

In one PragerU video, Brandon Tatum (who is African American) hasn’t faced the discrimination that is often cited by liberal activists. But he does acknowledge that we do have certain privileges. “There’s two-parent family privilege. There’s born in America privilege. There’s good gene privilege.” So, yes, some people do enjoy certain privileges because of their family background or merely that they were born in the US.

But another way to look at this is to go back to the list created by Professor McIntosh of 26 different examples of privilege she created a third of a century ago. Has some of that improved? Number 5 was “I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.” Today I can turn on lots of TV programs and news programs and see a great deal of racial diversity.

Brandon Tatum in the video mentions Number 26 which says, “I can choose blemish cover or bandages in flesh color and have them more or less match my skin.” Go to a drug store and see if that is still a problem today.

I encourage you to look at the list. Some of these privileges still exist, and that is part of the reality of the world. But I suspect you will also notice that more than three decades later much has improved.

George Floyd was killed three weeks ago, and protests have been with us since the video surfaced. You would think that some of the focus would be on who is responsible for his killing and others like it in the city. Kevin Williamson says the “answer to that question is not unknowable – but it is in many political quarters, unspeakable.”

There is a reason for that. Minneapolis is a Democratic city with a Democratic mayor and a Democratic city council that is in a state with a Democratic governor and a Democratic state house. That is why the focus hasn’t been on specific changes that should be made but on abstractions that take the focus off the politicians. But the city hasn’t been governed by abstractions but by real people.

The most concrete proposal we have heard so far is to “defund the police.” Protesters in nearly every city have called for cutting or even eliminating the budgets for law enforcement. But most cities won’t cut the police budget, except for the harsh reality that tax revenues may be less because of the pandemic lockdown. In the end, “defund the police” will be merely another abstraction.

A more reasonable solution is to abolish or reform police unions. John Fund documents how these unions protect bad cops. One retired NYPD commander writes that police unions in New York City outright protect cops. An article in the Stanford Law Review documents how police unions shield their members from public accountability.

The former Minneapolis police officer who held his knee on George Floyd’s neck had 18 prior complaints. One of the officers who stood by and did nothing has 6 complaints (one still open and another lawsuit settled by the city). This would be a good place to start by focusing on the reality rather than talking about abstractions.

George Barna has been doing an extensive inventory of the worldviews of Americans through the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. He was on my radio program last week to talk about two of his most recent surveys dealing with truth and morality.

Past generations of Americans viewed God as the basis for truth. Not only has that changed for the general population, it is also changed significantly within the church. He found that there were certain groups that rejected the idea of absolute truth. That would be members of the LGBT community, political liberals, spiritual skeptics, Democrats, and young people under the age of 50.

By contrast, those most likely to see God as the basis of truth are the group called SAGECons. That stands for Spiritually Active Governance Engaged Conservative Christians. Nearly nine out of ten (87%) point to God as the source of truth and more than six in ten (62%) recognize the existence of absolute moral standards.

In his next report, he decided to see how we apply moral principles in real life situations. The questions ranged from telling a “white lie” to failing to pay back a loan to speeding to abortion. It was troubling to see what percentage of Americans felt that some of these behaviors were not even a moral issue. In some cases, a significant percentage might have believed it was a moral issue but that it was morally acceptable in today’s society.

Another troubling finding was what Barna calls a “seismic shift” in Christian views about morality. For example, born-again Christians in the survey were three times as likely to say they rely on the Bible for primary moral guidance. But less than half (48%) actually do so.

The latest Barna surveys are a reminder to pastors and other Christian teachers that we need to make the case for moral absolutes based on God’s Word.

We have all heard the phrase: “the cure is worse than the disease.” Some have applied that to the pandemic lockdown, but is that claim really true?

Dr. Scott Atlas is both a physician and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He and his colleagues looked at the accumulated years of life lost because of the lockdown. They used information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Labor along with various actuarial tables.

Lost economic output in the US alone is estimated to be 5 percent of GDP or about $1.1 trillion for each month of the shutdown. They use a conservative average of about one additional life lost for every $17 million income lost resulting in 65,000 lives lost in the US for each month because of the economic shutdown.

Then there are the lives lost due to delayed or foregone health care. Some were prevented from getting screenings or treatments. Others avoided hospitals for fear of getting the virus. Emergency stroke evaluations are down 40 percent. Of the 650,000 cancer patients, an estimated half are missing their treatments.

Treatment delays resulted in 8,000 US deaths per month for another 120,000 years of remaining life. Missed strokes contributed an additional loss of 100,000 years of life lost for each month. Late cancer diagnoses lost 250,000 years of remaining life.

The expected lifetimes of COVID-19 patients who died account for about 800,000 lost years of life. Even the most conservative estimate for the life lost from the lockdown already exceeds 1.5 million years of lost life. The lockdown will account for more years of lost life than the virus itself.

Has Christianity made a positive impact on Western civilization? That was a question I posed a few months ago in a commentary and provided a short list of atheists who would agree with that statement. Now, there are more atheists coming to that conclusion.

Jonathon Van Maren writes about a number of atheists who he calls “King Agrippa Christians.” After the Apostle Paul gave his testimony and the gospel, the king said he was nearly persuaded. None of the atheists Van Maren mentions have become Christians, but they do acknowledge the important contribution of Christianity to our world.

One example is the historian Tom Holland, who often writes about the ancient world. His new book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, makes a convincing case for Christianity. Christian writers who have read the book praise it because it provides examples that various Christian historians have documented.

The ancient world was cruel. Spartans, for example, routinely killed off “imperfect” children. The bodies of slaves were treated like outlets for physical pleasure. Only a few citizens had rights.

Holland explains that Christianity changed the prevailing views about sex and marriage. It demanded that men control themselves. It placed sex within marriage and within monogamy. And Christianity elevated the status of women. To put it simply, Christianity transformed the world.

Without Christianity, the Western world as we know it would not exist. If the West had not become Christian, Holland writes, “no one would have gotten woke.”

This growing list of atheists who say positive things about Christianity is encouraging. They are willing to admit that Christianity has been a force for good in our world.

Sometimes I feel that my responsibility is to provide context for events in the news. That was certainly the case when riots that started in Minneapolis broke out in cities across the country. Certain media personalities felt it was their responsibility to excuse and even downplay the violence and property damage of the rioters.

This is not a new phenomenon. We need to explain, especially to our younger audience, that liberal and progressive stars in the media have been doing this since the 1960s. That is why Kyle Smith in a recent column felt the need to say, “Don’t excuse, defend, or encourage rioters.” You might think that would be obvious. Apparently, it is not. Here are a few of the ways excuses were made for the rioters.

Some commentators want to keep telling you that what you see is merely a protest and not a riot. Holding a sign and marching in the street is one thing. Throwing rocks at law enforcement, breaking windows, stopping cars, and beating up bystanders is quite another. The general public knows the difference even if some media personnel do not.

Some commentators suggest that property damage is merely an example of free speech expression. People who are frustrated sometimes throw something or break something. That may be understandable but it’s not justifiable. But media personnel who sympathize with the frustrations of rioters never have to deal with the consequences. I suspect they would feel differently if it was there car or store set on fire.

Other commentators argue that riots are the only way to attain justice in a rigged system. But even that argument falls flat when we see riots in cities where both the mayor and the police chief are African American. Nor do they explain how burning down the police headquarters advances any form of justice.

This isn’t a difficult call. No one should be trying to excuse or defend rioters.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal asked an insightful question. “Where would President Trump be if his critics didn’t so often help him?” What they are talking about was the decision by Twitter to fact-check the president for the first time.

The president wrote that mail-in voting in places like California would be “substantially fraudulent” because the governor is sending ballots out to anyone living in the state. Twitter reminded everyone that the ballots are sent only to registered voters, but then falsely stated that “there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.”

In previous commentaries I’ve talked about problems with mail-in ballots. The Heritage Foundation database currently lists over 1,285 proven instances of voter fraud, with nearly half involving absentee ballots and mail-in ballots. There is no chain of custody between the voter and the ballot box. Fraud and abuse can take place without any oversight. It is also worth mentioning that a congressional election in North Carolina was overturned because of clear evidence of abuse.

Why did Twitter pick this Trump tweet to fact check? Over the last few years, he has posted a number of tweets that probably deserved to be evaluated by Twitter more than this one.

Twitter handed to the president more evidence that the Big Tech companies are out to get him and his followers. They could have let the president’s critics counter his comments. But Twitter decided to put on a striped shirt and play umpire.

That’s why President Trump signed an executive order that allows the government to evaluate the legal protections in the Communications Decency Act. The order will be challenged in court and isn’t even supported by some of the president’s conservative followers. But it has raised the stakes in the debate about the influence of Big Tech.