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Economist Explains Why ‘Americans Are Being Absolutely Crushed Right Now’

October 17, 2022/in Economy, Featured, Liberty, National Security, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Samantha Aschieris

Editors’ Note: We hope readers will take the time to either read or listen to the podcast below. In so doing, remember that we got here because of policy decisions. It was the FED that was discontented with 1 1/2% inflation and wanted it above 2%, remember? It was the FED that agreed to monetize huge quantities of debt, allowing politicians free to spend their heads off without disturbing interest rates and the housing market. And it was the Democrats who primarily gave us a Covid-related lockdown, kept it in place the longest, and then attempted to bail out the economy they had crushed with wild debt-financed federal spending and sent checks out to everyone. The result was an unprecedented bulge in the money supply (up 40%). They then ignored the problem calling it “transitory”, and then inflicted more pain with their Green New Deal energy policy. This left the world dependent more than ever on Russia. Sensing his opportunity, Putin struck out at Ukraine. Now we have war in the midst of a worldwide slump. When management screws up this badly, you fire them. Ballots for mail-in voters (80% of Arizona voters, 90% in Maricopa County) were mailed on 10/12 and are arriving across the state. Don’t forget the current misery is the direct result of bad policy, bad governing philosophy, and ideological excess. They wanted to transform America all right. Transform us into a Third World nation! Well, you now have the opportunity to have your voice heard. Let them hear you, loud and clear. Much hinges on the narrow control Democrats have in the U.S. Senate. Therefore, from both the national and Arizona perspective, while all your decisions are important, the most important decision you will make will be regarding Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat. We urge you to send Mark Kelly back to his home in Tucson. It is a nice town. He will like it there.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Thursday that the consumer price index rose 0.4% in September, showing that inflation remained at a near four-decade high of 8.2%.

“Today’s report shows some progress in the fight against higher prices, even as we have more work to do. Inflation over the last three months has averaged 2%, at an annualized rate,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.

EJ Antoni, a research fellow for regional economics in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation, couldn’t disagree more.

“This is just the latest example of how Americans are being absolutely crushed right now by these higher prices. And it’s not yachts and caviar that are driving these increases. It’s necessities. It’s the basic staples,” Antoni says.

“It’s eggs, bread, milk. We’re not talking about filet mignon here. We’re talking about ground beef. And sadly, Americans are really paying the price for what has been going on the last two years in terms of the government just spending, borrowing, and printing trillions and trillions of dollars,” says Antoni.

Antoni joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to take a deeper dive into what the consumer price index means, and how it compares to the producer price index, and even offer some spending advice ahead of the holiday season.

Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript:

Samantha Aschieris: Joining the podcast today is EJ Antoni. He’s a research fellow in regional economics in the Center for Data Analysis here at The Heritage Foundation. EJ, thanks so much for joining.

EJ Antoni: Samantha, thank you for having me.

Aschieris: Of course. Now, let’s just dive right in. The consumer price index number came out Thursday morning. It showed an increase of 0.4% in September and 8.2% since last year. Kick us off here. Break this number down for us.

Antoni: Sure. I mean, this is just the latest example of how Americans are being absolutely crushed right now by these higher prices. And it’s not yachts and caviar that are driving these increases. It’s necessities. It’s the basic staples. It’s eggs, bread, milk. We’re not talking about filet mignon here. We’re talking about ground beef.

And sadly, Americans are really paying the price for what has been going on the last two years in terms of the government just spending, borrowing, and printing trillions and trillions of dollars.

Aschieris: And did we see any sort of relief from this number? Were there any index decreases, basically?

Antoni: No. None of the major categories went down, sadly.

And one of the things that has been keeping the index down the last several months has been the drop in gasoline prices. But now that we’re going into the winter and there’s going to be an increased demand for things like home heating oil, for example, and the fact that we now have OPEC decreasing production, and at the same time, the Biden administration won’t let domestic producers increase our own production, all of this is going to come together to mean higher energy prices.

And so the one thing that has really been keeping the index in check, more or less, is now going to be let loose as well.

Aschieris: Yeah. It’s only October and I’ve already had to put the heat on. So, I’m not looking forward to this winter.

Something I also wanted to ask you about was the producer price inflation number that also came out this week. It came out on Wednesday. It showed an increase of 0.4%. Now, how do these two numbers compare?

Antoni: Sure. The producer price index measures the prices that businesses are having to pay, whereas the consumer price index is going to measure the prices that you and I have to pay. And what happens is that over time, these numbers tend to track together. And the reason for that is because as costs increase for businesses, they pass those costs on to consumers.

And what we’ve seen during the Biden administration is that those costs for businesses have actually increased substantially more than the costs for consumers. In fact, the producer price index, the PPI, has been higher than the CPI every single month of the Biden administration in terms of those year-over-year changes.

So that means there are already tremendous price increases basically baked into the cake in the economy right now, so that even if prices for businesses were to magically flatline, which obviously isn’t going to happen, but even if it did, there’s going to be continued cost increases that will be passed on to consumers in the months ahead. So, unfortunately, there’s no relief there, either.

Aschieris: Yeah. And it was interesting because President [Joe] Biden talked about the CPI number in a statement that the White House put out. He talked about that it showed some progress in the fight against higher prices, even as we have more work to do. Something that we had talked about before the interview was the core consumer price index increase. What’s the difference between just the consumer price index versus the core consumer price index?

Antoni: The core consumer price index is going to exclude food and energy. And you may say, “Why on Earth would you want to exclude those things, because everybody needs food and energy?” And that’s true. But food and energy prices are notoriously volatile. So, when you exclude those, you can get a better sense of what the overall price level is doing.

And over time, sure enough, both the CPI and the core CPI tend to track together. One may be a little higher or a little lower, but over time, it all averages out.

Well, we’ve seen energy increase so fast for the last two years that we haven’t really had enough time yet for all of those costs to fully trickle down into other parts of the economy.

For example, the price of diesel fuel has been through the roof, which means that truckers are having to charge more and railroads are having to charge more for transporting literally everything you get off a store shelf. And so now, those costs are being passed on in earnest to consumers at all levels of the economy.

And now, core CPI has hit a 40-year high, just like the headline CPI number has been hitting 40-year highs.

Aschieris: Yeah. I want to talk about that a little bit more. Do you anticipate these numbers to continue to get worse or do you think we’ve seen the worst?

Antoni: Well, just like CPI really hasn’t caught up to PPI, also, the core CPI has not caught up to CPI. In other words, we still have a lot of food and energy costs that are going to trickle down everywhere else in the economy. So, no. Unfortunately, I really don’t see any signs of relief for the consumer.

Aschieris: I want to shift a little bit to some other concerns that Americans are feeling, and they’re facing a recession. Earlier this week, President Biden was in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. He said that he didn’t anticipate a recession, but even if there was one, it would be basically a slight recession. First and foremost, what indicates a recession? And are we in one already?

Antoni: Certainly. When we talk about recession, we’re talking about the economy contracting. And it’s actually not uncommon for economic activity to decline for a single month or even a single quarter, a three-month period. In certain cases, it actually happens routinely every single year.

For example, if you want to go from December to January, the economy always contracts because all of that retail activity that’s concentrated around the holidays goes away. Employment goes down. And so we seasonally adjust for all these different factors. In other words, we try to take out all of the seasonally predictable factors that go into the economy.

So, what we’re left with at the end is an answer to the question of, what would this month or this quarter look like if it had happened any other time of the year? Even with all that taken into account, the first half of the year, not just a month, not just a quarter, but two quarters in a row, six months, the economy contracted. So, we’ve already had the recession.

At this point, it’s not a question of, are we going to have a recession? It’s, are we going to have a double dip? In other words, the third quarter looks like it’s going to be positive. But then after that, all bets are off because everything that I see is pointing to continued decline.

Aschieris: Now, as we head into the holiday season, as you just mentioned, what should consumers, what should Americans be aware of this holiday season?

Antoni: Oh, wow. That’s a good question. One of the things that Americans are going to increasingly need to be aware of is the cost of financing debt. What I mean by that is interest rates continue to rise.

To put into perspective how much of an additional cost this is causing consumers, if you look at the median-priced home when Biden took office and compare that to the median-priced home today, the mortgage on that has gone up about 80%.

I mean, it’s just absolutely devastating. People can’t afford homes anymore. And sure enough, the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s home affordability index is down over 30% because of that.

In terms of, again, that median-priced home, if you add up all your mortgage payments over the course of a year, they’ve increased by about $10,000 a year because of a combination of the price of the home going up and the interest rate now doubling in literally a matter of months.

But it’s not just homes. It’s going to be credit cards. It’s going to be student loans, auto loans. All kinds of debt are getting more and more expensive.

As tempting as it may be when you’re doing your holiday shopping, for example, to splurge, remember how much more it’s going to cost you in terms of trying to pay off that credit card.

Aschieris: Yeah. It’s going to be a crazy holiday season, for sure.

One final question for you, and it might seem like a pretty big ask. But if you could do anything, in your opinion, what is the No. 1 thing that you would suggest or advise the Biden administration to do to reverse the course that the country’s headed on in terms of the economy right now?

Antoni: Balance the budget immediately. Right now, as the Federal Reserve is hiking up these interest rates—and as we just said, that’s causing a tremendous amount of harm to Americans, they would not need to hike the rates nearly as hard or as fast if we had a balanced budget.

But right now, we have a Congress and president that are working at cross purposes to the Fed. And the more they spend and the more they borrow, the more the Fed has to slam on the brakes. And so if they—they being the Congress and the president—could stop the reckless spending and borrowing, then that would solve a tremendous amount of our problems and have an incredibly positive impact on bringing down inflation.

Aschieris: Well, EJ, thank you so much for joining the show today. I really appreciate you taking the time to provide some insight. Thank you so much.

Antoni: Samantha, thank you for having me.

*****

This Podcast comes from the Daily Signal (Heritage Foundation) and is reproduced with permission.

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How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). The ballots will be mailed out to all voters registered for mail-in voting on October 12^th. The actual ‘day’ of the election is Tuesday November 8, 27 days later.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

How Republicans Can Stop Letting Libertarians Spoil their Victories

October 17, 2022/in Featured, Liberty, National Security, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Keith Knight

Editors Note: Most conservatives would share almost all these sentiments. We may differ on cultural matters on occasion, but even that can be handled by simply letting people be free and letting competition shake out the bad ideas from the good. However, the central point he makes is valid. The best protection Republicans can have from libertarians spoiling the election, is for Republicans to be more reliable when it comes to protecting freedom through limited government. We have too many in the party that cave to the Chamber of Commerce from time to time, cave to the “international community” like the UN and its agencies, cave to the mainstream press, and cave to the Department of Defense. However, to libertarians, we ask that they recognize we are in a struggle with a party that really knows how to use political power, and that political power will have to be used to claw back our freedoms. Don’t vote for a candidate who can’t win. Vote for the one that most closely matches your own concept of liberty. In this case, conservatives and libertarians can agree, a vote for Blake Masters is key to taking the Senate and stopping the socialist juggernaut.

If Republicans want control of the U.S. Senate they need the four swing states (AZ, GA, PA, and NV) to go Republican. In Arizona, (R) Blake Masters is behind (D) Mark Kelly by 4.5 points, while (L) Marc Victor is covering the spread.

As a personal friend of Marc Victor’s and a Libertarian, I want Blake Masters to win by being such a good freedom advocate that he renders the Libertarian candidate irrelevant.

Here is how I believe he can do so without losing his base.

After a 20-year war in Afghanistan with thousands of deaths leading to the Taliban taking over in 11 days, it’s clear that Republicans need to embrace their antiwar roots. I’d love Masters to say this:

Thou Shalt Not Murder.

Not provoking a nuclear war with Russia or China needs to be our number one priority. Wars result in mass death, missing limbs, lost loved ones, and post-traumatic stress disorder for the common man while providing prestige for politicians, never knowing if the end result will be worth the monumental cost. Dwight D. Eisenhower knew this in 1956 when he refused to respond militarily to Soviet atrocities in Hungary, Ronald Regan understood this in 1983 when the Soviets shot down an American aircraft (KAL007) which killed an American Congressman. War eventually brought down the Soviet Empire, Japanese, German, French, British, Austro-Hungarian, Romanov, and Ottoman Empires. War – indiscriminate theft and mass murder – is immoral AND we cannot afford it.

The Economy:

Thou Shalt Not Steal.

As those bearing the torch of the Declaration of Independence, we advocate the separation of economy and state and work towards the decriminalization of all economic activity between consenting adults. Abolish the Federal Reserve’s legal monopoly on currency and recognize that increasing the money supply (inflation) creates more dollars chasing the same amount of goods resulting in higher prices. South Korea is wealthier than North Korea not because of welfare and money printing, nor did the world grow rich from such parasitism. When people are free, they have more options on how to cooperate with one another, leading to more mutually beneficial transactions. As far as housing, universities, and health care go: It’s no coincidence that the most expensive industries are the most regulated and subsidized. He who pays the piper calls the tune, either producers try to please customers or politicians.

Schooling:

Just as we would oppose the Catholic Church forcing people to fund their schools, governments need to allow citizens to opt-out of funding schools they don’t feel are a net benefit to society. The population by every metric is historically, logically, economically, and philosophically illiterate – teachers need to start doing a better job, and we must embrace competition.

Racism:

The Democratic party explicitly judges people by their race, we fully reject this racist psychopathy and treat people based on their actions not accidents of birth. After looking at the statistics regarding black-on-white violence, there is no evidence that whites are uniquely to blame for America’s problems. Just as Asians having much higher incomes than whites does not prove discrimination, no outcome disparity can automatically be attributed to racism or sexism. Masters is already great concerning Critical Race Theory.

January 6th:

For months in 2020 looters and rioters intimidated innocent people with no institutional power. On January 6th, for a couple of hours, the most sinister powerful people in the country finally faced a minor inconvenience. No need to clutch pearls for months after the event.

Big Tech:

Just as needing a license to vote can impose costs on the poor, needing a license to compete with big business hurts the poorest among us giving consumers fewer choices. Today people can use Odysee.com as an alternative to YouTube and Minds.com as an alternative to Twitter. Once big names are on these sites (social proof), the problem is solved. Just as MySpace, Sears, BlockBuster, A & P Grocers, Sam Goody, and Nokia, all lost market shares eventually, Big Tech must face the greatest check and balance a society can offer: The freedom to voluntarily disassociate from bad actors.

Police:

Abolish qualified immunity and victimless crimes. If we the citizens don’t have the right to do X, then logically we cannot delegate X to government officials.

Abortion:

Abortion involves initiating violence against a peaceful person and is immoral, Masters is good on this issue, just needs to allow rape victims to have abortion access for up to 8 weeks. Just as men need Jordan Peterson to tell them to seize responsibility, women need Kristan Hawkins to appreciate the importance of the concept that only you directly control your actions, others can only indirectly influence you.

Gun control:

Masters is great on this, we ask that he specify the problem is the government monopolizing weaponry.

American exceptionalism:

From elementary school to college I was told America invented slavery, colonialism, and child labor. This bigoted narrative needs to die.

Holding truths to be self-evident. Equality of unalienable rights to act peacefully. Freedom to speak unpopular truths. Opposing state monopoly of weaponry. Rewarding innovators who make life worth living: Vanderbilt, Carnegie, The Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, Henry Ford, Charles Francis Jenkins, Norman Borlaug, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, Jimmy Wales, and countless others. Just as we hate to see Masters vilify hard-working, compassionate illegal immigrants, I hate to see my ancestors negatively generalized.

I hope we can keep America great by forming an alliance between conservatives and libertarians.

*****

Keith Knight is a writer and host of the Don’t Tread on Anyone Podcast.

Photo credit: Darron Birgenheier

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). The ballots will be mailed out to all voters registered for mail-in voting on October 12^th. The actual ‘day’ of the election is Tuesday November 8, 27 days later.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

Massive Florida Medical Center Boasted Of Helping Child Get ‘Gender-Affirming’ Surgery, Hormones

October 16, 2022/in DrRichSwier.com, Featured, Healthcare, Politics, Science /by DrRichSwier.com

By The Daily Caller

UF Health’s Youth Gender Program offers medical treatments to minors to help them present as the opposite sex; the program boasted about helping a minor undergo hormones and feminizing facial surgery and obtain a referral for “gender affirmation surgery,” according to the institution’s website.
UF Health did not respond to dozens of requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation and ignored many requests for their age guidelines.
“Your parents may not understand and may fight your transition, but this is the way you were born,” one patient said in a UF Health testimonial prominently featured on their website. “Your authentic life is worth fighting for.”

UF Health, a medical network affiliated with the University of Florida located in Gainesville and Jacksonville, boasted about helping a child with gender dysphoria undergo hormone blockers and surgeries in a testimonial on their website.

UF Health’s Youth Gender Program boasts of nationally recognized endocrinologists who specialize in administering pubertal suppression and cross-sex hormone medications to minors and connects children and their families with a host of resources that unquestioningly encourage medical transition for children. One testimonial on their website highlights a minor who, with the help of UF Health, received facial surgery, hormone blockers and a referral for an unspecified cross-sex surgery before turning 18.

The patient, referred to as “Hunter,” underwent hormone blocker injections and sperm cryopreservation as a minor upon adopting a transgender identity at age 15 after watching “I Am Jazz,” a show about a transgender child, according to a testimonial featured prominently on the Youth Gender Program’s website. Hunter received facial feminization surgery, which can include altering the hairline, shaving down the chin and jawbone or augmenting the lips and nose, upon turning 16 with the help of then-UF Health clinical psychologist Anyaliese Hancock-Smith, and was slated to undergo “gender affirmation surgery” in the summer of 2017.

“At the age of 15, Hunter was watching TLC’s transgender reality series, I am Jazz, when she realized she could no longer continue living uncomfortably in the wrong body. Hunter immediately ran into her mother’s room and told her she needed to be on puberty blocking medication,” the testimonial reads.

Hunter was 17 in April 2017, and it is unclear whether the adolescent turned 18 before the surgery; it’s also unclear precisely which surgery Hunter had and whether UF Health performed it or wrote a referral, though Hunter vaguely gives credit to UF Health.

“After meeting with Dr. Silverstein and being diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria, Hunter was prescribed hormone blocker injections and later underwent sperm cryopreservation, a procedure which would eventually allow her to produce biologic children if she wishes,” the post read. “Hunter now believes she looks on the outside like the gender she has always been on the inside, and she credits much of it to her team at UF Health.”

“Hunter now meets with clinical psychologist Anyaliese Hancock-Smith, Ph.D., who assisted Hunter in healthy development of gender identity and expression congruency. This included Hunter getting some facial feminization surgery for her 16th birthday,” the post continued. “Now seventeen years old, Hunter is preparing to have gender affirmation surgery in the summer of 2017, which will allow her to finally feel comfortable in her own skin. She hopes her story will inspire others to embrace their true selves.”

UF Health also included a quote from the patient encouraging others to go against their parents’ wishes when pursuing medical transitions.

“Your parents may not understand and may fight your transition, but this is the way you were born,” Hunter said in the testimonial. “Your authentic life is worth fighting for.”

UF’s Youth Gender Program was following about 50 children receiving puberty blockers and had about 200 patients total on hormones, according to data supplied to the Tampa Bay Times. Fewer than 50 patients in the practice had mastectomies, which are not performed on children under 16, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

The program collaborated with transgender activist group Equality Florida, a group that supports childhood gender transitions and has staunchly opposed efforts to limit those procedures for minors in Florida.

UF Health did not respond to dozens of requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation, including numerous requests over phone, voicemail and email for the institution’s age guidelines for gender-related procedures. UF Health also has yet to share records requested through Florida’s freedom of information law regarding its Youth Gender Program.

Many medical professionals criticize administering puberty blockers and performing sex change surgeries on minors, arguing that children can’t consent to the irreversible procedures and questioning their purported benefits. However, prominent medical organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics support affirming transgender identities through medical procedures, even for minors, and view the procedures as a way to improve adolescents’ mental health.

“All the up-to-date evidence shows that puberty blockers are neither safe nor reversible. The evidence shows that 98% of children who take puberty blockers go on to cross-sex hormones,” Stella O’Malley, an Irish psychotherapist and founder of the gender-critical organization Genspect, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We are roughly 10 years into this large-scale experiment and already we have reports on issues with cognitive development, bone mineral density and fertility. It is only with class action suits, like that taken in the UK, will we see a full exploration of this issue.”

Detransitioners, people who regret undergoing medical gender transitions, are also speaking out against the procedures. Helena Kirshner, a young woman who took cross-sex hormones and socially transitioned to a male identity as a teenager, attributed her temporary trans identity to emotional struggles, peer influence and social media.

“The adolescent brain is in a developmental stage primed to incorporate experiences into the process of identity formation,” she wrote in a February Substack post. “At my first appointment, I was prescribed testosterone, and I would remain on this regimen for a year and a half. It had an extremely negative effect on my mental health, and I finally admitted what a disaster it had been when I was 19 … It has not been easy, and the whole experience seriously derailed my life in ways I could never have foreseen when I was that fifteen-year-old kid playing with pronouns on Tumblr.”

The Youth Gender Program offers consultation, psychotherapy and assessment of medical readiness for cross-sex hormone therapy, according to its website; though it does not list surgical procedures it provides for minors, the first item on its resource page is financing advice for “gender confirmation surgery.” Resources for transgender youth also include a guide to “tucking,” or using tape to hide one’s penis, along with various activist groups including GLAAD which are vocal proponents of childhood medical transitions.

The Youth Gender Program claims its services are consistent with World Professional Association For Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines; WPATH’s most recent standards of care do not list any age restrictions for minors to be eligible for cross-sex procedures including surgeries, and the organization is generally supportive of adolescent medical transition.

Yesterday, WPATH published their newest “Standard of Care” for “Transgender and Gender Diverse People.”

They issued a correction on the same day. What was corrected?

Without justification, it was “corrected” to remove all age restrictions for receiving “gender-affirming care.” pic.twitter.com/luNvLfYpWX

— Jeremy Redfern (@JeremyRedfernFL) September 16, 2022

Dr. Michael Haller, chief of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Florida, publicly criticized detransitioner Chloe Cole on Twitter in August after she voiced regret about undergoing a medical transition as a minor and criticized the interventionist approach to gender dysphoria that Haller endorses. Cole, who underwent a “gender-affirming” double-mastectomy at age 15 along with cross-sex hormones that permanently altered her voice, no longer identifies as transgender and advocates against sex change procedures for minors.

“She states she was ‘rushed’ through care but notes her first endocrinologist actually said ‘no’ to rapid transition,” Haller wrote. “She sought alternative avenues for treatment. She then speaks as if her case should justify full scale elimination access for all trans patients.”

“You chose internet notoriety over anything that will ever help patients,” he wrote in another tweet.

“At this point, Dr. Haller has a creepy obsession with me. He’s a corrupt Dr. and Prof. who recommends children for double mastectomies and cross sex hormones. Dr. Haller exhibits abusive habits towards outspoken victims of gender care,” Cole wrote.

Haller initially agreed to an interview with the DCNF before cancelling and instructing the DCNF to direct questions to an outside organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, which also did not respond to a request for comment.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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LAUREL DUGGAN

Social issues and culture reporter.

California Superintendent Attempts to Justify Student Masturbating in Class

When the Family Is Abolished, People Starve

October 16, 2022/in Featured, Liberty, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Barry Brownstein

Editors’ Note: In the current election cycle, Republicans remain concerned that they have lost the college-educated suburban soccer moms. Democrats hope to use abortion as the wedge issue to keep moms from drifting towards Republicans because of crime, illegal immigration, and the economy. There is a certain irony here that conservatives need to use to inform suburban moms, and moms everywhere, and that is this: it is Democrats who are anti-family, anti-female, and anti-procreation. Democrats want small families or no children at all. The only current countries that apply the current abortion position of the Democrat Party, are North Korea and Communist China. Further, that is why Democrats push birth control in schools, homosexual and transgender advocacy in schools and society at large, and unlimited state-funded abortion on demand. Some of this stems from what the author below explains, the deep anti-family tradition of the left. We see this in the Communists Manifesto but also in Nazi ideology. Both hate the bourgeoisie family. But one sees it today played out in the declarations from Black Lives Matter which calls for the destruction of the nuclear familty to environmentalists who believe the “carrying capacity” of the earth is stretched by “overpopulation.”

We see it also in the alteration of language to obliterate mothers by calling them “birthing persons” and even the Air Force Academy accepting language that obliterates the idea of Mom and Dad. We see it in forcing women to compete with men in sports and allowing adult men who have gone through puberty to declare themselves to be women and force women out of their own locker rooms. The point here is: you can’t be a suburban soccer mom if there are no children and no mothers. Further, it is hard to live the suburban life of an individual house, minivans, and soccer practice, if you don’t have a husband who helps pay the bills and helps raise the kids. Also, the vast majority of women, want a long-term loving and sexual relationship with a man. Remember, it was the left that spread the nonsense that ” a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” in the 1970s. Democrats love feminists who hate men because in so doing they can undermine the traditional nuclear family. Finally, you can’t live a comfortable suburban life without a good capitalist economy that provides employment opportunities, cheap gasoline, and inexpensive electricity; all things Democrats seek to undermine. The Democrats embrace the progressive idea that all sins can be laid at the feet of white males. So, for “soccer moms” we simply ask: who really is your friend here? What kind of environment is that to raise a son, white or otherwise? And how do you expect your daughters to find decent and successful men to marry if society and politics constantly degrade the role of men and fatherhood? Yes, Republican legislators will likely put some restrictions on abortion and let that be settled by the people and their representatives in the legislature. But Democrats want to destroy masculine men, procreation, the free enterprise system, the traditional nuclear family, and the idea of womanhood itself. Almost all decisions require trade-offs. For college-educated mothers, the trade-offs are some restrictions on abortions or the destruction of the traditional nuclear family and the free enterprise system. We never really would have thought that the idea of family is something that would appear on a ballot, but this election cycle, it certainly does. For women, they have to ask themselves: is the right to kill your baby up to the point of delivery the most important thing in your life, or is faith, family, and freedom a more important value?

Sophie Lewis wants to Abolish the Family. In her sympathetic review of Lewis’s book, Erin Maglaque traces through the “utopian” views of the anti-family movement. She tells of the 19^th Century Fournier communes that “freed” women of the “drudgery” of cooking for their families. Lewis wants to expand on the idea of kitchenless households to include collective childcare. Maglaque writes,

The family, Lewis and other abolitionists and feminists argue, privatises care. The legal and economic structure of the nuclear household warps love and intimacy into abuse, ownership, scarcity. Children are private property, legally owned and fully economically dependent on their parents. The hard work of care – looking after children, cooking and cleaning – is hidden away and devalued, performed for free by women or for scandalously low pay by domestic workers.

“If we abolish the family,” Magaque writes, “we abolish the most fundamental unit of privatization and scarcity in our society. More care, more love, for all.”

Family abolitionists see themselves as liberators, but their dreams are dystopian. Only through force can the family be abolished as a crucial foundation of society. There is no love in force; the utopian hope of “more love” really means more hate for all.

“More love for all” was not how it worked out when Mao sought to abolish the family during his Great Leap Forward. Like the Chinese communists, Lewis sees no need for every family to cook, wash clothes, and raise children. For the Chinese, instead of paradise, the outcome was the worst man-made famine in history.

In his meticulously researched book Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962, Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng reports, in harrowing detail, the totalitarian-induced famine that killed 36 million Chinese. The toll of Mao’s famine exceeds, by many times, the toll of Stalin’s death by starvation of Ukrainians.

Mao and other Chinese communists, according to Jisheng, saw “the family as the social foundation of the private ownership system and a major impediment to communism.” In a 1958 speech Mao said: “In socialism, private property still exists, factions still exist, families still exist. Families are the product of the last stage of primitive communism, and every last trace of them will be eliminated in the future.” Mao continued, “in the future, the family will no longer be beneficial to the development of productivity … Many of our comrades don’t dare to consider problems of this nature because their thinking is too narrow.”

Jisheng took a deep dive into the Chinese Communist Party archives. Chinese premier Zhou Enlai believed “thorough liberation required liberating women from their household duties.” Enlai “promoted communal kitchens and communal nurseries as the sprouts of communism.” Vice-chair of the Communist Party Liu Shaoqi observed: that “by eliminating families it would be possible to eliminate private property.”

The intent was to make the Chinese population more controllable and China more productive. A 1959 party report laid out the results:

People eat together in the canteens and go out to work together … Before the canteens, commune members could only work for seven to eight hours a day; now they work an average of ten hours a day … At breakfast, as soon as the bowls are pushed away, the section heads lead people out to work … Before and after meals, commune members read newspapers and listen to radio broadcasts together, improving their education in communism.

Food is usually cooked by families because it is efficient that they do so. During the Great Leap Forward, communal kitchens were rapidly established, some feeding up to 800 people. Jisheng reports, “The communal kitchens were a major reason so many starved to death. Home stoves were dismantled, and cooking implements, tables and chairs, foodstuffs, and firewood were handed over to the communal kitchen, as were livestock, poultry, and any edible plants harvested by commune members. In some places, no chimneys were allowed to be lit outside the communal kitchen.” In short, households lost even the ability to boil water.

The consequences were catastrophic. Jisheng writes, “Eliminating the family as a basic living unit reduced its capacity to combat famine.”

Introducing communal kitchens meant people had to go to a kitchen to be fed. Jisheng observes, “In the mountain regions, people had to tramp over hill and dale for a bowl of gruel.” The details reflect the mad arrogance of the planners:

In the spring of 1960 the newly appointed first secretary of Yunnan Province went to the countryside for an inspection. In the hill country he saw an old woman, covered from head to toe in mud, lugging a basket up a slope during a rainstorm on her way to the kitchen. Some villagers told him that this elderly woman had to cover only two hills and seven-plus kilometers, which was not so bad; some had to travel fifteen kilometers on their donkeys to reach the communal kitchen, spending a good part of a day fetching two meals.

The abolition of the family meant families couldn’t divide labor as they cared for the young, elderly, and infirm. Individuals can see through the eyes of love, but all that mattered to the communists was productivity. A party official proclaimed: “Even the old and feeble cannot be allowed to eat for free, but must contribute their effort. If they can’t carry a double load, they can share a load with someone else, and if they can’t use their shoulders, they can use their hands; even crawling to the field with a bowl of dirt in one hand contributes more than lying in bed.”

The communists seized homes. Jisheng reports, “Kindergartens, nurseries, and facilities for the elderly were established with resources seized from families without compensation, and homes were vacated to house the facilities.”

Of course, none of this was voluntary. Jisheng explains that “Cadres and militia ransacked homes and sometimes beat and detained occupants. When villagers handed over their assets, it was in an atmosphere of extreme political pressure. The campaign against private property rendered many families destitute and homeless.”

Jisheng describes, how initially, with “free” food, commune members gorged themselves:

The communal kitchens were most damaging in their waste. During the first two or three months that the canteens operated in the autumn of 1958, members feasted. Believing that food supply problems had been completely resolved, Mao and other central leaders worried about “what to do with the extra food,” which in turn led villagers to believe that the state had access to vast stores of food to supplement local supplies when they ran out. The slogan was, “With meals supplied communally, there is never any fear of eating too much.”

Of course, as food ran out, not all were equal. Jisheng reports on how the cadres [officials charged with managing communist party affairs] “helped themselves to white rice, steamed rolls, stuffed buns, steamed buns, and meat and vegetable dishes, while ordinary commune members ate watery gruel.” The gruel “was often execrable. Boiling cauldrons of congee might contain rat droppings and sheep dung.”

Operating in a totalitarian hierarchy, the cadres lost their humanity. Jisheng continued to explain how a cadre member “needed only to gain the confidence of his direct superior to become a ‘local despot’ with utter impunity. Corruption eroded already inadequate food supplies and intensified the famine.” They were slaves “facing upward and a dictator facing downward.” Jisheng graphically reveals the brutality of the cadres:

Cadres inflicted brutal punishment on villagers, who had mixed feelings about the communization process, who furtively consumed the collectives’ seedlings out of hunger, or who had no strength for the massive irrigation projects, and on some conscientious cadres. Punishments included being beaten while suspended in midair, forced into protracted kneeling, paraded through the streets, deprived of food, exposed to the cold or the sun, and having one’s ears or fingers cut off. In the villages, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat was in fact the dictatorship of the cadres, and those with the greatest power were able to inflict the greatest amount of arbitrary abuse.

Jisheng’s book is not an academic from-a-distance analysis, but an up-close, visceral account. Looking at the specific evils of totalitarianism is instructive:

On October 15, 1959, Zhang Zhirong of the Xiongwan production team, upon failing to hand over any grain, was bound and beaten to death with kindling and poles. The brigade’s cadre used tongs to insert rice and soya beans into the deceased’s anus while shouting, “Now you can grow grain out of your corpse!” Zhang left behind children aged eight and ten who subsequently died of starvation.

On October 19, 1959, Chenwan production team member Chen Xiaojia and his son Chen Guihou were hung from the beam of the communal dining hall when they failed to hand over any grain. They were beaten and doused with cold water, both dying within seven days. Two small children who survived them eventually died of starvation.

On November 8, 1959, Zhong Xingjian of the Yanwan production team was accused of “defying the leadership,” and a cadre hacked him to death with an ax.

According to Jisheng, the few officials “who spoke the truth were labeled ‘deniers of achievement’ and ‘right deviationists,’ and were subjected to merciless struggle.” When one party secretary admitted, “there was no food and that the procurement quota could not be met, he was lifted by his arms and legs and hurled like a battering ram against the floor.”

Do not assume these examples reflect a few bad seeds. In Tombstone, Jisheng reports that over 50 percent of the cadres participated in crimes against humanity. The cycle of violence is revealed in this account of a cadre member: “If you didn’t beat others, you would be beaten. The more harshly you beat someone, the more firmly you established your position and your loyalty to the Communist Party. If you didn’t beat others, you were a right deviationist and would soon be beaten by others.”

Jisheng sums up what families experienced during the Great Leap Forward: “Families were scattered to the winds, children abandoned, and corpses left along the roadside to rot.”

How Totalitarianism Created the Famine

Jisheng is blunt; the cause of death by starvation was totalitarianism:

The basic reason why tens of millions of people in China starved to death was totalitarianism. While totalitarianism does not inevitably result in disasters on such a massive scale, it facilitates the development of extremely flawed policies and impedes their correction. Even more important is that in this kind of system, the government monopolizes all production and life-sustaining resources, so that once a calamity occurs, ordinary people have no means of saving themselves.

The historical evidence links famine to tyranny. In “Democracy as a Universal Value,” Nobel laureate in economics Amartya Sen wrote,

In the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. We cannot find exceptions to this rule, no matter where we look: the recent famines of Ethiopia, Somalia, or other dictatorial regimes; famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; China’s 1958-61 famine with the failure of the Great Leap Forward; or earlier still, the famines in Ireland or India under alien rule. China, although it was in many ways doing much better economically than India, still managed (unlike India) to have a famine, indeed the largest recorded famine in world history: Nearly 30 million people died in the famine of 1958-61, while faulty governmental policies remained uncorrected for three full years. The policies went uncriticized because there were no opposition parties in parliament, no free press, and no multiparty elections. Indeed, it is precisely this lack of challenge that allowed the deeply defective policies to continue even though they were killing millions each year. The same can be said about the world’s two contemporary famines, occurring right now in North Korea and Sudan.

In Jisheng’s view, Mao and his minions “considered no cost or coercion too great in making the realization of Communist ideals the supreme goal of the entire populace.”

The totalitarian hierarchy meant the 1958 goals set by Mao of surpassing the United Kingdom in steel production in two years would be carried out by the cadres, no matter what the cost. Yet, as Jisheng writes, “The steel furnaces didn’t actually smelt any iron; rather, the woks and cooking utensils of the peasants, the door knockers from their homes, and the bells from temples were all melted down in order to report success.”

Mao’s goal of rapid industrialization meant impossible demands were placed on the peasant farmers. The records and testimony Jisheng reviewed are clear. Party officials “met” those demands by lying about crop yields. With inflated crop yields came “high state procurement quotas.” Most counties met their quota “by taking every kernel of grain ration and seed grain from the peasants:”

If farmers were unable to hand over the required amount, the government would accuse production teams of concealing grain. A “struggle between the two roads” (of socialism and capitalism) was launched to counteract the alleged withholding of grain. This campaign used political pressure, mental torture, and ruthless violence to extort every last kernel of grain or seed from the peasants. Anyone who uttered the slightest protest was beaten, sometimes fatally.

The result was the “prolonged agony” of starvation. Jisheng writes:

The grain was gone, the wild herbs had all been eaten, even the bark had been stripped from the trees, and bird droppings, rats, and cotton batting were used to fill stomachs. In the kaolin clay fields, starving people chewed on the clay as they dug it. The corpses of the dead, famine victims seeking refuge from other villages, even one’s own family members, became food for the desperate.

Out of fear and faith, Jisheng describes, “People sat alongside storage depots waiting for the government to release grain, crying out, ‘Communist Party, Chairman Mao, save us!’ Some people starved to death sitting next to the grain depots.”

Graphically, Jisheng recounts, “Commune members first lost weight, then swelled with edema, then wasted away until they vomited fluid and died.” One father “was afraid that his sons, ages three and four, would be left with no one to care for them, so he drowned them in a pit just before he died.”

When nothing else was left, some ate their own or exchanged children to be eaten. In a memoir, official Yu Dehong wrote: “There were cases of cannibalism in nearly every village, and many incidents so tragic that I cannot bear to speak of them.”

Jisheng, echoing Sen, writes, “It is a tragedy unprecedented in world history for tens of millions of people to starve to death and to resort to cannibalism during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or epidemics.”

Had Mao and his cadres learned from Stalin’s playbook? Jisheng’s reporting echoes the Holodomor:

To prevent starving people from fleeing and spreading news of the disaster, county party committees deployed armed guards to patrol borders and access roads. Sentry posts were set up on roadways, and checkpoints at every village. Bus stops were manned by police officers, and long-distance buses could be driven only by party members. Anyone discovered trying to leave had all his belongings confiscated and was beaten. Xinyang’s rail depots were monitored by the railway public security bureau. The peasants could only stay home and await death.

The peasants “were swollen with starvation, while the cadres were swollen with overeating.” The destruction of the family in China didn’t mean “more care, more love.”

Mao knew. Communist Party Vice-Chair, Liu Shaoqi told Mao, “History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!”

None of this is what family abolitionists, like Lewis, have in mind. Despite all his horrific crimes, Mao didn’t have mass starvation in mind when he set out to abolish the family. Mao blamed the unfathomable millions of dead “on political and class enemies.” As always, with totalitarians, “mistakes were made, but not by me.”

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How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). The ballots will be mailed out to all voters registered for mail-in voting on October 12^th. The actual ‘day’ of the election is Tuesday November 8, 27 days later.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

Against Climatism

October 16, 2022/in Economy, Environment, Featured, Liberty, National Security, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Emmet Penney

The Right needs a total vision overhaul on energy.

For over half a century, the environmental perspective has succeeded in overtaking every other outlook on energy and industry. Even fossil fuel companies and their allies like the American Petroleum Institute cast themselves in the green idiom. In the era of climate change, wherein major news organizations and the courtier class broadcast visions of eco-apocalypse ad nauseum, green hegemony has only deepened. Concerns about the climate are worth attending to, of course—so is environmental degradation. The seriousness of these issues may tempt conservatives to adopt green politics of their own. Should they take the bait?

The first danger is the most obvious. The American Right does not own the environmental issue, which means it does not own the climate issue, because they are, in practice, the same issue. Some might say that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Maybe, they might say, what’s needed is a more market-oriented version of liberal climate politics. Sadly, they would also be about 30 years too late—major environmental organizations conquered that territory in the fight for electricity restructuring.

This means that if conservatives were to take on green politics of their own they would have to cede cultural and political ground to the environmental movement’s moral monopoly. Their vision would be cast in the green idiom and appear more like terms of surrender than a unique and organic vision of its own. An example from the Left is illustrative: those who fancy themselves “class first socialists” on the Left always play the junior partner to the woke. Their criticisms of wokeness have the puzzling effect of reifying wokeness’s core premises while letting the non-woke develop self-soothing techniques for their Stockholm syndrome. To bring it closer to home: imagine decades of arguing about who the “real planet killers” are the way the contemporary Right argues about who the “real racists” are with the Left. The returns aren’t even diminishing—they don’t exist.

We should be grateful that this is the situation. Climate politics as it actually exists is anti-conservative because it is a politics of permanent emergency built on castigating our past achievements while turning our future into an extended crisis that demands we abandon our values and transform the state into a perpetual baptists-and-bootleggers machine so that we can stave off the end of the world. Plus, it presents American conservatives with a unique opportunity.

After all, the world will not end, we do not need to abandon our way of life, and we certainly do not need some kind of revolution to handle the climate issue. Humankind will adapt. America will adapt. But how we adapt depends on what energy we have at our disposal. And the energy solution is quite simple even though it is also quite difficult—we need more natural gas and more nuclear, and we need far less wind and solar. We need to focus on reliable, affordable, and clean energy projects—in that order. If we’re concerned about emissions, then we should be competing with Russia and China to build nuclear power plants abroad, as the coal boom in the developing world has obliterated the last 15 years of emissions reductions in America.

Now, someone might say, that sounds like a great climate message. Why can’t that be the conservative climate message? Why not own the libs by their own logic? As a nuclear advocate, I can tell you exactly why that’s a mistake.

You will end up in the unenviable “both and” territory that’s a slightly more dignified version of the junior partner Stockholm syndrome. Conservatives will say, “Hey, if we really cared about climate, we would be deregulating nuclear, which is the only proven full-scale decarbonizer the world has ever known.” And they’ll respond, “Why, that’s a great idea…after we finish fragilizing the grid with more wind and solar. The world’s about to end after all and we have no time to waste!” Such a situation is a death knell for message clarity and policy victories.

Moreover, it misunderstands the opponent. Environmentalists don’t actually want to solve climate change or protect the environment. They want to build wind and solar. They might think they’re solving climate change and protecting the environment by building them, but that’s because they’re generally ignorant about energy and energy systems.

Plus, their money flows from the financiers who enjoy wind and solar tax credits. And their Energy Lysenkoism assumes we need to vastly restrict energy consumption and repattern society accordingly. They are as likely to change their minds as they are to meet you halfway. Those two things—tax credits and energy austerity—are the only reasons to build wind and solar, by the way. As California has recently shown us, renewables are a complicated way to make natural gas yet more essential.

So, what conservatives must do—and make no mistake, this is as difficult as it is necessary—is reject the climate framing altogether. They must shatter the moral monopoly environmentalism has on how we think about energy and our society. They must present a solid alternative that can prize these issues from the slimy doom-mongering that has clamped its feral maw around them. Conservatives must instead supply the country with a vision—cultural, political, philosophical, and economic—for the Second American Century.

This vision would center on energy security and energy abundance—the prime movers of the economy. It would mean more gas pipelines, more fracking pads, a flowering nuclear fleet, and a reliable and resilient electricity grid. It would be about real jobs and real work. And it would handle issues Americans actually care about—their livelihoods, their children’s future, and the continuation of the American way of life.

It’s a vision that would communicate three simple truths: Americans are workers, not servants; our energy infrastructure is essential, not incidental; and our future is not an apocalypse only authoritarian control can avoid, but a flourishing expression of our glorious past.

*****

This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). The ballots will be mailed out to all voters registered for mail-in voting on October 12^th. The actual ‘day’ of the election is Tuesday November 8, 27 days later.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

Remembering 2012 in Arizona When Libertarians Elected Kyrsten Sinema

October 15, 2022/in Featured, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Neland Nobel

We have received some friendly pushback from some of our libertarian friends because of our contention that more often than not, the Libertarian Party rarely elects anyone but Democrats.

Now frankly we have not examined every race that has been conducted over the past 40 years so we could be wrong. However, we have a more recent and relevant case to be examined.

In 2010, the new census data lead to the creation in Arizona of the 9^th Congressional district, which included areas of Mesa and Tempe and parts of Phoenix. As such, it is a pretty good blend of conservative Mormon Mesa and the more liberal areas around ASU. It looks a lot like suburban Arizona and hence is instructive.

Featured in the race was the first openly bisexual running for Congress, former State Representative, and State Senator Krysten Sinema versus a Tea Party Black conservative, Vernon Parker.

The race was so close, it could not be called on election night but was delayed until November 12^th. According to Wikipedia, here are the following results:

Democrat Kyrsten Sinema 121,881 or 48.66%

Republican Vernon Parker 111,630 or 44.46%

Libertarian Powell Gammill 16,620 or 6.63%

The remaining tiny fraction of .14% was write-ins.

Now, you can see that what divided the Democrats from the Republicans was only about 4% while the Libertarians took over 6 1/2% of the vote. So, if roughly two-thirds (a reasonable assumption) of the Libertarians had voted for the Republican Black conservative Vernon Parker, he would have been elected. History would have been different.

Sinema went on to win again, and you might remember a few weeks ago, was the key vote in the Senate putting Biden’s wild spending agenda across the line.

Elections have consequences and close elections make no difference. We doubt she has voted any differently than if she has won by a wider margin.

So, it is not silly to say Libertarians often elect socialist-oriented candidates, people opposed in almost every way to the principles of limited government and personal liberty.

Here is a real-life, current example of what we are talking about. This is not theory, but an actual consequential example to drive home our point.

As for the educational importance of the campaign, does anyone remember Powell Gammill? Do you remember what he said? Did his presence in the race make Vernon Parker any more dedicated to his principles? I am sure he was a decent fellow, but really, Gammill’s lasting legacy insofar as politics is Krysten Sinema, not his ideas and principles.

The race between Mark Kelly and Blake Masters is a close one. While there are reasons to suspect the recent poll that gave 15% to the libertarian Marc Victor, other polls show it in the 3% range, within the margin of error. Whatever it really is, it likely is quite close.

To our libertarian friends we say, your vote has consequences in close elections. Don’t let your egos get in the way of the cause of liberty. We all have suffered because of your errors in 2012. Please, do not do it again in this critical election cycle giving the victory to Democrat Mark Kelly for the Arizona U.S. Senate seat.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). The ballots will be mailed out to all voters registered for mail-in voting on October 12^th. The actual ‘day’ of the election is Tuesday November 8, 27 days later.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

Executing a Long Term Plan While Playing Dumb

October 15, 2022/in Featured, Liberty, National Security, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Thomas C. Patterson

Pundits commonly depict the ongoing calamity at our border as the result of the Biden administration’s incompetence. As with inflation, urban crime, and the deficit, their near-complete lack of insight and management skills is leading us over a cliff.

But this analysis itself is a major error. They know exactly what they are doing and they are doing it well. They are executing a long-range plan that is achieving great success.

They are doing everything they can to bring across the border as many illegal immigrants as possible, braving considerable political blowback to achieve their goals. They believe the mostly unskilled, uneducated migrants will gravitate to the party that promises more government benefits and thus ensure Democratic dominance indefinitely.

So they alternately claim the border is actually “closed“ and admit they are concerned but don’t know what to do about it. Now admittedly some of the Washington Dems aren’t that bright, but it’s not possible to be so stupid as to not be able to see what is happening here.

Biden immediately after his inauguration announced the border was open and reversed the Trump policies, “Return to Mexico“ and “Title 42“, that had limited illegal border crossings. Now illegal immigrants face no consequences if they defy the border police and make it across the line.

Instead, they are treated humanely, fed, housed, and released into America, usually with a deferred asylum hearing which most don’t attend, since few have legitimate asylum claims. Yet our VP border czar pretends to not understand why five million illegal immigrants have crossed the border on her watch or what to do about it.

But open borders advocates gave away the real game. Czar Kamala, and others, said a plan to control the border might be worked out if Republicans would only “come to the table“. However, the only way to control the border would be through “comprehensive immigration reform“, which is their euphemism for amnesty.

So there you have it. Democrats are okay with cranking up a situation so intolerable that Republicans will be forced to grant citizenship to the millions who entered America illegally.

Not long ago, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama called for strict border enforcement to protect the wages of low-income workers. Democratic opinion changed when the offspring of 20 million or so illegal aliens began to vote as anchor babies

California has become a one-party state and several other western states seem poised to follow suit (although the Democrats’ grip on Latino voters may be fading as they become Americanized).

Playing-dumb Democrats aren’t the only group that benefits from open borders. Foreign governments benefit from billions of dollars of remittances, money immigrants send back home saved from their earnings, and, often, government subsidies they receive here.

The political champions of racial grievance benefit from a large community of immigrants whose relative poverty purportedly is proof that America is nativist or racist. Thus Latino welfare organizations, academic departments, lawyers, and political organizations are required to remedy this lack of social justice.

Employers clearly benefit from a pool of young compliant workers who work for wages and conditions unacceptable to growing numbers of Americans. Caring progressives not only get a cause to pontificate for, but nannies, gardeners, and housekeepers make their lives easier.

Of course, illegal immigrants benefit too, although they successfully competed against a legal applicant who waited and played by the rules. But unlike illegal immigrants, illegals don’t come because they love America and want to become loyal Americans.

Their illegal entrance shows their disdain for the Rule of Law. Many cheered wildly when socialists like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela promised to confiscate land and assets from “the rich” and give it to “the people”, ultimately resulting in the economic devastation they are now fleeing.

Americans are bound together as a nation not by blood or soil, but by the values and ideals which brought us freedom and prosperity. Our future depends on an immigration policy that selects immigrants, of any color or ethnicity, who understand this and want to share with us not only the privileges but also the responsibilities, of being an American.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). The ballots will be mailed out to all voters registered for mail-in voting on October 12^th. The actual ‘day’ of the election is Tuesday November 8, 27 days later.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

Social Security’s 8.7% COLA Will Protect Retirees From Inflation, but Will Hasten Program’s Insolvency

October 15, 2022/in Economy, Featured, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Rachel Greszler

Editors’ Note: Democrats make a lot of political theatre every time someone points out that the emperor has no clothes. The subject here is the king of all government programs, Social Security. Who can forget the classic television ad of a Paul Ryan lookalike pushing a gramdma in a wheelchair off a cliff? Such demagoguery has stymied any attempt over the years to genuinely reform the program, which is running out of money. We can’t think of any greater disservice to the public than to make so many people dependent on a program with such shaky financial underpinnings and then use any attempt to shore up the system as a cudgel to be used to club your political opponent. We see the same tawdry strategy in the ads Mark Kelly is running against Blake Masters. The only way to keep Social Security and its companion Medicare solvent is to either cut benefits or raise taxes to fund it. Democrats propose we just add shortfalls to the deficit and pay for it all through inflation. For them and their Modern Monetary Theory magicians, there is no limit on deficit spending. They argue that a government that can print money to pay its bills can never go bust. That may be true for the government but the rest of us don’t have our own printing presses. We can and do go bust. They also hide that deficit finance erodes the value of money. It is clever to hide the cost of excessive spending of all kinds in the insidious process of inflation and currency debasement. But inflation is the great enemy of the retired, and for most people, Social Security provides only about a third of what they need. The rest of their portfolio and savings has no inflation indexation, and hence the purchasing power of investor private sector assets erodes with inflation. It would be nice if Democrats would just stop exploiting fears long enough to allow reform of the program. But, Mark Kelly continues to play the dishonest Washington game and claims the emperor has achieved sartorial splendor.

The Social Security Administration announced Thursday that beneficiaries will receive an 8.7% cost-of-living adjustment next year. That’s good news for seniors today who—like all other Americans—are struggling with rising costs, but it comes at the expense of a diminished Social Security system for current and future retirees.

Social Security is funded by current workers’ payroll taxes, but since the average worker’s wages increased only 4.1% over the past year, that means Social Security’s revenues have increased at less than half the rate of its newly announced expenditure increase.

Add in the fact that there are 2.8 million fewer people working today compared with the pre-pandemic employment-to-population ratio, and Social Security’s revenues are almost certainly below trend while its costs are above trend.

Even before this large COLA increase, Social Security was projected to run out of money to pay scheduled benefits in 2034. Absent reform, that means that anyone who is 55 or younger today won’t receive a single full Social Security benefit.

Paying out COLAs that exceed workers’ wage gains (and Social Security’s payroll-tax revenues) will cause Social Security’s trust fund to run dry sooner, subjecting more people to benefit cuts, and beginning at an earlier date.

When Social Security runs out of money, retirees won’t receive a $1,750 benefit increase—the average benefit boost for a retired worker in 2023—but instead will be subject to a $5,040 benefit cut.

Seniors are struggling from the effects of inflation, and many of them lack the ability to work, which makes Social Security’s COLA especially important for them.

But while a portion of retirees’ benefits is held harmless from inflation, workers can’t escape rising costs. Despite earning almost $3,800 more per year since January 2021, the average worker is $3,000 poorer after inflation’s eaten away $6,800 of value from their paycheck.

Those same workers will be the ones who will either receive only a fraction of what today’s Social Security beneficiaries receive, or they will pay substantially more in taxes throughout their lifetimes.

According to the Social Security trustees, maintaining current benefit levels would require an immediate payroll-tax increase from 12.4% to 15.8%, which would translate into an extra $2,400 in Social Security taxes per year and $11,200 in total Social Security taxes for the median household with $70,800 in earnings.

This year’s Social Security COLA is yet another factor contributing to a massive deterioration in the U.S.’ fiscal outlook over the past few years, which will make it all the more difficult to maintain Social Security’s current benefits.

Policymakers must act now, and Congress has a choice.

It can expand Social Security—increasing taxes and increasing benefits for everyone—or make it better targeted.

The Heritage Foundation has proposed a set of reforms that would better target Social Security to its original intent, including gradually shifting to a universal benefit that would lift lower-income retirees out of poverty, slowly raising the retirement age and indexing it to life expectancy, using a more accurate inflation measure, and eliminating work disincentives. All of that would protect and improve Social Security. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

The Heritage Foundation’s Social Security model estimates that those changes would solve the program’s shortfalls and allow for a roughly 20% tax cut.

A better-targeted program would also benefit the economy. The Penn Wharton Budget Model projected that reforms similar to what The Heritage Foundation has proposed would result in an economy that is 7.3%, or $1.6 trillion, larger than with reforms that expand Social Security for everyone.

That translates into $10,740 more in annual income per household across the U.S.

Each year that policymakers fail to act, the costs and consequences of Social Security’s inevitable reform just become larger. Over just the past 10 years, Social Security’s unfunded obligations more than doubled, to $20.4 trillion—the equivalent of $157,000 per household.

That’s not a cost the average household can afford—especially with out-of-control inflation.

By tackling Social Security reform now, policymakers could protect a popular program and reduce the chances of a fiscal crisis.

Getting America’s fiscal house in order would ease the consequences of inflation now and improve Americans’ future opportunities and financial security.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). The ballots will be mailed out to all voters registered for mail-in voting on October 12^th. The actual ‘day’ of the election is Tuesday November 8, 27 days later.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

Court Upholds Florida Ban On Taxpayer Funding For Sex Changes

October 14, 2022/in Courts & Law, DrRichSwier.com, Elections, Featured, Healthcare, Politics, Science /by DrRichSwier.com

By The Daily Caller

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Florida can move forward with a new rule barring Medicaid funds from being spent on sex-changes and other transgender-related care.

A group of transgender rights organizations filed a preliminary injunction request against the rule after it was implemented by the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration in August, but Judge Robert Hinkle ruled against the request Wednesday. Hinkle stated that the challenge to the rule wasn’t a constitutional one, rather a question about the Medicaid statute.

Yet, a federal court disagreed today and ruled in Florida’s favor. @AHCA_FL remains committed to ensuring Florida Medicaid only covers treatments deemed safe and effective. See the court’s ruling below: https://t.co/XpIlGRNnXI pic.twitter.com/BhoHBjMQx1

— Florida AHCA (@AHCA_FL) October 12, 2022

Transgender advocates had alleged that the rule, which prevents the state from covering most “gender-affirming” care via Medicaid, violated the equal protections clause of the constitution. “There’s nothing wrong with the state saying they will approve treatment for this and not that,” Hinkle determined. “The question here is about the Medicaid statute.”

Gender-affirming care is a euphemism for treatments that facilitate sex changes. The Florida rule covers procedures including sex-change surgeries, behavioral therapy and hormone therapy.

The groups that filed the suit did so on behalf of four plaintiffs, two of whom are 12-year-old children. Florida has taken steps to push back on the promotion of transgenderism to children in recent months, including via the highly contentious Parental Rights in Education law.

One witness who testified for the state was New Jersey resident Yaakov Sheinfeld, whose 18-year-old daughter began the process of gender transition on the advice of a therapist who diagnosed her with gender dysphoria. Sheinfeld said his daughter’s anxiety and depression never went away, even after the “gender-affirming” care began, and she ultimately died of a drug overdose.

Florida is now one of ten states that doesn’t cover sex changes and related care under Medicaid.

AUTHOR

DYLAN HOUSMAN

Healthcare reporter. Follow Dylan on Twitter

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MICHIGAN: Dearborn Muslims protest LGBTQ agenda at school board meeting, Muslim leader calls protest ‘very embarrassing’

October 14, 2022/in DrRichSwier.com, Education, Elections, Featured, Politics, Religion /by DrRichSwier.com

By Jihad Watch

This protest was “very embarrassing” for everyone concerned. The far-Left Detroit Free Press pseudo-journalist Niraj Warikoo says that even “a heavy police presence” couldn’t keep the meeting from “descending into chaos,” and this is especially “embarrassing” for local Muslim leaders such as Osama Siblani, as they know that Leftists are their staunchest and most dependable allies. If the Leftist-Islamic alliance splits, events could take an ugly turn, especially given the Left’s increased penchant for authoritarianism.

But this is also embarrassing for the Leftist school board members for they would rather have their teeth pulled out one by one with rusty pliers than appear to be “Islamophobic,” and yet they can’t appease the Muslims in Dearborn in this instance without giving up their cherished gender fantasies and relentless agenda of sexualizing children. So who will give? The appalling Niraj Warikoo is staunchly on the LGBTQ side, as you can tell here from his editorializing at the end of his article, where he says “As Stone walked away, a protester yelled at him a phrase advocates note is often used to make bigoted attacks against gay people based on inaccurate stereotypes: ‘Leave our kids alone.’” What will Warikoo do when all the friends he has made in the Muslim community over the years with his relentlessly biased coverage turn on him because of nasty little digs like that one?

“Protesters shut down Dearborn school board meeting over LGBTQ books,” by Niraj Warikoo, Detroit Free Press, October 11, 2022:

Hundreds of protesters packed a Dearborn Public Schools board meeting this week and shut it down with cries of anger over certain LGBTQ books they said are too sexually explicit for children. And now, some community leaders anxiously await a rescheduled meeting set for Thursday night as others call for calm.

A heavy police presence failed to prevent the Monday night meeting from descending into chaos as demonstrators took it over and then various factions within them jostled for control, shouting at each other. Protesters often ignored the requests of police officers to stop interrupting board members.

It was unclear who was in control of the meeting at times. Most of the crowd appeared to be in opposition to the books, but there were also a number of people with the the American Federation of Teachers union who showed up to support inclusion of LGBTQ people and others.

Not until Dearborn Police Chief Issa Shahin arrived later did the protesters stop their agitation. Shahin pleaded with the crowd to relax and not embarrass Dearborn. There was concern expressed by some community leaders that the protesters are making the city and its Arab American Muslim population look bad. But others said that as Muslims, they have to stand up for their faith….

“Vote them out!” the crowd repeatedly chanted during the raucous meeting inside an administrative center where the board holds its public meetings. The room was packed tightly, with many using an overflow room and others standing in the back and on the sides. Several held up signs with anti-gay rhetoric in English and Arabic, making religious references to assert that LGBTQ educational materials and books should not be available in Dearborn Public Schools, the third largest school district in Michigan. Some of the placards held up read: “Keep your porno books to yourself,” “Homosexuality Big Sin,” and “If democracy matters, we’re the majority.”

Most of the protesters appeared to be Arab American and Muslim. But others in the Arab American community strongly objected to the actions of the protesters Monday night.

“What happened tonight at the school board meeting in Dearborn is very embarrassing and is totally rejected,” Osama Siblani, publisher of the Dearborn-based Arab American News and a longtime community leader, wrote on Facebook. “Remember that the loss of any individual’s right to express himself/herself is the beginning of the end of all people’s rights … Remember that Islam is a religion of love, peace and tolerance, not a religion of insults, violence and threats.”

Aya Moughni, a Dearborn resident who is Muslim, also said earlier that Arab Americans should not be attacking the LGBTQ community. She spoke at a previous Dearborn rally in support of the books….

Police officers repeatedly told people who yelled out and interjected to keep quiet. But their efforts failed as the crowd’s anger grew. Part of the frustration was the board first addressed other issues not related to the books that most had showed up to discuss. They also didn’t like what some called a condescending attitude toward them and their concerns….

Brian Stone, who is part of the LGBTQ community, attended the meeting with a poster that displayed two photos next to each other: the one on the left said “1957” with a photo of whites screaming in anger at a Black woman, Hazel Bryan, attending a school in Little Rock, Arkansas that was integrated for the first time; the photo on the right said “2022,” with a photo of a man with an angry face giving the middle finger to Sam Smalley, a transgender person who was a counter-protester, at the Sept. 25 rally at the library against the books.

As he displayed the sign, Stone drew the attention of some angry men, including Chami.

“This is a community where everyone should be safe and they should be represented,” Stone said as they yelled.

Stone was later escorted to his car by two police officers, echoing the scene after the Sept. 25 rally, where several police officers had to escort Smalley to protect him as he walked to his car.

As Stone walked away, a protester yelled at him a phrase advocates note is often used to make bigoted attacks against gay people based on inaccurate stereotypes: “Leave our kids alone.”

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

RELATED TWEET:

BREAKING: Senator @DougMastriano releases graphic new ad slamming Josh Shapiro and Rachel Levine’s agenda of sexualizing and medical experimenting on PA children

Viewer Discretion is Advised pic.twitter.com/WWB7vIQQao

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 14, 2022

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President Donald J. Trump’s ‘Our nation is SUFFERING’ letter to the J6 Committee

October 14, 2022/in DrRichSwier.com, Elections, Featured, Politics /by DrRichSwier.com

By Dr. Rich Swier

President Donald J. Trump released a letter, below, to the members of the J6 Committee. Before reading his letter it is important to understand exactly what President Trump said on January 6th to those who peacefully came to the Save America rally in Washington, D.C. Watch:

Please repost and then some ! 🇺🇲⬇️ pic.twitter.com/lR31eP14AB

— Nyorky2000 (@nyorky2000) October 14, 2022

We also must remember that President Trump requested that the National Guard be called out before the January 6 rally in Washington, D.C. and Nancy Pelosi denied his request. Watch.

.@SpeakerPelosi must be held accountable for refusing Pres Trump’s multiple requests for the National Guard to be at the Capitol on Jan 6th.

The Capitol is her responsibility & she failed. Was it intentional?

And if they can release this video, then release ALL of the videos. https://t.co/m4yZW8RqxN

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) October 14, 2022

STATEMENT BY PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

“PEACEFULLY AND PATRIOTICALLY”

The Honorable Bennie G. Thompson

Chairperson

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol

Longworth House Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Chairman Thompson,

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN!

Our nation is SUFFERING. Our economy is in the gutter. Inflation is rampant. Gas prices have reached an all-time high. Ships are unable to unload cargo. Families cannot get needed baby formula. We are an embarrassment around the world. Our withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster that cost us precious American blood, and gave $85 billion worth of the best military equipment on earth to our enemy.

Millions and millions of illegals are marching to the border and invading our country. We have a White House in shambles, with Democrats, just this week, declaring that Biden is unfit to run for reelection. And what is the Democrat Congress focused on? A Kangaroo Court, hoping to distract the American people from the great pain they are experiencing.

Seventeen months after the events of January 6th, Democrats are unable to offer solutions. They are desperate to change the narrative of a failing nation, without even making mention of the havoc and death caused by the Radical Left just months earlier. Make no mistake, they control the government. They own this disaster. They are hoping that these hearings will somehow alter their failing prospects.

A certain Democrat once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Well, Democrats now seem to think that Americans are “stupid.” They are not. America is crumbling, and Democrats have no solutions. Our nation has no hope of change for the better under Democrat leadership. People are desperate. Rather than solving problems, Democrats are rehashing history in hopes of changing the narrative. During my time in office, our nation was thriving, our economy was strong, and the price of gas was very low. Above all else, we were respected, perhaps like never before.

America prospered under the Trump Administration.

The Sham Investigation

The January 6th Unselect Committee is disgracing everything we hold sacred about our Constitution. If they had any real evidence, they’d hold real hearings with equal representation.

They don’t, so they use the illegally-constituted committee to put on a smoke and mirrors show for the American people, in a pitiful last-ditch effort to deceive the American public…again.

Our Constitution protects the right to confront accusers, honors the right to fair trials, and holds the right to legal representation as paramount in our justice system. Equal representation and the opportunity to offer rebuttal evidence is fundamental in our legal process. The Committee has obliterated those rights and is making a mockery of justice. They have refused to allow their political opponents to participate in this process, and have excluded all exculpatory witnesses, and anyone who so easily points out the flaws in their story.

MAGA witnesses were interrogated behind closed doors and ordered to not record their own testimony. Members of my staff, my friends, supporters, volunteers, donors, were subjected to hours upon hours of inquisition – oftentimes having nothing to do with January 6th. Their very lives were turned upside down for obvious reasons. They were told it was an ongoing investigation and any reproduction of the interrogation would be viewed as an attempt to interfere in the investigation. They were gagged, threatened, and in some cases ruined.

Yet, the Unselect Pseudo-Committee has coordinated with their media puppets to broadcast their witnesses on national television without any opposition, cross-examination, or rebuttal evidence. The American public has a right to know the truth and see every witness, but these corrupt officials are trying to force-feed the public with their politically opportune sideshow.

What are the members of this treasonous “Committee” afraid of? Why can’t they let the countervailing opinion be heard? Why are they hiding evidence from the public and only showing information that favors the Democrats’ tall tale? They’re afraid of losing the narrative, because their political opponents could easily show how the committee is lying to the nation and has stripped Americans of their rightful power.

Democrats created the narrative of January 6th to detract from the much larger and more important truth that the 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen. Politicians from both parties, but mostly the Democrats, worked in conjunction with corporate elitists to strip Americans of our right to elect our own leaders. To do so, corrupt officials violated their own state laws.

The separation of powers is designed to make sure that no officials become dictators by granting the authority to make laws with the legislature and execute laws with the executive

branch. No one office should have complete power. It must be separated among different offices.

In 2020, separation of powers went out the window. The state executive branch, in both red and blue states, decided to completely ignore state laws, make up their own rules, and execute them.

In other words, they became the little dictators our Constitution was designed to prevent.

They illegally inflated voter rolls, illegally allowed harvested and stuffed ballots, abused the use of mail-in ballots, physically removed Republicans from counting facilities, abused the elderly in nursing homes, bribed election officials with donations, stopped counting on Election Night, gave Democrats three extra days to harvest ballots, and demanded that the American people believe it was legitimate.

This entire charade of the Unselect Committee is a brazen attempt to detract the public’s attention from the truth. The truth is that Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. in massive numbers (but seldom revealed by the press), on January 6th, 2021, to hold their elected officials accountable for the obvious signs of criminal activity throughout the Election. Those who are supposed to be public servants are using the power of government against the people who entrusted them with the power. We’ve been betrayed.

Since the Unselect Committee refuses to allow their political opponents to participate in the hearings, the public likely won’t hear from the many patriots who contradict the lies being broadcast – at least not in these hearings. This is all a ridiculous and treasonous attempt to cover up the fact that Democrats rigged the Election and are siphoning Americans’ freedoms and power for their own benefit.

Without the ability to have political, legal, or witness representation from conservatives in this Kangaroo Court, it’s up to American patriots to arm themselves with the information.

This hearing isn’t about January 6th, it’s about November 3rd, and here’s what happened.

Stop the Count

On Election Night, America watched as my lead grew and grew over Joe Biden, as I was set to claim another victory. By the morning of November 4th, the day after the Election, I led by 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania,1 300,000 in Michigan,2 and hundreds of thousands in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin.3 Then, the same “little dictators” who destroyed the separation of powers made the treasonous decision to stop counting.4 These same states, who had counted millions of ballots in a single day, had to stop counting in order to count a few hundred thousand ballots over the next four days to call the race on November 7th.

Why would it take four more days to count a few hundred thousand votes when they had counted millions in one day? They needed time to traffic the ballots and manipulate the outcome of the Election. The Swamp was so determined to keep their stranglehold on power that they delayed the results of the Election so that they could find, manufacture, or produce more ballots, after they knew how many they needed to beat me. They cheated! There’s no reasonable explanation for why it took so much longer to count the few remaining ballots as opposed to the millions on Election Day – other than they needed to traffic more ballots, and it took four days to produce the ballots and do it. They couldn’t have done it without an elaborate ballot trafficking scheme.

Ballot Trafficking

Highly respected True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips showed the nation exactly what the Democrats’ illegal ballot trafficking scheme looks like. They spent years investigating election crimes, and their hard work provided America with the indisputable proof so many had been waiting for. True the Vote cooperated with Dinesh D’Souza to produce the blockbuster documentary 2000 Mules, which provides video evidence of the ballot trafficking scheme Democrats have created.

Engelbrecht and Phillips used geo-fencing data that they purchased to isolate and identify potential mules. Like drug mules, in this context, mules are those paid to illegally traffic ballots from nonprofits organizations and drop them into the ballot drop boxes. The search criteria they used was to isolate cell phone data that had been to 10 or more ballot drop boxes, while also visiting at least five identified nonprofit organizations during a two-week period.6

There’s no legitimate reason for any individual to visit 10 or more ballot drop boxes.

Why would anyone need to vote 10 times? Couple that with the idea that the same individuals are also visiting the offices of liberal nonprofits in the same time period.

At least one whistleblower at one of the nonprofits in Yuma came forward and confirmed that these organizations act as trafficking hubs for the mules to pick up the ballots to drop off at the drop boxes.7 One woman in Arizona has already plead guilty to a Class 6 felony for participating in this ballot trafficking scheme.8 And Democrats are getting tax write-offs for this behavior!

True the Vote and local law enforcement have the video surveillance showing the mules dropping many ballots into the drop box, which confirms the geo-fencing data that Engelbrecht and Phillips had gathered. This is the same surveillance evidence that the FBI has used to identify January 6th protestors.9

In fact, the FBI has used this same type of evidence in 45 of the criminal cases against January 6th protestors.10

Yet, the dishonest media puts experts front and center to tell America that True the Votes’ evidence is unreliable.11

It’s the exact same evidence the FBI used against January 6th protestors! How can the evidence be an indispensable tool to identify January 6th protestors, but when applied to ballot traffickers, the science is unreliable and not precise? The hypocrisy is stifling! The Swamp has blown the bottom out of how low they’ll go to deceive the American public in order to keep their vice-grip on power. Thankfully, Americans are taking responsibility for what they believe, and simply no longer believe the narrative.

The truth is, according to Joe Biden, that the Swamp has created the “most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics,”12 and it centers around ballot trafficking.

The Math

The illegal ballot harvesting operation is an insult to the democratic process, but the kicker is the media feeding us the bogus line that this was the most secure election in U.S. history. What a load of bologna! The data shows us how compromised the system was. The math shows us that it changed the outcome of the Election.

Looking at just the known traffickers Engelbrecht and Phillips identified, the 2000 mules, we know they averaged 38 drop box visits averaging five ballots per box.13 That totals 380,000 illegal ballots inserted into the Election via the drop boxes. We also know they targeted specific counties in order to impact the outcome of the Election. Many of those counties were separated by only a few thousand votes.

Based on the data, Georgia had 250 mules average 24 drop boxes with five ballots each, totaling 30,000 illegal ballots.14 The margin of victory in Georgia was only 11,779, meaning that ballot trafficking alone would have changed the outcome of the state. There was a lot of other suspicious activity in Georgia, but the trafficking, by itself, was sufficient to change the outcome.

Georgia’s 16 electors should not have gone to Biden.

A similar story occurred in Arizona. Two hundred identified mules averaged 20 drop boxes and five ballots each.15 That’s a minimum of 20,000 illegal ballots. The margin of victory in Arizona alone was 10,457, meaning that ballot trafficking alone was enough to flip the state.

Arizona’s 11 electoral votes should not have gone to Biden.

True the Vote identified 1,100 mules in Philadelphia alone, each averaging 50 drop boxes and five ballots per box. That’s 275,000 illegal votes. The margin of victory in Pennsylvania was only 80,555, meaning the ballot trafficking scheme in Philadelphia alone was enough to flip the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

The Commonwealth’s 20 electoral votes should not have gone to Biden.

Those three states show that the illegal ballot trafficking scheme alone sufficed to change the outcome of the Election. But what about the other states?

Michigan had 500 mules identified, averaging 50 drop box visits, and five ballots per visit for a total ballot harvest of 125,000 ballots.16

Biden’s margin of victory in Michigan was 154,188. That means the ballot harvesting scheme, at a minimum, narrowed the results so that operatives at the polls only needed to manufacture a little over 29,000 votes statewide. We all saw as citizens in Detroit protested outside the TCF center,17 because Republicans were excluded from the process in one of the most corrupt areas in the country.18 What were they doing inside?

Did they discard Republican ballots? Did they print new Biden ballots? No one has been allowed to investigate in Michigan.

Engelbrecht and Phillips identified 100 mules in Wisconsin that averaged 28 drop boxes and five ballots per box.19 That’s 14,000 illegal votes. The margin of victory was 20,682. That leaves only 6,000 votes for Democrat operatives to make up by either adding Biden votes or discarding Trump votes. We know that Democrats abused the elderly in nursing homes that easily could have generated more than 6,000 illegal votes,20 likely more. They had to cheat in multiple ways to steal Wisconsin, but the evidence of foul play surpasses the margin of victory in Wisconsin by thousands of votes.

With just Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, and there were others, the Electoral College vote would have been Trump 279 to Biden 259. But they cheated. And now look where we are as a country!

But What If There Were More

What if True the Vote’s criteria to identify the mules was too conservative? Rather than using the requirement to identify someone who went to 10 drop boxes with five or more visits to the liberal nonprofits, what if they looked for people who went to five drop boxes? It’s highly unlikely that anyone would need to go to five drop boxes while also visiting nonprofits in the same time span. The data is astonishing! Rather than 2000 mules, the number jumps to 54,000 mules!21

And how about if they widened the search even more? The numbers become astronomical, and the results would be a landslide victory for Trump. It is all on live tape produced by the government.

Continuing the conservative estimate of just three ballots per mule with 54,000 mules, the numbers spike tremendously. In Wisconsin, 83,565 illegal votes were trafficked, more than four times the margin of victory.22 In Georgia, 92,670 illegal votes were trafficked, more than eight times the margin of victory.23 In Pennsylvania, 209,505 votes were trafficked, more than double the margin of victory.24 In Michigan, 226,590 votes were trafficked, tens of thousands of votes over the margin of victory.25 In Arizona, 207,435 votes were trafficked, almost 20 times the margin of victory.26

Using this slightly less conservative calculation, coupled with the geotracking data, the same used by law enforcement, I decisively won all of the contested states. The final electoral count should have been Trump 305 to Biden 233.27.

It’s also highly likely that True the Vote did not uncover 100% of the mules, making the numbers much larger than a landslide in scope, and that there were many more mules out there affecting more of the Election than we realize. This was not a close Election.

Defying the Odds

There were 19 counties in the U.S. that voted for the winning Presidential candidate since 1980, they’re known as bellwether counties.28 I won 18 of the 19 bellwether counties.29 Eighteen of the 19 counties who consistently vote for the winning candidate voted for me, yet we’re supposed to believe that Joe Biden won the Election?

Joe Biden, a candidate who never left his basement and can’t speak without a teleprompter, outperformed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in their two high-charged elections.30 Biden even outperformed Obama in black communities, but only in important swing states. Isn’t that amazing? It’s impossible.

Basement Biden earned more votes than Obama in Fulton County, Ga. (Atlanta) by 131,733 (53%), and Wayne County, Mich. (Detroit) by 1,917 (0.3%),31which are the two largest

black populations in the United States.32 Biden also earned more votes than Obama’s 2012 campaign in Cobb County, Ga. by 89,321 (52%),33 and Oakland County, Mich. by 85,093 (24.4%)34. Either there’s a lot of black voters in America who identify more with Joe Biden than Barack Obama, or Democrats are stealing black votes – and we all know the answer to that.

Apparently, Joe Biden is twice as popular in Arizona as Barack Obama, even among black and Hispanic voters. Sleepy Joe earned a total of 1,040,774 votes in Maricopa County, Ariz. (Phoenix). That’s 508,490 more votes than Obama earned in 2012 (532,284), nearly doubling Obama’s 2012 performance in the key swing state. Biden’s unbelievable success of outperforming Obama continues in Las Vegas35, Nev., Madison, Wisc.36, Green Bay, Wisc., 37 and a number of other cities across the country. It didn’t happen.

In Pennsylvania’s six largest counties, Biden supposedly outperformed Obama’s 2012 record setting numbers in Philadelphia by 46,766 (8.3%), in Allegheny County (Pittsburg) by

80,914 (23.2%), in Montgomery County 91,950 (40.4%), in Bucks County 45,114 (28.2%), in Delaware County 41,618 (25.2%), and in Lancaster County 28,739 (32.99%). The trend continues to many of Pennsylvania’s smaller counties.38 Across the Commonwealth, Biden earned 550,781 more votes than Barack Obama in 2012.39.

Zuckerbucks

Mark Zuckerberg contributed $419 million dollars to election initiatives around the country.40 Supposedly, the money was used to make elections safer as a result of the China Virus (COVID-19). However, the money was not primarily used for China Virus protection, although some did go for that purpose. For example, in Wisconsin, the money was conditioned upon the five largest counties adopting a Democrat only initiative of the Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan (WSVP).41

The five key counties, Milwaukee, Kenosha, Madison, Racine, and Green Bay, became known as the “Zuckerberg 5.”42

Zuckerberg funneled his money through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a liberal nonprofit based in Illinois, which received the lion’s share of the money, at least $350 million.43 CTCL is a radical leftist organization filled with Obama Foundation fellows and Obama appointees.44

Almost all of the money went to Democrat-run and controlled areas. Very little, for cosmetic purposes only, went to Republican areas. They threw us a bone.

According to the Special Counsel report in Wisconsin:45 “[A]nother election purpose existed as evidenced by the documents obtained by the Special Counsel. That other election purpose was to fuse together the CTCL, their allied private corporations, the Zuckerberg 5, and $8.8 million of private funding into joint operations in that group of cities, where the focus would be on facilitating increased in-person and absentee voting, particularly in their “communities of color.” See, e.g., App. 7- 27 (WSVP). From the beginning, the purpose of the WSVP contract and its private funding was for the Zuckerberg 5 to use CTCL’s private money to facilitate greater in-person voting and greater absentee voting, particularly in targeted neighborhoods.”

Based on the Special Counsel’s report, liberal nonprofits funded by Zuckerberg – who was also trying to control the election narrative on his social media platforms – lied to the public about the real use of their money. Why would they need to lie if they weren’t doing anything wrong? Because they were doing something wrong and they knew it. They knew the money was conditioned upon their ability to control the election process. The Special Counsel further states in his findings:46

“Any Agreement Where a City’s Election Officials Receive CTCL or Other’s Private Money to Facilitate In-Person and Absentee Voting Within a City Facially Violates Wis. Stat. § 12.11’s Prohibition on Election Bribery Under Wis. Stat. § 12.11.

The CTCL agreement facially violates the election bribery prohibition of Wis. Stat. § 12.11 because the participating cities and public officials received private money to facilitate in-person or absentee voting within such a city. Any similar agreements in the 2022 and 2024 election cycle would also be prohibited election bribery.”

According to Wisconsin’s Special Counsel, the money was intended to impact in person and absentee voting, which would have a direct impact on the outcome of the Election.47 Also, according to Wisconsin’s Special Counsel – that’s bribery.

Zuckerberg should be criminally prosecuted. Election laws prevent individuals from donating more than $5,000 per year,48 yet Zuckerberg gave $419 million.

And it’s not just Wisconsin. CTCL provided funds, according to their form 990 they filed with the IRS, to 47 of the 50 states, plus Washington, D.C.49

For example, before the 2020 Election, the group gave $45 million to Georgia, $38.6 million to Texas, $25 million to Pennsylvania, $25 million to New York, $7.5 million to Ohio, $21 million to New Jersey, $16.8 million to Michigan, $21 million to California, and $5 million to Arizona, among others.50 Did all the grants to the states have strings attached? Or was it just Wisconsin?

How unfair and illegal is this? How do you win an election against this? But we did, getting almost 75 million votes, the most in history for a sitting President.

Pandemic of Injustice

Beginning the night of November 3rd, Americans knew there was something wrong going on. Almost immediately, citizens around the country started filing lawsuits seeking information and clarification about the Election.

The year leading up to the Election had been a year of violent liberal assaults on cities around the country. Democrats made it known that they would rather burn cities to the ground than allow for a civilized political process. They knew their policies were failing, citizens weren’t buying their hype, and they were losing their influence. So, they spent the year creating an atmosphere of fear, and that’s the environment in which concerned citizens were forced to file their lawsuits.

Judges, including Justices of the United States Supreme Court, were scared. Some were political hacks who refused to be the sole arbiter of such a strong political issue. It was liberal fearmongering. Rumors circulated that the Justices devolved to shouting and argued intensely over how to handle the Texas v. Pennsylvania case.51 Ultimately, the Justices yielded to the same fear mongering tactics Democrats had deployed for years. They punted and threw the case out on standing. Following their lead, every lower court threw the cases out on standing, and usually without barely even looking at them.

Some of the cases had well established grounds for standing, and one had even been in open litigation for 10 months before the court reversed itself and threw it out. Specifically, that happened in Georgia, where a court had ruled that the plaintiffs were entitled to review the original ballot images after granting them access to the files. Then, defendants stalled for months. Ten months after the initial filing, the court decided the plaintiffs no longer had standing.52 What?!

On November 4th, 2020, Antrim County, Michigan announced that 16,047 votes had been cast and Joe Biden received 7,769 and I received 4,509.53 In 2016, I had received 62% of the vote in Antrim, making the 2020 results particularly surprising. Mr. Bailey, an Antrim County voter, made some phone calls and the Antrim County clerk double checked the results, and issued new results.

A closer look showed 18,059 votes cast in Antrim County.54 Joe Biden received 7,289 votes, and I received 9,783, meaning I won 54% of the vote, which still seemed odd compared with the 2016 results. This also doesn’t account for the difference in the number of votes cast.

Why were they short, and where did the new votes come from?

Antrim County checked a third time and found 16,044 votes cast and that Joe Biden received 5,960, while I received 9,748, winning 60.75%.55 Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan

Secretary of State asserted the error was simply a clerical error, because the clerk failed to update the Mancelona Township tabulator prior to Election Night for a down ballot race, and that the correct count was always on the tabulator tape. She insisted that the Antrim County Clerk simply made a mistake, and this was not a cause to look closer at every county in Michigan. Benson shut the discussion down, but Bailey continued to fight in court.56

Matt DePerno, Bailey’s lawyer, aggressively pursued discovery in the case and successfully won a motion to audit the election machines in Antrim County. On April 9th, 2021,

DePerno released an exhibit in the Bailey case, with additional findings from the experts examining the evidence, which found that, despite critics saying otherwise, the voting machines were connected to the internet, and the officials knew they were connected.57 The exhibit produced email communications from Election Night discussing the terrible internet connection.58 This also highlights the weird disinformation campaign waged immediately following the Election to dispel the belief that machines were connected to the internet, despite the fact that it was true.59

Voting machines send the tallies, via the internet, to allow the totals to be counted faster. Connecting them to the internet does create some vulnerabilities, but does not mean any

malicious activity actually took place. So why all the drama? Why all the hype from election officials across the country trying to convince the public the machines were not connected to the internet when they knew that they were? Why not just say that the machines were connected to the internet, but no security breaches occurred…if that was in fact true? Was it true?

DePerno continued to release exhibit after exhibit detailing technical specifics of anomalies and irregularities raising questions from the 2020 Election.60 The corrupt media continued to ignore and bury the story, and hurled insults at DePerno and his case. The court eventually dismissed the case, but not based on any of the evidence DePerno had amassed. It dismissed the case on procedural grounds: the plaintiff was asking for an audit of the Election, and the Democrat Secretary of State told the court she had already conducted an audit.

Therefore, the court ruled, the case was moot.61 No evidence presented, no witnesses to testify. Just, case dismissed. As usual, saved by the court.

Cases around the country received the same treatment. Courts didn’t want to be the sole arbiter of such a massive political issue, but they also shouldn’t be afraid to do their job. State legislators, members of Congress, senators, governors, secretaries of state, and many other state and federal officials should do their jobs and protect their citizens’ right to vote. But, the Swamp runs deep. I guess that turning around an election was a step too far.

As we near the midterm elections, we’re watching the Swamp creatures circle the drain as true Americans step up to replace the corrupt Establishment with patriots who will fight for our freedoms.

The Establishment is holding on as tightly as they can to their power as they watch it slip from their grasp. Our country is in a nosedive. Americans are struggling to fill their gas tanks, feed their babies, educate their children, hire employees, order supplies, protect our border from invasion, and a host of other tragedies that are 100% caused by Democrats who obtained power through a rigged election, and the people of our country are both angry and sad.

Americans have very real pressing concerns about the basic necessities of life.

What is Congress doing about it? They’re doing everything they can to ignore and distract from the very real pain that they have caused this country. They want to talk about anything but the 2020 Election results and the fact that they are the cause of our country’s problems.

Nobody brings this up, but as President, I suffered years of vicious lies, scandals, and innuendo concerning a fake and contrived narrative of Russia, Russia, Russia. The entire Russia Hoax was a concoction made up by Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party.

It was used as an excuse for her loss, but endured throughout my entire Administration.

It was a fake and fraudulent narrative, and now they’re trying to do it again.

Many other forms of cheating surfaced during 2020. Republican challengers were excluded from the process, bullied, and berated. Corrupt officials moved to centralize the vote count away from precincts, making it easier to cheat. Some areas are reported to have had more votes than voters! That raises some questions. These are only a few of

the many forms of cheating that took place in, what I call, the Crime of the Century, and its cover up by the American media.

This is merely an attempt to stop a man that is leading in every poll, against both Republicans and Democrats by wide margins, from running again for the Presidency.

The reason I am leading in the polls is because Democrats have caused record inflation, sky high gas prices, energy dependence on our adversaries, the education system is in crisis, illegal aliens are invading our border, the supply chain has crippled our way of life, parents can’t get baby formula, mandates have crippled businesses, and our way of life

has been crushed by government regulations. The United States is being destroyed.

The Democrats know that I would correct all of this, and they are doing everything in their power to stop me – but we can’t be stopped.

We have to Save America.

Arizona GOP Senate Nominee Masters Now Deadlocked with Democrat Incumbent Kelly: Poll

October 14, 2022/in Featured, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Madeline Hubbard

Editors’ Note: It is likely that as the race for US Senate between incumbent Kelly and Republican challenger Masters tightens, what libertarians decide to do will prove decisive. The polling evidence confirms this is happening. We have provided two articles on this subject which we urge our libertarian readers to consider. We don’t hold out much hope that libertarian leaders can be convinced but we hope libertarian voters are more practical. As we examined in one article, the classic arguments that libertarian campaigns educate the public and hold Republicans firmer to their small government standards, just don’t apply in the real world. We don’t know of any libertarian political campaign which has stopped RINOs from taking power. Only conservative Republicans can keep RINOs from taking power because they work within the party. More often, the outcome is perverse from the standpoint of liberty. In close elections, libertarians wind up electing socialists. As another article argued, with the political parties now so polarized, it really boils down pretty much to a choice between the socialist party and the Republican Party. When you split the anti-socialist vote, it results in electing Democrats. We think libertarians contribute a lot to the discussion in this country. However, the Libertarian Party has not been successful at electing libertarians but has been successful at electing socialists. To be sure, Republicans have disappointed more than any of us would like. But you don’t solve that problem by electing Democrats, which are now operationally and philosophically a socialist party. We urge libertarians to put their egos aside and not betray their principles by electing Democrats. You may disagree with some Republicans on free trade and drug legalization, but the socialist orientation of the modern Democrat Party is a much greater threat to our liberty. Libertarians disagree with socialists on a much broader range of topics. Pick the candidate which more closely reflects your view overall and one who has a chance to be elected. For the Senate, that clearly is Black Masters.

Blake Masters, Arizona’s Republican nominee for Senate, is 3 points behind Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, placing him within the margin of error, according to a poll.

Masters, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, comes in at 48% with Kelly at 51%, a CBS News/YouGov Battleground Tracker survey from last week shows.

The poll was conducted with 1,164 registered Arizona voters from Sept. 30-Oct. 4, and the margin of error is 3.8 points, meaning that Masters may have an edge over Kelly one month before the midterm election…..

*****

Continue reading this article at Just the News.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). The ballots will be mailed out to all voters registered for mail-in voting on October 12^th. The actual ‘day’ of the election is Tuesday November 8, 27 days later.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

Will Libertarian Candidates Again Deny GOP the U.S. Senate?

October 14, 2022/in Featured, Liberty, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Edward Ring

The more powerful the Libertarian Party becomes, the more certain it is that they will turn America over to Democrats—rendering the majority sentiments of Americans politically irrelevant.

The political reality in America today is that of a two-party system. Embracing this reality means if you want to change the political direction of the nation, you have to transform one of the two major parties. Denying this reality, by running as a third-party candidate, can also transform the political direction of the nation. But it’s unlikely to change in the direction the third-party candidate wants to go. Third-party candidates rarely win elections, but they’re very good at splitting the vote.

This is the only context in which the national Libertarian Party, “The Party of Principle™,” is relevant in America today. This party, with its principled candidates, above all else, believes in limited government. Which is to say they oppose socialism. And voilà, when you split the anti-socialist vote, the socialist wins.

It shouldn’t be necessary to defend Republicans versus Democrats. Right now, the fact that Republicans are not Democrats should be enough. Even if many Republicans are just RINOs, they generally vote with their party on the major issues and, in any case, when Republicans control the Senate or the House, they have control over the budget, the court appointees, and the investigations. Overall, Republicans tend to approve less damaging legislation than Democrats.

This is reality. This is politics in America. Consider the Republican leaders with national stature today, then compare them to Democratic Party leaders with comparable visibility and influence. Maybe some of these Republicans are rough around the edges, or don’t agree with you or with each other on every issue. So what? Which gang do you want running the country? If you’re a populist conservative, or even if you’re a libertarian, the choice should be easy.

The ability of Libertarian candidates to get Democrats elected is vast. From who occupies the White House all the way down to control of state legislatures, the deeper you dig, the more you find. The last two presidential elections both offer compelling evidence of Libertarian impact.

In the 2016 election, the Libertarian presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, attracted just over 4.5 million votes. The leftist equivalent, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, received only 1.5 million votes. Despite being a deeply flawed candidate, Gary Johnson moved the national popular vote from a toss-up to a clear Clinton edge. In the Electoral College, Johnson’s influence was even greater.

At the state level in 2016, Gary Johnson very nearly handed crucial states to Clinton. In Pennsylvania, where Trump’s margin was just 1.3 percentage points, Johnson got 2.4 percent of the vote. In Wisconsin, where Trump won by 0.6 percentage points, Johnson got 3.7 percent. In Michigan, where Trump won by a razor thin 0.3 percentage points, Johnson got 3.6 percent.

Not only did Johnson very nearly leave the “Blue Wall” intact for Democrats in 2016, he also took states out of play that might have been toss-ups. In Colorado, for example, Trump lost by 3.6 percentage points, but Gary Johnson got 4.7 percent. In Nevada, Trump lost by 2.7 percentage points and Johnson got 3.1 percent.

In the 2020 election, it is possible that Jo Jorgensen, the Libertarian candidate, threw the election to Biden. In the six states where Trump was reported to have lost by the thinnest of margins, the impact of the Libertarian candidate either flipped the election to Biden or very nearly did.

Notably, the Green Party candidate was not present on the ballot in any of these states except for Michigan, where he only won 0.2 percent of the vote. If the voters who’d opted for Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgenson had chosen Trump instead, Trump would have won Georgia with 50.5 percent of the vote, Arizona with 50.6 percent, and Wisconsin with 50.1 percent, and he would have been reelected.

You don’t have to be a MAGA zealot, or an “election denier,” to remain unconvinced that a Biden Administration is better for the average American than a reelected Trump.

Libertarians frequently argue that they also take votes away from Democrats, or they attract votes from people who would not have otherwise participated. It’s also possible the 2020 election was influenced more by other factors—Mark Zuckerberg’s $400 million comes to mind, as does the mass censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, to name only two—and so perhaps we should lay off Libertarians.

Or maybe not. In close races, it remains that Libertarian candidates get Democrats elected.

Denying Senate Control

Which brings us to how Libertarians affect which party controls the U.S. Senate. In Georgia, in November 2020, the candidacy of Libertarian candidate Shane Hazel threw the battle between Republican David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff into a runoff. It might be true that Perdue could have won his runoff if various external events hadn’t affected turnout on January 5, or of course, if he’d been a better candidate. But that’s beside the point. If Hazel hadn’t been a spoiler in November, there would have been no runoff for Perdue to lose.

Perdue only needed an additional 0.3 percentage points to win in 2020. If Hazel had not been on the ballot, only 1-in-7 of Hazel’s voters would have had to decide instead to vote for Perdue in order for Perdue to win. Read Hazel’s 2020 candidate survey on Ballotpedia, or watch his podcast. He did not take votes away from Democrats.

The battle for the U.S. Senate in 2022, according to the Cook Political Report, includes eight races that are currently listed as “toss-ups.” Of those eight, there are six states with Libertarian candidates also in the race. They are Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Only one of those states, Pennsylvania, has a Green Party candidate also running.

The race in Arizona, currently rated a toss-up by Cook, bears a closer look. The Libertarian candidate, Marc Victor, raised over $60,000 in individual contributions. These are through June 2022 and don’t reflect contributions since then, which may be substantial. The next report to the Federal Election Commission isn’t due until September 30. But $60,000 is just enough money to hire a campaign attorney and campaign treasurer, gain the endorsement of the Libertarian Party, and end up on the Arizona state ballot as a spoiler.

Most interesting is who has supported Victor in his Senate campaign. Through June, he has only attracted 21 donations—every one of them from California. Of those 21 donations, 16 came from donors with the same surname, presumably from the same family. The patriarch of this family is Ron Conway, Sr., a venture capitalist who lists his address in Belvedere, one of the wealthiest cities in America.

Why would wealthy and politically savvy individuals offer financial support to an obscure candidate in another state, someone who has zero chance of winning? Only one reason makes sense: To take votes away from the Republican candidate, and keep the U.S. Senate in the hands of Democrats.

When the November 2022 election is over, it will be interesting, and telling, to see how much money poured into the hands of Libertarian candidates for U.S. Senate and House seats. For Democrat and NeverTrump megadonors, it will have been money well spent.

Libertarian candidates have various motives. Some are running on principle, some to acquire celebrity status, and some are just so disillusioned with the Republican Party that they’re running as spoilers to hasten its destruction. Republican candidates could be doing more to help themselves. Offering a compelling and coherent vision of America’s future, instead of merely identifying the spectacular failures of the Democrats, would be a good start.

But the disunity, imperfections, and failures of Republicans don’t justify their collective destruction. Overall, the ideological bias of Republican candidates and voters leans in the same direction as Libertarians. The more powerful the Libertarian Party becomes, the more certain it is that they will turn America over to Democrats—rendering the majority sentiments of Americans politically irrelevant. That’s life in a two party system.

*****

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). The ballots will be mailed out to all voters registered for mail-in voting on October 12^th. The actual ‘day’ of the election is Tuesday November 8, 27 days later.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

Katie Hobbs Says She Supports No Limits on Abortion, Even Up to Birth

October 14, 2022/in Featured, Life Advocacy, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Corinne Murdock

In a Sunday interview, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs said she wouldn’t put any limits on abortion. Hobbs also evaded questions about her strength to handle a debate with Lake, as well as who caused the present border crisis.

Hobbs’ remarks occurred during her 8-minute one-on-one interview with CBS host Major Garrett, as part of a “Face the Nation” segment that also featured a separate one-on-one with Lake. Concerning abortion limits, Hobbs stated repeatedly that no laws should exist limiting abortion.

“I support leaving the decision between a woman and her doctor, and leaving politicians entirely out of it,” said Hobbs.

Hobbs said she didn’t agree with the state’s 15-week limit on abortions. She didn’t denounce late-term abortions but claimed that they’re never elective.

When pressed about her refusal to debate Lake, Hobbs claimed that her opponent would create a “circus” of no benefit to voters. Hobbs refused to answer Garrett when he asked if she were strong enough to handle the “circus” Lake might concoct. Rather, Hobbs said voters had plenty of other opportunities to see her performance under crisis, referencing controversy over the 2020 election.

Hobbs said there were no circumstances under which she would debate Lake.

Hobbs again refused to answer Garrett when he asked who she considers responsible for the present border crisis, and whether the Biden or Trump administration policies were safer for immigrants. Rather, Hobbs said that decades of bad policies from both parties were to blame.

Garrett pressed Hobbs, reminding her that she’d criticized “current immigration policy” — which would be that of President Joe Biden’s administration. Hobbs admitted that Biden should do more to mitigate the border crisis, but didn’t say he was to blame. She noted that former President Donald Trump failed to fulfill his promise of a complete border wall.

“Biden does need to step up immigration and border security,” said Hobbs.

Hobbs also claimed that her economic plan, which includes upending Arizona’s universal school choice, would reduce inflation.

During her one-on-one interview, Lake took the opposite stance on all issues. Lake answered nearly all of Garrett’s questions directly, except for his question about whether she believed that President Joe Biden was the legitimate president. Rather, Lake said that distrust in elections has been a pervasive issue since the early 2000s. She said that the ability for people to question elections ceased with the 2020 election, though doubts over the 2016 election continue to be permitted.

“All of a sudden in 2020, we don’t have free speech anymore,” said Lake. “All I’m asking for is the ability to speak out: when our government does something wrong, we should be able to speak against it.”

Concerning her plan to form an interstate compact to secure the border, Lake explained that the Constitution granted her plan the legal authority to act. She disclosed that other governors agreed to join the compact.

“We meet all three criteria [of Article I Section X of the Constitution]: we have an invasion, our people are in danger, and time is of the essence,” said Lake. “I hope that Joe Biden doesn’t fight us, because then it will really look like he’s on the side of the cartels.”

Lake said that the “lust” for cheap illegal immigrant labor exists not only in Arizona, but nationwide. She pointed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA-12) press conference remarks that Republican-led states should welcome illegal immigrants because they can “pick the crops” there. Lake expressed concern not only for the quality of life for illegal immigrants,

On abortion, Lake said that she would uphold the law as governor. She said that she was for “true choices” which would entail more than just abortion. Lake asserted that abortion was the only choice offered at abortion clinics, not other choices like adoption.

Lake agreed with last week’s arrest of an Iowa man who threatened a Maricopa County supervisor over the 2020 election. She opined that the root cause of these threats were frustrations from restrictions on free speech and expression that occurred during the pandemic.

The latest polling shows Hobbs and Lake tied among likely voters.

Read the full transcript of the Hobbs and Lake interviews here.

*****

This article was published by the Arizona Free News and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). The ballots will be mailed out to all voters registered for mail-in voting on October 12^th. The actual ‘day’ of the election is Tuesday November 8, 27 days later.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

Easy Money and Hard Economic Times

October 14, 2022/in Economy, Featured, Liberty, National Security, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Craig J. Cantoni

Editors’ Note: As the article below indicates, a new magisterial history of interest rates and central banking has been published. The author, Edward Chancellor wrote a previous book just before the last great financial crash called Devil Take the Hindmost, which was extremely timely if not prescient. This new book is extremely critical of current central bank policies, which have caused a serial set of financial bubbles, that have caused immense economic distortions setting us up for another crisis and putting governments themselves into a debt trap. As this book is beginning to get recognized, the shallowness of our institutions is once again revealed. The Nobel Committee has awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics to former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, considered the architect of Quantitative Easing, at least in the West. This is roughly equivalent to presenting the Sherwin – Williams award for painting, to a house painter who painted himself into a corner all while setting the house on fire.

A brilliant book explains the causes of our economic travails and names names.

It is longer than a tweet, a text, a TikTok, a YouTube, or a news blurb.
It requires a basic understanding of finance, economics, statistics, and multi-syllable words.
It makes the reader feel intellectually inadequate at times, especially this reader of mediocre intelligence.
It is nonpartisan and criticizes both political parties as warranted.
It is not about race, gender, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the Kardashians, or sports celebrities.
As a result, it’s not going to be a best-seller.
What is it? It is the following masterpiece:

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, by Edward Chancellor, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022, 398 pages.

It’s a shame that the book won’t be a best-seller, for it explains the major causes of flat-lined productivity, of slow economic growth, of the corruption of capitalism, of income inequality, of bubbles in real estate and other assets, of the financialization of the economy, of leveraged buyouts and mergers and acquisitions that hollow out companies and stifle competition, of sky-high stock valuations for unicorn companies that have never turned a profit, and of stock buybacks that line executives’ pockets while weakening their companies.

On second thought, it’s a blessing, not a shame, that the book won’t be a best-seller. If it were widely read, it could trigger an uprising that would make the Capitol attack on January 6 look like a playground spat, for Americans would come to understand how they’ve been screwed and who did the screwing.

The book’s title refers to the time value of money—to the fact that time is valuable, that economic and financial activities take place across time, that money has more value in the hand than in the future, and that interest is needed to induce people to forego consumption and lend their money for more productive uses.

In the author’s words:

The argument of this book is that interest is required to direct the allocation of capital, and that without interest it becomes impossible to value investments. As a reward for abstinence, interest incentivizes saving. When it comes to regulating financial markets, the existence of interest discourages bankers and investors from taking excessive risks. On the foreign exchanges, interest rates equilibrate the flow of capital between nations. Interest also influences the distribution of income and wealth. As [Frederic] Bastiat understood [in the nineteenth century], a very low rate of interest may benefit the rich, who have access to credit, more than the poor.

The author gives the history of interest going back to ancient times, including the history of usury laws and their consequences. He identifies empires and nations that stagnated or worse due to keeping interest rates too low and spending too high. He quotes thinkers of hundreds of years ago who seems to have known more about economics than the 400 PhD economists employed today by the Federal Reserve. He discusses the interrelationships between interest rates, the money supply, and inflation during the era of the trusts and robber barons of the late nineteenth century, as well as the years leading up to and following the stock market crash of 1929.

He goes on to show the economic consequences in recent times of low or even negative rates, especially when the rates are coupled with quantitative easing, the printing of money, deficit spending, a humongous and growing national debt, and the Federal Reserve’s arbitrary inflation target of two percent. The result is “irrational exuberance,” to borrow Alan Greenspan’s words, an exuberance that inevitably leads to a downturn and often leads to high inflation, which in turn leads to the Federal Reserve removing the punch bowl through higher interest rates.

Such monetary and fiscal policies cause business cycles to be more volatile, corrections to be more protracted, and the painful but beneficial process of creative destruction to be most destructive.

Former heads of the Federal Reserve won’t be endorsing the book, especially Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, both of whom are excoriated by the author. That would be the same two who were praised extensively during their tenure by the business press and general media, and the latter is the same person who is the current Treasury Secretary.

In April 2016, Yellen and former heads of the Federal Reserve gathered at a meeting in New York City. She was asked during a panel discussion if the United States was a bubble economy. She adamantly replied that it was not. At that, “the oldest surviving Fed Chairman, Paul Volcker, nodded in agreement but also pulled out a handkerchief and loudly blew his nose.” As noted in a footnote in The Price of Time, when author Edward Chancellor asked Volcker afterward if he had agreed with Yellen, he replied, “No, of course, there’s a bubble. My grandchildren can’t afford to buy apartments in New York City. I just didn’t want to say so in front of the Wall Street Journal.”

Then there is this about Bernanke: In 2006, in the midst of the housing bubble and just prior to its bursting and the advent of the Great Recession and financial crisis, Bernanke told Congress that increases in home prices “largely reflect strong economic fundamentals.”

And this excerpt from the book:

“Bernanke’s Fed,” concludes historian Philip Mirowski, “has evaded suffering any consequences for its intellectual incompetence.” Instead of being hounded from office, Bernanke was credited with saving the world from another Great Depression and anointed Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2009. His exercise in denial meant that the Fed learned little from the crisis. Besides the odd tweak, monetary policymakers saw no need to change their flawed models. If low interest rates hadn’t caused the crisis, there would be no problem in taking them even lower in the future.

The book doesn’t say this, but Bernanke was credited with saving the world from another Great Depression, because, in 2008, he had bailed out big financial companies that were deemed “too big to fail.” It was something that he had found very distasteful but felt there was no choice, given that the world’s financial/monetary system seemed to be crashing at the time. The book does say, however, that the cause of the crisis was the imploding of the subprime mortgage market, a market that had grown to frothy levels due to investors seeking higher interest rates under a monetary policy that had kept rates near zero in normal credit channels.

After the financial crisis was over, the billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer said that the reflation of the US economy after 2008 was based on “fake growth, fake money, fake financial stability, fake inflation numbers and fake income growth.”

Ironically, a year prior to being elected president, Donald Trump made similar comments about the economy. It was ironic, because as a property developer, his wealth depended on inflated property prices and cheap financing. Moreover, near the end of his presidency, he joined the feeding frenzy of doling out free money in response to the COVID pandemic. His contribution from the public purse was about one trillion dollars.

The government’s role in the 2008 financial crisis was lost on Congress and the public. Instead of addressing the root cause, the government did what it does best: It passed a counterproductive law—specifically, the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which generated thousands of pages of regulations. By contrast, the landmark Depression-era regulatory act known as Glass-Steagall totaled just 37 pages. Other countries followed suit, leading bond guru James Grant to say that governments were printing rules almost as fast as they were printing money.

The Price of Time draws parallels between today’s central bank shenanigans and the shenanigans of John Law. Law was appointed France’s finance minister in 1720, was the founder and head of the French central bank, and was the head of the Mississippi Company, a vast corporate enterprise that accounted for a large share of the French economy. But it turned out that France’s booming economy and the company’s booming financials and stock price were a chimera created by easy money. The resulting bubble and collapse were among the biggest in history.

After the global financial crisis of 2008, Antoin Murphy, the author of a biography on Law, wrote, “What central bankers are doing now is exactly what Law recommended.” He went on to say, “Law’s banking successors have been Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi [the head of the European Central Bank].”

The penultimate chapter of the book, Chapter 17, details how America’s easy money unleashed a “global monetary plague.” It is a sobering read.

The last chapter describes how easy money and financial repression in China have created huge financial bubbles and massive malinvestments in that nation. As in America and much of the West, such policies have favored the rich and well-connected. As a result, China has gone from being one of the most egalitarian nations to one of the least equal.

The book’s Conclusion makes the point that the more that policymakers blunder, the more the system appears to fail, which in turn justifies further interventions by policymakers. At the same time, many Americans, especially younger ones, are blaming capitalism for socioeconomic problems and embracing socialism as a better system, not realizing how capitalism has been corrupted by the Fed, the government, and the representatives they have elected to Congress.

The book’s Postscript discusses the COVID pandemic and its consequences—the increased money printing, the forming of new bubbles, the escalation in deficit spending, and the phenomenal growth in the Fed’s balance sheet. Writing the postscript before the current downturn, the author was prescient in predicting that “inflation is likely to pick up and interest rates will have to rise to contain it.”

This book review was written a month before the November elections of 2022. Once again, tellingly, the root causes detailed in the book are largely missing as campaign issues. The last member of Congress to understand the causes, to try to make them a priority, and to warn about them was Ron Paul, who was dismissed by the right and left as a kooky Cassandra.

Time to sign off. This stuff is depressing and hurts my head. I wonder what the Kardashians are doing.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). The ballots will be mailed out to all voters registered for mail-in voting on October 12^th. The actual ‘day’ of the election is Tuesday November 8, 27 days later.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

BOOK REVIEW: Easy Money and Hard Economic Times

October 14, 2022/in Economy, Featured, Liberty, National Security, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Craig J. Cantoni

Editors’ Note: As the article below indicates, a new magisterial history of interest rates and central banking has been published. The author, Edward Chancellor wrote a previous book just before the last great financial crash called Devil Take the Hindmost, which was extremely timely if not prescient. This new book is extremely critical of current central bank policies, which have caused a serial set of financial bubbles, that have caused immense economic distortions setting us up for another crisis and putting governments themselves into a debt trap. As this book is beginning to get recognized, the shallowness of our institutions is once again revealed. The Nobel Committee has awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics to former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, considered the architect of Quantitative Easing, at least in the West. This is roughly equivalent to presenting the Sherwin – Williams award for painting, to a house painter who painted himself into a corner all while setting the house on fire.

A brilliant book explains the causes of our economic travails and names names.

It is longer than a tweet, a text, a TikTok, a YouTube, or a news blurb.
It requires a basic understanding of finance, economics, statistics, and multi-syllable words.
It makes the reader feel intellectually inadequate at times, especially this reader of mediocre intelligence.
It is nonpartisan and criticizes both political parties as warranted.
It is not about race, gender, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the Kardashians, or sports celebrities.
As a result, it’s not going to be a best-seller.
What is it? It is the following masterpiece:

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, by Edward Chancellor, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022, 398 pages.

It’s a shame that the book won’t be a best-seller, for it explains the major causes of flat-lined productivity, of slow economic growth, of the corruption of capitalism, of income inequality, of bubbles in real estate and other assets, of the financialization of the economy, of leveraged buyouts and mergers and acquisitions that hollow out companies and stifle competition, of sky-high stock valuations for unicorn companies that have never turned a profit, and of stock buybacks that line executives’ pockets while weakening their companies.

On second thought, it’s a blessing, not a shame, that the book won’t be a best-seller. If it were widely read, it could trigger an uprising that would make the Capitol attack on January 6 look like a playground spat, for Americans would come to understand how they’ve been screwed and who did the screwing.

The book’s title refers to the time value of money—to the fact that time is valuable, that economic and financial activities take place across time, that money has more value in the hand than in the future, and that interest is needed to induce people to forego consumption and lend their money for more productive uses.

In the author’s words: