The commitment to GOTV efforts has to be year-round, and conservative ground game leaders are finally waking up to that fact.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more energetic group of go-getters than the army of vote wranglers in the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition. SLSV, which bills itself as the “national hub & largest nonpartisan network in the country dedicated to increasing student voter participation,” is definitely dedicated.

But the coalition, which is at best “nonpartisan” in name only, is just one of a litany of leftist groups tirelessly and cooperatively working around the nation, particularly in the election-deciding battleground states, to elect Democrats.

The mission-focused group is but one working example of why the left is a well-oiled machine in turning out votes, especially among younger voters. But conservatives are waking up and pushing back, using some of the same get-out-the-vote (GOTV) strategies and tactics that Democrats have so effectively employed to win.

SLSV’s monthly meeting in February featured Amanda Fuchs Miller, deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Postsecondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). The bureaucrat gave the clubhouse gang a rundown of DOE’s legally suspect plan to use federal work-study program funds to pay college students to register their peers and work at the polls. It’s all part of the Bidenbucks plan, the Biden administration’s sweeping get-out-the-vote campaign using federal agencies and liberal groups to target Democrat-leaning voters ahead of November’s presidential election.

Yet there was so much more to the coalition’s February Zoom call: a presentation on the output of SLSV’s bee-busy working groups, an update on upcoming Action Plan Workshops, and a detailed discussion of the group’s goals this election year and beyond.

The meeting opened with a partner spotlight of Tevon Blair, co-founder of Xceleader. Blair is a “strategic communicator and social equity advocate in the nonprofit and political sector,” according to his company website bio.

Groups like SLSV and Xceleader are in it to win it all year round.

“Students enjoy that they know that every time a presidential election or governor’s race comes around, they know there’s going to be somebody on that campus trying to get them activated,” Blair told his leftist allies on the Zoom call.

While SLSV’s foot soldiers may be mainly made up of fresh-faced, wide-eyed left-wing college students, the organization and partner groups such as Xceleader are directed by seasoned former Democrat operatives tapped into a vast network of far-left money and resources.  

Blair worked on Democrat Stacey Abrams’ failed Georgia gubernatorial campaign. That fact might suggest how he and his organization get young voters “activated.” SLSV’s co-founder and Executive Director Clarissa Unger is a proud alumna of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

“Being a part of the Obama 2008 campaign was an honor and a transformative experience. 15 years later, I love that I still get to spend every day working to help students across the country have a voice in our elections. #ObamaAlumni #Obama08 #YesWeCan,” Unger wrote last November in response to Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s former senior adviser and CEO of the Obama Foundation.

‘We Had to Do Something’

While it may seem the left is light years ahead of the right in driving voters to the polls (by hook or crook), conservative groups across the country have been working overtime to catch up. 

In battleground Michigan, where Biden won in 2020 amid myriad election administration “irregularities,” Michigan Fair Elections and Pure Integrity Michigan Elections (PIME) are more than election integrity watchdogs. As election security lioness Cleta Mitchell said on her podcast, Patrice Johnson, chairwoman of the nonprofit organizations, is doing all she can to ensure her state doesn’t “fall prey to the things that happened in 2020.” 

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Johnson and some of her fellow citizens “decided to take action to help restore election integrity in Michigan,” as PIME’s website states.

“There were just several of us sitting around a kitchen table after the elections, and we were grousing and doubtful and skeptical and very upset. And we decided this wasn’t going to do anything. We had to do something,” Johnson told Mitchell last year on the latter’s podcast, “Who’s Counting?“

These frustrated Michiganders concluded, “If we’re going to focus on something, it had better be election integrity because without that we don’t have anything,” Johnson said.

Among its long list of initiatives, PIME launched the Underserved Voter Outreach Team (UVOTE), charged with identifying segments of the voting population the left wants little to nothing to do with. They include people of faith, gun owners, veterans, and others — constitutional patriots, a significant portion of whom have for various reasons sat out elections. Johnson said that often these would-be voters simply haven’t been approached.

“I think it’s very important to show them why, now more than ever, that it’s important to stand up for the Constitution and their constitutional rights and the quality of our elections,” Johnson said. “They’re good people, they’ve just been overlooked.”

The GOTV effort is a natural offshoot of the organization’s “Soles to the Rolls” program, which encourages its growing army of volunteers to use the Check My Vote website to track potential problems in Michigan’s voter rolls. As my Federalist colleague Shawn Fleetwood reported, the free voting history database was created in the wake of Michigan’s leading Democrat election official’s refusal to clean up the Great Lakes State’s rolls.

Soles to the Rolls has been so galvanizing that it’s earned the expected disdain of The New York Times. The Democrat Party’s mouthpiece suspects the election integrity initiative is “an apparent play on Souls to the Polls,” the far-left-funded get-out-the-liberal-vote campaign in Wisconsin. It’s all just more “election-denial movement” stuff, according to the election integrity deniers at the Times.

Getting into the Harvest

In deep-blue California, Republicans are getting wise to one of the left’s more effective vote-capturing tools: ballot harvesting. 

Conservatives have rightly complained about the practice and the election integrity holes in such ballot-collection initiatives by third-party groups. But as CalMatters notes, the California Republican Party is “going big” on ballot harvesting in 2024. Reporter Sameea Kamal wrote in October:

In part, it’s a reflection of political reality: With a few exceptions, the Republican Party has been struggling. On top of Democratic majorities in the Legislature since 1996, no Republican has been elected statewide office since 2006. And since the COVID-19 pandemic, California has sent mail ballots to every registered voter, making it easier for people to cast their ballots earlier and not just at polling places on Election Day.

California is one of 33 states that allow voters to authorize someone else to return their absentee ballot for them, with varying limitations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. California legalized the practice in 2016 but has since prohibited compensation based on the number of vote-by-mail ballots returned. Flat-rate payment is allowed. The left-wing Golden State has also barred ballot dumps at places of employment.

Jessica Millan Patterson, chairwoman of the California GOP, did not return The Federalist’s requests for comment. But she did tell CalMatters that the party is playing by the rules they’ve been given.

“It doesn’t make any sense to only be Election Day voters. That is like only playing three quarters of a football game,” she said, countering conservative purists who don’t want anything to do with ballot harvesting.

‘That Can’t Happen Again’

Conservatives in the critical swing state of Arizona are finding other ways to beat Democrats at their own GOTV game, said Scot Mussi, president of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. Mussi said right-of-center Arizonans are assembling a “whole coalition of different organizations so we have a ground game and a get-out-the-vote operation that beats the intensity of the left.” 

The effort begins with the Arizona Liberty Network, dedicated to helping citizens “effectively engage on political, social, cultural and economic issues affecting” the state. Mussi said the ground game initiative includes consistent and sustained Hispanic outreach. 

Hispanics are projected to account for nearly 1 in 5 voters in Arizona in November’s elections, Cronkite News reported. Hispanic voters in the last midterm election continued to back Democrats over Republicans, but a higher rate of Hispanic voters cast ballots for GOP candidates compared to the previous midterms, according to Pew Research. The gap dropped from 72 percent of Hispanics voting Democrat compared to 25 percent supporting Republicans in 2018 to 60 percent and 39 percent, respectively, in 2022.

“Our belief is that Hispanic voters are traditionally conservative on issues like crime, culture, schools for their kids, the economy, even on immigration,” Mussi said, adding that these are the issues that conservative groups are talking about with Hispanic voters.

The data bear out the fact that Hispanics are not some monolithic voting bloc, and their votes cannot be taken for granted. That’s particularly true among younger Hispanics.

Arizona Corporation Commissioner Lea Márquez Peterson told Cronkite News that she started Hispanic Leadership PAC, a political action committee that supports Hispanic Republicans who run for office.

“My parents are Democrats, my brother and I are Republican. I mean, so we’ve seen a lot of shifting and changing and it really depends on the perspective people are looking towards,” Márquez Peterson told the publication.

But Mussi said the commitment to GOTV efforts has to be year-round, and conservative ground-game leaders are finally waking up to that fact. He said failing to get conservative voters engaged and effectively communicate what’s at stake will keep Joe Biden and his disastrous regime in power for another four years, with a majority in Congress to do the far-left’s will.

“When we reviewed 2022, we found we experienced a drop off in Republican voting performance. That can’t happen again,” the conservative leader said. “We need to make sure conservatives and independent voters believe that Biden has led us in a wrong direction and make sure they are showing up.”

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

The world has been directing negative comments against lawyers for at least five hundred years. Law schools push out too many people with degrees that go on to lay waste to our economy. Ambulance chasers have given way to the mass marketers arranging financial mayhem. Our government hires throngs of attorneys to attack our businesses and stifle our livelihoods. They end up engaging against legal counsel at other governmental entities in death-match battles financed by our taxes. This has accelerated into an egregious attack on our political system.

The visceral hatred of Donald Trump has redefined “political positioning.” Having lived through both RDS (Reagan Derangement Syndrome) and BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome), the TDS we are experiencing eclipses the previous ones in such a manner to resemble zombies on speed due to their vengefulness. They were willing to threaten our political system while he was President and have been working to destroy our court system ever since. If you don’t think these actions have a destructive effect permanently, you are probably experiencing TDS yourself where anything is justified to rid us of the menacing “Orange Man.”

This refers to the five ginned-up court cases against him. These include the defamation case held in one of the two locations (NYC and DC) that Republicans — and particularly Trump — have no chance of winning. The case only existed because a New York State law was created just so the case could move forward. Then a billionaire hater of Trump funded the legal fees to enable the lawsuit. The fact that a person can win a case based on an incident where she cannot even identify the place or date that it occurred is an affront to our legal system.

The other four cases are based on three people who engineered their political careers to get and convict a person without any specific knowledge of a crime. The fourth, Jack Smith, is such a rabid attack dog that he has spent hundreds of thousands of our dollars attempting to try and convict Trump, timed specifically to precede the 2024 election to ensure Trump loses.

The case just ruled on in New York is so disgusting it almost defies description. Leticia James, who has twice been elected Attorney General of the State of New York, defines how sick their political system has become. After persistent attempts, she finally found a 1956 statute – one that has never been applied (to anyone’s knowledge) because it is so absurd on its face. Let’s be clear here, despite anything James has charged, and Judge Arthur Engoron (handpicked by James) ruled, Trump did absolutely NOTHING wrong. If you believe he did then you have blanket ignorance of real estate loans in the modern world and most likely have a severe case of TDS. There were no criminal charges here. No one was harmed.

Engoron judged Trump owes $360 million not including interest. He has the chutzpah to say in his verbose ruling that if Trump had just been contrite Engoron would have ruled differently. If Trump had been, Engoron would have just stated, “See, he admitted he is wrong” and then puked out the same ruling in an attempt to break Trump. The fact that Trump must produce the funds in cash within 30 days and cannot use any banks doing business in New York (one of the world’s two banking capitals) demonstrates Engoron’s single-minded vengeance. Fortunately, an appeals court set aside some of the draconian requirements established by Engoron.

There is the special case of Kathy Hochul, New York’s clueless governor, who came out immediately and told the business world not to worry about doing business in New York as this ruling relates only to Trump. That statement alone validated the trial’s sole purpose: the destruction of Mr. Trump. Be assured the remainder of the business world saw what happened and will be reorienting their efforts away from New York thinking they could be next in line to have their assets confiscated by hollow rulings.

Jack Smith had a pitchfork thrown at his case to get Trump before our national election. Turns out President Biden had acted similarly, but even worse. He was not President at the time he kept top secret documents on open and careless display in his garage next to his prized Corvette. Robert Hur, the federal prosecutor in the Biden case, stated he did not recommend pursuing a case against Biden because he is too mentally feeble. Hur had to state his rationale, the absence of which would have clearly defined the separate and unequal justice for Democrats versus Republicans. Not levying charges against Biden makes Smith’s case a testament to inequality.

Suggesting “Trump acted differently” is simply hogwash. It is all about TDS.

There is a special case of DA Fani Willis. Ms. Willis had to concoct a RICO case that should have been handled by the Attorney General of the state if it had any validity. She is obviously a well-educated lady, but she should brush up on Confucius. He stated, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”

During a recent lunch with a litigator friend, he looked at me and said “What was she thinking? How did she think the relationship with (special prosecutor) Wade would not be discovered?” By immediately stating the cause of the claims against her was – you guessed it, racism – it was obvious she had no defense.

My friend and I spoke again after Willis testified that she had actually paid Wade back in cash. Please give me a break. In 45 years of working with the IRS, I have never and would never invoke the word “cash.” Where did the cash come from? She and her father then ginned up this story of black people paying for things in cash. Maybe 50 years ago. Every black person I know chases their credit card mileage points like the rest of us. Show us the withdrawals from your bank account, Ms. Willis, your W-2 employee. To answer my friend’s rhetorical question, she could only have been thinking no one would look into her. And when they did, she made up this grossly stupid story about cash. Has she never heard of Venmo?

Ms. Willis proceeds with this immense disservice to prosecutors everywhere. Wade did not think about this because he is not really a prosecutor, and he would not know unless he watched a cop show. When she made up the lie about when their relationship started, she never thought they might trace his cell phone activity. That is what cops do today — trace the cell phones of suspected criminals and pinpoint their locations. Do you think Willis would know it is provable that Wade was servicing her late at night way before invoking the phony date their relationship supposedly began? Wade never thought of tracing because he is not really a prosecutor, and/or doesn’t watch cop shows.

In this case, Confucius may be wrong. Hopefully, she will only have dug one grave – her own.

Alvin Bragg’s case is not worthy of discussion except to say he is another attorney using his power to destroy a disfavored person. His case has been judged to be inane, but you can never predict a New York jury vis-à-vis Mr. Trump.

It sounds like this column is about defending Trump. It is not. It is about defending our legal system against lawyers attempting to destroy it. How about lawyers destroying our legal system when they go after the licenses of attorneys general they disfavor? I rest my case. We must put a stop to this before we decline further to a second-rate country. It is not about Trump; it is about our government.

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This article was published in Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.

A very brief inquiry into MSNBC’s theory of the natural rights of man

The other day, Politico writer Heidi Przybyla appeared on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” to talk about the hysteria de jour, “Christian nationalism.” Donald Trump, she explained, has surrounded himself with an “extremist element of conservative Christians,” who were misrepresenting “so-called natural law” in their attempt to roll back abortion “rights” and other leftist policy preferences. What makes “Christian nationalists” different, she went on, was that they believe “our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority.”

As numerous critics have already pointed out, “Christian nationalism” sounds identical to the case for American liberty offered in the Declaration of Independence. Then again, the idea that man has inalienable, universal rights goes back to ancient Greece, at least. The entire American project is contingent on accepting the notion that the state can’t give or take our God-given freedoms. It is the best kind of “extremism.”

None of this is to say there aren’t Christians out there who engage in an unhealthy conflation of politics and faith or harbor theocratic ideas. It is to say that the definition of “Christian nationalism” offered by the people at Politico and MSNBC comports flawlessly with the mindset that makes the United States possible.

Conservatives often chalk up this kind of ignorance about civics to a declining education system. It’s not an accident. It’s true that Przybyla, a longtime leftist propagandist — and I don’t mean a biased reporter; I mean a propagandist whose reporting is often transparently ludicrous — followed up her MSNBC appearance with an embarrassing clarification. But even if Przybyla were fluent in the philosophy of natural rights, one strongly suspects she, like most progressives (and other statists), would be uninterested. It’s a political imperative to be uninterested.

If natural rights are truly inalienable, how can the government create a slew of new (positive) “rights” — the right to housing or abortion or health care or free birth control? And how can we limit those who “abuse” free expression, self-defense, and due process if they are up to no good? You know, as Joe Biden likes to say — when speaking about the Second Amendment, never abortion — no right “is absolute.”

The most telling part of Przybyla’s explanation, for example, was to concede that “natural law” had on occasion actually been used for good. When natural law is used to further “social justice” it is legitimate, but when applied to ideas the left finds objectionable (such as protecting unborn life) it becomes “Christian nationalism.” It’s almost as if she doesn’t comprehend the idea of a neutral principle. It’s the kind of thinking that impels the media to put skeptical quotation marks around terms like “religious liberty,” but never around “LGBT rights” or “social justice” and so on.

It’s also true that the “Christian nationalism” scare is a ginned-up partisan effort to spook non-Christian voters. And, clearly, to some secular Americans, the idea that a non-“earthly authority” can bestow rights on humans sounds nuts. As a nonbeliever myself, I’ve been asked by Christians many times how I can square my skepticism of the Almighty with a belief in natural rights.

My answer is simple: I choose to.

“This is the bind post-Christian America finds itself in,” tweeted historian Tom Holland. “It can no longer appeal to a Creator as the author of its citizens’ rights, so [he] has to pretend that these rights somehow have an inherent existence: a notion requiring no less of a leap of faith than does belief in God.”

No less but no more. Just as an atheist or agnostic or irreligious secular American accepts that it’s wrong to steal and murder and cheat, they can accept that man has an inherent right to speak freely and the right to defend himself, his family, and his property. History, experience, and an innate sense of the world tell me that such rights benefit individuals as well as mankind. It is rational.

The liberties borne out of thousands of years of tradition are more vital than the vagaries of democracy or the diktats of the state. That’s clear to me. We still debate the extent of rights, obviously. I don’t need a Ph.D. in philosophy, however, to understand that preserving life or expression are self-evident universal rights in a way that compelling taxpayers to pay for your “reproductive justice” is not.

John Locke, as far as I understand it, argued as much, though he believed that the decree of God made all of it binding. Which is why, even though I don’t believe my rights were handed down by a superbeing, I act like they are. It’s really the only way for the Constitution to work.

The question is: How can a contemporary leftist who treats the state as the source of all decency– a tool of compulsion that can make the world “fair” — accept that mankind has been bequeathed a set of individual liberties by God, regardless of race or class or political disposition? I’m not sure they can anymore.

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