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Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement. Now also a Blogger on the Times of Israel. Look for my column

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My 100th trip to the Har Habayit on Tish Abov 2020 and why the Temple Mount is Controversial.

Here is my trip of my own pictures that I have put on Youtube. After a little explanation, I will share my own history.

https://youtu.be/7TAOg9ep35Q

Many people make the common mistake, of calling the Western Wall "the holiest site in Judaism," when, in fact, it is the Temple Mount.

The landmark is of deep religious significance to both Judaism and Islam, which is why it has been the focal point of conflict for decades (and centuries before modern Israel).

For Jews, it is the holiest site, the location of the two Holy Temples that were destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the Romans in 70 CE, and the anticipated site of the third Temple in the Messianic era.

For many Jews who don't identify as religious, the Temple Mount remains symbolically significant nevertheless. As the secular Moshe Dayan announced to Israeli newspapers on July 8, 1967, "We have returned to our holiest site never to part with it again."

When Moshe Dayan decided to relinquish Israeli control of the Temple Mount, and permit Jewish visitation but restrict Jewish prayer there, he set in place a policy that has been maintained ever since. He compromised for what he thought was the sake of peace, stating: "We did not come to conquer the sacred sites of others or to restrict their religious rights, but rather to ensure the integrity of the city and to live in it with others in fraternity.

Moshe Dayan's spontaneous concession was without any government approval, yet he saw this decision as one that would prevent the Arab-Israeli conflict from turning into a Holy War. Interestingly, his decision at the time met with the approval of most Israeli religious leaders, who wanted to prevent Jews from unwittingly trespassing on the Holy of Holies.

In September 2000, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon paid a visit to the Temple Mount. Many Palestinians were furious and rioting ensued. Some have credited this act with sparking the Second Intifada, in which over 1,000 Israelis were killed and 7,000 injured. Others, however, disagree.

Jewish tradition holds that the very world originated here, with a Foundation Rock located beneath the Temple (hence the Arab title to the current building, Dome of the Rock). The Western Wall is often mistaken as the holiest site in Judaism, but the wall is merely a remnant of the outer foundation walls of the Second Temple (not of the second temple itself), a reminder of the great edifice that once stood, and the closest Jews were able to come to the Temple Mount for centuries. For Muslims, this is the third-holiest site after Mecca and Medina. It is where they believe Muhammed was miraculously transported from Mecca on his "Night Journey," and from where he ascended to heaven. Both the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque were built in the 7th century. According to both Judaism and Islam, the Temple Mount is where Abraham performed the binding of his son: Isaac, according to the Torah, and Ishmael, according to Islam.

Interestingly, most religious Jews are comfortable with maintaining the status quo; they do not even wish to enter or pray at the Temple Mount. Why? Because according to traditional Jewish law, the site of the Holy of Holies, the holiest point within the Temple, is forbidden to the average person (and reserved for the High Priest on Yom Kippur). The exact location of this point is unknown, and therefore one may not walk around in the vicinity for fear of accidental trespass. This is the position of the Chief Rabbinate, most Haredi rabbis, and many religious Zionist rabbis. Last year on Tisha B'Av, Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef stated, "it is imperative to recall that the pilgrimage to the Temple Mount is forbidden by Jewish law."

There is, however, a strong contingent within the religious Zionist camp that does allow people to visit the Temple Mount (after immersing in a mikvah, ritual bath, and walking along a precise route). This group pushes for increased Jewish access to the Temple Mount, arguing that Jews should certainly be allowed to pray at their holiest site. Former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren permitted ascension to the Temple Mount according to Jewish Law; he himself was present and blew the shofar when Israel captured the Old City in 1967, and he wrote a book called Har Habayit explaining the matter in depth. The most well-known proponent today of Ascension is former MK Yehuda Glick, who survived an assassination attempt in 2014 after speaking on this topic. He has stated, "I will do all that is in my power to end the injustice that takes place every day at the holiest place in the world, where police officers are under orders to check whether a 90-year-old Jew is, G-d forbid, moving his lips or not."

In service of engendering empathy, ask to imagine the feeling of being a Jew at Judaism's holiest site, and to be watched over while Muslim officials ensure you do not move your lips in a way that might indicate prayer.

My own history of trips to the temple mount start in 1990 when I came to Israel for the first time. I didn't know the religious restrictions at the time and even went into the dome of the rock, since at that time it was permitted for tourists (no longer today).

Since then I have gone many times with groups and on my own. When I would go on my American passport and not specifically as a Jew, I could stay as long as I wanted to and pray privately and no one said a word to me. When I go as a Jew the police walk us around on a short escorted tour. Over the years, the Arabs would pay zealots to throw stuff at us yelling Ala Ackbar and threatening us. On my last trip on Tish Abov, the authorities didn't even ask for my passport. I live across the street from the old city and can see the Har Habit from the Dan Hotel behind my house. All I can say, is that your life in Israel is not complete until you have been on the holiest site in Judaism, The Temple Mount (Har Habayit).

https://youtu.be/7TAOg9ep35Q

Is Jeffrey Epstein's Money Funding Leftist 'Black Flag' Riots in Israel?

The anti-Israel protests are backed by a group funded by the world's worst child rapist.

Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Even as coronavirus cases rose sharply in Israel, radicals waving black flags, PLO terrorist flags, and Israeli flags defaced with black, continued their protests against Israel's government.

While millions of Israelis were facing the prospect of returning to lockdown in their own homes, the radicals gathered in huge groups in Kings of Israel Square, hung black flags on historical sites, and clashed violently with police officers who were trying to stop these violent extremists.

Despite their lack of regard for public health, the radical rallies were praised by everyone from former prime minister Ehud Barak to the Israeli Communist Party: part of the Islamic Joint List.

Barak's support for the rallies wasn't surprising since a Channel 13 investigation found that the National Responsibility Association had allegedly spent 100,000 shekels (approximately $30,000) on equipment, publicity, and even potentially expenses incurred by the protesters.

The National Responsibility Association had been set up a few years ago by Oshi Elmaleh, Barak's political adviser, and by his aides and his niece. At the time, Haaretz had described it as a platform for the left-wing politician to relaunch his career. These days the organization claims that it's deeply interested in democracy and fighting the "far-right".

But the Channel 13 investigation suggests that it's actually playing a major role in the rallies.

Early on, Barak appeared to borrow the symbol of the front group in an op-ed titled, "A Sick Country and a Black Flag", and praised the radicals who have been staging the protests.

While astroturf rallies and front groups are a common feature of left-wing Israeli politics, there is a much more troubling angle to the Black Flag movement and Barak's alleged involvement.

"The Palestinian Authority flag at a left-wing protest organized by Ehud Barak, the partner of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, yesterday outside the prime minister's house in Jerusalem. Shame and disgrace," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently tweeted.

Next day, protesters outside Barak's house carried signs reading, "Black Flag protests – financed by money from the sex trafficking of minors".

The accusations touched on one of the most sensitive issues in Israeli left-wing politics.

In one of the more shocking photos of the Epstein case, Barak was photographed hiding his face as he entered Epstein's Manhattan townhouse in 2016. The British tabloid noted that on the same day four young women had also entered the now infamous mansion.

One of the women was a Russian model whose father was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Red Army, who had attended a university described as an incubator for the KGB, and whose non-profit advocating for diversity in STEM had been reportedly funded by Epstein.

Barak claimed that he was covering his face because of the cold and denied any wrongdoing.

"I was there, for lunch or chat, nothing else. So what?" the leftist politician claimed. "I never attended a party with him. I never met Epstein in the company of women or young girls,"

Barak then threatened to sue the Daily Mail for the "sordid institutions". That was in 2019.

After the photos came to light, Barak tweeted, "I admit, I usually cover my face when it is cold. Not just in New York. Everywhere in the world. I did not know that this was newsworthy."

January 2016 was actually New York City's second warmest winter on record and locals enjoyed temperatures as high as 59° Fahrenheit

More relevant than whether Barak was hiding his face while paying a visit to the world's most notorious pedophile because of the weather, was his business relationship with Epstein.

Barak claimed to have met Epstein at a party a year after having to leave office where, in his own words, "there were many famous and important people, including, if I recall, both Clintons."

The former prime minister owed his time in office to Bill Clinton, who had allegedly dispatched his advisers to intervene in the election between Netanyahu and Barak. Obama had made a similar effort to intervene in the Israeli elections against Netanyahu, but Clinton had succeeded.

Barak claimed to have been introduced to Epstein by his corrupt Labor Party predecessor, Shimon Peres, who had been defeated by Netanyahu, despite Clinton's intervention.

"It would be fair to say that I tried to help Peres win the elections, and I tried to help him in such a way that I would not be openly involved," Bill Clinton later admitted in an interview with Israel's Channel 10.

In the interview, Clinton fumed that he was "embarrassed by the audacity" of Netanyahu.

His next choice, Barak, did succeed in taking down Netanyahu, aided by top Clinton advisers,

James Carville, Robert Shrum, and Stanley Greenberg. But then Netanyahu made a comeback.

"You should never underestimate him," Clinton commented on Netanyahu's recent victory.

Back in 2001, Barak had lost badly to Sharon, and he was soon looking for career opportunities. A New York Times article noted Barak's role in global finance, lobbying for big investments from a union in America as a director of a fund run by an unrelated namesake of Winston Churchill.

During this period, he would later claim to have been earning over $1 million a year. Meanwhile he was engaging in business ventures around the world at firms whose names he kept secret.

In 2006, Barak deposited 38 million Japanese yen in a Cayman Islands bank. In 2007, he made a comeback in a unity government with Prime Minister Olmert, who was later convicted and imprisoned on bribery charges. The Olmert-Barak coalition was a disaster for Israeli security and Barak once again announced that he was leaving politics. He began by selling his 31st floor tower apartment, complete with gym, pool, and spa, for $7 million.

Four years later, Barak was touting a new app named Reporty. Two years later it was renamed Carbyne and was backed by $1 million in Barak's money and by Jeffrey Epstein's cash. While Barak was the chairman of Carbyne, Epstein had a stake of about 5% in a company valued at around $100 million.

But Epstein didn't just invest in Barak's company, he also invested in Barak's political ambitions.

When Barak's associates launched the National Responsibility Association, money poured in from American businessmen. The biggest donation came from activist investor Bill Ackman, a top Democrat donor. Ackman, who is married to MIT's Neri Oxman, had urged MIT to keep his wife's name out of the university's Epstein scandal, after Epstein donated $125,000 to her lab.

"I don't want to see her forced into a position where to protect her name she Is required to be transparent about everything that took place at MIT with Epstein," Ackman wrote to MIT Media Lab bosses about his wife.

A 44,000 shekel ($40,647) donation to the National Responsibility Association came from HBRK Associates. HBRK was Epstein's secret non-profit.

Barak denied any wrongdoing. He protested that, "like many respectable people in the United States that we have heard about, I would have preferred in retrospect for this relationship to never have been formed." But when he was visiting Epstein's townhouse in 2016, the pedophile's crimes were public knowledge. Epstein had been tried and sentenced in 2008.

"He'd served his sentence for soliciting prostitution, the indictment didn't say she was a minor," Barak protested to Channel 12, when asked about his Epstein ties.

Residents of a building owned by Epstein's brother, which had been allegedly used to house underage girls sent to Epstein's parties, frequently reported seeing Barak or his security people.

When asked about his visits, Barak claimed that he couldn't answer the question because of Israeli politics. "Despite the fact that there was no wrongdoing on my part, and that there is not even the faintest suspicion of wrongdoing on my part, I'm not going to address these questions."

Barak claimed to have met Epstein, "more than 10 times and much less than a hundred times, but I can't tell you exactly how many" and admitted to visiting what had been dubbed, Pedophile Island, but claimed that it was, "years after the publications about sex parties or orgies there."

It's not clear why Barak thought that would be a defense.

The National Responsibility Association promised to transfer Epstein's donation to at-risk youth, meanwhile it seems to be using its money to fund radical protests targeting Netanyahu.

And it doesn't end there.

Netanyahu allies have repeatedly raised the question of the $2.3 million that Barak received from the Wexner Foundation. Les Wexner, the Victoria's Secret billionaire, was the alleged source of much of Epstein's wealth.

Barak insisted, once again, that it was no one's business. "My services are in demand, and there are bodies prepared to pay me large sums for them."

The Wexner Foundation claimed that it had paid Barak $2.3 million to write two papers. The second paper on the subject of leadership had never actually been written.

"We wish to put an end to ugly insinuations, speculations and rumors aimed at tarnishing the foundation's name without justification," the Wexner Foundation contended.

In July, Israel cut off ties to the Wexner Foundation over allegations that it was indoctrinating high-level participants in its activities with left-wing politics.

The Wexner Foundation partners with the Jim Joseph Fund, which funds the BDS-linked NIF.

A Netanyahu video asked, "What else has sex offender Epstein given to Barak?"

Barak has continued denying the Epstein allegations, angrily asserting last month that, "In the Netflix documentary that was very comprehensive, my name was not mentioned once."

Meanwhile the hateful Black Flag protests continue to undermine and divide Israel.

Borrowing from the rhetoric of the antisemitic Black Lives Matter movement, Barak asserted that, "Netanyahu and his gang are sitting on the Knesset's neck just as the white police officer did on the neck of George Floyd". The Black Flag movement that the National Responsibility Association is funding uses the same white and red on black color scheme as BLM.

The color coordination and the branding strongly suggest that the Black Flag movement is yet another example of an Israeli astroturf group invented by American political consultants. A number of these "social movements" protesting for social justice have come and gone. Their protests were invariably in phase with some Israeli politician's ambitions and his D.C. consultants, who were free and weren't working on a Clinton or Obama campaign at the time.

But Epstein's money adds a darker tone to the Black Flag campaign against corruption.

Netanyahu reminded Israelis that the protests by social justice activists are not only backed by one of the country's shadiest politicians, but by an organization funded by a child rapist.

And as the Black Flag protests worsen Israel's coronavirus crisis, Jeffrey Epstein's money may not only be advancing left-wing politics, but wrecking Israel's economy and even costing lives.

As Black Flag rioters block roads, throw things at police officers, and start fires, spreading hate and the virus, somewhere deep down, Jeffrey Epstein may be smiling.

Betraying Jewish history by watering down the Holocaust by Melanie Phllips

Unless the Holocaust is seen as it really was, the attempt to
exterminate an entire people, it can be turned against the Jews. Op-ed.

The British baroness Ruth Deech, whose family were Jewish refugees from Nazism, recently delivered an impassioned address to the Oxford Jewish community about the way that the Holocaust is being evacuated of meaning by memorials and museums in its name.

Her concern was prompted by the controversial plan to build a Holocaust memorial and learning center in London's Victoria Tower Gardens, a small park near the Houses of Parliament.

Westminster council, the local planning authority, has turned down this proposal on environmental grounds. The space is a small, green oasis that would not only be marred by a jarring brutalist structure, but risks becoming submerged by tourist traffic and anti-Jewish vandals alike.

The British government is making extraordinary and arguably irregular efforts to overturn this decision and get this center built. Its insistence is all the more strange given that there are already five major Holocaust memorials in Britain.

Deech's concerns, however, go far deeper than inappropriate positioning. Her sharpest point is that these memorials tend to shy away from the real causes of Jew-hatred. Instead, they are increasingly being used to promote a self-congratulatory and sometimes self-exculpatory image of the country that erects them.

Britain's memorials, for example, do not note how in the 1930s and 1940s, the U.K. government blocked the entry into Palestine of desperate European Jews, in flagrant repudiation of the British Mandate to settle Jews there, thus facilitating their extermination in the Nazi slaughter.

Hungary, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries have used Holocaust memorializing to erase their own complicity in the slaughter of the Jews, presenting themselves instead as historic victims of the Nazis or else equating the Nazi killing of Jews with the Soviet killing of other minorities.

As Deech observed, the Holocaust tends to be lumped together with other genocides and examples of racism or persecution, thus watering down its significance. The message becomes a generalized one of avoiding hatred and intolerance.

But that doesn't address or explain the roots of the Holocaust: "Namely, centuries of Jewish persecution; first, on the grounds of religion, and then on the grounds of race, and now on the grounds of a distorted left-wing view of the State of Israel."

Of course, governments and nations should stand against all bigotry and persecution. But this kumbaya-esque mush robs Holocaust memorializing of its key point: that the Holocaust was a unique atrocity.

So it's not surprising that more and more people are viewing it as just one of many equivalent crimes against humanity.

That's why it's been used to draw a comparison with the appalling treatment of the Uighurs by the Chinese regime. Video footage has surfaced of blindfolded and shackled Uighurs being led onto trains taking them to indoctrination camps. There are reports of forced sterilizations, abortions and rapes.

This caused Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, to protest to the Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom about the "similarities between what is alleged to be happening in China" and "what happened in Nazi Germany 75 years ago: people being forcibly loaded onto trains, beards of religious men being trimmed, women being sterilized, and the grim picture of concentration camps."

Progressive "post-colonial" scholarship holds—preposterously—that emphasizing the singularity of the Holocaust diminishes and squeezes out other suffering and victimization.

A London rabbi, Moshe Freedman, agreed and writes in The Jewish Chroniclethat Holocaust education "was never exclusively about the survival of the Jews or the injustices that were perpetrated again us. It was about global human decency, morality and justice."

But the Holocaust didn't involve "injustices" against the Jews. It involved the attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish people.

The measures against the Uighurs and other Chinese Muslims amount to an attempt to stop them from practicing their faith and turn them instead into indoctrinated clones of the Chinese Communist Party.

That's horrific, of course. But it's not the same as the Holocaust, whose unique characteristic was its aim to wipe the entire Jewish people off the face of the earth.

It took a non-Jewish British MP, Alistair Carmichael, a vice chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on China, to uphold the principle that is in such danger of being lost.

Observing that states around the world "need to hold the Chinese Government to account for their brutal suppression of the Uighurs," he added: "It is never a good idea to compare any contemporary incident to the Holocaust. My fundamental rule is that nothing can be compared to the Holocaust."

Renowned scholars have also stated in the past that the Holocaust was an event without parallel. The philosopher Emil Fackenheim said that, while it belonged to the category of "genocide," the planned and largely executed borderless extermination of the Jews was "unique."

Another Jewish philosopher, David Patterson, went further and said that the Holocaust couldn't be reduced to a case of genocide.

"The Nazis set out to annihilate more than a people. … They set out to annihilate a fundamental principle; to obliterate millennia of Jewish teaching and testimony; to destroy the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; to eradicate a way of understanding God, world, and humanity embodied by the Jews in particular."

The main driver of the Holocaust was not racism, nor hatred of "the other," nor a dehumanizing view of certain groups—a view the Nazis shared with much progressive Western opinion in the 19th and early-20th centuries.

It was instead a paranoid and deranged view of the Jewish people as an evil conspiracy of positively supernatural proportions, and who therefore had to be wiped off the face of the earth. This is not recognizable in any other prejudice, bigotry or hatred directed at any other people or group.

But for some, the uniqueness of Jewish suffering is an intolerable fact that must be suppressed. Progressive "post-colonial" scholarship holds—preposterously—that emphasizing the singularity of the Holocaust diminishes and squeezes out other suffering and victimization.

Many Diaspora Jews, moreover, run a mile from any suggestion that the Jews are fundamentally different. They believe their safety and security rest upon not standing out from their surrounding societies.

Which is why they are so anxious to claim that their historic persecution is on the same level as the suffering of others, and that anti-Semitism is just another form of "racism" or "othering."

They thus join forces with those who want to deny Jews their true status as the world's ultimate victims.

And it's been but a short step from that to the false and malevolent view that the Jews of Israel have ended up doing to the Palestinians what was done to them.

As Baroness Deech observed: "The more the national Holocaust remembrance day events are packed out, the more the calls for sanctions on Israel that would result in her destruction, and the more the Holocaust is turned against the Jews. I hear it in parliament—'after all you people went through, look what you are doing to the Palestinians; have you learned nothing.' "

Many peoples and groups in the world suffer untold horrors at the hands of brutal regimes. Jews and others have a duty to speak out against the persecution of the Uighurs and all who are being victimized by the Chinese Communist Party.

But there is also a duty to speak up for the uniqueness of the Holocaust: a duty not to betray the facts of Jewish history by minimizing the particular evil of Europe's darkest moment, a madness that singled out the Jewish people for a fate reserved for them alone.

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for "The Times of London," her personal and political memoir, "Guardian Angel," has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, "The Legacy," in 2018. Her work can be found at: www.melaniephillips.com.

Socialist Distancing

Sacrificing science to destroy American community.

Joseph Hippolito--Front Page Magazine

When The Great Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020 hit the United States, many Americans were more than willing to wear masks and maintain social distancing to "flatten the curve."

Then came George Floyd's death in police custody. Then came protests featuring thousands of activists across the nation -- social distancing be damned.

Not even Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, the pandemic's two most visible experts, initially expressed concern -- let alone alarm -- about the blatant disregard of health protocols when the protests began. Indeed, Fauci waited 12 days after Floyd's death to comment publicly.

Many Americans now realize that they have been -- and continue to be -- deceived. Meanwhile, their emotional and psychological health rapidly deteriorate because of draconian mandates ostensibly designed to protect them.

Scientific studies provide specifics. Research conducted by Johns Hopkins and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed a dramatic increase in the percentage of American adults displaying symptoms of psychological stress.

The study revealed that 13.6 percent of adults showed such symptoms in April, compared to 3.9 percent in 2018. The most striking increases appeared among adults with incomes less than $35,000 (19.3 percent from 7.9 percent), Latinos (18.3 from 4.4) and adults between 18 and 29 (24 from 3.7).

The researchers listed social distancing as one of the factors contributing to the accelerating stress, which "may transfer to longer-term psychiatric disorders requiring clinical care," wrote Beth McGinty.

In April, the New England Journal of Medicine published a paper by Drs. Carol North and Betty Pfefferbaum. They concluded that the social isolation imposed through self-quarantining and stay-at-home orders leads to "stress, irritability, insomnia, fear, confusion, anger, frustration, boredom, and stigma associated with quarantine," they wrote.

Those factors increase not only the risk of drug and alcohol abuse, they added, but also suicide.

"Extensive research in disaster mental health has established that emotional distress is ubiquitous in affected populations," they wrote, "a finding certainly to be echoed in populations affected by the Covid-19 pandemic."

Social distancing even sabotages the body's ability to fight viruses.

In 2015, the National Academy of Sciences published a study showing how social isolation inhibits cells at the genetic level from producing antiviral agents. Instead, they produce anti-inflammatory substances that weaken the immune system.

"That social connection really boosts the immune system," said Shiva Ayyadurai, who holds a doctorate in biological engineering from MIT. "It boosts antiviral compounds when you feel safe and friendly and secure and in good social relationships.

"When you're socially isolated, you don't trust people and you have all that psychological stress, your body will actually create inflammation and lower antiviral compounds."

Supposedly, Democrats and their left-wing comrades would take such information seriously, since they claim to value science and compassion. But they not only ignore the evidence. They intensify their own despotism.

In Kentucky, authorities placed a couple under house arrest -- complete with ankle monitors -- because the wife would not sign forms demanding self-quarantine.

Elizabeth Linscott took a Covid-19 test July 11 because she planned to visit family in Michigan. Though she displayed no symptoms, Linscott tested positive. Afterward, the commonwealth's health department sent her the requisite forms.

But Linscott refused to sign because of the following demand: "I will not travel in any public, commercial or health-care conveyance, such as an ambulance, bus, taxi, airplane, train or boat without the prior approval of the Department for Public Health."

"My part was if I have to go to the ER, if I have to go to the hospital, I'm not going to wait to get the approval to go," Linscott told Louisville's WAVE-TV.

The department told Linscott by text that law enforcement would get involved. On July 16, the Hardin County sheriff visited the Linscotts' home with a posse.

"I open up the door, and there's like eight different people, five different cars, and I'm like 'What the heck's going on?' " said Linscott's husband, Isaiah. "This guy's in a suit with a mask. It's the health department guy, and they have three papers for us -- for me, her and my daughter."

The sheriff attached the ankle monitors, which notify police if either husband or wife travels more than 200 feet.

"We didn't rob a store," Elizabeth Linscott said. "We didn't steal something. We didn't hit and run. We didn't do anything wrong."

So what do "progressives" and their Democratic minions want? At least three things, as FrontPage magazine showed in the 42, "Liberal Masquerade."

First, they want to encourage mail-in voting, which enables them to manipulate elections for their benefit. Second, they want to impede legitimate investigations into criminal behavior allegedly committed by members of the FBI and the Justice Department under President Barack Obama's administration. Third, they want to condition Americans to accept more powerful restrictions on their freedom.

As scientific studies show, social distancing instills fear, anxiety, suspicion, loneliness and hopelessness. Add the violent civil disorder that Democrats encourage, and you have the optimal recipe for mass societal depression, where energetic initiative against the "progressive" tide becomes impossible.

Social distancing is not about containing the Covid-19 virus. It is about destroying the American people.