Authorities at a rural high school in southeastern Indiana apologized after a social media post about them asking a student to take down the U.S. national flag from his truck last Thursday on the campus went viral, according to reports.
The counselor and vice-principal of East Central High School in St. Leon summoned the student, Cameron Blasek, over the matter, and threatened him with insubordination if he did not remove the flag from his truck, local outlet The 765 reported. Principal Thomas Black reportedly also told him the school had the right to request him to take down the flag.
“I kind of just told them straight up from the get-go, I said, ‘It’s not gonna happen,’” Blasek recalled, FOX News reported. “I read them their own handbook and I read them all the guidelines and I read them Indiana State laws and everything that shows them that I’m perfectly legal and fine to fly that flag.”
The only mention of the word “flag” in the school’s handbook was the flag twirling section, WKRC reported.
The school claimed to have the right to the request since Blasek’s truck was on the school’s premises, and the school can enforce a rule, even if unwritten, on a case-by-case basis, the school authorities reportedly replied to Blasek.
“‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘…but since it’s just a request, a request means that you’re not demanding or telling me that I have to. So, I’m going to decline your request,’” Blasek recalled replying to the authorities, according to WKRC.
Blasek said he did not know what prompted the complaint, WKRC reported. The authorities’ concern was that some other students could then display other flags that could be offensive, local outlet The 765 reported. (RELATED: College Professor Says American Flag Makes Him ‘Anxious’)
The principal said there was neither a complaint about the American flag at the school nor any insinuation that the flag was offensive, according to WKRC. Nonetheless, posts emerged on social media, including one by Blasek’s mother which garnered over 6.5 million views on Libs of Tiktok as of the time of this report.
“People were sending me messages throughout the night and everything of everybody going out and buying flags left and right. I was getting messages. My phone was blowing up,” Blasek told WKRC.
Nearly 24 students of the school reportedly flew the flag on their vehicles Friday. The school authorities relented.
“After careful consideration and in recognition of the importance of the U.S. flag as a symbol of unity and national identity, I am pleased to inform you that we are allowing the display of the U.S. flag by students in the East Central High School parking lot,” read a copy of Black’s signed letter shared by Eagle Country 99.3, which indicated that the community raised concerns with the authorities regarding their handling of the situation.
“I would like to extend my sincere apologies for any confusion that may have arisen due to the initial lack of clarity on this matter,” Black reportedly wrote.
Blasek, 17, has veterans in his family and intends to join the military upon graduation, WCPO 9 News reported.
“I was always taught never to back down on a situation that you believe in,” Blasek told FOX News. “That’s just the way I was raised — my family raised me that way — and I’m very grateful for it.”
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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Have you ever wondered how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the world of politics? The topic is as fascinating as it is potentially concerning. AI influences political campaigns in many ways, from analyzing voter sentiment to tracking campaign costs and conducting opposition research.
AI’s impact on politics is far-reaching. Imagine understanding voter preferences and outreach strategies in real-time, thanks to AI’s ability to analyze social media trends and sentiment. By examining influencers, trends, and public sentiment, campaigns can better tailor their messages to connect with voters. It’s like having a real-time pulse on the electorate.
Not only can AI help campaigns understand voters, but it can also assist in measuring the effectiveness of various campaign activities. AI can track everything from advertising to canvassing and events, providing insights into what’s working and what’s not. Campaigns can make data-driven decisions to optimize their strategies and maximize their impact.
But that’s not all. AI isn’t just about understanding voters; it’s also about understanding the money. It can track campaign spending by identifying discrepancies and patterns in politicians’ spending habits. This is crucial for maintaining transparency and accountability in the political process. AI-powered auditing tools can streamline the financial oversight process, making it more efficient and accurate.
Let’s remember the advantage it gives political parties in opposition research. AI can dig deep into opponents’ voting records and past statements, providing valuable insights to gain a competitive edge.
However, there’s a darker side to AI in politics. Privacy and ethical concerns loom large. For instance, using AI to gather and analyze personal voter data raises serious privacy and data protection issues. We’re talking about your personal information, and the potential for misusing it should not be underestimated.
Moreover, there’s the unsettling prospect of AI making political campaigns more deceptive. AI can be used to create fake images and audio. I am sure you know about deepfakes, which are synthetic media that appear to be real but are actually manipulated. Such powerful methods can be employed to launch misleading campaign ads targeting other candidates. AI can be used to spread disinformation and propaganda. Governments and powerful elites can use AI to standardize, control, or repress political discourse, undermining the fairness and quality of political discourse.
AI algorithms can inadvertently perpetuate existing biases. For instance, if the data used to train the AI is biased, the AI’s outputs can also be unfair. This can lead to unjust targeting of specific demographics or communities. Indeed, it’s a digital battleground where authenticity can be blurred, and the line between fact and fiction becomes hazy.
But then, AI can bring several benefits to political campaigns beyond tracking costs and conducting opposition research.
Here are some potential benefits:
Enhancing Communication: AI can improve communication by providing personalized messages to voters. It can analyze the preferences and behaviors of individual voters and tailor the communication accordingly. This can lead to more effective campaigns and better engagement with voters.
Improving Campaign Strategy: AI can analyze large amounts of data to identify trends and patterns that can inform campaign strategy. This can help campaigns anticipate potential challenges and develop effective responses.
Facilitating Transparency: AI can help campaigns maintain transparency by objectively analyzing their activities. This can help campaigns manage their reputation and respond to criticisms effectively.
Generating Political Messaging: AI can generate political messaging based on public discourse, campaign rhetoric, and political reporting. This can help campaigns develop effective messaging strategies and reach a wider audience.
Creating Political Parties: AI could be used to develop political parties with their platforms, attracting human candidates who win elections. This could revolutionize the political landscape by creating new political parties based on AI-generated platforms.
Fundraising: AI is capable of fundraising for political campaigns. It could take a seed investment from a human controlling the AI and invest it to yield a return. It could start a business that generates revenue or political messaging to convince humans to spend their own money on a defined campaign or cause.
It’s intriguing, isn’t it? The world of AI in politics is both a boon and a minefield. It can empower campaigns and voters but also carries risks of manipulation and deception. As we continue to explore the vast landscape of AI in politics, it’s crucial to tread carefully, adhere to ethical guidelines, and protect personal data from unauthorized access.
So, the next time you follow a political campaign, remember that behind the scenes, AI might be at work, shaping the discourse, analyzing voter sentiment, and, in some cases, creating an illusion of reality. How AI and politics interact is a complex and evolving story, and it’s up to all of us to stay informed, vigilant, and engaged in this digital age of politics. The journey is far from over, and the questions are still unfolding. What will we discover next?
Artificial Intelligence (#AI) presents immense potential for improving our lives, yet its unchecked advancement raises valid concerns. As we harness its power, we must tread carefully to ensure AI remains a tool for human benefit, not a force that overcome us. pic.twitter.com/kEuHF7H7dG
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2024-03-17 19:51:372024-03-17 19:51:37Artificial Intelligence in Political Campaigns: Benefits, Risks, and Ethical Considerations
Haiti, a Maryland-sized country sharing half the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, won independence from France in 1804 and since then has been beset by political strife and poverty.
Today, Haiti has descended into a Hobbesian state of nature, in which gang leaders like Jimmy Chérizier, aka “Barbecue,” will fight for control until someone stops them or one of them wins.
This month, gangs ransacked police stations, the airport, and public buildings and released hundreds of prisoners from jails. Just last weekend, what’s left of Haiti’s government declared an emergency in what seems to be more of a cry for help than notification of any change in circumstances.
At the same time, the U.S. Embassy evacuated nonessential staff in the dead of night, and the unelected prime minister resigned, unable to return from a trip abroad.
On March 13, U.S. Southern Command deployed a Marine Fleet-Anti-terrorism Security Team to support the Marine Security Guard unit permanently assigned to protect U.S. Embassy Port-au-Prince. These Marines will protect U.S. facilities and personnel but won’t attempt to restore order outside.
While the U.S. has pledged financial support for a U.N. mission to help stabilize security in Haiti, the American people are reluctant to lead yet another foreign intervention. Although the effort might keep the peace and temporarily earn the gratitude of the Haitian people, it would quickly be resented by the U.S. and global Left as neocolonialism. And it might fail outright and result in the loss of American lives and treasure.
Haiti’s last president was assassinated in July 2021. After that, Ariel Henry was sworn in as interim prime minister with U.S. support. He agreed to hold elections in 2023 and form a new government in February 2024. When he didn’t, riots erupted.
Meanwhile, Guy Philippe, a former police chief who helped force out President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, completed a nine-year sentence in U.S. prison for helping Colombian drug smugglers, only to return home to contend for power with the likes of Barbecue.
As the situation in Haiti unraveled, the Biden administration proposed “an inclusive, Haitian-intensive-led process to find a broader political consensus around a new transitional government,” according to the State Department.
After a meeting in Jamaica with regional leaders, the U.S. supported a “transitional council” to set up elections. This would require not only pacifying or co-opting Haiti’s 300 gangs and various warlords, but also finding countries willing to send soldiers and police to do the work.
In less squeamish times, the U.S. simply took Haiti over. In 1915, after Haiti went through seven presidents in five years, President Woodrow Wilson sent in the Marines, who remained until 1934.
From 1957-1986, Haiti was under the dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. After a popular uprising overthrew the regime, a brief period of democracy followed, but things fell apart again in 1991. Back went the U.S. in the 1994 Operation Restore Democracy. That restoration didn’t last long.
From 2004 to 2017, the United Nations had a stabilization and security mission in Haiti that kept things from boiling over. In 2011, there were 12,500 soldiers and police in Haiti from 50 U.N. member countries. U.S. troops were not there, but we paid nearly half of the tab.
What did that get us?
At minimum, it avoided the current lawlessness, economic collapse, and potentially massive outflows of “boat people” to the U.S. that we saw in the 1980s and 1990s. But it was not a recipe for lasting stability.
The U.N. provided security, but it could not supply the country or prevent brain drain, nor could it cure the corruption, endemic poverty, and entrenched oligarchy that have kept Haiti stuck in the early stage of development. The U.N.’s reputation was also tarnished with allegations of sexual assault and a cholera outbreak linked to U.N. peacekeepers who killed thousands of Haitians.
Now, Haiti is back to square one. In 2023, gangs killed more than 4,700 people. Kidnappings for ransom by gangs such as the Kraze Baryè are common. In early 2023, a vigilante movement called “bwa kale” (peeled wood) briefly tamped down the gangs by being equally brutal, but a few months later, the chaos returned.
Busy with war in Ukraine, Chinese expansionism, and the war Hamas started with Israel, no one wants to deal with Haiti yet again.
So, what’s the world to do?
Like other presidents before him, Joe Biden’s approach so far has been to prop up a weak and unpopular Haitian leader and hope for the best. Former U.S. Special Envoy to Haiti Daniel Foote described backing Henry as “arrogance and the hubris.” Now, with Henry resigning in favor of a “transitional council,” U.S. options are shrinking, and are all bad.
In 1969, a CIA estimate concluded that should Haiti destabilize after the fall of François Duvalier, “the United States would stand to gain nothing through intervention.” That was before the massive migrant outflows of the 1980s and 1990s. This threat looms yet again, and the Biden administration, given its generally lax approach to immigration, seems to be wholly unprepared.
Undeterred by past failures, last October, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution to authorize a Multinational Security Support mission to Haiti. The Biden administration pledged $200 million to fund it. Kenya offered to send up to 1,000 police officers to train and assist Haitian police and “protect strategic installations,” but it put a hold on this after Henry resigned. Even if they eventually agree to go, 1,000 Kenyan cops alone won’t do it.
In fiscal year 2021, over 46,000 Haitians were caught trying to cross U.S. borders illegally. Most of these were “asylum shoppers,” Haitians who had already been living safely elsewhere outside of Haiti but saw the chance under Biden to move to the United States instead.
In 2023, the official number trying to cross the border was down to 2,430, but they had not really stopped coming.
The Biden administration, partly to avoid more media nightmares of Haitians huddling under bridges at the border, invented a program to let Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans in the U.S. by abusing immigration parole.
Customs and Border Protection data indicates that nearly 160,000 Haitians came in through parole programs last year and another 80,000 have come in fiscal year 2024 so far. Many Haitians already in the U.S. illegally benefit from “temporary protected status,” which shields them from deportation.
The White House is reportedly dusting off plans to use the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base detention camp for Haitians caught attempting to enter the U.S. by boat.
When Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton used Guantanamo for initial asylum screenings in the early 1990s, the camp’s capacity was about 12,000 people, though now it could hold 60,000.
Under the George W. Bush administration in 2004, thousands of Haitians attempted to use a “shark visa” to get to America, meaning they would leave on tiny, unseaworthy boats and hope to make it outside Haiti’s 12-mile territorial waters to be rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard.
Among the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who crossed into the U.S. under Biden’s parole program or over the open southern border, there would surely have been some corrupt government officials, criminals, and gang members. We don’t know how many, because the Department of Homeland Security can’t check all their criminal records back in Haiti or elsewhere.
But the exodus also contained a considerable portion of Haiti’s middle class. Up to 40% of health care workers have left in the last few years, and more than 1,600 Haitian police officers left just last year. Putting Haiti-Dumpty back together again without educated professionals will be nearly impossible.
The best-case scenario for a new international mission to Haiti would be to reestablish law and order enough to hold an election, then hand over power and leave.
The whole cycle of political collapse could then repeat itself in a decade. But in the meantime, the U.S. could repatriate asylum-seekers, end temporary protected status, and discontinue the mass parole program benefiting Haiti. That way, thousands of educated, skilled Haitians could assist in rebuilding their own country.
Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.
POSTS ON X:
ABANDONED!
Biden Administration announces ONE chartered flight to evacuate Americans stuck in Haiti amid the brutal and catastrophic fall of the country’s government – U.S. citizens told they have to make it to an extraction point “at their own risk” in order to be air flighted… pic.twitter.com/2g3FkI43Wf
Absolutely based. DeSantis has confirmed that the state of Florida is mounting rescue operations of American missionaries in Haiti, rescuing them from cannibal gangs.
“I have authorized rescue flights like we did in Israel after the October 7th because we’ve got a lot of folks… pic.twitter.com/c8NBq2pySG
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
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Leave it to Joe Biden. When the 80-year-old plutocrat John Forbes Kerry steps down as Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC), he chose 75-year-old John David Podesta, Jr., to finish out the year. The two climate czars could not have come from more different beginnings.
For his self-important mission to “save the planet,” Kerry has been called a “climate clown” on social media and “the Forrest Gump of Climate” by Bloomberg Media. Ever the aloof Eurocentric diplomat, Kerry never lets anyone forget how important he is. Podesta, from much more humble roots, prefers to work behind the scenes, often in a supporting role.
It was clearly past time for Kerry to go. The day before he “retired,” Kerry spoke at a press conference and raised eyebrows and temperatures when he blurted out that people might “feel better” about the Russian government if Russia would just commit to fighting climate change as hard as he has done.
Kerry’s strange remarks came in response to a question from a Russian reporter as to whether the long-running U.S. campaign against Russian influence – one that has escalated into a major war that could soon become nuclear – was interfering with climate cooperation. The Russian Federation waited until 2019 – when Paris opponent Donald Trump was President — to adopt the Paris Agreement, overcoming strong opposition from Russian industry lobbyists.
At the time, Rusian Edelgeriev, President Putin’s climate advisor, said his country would become a “full-fledged participant in this international instrument.” He boasted that Russia had cut its carbon emissions nearly in half since 1990, the year of the collapse of the old Soviet Union.
But oil and gas provide about 20 percent of the Russian economy, and Europeans who had shunned fossil fuel production themselves were still heavily dependent on Russian fossil fuels to keep their own economies afloat. Russia today is developing coal resources in the Far East and wants to open more Arctic shipping lanes.
Imagine the grating of teeth in the Kremlin as Kerry droned on that even with its “illegal” war against Ukraine, “they ought to be able to find the effort to be responsible on the climate issue.” Maybe Kerry was saddest that, because of the war, he has not been able to fly back and forth to Moscow (or preferably, to a Crimean dacha?) to “negotiate”.
Missing from Kerry’s diatribe was the well-known fact that Russia only contributes 5 percent of global human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, less than half that of the U.S. (12.6 percent), and only a tiny fraction of China’s whopping 33 percent. But Kerry would not dare tell China it “ought to be more responsible on the climate issue.”
Instead, after lengthy negotiations in Beijing, Kerry insisted he was not disappointed that no new agreements came from his “work,” or that President Xi reaffirmed that China would pursue its climate goals at its own pace and in its own way. Kerry was just glad he got a few free meals.
In his first year as SPEC, Kerry took a reported 48 trips on his wife’s private jet, including meetings with authoritarian heads of state. He refused to publicly criticize China for building a new coal-fired power plant every week. But he did compare the fight against climate change to the Allies’ fight to defeat Nazi Germany.
Young Americans may remember that Kerry was the (losing) Democratic Party nominee for President in 2004. They may also know that, long before became the “climate guy,” Kerry was a spokesperson for Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
The Massachusetts brahmin, after a failed Congressional campaign and a short stint as Michael Dukakis’ lieutenant governor, parlayed his fame (or infamy) into a U.S. Senate seat in 1984. He stayed in the Senate until 2013, when he became President Obama’s Secretary of State, following the inestimable Hillary Clinton. His crowning moment there was signing the Paris Agreement on climate change. No wonder Biden chose him.
As SPEC, Kerry is best known for his defense of his widespread use of private jets. Kerry famously stated, “If you offset your carbon, it is the ONLY choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.”
Kerry’s messianic vision continued: “I have to fly to meet with people to get things done, but what I am doing almost full time is working to win the battle for climate change. And if I offset and contribute my life to do this I am not going to be put on the defensive.”
Kerry loves flying almost as much as mirrors. He even flew on a giant military transport to Antarctica as a lame duck just days after President Trump was elected in 2016 – ostensibly to meet with scientists about the impact of climate change on the frozen continent.
Kerry has always been “special.” His grandmother sent him to elite boarding schools in Europe as his father served in the State Department’s Bureau of United Nations Affairs, then as U.S. attorney for Berlin, and later at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo.
Young John was whisked back to the States to attend more elite boarding schools before matriculating at Yale University, where he distinguished himself as a debater and soccer player but not as a student. His GPA was “lackluster” (a 76 average), but it got him into Yale.
Before marrying the billionaire heiress to John Heinz’s huge fortune, Kerry was already the wealthiest person in the U.S. Senate (other than Heinz), as the beneficiary of at least four trusts inherited from Forbes family relatives. His own 2011 financial disclosure admits to personal assets ranging from $230 to $320 million (not including any Heinz money).
By contrast, 75-year-old John Podesta grew up on the streets of Chicago, the son of a Greek-American mother and an Italian-American father, a factory worker who never finished high school. His big break in life came when he met the young Bill Clinton in 1970 when both were working on a Senate campaign.
John and his older brother Tony built their lives around politics, with John serving as an attorney for various Democratic Party leaders and Tony working as a lobbyist. Together they formed the Podesta Group, a government relations and public affairs lobbying firm with close ties to the Democratic Party. Not bad for a couple of poor kids.
Politics has been good to the Podestas. John served as chief of staff for President Clinton and counselor to President Obama before joining the Biden Administration as senior advisor for clean energy innovation and implementation. There he has overseen the disbursement of $370 to $783 billion in clean energy tax credits and incentives under the (sic) Inflation Reduction Act.
Both Podestas have left their biggest public marks through the political nonprofits they created, Tony was a founding president of Norman Lear’s People for the American Way, while John is the founder and former president of the Center for American Progress, which helped to craft the Inflation Reduction Act, a cash cow for progressive interests.
In sum, while Kerry has often been compared to a strutting peacock, Podesta has long been one of the most effective operatives in Washington and a major architect of the Progressive agenda. Kerry may have gotten a lot of headlines, but Podesta has used the power of the purse to impact the business and diplomatic communities far more effectively.
*****
This article was published by CFACT, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, and is reproduced with permission.
TAKE ACTION
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-17 02:30:002024-03-17 02:30:00A Tale Of Two Johns As SPEC [A John Kerry Tale]
The chorus of voices in opposition to the Internal Revenue Service’s taxation of a state rebate many Arizona families received last year continues to grow.
On Wednesday, U.S. Reps. David Schweikert, Greg Stanton and Juan Ciscomani asked the IRS to change course on taxing the “Arizona Families Tax Rebate.” Taxpayers in Arizona have already begun to file with the federal deadline being April 15, and 1099-MISC forms were sent out for the rebate.
“We urge the IRS to reconsider its determination and provide expedited relief to compliant Arizonan taxpayers who have already filed their 2023 tax returns,” the lawmakers stated in a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://thepricklypear.org/wp-content/uploads/iStock-174879501-scaled.jpg17072560Cameron Arcandhttps://thepricklypear.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_2023.pngCameron Arcand2024-03-17 00:28:512024-03-16 05:41:56Arizona Congressmen Call On IRS To Not Tax State Rebate
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-17 02:28:002024-03-17 02:28:00Arizona Congressmen Call On IRS To Not Tax State Rebate
As November draws steadily closer, yet another poll is showing support for former president Donald Trump surging ahead of support for incumbent Joe Biden. According to a HarrisX poll conducted in the days following Biden’s State of the Union address, Trump is leading Biden by five percentage points (46% to 41%), with 13% of voters undecided.
When undecided voters were asked which way they lean, Trump leads Biden 52% to 48%. When Independent and third-party candidates are added to the mix, Trump still maintains his lead (41%), while Biden trails behind at 35%, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at 12%, and other candidates at 1% each, with 10% of voters undecided. When undecided voters were asked which way they lean in an expanded field, Trump still takes first place with 44%. Significantly, Trump leads among Independent voters in every scenario.
The HarrisX survey also revealed that nearly 60% of voters polled disapprove of Biden’s job performance as president, including nearly a quarter (22%) of Democrats. Nearly 60% of voters (including over a quarter of Democrats) said that Biden’s State of the Union speech served to “divide” the country and more than half (57%) of voters said the speech “raised questions or concerns” about the president’s age, including almost 40% of Democrats. A marginally smaller percentage said the speech raised questions or concerns about Biden’s fitness for office. A strong majority (61%) of voters polled also said that Biden did an “inadequate job addressing immigration during the State of the Union address…”
This follows a Rasmussen Reports survey finding that 61% of voters (79% of Republicans, 45% of Democrats, and 61% of Independent voters) believe immigration will be “very important” in November’s election. Despite all of the attention Democrats are dedicating to it, only 42% of voters (28% of Republicans, 66% of Democrats, and 32% of Independents) said that abortion will be a “very important” issue in November.
A Yahoo News/YouGov poll also found that voters weren’t impressed with Biden’s State of the Union address. According to that survey, Biden’s job approval was at 40% before his speech last week but dropped to 39% after the speech.
A slew of other polls have shown Trump leading Biden in the wake of the incumbent Democrat’s State of the Union address. A recent USA Today/Suffolk University survey found that 49% of voters approve of the job Trump did as president, while only 41% approve of Biden’s job performance. Another Rasmussen Reports survey also showed Trump is not only leading Biden (49% to 41%) but other Democrats teased as potential Biden replacements: Trump leads former First Lady Michelle Obama 50% to 43% and current California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) by a whopping 51% to 34%. Once again, Trump leads among Independent voters in a matchup against all three Democrats, leading Biden by 12 points (45% to 33%) in that demographic.
Pointing to polling data, former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said that Biden has “a devastating mountain” to climb in facing off against Trump in November. Gingrich explained that the president “has a problem with everybody because they go to the grocery store, they go to the gas station. Biden-ism isn’t working.” He continued, “Biden has got a huge problem when speeches don’t change and advertising doesn’t change, because people go to the store, and they say, ‘In my own life, I know what he’s doing to me, right?’” The former speaker added, “And if you’ll notice, people consistently now say that they were better off personally, better off under Trump than they are under Biden.”
For months, Biden has been floundering in nearly every major poll. A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released last month reported Biden’s approval rating at 45%, with nearly half (48%) of voters saying he’s become worse as a leader. Like many current surveys, that one found that over half of voters approved of Trump’s presidential job performance and showed the former president leading the current president ahead of the November election.
Voters have been particularly disappointed with Biden’s management of illegal immigration, inflation, the economy, rising crime rates, and other issues. A Monmouth University poll (also released last month) found that 84% of voters consider illegal immigration a serious issue, including 61% who consider it “very serious.” Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, identified illegal immigration as “Biden’s weakest policy area, including among his fellow Democrats.”
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2024-03-16 18:51:572024-03-16 18:51:57Poll after Poll Shows Biden Losing to Trump
For many years, the United States has been effectively a technocracy, run by unelected “experts.” Former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s fall from grace may mark the end of that era.
Technocrats have long told us what we can and can’t do, what we’re allowed to own, what our kids must learn in school, and so on. For the most part, we never voted for any of that, yet we have gone along docilely, not noticing or not caring or, at best, unwilling to make waves.
The result has been the rise of self-selected “experts,” the credentialed class, who exist primarily to impose their will on others. Their ranks have swelled recently with the exponential growth of government and education bureaucracies and the emergence of “academic” programs designed not to increase knowledge but to feed those bureaucracies.
This is what I refer to as “credentialism:” the pursuit of dubious credentials, like degrees in pseudo-sciences and quasi-academic subjects, solely for the purpose of advancing one’s own career and personal policy preferences. The term might also apply to those with legitimate credentials who in their hubris believe being an “expert” gives them the right to tell everyone else how to live.
Much to the dismay of the credentialed class, Americans’ tolerance of this system began to wane about four years ago, when it became apparent to many that a) the experts don’t always know what they’re doing, and b) they don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart.
Anyone who was paying attention could see, as early as April 2020, that much of what the “experts” were telling us—about masks, “social distancing,” school closures—had no basis in science. Anonymous social media accounts routinely exposed the technocrats’ contradictions, statistical errors, and bald-faced lies.
That trend continued into 2021, when the much-ballyhooed “vaccines” failed to prevent people from contracting or transmitting the virus—just as the “conspiracy theorists” had predicted. Attempts to suppress this information were to some extent stymied by lawsuits, FOIA requests, aggressive alternative media (including Campus Reform), and Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X.
The truth, bit by bit, came out. The “experts” were discredited. Credentialism began to implode as people realized that merely having a degree or title is no guarantee of anything.
The collapse was hastened by the medical and scientific establishment’s embrace of “transgenderism.” As the “transgender activists” constantly reminded us, virtually every major medical association in the country has endorsed the idea that people can change their sex.
But since literally everyone knows that’s not true–people can’t actually change their sex—the self-righteous harangues of the credentialed class fail to persuade. Instead, they just further discredit themselves and their entire profession.
This brings us to the latest and perhaps pivotal episode in the slow-motion train-wreck that is the fall of credentialism: Claudine Gay’s resignation.
She is also a classic example of credentialism—what academics sometimes refer to as “careerism”—parlaying her advanced degrees into a series of leadership roles as she climbed the administrative ladder. The derivative nature of her “scholarship,” combined with her meteoric rise, suggests that she was always focused more on her own ambition than on the pursuit of truth.
Unfortunately for Harvard, for the Ivy League, and for the entire credentialed class, her appointment as president proved to be a disaster. When the leader of the most prestigious institution in the country, the one at the very top of the credentialism heap, turns out to be a proven plagiarist and a potential fraud—well, that doesn’t exactly inspire the rest of us to put much faith in degrees and titles.
Indeed, today people tend to trust higher education less than ever. They put less stock in credentials. And that is generally a good thing—unless you genuinely need a credential to work in your field. What should you do, in that case? I plan to talk about that in my next column, so stay tuned.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-16 02:32:002024-03-16 02:32:00The Collapse of Credentialism
As the mother of two young daughters, I want to safeguard the values that make our nation great for the next generation. The recent acquisition of Tutor.com by the Chinese private equity firm Primavera Capital Group undermines those cherished values.
This development gives me significant pause as a parent who understands that children sometimes need additional academic support outside the classroom. Users of Tutor.com, including countless vulnerable students, will now be required to relinquish their privacy rights, exposing them to a “TikTok-level privacy and security risk.”
This is especially concerning given that over the past two years, public school districts have poured more than $30 million into Tutor.com and its affiliate, Princeton Review. This financial investment provides the Chinese-owned company unprecedented access to the personal information of millions of students and families across the nation. Lawmakers such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) have rightly raised concerns about the implications of this data access.
Tutor.com’s “Terms of Use” leave no room for ambiguity — the company claims ownership of all data collected on its platform, including that generated by underage students. Those terms grant Tutor.com the alarming authority to capture and transfer the data of U.S. students without any limitations.
Several states, including Virginia, California, Washington, and West Virginia, have partnered with Tutor.com, inadvertently exposing their residents to significant privacy risks. The U.S. government’s belief that entities operating in China can be coerced into sharing information with Beijing adds another layer of concern.
In my home state, Virginia, at least 12 school districts, including some of the largest, have recently used Tutor.com, spending more than $8 million on the service over several years. While the Virginia Department of Education tutoring playbook does not have a specific list of approved vendors for its ALL In Tutoring program, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), given his positions on China, may want the agency to provide updated guidance.
The U.S. Department of Education should also take decisive action promptly to issue guidance warning school districts about the inherent risks of partnering with Chinese-owned education providers such as Tutor.com. This would empower local education authorities to make informed decisions that prioritize the safety of our classrooms.
In addition, the U.S. Department of Education should ban the use of state funds for Chinese-owned products and services in educational settings. This proactive measure would prevent taxpayer dollars from indirectly supporting entities that compromise the privacy and security of U.S. citizens.
As a parent, I understand that many young students might need extra help in their studies, particularly after the harmful effects of rampant lockdowns during the pandemic. But the last place our nation’s children should go for assistance should be to a company now run by a regime that, at minimum, worsened COVID’s impact by lying to the rest of the world during the pandemic’s first months and still refuses to cooperate with independent investigations into the virus origins.
For that reason and many others, school districts and states should prioritize the security and privacy of our youth by swiftly addressing the threats posed by Chinese-owned Tutor.com. Together, we can ensure a safe and secure educational environment for every student.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-16 02:30:002024-03-16 02:30:00China’s Purchase Of This Academic Support Site Jeopardizes Students’ Security
England’s National Health Service has declared that there’s not enough evidence of “safety and clinical effectiveness” for children and young people to be given puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria.
“Puberty blockers (gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogues) are not available to children and young people for gender incongruence or gender dysphoria, because there is not enough evidence of safety and clinical effectiveness,” the NHS notes on its site.
“From the age of 16, teenagers who’ve been on hormone blockers for at least 12 months may be given cross-sex hormones, also known as gender-affirming hormones.”
The NHS explicitly states that these hormones cause irreversible changes, including maturing girls’ development of breasts, the breaking or deepening of a person’s voice, and temporary or even permanent infertility.
The news broke on Tuesday, Detrans Awareness Day, a day on which detransitioners share their stories of transition regret, warning others to avoid falling into the medical and therapeutic manipulations they experienced. Detransitioners are individuals who sought to transition to the other gender before ultimately realizing that that’s not possible.
“I am in full support of what the United Kingdom is doing now,” detransitioner Abel Garcia told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “I agree that we need to keep children safe, and I’m glad to hear that children in the United Kingdom are able to live healthy lives, at least through the stages of human puberty—which is a human right.”
Detransitioner Prisha Mosley similarly praised the news.
“It’s an incredible step in the right direction,” she told The Daily Signal. “It shows that politicians have finally been listening to what experts and detransitioners have been saying for years.”
Leaders in the movement combating gender ideology in the United States were quick to celebrate the news, emphasizing that European eyes are being opened to the dangers of indiscriminately greenlighting gender transitions for minors.
“It is only a matter of time before the American health care establishment follows the science and the wisdom of the National Health Service and begins to save children from this damaging enterprise called ‘gender-affirming care,’” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the organization Do No Harm, told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “Children simply cannot give informed consent for these procedures.”
Jay Richards, the director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, celebrated the news while emphasizing that “gender-affirming” interventions are often “sex-erasing.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“Gender-transition partisans have claimed for years that these drugs are reversible pause buttons for gender-dysphoric kids,” he explained. “In fact, they are very often irreversible, fast-forward buttons. We know they can harm bone and even brain development in children and put kids on a different timeline from all their peers.”
“And worst of all,” Richards added, “they usually serve to lock many kids into the transition pathway who might otherwise have resolved their feelings of gender discordance if they’d been allowed to go through natural puberty.”
Harmeet Dhillon is the CEO and founder of the Center for American Liberty, a law firm representing a number of young women like detransitioner Chloe Cole, who underwent transgender “treatment” in the United States, including puberty blockers and the removal of healthy breasts.
“It’s encouraging to see that increasingly in Europe, including this most recent decision from the U.K., both scientists and government officials are acknowledging that the risks and uncertainties of prescribing puberty blockers to children outweigh the demands of transgender extremists,” Dhillon said.
She added: “Great Britain’s decision will save lives and stem the destruction wrought by the junk-science peddlers claiming that a child is ever born in the ‘wrong body,’ or that gender is a social construct independent of binary sex.”
Richards likewise emphasized that the NHS’ move will have international effects.
“The NHS has shown intellectual and moral courage at following the evidence where it leads, rather than surrendering to a fashionable ideology that prevails because of marketing, intimidation, and institutional capture, rather than through evidence-based medicine,” he said. “The largest NHS decision serves as a rebuke to doctors’ lobbies like the [American Academy of Pediatrics] and Endocrine Society, which continue to push these harmful interventions for kids, despite the mounting evidence against them.”
Brandon Showalter, a journalist with the Christian Post who covers gender ideology and hosts the “Generation Indoctrination” documentary podcast series, is glad to see the NHS dialing back in this manner. But there’s far more work to be done, he said.
“This entire scourge is predicated on a lie that it is possible to be ‘born in the wrong body,’” he said. “While some children will certainly be spared the horror of what blockers do to the body, the entire protocol of so-called ‘gender affirming care’ needs to be dismantled because it is impossible for any human to be the other sex, and therefore, any medical treatment that lends credence to a lie will, of course, be irretrievably flawed from the start.”
Showalter stressed the need to care for those “with mental health issues and distress over their sex.”
“But that doesn’t mean cross-sex hormones, or an irreversible surgery,” he said. “Restricting the use of blockers is but the first step in the reckoning over this enormous medical scandal.”
Prominent pro-LGBTQ organizations, including the ACLU and GLAAD, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-16 02:30:002024-03-16 02:30:00England Banning Puberty Blockers for Kids Will ‘Save Lives,’ Experts Predict
As the mother of two young daughters, I want to safeguard the values that make our nation great for the next generation. The recent acquisition of Tutor.com by the Chinese private equity firm Primavera Capital Group undermines those cherished values.
This development gives me significant pause as a parent who understands that children sometimes need additional academic support outside the classroom. Users of Tutor.com, including countless vulnerable students, will now be required to relinquish their privacy rights, exposing them to a “TikTok-level privacy and security risk.”
This is especially concerning given that over the past two years, public school districts have poured more than $30 million into Tutor.com and its affiliate, Princeton Review. This financial investment provides the Chinese-owned company unprecedented access to the personal information of millions of students and families across the nation. Lawmakers such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) have rightly raised concerns about the implications of this data access.
Tutor.com’s “Terms of Use” leave no room for ambiguity — the company claims ownership of all data collected on its platform, including that generated by underage students. Those terms grant Tutor.com the alarming authority to capture and transfer the data of U.S. students without any limitations.
Several states, including Virginia, California, Washington, and West Virginia, have partnered with Tutor.com, inadvertently exposing their residents to significant privacy risks. The U.S. government’s belief that entities operating in China can be coerced into sharing information with Beijing adds another layer of concern.
In my home state, Virginia, at least 12 school districts, including some of the largest, have recently used Tutor.com, spending more than $8 million on the service over several years. While the Virginia Department of Education tutoring playbook does not have a specific list of approved vendors for its ALL In Tutoring program, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), given his positions on China, may want the agency to provide updated guidance.
The U.S. Department of Education should also take decisive action promptly to issue guidance warning school districts about the inherent risks of partnering with Chinese-owned education providers such as Tutor.com. This would empower local education authorities to make informed decisions that prioritize the safety of our classrooms.
In addition, the U.S. Department of Education should ban the use of state funds for Chinese-owned products and services in educational settings. This proactive measure would prevent taxpayer dollars from indirectly supporting entities that compromise the privacy and security of U.S. citizens.
As a parent, I understand that many young students might need extra help in their studies, particularly after the harmful effects of rampant lockdowns during the pandemic. But the last place our nation’s children should go for assistance should be to a company now run by a regime that, at minimum, worsened COVID’s impact by lying to the rest of the world during the pandemic’s first months and still refuses to cooperate with independent investigations into the virus origins.
For that reason and many others, school districts and states should prioritize the security and privacy of our youth by swiftly addressing the threats posed by Chinese-owned Tutor.com. Together, we can ensure a safe and secure educational environment for every student.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Republicans are walking a tightrope heading into the 2024 election.
They must show their base that they are fighting hard on the issue of election integrity, which many conservatives believe cost former President Donald Trump his 2020 re-election bid.
Simultaneously, they must operate in the reality that they now live in the world of ballot harvesting and drop-boxes.
That dichotomy is why the Republican National Committee (RNC) told the Daily Caller they are committed to prioritizing election integrity efforts between now and November. They are waging lawsuits on issues ranging from ballot access to voting rules. Yet the party is also heavily pushing its “Bank Your Vote” initiative, encouraging Republicans to vote early.
Other elements of the party seem more resigned to playing by Democrats’ rules rather than trying to change them. The Caller also reached out to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), which the RNC said is helping bankroll the party’s legal fights.
After sending the Daily Caller a link to an Axios article about get out the vote efforts, and then ignoring multiple follow-up requests for an interview about election integrity, NRCC spokesperson Will Reinert sent the Caller the following: “We’ve complained about your coverage several times to editors, so to tell you the truth, we really don’t care to engage on pieces we don’t care about to help you guys out.”
A prominent conservative pundit read the Reinert email and told the Daily Caller, “‘pieces we don’t care about’ is the giveaway. They’re mailing it in on election prep, in other words.”
Election integrity is, however, an issue Republican voters care deeply about: coming out of the last presidential election, nearly two-thirds of Republicans and Trump voters said they had little faith votes were counted accurately, according to one poll.
In 2020, a number of election laws were changed, and others were straight up ignored, in key states due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona, voters had expanded access to methods of voting including ballot drop-boxes, mail-in voting and early voting thanks to Democratic Party legal efforts led by Marc Elias.
Elias is a high-powered attorney who has played a leading role in hundreds of lawsuits seeking to make it easier to vote and undo Republican efforts to make elections more secure.
A Daily Caller review of current election laws found that the situation on the ground remains dire for election integrity hawks. A number of key battleground states, including those that delivered Biden the presidency, are still slated to use many of the election procedures in 2024 that outraged Republicans in 2020.
At least seven are slated to deploy ballot drop-boxes. Nearly all are likely to have no-excuse absentee voting. Five are on track to have more than two weeks of early voting, and Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina will mail out absentee ballots more than six weeks before election day.
“As we’ve talked about, the damage done by Democrats to change laws during COVID was unprecedented. There’s still a lot of work to do, not everything is where we want to be right now. But that’s why we’re scaling up this massive program and filing all this litigation because we’re actively trying to fix it up,” an RNC official told the Daily Caller. “We understand that there are still issues, especially in swing states with key stuff we need to fix. That’s why this exists.”
There is still time for some of these laws to change before election day, but the clock is ticking for Republicans to make inroads toward changing them.
After media outlets began calling the election for President Joe Biden in 2020, Republicans across the spectrum of the party concluded that those changes to how America votes played at least some role in his loss. Certain conservatives will tell you it was the single biggest factor in President Joe Biden’s victory.
Tucker on the 2020 election: “It was 100% stolen. Are you joking? They completely change the way people vote right before the election on the basis of COVID? And then you censor the information people are allowed to get?”pic.twitter.com/PHzBP9Jruz
With eight months to go, Republicans are mobilizing operatives across the country and spending millions of dollars to avoid a lawfare wipeout akin to what they suffered in 2020 — but the climb is uphill, and progress has been marginal.
Now, heading into 2024, some conservatives find themselves concerned about the state of the election and whether the party is doing enough to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself.
“I have no idea what the Republicans are doing. But I can tell you what we did in 2020 when we were watching the Republicans stay on the sidelines,” Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True The Vote, told the Daily Caller.
I’ve seem no evidence that the Trump campaign and RNC are more prepared for 2024 hijinks than they were in 2020. (Remember it was ME going on about ballot harvesting and being ignored.)
But I’m not fake religious guy.
You go to the election with the guy on the ballot.
The Daily Caller began its investigation into Republicans’ election integrity efforts at the beginning of 2024, conducting an interview with members of the RNC’s election integrity staff in the beginning of February.
Since the interview, new leadership has taken over at the RNC and the Trump campaign has merged with the organization and made several staff shakeups.
National Review reported that the election integrity department had been a part of widespread layoffs that saw dozens of RNC staffers cast aside. However, an RNC official with direct knowledge told the Caller that reports the election integrity staff were asked to re-apply for their jobs was false. A source with the Trump campaign confirmed the same reality, stating that the staffers had not been let go.
Christina Bobb, a former Trump administration staffer who went on to be Trump’s attorney and a One America News Network anchor, has been appointed as the RNC’s election integrity senior counsel, a source told the Daily Caller. The Trump campaign source said the previous election integrity staff at the RNC would be sitting down with Bobb in the future.
When it comes to election integrity, the RNC and its partners are working, but they are playing catch up to Democrats’ nearly 40-year head start. The RNC was subjected to a consent decree in 1982 after a Democratic National Committee (DNC) lawsuit, neutering the party’s ability to engage in election integrity lawsuits until the decree was lifted in 2018.
The DNC sued the RNC in the 1980s, alleging that the party had sought to discourage African-Americans from voting through targeted mailings warning about penalties for violating election laws. The consent decree largely limited how the RNC could participate in election lawsuits.
“Early voting and GOTV effort is like the Space Race or the Arms Race of the Cold War. We defeated the Russians essentially by spending them into oblivion,” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, told the Daily Caller. “The Democrats are spending us into oblivion. They are miles ahead. They’ve already landed on the moon a few times and we haven’t even gotten the ship off the ground.”
The RNC told the Daily Caller that the party first dove into the election integrity sphere in 2022. It was the first time the RNC had the opportunity to work with other campaign committees, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the NRCC. The effort was “loose,” a member of the RNC’s election integrity department told the Daily Caller.
The party did not offer clarification on the timeline of its election integrity efforts prior to 2022 after the Daily Caller followed up.
Following the 2022 election, then-RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel moved to make the RNC’s election integrity efforts an actual department of the party. That allowed the operation to pull resources from all departments such as communications, politics and legal.
Now, in addition to its legal department, the RNC has three election integrity counsels based at its headquarters and 13 election integrity counsels in key states including Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“These counsels work around the clock to identify and act on opportunities for election integrity litigation, in addition to coordinating with local law firms and stakeholders in their respective states,” Josh Helton, an RNC election integrity official, told the Daily Caller.
By the end of February, the RNC told the Daily Caller that it planned to have deputy election integrity directors in each of the 13 states where it has an election integrity counsel. Regional directors will also join the election integrity effort to oversee a specific geographic territory and oversee how the party liaised with stakeholders in the area.
In addition to the legal counsels, the RNC has “boots on the ground” as a part of their “recruitment training and shifting of poll workers and poll watchers.”
“These are folks that are going to be in those in those polling locations and they’re going to be our eyes and ears on the ground. That will be reporting back to our our election day headquarters, which happens all during early voting and Election Day,” Helton told the Daily Caller.
“Where we have volunteer and paid attorneys they are going to be taking in those calls triaging the information that comes in and taking the appropriate action,” Helton continued.
With 79 election integrity lawsuits filed in 23 states ahead of the 2024 election, the RNC told the Daily Caller that it has plans to reach at least 100. The party is also in “constant contact” with all 56 Republican state and territory parties to collaborate on election integrity litigation — even transferring money to them as needed, the RNC told the Daily Caller.
“The RNC from what I’ve seen, is is an intervener you know, it’s liberal groups that file these lawsuits. In some some of these cases, the RNC is intervening to try to help defend the state statute. That’s basically what’s going on all across the country,” Hans Von Spakovsky, the manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, told the Daily Caller. Von Spakovsky added that he thought the state of election integrity was in a better position than 2020, and does not expect a repeat of 2024.
Others disagreed.
“From what I have seen and what I haven’t, we definitely are,” conservative attorney and pundit Kurt Schlicter said about whether he thought the GOP would end up in a similar situation to 2020.
“And I would love to be wrong. I hear ‘we’ve filed 78 lawsuits’ that’s like saying if I’m a commander, ‘oh I’ve fired 78 shells,’” Schlicter added.
“They should be getting insurance. They should be filing lawsuits, and getting injunctions in place to make sure that all the state legislatures, election rules are being followed strictly. And that they’re not being waived because of COVID or Chinese flu or Chinese pneumonia or whatever the next bullshit pandemic is going to be,” Mike Davis, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and founder of the Article 3 Project, told the Daily Caller.
“You need to get injunctions early so the Democrats can’t change the rules at the last minute. If they change the rules, they’ll be in contempt of court,” Davis continued.
Count Marc Elias himself among those who are skeptical of Republican efforts. For years, dating back to 2009, Elias was the lawyer for the Democratic party. Elias is most prominently known for his work during the 2020 presidential election cycle, when he spearheaded the Democratic Party’s efforts to expand voting access and loosen election integrity provisions.
“It seems nearly certain that Republicans at all levels will continue to file frivolous post-election lawsuits and will suffer similar results in 2024,” Elias wrote in a recent report.
Ahead of the election, Elias has begun to track his own and other “pro-voting” suits. Over the last year, Elias and other “pro-voting” lawsuits saw 83 victories for voters across 26 states, according to his report.
According to Elias’ report, Republican and their election integrity forces prevailed a mere 20% of the time in 2022 and 27% of the time in 2023. The same report noted that there were 51 “pro-voting” lawsuits in 2023 to just 22 election integrity lawsuits.
Despite the improvement, Elias has predicted that Republicans will once again watch the rug be pulled out from underneath them and suffer the same fate as 2020.
For their part, the RNC dismissed Elias’ claims that 2024 will be a repeat of 2020.
The Daily Caller provided the RNC with the same report and cited specific stats from it, asking for a response to Elias’ data which portrays Republicans as behind in its legal fight. The RNC dismissed Elias’ report and concerns entirely.
“We don’t put much stock into how Elias tracks lawsuits,” an RNC spokesperson told the Daily Caller.
Results have been mixed so far for the RNC — the organization sent the Caller a list of 17 “selected litigation wins” from 2022 until now. Some were significant, such as protecting New Hampshire’s voter ID requirement or banning expanded ballot harvesting in Arizona. In Florida, the RNC strengthened Florida’s voter ID requirements.
But others were cases still in progress, or only resulted in marginal changes unlikely to significantly affect the election.
There are notable instances were Republican lawfare has failed. In 2020, ballot curing was a key issue in Pennsylvania. The state secretary of state’s office issued guidance right before election day telling counties they could inform voters of improperly filled out absentee ballots, allowing them to turn in a provisional ballot on election day to ensure they got counted.
But a number of Republican-leaning counties ignored this guidance, believing it to be a violation of state law. The Trump campaign sued after the election to discount the cured ballots from Democratic-leaning counties, but lost at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, 7-0.
Republicans, including the RNC, have since sued again to overturn the ballot curing rules. But those efforts culminated last year with a state judge dismissing the RNC’s lawsuit, leaving in place the patchwork set of ballot curing policies from county to county.
The RNC’s election integrity blitz has also seemingly left party allies, as well as most voters, in the dark.
“The first thing I look for is a chain of command. I’m just a military guy. Who is the person whose lapels I grab, look in the eye and say, what is going on? And there isn’t one, to my knowledge,” Schlicter said. “I don’t see the kind of coordinated planned operation that I would look for that would memorialize best practices.”
McDaniel sat down at the end of February with the head of the RNC’s election integrity project for her podcast “Real America.”
The RNC’s Election Integrity Twitter account tweeted out a clip of the podcast to its less than 2,000 followers. The pair talked about the GOP’s efforts to make elections “FAST – Fair, Accurate, Secure, and Transparent” ahead of November.
By the party’s own measures of success, the interview was a failure — because hardly anyone actually saw it. Just over 12,000 people viewed the video where McDaniel touted their efforts to recruit poll watchers, use volunteer lawyers and the building of a war room.
Just 37 social media users liked the tweet. The podcast currently has 1,200 views on YouTube. Comments are turned off on the video.
“When I go and speak to folks around the country, a lot of folks after I do my presentation, they said ‘we didn’t know the RNC was doing all that. We had no idea.’ If people don’t know, if the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, like if people don’t know how hard the RNC and the NRSC and NRCC are fighting to secure these elections, we’re not gonna accomplish one of our primary goals, which is to restore that faith and confidence in the electoral process,” Helton said.
The RNC isn’t working alone. It’s partnering with the NRCC and the NRSC to equally fund the election integrity operation.
After the NRCC ignored multiple interview requests from the Caller to talk about this issue, the Caller told Reinert his initial one-sentence response with an Axios link was some of the “laziest shit [I’d] ever seen,” prompting Reinert’s reply that the organization doesn’t care about this election integrity story.
Jack Pandol, NRCC communications director, followed up with the Daily Caller about the interaction with Reinert, telling the outlet that the parties were making a historic committee investment, funding the RNC’s election integrity program and “getting better at it than the Democrats.”
Pandol added that the NRCC’s legal teams are in regular communication with the RNC and NRSC as they work “jointly on the project.”
During the NRCC’s brief interaction with the Daily Caller, Pandol noted that the party’s legal team was in regular communication with the RNC. Despite the frequent conversation, however, the NRCC was unable to explain which election integrity organizations have been in communication with the RNC to work on litigation ahead of the election.
“I have no idea what local groups have or haven’t heard from the RNC, I’m not a spokesman for them so I’d suggest you talk to them about it,” Pandol told the Daily Caller.
The NRSC, the other arm of Republicans election integrity effort, painted a more candid picture about the party’s coordination with other election integrity focused groups.
“We’re getting our ass kicked in that realm. Excuse my language but like, the Dems have the Arabella, that whole network. They have so much more money than us. You haven’t seen an equivalent on our side,” a member of the NRSC election integrity effort told the Caller.
“RITE has been involved somewhat. You see a funding discrepancy across the board, not just with legal right-wing. They have more money than we do. That’s kind of the problem,” they added.
Outside of the official party apparatus, independent organizations focused on election integrity are bustling.
Some, such as Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), have had the opportunity to work hand-in-hand with the RNC in a battle for election integrity.
“The main thing that we see is, first of all, wherever Marc Elias has been active and running, everywhere he is, the ecosystem of the election integrity world is there to meet him and confront him,” Derek Lyons, the president of RITE, told the Daily Caller. Because of how the election integrity ecosystem has confronted Elias, Lyons told the Daily Caller that the democratic lawyer has not had much success.
It is evident from dozens of operatives working on election integrity within the Republican sphere that there is no Marc Elias of the right. The effort appears more balkanized than that of the Democrats, for better or worse.
RITE is currently involved in 17 states such as Colorado, Ohio, Montana, Kansas and Florida where the organization is working to protect drop box safe guards, mail-in ballot rules, signature matching, voter identification and ballot harvesting rules, the organization told the Daily Caller.
In New York, Georgia, Arizona and Vermont, the group is going “on offense” and trying to enact laws around citizenship requirements, no-excuse absentee voting, invalid signature matching and double voting.
Other election integrity organizations are non-partisan, which prohibits them from working with political organizations such as the RNC. But for the Public Legal Interest Foundation (PLIF), the group finds its non-partisan nature more beneficial than if it was to work with the GOP.
“When Republicans file cases, they run into a buzzsaw,” J. Christian Adams, the president of PLIF, told the Daily Caller.
“To go on offense, you really needed to do it last year. And instead of suing on behalf of Republicans, we’re suing on behalf of a county election official who has to accept the balance,” he continued.
“You see the difference? Because if you bring a case under the brand Republican versus I’m just this poor schlub, who has to make a decision, the courts are more likely to rule in favor of the poor schlub than they are in favor of a Republican Party,” Adams added.
But within what the RNC described as a “robust” ecosystem, some groups have felt abandoned. True the Vote, one of the many nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations working within the election integrity sphere, noted that they had no clue what the GOP was doing legally ahead of the election.
“We just won a huge legal victory in Georgia against Stacey Abrams. That’s a great example of a place that the RNC or NRCC or so many that claim that they’re supportive of election integrity, could have made some kind of an overture. We fought that alone for three years and I think speaks to the distance,” Engelbrecht told the Daily Caller.
“They’re going to do what they’re going to do. We’re here on the ground, seeing things fall apart and knowing that action needs to be taken and we just are assuming that we’ll do what we can and pray that others join in the fight,” she continued.
The RNC noted to the Daily Caller that the party never heard from True the Vote regarding any possible assistance in its legal battle.
“One thing you want to avoid is doing duplicative work. So if like there’s one group, that is you know, deep in the trenches on specific Georgia litigation, maybe that frees us up to get really into a court battle in Arizona, so on and so forth,” the RNC told the Daily Caller, adding that the party has to be very careful with how it works with and communicates with nonprofits.
True the Vote later told the Daily Caller that they cannot reach out to the RNC because of their nonpartisan nature, but expressed optimism that the party would engage in their litigation in the future.
“True the Vote is very happy to hear about the RNC’s election integrity efforts. Must be a stealth campaign,” Engelbrecht hit back.
The landscape could shift with former President Donald Trump securing the GOP nomination for 2024 and integrating his campaign with the RNC.
“Securing our elections is a top priority,” Chris LaCivita, a Trump campaign senior adviser told the Daily Caller in a statement. “Across the country, we will be aggressive in addressing issues related to the way elections are conducted because we must restore the integrity of the election process and Republican voters’ trust in the system. Otherwise, we risk losing future elections and losing our country.
With the new leadership in place, some organizations previously snubbed out of partnership have already seen improvement. Turning Point Action, a 501(c)4 partner of Turning Point USA, is one of those groups that has felt an increase of optimism as it has begun its “Chase the Vote” effort.
“Before with the old leadership, we heard nothing. There was no willingness or coordination to work with us.” Kolvet told the Caller. “With the new leadership we are very hopeful. We are very optimistic, there is a new vibe.”
Still, no centralized agenda seems to exist. And in the meantime, some Republicans are focused not on overturning Democrats’ election rules, but simply beating them at their own game.
To some degree, that includes the RNC itself, which is putting major juice behind its “Bank Your Vote” initiative encouraging conservatives to vote early in 2024.
Turning Point Action’s “Chase the Vote” initiative focuses on getting in touch with voters who have received mail-in ballots and encouraging them to fill it out and cast their vote. The initiative currently focuses on Arizona and Wisconsin where the organization plans to hire hundreds of full-time staffers devoted to the effort, Kolvet told the Daily Caller.
“Our ultimate goal is, I don’t think that we’re looking to set a blanket regime of election laws across the country. I don’t think that that’s realistic. We as conservatives and Republicans have a very strong belief that elections are to be left to the states to make up their minds on how to run those,” Helton said.
Regardless, time remains, and the parties leading the effort are remaining optimistic about their chances.
“You asked the question, are we in this position where we’re going to be told it’s too late to challenge things, like again in 2020. Hopefully not,” Lyons told the Daily Caller.
🚨New RNC Co-Chair @LaraLeaTrump says Republicans will start registering voters at MASSIVE events like the NRA Convention, UFC Fights, the Daytona 500 and Country Music Concerts pic.twitter.com/lVk9Guf46H
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2024-03-15 16:51:212024-03-15 16:51:21‘They Are Miles Ahead’: Despite ‘Election Integrity’ Hype, GOP Could Be Walking Into 2024 Legal Buzzsaw
“There are but two parties now: traitors and patriots. And I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter and, I trust, the stronger party.” — Ulysses S. Grant
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” — John F. Kennedy
“The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other – until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.” — Ayn Rand
“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.” — Frederick Douglass, African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman.
Dr. Rich Swier, has published an “American Patriot’s Manifesto” to preserve, protect and defend our Constitutional Republic from all enemies, both foreign and increasingly domestic.
Rich published this Manifesto because there truly are today only two parties — Traitors and Patriots. Rich identifies with the latter and stronger party.
This DISSENT Manifesto is designed for every patriot to educate him or herself on the top issues of our day. Those issues are the most important in this election cycle. It is designed to be shared with family, friends and on social media.
Every Patriot must first understand and then fight for the truth. This Manifesto gives you the truth.
This book gives every patriot the “intellectual ammunition” needed to expose the lies and myths.
America’s domestic enemies abound in the Deep State from the schoolhouse to the White House and from the school boards to corporate boards across this nation.
This book is a guide to help patriotic Americans understand the many myths that have been pushed by the traitors.
Our intent is to have an informed electorate for the November 5th, 2024 Presidential Election.
We the patriots must elect those who will return power to we the people. We patriots must drain the swamp, or we all will surely drown in it or be eaten by its political elitist traitors.
Rich humbly asks you to purchase his book and after reading it, if you wish, pass it along to others.
Rich asks each patriot to remember, if not us, then who? If not now, then when?
If you cannot afford to buy either the hardcopy or paperback version thenjust go to your local public, school, college, or university library and ask them to order it for you.
DISSENT: The Highest form of Patriotism may be purchased on:
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2024-03-15 15:52:122024-03-15 15:52:12An American Patriot’s Manifesto to Preserve our Constitutional Republic Against All Enemies
The venerable economist Milton Friedman once said, “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change.” That’s the impulse behind Winston Churchill’s admonition (later famously echoed by Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel): “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Well, welcome to the world of American higher education. Crippling tuition, bloated bureaucracies, huge rates of noncompletion, campus groupthink, DEI loyalty oaths, grade inflation, enrollment cliffs, and stretched institutional budgets have all added up to a crisis of confidence—inside higher education and among the broader public.
Trust in the nation’s colleges has been crumbling for the better part of a decade. In 2023, Gallup reported that just 36 percent of American adults said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in higher education. Among Republicans, the share of adults who trust colleges plummeted from 56 percent in 2015 to 19 percent in 2023. But it wasn’t just a right-wing thing. Among independents, the numbers plunged by a third, from 48 percent to 32 percent, and among Democrats, trust declined from 68 percent to 59 percent.
There is a challenge here—and an opportunity.
Policymakers who are troubled by this state of affairs but unsure how to respond may be inclined to look to the K–12 playbook, thinking that what’s needed is a strong dose of “school choice for college.” But the truth is that American higher education already features an extraordinary degree of choice. Pell Grants, the GI Bill, and many state scholarships essentially operate as vouchers for low-income students to attend the school, public or private, of their choice. Heavily subsidized federal student loans can also be used at nearly every institution of higher education. And yet, for all this, the higher education landscape is a mess.
It would be a profound mistake to read this as an indictment of educational choice. Rather, the problem is that anti-competitive practices have been allowed to stymie robust, healthy competition and fuel the self-dealings of campus mandarins.
What’s needed today is a heavy dose of trust-busting, deregulation, and entrepreneurial energy.
Busting the Accreditation Trust
Federal policymaking over the past half-century has mostly focused on subsidizing higher education. Pell Grants, institutional aid, and the student lending program have provided vast sums to cover or underwrite tuition, plumping college coffers while expanding their consumer base. In order to guard against waste and fraud, these programs have relied on a system of college accreditation that has, ironically, served to further protect incumbent institutions and encourage bureaucratic bloat.
For an institution of higher education to receive federal funds (including Pell Grants and subsidized loans), it must be accredited. The problem is that accreditors are trade associations operated and funded by the colleges they oversee. This means they’re essentially a legally sanctioned, publicly funded cartel. Mediocre colleges keep their accreditation even as they overcharge and underperform. Meanwhile, new and nontraditional entrants must leap over enormous hurdles just to get started.
The current system isn’t suited to facilitate competition and creation. However, some form of oversight is necessary as a matter of fiduciary responsibility. The obvious solution is to build on the Trump administration’s efforts to create room for new accreditors that are less entwined with the cartel and more hospitable to new providers. This is eminently doable: Under existing law, the US Department of Education can recognize new accreditors not beholden to the same entrenched interest groups.
The Postsecondary Commission (PSC) offers one intriguing approach. PSC seeks to adapt the K–12 model of charter authorizing to higher education by focusing more on outcomes than on inputs and compliance. PSC founder, Stig Leschly, says that the goal is to stop counting faculty or campus materials and instead judge colleges based on economic returns, transparency, accountability, and innovation. To be accredited by PSC, institutions need to track and report short-term results like rates of graduation, year-to-year retention, and job placement. Over the longer term, they would need to track student labor market outcomes and calculate graduates’ earnings—as compared to a counterfactual estimate of what they would make had they not attended the institution—minus the cost of attendance. Such a system rewards institutions that build programs and approach staffing with a focus on outcomes and ROI—a development that, in turn, should have the happy effect of squeezing out the ideological stylings that have proliferated at institutions where students or faculty have too much idle time and too little focus. PSC is an example of the type of forward-thinking activity that could allow for the emergence of new accreditors, and thereby new colleges, that are less beholden to the unworkable status quo.
The College Shakedown Racket
But there is an even more insidious trust lurking just under the surface of American higher education. Employers use college credentials as a hiring requirement—whether they’re demonstrably relevant to the job in question or not. This practice took off after the Civil Rights Act of 1965, when it became increasingly dicey for employers to use other kinds of hiring tests. The Supreme Court warned in the early 1970s that college degrees shouldn’t be treated any differently than any other hiring requirement, but nonetheless, they have been given exactly that kind of carve-out—making them a safe haven for risk-averse HR departments and employment attorneys. The result is that employers who are fearful of screening based on knowledge or skills will casually demand a diploma even for jobs that don’t truly require one. These paper credentials have become admission tickets to the middle class that must be purchased from existing institutions of higher education.
It’s time to level the playing field. Students should enroll in college because they want to or because they need specific training, not because it’s the only way to ensure they’ll get a fair look from potential employers. There are several ways to reduce employers’ reliance on college degrees. First, the courts should subject college credentials to the same kind of scrutiny applied to any other hiring test. Degrees should be required only if they’re demonstrably related to the work at hand. Meanwhile, there’s a need to devise reliable, credible, legally sound hiring tests that can offer an appealing alternative to college credentialing for applicants and employers. Public officials have a unique opportunity to lead on this issue. Indeed, they should take a page from red and blue governors like Larry Hogan in Maryland and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania and eliminate degree requirements for most state government jobs, thereby requiring that positions be filled based on skills and experience rather than paper credentials.
Higher education is ripe for a new era of institution building. Choice works when new, better alternatives force lazy, self-indulgent incumbents to raise their game or risk obsolescence.
The merit of a college education isn’t the point. The issue is that today an arbitrary judicial standard, an excessive regard for employer convenience, and an unwillingness to stand up to the college cartel mean that Americans are required to pay the ransom of a college diploma in order to seek professional success. Compelling Americans to buy an expensive degree of dubious value is behavior more typically associated with protection rackets than engines of opportunity.
Public Scams and Public Subsidies
Higher education is also rife with dubious practices that reward influence peddling and shower massive public subsidies on unaccountable providers. Some of these practices especially advantage brand-name institutions, while others insulate the broader sector from the consequences of its failings.
Today, wealthy families who make influence-peddling “donations” to help grease the admissions skids for their children are allowed to write off the full amount as charitable contributions. This is nonsensical. After all, the IRS has long held that donors can only deduct the value of their contribution minus the value of any good or service they receive in return. This makes obvious sense: An exchange of goods or services is not a charitable contribution. Yet the IRS currently ignores the quid pro quo when it comes to admissions. Elite schools shake down wealthy families to pad their endowments and insulate themselves from market pressure. They then gift seats to donors’ children at the expense of their more deserving peers. Taxpayers pick up the tab as donors buying access wind up illegally deducting 50 percent or more of these “charitable contributions.” That publicly subsidized institutions engage in such influence peddling is particularly galling given the leaders of those same institutions are prone to go on at great length about the evils of privilege and their commitment to equity.
There is also a general lack of institutional accountability for publicly provided funds. Colleges admit students and, as long as they’re enrolled, keep pocketing taxpayer dollars—directly in the form of Pell Grants or indirectly through federally subsidized loans. If the student never graduates, the college keeps all that money. The student leaves with no degree but all the debt. When students don’t repay their loans, taxpayers are on the hook for the balance. Now we are seeing the frustration over accumulated debt fuel a political push for loan “forgiveness” that sticks taxpayers with the tab for hundreds of billions in borrowed funds, even when those funds simply serve to alleviate financial pressure on colleges whose students have no degrees or earnings to show for all the time and money they spent there.
Institutions that accept public funds should be expected to make taxpayers whole for the tuition and fees they’ve collected from students who don’t repay their loans. This would create intense pressure on colleges to help ensure that students complete their degrees and find gainful employment. It would also likely make colleges more cautious about whom they enroll. That’s a good thing. Admitting students who are unprepared for college and then pocketing tuition from them isn’t good for anyone.
Building New Institutions
Dynamism used to be the norm in higher education. Americans weren’t stuck with the institutions we inherited. Rather, we built new institutions in response to changing needs. Between 1820 and 1899, 672 new colleges were established in the US. Of those, 573 were private. That’s an average of more than a half-dozen new private institutions each year. During the second half of the nineteenth century, private donors founded 11 universities that are today ranked among the nation’s top twenty, including such famous names as Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago. We’ve fallen out of this habit. In recent decades, donors have steered big gifts toward old, inflexible institutions and given short shrift to new entrants.
Much of that nineteenth-century dynamism was born of the millionaires produced by the Industrial Revolution. They saw a need for new institutions attuned to the changing needs of the economy and society. Today, the deep-pocketed donors born of the Information Age have seemingly concluded that it’s foolish to build from scratch when there are already so many prestigious institutions. Instead, they direct their giving to existing schools, ballooning endowments and erecting new buildings while further entrenching familiar brands. Nearly $60 billion was donated to higher education last year, with close to a quarter of that flowing to just 20 institutions.
Higher education is ripe for a new era of institution building. Choice works when new, better alternatives force lazy, self-indulgent incumbents to raise their game or risk obsolescence. Long lists of rules, regulations, and subsidies have yielded a higher education landscape that’s neither responsive nor responsible. It’s time to look for institutions that can do better.
Deep-pocketed donors would do well to focus on underwriting new entrants rather than cutting eight-figure checks to erect buildings, stadiums, and new initiatives at institutions busy squatting atop ten-figure endowments. We’re seeing this kind of pioneering spirit play out with the promising new University of Austin. And there’s great value in creating quasi-autonomous new units at universities to provide a home for heterodox scholarship on civic virtue, American history, and the Great Books (as at Arizona State and the University of Florida). It shouldn’t be either-or. We need a wave of such efforts.
In time, of course, these new institutions may themselves lose their way or get captured. But that simply strengthens the case for building a steady supply of new ones. This requires a shift in how we think about the tension between tradition and dynamism in higher education, where the former impulse has usually won out. Big donors troubled by the status quo should refuse to subsidize bad behavior and instead invest in new institutions—whether those are focused on workforce preparedness, the liberal arts, or anything in between.
Looking Forward
There’s much more to be done, of course. In our new book, Getting Education Right, we explain the need for both structural changes in higher education and a renewed commitment to rigor, free inquiry, and the telos of the enterprise. However frustrated we may be with higher education today, it’s a mistake to reduce colleges and universities to social media punching bags. Whatever the manifold failings of performative professors and slacker students, higher education plays a vital role in safeguarding human knowledge, promoting scientific inquiry, and teaching wisdom to the next generation.
We can’t afford to merely lament or critique the woeful state of higher education. We need to pursue changes that will help colleges and universities better fulfill their purpose. As Friedman, Churchill, and Emanuel would remind us, there’s a lot of silver in those clouds. Finding it requires institutions of higher education to honor their mission and serve as beacons of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom for the students they serve today as well as those yet to darken their doors.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-15 02:30:002024-03-15 02:30:00Taking On the College Cartel
Editors’ Note: Certainly left-wing oligarchs like Zuckerberg have the right to free speech, but we have the right to know what they are funding. If you don’t like the breakdown in law and order, it might be appropriate not to buy products from Facebook/Meta. It is also clear big left-wing money is corrupting some conservatives and libertarians.
Mark Zuckerberg is no stranger to writing big checks for politically charged philanthropy. The $400 million Zuckerberg distributed to local election offices through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (and the Center for Election Innovation and Research) during the 2020 election is his most famous, perhaps even the most infamous charitable contribution ever.
But it’s not the only nine-figure contribution Zuckerberg has made. Mark Zuckerberg made another politically charged philanthropic contribution of $350 million after the 2020 election, and there’s a good chance you’ve never heard about it.
The Just Trust Begins
In January 2021, before the full scope of the original “Zuck bucks” was known, Zuckerberg announced the creation of the Just Trust, a five-year $350 million initiative to “reform” the U.S. criminal justice system. This second wave of Zuck bucks benefiting the common criminal instead of the county election clerk went relatively unnoticed.
It was not Zuckerberg’s first foray into criminal justice policy, but it is the largest to date. As CRC’s research uncovered, Zuckerberg used “dark money” groups as early as 2018 to secretly deliver funds to far-left district attorney candidates in Oregon and Nevada. In all, Zuckerberg’s philanthropic network had already given “164 million in funding to [criminal justice policy organizations] to date” at the time the grant to the Just Trust was announced, but the Just Trust was intended to be a new and improved initiative for all-things criminal justice “reform” in the Zuckerberg-Chan empire.
To lead the organization, Zuckerberg selected his personal criminal justice guru, Ana Zamora, a veteran ACLU employee. She had been recruited to head the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s (CZI) criminal justice reform programs after years of criminal justice policy advocacy in California, where voters are now notably fed-up with“reform.” Zamora also boasts in her bio that her team at CZI “backed key wins like Measure 110 in Oregon to decriminalize all drug possession,” hardly the moderate common-sense position that the Just Trust claims to promote. Since Measure 110 was passed, opioid overdose deaths have increased by 241 percent statewide and just this past week a bipartisan group of Oregon lawmakers passed legislation to recriminalize drug possession.
Common Ground or Classic Misdirection?
Zamora’s and CZI’s records as commonsense nonpartisan actors are not exactly stellar. Yet the Just Trust insists on its website that the group “collaborates across political spectrums” to get things done. This assertion is at odds with CZI’s choice of Arabella Advisors to initially house the Just Trust as a fiscal sponsor during its beginning phases.
The Arabella Advisors fiscal sponsorship network (first discovered by researchers here at the Capital Research Center) is the undisputed heavyweight champion of Democrat-aligned “dark money”operations. Arabella recently landed in a heap of legal trouble for a different fiscally sponsored project that professed to operate across political lines but was ultimately shown by leaked documents and lawsuits to be a scandalous trojan horse for left-wing policy advocacy. Even though the Just Trust quickly spun-out from the Arabella nursery and became its own organization, the Just Trust for Action (JTFA) reported paying Arabella Advisors $350,000 in consulting fees during 2022, making it the group’s highest paid independent contractor.
The Just Trust does at least make an effort to appear bipartisan.
Representing the libertarians on JTFA’s board members is Jenny Kim, former senior vice-president for policy in the libertarian-leaning Koch network and current employee of the Gober Group. Kim’s last appearance in the news was as the incorporator of a “dark money” group in Iowa that sent out “dirty trick” mailers before the 2023 Iowa caucus that seemed designed to provoke infighting among Republican candidates. Supposedly representing conservatives on JTFA’s board is Kevin Madden, who once worked for Mitt Romney and other Republican leaders. Madden more recently spent years in employ of Arnold Ventures, the left-leaning philanthropic empire of John Arnold. Arnold is notorious for using less-than-transparent funding arrangements to pay nominally conservative organizations and pundits to support left-wing policy changes on a seemingly for-hire basis. Then, right next to Madden on the JTFA board is David Plouffe, director of both of Barrack Obama’s presidential campaigns and author of the highly nonpartisan classics A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump and How the Democrats Can Win by Leading America to a Better Future in 2010 and Beyond.
Just “Dark Money”
In 2022, the Just Trust for Action, the 501(c)(4) “dark money” wing of the Just Trust spent just over $21 million—most of it in the form of grants to other “dark money” organizations. The overwhelming majority of them were left-leaning, though a few conservative and libertarian groups appear on the list.
In 2022, the Just Trust for Action (JTFA) granted$3.5 million to Action for Safety and Justice, the 501(c)(4) wing of the Alliance for Safety and Justice. Action for Safety and Justice reported just $5 million in revenue during 2022, meaning 70 percent of its revenue came from JTFA. Action for Safety and Justice stashed away most of the funding for the future but spent $412,740 on lobbying during the year in states like Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Another “dark money” group, Reform Action Fund, received $2.6 million from JTFA. Reform Action Fund is the lobbying arm of the Criminal Justice Reform Foundation and its board members include rapper Meek Mill, artists Jay-Z, and Patriots owner Robert Kraft. The $2.6 million grant accounted for half of the Reform Action Fund’s revenue for the year. The organization reported spending $1.4 million on lobbying in 2022 but provided no explanation on where or which specific legislation.
The American Conservative Union (ACU), the organization that famously hosts yearly CPAC convenings in DC, also received $1 million from JTFA. Every year the ACU hosts panels and speakers professing to make the conservative case for criminal justice reform that have mystified attendees. Even openly far-left speakers like Van Jones have been given a platform on the main stage. This is largely, some popular commentators have speculated, a result of the millions that the ACU has received from left-leaning funders interested in pushing criminal justice reforms. Both the Arabella network and the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative have given large grants to the ACU in the past.
JTFA also contributed over $1 million to the Yes on 820 campaign of Oklahomans for Sensible Marijuana Laws, an Oklahoma political action committee (PAC). The campaign advocated for a marijuana legalization ballot measure that voters ultimately rejected in 2022. Oklahoma campaign finance records show that JTFA sent Yes on 820 another $1 million in the first quarter of 2023, just before the ballot measure went to a vote. Oklahoma campaign finance records show that Yes 0n 820 raised just over $4.8 million total, meaning that JTFA, and by extension Mark Zuckerberg, provided nearly half of all the funding for the ballot measure.
Drug Policy Action, a long-time favorite of George Soros, received $1.5 million from JTFA and was also a leading funder of Yes on 820, giving the PAC nearly $300,000 between 2022 and 2023. JTFA also made a $3 million grant to the ACLU, which in-turn gave roughly $540,000 to Yes on 820. Coincidentally, JTFA distributed exactly $540,000 worth of grants to the Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, and West Virginia chapters of the ACLU during 2022. That’s nearly $3 million worth of funding for Yes on 820 that can plausibly be traced back to Zuckerberg’s JTFA. It’s also about $3 million gone up in smoke (pun intended).
Although the ballot measure to legalize weed in Oklahoma failed, JTFA has plenty of notches in its belt. In fact, the organization keeps a meticulous public list of all its policy wins (though it doesn’t mention the losses). In its 2023–23 annual report database the Just Trust provided a list of wins broken up into four categories: affirmative wins, or the passage of new policy; defensive wins, or stopping left-wing policies from being overturned; implementation wins, or helping advise or manage the actual implementation of affirmative policy wins; and narrative wins, or successfully changing the narratives around left-wing criminal justice reform.
Marijuana isn’t the only drug the Just Trust was working on. Over 109,000 people in the United States died of drug overdoses in 2022, and 70 percent of those overdoses were the result of fentanyl or fentanyl analogs. The worst state for fentanyl overdose deaths per capita was West Virginia, where the Just Trust was doing everything it could to fight legislation intended to increase the penalties for fentanyl dealers. JTFA boasts that its grantees were able to defeat House Bill 2847, which would have imposed a life sentence on those convicted of selling fentanyl. Meanwhile in Kentucky, the fourth worst state for fentanyl overdoses, JTFA partners “successfully weakened a bill that increased criminal penalties for fentanyl” by providing “testimony, policy analysis and public education, direct lobbying of legislators and talking points.” In Arizona JTFA claims that an unlikely duo of the ACLU and American Conservative Union (ACU) teamed up to defeat House Bill 2167, which would have applied the felony murder rule to deaths resulting from the sale of fentanyl or fentanyl laced drugs. It wasn’t the only time JTFA claimed the ACU helped it secure a win.
JTFA’s database claims that the ACU helped them get certain provisions of Georgia Senate Bill 92 removed that would have made it easier to recall district attorneys and would have limited their ability to use prosecutorial discretion to decide which laws to enforce and (more importantly) not enforce. The Just Trust database also notes that this bill would have “[jeopardized] the independence of investigations” no doubt in reference to a certain high-profile case brought by a left-leaning district attorney in Georgia. In Idaho the ACU was again enlisted by JTFA, credited for working with Right on Crime, a campaign of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, to block House Bill 149, which would have created a mandatory minimum sentence for fentanyl possession and made it a felony.
Soros’ Apprentice
The largest estimates suggest that Soros has spent over $50 million supporting the campaigns of far-left district attorney candidates. He has been so successful with this political arbitrage tactic that the term “Soros DA” has gained a life of its own, now referring less to the man than to the movement he created, but recently Zuckerberg has actually spent much more than Soros on nonprofit policy advocacy.
With the Just Trust commitments and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s prior spending, Zuckerberg has spent north of $500 million advancing the Soros brand of justice. Making matters worse, Zuckerberg has been joined by his Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, who has created a similarly named organizing hub called Just Impact and has spent at least $200 millionon left-wing “reform” advocacy. Zuckerberg and Moskovitz, true to their pasts, are trying to create a justice system that looks a lot like Facebook’s content moderation policies; extremely lax, wildly unpopular, and openly biased against conservatives.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-15 02:28:002024-03-15 02:28:00“Zuck Bucks” for Soft-on-Crime Prosecution
You have probably seen a cop show where there is a company owned by an entity that is owned by another entity to hide the real owners. A perfect example of someone using what can be referred to as “shell companies” is Hunter Biden having more than 20 of them. Congress wants to stop these activities which are believed to be sheltering illegal activities. Their solution? A proposal with such overkill it is akin to killing a mosquito with a bazooka.
The Corporate Transparency Act was passed in 2021 with bipartisan support. It put enforcement of this in the hands of a U.S. Treasury bureau named the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN). According to Director Andrea Gacki, their website states “This final rule is a significant step forward in our efforts to protect our financial system and curb illicit activities.” “BOI (Beneficial Ownership Information) can provide essential information to law enforcement, intelligence, and national security professionals as they work to protect the United States from bad actors who exploit anonymous shell companies to engage in money laundering, corruption, sanctions and tax evasion, drug trafficking, fraud, and a host of other criminal offenses with impunity, while legitimate businesses suffer from their misdeeds.”
That all sounds wonderful until you find out that an estimated 32.6 million companies will have to file reports on their website by the end of 2024. That includes all corporations, LLCs, partnerships, S corporations, and some trusts. This is not aimed at big businesses; it is aimed at small businesses. Your company is exempt from reporting if you have more than 20 full-time employees or you run a tax-exempt entity. One financial professional suggested a lot of shenanigans are done through non-profit entities wondering why they are exempt.
In addition, if you have more than $5,000,000 in gross receipts you do not have to file. There are 23 other categories of businesses that may be exempt. These businesses are licensed businesses like banks, insurance companies, investment brokerage companies, etc.
Once you determine you must file this report, what do you have to report? You must tell them every person who has 25% or more ownership. In simple terms, if you are the boss or one of the bosses you must be included in the report. When the company files they must report your full legal name, home address, and social security number. Most importantly, you have to provide a PDF of each person’s driver’s license or passport.
If anything changes after filing, you must also report the change within 30 days. That is an ill-defined requirement. For example, if you renew your driver’s license and the issue date and expiration date change, do you have to file a change?
As with any government mandate today there are penalties – lots of penalties – for non-compliance. You are subject to civil penalties of $500 per day if you don’t comply. Or you could be subject to criminal penalties of up to $10,000 and imprisonment for up to two years.
You can try to file this yourself, but most likely you need a professional. The American Bar Association has said it is questionable that attorneys should do it. The insurance companies for CPAs say they are not insuring for this act because they believe it to be legal work, not CPA work. A high-powered attorney who has been giving seminars on compliance with this new law stated he believes attorneys will include this in their process while creating a new entity for someone. He also stated that he believes CPAs are best suited to file for existing companies because they have the current information on the owners of companies, including who is in charge. Then some utilized a website to form their own company and don’t have an attorney or a CPA. Remember these are small businesses.
I spoke to attorneys who are going to charge at least $500 to comply with this law for new entities. That fee might increase for existing companies because of the law’s complexity. Remember, these are small companies by the law’s own definition. It is another barrier to people trying to start a business and free themselves from working for the gigantic corporations about which many of the elected officials who voted for this complain.
FINCEN has promised the protection of everyone’s personal information. Yeah, right. First, their own website lists a multitude of agencies that will gain access to this information. Second, this comes on the heels of IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn stealing up to 7,500 individuals’ tax information and distributing it to the New York Times and ProPublica. He was charged with just one felony and received only five years in prison. Not much of a deterrent for the disclosure of 7,500 tax returns. How trusting should we be?
A federal judge has in just the last couple of days put a hold on the program saying it is duplicative overkill as the states register all these businesses. It is yet unclear whether the Biden Administration will appeal.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to delay implementation of this law for existing businesses until 2025. The Senate has not yet addressed it. What they both should do is put a spike in the core of this overly invasive and costly mandate. It is just like the government to kill a mosquito with a bazooka.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-15 02:26:002024-03-15 02:26:00Killing A Mosquito With A Bazooka [Corporate Transparency Act]
The Islamic State and al-Qaeda have been calling upon Muslims to attack Israeli and U.S. interests for years, but Avril Haines was likely too consumed with hunting for “insurrectionists” to notice.
US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on Monday that the Islamist terrorist groups al Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) have been inspired by Hamas to attack Americans and Israelis.
“While it is too early to tell, both al Qaeda and ISIS, inspired by Hamas, have directed supporters to conduct attacks against Israeli and US interests,” Haines testified to the US Senate Intelligence Committee. “And we have seen how it is inspiring individuals to conduct acts of antisemitism and Islamophobic terror worldwide.”
Antisemitism has skyrocketed since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel launched the current war in Gaza, which is ruled by the Palestinian terrorist group. Antisemitic incidents have reached record levels in the US and several European countries following the Hamas atrocities, which resulted in the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust by the Nazis during World War II.
“It is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism,” Haines told US lawmakers. “The crisis in Gaza is a stark example of how regional developments have the potential of broader and even global implications.”
Haines also noted concerns that the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza could spread global insecurity: “The crisis in Gaza is a stark example of how regional developments have the potential of broader and even global implications.”…
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2024-03-14 16:53:102024-03-14 16:53:10U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, ‘Al Qaeda and ISIS, inspired by Hamas,’ demand Muslims ‘attack Israeli and U.S. interests’
BREAKING INSIDE THE PENTAGON:Associate Director in the Office of the Secretary of Defense says, “Why not just have an open border?” “Tear down the wall.”
“I think we should repeal the Second Amendment and take the guns all away!” says Jason Beck, who has a classified security clearance and works for the Department of Defense. Beck, who uses a fake name Aidan Grey in his meetings with a disguised James O’Keefe, describes his extremist policies, including “mobilizing the national guard” to confiscate guns from people’s homes. Beck says he wants a “monopoly on state violence,” a concept he describes as “‘We [the government], are the only ones with guns.”
Jason Beck works in Total Force Requirements & Sourcing Policy in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense. This office oversees the Department of Defense and acts as the principal defense policy maker and adviser to the President of the United States. Beck says he helps “writes answers for testimony” of “the department’s senior leadership – basically they go over to the Hill for hearings on the department’s posture.”
In this shocking footage we get an INSIDE look as Jason Beck tells James O’Keefe: “we need to pack the Supreme Court,” ban the United States Senate, and abolish the electoral college. He also discusses his “bottom surgery’ being painful and the changes to his plumbing.
OMG got a concerning peek under the lid of Pentagon policymaking when James O’Keefe went undercover to have dinner with Jason Beck, the Associate Director in Total Force Requirements & Sourcing Policy for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Headquartered in the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense oversees the Department of Defense (DoD) and acts as the principal defense policy maker and adviser to the President of the United States. The mission of the Department of Defense is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.
Oddly enough and never explained, Beck introduced himself to O’Keefe as Aidan Grey. His name was not the only thing Beck was confused about as he detailed his bottom surgery to change his sex, explaining to desired love match O’Keefe: “The plumbing is different.” It is in this mind frame Beck, who has classified security clearance, conducts his work. Beck stated that he helps write answers for senior DoD officials for their testimony before Congress in Posture hearings, is “trying to get policies in place” to revise DoD policies for issues including contracts with private military contractors like former CEO of Blackwater Erik Prince, and implements DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives throughout the DoD, the nation’s largest government agency. When O’Keefe asked about the recent controversy surrounding Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin hiding his health condition and surgery from the White House, Beck admitted “the way they hid it was really strange um, nobody knew?”
The most disturbing aspect of OMG’s undercover footage of Beck was how he harbored views not only antithetical to the mission of the agency for which he works but also to the very tenets of our government. Beck expressed how he wanted to work on the State’s Monopoly on Violence – the idea that government is “the only legitimate purveyor of violence and enforcement of force, so, we [the government] are the only ones with guns” – something our Founders knew inevitably leads to government tyranny. Nonetheless, Beck advocated for the repeal of the Second Amendment and for the National Guard “to take them [guns] all away,” similar to the forced integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. To ensure individuals within the National Guard followed orders to confiscate Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms, Beck justified packing the United States Supreme Court with a leftist majority so legislation banning all guns could not be overturned as unconstitutional.
Addressing border security, which ensures the security of our nation – the very mission of the DoD, Beck harbored extremist views entirely out of line with the majority of Americans. He claimed the recent immigration bill was “really racist” and wanted to “tear down the wall” even when public health emergencies would allow for the removal of illegal immigrants under Title 42. Instead, Beck demanded: “Why not just have an OPEN BORDER.” He maintained the border is “not a security crisis” and any belief dangerous individuals are coming across the border are “just made up.” It was apparent Beck had not seen OMG’s ongoing border coverage exposing piles of discarded ID cards from China, Venezuela, Cuba, Turkey, Syria, and Egypt found by OMG Citizen Journalists or OMG’s exposé on No Mas Muertas where OMG’s undercover immigrant was held at gun point by Spanish-speaking men who looked and acted like cartel members. Thus, perhaps the only thing more disturbing than Beck’s hatred of Constitutional rights was his ignorance of documented facts and current events. In fact, DoD officials testified before the House Armed Services Committee this week acknowledging concern about an anticipated mass migration into the United States from an incredibly dangerous and unstable Haiti.
The power wielded by Beck influencing DoD policy according to extremist anti-Constitutional views and IRS officials like Alex Mena unconstitutionally using AI to view the contents of our private bank accounts reveals a modern federal bureaucracy that is dangerously unaccountable. We can only hope that OMG and its army of Citizen Journalists continue to expose government corruption and turn the tide.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2024-03-14 16:53:082024-03-14 16:53:08VIDEO EXPOSÈ: Secretary of Defense Personnel, “Why Not Just Have An Open Border?”
President Joe Biden released his proposed 2025 budget on Monday. “As the president is fond of saying, a budget is a reflection of our values,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) at Senate hearings on the multi-trillion-dollar proposal. But Biden’s proposed budget would:
Place transgender-identifying minors into the foster care facilities of the opposite sex, a policy that has led to sexual abuse and human trafficking;
Deny most Americans, especially Christians, the right to participate in foster care for certain children unless they agree to subject those minors to transgender medical interventions, such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone injections;
Seek to expand abortion;
Overturn laws that punish prostitutes for knowingly infecting others with HIV/AIDS;
Eliminate abstinence-based sex education;
Spike funding for Title X, a program that encourages doctors to give contraception to underage minors without parental knowledge and conceal children’s sexual activity from their parents;
Entrust government-funded workers with raising children beginning at the age of three; and
Increase funding for controversial, United Nations population programs.
Below is an overview of the budget’s most controversial features in his 2025 budget, which would raise taxes by more than $5 trillion, spend more than $8.6 trillion, enact a constitutionally-dubious wealth tax, implement a global minimum tax, and add $16.3 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.
Promoting Extreme Transgender Ideology
Joe Biden has repeatedly committed his administration to promoting the LGBTQ agenda. The Biden administration’s proposed 2025 budget intends to make the LGBTQ revolution permanent by placing children in sex-segregated group homes of the opposite sex, and by denying Christians the right to participate in aspects of foster care.
Buried in Table S-6, on page 153 of the budget (page 157 of the PDF), is a line item committing to “[p]revent and combat religious, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or sex discrimination in the child welfare system.”
That apparently refers to a proposed rule the Biden administration issued last September requiring the foster care system to place LGBTQ-identifying children with “safe and appropriate” homes — homes that agree to facilitate a child’s social and medical “gender transition.” The rule would “require specific steps before the placement of transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming children in sex-segregated child-care institutions (CCIs),” specifically that they place children and teens in foster care facilities according to their gender identity. That is, the Biden administration intends to place children who say they identify as transgender into sex-segregated foster care facilities of the opposite sex. Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, pointed out this would open the beds and showers of female foster homes to teenage boys.
Such a policy has already led to tragic results. In Virginia, a 14-year-old girl named Sage began to identify as a boy. Police found the teen after she ran away and got sexually trafficked, but instead of returning her to her home, a judge accused her custodial grandparents of “emotional and physical abuse” by “misgendering” her. Sage was placed in the male section of a foster home, where she was beaten and given drugs. She then ran away again, where she was apprehended by a human trafficking ring in Texas, where she was “drugged, raped, beaten, and exploited.”
The definition of “safe and appropriate” also excludes anyone who expresses skepticism about exposing children to transgender procedures. Christians and anyone who shows “hostility” toward the LGBTQ agenda would be deemed unsafe to foster children who identify as transgender. Similar policies have already denied Christians the right to care for children in Oregon and Massachusetts. This issue stood at the heart of a 2021 Supreme Court ruling, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, which ruled the city’s policy against contracting with Catholic Social Services because of their religious beliefs “violates the First Amendment,” specifically the Free Exercise Clause. The rule attempts to sidestep this concern by saying Christians can still care for foster children, just not those who identify as LGBTQ.
Multiple U.S. senators expressed concerns with the language of the rule at the time. “We are fighting back against the Biden Administration’s woke gender ideology and pronoun politics,” said Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) “Their new proposed rule aims to exclude faith-based foster care providers from helping children in need.” A coalition of 19 state attorneys general also raised alarms about the policy’s unconstitutional, and religiously discriminatory, language.
To justify these policies, the Biden rule falsely asserts, “when a LGBTQI+ child has their identity respected and supported by the caregivers in their life, their risks of attempted suicide decrease dramatically.” Yet a host of studies, from around the world over multiple decades, have found that transgender procedures do not help, and may harm, those who undergo them. A 2021 study in the Journal of Urology found, “The overall rates of suicide attempts doubled” among trans-identifying men “after vaginoplasty,” commonly referred to as “bottom surgery.” The budget indicates Biden is doubling down on this rule and its flawed methodology.
Abortion
In releasing the 2025 proposed budget, the “Biden-Harris [a]dministration has taken action to protect and expand access to reproductive health care, including abortion and contraception,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, “in every way possible.”
The budget spreads misinformation while announcing the administration’s intention to expand abortion in all 50 states. “Twenty-seven million women of reproductive age — more than one in three — live in one of the 21 [s]tates with an abortion ban currently in effect. In the last year, women have been denied medical care needed to preserve their health and save their lives,” the budget asserts. In fact, no state bans abortion if the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother. Pro-life advocates say doctors may have been confused specifically because abortion industry lobbyists have repeatedly claimed “miscarriage care” is illegal.
After touting Biden’s actions on behalf of the abortion industry, the budget states, “The [a]dministration continues to call on the Congress to pass legislation restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade in [f]ederal law.” The Biden administration endorses the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act, which goes well beyond Roe.
In concrete terms, the budget proposes giving $390 million to the “family planning” services of Title X, a 36% hike. As this author exposed, training sessions funded by the Biden administration encourage Title X providers to talk about sex with minors behind parents’ backs, hide minor children’s sexual activity from parents both during live conversations and in medical records, and even to have vans roam neighborhoods giving minors federally funded contraceptives.
The budget also “provides $594 million, an increase of $37 million above the 2023 level, for USAID directed high-impact and lifesaving voluntary family planning and reproductive health programs and America’s voluntary contribution to the United Nations Population Fund,” the budget states. UNFPA was long complicit in forced abortions necessitated by China’s one-child policy and remains tied to controversial population control efforts worldwide.
The abortion lobby said the proposed budget proved the Democratic administration is enacting their values. “The Biden-Harris administration is fighting by our side,” said Mini Timmaraju, CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL). “[T]his budget is proof. We look forward to partnering with our allies in the White House and Congress to pass a budget where our values are reflected.” Planned Parenthood also greeted the budget as “an encouraging sign of their continued support for sexual and reproductive health care.”
Universal Pre-K
As he did in last year’s $6.9 trillion budget proposal, Joe Biden proposed offering “free” preschool to children beginning at age four and “charting a path” to expanding the program to three-year-olds. The program is a longstanding item on the Left’s wish list, constituting a part of Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, mentioned in Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address, and referenced in Obama’s 2010 report to the UN Human Rights Council. Yet children being raised by daycare are associated with a panoply of negative outcomes for children and, polls show, is unwanted by parents, especially mothers.
Fighting Laws against Spreading AIDS, Combatting ‘Hate Crimes’
The 2025 proposed budget continues President Joe Biden’s fixation on overturning state laws designed to prevent AIDS-infected prostitutes from spreading HIV. “The Budget further supports State and local efforts to promote equity and protect civil rights by including $10 million for a new initiative to modernize outdated criminal statutes with a discriminatory impact on HIV-positive individuals … and $50 million for programs to combat hate crimes.”
The Biden administration sued the state of Tennessee over its aggravated prostitution law (§ 39-13-516), which charges anyone who knowingly sells sex while HIV-positive with a felony. The lawsuit came as the administration is negotiating the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Agreement. In January, WHO Secretary-General Tedros Ghebreyesus instructed “[p]olitical leaders at all levels” to “counteract conservative opposition” and “enact progressive laws” championing “sexual rights.” Specifically, “Countries must repeal laws that criminalize homosexuality, sex work and HIV transmission.”
Ending Abstinence-Based Education
The Biden budget would end funding for the Sexual Risk Abstinence Education program. Instead, he would give $101 million for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, despite a 2015 survey which found 40% of teenagers said these classes made them feel pressured to have sex. The Department of Health and Human Services lists eight regional Planned Parenthood alliances among the current Teen Pregnancy Prevention grant recipients.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
As The Federalist reported, former Rep. Liz Cheney suppressed evidence that Trump requested National Guard troops for Jan. 6, 2021.
In her memoir, former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., falsely framed former President Donald Trump as the mastermind of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, with claims that the commander-in-chief resisted calls to deploy the National Guard. The Federalist exclusively reported on Friday that the vice chair of the since-disbanded Select Committee on Jan. 6 even suppressed evidence showing Trump actually pushed for more troops.
In her December book, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, Cheney outlined how the select committee discovered the White House was warned about the potential for violence in the run-up to Jan. 6, 2021. The chapter titled “They Knew” said the committee learned of warnings through records obtained by the Secret Service.
“To be clear, the issue was not that the Secret Service failed to brief those up the chain at the White House about the threat,” Cheney wrote. “It appeared to the Committee that this information was being conveyed up the chain, including directly to Mark Meadows and President Trump.”
Cheney wrote as if Trump was negligent about the need for security in Washington on the day of the electoral count.
“With the weight of the intelligence we received via Homeland Security, it is exceptionally difficult to believe that anyone in the White House with access to this information could have failed to recognize this obvious menace,” Cheney wrote.
But the Trump administration did recognize the risk of mayhem and actively sought to deploy 10,000 National Guard troops to reinforce D.C. police. Cheney just covered it up.
Last week, Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway reported that Cheney’s committee concealed testimony from former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato. In Ornato’s first interview with House investigators on Jan. 28, 2022, Ornato told lawmakers he overheard Meadows urge D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to mobilize as many National Guard troops as needed.
“He also testified President Trump had suggested 10,000 would be needed to keep the peace at the public rallies and protests scheduled for January 6, 2021,” Hemingway reported. “Ornato also described White House frustration with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s slow deployment of assistance on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.”
Lawmakers on the partisan probe kept the transcript from the public and went on a press campaign to discredit Ornato as a witness. In her book, however, Cheney cited Ornato’s testimony as evidence of White House dismissiveness surrounding the security situation in Washington on Jan. 6.
“It is also extremely difficult to believe that Mark Meadows, Donald Trump, and others were not briefed,” Cheney wrote, adding:
I would invite anyone who still harbors doubts to read the Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and in particular to download and read the November 29, 2022, recorded examination by Chief Investigative Counsel Tim Heaphy of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato. They knew.
But Cheney made no reference to Ornato’s Jan. 28 interview when he told lawmakers that Trump actually sought 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the Capitol.
“The former J6 Select Committee apparently withheld Mr. Ornato’s critical witness testimony from the American people because it contradicted their pre-determined narrative,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., who is investigating the Jan. 6 committee, said on Friday. “Mr. Ornato’s testimony proves what Mr. Meadows has said all along: President Trump did in fact offer 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the U.S. Capitol, which was turned down.”
Ornato told lawmakers that Mayor Bowser rejected the request for additional Guard troops in Washington, D.C. “Meadows,” he said, “wanted to know if she needed any more guardsmen.”
And I remember the number 10,000 coming up of, you know, ‘The president wants to make sure that you have enough.’ You know, ‘He is willing to ask for 10,000.’ I remember that number. Now that you said it, it reminded me of it. And that she was all set. She had, I think it was like 350 or so for intersection control, and those types of things not in the law enforcement capacity at the time.
Bowser ultimately requested a few hundred unarmed troops to offer District police rudimentary assistance.
“No DCNG personnel shall be armed during this mission, and at no time, will DCNG personnel or assets be engaged in domestic surveillance, searches, or seizures of US persons,” she wrote in a New Year’s Eve letter to the commanding general of the local National Guard. Bowser had previously been a critic of additional federal troops in D.C. when far-left demonstrators were tearing down the city in 2020.
The White House then turned to the Department of Defense to preemptively deploy more Guard troops.
“I remember Chief Meadows talking to DOD about that, I believe,” Ornato told the J6 committee. “I remember Chief Meadows letting me know that, ‘Hey, there was going to be National Guard that’s going to be at Joint Base Andrews in case they’re going to need some more, we’re going to — the Mayor would need any, we’re going to make sure they’re out there.’”
The select committee, with Cheney at the helm, refused to investigate then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s own opposition to additional Guard troops at the Capitol. Pelosi was reportedly concerned about the “optics” of reinforcements at the Capitol after Democrats condemned the use of federal troops in Washington amid the 2020 riots.
The House speaker was slow to give the green light for additional Guard troops on Jan. 6, while the White House became frustrated with Secretary Miller’s slow response to dispatch reinforcements once the Capitol was breached. Cheney herself reportedly discouraged the Pentagon from taking action with an op-ed she organized by former defense secretaries days before the riot to preemptively condemn troop mobilization.
Ornato described Meadows’ vexation with the Defense Department on the day of the riot:
“Every time [Meadows] would ask, ‘What’s taking so long?’ It would be, like, you know, ‘This isn’t just start the car and we’re there. We have to muster them up, we have to’ — so it was constant excuses coming of — not excuses, but what they were actually doing to get them there. So, you know, ‘We only have so many here right now. They’re given an hour to get ready.’ So there’s, like, all these timelines that was being explained to the chief. And he relayed that, like, you know — he’s like, ‘I don’t care, just get them here,’ you know, and ‘Get them to the Capitol, not to the White House.’”
Cheney, however, never let Ornato’s testimony come to light. Instead, her committee said in the final report that Trump “never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on January 6th or on any other day. Nor did he instruct any Federal law enforcement agency to assist.”
Hemingway reported Friday, “Ornato’s description of events also matched testimony offered by Kash Patel, the former chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, in the Colorado Supreme Court hearing about Democrat efforts to limit the ability of Americans to vote for the candidate of their choice.”
“The Colorado court, whose efforts to remove Trump from the ballot were so extreme they were overturned this week by a unanimous Supreme Court, claimed Patel’s ‘testimony regarding Trump authorizing’ at least 10,000 National Guardsmen was ‘illogical’ and ‘completely devoid of any evidence in the record,’” Hemingway wrote. “Because Ornato’s corroborating information had been suppressed from the public record by the January 6 committee, the Colorado Supreme Court improperly dismissed evidence.”
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-14 02:30:002024-03-14 02:30:00Liz Cheney Covered Up Trump’s Push For National Guard On J6 In Political Memoir
Between the ongoing war in Gaza and Houthi attacks on Western shipping in the Red Sea, the media has had plenty of gruesome foreign policy fodder for the content mill. However, this coverage has come at the expense of the ongoing grinding conflict in Ukraine, which has quickly gone from a euphoric cause célèbre to a now embarrassing catastrophe that is best shoved in the closet and forgotten like all the rest of America’s decades of costly foreign policy disasters.
In recent weeks and months, the tone of coverage around the ongoing war in Ukraine has changed. At one point, any Russian advance was treated as a fluke and any Ukrainian success was seen as the precursor to an inevitable victory. The tone has now decidedly shifted, however, toward a more pessimistic view of Ukraine’s prospects and the fulfillment of NATO/Western goals. We wrote in a previous piece that time was not on Ukraine’s side. Now it appears that the mainstream press is starting to come around to the same conclusion.
Whereas before any suggestion that Ukraine would achieve anything short of total victory against Russia was met with howls of protest and vitriolic accusations of being a Kremlin stooge, mainstream outlets have begun to openly acknowledge the writing that has been on the wall for quite some time.
Near the beginning of the war, the Russian troop columns had taken almost the whole of Novaya Rossiya and were putting pressure on Kiev. Amid this offensive, a delegation from Ukraine met with Russian counterparts in Turkey to discuss a possible end to the conflict. The US assumption seems to have hedged on the idea that the Russian government would not survive a sustained conflict against the might of NATO supplies and Ukrainian strength of arms. The question remains how likely it was that Russia would cave under the sanctions pressure it was under.
From the actions of the Russian government at the beginning of the war it has been convincingly argued that Russia did not intend to invade and conquer Ukraine for annexation, let alone continue on a rampage into the rest of Eastern Europe. Rather, the invasion’s goal was to have a show of strength and rapidly coerce Ukraine away from joining NATO and to secure the interests of Russian people living in Ukraine. It is arguable that when negotiations broke down in March of 2022 they moved forward with a more direct goal of annexing key regions of strategic interest that contain more Russian speakers and ethnics. For much of Ukraine’s history, these southern and eastern regions formed the backbone of pro-Russian sentiments in the Ukrainian government. However, the war has changed these attitudes in a myriad of ways. It was argued that in the leadup to the fighting the nearly 130,000 troops that Russia allocated in the first months of the war were not enough to pacify the whole country even if it was the goal.
However, as has now become unmistakably clear, the US and UK quashed these negotiations, and Ukraine, quite disastrously in hindsight, complied and declared nothing short of total victory, including the reclamation of Crimea, would be acceptable. In response, Russia realized that to win the war, Ukraine would have to be effectively neutralized by force and began to annex oblasts and incorporate them into Russia proper, effectively burning the ships behind them and ensuring that it was going to be invested in the conflict for the long haul.
At the beginning of the war, Ukraine was able to achieve success against overstretched Russian forces who were not prepared at the time to fight a drawn-out war of attrition. This in turn induced visions of further Ukrainian breakthroughs that would cause the Russian military to collapse and even potentially Putin’s government. However, these Ukrainian victories were never against well-prepared and fortified Russian positions. As the failed counter-offensive has demonstrated, Ukraine has thus far been unable to make gains against the Russian army when at parity.
In the year since that counter-offensive, the situation has turned against Ukraine in ways that were not difficult to foresee. The US and the West scraped the bottom of the barrel to outfit Ukrainian forces for the counter-offensive that in the end achieved nothing other than depleting manpower. To quote a former US official, “We built up this mountain of steel for the counteroffensive. We can’t do that again. It doesn’t exist.” Or in the words of NATO’s most senior military official, Admiral Rob Bauer, “The bottom of the barrel is now visible.” As the authors previously noted, the West is woefully unprepared to wage a modern war of attrition in Ukraine.
Western stocks were already facing shortages and production shortfalls, but thanks to the outbreak of the war in Gaza there is additional pressure that has seen ammunition earmarked for Ukraine rerouted to Israel instead. Furthermore, at the time of writing, Congress has not passed supplemental funding for Ukraine, even after returning from Christmas break. This means that not only is Ukraine not receiving what little American military aid it might hope to get, but it is also rapidly running out of funding to continue the functions of the rest of its state apparatus. Everything from firemen to pensions has been paid for by American aid that has now dried up.
The war in Gaza is hardly the only conflict competing for limited American resources. Numerous other potential crises loom on the horizon, ranging from further escalation in the Middle East due to attacks by Iranian proxy groups, pirate-style terrorist attacks on Red Sea shipping by the Yemeni Houthis, growing military escalation on the Korean Peninsula, and the potential Venezuelan invasion of Guyana in America’s backyard. Not to mention, America’s growing great power rivalry with China and the potentially devastating conflict over Taiwan that conflict entails. With so much chaos, Twitter activists are running out of room for flag emojis in their bios.
Commentators and scholars have long warned that the West would end up leaving Ukraine out to dry and were ignored for years, but increasingly such warnings appear prescient.
Internal Fractures
Meanwhile, European goodwill towards Ukraine has been collapsing. Perhaps even more notable than the stalled American aid package has been the collapse in relations between Poland and Ukraine, with the President of Poland comparing Ukraine to a drowning person who risks pulling its rescuer down with it. Polish truckers have even taken to protesting at the border to stop Ukrainian grain exports from undercutting their businesses. Additionally, recent European elections have seen a rise in support for parties and leaders that are on the record as opposing further aid to Ukraine, notably the election of Robert Fico as Prime Minister in Slovakia, and the unexpected electoral success of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.
Ukraine’s increasingly dire situation has not been lost on its leadership, which has now begun to openly feud amongst itself. According to Time Magazine, one of Zelensky’s closest aids stated that “he deludes himself” with talk of retaking the pre-2014 borders, and another states that corruption has continued unabated and that “people are stealing like there’s no tomorrow.”
At the beginning of December, former Ukrainian president, and Zelensky rival, Petro Poroshenko’s papers were canceled, and he was prevented from leaving the country to meet with foreign leaders. Another rival, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko, has accused Zelensky of turning into an authoritarian and of centralizing power in the country to such an extent that “at some point, we will no longer be any different from Russia, where everything depends on the whim of one man.”
Also concerning is the rumored rift that has now found its way into the public eye between Zelensky and the (now former) commander of the AFU General Zaluzhny. This has come about seemingly over their differing assessments of the state of the war. In an interview published by The Economist on November 1, 2023, Zaluzhny stated that the war had turned into a stalemate. Zelensky was quick to insist that this was not true, despite the abject failure of the summer counter-offensive to achieve anything.
Days later, on November 7, 2023, one of Zaluzhny’s aides was killed under unusual circumstances when he was opening birthday presents with his son and somehow set off a grenade. There are multiple accounts of what transpired, but as the BBC notes, “The official cause of the explosion has been questioned by Ukrainian commentators, some of whom have speculated whether it was an attack targeting Gen Zaluzhny himself, on the assumption that he might have attended his aide’s birthday celebrations.”
Speculation aside, Ukrainian media reports that Zelensky is suspicious of Zaluzhny’s potential political aspirations and that in addition to making political appointments to the military, he is also circumventing Zaluzhny in the chain of command to avoid his loyalists and instead deal with those loyal to Zelensky. This pessimism within the government also seems to have reached Zelensky himself who has been quoted by the critical Russian media agency, The Moscow Times, that he “no longer sees an end in sight” and is turning down requests from the army to mobilize as many as 500,000 men which will surely make his already precarious position even harder to maintain. At the time of writing, the long-standing feud between Zelensky and Zaluzhny has resulted in the firing of the latter. Time will tell how this will affect the Zelensky government as Zaluzhny ranks as one of Ukraine’s most trusted public officials.
No Foreseeable Future
On June 8, 2016, John Mearsheimer was on a panel at the Atlantic Council on the subject of NATO enlargement and Russia where he warned that “these policies [NATO expansion and integration] are leading the Ukrainians and the Georgians down the primrose path, because on one hand, we are provoking the Russians, causing all sorts of problems, giving them the incentive to do damage in Georgia and Ukraine and the idea the West is going to come to their rescue, you believe much too much in the United States.”
Negotiations that were scotched in early March of 2022 offered the possibility that Ukraine might have been able to survive with some semblance of sovereignty intact. Now Russia is likely unwilling to accept a Minsk III deal. With their annexation of the Novaya Rossiya region, they are signaling that this struggle will be one of total victory. Russian government ministers like Sergei Shoigu have stated that the war has been planned out at least until 2025. Furthermore, with the recent Russian victories around the Ukrainian stronghold of Avdiivka, there is growing doubt amongst observers that Ukraine can successfully resist Russian advances even at some of the most heavily fortified cities along the contact line.
Commentators and scholars like Mearsheimer have long warned that the West would end up leaving Ukraine out to dry and were ignored for years, but increasingly such warnings appear prescient. Some Ukrainians have woken up to this grim reality. As former Ukrainian presidential advisor, and now Zelensky rival, Oleksii Arestovych recently remarked, “In the conflict of globalists and realists, we made a bet on the wrong side. We shed blood to end up in the losing camp.” Hopefully, it is not too late to salvage an acceptable compromise and forge some semblance of peace, but that means accepting the reality of Ukraine’s untenable position.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-14 02:28:002024-03-14 02:28:00The Consequences of Good Intentions [Ukraine]
