Policymakers across the U.S. are finally pushing back against Wall Street firms buying up single-family homes to rent at high prices. However, they face formidable opposition from a powerful new single-family rental lobby.

Wall Street firms like FirstKey Homes have been buying entire neighborhood blocks, driving up corporate purchases of single-family homes. Housing advocates warn that these companies are harming tenants and pricing out potential homebuyers. Policymakers in various states and Washington, DC, are starting to push back, but the powerful single-family rental lobby presents a significant challenge.

The pandemic-era real estate boom has accelerated corporate landlords' acquisition of assets, especially in fast-growing markets like Phoenix and Atlanta. These companies prioritize short-term profits, driving up housing prices and exacerbating the housing crisis. Research shows that corporate landlords file for more evictions than smaller landlords, often trapping tenants with late fees and surprise costs.

Chris Noble, policy director at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, explains that institutional investors are driven by the need to provide returns to their shareholders, often at the expense of tenants. This focus on profit has led to significant issues for renters, including deteriorating living conditions and frequent evictions.

In response to the growing crisis, Senator Jeff Merkley introduced a bill in December to end corporate ownership of single-family houses. Lawmakers in eight states have also proposed bills to limit or penalize corporate investors. These efforts face strong opposition from the National Rental Home Council, which has significantly increased its lobbying expenditures to fight such legislation.

The child care crisis has only worsened the situation for many families. During the 2008 financial crisis, many homes were bought up by investors after small-time homeowners were forced into foreclosure. This trend continued during the COVID-19 pandemic, with investors accounting for nearly 30% of single-family home sales by 2022. This has led to a significant increase in single-family rentals owned by corporate landlords.

Advocates worry that corporate landlords are taking away opportunities for homeownership and raising new concerns for tenants. Studies have shown that these companies often raise rents and fees, making it difficult for tenants to keep up. For instance, a 2022 study found that major rental companies increased their fees by 40% over three years, leading to higher rates of rent delinquency.

Efforts to curb corporate ownership of single-family homes are growing. Senator Merkley's End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act aims to force major corporate investors to sell their properties to individual homebuyers. State lawmakers have also introduced bills to limit corporate ownership of single-family homes. However, these efforts face significant resistance from the well-funded single-family rental lobby.

As policymakers continue to push for reforms, it is crucial to increase transparency and enforce regulations that prevent corporate landlords from exploiting tenants. Without such measures, families will continue to suffer from unaccountable rental companies, struggling to find safe and affordable housing.

(Stream) - Five years ago, the Oxford City Council in England canceled me from giving an academic lecture on transgenderism, complaining that it breached the city’s diversity policy.

The organizers had timed my address to coincide with Oxford University’s Hilary Term so students would be able to attend; at my lecture, they would hear an alternative to the dogmas of intersectionality they usually encounter in university courses.

My lecture was titled: “Feminism Was Women’s Great Enemy — Until Transgenderism Came Along.” That alone was guaranteed to trigger feminists and transgender people in the city of dreaming spires.

So, last week, when I saw that Paris City Hall had canceled two feminists for their book Transmania : enquête sur les dérives de l’idéologie transgenre (Transmania: An Investigation into the Abuses of Transgender Ideology), I felt a rare sense of solidarity with the sisterhood and asked the authors to send me a copy of their 400-page bombshell book.

The Kafkaesque World of Transmania

Transgenderism is one of the “biggest conceptual heists in history,” write Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern. The feminists testify how they underwent a conversion when “transgender lunatics” began bullying them into including “transwomen” (biological males pretending to be women) in their feminist struggles.

“We are greatly disappointed with contemporary feminism,” they lament. “The women we once supported and encouraged fueled our harassment in the name of ‘sisterhood’ toward their ‘penis sisters.’”

The authors uncover a Kafkaesque trans world where “there is no room for reality, for what is reasonable, what is easily measurable, observable, quantifiable, describable,” but where “the dictatorship of feeling” rules with an iron fist.

The book begins with a decalogue of transgender terrorism.

The Ten Commandments of Transgenderism

The first commandment is really an imperative summoning trans terrorists to hijack language so they can grotesquely distort truth by gaslighting about reality. In this cult, reality is made malleable by hypnotically repeating the mind-bending mantra: “A transwoman is a woman.”

Biological reality is oppressive and hence must be abolished by expunging the vocabulary of “male” and “female.” Doctors “violently” assigned you a female or male gender at birth. The second commandment therefore demands a primal act of liberation, with every person asking: “Was I born in the right body?”

If transgenderism wins by distorting words, we can only fight this battle by exalting the Word — the anti-gnostic Word Made Flesh, Who has triumphed over the Father of Lies, the ultimate puppet-master behind transgenderism and transhumanism, whose ultimate lie to those who believe him is that “you will be like God.”

The third commandment requires the transgender totalitarian to lay the dogmatic foundation of transgenderism by taking hostage the psychological illness of “gender dysphoria.” Once this is done, it is time to murder the hostage and affirm that transgenderism is not a mental illness, but “perfectly normal.”

The latter commandments are directed at a Jacobin no-holds-barred reign of terror which will make any alternative version of reality a thought crime: “You don’t just have to stop people from saying what they see, you have to stop them from seeing what they see.”

These commandments are a recasting of the Great Commission which sends transgender jihadis as evangelists to the uttermost parts of the world to preach the new religion and “colonize women’s spaces,” “infiltrate all spheres of society,” and “vampirize children.”

Pornography: A Porthole into Transmania

Moutot and Stern cite numerous scientific studies that demonstrate the pernicious effects of gender ideology, while daring to say what most academic research dare not.

For example, they cite online pornography as one of the main causes of men desiring to becoming women. In 2022, Pornhub announced that the popularity of transgender porn increased by 75% to become the third most popular category in the United States and the seventh most popular in the world.

Robert, a fictional character who provides the reader with much-needed comic relief from the dark world of the Dr. Mengele-like ideology, functions as a connecting thread through the book — a plot that climaxes in unveiling the puppet masters behind the Luciferian curtain of transgenderism.

The book uses Robert, a married man with two grown children, to delve into the world of marriages that have been shattered because of porn addiction — which obeys the law of diminishing returns and finally leads the addict to the deepest recesses of Hell.

The phenomenon of transgender widows and orphans is but one byproduct of this cult.

The Sacrament of Self-Mutilation

Even worse than porn is the mutilation of the body, which is hailed as a sacrament that leads to glorification. The book describes in detail the horrors of hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery and its shocking effects.

The woman on hormonal drugs loses her fertility after five years of testosterone injections. The risk of uterine and ovarian cancer increases so greatly that doctors recommend removing these organs. Also increasing are the risks of breast cancer, endometriosis, blood clots, cardiovascular pathologies, baldness, acne, and diabetes. The vocal cords are irreparably ruined.

A tragic case cited is that of Prisha Mosley, who was 15 when she started believing she was a boy, and 17 when she started taking testosterone injections. Today, the lady from Michigan is 25 and, like hundreds of detransitioners, deeply regrets experimenting with her body.

Her vagina has atrophied to the point that she can no longer use tampons. She bleeds during sex. The enlargement of her clitoris causes acute pain at the slightest friction. Even though Mosley did not undergo surgery, she experiences the irreversible effects of testosterone.

“I have the impression of having been an object of experimentation. I feel like a monster. I feel devastated,” she moans. Her vocal cords are sore. She can’t scream or sing anymore.

While the media applauds biological males masquerading as women, what is truly terrifying is the percentage of young girls seeking to become boys, as the authors discover.

Currently, young women are doing the bulk of the transitioning. At the Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris, which hosts the largest service dedicated to transitions for those under 20, 68% of the patients are girls. (This is consistent with research in the U.S. as well.)

According to Moutot and Stern, the reasons girls and women transition are very different from those of men and boys: rejection of their femininity after having suffered sexual violence, psychological disorders such as autism, a desire to be fashionable, etc.

Transgenderism Is a Means to an End

But is transgenderism an end in itself? It’s obviously a cash cow for Big Pharma and allies like Planned Parenthood, which are raking in billions from the witch-doctor remedies on offer.

Transmania demonstrates that transgenderism is actually a paver on the road to transhumanism — the first stage of a social project that ends in humans merging with machines.

“The transhumanist sees the biological body as a limitation to be overcome, seeking to choose one’s ‘gender’ and escape the death of one’s biological form to achieve immortality,” warn Moutot and Stern, flagging the ominous agenda of radical transhumanist ideologues like Yuval Noah Harari and Martine Rothblatt.

At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in 2018, Harrari declared, “I think the reason the debates about transgender people, nonbinary people, etc., are so heated is because people subconsciously feel that future debates will be about what we can do with the body and the brain; how can we redraw them, modify them.

“The first practical reality concerns gender. You can say that people are intolerant and very sensitive when it comes to sex and gender, but I think in reality it’s because they know that this is the first debate on transhumanism.”

Rothblatt, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur and creator of “Terasem,” the world’s first trans religion, spells out the goal in his book From Transgender to Transhuman. A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form.

“The fundamental transhumanist concept is that a human being does not necessarily need a fleshly body, just as a woman does not necessarily need a real vagina,” he writes. “Humanity resides in the spirit, as does sexual identity.”

If we can accept that a person without a penis can be a man, Rothblatt notes, then humanity will be ready to take the second step, which involves the idea that a person without physical form (a software-only person) can be considered a human being.

Feminist Gnosticism Killed Womanhood

But what is to blame in the first place for the biological, ontological, and existential deconstruction of the idea of humans as either male or female — the God created them in the very beginning, in His image and likeness?

“We think that feminism perhaps has its share of responsibility in the fact that women today want to become men like others and vice versa,” Moutot and Stern conclude.

In my canceled lecture, which I delivered later at several alternative venues, I went beyond the two feminists and explained why radical feminism lay at the heart of transgenderism: “Feminism destroyed womanhood by launching a nuclear assault on the category of gender as a biological construct.”

Simone de Beauvoir spelled this out in her grand dictum: “One is not born but becomes a woman.” As high priestess Kate Millett pronounced in Sexual Politics, women’s nature is “essentially cultural, rather than biological.”

My conclusion was that feminism has its roots in Gnosticism, wherein matter is bad and spirit is good. The idea of androgyny and erasing the distinction between male and female (we would call it gender fluidity) is gnostic.

The Judeo-Christian narrative is the ultimate inversion of Gnosticism. In Genesis, God not only declares matter to be good, but a fitting vehicle for His Son to be “made flesh and [dwell] among us.”

If transgenderism wins by distorting words, we can only fight this battle by exalting the Word — the anti-gnostic Word Made Flesh, Who has triumphed over the Father of Lies, the ultimate puppet-master behind transgenderism and transhumanism, whose ultimate lie to those who believe him is that “you will be like God.”

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.

(Fall River, Mass) - In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the community of Fall River was horrified by three brutal murders. Doreen Levesque, Barbara Raposa, and Karen Marsden were killed as part of a satanic cult and prostitution ring.

Robin Murphy, who was convicted in the gruesome killing of Marsden 40 years ago, has been granted parole. At the time of her conviction, Murphy was just 17 years old and was found guilty of second-degree murder in the death of her girlfriend, Marsden.

Murphy's testimony was crucial in sending Carl Drew, the alleged leader of the satanic cult, and Andrew Maltais, another cult member, to prison for life without the possibility of parole. Maltais has since died in prison.

Now 61, Murphy went before the Massachusetts Board of Parole in March, asking for release for the eighth time. On Monday, the board granted her parole, citing her history of trauma, empathy for the victims, and her educational achievements while incarcerated. It is unclear if she has recanted her allegiance to satanic worship and/or activities.

Murphy was previously released in 2004 but was re-incarcerated in 2011 following a parole violation.

State Representative Alan Silvia of Fall River, who was a detective during the original investigation, testified against her release. He expressed concerns about her return to society, especially the possibility of her returning to Fall River. Also, Bristol County D.A. Thomas Quinn said he was “very disappointed” in the board’s decision. 

~~~
In Fall River's haunted night,
Three lives lost to evil's blight,
Families weep for those they mourn,
In hearts their memories are worn.

Robin Murphy, now set free,
A dark past etched in history,
We pray for healing, pray for light,
For victims' families, peace in sight.

May she seek a righteous way,
Find redemption, start to pray,
In Christ's embrace, may all find peace,
And broken hearts find sweet release.
~~~

Sources:

Woman convicted in Fall River 'satanic cult' murder granted parole (boston.com)

Fall River woman convicted in satanic cult killing granted parole (turnto10.com)

Fall River murders - Wikipedia

New evidence attempts to rewrite the timeline of when humans first traversed North America. In the White Sands National Park of New Mexico, researchers have found fossilized footprints that are believed to be 23,000-21,000 years old. Previously it was thought humans were in this area no more than 13,000 years ago. Of course this news comes with a disclaimer. Science.com states “These ages remain controversial because of potential old carbon reservoir effects that could compromise their accuracy.” 

Popular Mechanics this month reported the findings by academics from Bournemouth University. “The site in New Mexico has rewritten history books as we’ve discovered wonderful examples of human activity, the way that humans interacted with one another, with the landscape, and with the animal life there,” said Sally Reynolds, a principal academic in paleoecology.  

The study initially utilized a dating method involving common ditch grass seeds to establish the timeline of the footprints. This method, though robust, faced potential challenges due to the impact of hard water on the seeds. Subsequent analysis using radiocarbon dating of fossilized pollen cells, confirmed by flow cytometry, validated the initial findings and eliminated concerns about hard water contamination.

In the pages of Science, revelations gleam,
Urging us to revisit and challenge, it seems,
For future discoveries, with their unforeseen might,
May once more shift our perspective's light.

Yet amidst the flux, steadfast and sure,
God's Word abides, a timeless lure,
A beacon guiding us, unwavering and clear,
To grasp the origins of humanity dear.

These revelations unearth a tale profound,
Of footprints in sands, ancient and sound,
They not only unveil a past unseen,
But beckon us deeper, where mysteries convene.

Sources:

Archaeologists Found 23,000-Year-Old Footprints That Rewrite the Story of Humans in America (popularmechanics.com)

Study confirms age of oldest fossil human footprints in the Americas | Bournemouth University

Independent age estimates resolve the controversy of ancient human footprints at White Sands | Science