I saw an interesting article over at Daily Wire that talks about the most dangerous country in the world for Christians: Nigeria. I thought Nigeria has Boko Haram running around kidnapping people, but the article says that “roughly 90% of all martyrs in 2022 — over 5,000 Christians murdered for their faith — were from Nigeria.” The author of the article is from ADF, so it’s reliable.

The article is paywalled, but here’s an archived copy.

Excerpt:

Northern Nigeria is a place where the Church faces some of the worst persecution on earth. According to Open Doors, roughly 90% of all martyrs in 2022 — over 5,000 Christians murdered for their faith — were from Nigeria.

One of those martyrs was Deborah Emmanuel Yakubu, a Christian student at a university in Sokoto State, who in May 2022 was stoned to death and burnt by her Muslim classmates because of her faith in Jesus. Another Christian woman, Rhoda Jatau, faced a mob and was arrested for blasphemy after the mob accused her of sharing a video that insulted Islam because it condemned the lynching of Deborah.
Rhoda sat in a jail in Bauchi State, Nigeria, for over 18 months because of the accusations. She only saw her family and lawyers at court hearings.

But through her witness to the injustice of the treatment of Christians in Northern Nigeria, both by extremist Islamist mobs and baseless prosecutions, her case caused national outrage.
Earlier this month, after enormous national outcry, Rhoda was finally released on bail, able to spend Christmas this year with her family in safety. While the charges against her are still pending, many within Nigeria and internationally are pushing for them to be dropped fully.

There are a couple of signs that things are improving in the article, here’s one:

As with many places where Christians are a religious minority, converts to Christianity, particularly from Islam, often find it extremely dangerous to practice their faith. Daniel Kefee* was an evangelist in Northern Nigeria who brought a young Muslim woman, Hafsatu*, to Christ. But when her family found out, members of her family threatened to kill her. She sought out help from Daniel, who found a Christian residential school that could care for her.

For helping Hafsatu, Daniel was charged by Nigerian authorities with kidnapping. Yet Daniel and his lawyers bravely presented to the court the reality of what had happened. In an astonishing result given the region, the judge not only acquitted Daniel, but prodded the prosecutors, asking them, “should the defendant have left the girl, what would have happened with her?”

And another one:

Also this year, in another state in Northern Nigeria, a young woman named Mary Olowe* similarly converted to Christianity and faced death threats from her family. She was able to flee and filed for a restraining order against those who threatened her. Once again, the court issued a remarkable decision, granting the order and explicitly recognizing as a fundamental right Mary’s ability to change her religion from Islam to Christianity without facing any threat of violence.

If you like to pray for Christians in other countries, Nigeria should probably be your first pick. The Muslims there are clearly out gunning for Christians. It would be nice if our elected officials in the Biden administration were doing something about this, but I don’t think they care. They have other priorities.

The GOP primary is about to begin in Iowa, and it’s a contest between a man who talks about himself, and a man who solves problems. One BIG problem in this country is teacher unions. Teacher unions collect mandatory dues from teachers, and they use those to advocate for far-left policies. But in Florida, DeSantis made a plan, and he executed that plan. And now the results are here.

Here’s the latest from Florida Voice:

As much as 60% of Miami-Dade public school educators could be withheld from representation after the state’s largest teachers union failed to meet membership requirements under state law.

United Teachers of Dade, the largest union in the country, reportedly did not meet the required threshold after some teachers opted out of paying membership dues.

[…]Signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, SB 256 mandates a union must apply for recertification if its membership dues fail to reach 60%. According to a report, UTD’s membership dues reached 58.4%.

[…]Under the law, unions are barred from directly withdrawing funds from public employee paychecks. An employee, such as a teacher, also must opt into a union to send payments.

SB 256 is a DeSantis bill. Passed by the legislators he helped to elect. And so when it got to his desk, he signed it.

“If United Teachers of Dade spent half as much time paying attention to their members’ interests as they have been pushing a political agenda with Randi Weingarten and running for office with Charlie Crist, they probably wouldn’t even be in this position,” Freedom Foundation Director or Labor Relations Allison Beattie said.

[…]“We were approached this summer by a number of teachers in Miami-Dade County who were unhappy seeing their hard-earned paychecks going into the pockets of union officers while those same officers have consistently negotiated away pay and benefits,” Beattie said.

[…]“We’re not surprised UTD couldn’t make the 60 percent threshold, because they’ve lost focus of their mission – representing rank and file teachers,” Beattie continued. “The union sends 46 percent of its budget to unions like the AFL-CIO, National Education Association, and Randi Weingarten.”

This is a historic win for conservatives:

According to the Freedom Foundation, United Teachers of Dade’s fracture is the largest decertified vote in American history.

How did DeSantis get the teachers to want to opt out of paying union dues? Well, Florida is a right-to-work state, so workers don’t have to join a union in order to work. They have the freedom to work without having to join a union. If they think that the union provides value worth their dues, then they can join and pay the dues. Traditionally, labor unions have pressured employers for higher pay. And that’s where the genius of Ron DeSantis can be seen. He has been taking away the need for teacher unions by paying teachers very well. That’s why the enrollment in unions has come down in Florida. This is wonderful for conservatives, because teacher unions are major proponents of every secular left policy you can imagine. Not just on fiscal issues, but on social issues, and foreign policy.

This article from Fox News explains why teacher unions are bad:

Universal school choice made significant gains in 2023 when a wave of red states passed legislation. Now, more states are looking to join the fold next year, a phenomenon called a “school choice revolution.”

American Federation For Children Senior Fellow Corey DeAngelis told Fox News Digital recently to look out for more states passing universal school choice legislation because a sea change is underway.

[…]DeAngelis added that school choice is difficult to pass in traditionally blue states like California, Illinois, and New York because the Democratic Party is “owned by the teachers union.”

“You look at Randi Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers, in 2022, according to Open Secrets, 99.97% of the contributions from Randi’s AFT went to Democrats as opposed to independents or Republicans,” DeAngelis said.

He explained further, “It’s basically an elaborate money laundering scheme where the Democrats funnel the money to the government schools and then the teachers unions take that money and they give it back to the Democratic Party. It’s a nonstop wash, rinse, repeat money laundering scheme where the teachers unions are basically an arm of the Democratic Party at this point.”

When Donald Trump was president for four years, he did absolutely nothing to take on teacher unions. Ron DeSantis is doing it now. If he loses the GOP primary, he’ll keep on fighting teacher unions. But if he wins, he’ll be fighting teacher unions at the federal level, in all 50 states. We can have that, if we vote wisely.

It’s the end of the year, and I thought it would be a good time to review five FBI scandals. Then you can decide for yourself whether you think that the FBI is doing a good job of enforcing the law. And remember, you’re paying their salaries with your tax dollars, so you have to decide whether you are getting good value for your money. Let’s take a look at some of the scandals.

Here is an article about the scandals from Fox News.

Attack Republicans:

Former counterintelligence FBI special agent Charles McGonigal — who led New York’s counterintelligence division and played a critical role in the alleged Trump-Russia collusion investigation — was earlier this month sentenced to four years in prison for charges related to colluding with a Russian oligarch.

[…]In May, Special Counsel John Durham released a long-awaited final report to the Justice Department, which spans more than 300 pages of his years-long investigation into the origins of “Crossfire Hurricane.” Durham found that both the DOJ and FBI “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law” when it launched the Trump-Russia investigation.

Durham said his investigation also revealed that “senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically-affiliated persons and entities.”

Protect Democrats:

While Trump and members of his inner circle remain at the center of several investigations, the bureau faced backlash for declining requests from House Republicans to release an unclassified FBI document that contained claims from an informant that President Biden was allegedly involved in foreign business dealings with his family.

But after the bureau balked for months to turn over the document to lawmakers, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, obtained the internal material — known as an FD-1023 — and released it to the public. The document accused the FBI of improperly delaying or completely shutting down a full investigation into the Biden family.

Pre-dawn raiding the homes of peaceful pro-lifers:

When the FBI wasn’t focused on — or allegedly turning a blind eye to — the White House, the bureau was slapped with a $1.1 million lawsuit in November brought by Catholic father and pro-life activist Mark Houck, who was arrested in his home in 2022 by FBI agents over a previous altercation outside a Planned Parenthood. A 12-person jury later unanimously acquitted Houck on all charges of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.

Houck filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department seeking restitution for what it called “a faulty investigation” and “excessive force” after a SWAT team of around 25 people arrested him in front of his children. The lawsuit alleges government agents deprived Houck of his Fourth Amendment rights by using excessive force to arrest him on non-violent charges.

Persecute taxpayers for their religious views:

Perhaps the bureau’s most shocking moment in 2023 came in February when former FBI agent Seraphin exposed an unclassified intelligence document from the FBI’s Richmond field office in Virginia that appeared to target traditional Catholics as so-called potential domestic terrorists, which immediately forced the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., to purge the anti-Catholic memo from its system.

After the bureau said it would “never conduct investigative activities or open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity,” lawmakers in the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government launched an investigation into the FBI and discovered that the bureau interviewed a priest and a choir director affiliated with a Catholic church in Richmond, Virginia.

You have to decide for yourself whether the FBI uses it’s power to break laws for the benefit of the Democrat party. You have to decide for yourself whether they’ve abandoned their duty to protect the Americans who pay their salaries. You have to decide for yourself whether the FBI persecutes American taxpayers solely on the basis of their first amendment activities. You have to decide whether the FBI is in violation of the Constitution – or maybe even at war with the Constitution. Vote accordingly in 2024.