BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Maricopa County GOP To Formally Censure County Recorder RINO Stephen Richer TONIGHT After Tuesday Primary Election Debacle – MARICOPA STILL COUNTING thumbnail

BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Maricopa County GOP To Formally Censure County Recorder RINO Stephen Richer TONIGHT After Tuesday Primary Election Debacle – MARICOPA STILL COUNTING

By Jordan Conradson

Editors’ Note: The following article is published to report the frustration and disappointment with the conduct of the August 2nd primary election in Maricopa County under the leadership of Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer. The Prickly Pear interviewed Mr. Richer in 2020 as a candidate for the Recorder’s office when he ran against and defeated Adrian Fontes, a Democrat partisan with clear violations of his role as a nonpartisan Recorder conducting honest elections. Stephen promised to make the Recorder’s office “boring again” and stated publicly that Fontes was incompetent and had criminally violated the office. The 2022 primary election in Maricopa County speaks very poorly of Mr. Richer’s competence and we question his ability to manage the November general election and, critically, the 2024 election. We are not yet calling for his removal as stated in the following article but are watching closely his performance and behavior going forward.

Separately, we observed voter after voter (too numerous to count) arriving at our polling stations this past Tuesday, August 2nd, depositing their ‘mail-in ballots’ in the ‘mail-in ballot’ box located where we traditionally actually cast our vote in the voting booth with the result available for tabulation by the evening for announced election results. With 80-85% of Arizonans voting by mail-in ballot and ballots arriving in their mailboxes almost 30 days before election day, dropping these green envelopes off at polling stations the actual day of the election prevents a full counting for days to weeks, if ever, with significant opportunity for election fraud. Signature verification and actual recording of mail-in ballots are labor intensive and delay the final vote tallies for every office throughout the state. A future article at The Prickly Pear will examine this major issue of the voting mechanisms in our state with recommendations for voter education and reform of our broken electoral system.

Tonight, The Maricopa County Republican Committee will move to formally censure RINO Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who ran on a platform of rooting out corruption in elections and cracking down on election fraud, but has done the exact opposite.

This resolution calls on Richer to resign or be permanently expelled from office by the voters through a recall.

Maricopa County had another corrupt election on Tuesday. The Gateway Pundit reported on the major fraud concerns and issues in Maricopa and statewide. We also reported that Maricopa County stopped the counting in the middle of the night on election night, just after Trump-Endorsed MAGA Queen Kari Lake took the lead.

Now, they’re still counting the ballots! The whole world is watching and wondering, what the hell is going on?

TAKE ACTION

The $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 being pushed through the U.S. Senate to be passed by reconciliation (50 votes plus the Vice President) before the upcoming August recess is a threat to America’s economy and the well-being of all Americans. The article above makes clear that Senator Kyrsten Sinema is the one Democrat vote that America is looking at. She alone can stop this legislation. Please contact her at her office locations in Washington, D.C. and in Arizona by phone and letter. Click the red TAKE ACTION link below for Senator Sinema’s contact information.

Although Senator Mark Kelly is a do-as -Chuck Schumer- tells-you-to-do partisan shill, contacting him may be helpful given his significant vulnerability in the November general election. His contact information is also found at the TAKE ACTION link below. We suggest that copying him on your letter to Senator Sinema may possibly have some impact on his voting behavior. Calling his office is also important – the staffs do score the relative positions of constituents and this too may influence the voting behavior.

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Democratic Activists Are Dishing Out Millions To Keep CRT, Gender Theory In Schools

By Reagan Reese

An education nonprofit that labels itself as non-partisan is pouring millions of dollars into political groups ahead of school board elections, according to Politico.

The Campaign for Our Shared Future, which works for “equitable, anti-racist programs, practices and policies” in K-12 education, is targeting school board elections in red states including Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, and Michigan, with a plan to reach at least 15 states, according to Politico. Executive Director Dr. Heather Harding said the group has raised at least $9 million for voter education efforts and plans to raise more. (RELATED: ‘We Are Being Censored’: Co-Founder Of Conservative Moms Group Blasts Twitter)

The campaign branches for Campaign For Our Shared Future were registered by two groups run by Arabella Advisors, a group known for pushing “Democratic dark money nonprofit groups,” Politico reported. New Venture Fund, which centers its work in “race, equity, diversity and inclusion” and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a group that works for “economic equity and racial justice,” are backing Campaign For Our Shared Future.

“After two years of being accused of a fake ‘astroturf’ movement, imagine the surprise of first-time activists and average parents from across the country to see that Arabella Advisors – a massive, dark money-funded network – has poured eight figures into jumping on the education bandwagon,” Parents Defending Education President Nicole Neily told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s unsurprising that democratic donors are panicked about how their allies have mismanaged this issue – but no amount of money can make up for the fact that at the end of the day, they truly believe that they know better than we do how to raise our children… and that is a losing message, period.”

Harding’s work history includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Teach For America, which values a “shared commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness.”

Campaign For Our Shared Future currently works with Our Turn, a youth activism group that focuses on social justice issues like immigration reform, Politico reported.

The education group provides a “voting guide” for school board elections in several red states and provides information on what makes a “good school board candidate” including someone who is fairly involved in the school, according to the website. “Extremists are causing chaos” in school board meetings, the group says, providing an example of a Florida man who challenged the school’s equity statement and deemed it “indoctrination.”

The group also called parents who opposed mask mandates in a Virginia school “conspiracy theorists,” the website shows.

Next, the group plans to target Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin but has not revealed in what ways, and will work with Florida Student Power, a group of students focused on LGBTQ, racial, and women reproductive injustices, Politico reported.

“It’s clear to me that the battle continues to grow,” Harding told the outlet. “We think that presidential politics will continue to keep schools sort of in their crosshairs. We don’t find that productive to the actual work of learning, so we do hope that as more donors join us we can be broader, and go deeper so that public schools continue to be a backbone of democracy.”

Campaign For Our Shared Future did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

*****

This article was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 being pushed through the U.S. Senate to be passed by reconciliation (50 votes plus the Vice President) before the upcoming August recess is a threat to America’s economy and the well-being of all Americans. The article above makes clear that Senator Kyrsten Sinema is the one Democrat vote that America is looking at. She alone can stop this legislation. Please contact her at her office locations in Washington, D.C. and in Arizona by phone and letter. Click the red TAKE ACTION link below for Senator Sinema’s contact information.

Although Senator Mark Kelly is a do-as -Chuck Schumer- tells-you-to-do partisan shill, contacting him may be helpful given his significant vulnerability in the November general election. His contact information is also found at the TAKE ACTION link below. We suggest that copying him on your letter to Senator Sinema may possibly have some impact on his voting behavior. Calling his office is also important – the staffs do score the relative positions of constituents and this too may influence the voting behavior.

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A Political Victory for the Joes Is a Loss for the Country

By William Anderson

Editors’ Note: If Manchin thinks this will end the war on fossil fuels, he of course is wrong. The legislation through taxation and subsidies still directs energy choices through a top-down, central planning model, rather than allowing free competition among choices. It also does nothing to challenge the dubious science of global warming, rather it embraces it. Nor does it stop wrecking our existing energy infrastructure while new plans fail to deliver. You would think with the example of Germany right before us, our leaders would have more sense.This defection could have been predicted as he is, after all, a Democrat. With such a narrow margin in the Senate, this capitulation by Manchin is of serious consequence to the nation. Senator Sinema of Arizona remains, but we doubt she has either the nerve or philosophical gumption to resist caving as well.

After months of being portrayed as a villain or worse in the mainstream media, Joe Manchin suddenly has become a Democratic Party hero—all because he has declared he will support legislation that he and President Joe Biden claim will “reduce inflation” and give us better weather. Not surprisingly, the New York Times is leading the way in effusively praising the legislation, claiming the bill “would be the most ambitious action ever taken by the United States to try to stop the planet from catastrophically overheating.”

The “newspaper of record” continues:

The bill aims to tackle global warming by using billions of dollars in tax incentives to ramp up wind, solar, geothermal, battery and other clean energy industries over the next decade. Companies would receive financial incentives to keep open nuclear plants that might have closed, or to capture emissions from industrial facilities and bury them underground before they can warm the planet. Car buyers with incomes below a certain level would receive a $7,500 tax credit to purchase a new electric vehicle and $4,000 for a used one. Americans would receive rebates to install heat pumps and make their homes more energy-efficient.

Biden declared: “This is the action the American people have been waiting for,” adding that the proposed bill provides “investments in our energy security for the future.”

Progressives claim this combination of new taxes, tax credits, and political favoritism will promote wind and solar energy, vastly curb carbon dioxide emissions, save the US government billions of dollars via cheaper drug prices, and curtail inflation (it is currently titled The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022). And—to ensure Manchin’s endorsement—it supports a natural gas pipeline in Manchin’s home state of West Virginia.

If anything can embody the current disconnect between progressive elites in politics, academe, and the media with how things operate in that sphere we call reality, it is the response to this legislation. We are told that increasing taxes on individuals and businesses, putting in a regime of price controls for drugs (which have artificially high prices in the first place because of government favoritism toward that industry), installing a system of tax credits for vehicles that are mostly a plaything of wealthy people, along with creating credits and subsidies for wind and solar power is going to reduce inflation and improve most Americans’ lives.

While each portion of this hodgepodge of wish lists needs scrutiny, one can sum up the entire ordeal by pointing out that the gap between what supporters of something like this claim it will do and what it actually does is enormous. Not surprisingly, the media concentrates upon the political aspects of passing the legislation, the “big story” being Manchin’s willingness to go along with it after having opposed similar legislation before.

Rarely, if ever, are the results of legislation—and especially the kind of legislation progressives tout—scrutinized after passage. Instead, progressives assume that the legislation in question will do everything its supporters claim. One should not expect to see an assessment of the results of this latest “historic” bill on the NYT op-ed page a year from now.

For example, any bill with the goals and actions presented in this “inflation reduction” legislation needs to be examined based on real costs and benefits. Tax credits and subsidies for “renewable” energy (which many unrenewable components go into producing) will mask the prices people must pay for these goods, but what are the real costs? What is the value that people will receive in return?

The first thing to remember is that while one can argue over whether a tax credit is a government subsidy or a real benefit, the fact that often is lost in the argument is that without the possible tax reduction, many people would not purchase the subsidized good in the first place. The tax credit incentivizes car buyers to make choices they would not have made otherwise, and it further distorts structures of production.

For all the happy talk about electric cars and the slick advertisements that herald a new age of electricity, the so-called transition is not about political goals and NYT editorials that claim otherwise. When we go past the rhetoric, we are dealing with government central planning, an energy-focused form of the Gosplan, which made the USSR’s economy nonfunctioning. Central planning can call for reallocation of resources and lay out the plans, but without market prices and profits and losses, resource allocation will become an economic train wreck.

While progressives give lip service to profits and losses, even trying to tilt the economic landscape with tax credits, bans on certain goods, and other coercive means, resources still will move in the direction of consumer choice. Economies depend upon real information, real goods, real prices, and real resources. If we do not have these things, along with free consumer choice, then there inevitably will be resource dislocations as production is pulled onto an unsustainable path.

Take the automobile industry, for example. Although some companies have announced their intention to go all-electric in the next decade, one doubts that anyone in those industries believes that operating vehicles purely with batteries is going to have the outcomes that progressives are promising. While battery costs have declined in recent years, they are decreasing at a decreasing rate. The gasoline-electric hybrids have more potential both in terms of unit cost declines and lowering emissions (when one takes in the entire scope of emissions per mile), but the political climate is pointing everything toward the exclusive use of batteries.

When politics and reality collide, reality always must win, no matter the rhetoric progressives give us. Joe Manchin can claim this newest version of “Build Back Better” is going to reduce inflation and improve life for most Americans, but the reality is that it is going to result in more inflation and shortages. The government can create new tax credits for electric cars, but that will not change the technological reality of building those cars. Consumers still are going to have to wait weeks and even months for their new electric cars, and after they get them, they will have to deal with the limitations those cars place upon them.

As for the progressives in the Democratic Party, the propaganda machines will move in reverse. Manchin now is a hero instead of a villain, and Gail Collins may even write something nice about him for a change.

The hard reality, however, is that central economic planning will create unnecessary hardships for many Americans—and this legislation attempts to do just that. In the end, the rhetoric accompanying this bill cannot overcome the reality that when politicians direct economic resources, bad things happen.

*****

This article was published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 being pushed through the U.S. Senate to be passed by reconciliation (50 votes plus the Vice President) before the upcoming August recess is a threat to America’s economy and the well-being of all Americans. The article above makes clear that Senator Kyrsten Sinema is the one Democrat vote that America is looking at. She alone can stop this legislation. Please contact her at her office locations in Washington, D.C. and in Arizona by phone and letter. Click the red TAKE ACTION link below for Senator Sinema’s contact information.

Although Senator Mark Kelly is a do-as -Chuck Schumer- tells-you-to-do partisan shill, contacting him may be helpful given his significant vulnerability in the November general election. His contact information is also found at the TAKE ACTION link below. We suggest that copying him on your letter to Senator Sinema may possibly have some impact on his voting behavior. Calling his office is also important – the staffs do score the relative positions of constituents and this too may influence the voting behavior.

Ballot Initiative to Reform Arizona Election Laws Allegedly Gathered Signatures Illegally

By Tom Joyce

A ballot initiative that would significantly change how the state’s electoral campaigns are funded and conducted is facing allegations of illegal signature gathering.

The Arizona Free Enterprise Club filed a lawsuit challenging an initiative that it calls “radical” and argues will weaken the state’s election integrity laws. 

The AFEC complaint alleges that many of the signatures turned in to support the initiative were invalid for various reasons and should not have counted. 

The organization argues that some signatures were gathered by paid circulators who failed to register with the Secretary of the State’s office and that others included incorrect information.

In all, the club estimates that over half of the signatures on the election initiative were illegally gathered.

“After analyzing over 45,000 petition sheets and 420,000 signatures, it’s clear that well over half of the signatures on this election initiative were collected in violation of state law,” President Scot Mussi said in a statement. “That should be more than enough to invalidate this initiative.”

The club also expressed these concerns with the initiative, if it were to pass, in a press release:

  • Upend Arizona’s election administration and voter registration laws.
  • Sharply reduce candidate contribution limits while channeling more taxpayer subsidies to so-called “Clean Elections” candidates.
  • Curtail safeguards governing the initiative and referendum process.
  • Impose new taxes.

The defendants in the case are Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and the political committee Arizonans for Free and Fair Elections.

The initiative in question is called the Arizona Fair Elections Act.

Among other provisions, the initiative would mandate automatic voter registration for everyone who obtains a state-issued ID, allow for same-day voter registration, and expand early voting.

Hobbs’ office and Arizonans for Free and Fair Elections could not be immediately reached for comment.

*****

This article was published by Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

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Davos Man, Master Of The Poors

By Rod Dreher

What globalists did to Sri Lanka, they are doing to us all, in many ways.

Slowly but surely, I’m getting used to this new posting system. I am receiving your comments about the problems with the new commenting system, and am passing them on to the Mothership. Sounds like we are quickly going to have a fix for the lack of anonymity. Please share your feedback with me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com; I’m forwarding everything on to the bosses. And hey, Jonah R., whatever your real name is, would you mind reaching out to me at that email address? Thanks.

I think I’m even more focused on decline-and-fall than usual because I’m sitting here in Central Europe reading the media and hearing people talking about how frightened they are of what’s coming in the autumn and winter, should Russian gas supplies be cut off. Very few people in this part of the world support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but nobody asked them if they were prepared to sacrifice their economies to tweak Putin’s nose. In Germany, business leaders and others are talking about the possibility of German industry collapsing from lack of gas to power its factories. This is not an empty threat. The German economy is the engine that powers Europe. If Germany falls into depression, so will the rest of Europe — and that means political unrest, perhaps even violence. If you see what’s happening in the Netherlands right now, with angry farmers fighting back violently against the state’s plan to take away their land, you see what is possible for all of Europe in the near future. Then what will NATO do?

Earlier today I mentioned the Uvalde cops as a metaphor for our leadership class. Here’s another metaphor: the World Economic Forum in Davos. You might have seen that the government of Sri Lanka collapsed this week in the face of national bankruptcy and rioting by people who can’t feed themselves. What happened? Sri Lanka followed the advice of the WEF, and shifted to all-organic farming a few years back. Its agricultural economy collapsed. A nation that used to be able to feed itself with rice is now reduced to importing it.

Funnily enough, the WEF scrubbed its “we’re going to make Sri Lanka rich” article from its website in the wake of the disaster there.

Ah, but the Wayback Machine remembers all! Here’s a link to a 2018 article by the Sri Lanka PM, written on the World Economic Forum website, promising to make his country “rich by 2025”.

The Sri Lankan people own, so to speak, a lot less now than they did back in 2018, when they were not rich, but could at least feed themselves. They took the advice of Western experts, and are now broke and hungry. Michael Shellenberger analyzes the causes of the crisis. Excerpt:

But the biggest and main problem causing Sri Lanka’s fall was its ban on chemical fertilizers in April 2021. Many other developing nations had to deal with similar challenges, including covid and high foreign debt, but have not collapsed. Indonesia has suffered terrorist bombings, which harmed tourism, but managed to rebound, and tourism rebounded in Sri Lanka starting last year. And while economic growth declined after 2012 but from astronomical peaks of 8% and 9% and remained above 3% and 4% until 2020.

The numbers are shocking. One-third of Sri Lanka’s farm lands were dormant in 2021 due to the fertilizer ban. Over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85% experienced crop losses. The numbers are shocking. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold. While there are just 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 15 million of the country’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming.

Things were worse for smaller farmers. In the Rajanganaya region, where the majority farmers operate just a hectare (2.5 acres), families reported 50% to 60% reductions in crop harvest. “Before the ban, this was one of the biggest markets in the country, with tonnes and tonnes of rice and vegetables,” said one farmer earlier this year. “But after the ban, it became almost zero. If you talk to the rice mills, they don’t have any stock because people’s harvest dropped so much. The income of this whole community has dropped to an extremely low level.”

But the damage to tea was the key to Sri Lanka’s financial failure. Tea production had generated $1.3 billion in exports annually. Tea exports paid for 71% of the nation’s food imports before 2021. Then, tea production and exports crashed 18% between November 2021 and February 2022, reaching their lowest level in 23 years. The government’s devastating ban on fertilizer thus destroyed the ability of Sri Lanka to pay for food, fuel, and service its debt.

This is precisely why, despite having a soft spot for organic farming, I have not been able to believe that organic farming is a solution for feeding all the people of the world.

Brendan O’Neill from Spiked connects the dots. Excerpts:

As with the global lockdown’s dire impact on Sri Lanka, these deranged and damaging green policies will feel to many Sri Lankans like an external imposition, something pushed on their nation by global institutions and global decisions. Yes, Sri Lanka’s own political elite feverishly embraced the organic lunacy. But as Michael Shellenberger points out, the World Economic Forum promoted organic in Sri Lanka. Many elite campaigners in the West advocated for Sri Lanka to move to full organic, some of them supported by funds from ostentatiously eco-friendly corporations like Google, Disney and JPMorgan.

If I were a Sri Lankan farmer, watching my yield deplete, seeing prices sky-rocket, seeing fuel and food running out, I would be angry primarily with my government, yes. But I would save some of my fury for the world’s influential eco-elites, who seem to view the developing world as a site for environmental experimentation rather than as a part of the world that needs more industrialisation and growth in order that it might enjoy economic equality with us in the West.

Sri Lanka shows us what happens when policy is shaped according to the desires and prejudices of the new elites rather than the needs of ordinary people. Lockdown may have been a boon for the laptop elites and for some billionaires, but it was incredibly harmful for many working-class people in the West and for millions of hard-up people in the global South. The green ideology may provide the new elites with a sense of purpose, flattering their narcissistic delusion that they are saving the planet from a man-made heat death, but it hits the pockets of workers in the West who will end up paying for the Net Zero madness, and it inflames hunger and destitution in those parts of the world not yet as developed as the West.

In Sri Lanka, we see an extreme and unsettling case study of what happens when global policy is built on the fear and narcissism of disconnected elites, rather than being informed by the question of what people need in order to flourish and become wealthier. Also in Sri Lanka we see exactly the kind of pushback we need against all this. The people have had enough. And they are not alone.

Note well these words: when the global policy is built on the fear and narcissism of disconnected elites, rather than being informed by the question of what people need in order to flourish and become wealthier.

Does gender ideology, and the queering of a generation of children, give them what they need in order to flourish and become wealthier? It does according to Joe “Transgender Rights Is The Civil Rights Issue Of Our Time” Biden, and every other member of the globalist leadership class. Does training up children to think of themselves wholly in terms of racial group identity, and to despise themselves or others based on group identity, give them what they need to flourish and become wealthier? Does teaching them phony ideological theories instead of science and facts, and teaching them to be so fragile that they scream bloody murder when confronted with questions that make the anxious — does contribute to their flourishing, learning the habits of intellectual conformity? Does turning criminals loose on the streets to prey on innocents, based on a ridiculous theory that criminals aren’t really responsible for their criminality, “systemic racism” is, give kids of any race what they need to flourish?

Why are ordinary people consenting to be colonized by these woke brahmins? What they did to the people of Sri Lanka, they would do to all of us. And are doing, in many ways. In traveling through Central Europe these past three years, I’ve encountered people — Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians — who believe that the efforts to destroy the family, and the gender binary, are a form of cultural imperialism, coming mostly from Woke Capitalists of the US and Western Europe. Of course, they are right! It will be a great day when we have governments in the US and Western Europe who agree with the ordinary folks of the former communist bloc European nations, and who are willing to use political power to fight this vampiric madness of Davos Man, and restore the conditions of health and flourishing.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.

Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.

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The Pentagon Owns Its Recruiting Crisis

By P. Michael Phillips

Editors’ Note: We think it likely that the emphasis on transgender issues, race, feminism, and betrayal of the troops in Afghanistan ( the long indecisive conduct of the War itself and multiple deployments) are all issues. As to the double down of the military on forced vaccines, we have this observation: the Commander-in-Chief has been vaccinated twice, boosted twice, lives in a mask-controlled bubble with an attending physician at hand, and he got Covid. If the vaccines really worked, this could not happen. The insistence that we all take the risk of serious side effects (particularly myocarditis in young men) for something that is patently ineffective, rubs people the wrong way. It is like, you can’t join unless you believe our lie about the vaccines and the equally offensive lie about the special campaign to root out white supremacy. Many people from the rural South who make up 40% of the military simply say that is BS, which it assuredly is. The military has lost sight of its mission: maximum combat readiness. Instead, it has let itself become a petri dish for progressive social experimentation. Who would want to become part of that and risk your life in the process?

Replenishing the military ranks with qualified personnel is a perennial challenge. It’s no secret, though, that this year our armed forces are fighting uphill to recruit and retain talent.

Most of the services are well behind their quotas. But the Army, our largest service, is having the hardest time enticing young Americans. That service will fall short, nearly 20,000 troops from its original target end strength of 485,000 for FY ’22, and next year could be worse.

To manage, Army officials have slashed end strength and enlistment goals, while recruiters are offering fat stacks of cash and generous service terms as inducements.

So far, nothing is working.

The Army’s Chief of Staff, General James McConville, blames the shortfall on the competition with the private sector. Others blame upwardly mobile families who would rather their children attend college than wear a uniform.

Both are old saws. And this year, they ring hollow.

Some civilian jobs do pay more. But for an 18-year-old with only a high school diploma, military compensation is nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, recruits most often cite generous pay and benefits as the reason for signing papers.

Meanwhile, undergraduate enrollments are down over 600,000 from last year. So, it appears our missing recruits aren’t trading rifles for books, either.

Instead of blaming their competition, the Pentagon brass might dwell on their tarnished image as the reason fewer young Americans want to join up. 

Public trust in the military institution has plunged steeply since 2018, according to one poll. Respondents cite politicized leaders, scandals, and the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan for their loss in confidence. 

We might add to that list suicidessexual assaultssocial justice indoctrination, and Covid vaccination policies as dulling the shine of military service.

Of the lot, the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate may prove its deepest self-inflicted wound. 

While the service chiefs are begging Congress to fund more generous recruiting incentives, they have forcibly discharged thousands of vaccine dissenters – including most of those objecting on religious grounds. A similar fate awaits tens of thousands more of the unjabbed in the National Guard and Reserve. Never mind that our military increasingly relies on these part-time troops for routine mission support.

And the Pentagon has doubled down. Submission to the vaccine is now a condition of enlistment, despite evidence the therapy is at best ineffective, and at worst dangerous for younger, healthier people.

It’s a policy gravely alienating to the families of Middle America whose children disproportionately serve in our all-volunteer force.

Before going further, consider that fewer than one quarter of Americans in the prime recruitment age of 17-24 years can meet our military’s physical, moral, or educational entry requirements, and that figure continues to decline. 

Of those, only about 9% of young Americans have any desire to serve. Perhaps only 1% ever do.

High standards have produced something of an embarrassment of riches. Our service members are amongst the healthiest, most disciplined, and best educated of their cohort nationally. But to maintain this quality, recruiters have come to count on solidly middle-class families inhabiting our Mid-American towns, suburbs, and rural counties to fill their quotas. 

Recruiters bank on small-town America because for a variety of reasons our populous cities produce few qualified volunteers. Even the New Yorkers and Californians in the ranks are more likely to hail from upstate or inland counties. In fact, a once-reliable third of all new recruits enter from just five southern states: Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.

The prepossessed term for these rich recruiting grounds is ‘flyover country.’

Instead, we might think of them as communities celebrating life on a smaller and more intimate scale, where patriotism, faith, family, and public service remain in fashion.

And yet their young people are not signing up like they used to.

The belief by some that vaccine mandates are meant to purge conservative Christians from the armed forces may be one reason recruiting offices are empty. After all, young people living in these prime recruitment areas are somewhat more religious and tend to be more conservative in outlook than many Americans.

They also are less likely to be vaccinated against Covid.

A more charitable account, though, is that the brass authored their own Catch-22 in the rush to prove their obedience to President Biden. As such, they have taken a position purported to improve readiness that has done quite the opposite. And now that they’ve become so thoroughly entrenched, they cannot easily retreat.

No matter. It should trouble the Pentagon more that their reluctant recruits are most likely military legacies.

Like many professions, the military is a family business. Roughly 80% of recruits either grew up in a military family or have a close relative who served. General McConville’s own clan is actually something of a poster family in career following, with three children and a son-in-law in uniform. Even the general’s wife once served.

Career following in military families is nothing new. It’s been going on since our country’s founding. The children of veterans, like those of bankers or physicians, often emulate their parents’ professional ethos early on. For soldiers, this includes respect for duty and honorable, selfless service. The generational transmission of such virtues has played a critical role not only in reproducing our service cultures but by extension our national values.

But it’s also a fragile chain.

While research indicates that military children are 5 times more likely to follow a parent into the service, only 1 in 4 do. And their desire to serve drops sharply every year over the age of 18. 

In short, the Pentagon’s stubborn adherence to its Covid protocol is breaking faith with its once loyal base. And the longer they dig in, the smaller that base will become.

It’s a high price our nation may pay for unimaginative leadership.

P. Michael Phillips is a retired senior military leader with significant political-military experience in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and a researcher in the social and cultural reproductive aspects of Civil-Military Relations.

*****

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

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The New Age of Orwellianism

By Josh Hammer

Community organizer and left-wing social activist Saul Alinsky wrote, in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals,” that “he who controls the language controls the masses.”

Alinsky, whose work profoundly influenced at least one notable fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama, was in that quip channeling George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel “1984.”

“Newspeak,” the language of Orwell’s fictional single-political party superstate, was a tool devised for monitoring the people’s communications, prosecuting “thoughtcrimes,” and ultimately controlling and dictating the people’s very beliefs.

Conservatives have taken pleasure in poking fun at the modern left’s “Orwellian” tendencies—perhaps too much, actually, as overuse of the accusation has had the effect of limiting its potency.

But as the woke ideology metastasizes within the American left like cancer it is, and as censors increasingly clamp down on anything sniffing of dissent to the regime’s orthodoxy, it is now clear that we are in a new age of Orwellianism.

In this new age, the regime and its enforcers pursue the suffusion of its orthodoxy at any cost, gaslighting dissenters into not believing their own lying eyes.

This week, new governmental data revealed that the American economy, measured by gross domestic product, contracted for the second straight quarter. That was, up until perhaps a week ago, the universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “recession.”

This was not a partisan issue; indeed, well-known liberal, Democratic Party economists have frequently defined recession in precisely these terms.

Back in 2008, President Joe Biden’s current National Economic Council director, Brian Deese, stated: “Of course economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”

And in 2019, top Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein said that a “recession” is “defined as two consecutive quarters of declining growth.”

Democrats are now singing a different tune. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has stubbornly refused to concede that America is now in an economic recession.

Deese apparently also disagrees with his old self of 2008: Following the release of the data evincing the second straight quarter of economic contraction, Deese stipulated that we are “certainly in a transition,” but also added that “virtually nothing signals that this period … is recessionary.”

The ruse is transparent and obvious to the point of comedy. As famed investor David Sacks tweeted: “A lot of people are wondering about the definition of recession. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth if a Republican is president. The definition is far more complicated and unknowable if a Democrat is president.”

Democrats similarly seem interested in changing the definition of “inflation,” which currently sits at four-decade highs and is disproportionately responsible for Biden’s dismal job approval ratings and Democrats’ unfavorable political outlook this fall.

The widely accepted economic definition of inflation is when there is too much money chasing too few goods. The way to tamp down inflation is thus to limit the money supply and/or increase the production of goods.

Just this week, around the same time as when the U.S. formally entered a recession, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., finally reached an agreement on a version of the White House’s long-sought-after Build Back Better domestic initiative. But Democrats renamed the bill: It is now not called Build Back Better but the Inflation Reduction Act.

And the revised bill includes new government expenditures to the tune of nearly $400 billion in energy- and climate-related spending. Authorizing such a fiscal boondoggle is the precise opposite of limiting the money supply. It is the logical equivalent of trying to put out a fire with a blowtorch.

Remarkably, it is the same ideologues who are eager to change the well-accepted definitions of “recession” and “inflation” who remain perplexed as to what exactly a “woman” is.

In March, then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, pointedly refused to define what a “woman” is. Her excuse was that she is “not a biologist.”

Related, in Matt Walsh’s excellent new documentary “What Is a Woman?” the myriad “gender studies” professors and gender ideology-bewitched “doctors” interviewed by Walsh invariably define a “woman,” in a circular fashion, as being “someone who identifies as a woman.”

Whether it is a Supreme Court justice herself or the vogue flatulence that now constitutes “gender studies” in the American academy, then, the left is incapable of defining what a “woman” is.

That confusion appears to be ubiquitous: Lia Thomas, the biological man who has been wreaking havoc in women’s collegiate swimming, was even nominated for the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.

Alinsky would be proud of such imperious enforcement of regime-approved orthodoxy; “he who controls the language controls the masses,” after all.

The left’s fundamental problem is that its haughtiness, fervor, and zeal for gaslighting us sane Americans is belied by its unpopularity. It is curious that the left can talk and act this way when its most notable avatar, Biden, is as severely unpopular as he currently is.

Perhaps the left will be chastened by its impending November defeats at the ballot box. But don’t bet on it.

*****

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

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Ms. Pelosi, You Must Go to Taiwan

By Bruce Bialosky

Shockingly, Nancy Pelosi emitted something with which I agree. She was not doing her usual thing of lying to us like telling us she never speaks to her husband about public policy and their investments. Ms. Pelosi is planning a trip with a Congressional member delegation to Taiwan. Way to go, Madam Speaker, you finally got something right.

Ms. Pelosi had stated she was planning to go in April, but the plan was canceled because she contracted COVID. Back then, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi stated the trip would be “a malicious provocation.” Really? A visit to an independent country by the United States elected representative must be approved by Chinese Communist dictators. Maybe Ms. Pelosi should be boarded up in her San Francisco home by the Chinese until she acquiesces and admits the error of her thinking.

Now that she has announced the August trip, matters have risen to even a higher level of Chinese nonsense. Then we have our president – someone who creates problems nearly every time he opens his mouth without reading from the teleprompter (and these people were worried about what came out of Trump’s mouth). This time he said about the Pelosi trip “The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now.” Once that spilled from his lips, the media started speculation about a military conflict between China and the U.S. over a visit by an American elected official.

The Chinese are the people who meet with such esteemed countries as Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and North Korea.

This time around the Chinese have been even more overwrought in their reaction. Wang Yi went even further and stated “This is a blatant double standard. If the US House Speaker, a political leader of the United States, deliberately visits Taiwan, it would be a malicious provocation against China’s sovereignty and gross interference in China’s internal affairs and would send an extremely dangerous political signal to the outside world. If the U.S. side insists on having its own way, China will surely make a firm response and all the consequences will be borne by the U.S. side.”

The Chinese dictators have determined they not only control the people in their own country but likewise control us. It has been stated the timing of the trip is sensitive for the Chinese because it comes in the same month as the August 1st anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. Folks, check your summer plans and make sure you have them approved by the Chinese Central Committee because you do not want to mess with their annual celebration of creating the greatest mass murdering machine in history. Maybe when we take down our flags from the Fourth of July celebration, we should put up the People’s Republic flag in anticipation of the big celebration? These are the kinds of things that get into your head when you listen to murderous dictators.

Obviously, there is no way in the world Pelosi can cancel this trip. If she cancels the trip, the Chinese mass murders would be determining our foreign policy. We would look even weaker than we do from Biden’s horrendous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Here is what Pelosi should do. She should go there and endorse the One China policy. She should say there is one China and there is one Taiwan. We should put an end to this horrendous idea that Formosa is or was a part of China. Even if you buy into that garbage, Taiwan has been an independent nation since 1948. There might be two people on the island who want to be part of China and handing Taiwan over to China would only enslave the Taiwanese. There would be indoctrination camps to eliminate the free thinkers and the others will be put in prison.

The British made the mistake of handing over Hong Kong to the Chinese. We are seeing the evil fruits of that decision which is destroying one of the true bastions of capitalism and freedom. The British should have declared Hong Kong a free and separate country. They should have never trusted the thugs of Peking.

We have a long history of telling others they will not dictate our foreign policy. We should not allow anyone to do that now. Certainly not a group of mass murdering thugs like the Chinese.

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No Farmers, No Food, No Life

By Carla Peeters

The world is now facing a man-made food catastrophe. It is reaching crisis levels.

Current policies in many parts of the world place a priority on climate change for realizing a green new deal. Meanwhile, such policies will contribute to children dying from severe malnutrition due to broken food systems, with shortages of food and water, stress, anxiety, fear, and dangerous chemical exposure.

More negative pressure on farmers and the food system is asking for a catastrophe. The immune system of many people, especially children, has lost its resilience and has weakened too far with high risks for intoxication, infections, non-communicable and infectious diseases, deaths and infertility.

Dutch farmers, of whom many will face a cost of living crisis after 2030, have drawn the line. They are supported by an increasing number of farmers and citizens worldwide.

It’s not the farmers who are the most heavy polluters of the environment, but industries who make the products needed for a technocracy revolution to green energy, data mining, and Artificial Intelligence. As more of the WEF plans are rolled out by politicians, inequalities grow, and conflicts are rising all over the world. 

The strong farmers’ revolt in the Netherlands is a call for an urgent transition to a people-oriented, free and healthy world with nutritious food cultivated and harvested in respect to natural processes. The cooperation of ordinary people worldwide is on the rise to prevent a mass famine catastrophe caused by the plan of scientism and technocracy to rule and control the world by unelected scientists and elites.

Enough food, access to food is the problem

Farmers around the world normally grow enough calories (2,800) per person (while 2,100 calories/day would be sufficient) to support a population of nine to ten billion people worldwide. But still over 828 million people have too little to eat each day. The problem is not always food; it is access. The UN which wrote in 2015 in the Sustainable Development Goals goal 2: No hunger and malnutrition for all in 2030 will not be reached.

Throughout history many times natural or manmade disasters led to food insecurities for longer periods of time, resulting in hunger, malnutrition (undernourishment) and mortality. The Covid-19 pandemic has worsened the situation. Since the global pandemic began, access to food estimates show that food insecurity has likely doubled, if not tripled  in some places around the world.

Moreover, during the pandemic, global hunger rose to 150 million and is now affecting 828 million people, with 46 million at the brink of starvation facing emergency levels of hunger or worse. In the hardest hit places, this means famine or famine-like conditions. At least 45 million children are suffering from wasting, which is the most visible and severe form of malnutrition, and potentially life-threatening.

With global prices of food and fertilizers already reaching worrying highs, the continuing impacts of the pandemic, the political forces to realize climate change goals and the Russia-Ukraine war raise serious concerns for food security both in the short and the long term.

The world is facing a further spike in food shortages, pushing more families worldwide at risk for severe malnutrition. Those communities which survived former crises are left more vulnerable to a new shock than before and will accumulate the effects, diving into famine (acute starvation and a sharp increase in mortality).

Furthermore, the growth of economies and the development of nations are currently slowing down due to a lack of workforce a sharp decrease in well-being, and higher mortality rates.

In the wake of new nitrogen limits that require farmers to radically curb their nitrogen emissions by up to 70 percent in the next eight years, tens of thousands of Dutch farmers have risen in protest against the government.

Farmers will be forced to use less fertilizer and even to reduce the number of their livestock, in some cases up to 95%. For smaller family-owned farms it will be impossible to reach these goals. Many will be forced to shutter, including people whose families have been farming for up to eight generations.

Moreover, a significant decrease and limitations of Dutch farmers will have huge repercussions for the global food supply chain. The Netherlands is the world’s second largest agricultural exporter after the United States. Still, the Dutch government pursues their agenda on Climate Change while there is currently no law to support the implementation, while they will not change much in the planet’s major air pollution. Models used to arrive at the decision of the Dutch government are debated by acknowledged scientists.

In no communication have Dutch politicians considered the effects of their decision on breaking a most important goal in the UN agreement: ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all in 2030.

Unfortunately, Sri Lanka, a country whose political leader introduced zero Nitrogen and CO2 emissions policy, is now facing economic problems, severe hunger, and difficulties to access food upon a political decision that farmers were not allowed to use fertilizers and pesticides. Still, politicians responsible for Nitrogen emissions/climate change in other countries pursue the same green policy. 

Furthermore, experts are warning that heat, flooding, drought, wildfires, and other disasters have been wreaking economic havoc, with worse to come. Food and water shortages have been in the media.

On top of that, Australian experts announce a risk for an outbreak of a viral disease in cattle. This could cause an A$80 billion hit to the Australian economy and even more real supply chain issues. Countless businesses and producers go bankrupt. The emotional toll they are facing to euthanize their healthy herds is immense and hardly bearable. It is pushing more farmers to end their life.

Hopefully, the need for the Danish government to apologize, as an investigative report on the cull of more than 15 million minks in November 2020 criticized the action that led to the misleading of mink breeders and the public and the clearly illegal instructions to authorities, will help politicians to reconsider such drastic measures on farmers.

Worldwide, farmers’ protests are rising, supported by more and more citizens who stand up against the expensive mandates for changes to “green policies” that already brought massive miseries and instability.

At a ministerial conference for food security on June 29 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that worsening food shortages could lead to a global “catastrophe”.

Malnutrition responsible for more ill health than any other cause

The increased risk of food and water shortages the world is facing now will bring humanity to the edge. Hunger is a many-headed monster. For decades conquering world hunger has become a political issuein a way that it could not have been in the past. The use of authoritarian political power led to disastrous government policies, making it impossible for millions of people to earn a living. Chronic hunger and the recurrence of virulent famines must be seen as being morally outrageous and politically unacceptable, says Dreze and Sen in Hunger and Public Action, published in 1991.

“For those at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger in the world would be a disaster. For those who need availability of cheap labor, hunger is the foundation of their wealth, it is an asset,” wrote Dr. George Kent in 2008 in the essay “The Benefits of World Hunger.”

Malnutrition is not only influenced by food and water shortage, but also to exposures of extreme stress, fear, insecurity of safety and food, social factors, chemicals, microplastics, toxins, and over-medicalization. No country in the world can afford to overlook this disaster in all its forms, which affects mostly children and women in reproductive age. Globally more than 3 billion people cannot afford healthy diets. And this is in contradiction to what many people think is just a low-income country problem.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic began, about 8% of the population in North America and Europe lacked regular access to nutritious and sufficient food. A third of reproductive-age women are anemic, while 39% of the world’s adults are overweight or obese. Each year around 20 million babies are born underweight. In 2016 9.6% of the women were underweight. Globally in 2017, 22.2% of the children under the age of five were stunting, while undernutrition explains around 45% of deaths among children under five.

As stated by Lawrence Haddad, the co-chair of the Global Nutrition Report independent Expert Group, “We now live in a world where being malnourished is the new normal. It is a world we must all claim as totally unacceptable.” While malnutrition is the leading driver of disease with nearly 50% of deaths caused by nutrition related non-communicable diseases in 2014, only $50 million of donor funding was given.

Malnutrition in all its forms imposes unacceptably high costs – direct and indirect – on individuals, families and nations. The estimated impact on the global economy of the chronic undernourishment of 800 million people could be as high as $3,5 trillion per year, as was stated in a Global Nutrition Report in 2018. While child deaths, premature adult mortality and malnutrition-related infectious and non-communicable diseases are preventable with the right nutrition.

This will be much more at this precious moment, as the population sharply increases in excess mortality and non-communicable diseases among the working age people as recently shown by insurance companies.

Famines cause transgenerational effects

Famine is a widespread condition in which a large percentage of people in a country or region have little or no access to adequate food supplies. Europe and other developed parts of the world have mostly eliminated famine, though widespread famines that killed thousands and millions of people are known from history, like the Dutch Potato famine from 1846-1847, The Dutch Hunger winter 1944-1945 and a Chinese famine of 1959-1961.

The latter was the most severe famine both in terms of duration and number of people affected (600 million and around 30 million deaths) and led to widespread undernutrition of the Chinese population in the period from 1959-1961. Currently, Sub-Saharan Africa and Yemen are countries with recognized famine.

Unfortunately, global destabilization, starvation and mass migration are increasing fast with more famines to be expected if we do not act today.

Epidemiological studies of Barker and later of Hales showed a relation between the availability of nutrition in various stages of pregnancy and the first years of life and diseases later in life. Their studies demonstrated that people with metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular diseases were often small at birth. More and more research proves the role of nutrition-related mechanisms influencing gene expression. Even the period prior to pregnancy might influence a later risk for insulin resistance or other complications of the fetus.

As demonstrated in a study with 3,000 participants in Northern China, prenatal exposure to famine significantly increased hyperglycemia in adulthood in two consecutive generations. Severity of famine during prenatal development is related to the risk for Type 2 diabetes. These findings are consistent with animal models that have shown the impact of prenatal nutritional status on neuro-endocrine changes that affect metabolism and can be programmed to transmit physiologically across multiple generations through both male and female generations. Early life Health shock conditions can cause epigenetic changes in humans that persist throughout life, affect old age mortality and have multigenerational effects. Depending on which trimester the fetus is exposed to food deprivation or even stress alone a related disease later in life may vary from schizophrenia, ADHD to renal failure and hypertension among others. Other studies of famine exposure in people have produced evidence of changes in the endocrine system and to prenatal gene expression in reproductive systems.

The effects of periods of famine or undernutrition have predominantly been seen in people with low social economic income. However, 1 in 3 persons in the world suffered from some form of malnutrition in 2016. Women and children are 70% of the hungry. There is no doubt that undernutrition increased further during the past six years. Stunting and wasting increased in the most vulnerable. Two out of three children are not fed the minimum diverse diet they need to grow and develop to their full potential.

The hungry people in countries like Sri Lanka, Haiti, Armenia, and Panama are the tip of the iceberg, opening the eyes of many citizens worldwide to a fast-growing problem as a result of the lockdowns, mandates and coercive policies in climate change, drought and the Ukraine war.

Citizens of the world have been facing for years: excess mortality, a fast decline in infertility and childbirth with a threat to human rights for women and more diseases.

Shocking reports of the UN and WHO acknowledged the health of people and environment is declining. The world is moving backwards on eliminating hunger and malnutrition. The real danger is that these numbers will climb even higher in the months ahead.

The truth is that food innovation hubs, food flats (vertical farming), artificial meats and gene and mind manipulations will not be able to tackle the depressing state humanity is facing.

Zero-Covid policy has brought humanity at risk in its existence. Covid-19 vaccines with a risk for harmhave been rolled out even for children under five years, hardly at risk for a severe disease, but undernourishment that greatly increases susceptibility to major human infectious diseases has not been taken care of.

Conflicts are growing worldwide, increasing instability. Citizens will no longer accept policies without a clear harm-cost benefit analysis.

We need to act now to decrease food and fuel prices immediately by supporting farmers and effective food systems for nutritious food to heal the most malnourished (children and females of childbearing age) in the population.

Let us hope for a return of Hippocrates’ principle: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”

*****

This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

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Big Tech’s Blueprint to Stop a Red Wave in 2022

By Allum Bokhari

Editors’ Note: Those libertarian friends we have should be made aware that The Prickly Pear was recently suspended by YouTube and we were put out of commission in our video section for about a week. Our infraction was never specified but related to running an interview of an individual who made remarks questioning election integrity and the outcome of the 2020 election. Discussing election integrity is not permitted by censors on YouTube. To avoid being shut down, we can’t run interviews on the subject. That is clearly censorship. Moreover, their software is ubiquitous and the only platform that meshes with dominant software in the industry that allows us to build our magazine on the back end. In short, they have a virtual monopoly position in the industry. Such monopoly power allows Big Tech to effectively censor ideas in the marketplace. Jabber about finding “competition” is made by those ignorant of how dominant these platforms really are. In reality, there is no competition. We have never been great fans of anti-trust laws but conservatives and libertarians need to rethink that position.

Republicans think a “red wave” is inevitable in November. But the Democrats still have one big advantage: the ever-tightening grip of Big Tech censorship, which will be used to prevent undecided voters from encountering even the most mainstream conservative news in the runup to the next election. Republicans will have a strong message — but what if voters are prevented from hearing it?

In the runup to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Google completely suppressed Breitbart News from its search results. Compared to 2016, Breibart News went into the 2020 election with a 99.7 percent reduction in visibility for its links on Google search. The censorship was so severe, no-name blogs with plagiarized headlines and content would appear in search results before the original Breitbart News articles. On searches for the term “Joe Biden,” Google cut visibility on Breitbart News links to zero.

Then, a few weeks before the election, Big Tech teamed up to suppress one of the biggest stories of the cycle: the Hunter Biden laptop story. A post-election poll found that 17 percent of Biden voters would have reconsidered their decision had they been aware of the laptop story alone, not counting the hundreds of Breitbart News stories voters didn’t have access to due to Google censorship.

Biden’s margin of victory in three swing states was less than a percentage point, making tech censorship a pivotal factor in the outcome. There is no law preventing Silicon Valley from not only repeating this plan in 2022, but scaling it up to a massive level – and that’s exactly what they are doing. The groundwork is already being prepared, in a number of ways:

#1 “Independent” Watchdogs Downgrading Conservative Media — NewsGuard Discredits The Right 

No matter how mainstream you are, you aren’t safe. NewsGuard, the establishment “misinformation” watchdog that received funding from the Pentagon and whose software is being rolled out by millions of schoolteachers across the country, recently downgraded Fox News in its rankings of trustworthy and untrustworthy news sources.

NewsGuard users will now see a red warning label next to Fox News links all around the internet, signaling to users that the source is considered untrustworthy by the organization, which was set up by former establishment media figures Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz in 2018, in the early years of the media-concocted “misinformation” panic.

Fox News and Breitbart News have now both received the negative “red” rating from NewsGuard. This means that, going into the 2022 midterm elections, NewsGuard is warning its users not to read the two leading conservative-leaning sources of online news.

Naturally, the sources that pushed the Russiagate hoax and said the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinfo” — a claim repeated by NewsGuard’s co-founder — receive no such warning label.

#2 Facebook Suppressing The News — If The Wrong Side Is Winning, Call Off The Game 

Silicon Valley has also found a way to censor all conservative media at the same time. For years, the left has been wailing and screaming about the success of conservative media on Facebook. Despite algorithm changes that suppressed traffic to conservative websites — by a whopping 20 percent in the case of Breitbart News — conservative media has continued to crush the competition.

Facebook has an answer: if conservative media is winning the news war on its platform, it will simply suppress all news at the same time. This month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the platform is shifting resources away from its News Tab and news distribution, and towards a “creator economy.” This means that news will be featured less frequently to users, whether they ask for it or not. This is a way of preventing unwanted narratives from reaching the public, at the very moment when news coverage of the failures of Democrat rule in D.C. will be ramping up.

This is a repeat of what Facebook did after the 2016 election when it reduced the visibility of political posts — a change that resulted in engagement on Donald Trump’s page dropping by almost half.

******

Continue reading  this article at Breitbart.

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Jim Jordan Demands Answers From FBI For Allegedly ‘Pressuring’ Agents To Bolster ‘Domestic Violent Extremism’ Cases thumbnail

Jim Jordan Demands Answers From FBI For Allegedly ‘Pressuring’ Agents To Bolster ‘Domestic Violent Extremism’ Cases

By Gabe Kaminsky

FBI officials are “pressuring” bureau employees to reclassify cases to involve Domestic Violent Extremism (DVE) in order to satisfy “performance metrics” created by data-hungry superiors, a top Republican alleged in a letter Wednesday, demanding answers on the matter.

“We continue to hear from brave whistleblowers about disturbing conduct at the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote in the letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray. “From recent protected disclosures, we have learned that FBI officials are pressuring agents to reclassify cases as ‘domestic violent extremism’ even if the cases do not meet the criteria for such a classification.”

Jordan is demanding the FBI provide the number of DVE investigations from January 2020 to the present and the number of “Confidential Human Sources” that have contributed to DVE reports since that same time, among other documents. He has set an August 10 deadline for the bureau to respond.

DVE pertains to someone in the U.S. “without direction or inspiration from a foreign terrorist group or other foreign power who seeks to further political or social goals wholly or in part through unlawful acts of force or violence,” according to the FBI. Wray testified in June 2021 that the FBI has a “very, very active domestic terrorism investigation program” and that it has “doubled the number of domestic terrorism investigations,” according to the letter. (RELATED: Congressional Republicans Urge FBI And DHS To Designate Jane’s Revenge Attacks As Domestic Terrorism).

“Given the narrative pushed by the Biden Administration that domestic violent extremism is the ‘greatest threat’ facing our country the revelation that the FBI may be artificially padding domestic terrorism data is scandalous,” Jordan also said.

FBI employees are not finding enough DVE and are being pushed by superiors to use minor evidence to reclassify cases, according to a whistleblower who allegedly spoke to Jordan and other Republicans. The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division Director and another official “have pressured agents to move cases into the DVE category to hit self-created performance metrics,” said Jordan.

The metrics are used to dish out “awards and promotions,” said a whistleblower to Jordan and Republicans. The new allegations are relevant given how the FBI has become politicized, said the Republican, who wrote a letter to Wray in June outlining whistleblower claims that the FBI is “purging” conservative employees.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

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A Cooler Assessment of Heatwave Deaths thumbnail

A Cooler Assessment of Heatwave Deaths

By Vincent Geloso

“Lawn watering banned: mercury 101.3” read one Toronto newspaper. “Heat kills 100 Twin Citizens” titled a St-Paul newspaper. These titles are not from the current heavily discussed heatwave. They are from the 1936 heat wave – one of the most extreme waves of the twentieth century according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Heat Wave Index. No other year since 1895 gets even close to that year in terms of intensity, and the next closest is 1934.

Highlighting this earlier historical episode is not something I do in order to push sideways the claim that heat waves have increased (and will increase further) because of climate change. I highlight this because it allows us to gain a perspective on the linkage between human wellbeing and climate that catastrophic media treatments fail to convey.

During the 1936 heatwave, an estimated 5,000 individuals died as a result of heat-related causes – a death rate of 39 per million in 1936. That number is probably too conservative given the quality of vital records in the past relative to today. Notoriously poor vital statistics regarding mortality causes among African-Americans and the poverty-induced vulnerability to these mortality sources make the death toll too low. Moreover, the number also seems to exclude those who died as a result of complications caused by the heat wave.

Nevertheless, let’s take this number at face value and contrast it with the EPA’s estimates of heat-induced mortality produced from the heat in the five hottest years between 1979 and 2018: 1980, 1988, 2006, 2007, and 2012. In those years, the average death rates from heat waves stood at between 0.86 and 2.87 per million. Scaling the EPA’s heatwave index to the same level as in the disastrous 1936 heatwave and assuming that mortality increases by the same proportion allow us to imagine the death toll from the same event taking place today. The mortality rate would have been between 3.49 and 14.21 per million. This means that heatwaves are killing between 64 percent and 91 percent fewer people (relative to population) today than in 1936.

This is an undeniable sign of our resilience to climate shocks. It does not invalidate claims that the intensity, duration, and frequency have been increasing since the 1960s. Neither does it invalidate the claim that climate change is driving these trends.

What it does, however, is tell us that there are two winds pushing the boat to fewer heat deaths. The headwind is climate change which explains roughly 37 percent (with a confidence interval going between 20 percent and 76 percent of the number of heat deaths between 1991 and 2018, according to an article in Nature Climate Change concerned with a large international sample of countries. The tailwind is technological progress and economic growth which offer households the ability to protect themselves from extreme climatic events.

This tailwind, which can be observed through high ownership rates of air conditioning, higher quality housing, better health care, access to clean and fresh water, and the like, explains the lion’s share of the decline in heat-related mortality. Indeed, even if you take the upper bound of the aforementioned Nature Climate Change paper of 76 percent of deaths explained by climate change, climate change would need to increase the heat wave index by a factor of ten to force the death rate to exceed 10 deaths per million. No climate model seems to suggest such a possibility.

Moreover, the death count from heat waves is just slightly lower than the number of cold-related deaths. As such, climate change may increase the former but decrease the latter – creating an ambiguous net effect on mortality rates from climate extremes. Some studies suggest that the net effect will be fewer deaths in total. Others suggest more deaths in total. Which set of studies is correct is, however, irrelevant. Indeed, the tailwinds that reduced heat-related deaths also reduced cold-related deaths.

Chasing after sensational headlines predicting doom and gloom do us a disservice. It hides the progress we have made historically and prevents us from using this history to guide public discussions. Journalists and pundits should keep this in mind before they try to use a current event to get attention.

*****

This article was published by AIER, and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.

Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.

NeverTrump’s Latest Attempt To Dismiss Election Concerns Is Particularly Dishonest thumbnail

NeverTrump’s Latest Attempt To Dismiss Election Concerns Is Particularly Dishonest

By Mollie Hemingway

If they want to convince voters outside their bubble, they should try far harder than they did with this report.

A group of establishment Republicans released a report last week claiming to make “The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election.”

It is not news that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The report’s strawman-slaying title is intended to suggest that concerns about the integrity of that election are without merit. But the report itself simply goes through court decisions and recounts, listing how they turned out. It focuses on questions about “fraud,” rather than the significant and extremely well-substantiated concerns Republican voters have about the election.

“Their methodology obscures the vast majority of actual material to consider if one were honestly engaging the problems,” said Capital Research Center President Scott Walter. His group has documented the significant role played by Mark Zuckerberg’s private funding of government election offices, a massive issue that the report almost completely elided.

Other major issues were also downplayed or ignored, even as court cases and investigative reports vindicate some of those concerns. In just the last few weeks, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, for example, ruled that unsupervised ballot drop boxes and third-party ballot trafficking both violate state law.

In its report, the group claimed its conservative Republican bona fides were beyond question, asserting that no members “have shifted loyalties to the Democratic Party, and none bear any ill will toward Trump and especially not toward his sincere supporters.”

In fact, the group is a combination of NeverTrumpers and people who thought the Republican Party had gone off the deep end long before Trump’s arrival. The report uses misdirection and red herrings regarding “voter fraud” to avoid talking about genuine and substantiated concerns regarding illegal voting and election integrity. And it is sourced to left-wing corporate media outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, hardly places to go to make any case, much less a credible or conservative one, about the 2020 election.

From the Voter-Rejected Wing of the GOP

Report co-author Thomas Griffith, a former federal judge whose enthusiastic support of Ketanji Brown Jackson was singled out by President Biden in his speech when he nominated her to the Supreme Court, told NeverTrump publication The Dispatch: “The idea is that it’s written by conservatives, for conservatives. We recognize the people who are watching [Morning Joe and CNN] are probably not the people we’re primarily interested in.”

Paul Ryan’s former chief of staff David Hoppe, another co-author, admitted the group got much support for its project from volunteers at high-powered, inside-the-Beltway law firms. Still, corporate media accepted the group’s framing of itself as “conservative.” Even a cursory look at the list revealed that to be overly generous if not completely misleading.

Ted Olson served as former President George W. Bush’s solicitor general, but he is most well known for being the brains and muscle behind the legal campaign to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. When President Trump sought to have his help to fight against the Russia collusion hoax that so undermined the country, Olson declined to help. He did go on television to publicly disparage the president after declining his request. Olson even tried to get Mitch McConnell to backtrack on his policy of not holding hearings for Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement until after the 2016 election. Olson is routinely derided by critics as a “conservative attorney for sale,” and someone who has “always been a hired gun.”

Former federal judge Michael McConnell argued on PBS in support of the second impeachment trial for President Trump.

Former federal judge Michael Luttig is already well known for helping out the Democrats’ Ja 6 Committee. He rather famously left the federal bench for Boeing — “taking his toys and going home,” as some put it at the time — after President George W. Bush didn’t put him on the Supreme Court. The Wall Street Journal noted that his resignation letterpointedly didn’t mention the younger Bush.

Luttig also serves on the advisory board of “The Safeguarding Democracy Project,” led by Richard Hasen, an election law professor who criticizes voter ID laws. Its mission statement claims Republicans who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election were acting in bad faith, and that election integrity laws passed after the 2020 election “threaten the cornerstone of American democracy.”

Gordon Smith, one of the report’s co-authors, wasn’t even considered a conservative in the old Republican Party back when he served as a senator from Oregon from 1997-2009. Before he became a high-paid lobbyist for the National Association of Broadcasters, he was assessed the fourth most liberal GOP senator after Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine, and Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, who officially joined Democrats in 2009. By 2008, when he was defeated, Smith scored only a 33 out of 100 by the American Conservative Union. Just this year, he declined to endorse a Republican for Oregon’s gubernatorial race.

Former Sen. John Danforth of Missouri, another co-author, thought the Republican Party was too conservative by 2005, arguing in The New York Times that it had become a party overtaken by conservative Christians. Danforth, an Episcopal priest, was a public supporter of efforts to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. He has said the worst mistake he ever made was supporting Sen. Josh Hawley’s political aspirations.

All of the report’s authors are or were Republican, including Hoppe, but they tend to inhabit parts of the old Republican Party that voters are increasingly rejecting, not just for their weak policy proposals but for their habit of cooperating with left-wing media in its unceasing attempts to undermine the new Republican Party’s political strengths.

The Man Who Lost the Decades-Long Battle for Election Integrity

Two days before the razor-thin 2020 presidential election, report co-author Ben Ginsberg, the long-time dean of establishment Republican election lawyers and former counsel to Bush’s presidential campaigns and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns, did one of the most hostile things imaginable to Trump and his voters. He went to The Washington Post to beg Americans to vote for Democrat nominee Joe Biden (“My party is destroying itself on the altar of Trump.”) He and other NeverTrumpers represent exceedingly little of the Republican Party outside of the Beltway, but in an election that came down to 43,000 votes across three states, they should get at least some credit — or if you’re a Republican voter, blame — for pushing Biden and other Democrats over the finish line and bringing the country to where it is today.

Ginsberg, it turns out, bears more responsibility for how the election turned out than most, and his op-ed explains why.

It wasn’t just that Ginsberg used his Republican pedigree in order to elevate his hatred of Trump when Republican campaigns desperately needed unity and strength. By November 2020, such tantrums were common among the Republicans who used to control the party. No, it was that he went on an absolute tirade against election integrity itself, adopting every Democrat Party talking point against Republican efforts to secure the ballot box.

Two days before the 2020 election had even occurred — and long before this report came out last week — his mind was made up. Proof of systemic fraud simply “doesn’t exist.” He compared concerns about election integrity to a hunt for the “Loch Ness monster.”

He praised practices enabling widespread unsupervised voting, including unattended ballot drop boxes, drive-through voting operations, and third-party ballot trafficking. He belittled concerns about even weak and insufficient verification systems, such as signature matches. He said Republican lawyers fighting against such practices were engaging in “voter suppression,” a common Democrat talking point.

Months after Ginsberg’s 2020 op-ed mocking election concerns, Time magazine itself confirmed what many Republicans suspected: the existence of a “conspiracy” by powerful Democrats to push through these unsupervised voting practices, creating an election system to ensure the outcome they desired. As Time wrote, it was “well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

The successful effort to change hundreds of laws and processes across the country to enable tens of millions of unsupervised ballots to flood the system was led by Marc Elias, the same Democrat attorney who had been behind the creation of the Russia collusion hoax, the lie that Trump didn’t win in 2016 but stole the election by colluding with Russia.

Democrats had been working for decades to accomplish these changes. For nearly four decades, it was Ginsberg’s job to fight them. As the Republican Party’s top election lawyer, Ginsberg was supposed to be the person responsible for pushing back against coordinated and well-funded Democrat efforts to expand unsupervised voting and to make it difficult to scrutinize the resulting ballots that were far more susceptible to fraud.

It’s not surprising that Republicans fared so poorly against the coordinated Democrat campaign to water down election integrity over the last 20 years given that Ginsberg was the guy supposedly leading their fight.

Early on in my reporting for my best-selling book on the 2020 election, I spoke with dozens of Republican attorneys at the state and federal levels who had found themselves battling this widespread and coordinated takeover of the 2020 election. I asked some of them about Ginsberg’s op-ed and work, and how he compared to Elias.

They told me that Elias doesn’t have much going on in his life other than his election work, and he wakes up each morning with big plans on how to manipulate elections. (A look at his active social media presence supports the characterization.) They explained to me that Elias isn’t as good of an attorney as he promotes himself to be, but he’s the type who will argue whatever he needs to for a client. If that means arguing that voting machines aren’t secure — as his group did in 2020 when trying to overturn the results of Rep. Claudia Tenney’s election in New York, he’ll do it. If it means mocking the idea that voting machines aren’t secure — as his group did in 2020 when battling Trump election challenges that same year, he’ll do that too. He takes whatever side of an issue he needs to in order to secure a favorable outcome for his clients.

These sources noted that Ginsberg, by contrast, usually managed to help Elias and other Democrats in their efforts. They said he was a decent and well-connected Beltway attorney, but he didn’t seem to care much about election integrity, relative to his Democrat counterpart’s efforts. He was a fine lawyer who tended to do a mediocre job, they said. In fact, as soon as he retired, Ginsberg’s written and spoken statements sounded like they could have come from Elias.

Ginsberg even recently co-founded a group to fight election integrity efforts, claiming that such efforts to ensure transparency and accountability put election officials at risk. His co-founder David Becker, formerly with radical left-wing group People for the American Way, now runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, one of the two groups Zuckerberg funded during the 2020 election with $419 million. Those funds enabled the private takeover of government election offices in the blue areas of swing states. With Luttig, Ginsberg serves on the advisory board of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, the group opposed to election integrity efforts.

So What About the Report’s Substance?

The report was presented as an exhaustive look at what happened in the 2020 election. In fact, it only really looked in a cursory fashion at a limited set of lawsuits officially raised by Trump attorneys in the days and weeks after the election.

The report’s co-authors admitted to The Dispatch that the information in the report wasn’t new. Indeed, it’s seemed mostly to be a summation of what law associates might find in Lexis-Nexis — a recitation of legal cases and brief mentions of a few reports and audits in six battleground states. It did not dig deep into any of them, merely restating the circumstances by which cases were dismissed or resolved. And it doesn’t even do a good job with that.

For instance, it characterizes a report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty as finding, “no evidence of widespread voter fraud and no evidence of significant problems with voting machines — in fact, they found that Democratic candidates performed worse than expected in areas with Dominion machines.” Of course, “widespread voter fraud” and “voting machines” are red herrings, intended to divert people from dealing with what actually happened to control the election outcome in Wisconsin.

Contrast the report’s summation of the issue in Wisconsin with the actual first statement from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on its website for election integrity, which says, “It is almost certain that in Wisconsin’s 2020 election the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.” The Supreme Court of Wisconsin has shown that claim isn’t even up for debate, and while that is not “voter fraud,” per se, many Americans would describe the efforts to enable illegal voting methods as “widespread election fraud.”

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s report was a particularly modest account. Other independent analysts and econometricians analyzing Wisconsin have found that Zuckerberg’s meddling had a far greater impact than they realized. Here’s what a team of academics wrote about the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s takeover of government election offices in Wisconsin’s biggest cities:

Without CTCL involvement in Wisconsin in 2020, Wisconsin would be a solidly red state. We estimate that CTCL’s investment in seven Wisconsin counties resulted in 65,222 votes for Biden that would not have occurred in CTCL’s absence. That’s more than three times as big as the final 20,800-vote margin between Biden and Trump in 2020.

Private funding of elections overwhelmingly went to Democrat areas of swing states, produced skewed results, and violated legal requirements prohibiting partisan effects to nonprofit work. The situation in Wisconsin was so bad that leftist activists funded by the Zuckerberg operation led to multiple resignations of local officials in protest.

The report barely mentions, and therefore fails to adequately deal with, Zuckerberg’s funding and what it paid for, merely mentioning that some legal challenges had cited it. This is despite its central role in the outcomes for multiple swing states, including Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia.

The report does a poor job dealing with Georgia as well. In its opening paragraph on Georgia, the report’s authors write, “Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a conservative Republican, conducted a full manual recount of the five million ballots cast, confirming Biden’s victory. At Trump’s request, election officials then conducted a post-certification recount, which also confirmed Biden’s victory. Secretary Raffensperger, with the assistance of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, evaluated and rejected numerous claims of fraud.”

There are multiple major problems with this characterization of Georgia. The report authors didn’t seem to understand, or failed to accurately convey, the situation with the Trump lawsuit filed there. To take just one example from that lawsuit, it alleged a serious problem with illegal voting. Shortly after the election, voting data expert Mark Davis noticed a problem of 40,000 votes cast by people who had registered to vote in a county different from the one they had claimed to move to. It was one of the dozens of categories mentioned in the Trump lawsuit, and in the intervening months, it has been confirmed that more illegal votes were cast in this manner than comprises the margin of victory for the race.

One could perform a recount a thousand times and not detect, much less deal with, that problem. A recount would simply recount the ballots, whether they were legal or not legal. As for the suggestion that Raffensperger took seriously, much less rejected, claims of illegal voting, the evidence does not support the claim. He fiercely fought the campaign’s efforts to determine the precise number of illegal votes during the time they needed the information for their lawsuit. After The Federalist reported on this issue last year, and a television station confirmed the existence of the problem, his office was cagey about whether they were going to investigate, much less do anything about it. His office also made excuses for the illegal voting, suggesting it was not a major concern for his office.

The issue isn’t even addressed in the report, and discussions of the lawsuit and how it was handled are completely inadequate and erroneous. The problem with the lawsuit — which did not allege fraud and which had many substantiated claims — was that it could not get a hearing before Jan. 6. The problems the campaign’s legal team had getting a hearing were Kafka-esque, and the report doesn’t seem to understand what the issues were, much less how they were handled.

Other major issues are neglected in the report. Because of the limited scope and lack of depth to the report, it doesn’t even acknowledge, much less give credit, to a 2022 Pennsylvania court decision ruling that all no-excuse mail-in voting in the commonwealth is unconstitutional. In its discussion of the Arizona audit, which found large and systematic problems in election administration, it quotes the response from the hostile Maricopa County Board of Supervisors as definitive. Likewise, it quotes news articles from the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, and other left-wing media outlets as definitive responses to election concerns. This is laughably unserious.

Reports Like This Harm the Republic

When Luttig went to the one-sided Jan. 6 star chamber, he concluded his remarks by saying that Trump and his supporters were “a clear and present danger to American democracy” because of their ongoing concerns about election security.

The report repeatedly asserts that the reason why there is a lack of trust in elections is because of Trump and his supporters. In fact, one of the most important reasons to fight the coordinated campaign to weaken election integrity is that the lack of controls that make fraud easier to commit and more difficult to detect is responsible for the lack of trust in elections.

Following the contentious 2000 election, former President Jimmy Carter and Republican James Baker co-chaired the bipartisan Commission on Election Reform. Its 100-plus-page report was called “Building Confidence in U.S. Elections,” and it treated election integrity as vitally important to that goal.

Rather than mocking or dismissing concerns about election integrity as unimportant, the Carter Commission stressed the problems caused by bloated and inaccurate voter rolls, nonexistent or faulty voter-identification procedures, and unsupervised voting. It said these practices threaten elections and democracy, as do misconduct by partisan election officials, the use of inconsistent procedures in different precincts, and an overall lack of transparency. The report noted that mail-in balloting is associated with higher risk of fraud and could also undermine faith in elections.

Making sure that voting is fair is one of the most important issues in the country. That’s why it remains a top concern to Republican voters, even as Washington, D.C., rolls out every member of the establishment to try to force them to fall in line with weak and insecure voting provisions.

If they want to convince voters outside their bubble, they should try far harder than they did with this report.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.

Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.

Take the Money and Run: Taxpayers in AZ Will Fund Students, not Schools thumbnail

Take the Money and Run: Taxpayers in AZ Will Fund Students, not Schools

By Laura Williams

Last month, the Arizona legislature passed Arizona HB2853 heralded as “the most expansive school choice legislation in the nation. Every school-aged child in the state, all 1.1 million of them, will have access to $6500 of the taxpayer funds (already set aside for their education) to pay for customized learning solutions their parents choose. Parents, not distant bureaucrats, will direct spending.

The Wall Street Journal proclaimed, “School Choice Blooms in the Desert.” National director of research at the American Federation for Children Corey DeAngelis, whose motto is, “fund students, not systems” called Arizona’s program “the gold standard for school choice nationwide.”

Arizona, in other words, just divorced taxpayer funding for education from government-run schools.

Public Funding for Personalized Learning

ESAs exist in a variety of forms. Arizona calls them “empowerment scholarship accounts,” but they are also called education savings accounts, education scholarship accounts, and tax-credit scholarships. Individuals and organizations fund customized educational expenses, then deduct that spending from taxes.

From 2011, when Arizona launched its ESA program, until last week, just 23 percent of Arizona students were eligible (about a quarter million). Participation was limited to children of veterans, wards of the state, children living on Native reservations, and families zoned to “D” and “F” rated schools. Fewer than 12,000 students received the funds in 2020 – just 5 percent of those eligible took part.

Unlike other programs of its kind, Arizona’s new ESA law doesn’t exclude students already in private schools, nor does it taper off with parent income. Sure, it’s still funded with forcible taxation, but within the current system, ESAs are a major improvement for families statewide.

At $6,500 per student, the publicly funded portion covers the median cost of tuition for private elementary schools. Even if the ESA doesn’t cover the entire cost, it dramatically lowers the cost, making that opportunity available to more families. Parents can also choose “unbundled services,” like micro-school fees, homeschooling curricula, educational or occupational therapies, tutoring – whatever a child might need to reach his individual potential.

Arizona’s ESA program also allows education funds to be spent on educational electronics, like laptops and graphing calculators, and on ride-share services if a student requires transportation to get to a better-suited school.

Parents manage funds through the ClassWallet program. Transactions must meet specific requirements, though the clarity of the requirements, as well as oversight and transparency, have been criticized by all parties. Shoddy administration has resulted in delayed funds, massive breaches of privacy, and frustration for ESA families.

For parents, ESAs’ authorization to customize education for their children has meant a chance to realize the promise of “public education” that schools were failing to deliver. A parent told Arizona’s State Board of Education in 2020: “I am a parent of three children on ESA, but I also have a master’s degree in elementary education, and ESA has saved the educational lives of my three children.”

Benefits for Zoned Schools

Hand-wringing from teachers’ unions claims ESAs “defund” public schools by allowing a portion of per-student funds to follow the student. When students move with their families to a better district, we don’t generally consider that to be ‘draining funds’ from the school left behind. The funding follows the student already. Arizona just blew open the monopoly.

What’s more, school districts receive $10,392 per student: 58 percent state, 14 percent federal, and 46 percent local. With ESAs at $6,500, one-third of local and state spending earmarked for that student, and all the federal funds, will be left behind in the residentially zoned school.

There are less obvious benefits to budgets, which also provide tremendous benefits to families. Students with serious disabilities are especially well-served by alternatives. These students are considered high-need and high-cost by zoned schools, which must force them into a model not built for them. With the freedom of an ESA, such students thrive in environments designed to provide specialized services. Relieved of these costs, zoned schools should experience some budget relief.

Students who’ve been labeled “disruptive” in the traditional classroom are also good candidates for customized ESA solutions, and the staff hours that would be devoted to serving (or suspending) them in a traditional public school can be returned to the general budget. ESAs, in short, should reduce budget pressures on public schools. The only counterargument comes from unions and their backers who think funds don’t rightly belong to students, but to the bureaucracies themselves.

In addition to saving money, ESAs improve school outcomes. ESA-funded alternatives raise student performance, both among those who departed, and those who remained in their zoned schools. As Florida’s tax credit program expanded, public school students who did not participate still saw higher test scores, lower rates of absenteeism, and lower incidence of suspension. Those benefits were universal but concentrated among low-income students. Public schools provide better service and better education to students if families have the option to withdraw. Once the rigid grip of zoned schools on public investment is broken, competitive pressures improve outcomes for everyone.

Arizona ranks 48th in funding among the 50 state systems and the district of Columbia, and 44th in teacher salaries, according to the NEA. Chronic teacher shortages plague the state. In September 2021, 26 percent of teacher vacancies in Arizona schools remained unfilled.

When it comes to the amount of money spent on actual student instruction, Arizona ranks dead last with $4,801, about half of the annual investment per student, according to the Arizona Auditor General. While higher spending doesn’t necessarily equate to better outcomes, the balance between spending on instructional costs (teacher salaries, textbooks) and other priorities (administration, facilities, food service, transportation) may illustrate the tension between how increasing education funding (taxes) is spent and the outcomes that families say don’t work for them.

In Arizona, as in many other states, teachers make up less than half of the school staff. Per-student spending and salaries continue to rise. Librarians, counselors, administrators, food preparers, bus drivers may be necessary for a full-scale industrial school to run, but many parents may see more value in employing two or three facilitators in a micro-school. A non-“expert” teacher in a 5:1 teacher-student ratio, may provide better instruction than an “expert” for 30:1. And packing their children’s lunch and dropping them off may serve the whole family better than an “all-inclusive” solution that isn’t delivering a true education. Families now have options. And they can turn the tables, look past the traditional, compulsory school, into a rich ecosystem and ask – compared to what?

Responding to Critics: Compared to What?

The Empowerment Accounts won’t go into effect without a fight. Save Our Schools Arizona collected signatures to block the expansion, demanding it is put to a voter referendum in 2024. They criticized the “privatization” of public schools and claim ESAs will divert $1 Billion in funding away from zoned schools. Never mind the $1 Billion in new K-12 spending the state just approved.

Milton Friedman wrote, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

Too often, government-run school systems are treated as an ideal, as if they actually provided equal, quality education to all children. If that were true, disrupting that perfection with ESAs might be wrong.

So putting aside the intention, what are the results of government-run, residentially zoned schools? The picture isn’t pretty. As a result, most criticisms of ESAs are dismissed with the simple question: “compared to what?”

Arizona’s public school classrooms are the second most crowded in the country. High school graduation rates hover about 8 percent below national averages and less than half of the graduating class went on to college in 2020. Workforce participation rates creep downward, and school segregation upward.

Some say parents who choose unbundled education services may spend funds unwisely or unethically.

Compared to what?

Perhaps a parent might use up all $6.5K before selecting a math or science curriculum. But in a state where 60 percent of public school students failed the state English assessment and 69 percent failed math, it’s unclear (at best) that students are worse off with unbundled curricula. This wasn’t a post-pandemic slide, either. At no point in the test’s history have even half of the students passed.

Learning loss due to school closures certainly should not, in any case, excuse poor student outcomes. Teachers’ unions (shadow stewards of zoned school policies) lobbied to keep schools closed long after the risk of COVID to children proved minimal. Closures galvanized support for alternatives among parents, and reopening protocols encouraged teachers to seek (and start!) alternatives, too.

If we leave parents to make their own spending choices, even with certain constraints, some of that spending will be wasted. Critics say a freer market in educational services may expose parents to unqualified teachers or fraudulent services.

Compared to what?

Broadly understood, taxpayer spending on Arizona’s education system includes lawsuit payouts to children abused by teachers and sketchy golden parachutes for departing administrators. Several public school superintendents in Arizona were indicted for fraud and for theft in recent years.

Debora Colbert, who launched Black Mothers Forum in Phoenix in 2020, put it this way: “We could be advocating 24/7, and still not make the impact that we wanted to see. So, what do you do, do you go charter? Do you try to keep working in the public school system? Nope, nope, not us. We said, well, we can do it ourselves.” And she did. With a network of 42 students, she launched micro-schools designed to spur raise expectations for achievement, and disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline for students of color.

ESAs don’t divert funding from public schools – they increase the funds available for students remaining in zoned schools. Of all criticisms of ESAs, the strongest might be that they leave too many students, and too much money, trapped beneath a crumbling facade.

Expanding Choice to the Poor

The wealthy have always, and will always have choices in how to educate their children. They might choose to pay the cost of a private school from kindergarten to high school, at around $148,200. They might move to a nearby top-notch public school district, into a house costing on average $175,000 more, and hefty real estate taxes. Even renters pay a premium. Those with a robust single income or independent wealth also find it easier to homeschool. If you have money, you already have a choice, even if you also have to pay your share of the zoned school your child isn’t using.

For the poor, however, ESAs can be the difference between affording homeschool materials or not; affording a local Montessori or not; between accessing occupational therapy or not. ESAs, pulled from taxpayers and distributed to learners, are an amazing equalizer – arguably, a fulfillment of what “public education” was supposed to mean.

Arizona has turned a corner in its understanding of public education. The one-size-fits-all factory model won’t have an iron grip on the state’s whole concept of education – nor its budget. More kids will get a customized education, and a fairer shot at a successful future.

The best strategies for Arizona parents? Know your children, and the kind of environment that might best prepare them to thrive. Know your options, whether public, private, charter, home-based, or community pod. Know your “default” zone school, and understand its reputation, ethos, performance, and outcomes. And once you know all that? Take the money and run.

*****

This article was published by AIER, American Institute for Economic Research, and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.

Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.

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Why Should We Have Confidence in Public Health Officials?

By Neland Nobel

Among the many casualties of government reaction to the Wuhan virus, has been the prestige of the public health establishment.  This is true in the U.S. and elsewhere as well.

They lied about the origins of the virus and continue to do so.

Those that do acknowledge that it likely came from a lab leak, most refuse to ask who funded the research that lead to the escape and who should be held responsible for damages to the world.

In the US, we were told masks were effective at stopping the virus.  And so it was said internationally. We now know, that except under hospital circumstances, that simply was not true.

To be fair, President Trump made some stupid remarks about ultraviolet light. Some suggested he said to inject bleach. But his ideas were dismissed promptly with contempt because he was not a doctor or a public health official. In fact, the press howled if he didn’t follow their expert advice. His first instinct, you might recall, was “two weeks to bend the curve”. It turned out to be two years and the curve is still there to some extent.

But in the end, who did more damage to our society: the amateurs or the professionals?

We now know, because of the self-congratulating book by Dr. Deborah Birx, that much of public health advisories were simply made up. The effectiveness of the 6-foot circle, the vaccines, and the boosters to the vaccines were all said to be vital to public health.

The Scarf lady said so. And it made such an impression on the public, that one still sees mask wearers, peddling their bicycles alone, outside in 110-degree heat. Media-induced brain damage apparently is permanent for some.

President Biden said if you get the vaccine, you won’t get Covid. He is twice vaccinated, twice boosted, and has Covid. He is a walking refutation of the BS peddled by Public Health officials and swallowed uncritically by most of the medical profession. Few seem to acknowledge that the President’s very condition destroys everything the man had said on the matter.

Here we have a 79-year-old man, fully vaccinated and boosted, living in a controlled masked-wearing environment, with an attending physician at his elbow, and he gets the virus. And at this juncture, he appears to be doing fine with it.

If that is true, is it worth shutting down society again as suggested recently by the New York Times and Dr. Fauci on his new media tour?

Their lame excuse is all the vaccines and boosters made the condition less lethal. How do we know that? The virus keeps mutating, and the vaccines and boosters may not be effective against the variants at present and the variants to be. And besides, he was taking therapeutics as he should. But if he is taking effective therapeutics, that could account for the milder symptoms. Also, it could be just a milder variant.

That the public, through fear, lost all ability to think critically. That too is a story worth telling.

But to stay on point, it is doubtful many of us can ever look at doctors, and “scientists” the same way ever again. If they can lie so easily, or more charitably, be that gullible, leap to conclusions without scientific basis; why should we believe them about anything?

They divided the American people and it has ruined relationships between relatives and friends. That rift continues today.

They may well have wrecked the global economy, which will cause great pain and likely echo for years to come.

They trampled our liberties: our freedom to assemble (unless you are rioting on behalf of BLM), to worship, and even to conduct our business. They shut down arbitrarily some businesses and left others alone. They interfered in the mortgage markets, interfered with private contracts between renters and owners, shut down schools, destroyed domestic and international supply chains, and contributed to great inflation.

Their policies may well have killed more people than the virus. Millions did not show up for checkups for their heart conditions, cancer, and other maladies. There has been a surge in suicide and drug abuse, spousal abuse, and child abuse. Why are not these issues matters of public health?

They did this in the name of lockdown. But now we have the data. There is virtually no difference in outcomes between harsh lockdown states such as California and more freedom-loving states like Florida. The same is true internationally. Soft lockdown countries such as Sweden had better outcomes than countries like New Zealand.

They said if you get the vaccine, you won’t get Covid. Then they said if you get the vaccine, you won’t spread Covid. The latter statement put responsibility that was misplaced on those who preferred not to take an experimental possibly gene-altering drug. It is you vaccine refusniks that are spreading Covid! The President said it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Members of the armed forces were dismissed, nurses were fired, and tennis stars were denied entry into countries and competitions.

The “logic” seemed to suggest the unvaccinated were spreading the virus to those already protected by the vaccine? How could that be if the vaccine is effective for those who took it? None of it made any sense, but non-mask-wearing individuals were subject to at a minimum the “stink eye”, but also emotional retribution, and at worst, job dismissal. No one has said they are sorry. And as suggested earlier, it hasn’t ended. Los Angeles seems to want to crank up mandatory mask wearing again and the left’s chief spiritual leader, the New York Times, wants to bring lockdown back.

It would seem evidence of failure is no deterrent to those who heard the original incorrect statements by health officials. For them it seems, it is cast in stone as the tablets delivered on Mt. Sinai.

James Agresti has an excellent service called Just Facts Daily. One of his more recent ones asked this question: In the United Kingdom during 2022, what portion of all deaths involving Covid-19 have been among people who were fully vaccinated and boosted? Was it about 25%, 50%, or 75%?  Which percentage is closer to actual results?

Yours truly pondered that we know vaccines were not effective, but likely they would not be worse than having not taken the jab at all, so I picked 50%. I was wrong.

The correct answer was 75%. Thus in the UK, public vaccinations may have made more people ill and killed more people than if they had done nothing. The other way to spin it is it was precisely those most vulnerable who took the jab, and thus it is the frailties of this group that accounts for greater deaths. That may possibly be true. But if it is true, why the push to vaccinate everyone, of every age, and of every condition?

Remember it was part of Covid policy to keep everyone at home (except made-up definitions of whose job was critical), to mask everyone, and to jab everyone, repeatedly. It was not limited to the elderly or those with co-morbidities.

Recall as well, that it was important for people to be able to go to titty bars, but not to church? Looking back, these officials look worse than silly.

The latest push is to vaccinate babies, a group that has not shown vulnerabilities. This is from the same people that disrupted schools for two years, stunted language development in formative years, and touched off a record of teenage suicides. Well, they had our interests at heart, did they not?

Getting back to the specific British study, here are supporting statements from Mr. Agresti:

An accurate measure of the vaccine status of people who die with Covid-19 is available from the United Kingdom, where government keeps detailed healthcare records on nearly all citizens. The latest data from the UK Office of National Statistics shows that 74% of all deaths involving Covid-19 from 1/1/22 to 5/31/22 were among people who were fully vaccinated and boosted. As the UK Health Security Agency has explained, “it is expected that a large proportion of cases, hospitalisations and deaths would occur in vaccinated individuals, simply because a larger proportion of the population are vaccinated than unvaccinated and no vaccine is 100% effective. This is especially true because vaccination has been prioritised in individuals who are more susceptible or more at risk of severe disease.”

Documentation of this ia at the following link: Latest UK DataData & Calculations (Excel)Not a Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.

Sadly, it would seem the reason we cannot have faith in public health officials is they destroyed their own credibility. The media spread their falsehoods and the politicians enforced them.

Stand by for the next crusade. It looks like it will be about global warming!

TAKE ACTION

Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.

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The West Might Lose The New Cold War With Its Self-Defeating Energy Policy

By Helen Raleigh

In today’s new Cold War, the West is losing its economic advantage because of its self-defeating energy policies to address ‘climate change.’

Three significant events this year indicate that we are already in a new Cold War. In early February, China and Russia established an unofficial strategic alliance by announcing “a friendship of no limits” while denouncing the Western democracies. Shortly after, Russia invaded Ukraine. After some initial hesitation and delays, the United States and its Western allies worked together to impose severe economic sanctions on Russia while providing Ukraine with military and humanitarian aid.

A new iron curtain has descended from the Baltic to the South China Sea. One side is a coalition of autocracies led by China and Russia, with illiberal regimes such as Iran and North Korea playing the supporting role. The other side we call the West, led by the United States, including liberal democracies in Europe, South Korea, and Japan. Will the West win this new Cold War?

The West claimed the victory of the last Cold War against Communism not only because of the superiority of liberal democratic values but also because of the economic strengths of the free market, which had created a higher standard of living and enormous wealth. It’s self-evident that freedom and prosperity go hand in hand. In contrast to the economic success of the West were widespread poverty and hunger in Communist countries. People in these countries either fled to the West or demanded political change at home through protests. It’s fair to say that the Berlin Wall fell, and the West won the Cold War, mainly because of its economic advantages over Communist regimes.

In today’s new Cold War, however, the West is losing its economic advantage because of its self-defeating energy policies driven by a cult-like devotion to addressing “climate change.” Aiming to slow down global warming (although our planet only warmed 1 degree Celsius since the late 19th century) and bring the greenhouse emissions back to the pre-industrial revolution level, liberal elites have decided to rapidly replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. They refuse to admit that despite many technological advancements, renewable energy is not reliable because the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow on demand. According to Lars Schernikau, an energy economist, “practically every windmill or solar panel requires either a backup or storage.”

The United States and Europe’s ill-advised energy policies have little effect on global warming or greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, they have made the West vulnerable in this new Cold War for three reasons.

1. The West Has Inflicted Economic Pain and Lower Standard of Living

The West’s anti-carbon energy policies resulted in energy shortages and high energy prices long before Russia invaded Ukraine. Since food security depends on energy, high energy prices led to food inflation and shortages. Higher prices of food and energy are the main drivers of rising inflation in Europe and the U.S. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exacerbated these problems and crystallized how foolish the West’s energy policies are.

For the first time in decades, people in the West must embrace economic pain and a lower standard of living that was familiar to those of us who used to live in Communist countries. Today in Germany, people face a “cost of living crisis,” with shortages of necessities such as cooking oil, flour, and toilet paper. Some local authorities have already limited hot water and traffic lights. Others warned they might have to turn off floodlights in soccer stadiums to conserve energy, something unthinkable for a soccer-crazy nation. But it’s the coming winter that may be most dreadful. If Russia cuts off the natural gas supply, pundits in Germany predict an economic recession and “major civil disorder, a winter of cold showers and extra jumpers.”

Other European nations aren’t faring any better. The continent is on the verge of an energy-driven recession. Fed up with rising fuel prices and local governments’ insistence on their unrealistic “green” policies, Dutch farmers staged protests in the Netherlands. Now similar protests led by farmers have spread to Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland.

Americans have been enduring economic pain too. A survey shows that rising gas and food prices have forced two-thirds of Americans to cut back on restaurants, movies, and entertainment, and to drive less. More than 4 in 10 Americans spent less on groceries. Some families have resorted to switching off lights and air conditioning due to the cost of energy. The survey also shows that the majority of Americans has a pessimistic outlook of our nation’s economy, expecting a recession.

The West cannot win the new Cold War when its green policies lead to economic suffering and political instability at home.

2. The West’s Energy Policies Have Empowered and Enriched Adversaries

Europe’s dependency on Russia’s oil and natural gas has enriched Russian President Vladimir Putin. Without money earned from energy exports to build his war chest, Putin probably would have had to think twice before he invaded Ukraine. After the European Union (EU) imposed economic sanctions on Russia after the invasion, Putin showed how he could use energy to retaliate. Russia reportedly reduced the flow of natural gas through Nord Stream (offshore natural gas pipelines run under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany) to about 40 percent of its capacity in recent months. Then it shut down the pipelines for ten days in the name of annual maintenance, when Europe was in the middle of a heat wave. Putin eventually turned the pipelines back on but “warned of possible new capacity shortfalls because of Western sanctions.” French President Emmanuel Macron finally acknowledged that energy has become “a weapon of the war.”

Anticipating the coming winter heating season, the EU urged members to cut back natural gas consumption by at least 15 percent over the next eight months and start to ration energy usage, prioritizing “essential industries.” That means both businesses and homes should expect rolling blackouts, which I was used to when growing up in Communist China. The prospect of no heat in winter may force some EU nations to give up economic sanctions on Russia in exchange for energy. A divided Europe is a win for Putin. If the EU can’t maintain a united front on sanctioning Russia, Putin will win his war in Ukraine. The EU has no one else but itself to blame for this outcome because previous U.S. administrations warned about it for years. But leaders such as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to listen.

While the EU’s green energy policies were enriching Putin’s Russia, in the U.S., the Democrats’ “green” energy has enriched Communist China. U.S. government subsidies for solar panels and electric vehicles have gone to China, since that country dominates the global supply chains of critical components and materials. A rich and powerful China has helped Russia mitigate the effects of Western economic sanctions by purchasing Russia’s agricultural and energy exports. Even more troublesome, China’s “clean” energy producers have been accused of causing environmental pollution and exploiting forced Uyghur laborers.

The West cannot win the new Cold War when it looks to adversaries for energy solutions.

3. The West Faces Difficulties Building a Broader Coalition

When the West led a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 35 countries abstained or voted no. In another vote to expel Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, 58 countries abstained. Some of these “abstainers” are ideologically aligned with Russia. Others refused to join the West’s condemnation due to their economic needs. Their top concerns are food and energy security, not climate change. They are unconvinced that the West’s “green” energy policies worked when they see the once affluent West is now suffering economic pain and instability. They also witnessed how countries such as Sri Lanka collapsed economically and politically after adopting the West’s green policies. Unlike foolhardy climate alarmists in the West, leaders in these countries know that they need affordable fossil fuels, food, and fertilizer exports from Russia, and economic investment from China to keep their people happy and maintain stability. Driven by these practical economic reasons, many nations chose not to take sides. Not surprisingly, the West is having difficulty building a broader and stronger coalition against Russia.

The liberals in the West need to face the reality that not only does the world primarily run on fossil fuels, but energy has also become a powerful weapon in this new Cold War. The West cannot win this new Cold War with its self-defeating anti-carbon energy policies.

*****

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

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Starbucks Closures Over Crime Show How Companies Dodge Woke Consequences

By Jarrett Stepman

Troubled times may be ahead for the marriage between corporate America and the left.

Starbucks recently announced that it’s closing over a dozen stores because of crime and safety concerns.

“We’ve had to make the difficult decision to close some locations that have a particularly high volume of challenging incidents that make it unsafe for us to operate,” a Starbucks spokesman told CNBC.

What is the primary driver of Starbucks locations becoming unsafe? Starbucks’ top executive had an interesting answer.

In a video leaked on Twitter, Starbucks interim CEO Howard Schultz pinned the source of the problem on politicians and other city leaders who’ve failed to contain crime.

“In my view, at the local, state, and federal level, these governments across the country and leaders—mayors, governors, and city councils—have abdicated their responsibility in fighting crime and addressing mental illness,” Schultz said.

It’s interesting to hear Schultz say this. He generally has been a man of the left, though he left the Democrat Party in 2019 and became an independent.

The question is: Will companies such as Starbucks reconsider their general support of left-wing social causes and policies that have caused them a huge financial headache?

And will left-wing activists stick with these woke companies that now are closing stores and laying off employees?

Of the 16 Starbucks locations set to close, a majority are on the West Coast, apart from Philadelphia and the District of Columbia. Most are in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon.

Every one of the cities with closing Starbucks outlets has a Democrat mayor and little political opposition.

This may just be the beginning of safety-related closures, as Schultz indicated in the leaked video.

“It has shocked me that one of the primary concerns that our retail partners have is their own personal safety,” Schultz says in the video. “America has become unsafe.”

That’s for sure.

The increase in violent crime has been a national trend, but the cities most affected by the spike in crime typically are places that had significant civil unrest in 2020.

Portland, the poster child of this crime wave phenomenon, has seen the most dramatic increase in violent crime. A recent report showed that Portland’s homicide rate increased by a staggering 207% between 2019 and 2021, nearly twice as much as the city with the second-highest increase in homicides.

And that city was Minneapolis, ground zero for 2020’s unrest and the initial epicenter of the “defund the police” movement following the death of George Floyd in police custody.

In many cities, property crime and retail theft are surging too, as criminals realize they won’t pay a serious consequence for lawbreaking.

What’s interesting about the safety-related Starbucks closures is how the announcement has followed the trend of other, major national companies that have decided to close stores or locations for similar reasons.

Walgreens, for instance, closed shops in San Francisco, citing out-of-control shoplifting and organized crime. Other retail chains have pointed to similar crime-related reasons for closures.

It’s no surprise to see Seattle on the list of Starbucks closures. The coffee chain’s home city has seen crime escalate dramatically in a few years. Amazon, the giant online retailer, recently relocated 1,800 employees out of downtown Seattle locations, citing crime.

Now, some have called into question the motives behind these closures, saying that it’s simply downsizing due to supply chain disruptions and a move to online retail.

In the case of Starbucks, some former employees say it was their plan to unionize that prompted Starbucks to close stores under the guise of safety.

Additional reasons may exist for sudden store closures other than crime. But there’s little doubt that increases in crime have created a more challenging economic environment.

Anarchy is bad for business. When you combine anarchy with resultant higher security needs, you end up with a lot more companies shutting down or moving to greener pastures.

Amazon wouldn’t be suddenly closing business locations if the problem was just the rise of online shopping.

Starbucks joins the growing list of companies that have cooled in their ardor for social justice when their bottom line took a hit.

In 2018, at a Starbucks in Philadelphia, two black men who were not customers were denied the use of a store bathroom. Officers arrested the men after the manager called the police.

This incident provoked Starbucks to conduct a company-wide racial bias training program. Starbucks also opened all its restrooms for public use.

Now the company is considering reversing the policy and closing restrooms to the public because of safety concerns, which include addicts’ drug use in the restrooms.

So, is this a return to racism for Starbucks, or is the company simply bending to the reality that there were very good reasons to limit public access to restrooms?

One would think restrooms should be primarily for employees and paying customers, not drug abusers looking for a convenient spot to shoot up. After a few years, it appears that Starbucks’ upper management is coming back to reality.

It’s interesting to see these problems hit corporate America, which in the past few years almost uniformly sided with woke causes. That commitment appears to be soft when it runs into the brick wall of woke consequences.

For cities consumed by the most ridiculous progressive policies, the bill has come due. And it looks like woke corporate allies aren’t going to stick around when it comes to picking up the tab.

*****

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

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Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.

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Mr. Roberts, Where Are You?

By Bruce Bialosky

Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed that he feels compelled to protect the image of the Supreme Court since he was sworn in as the leader. That is why we have been told he conceived of the Obamacare Individual Mandate as being a tax. That is after the President and the supporters of Obamacare stated repeatedly it was not a tax, thus saving Obamacare in the ruling on National Federation of Independent Business et al vs. Sebelius. Why at this critical juncture is he not vociferously defending the court?

Let us begin by defining the fact that I am wholly in favor of the divide we currently have in this country between what has been characterized as “Red” and “Blue” states. The states are designed as incubators of public policy. In a society where we have significant choices, people make decisions about which states have not only the best climate and best jobs for them but the best public policy that aligns with their views.

There have been many discussions regarding people relocating to red states during COVID. A few years only tells part of the story. The three most populated blue states are New York, Illinois, and California. I looked at their population this century (2000 vs 2022). US population increased by 17.7% during that period (332 million vs 282 million). Population for the state of Illinois increased 2 % (12,671,000 vs 12,419,000). The state of New York grew 6% (20,115,000 vs 18,976,000). The state of California did better at 15.8% (39,240,000 vs. 33.870,000). Collectively, however, these states lost population compared to the rest of the country.

All three of these states lost an electoral vote this past year because people are either not moving to these states or are leaving them. In a time in history where many people can work at their jobs wherever they choose to live, they are no longer relocating for jobs. They are moving for other factors, such as the cost of living or invasive governments that restrict housing development.

The Supreme Court at the end of its term made some major rulings that affected people’s lives. The essence of those rulings was stating more boldly and strongly than they have recently that they are not going to be making laws. Rather, they are returning to the time where their job, as written in our Constitution, is to interpret whether the laws written by Congress and enforced by the Executive branch are allowed within the framework of our Constitution as written.

All this garbage about being “originalists” or venerating dead white men is exactly that – garbage. The Justices are doing exactly what their mission is. This is although their predecessors often strayed by taking the law into their own hands. That is largely coming to a halt. Some people are upset, having thought they ran the country by having Justices do their work for them. Now they must do their own work. Armageddon did not happen. What happened is if you are an elected official, you now must do your job because the nine robed people are not going to. There are still three who want to write laws. One only needs to read their dissents in the three most notable recent cases, and it is impossible to come to any other conclusion.

So where is John Roberts laying this out and telling the other branches pointing fingers at the Court to do their job? He needs to give a forceful speech defending the Constitution and the actions of his fellow Justices. He needs to say to the members of Congress “if you don’t like the fact that the EPA or any other agency can no longer go cowboy on us and makeup rules then do what you were elected to do.” If Congress wants federal agencies to accomplish something, write a law, and get it passed and signed. Read the Constitution. It is your job. If legislators do not like the abortion-related laws in their states – pass new ones. You were elected to do that, not just give speeches, or send out tweets.

And if residents do not like abortion restrictions in their state, they can pick up and move. The protests that have gone on are almost exclusively in states where abortion is already legal after Dobbs. What are they protesting? Two-thirds of abortions are already performed in blue states. If a woman who is pro-choice from Missouri must relocate to Illinois, I for one do not feel sorry for her. If that is such a burning issue to her then she has the freedom in our country to do as she chooses. And those who do not like my attitude are welcome to look at my database of all my like-minded friends who have relocated to Tennessee, Nevada, Texas, Florida, and other states.

Justice Roberts should make clear the Justices are only doing their job. And he should call the President and the AG and tell them to stop the misbehavior of the protestors who live in jurisdictions where abortion is legal. Members of the Supreme Court and/or any other elected official should not have the privacy of their homes or their neighbors’ homes disrupted. People should be allowed to eat in restaurants without protestors disturbing everyone on the premises. Roberts should call Pelosi and suggest to her to rein in her unruly members who suggest hunting down Supreme Court members is a civic duty.

These actions by the protesters may or may not be legal. That is not the point. The actions are not civil, and we have a civil society. To pay a bounty for spotting of Justices outside their homes so they can be confronted is despicable. Who is funding this? What kind of morals do they have? To access a restaurant’s reservation system and make false bookings is childish behavior and uncivil. Because a restaurant does not want its patrons disturbed no matter what the issue, they should not be confronted by “children.” (That’s an insult to well-behaved children). That is what they are. I did things like that when I was thirteen. I grew up. Do these protesters believe they are really making a difference?

We have laws and we should all be delighted when the laws are being followed. We should vote out anyone who is not administering those laws. And Justice Roberts should defend his court which has done nothing other than telling people the Court is now doing its job.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.

Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.

Bombshells Undercut The ‘Big Lie:’ 21 Confirmed Illegalities, Irregularities from 2020 Election thumbnail

Bombshells Undercut The ‘Big Lie:’ 21 Confirmed Illegalities, Irregularities from 2020 Election

By John Solomon

There are now nearly two dozen credible confirmations of wrongdoing, irregularities, and illegalities that undercut the claims of bureaucrats, journalists, and Democrats that the November 2020 general election was flawless.

Democrats and their allies in the traditional news media have coined the term the “Big Lie” to dismiss anyone who questions the conduct of the 2020 election.

But with each passing day, new irregularities, security vulnerabilities, and illegalities are being unmasked by bombshell revelations from courts, legislators, and other investigative bodies like the FBI and Homeland Security Department.

The latest came last week when the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared that state election regulators had no legal authority to allow voters to cast ballots in mobile drop boxes, a jaw-dropping decision that invalidated the way tens of thousands of voters — many of them Democrats — cast their ballots.

From Phoenix to Detroit, and Madison to Austin, there are now nearly two dozen credible confirmations of problems that undercut the claims of bureaucrats, journalists, and Democrats that the November 2020 general election was perfect. In fact, it was quite imperfect.

And while none of the revelations, at this point, have persuaded courts to reverse the outcome of the presidential tally or unseat Joe Biden from the White House, they have shaken voter confidence in key battleground states and built a compelling case that the bigger lie was that the 2020 election was flawless.

Here are 21 important revelations uncovered by Just the News over the last 18 months of reporting, complete with substantiating evidence and links:

    1. Illegal ballot drop boxes. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that the 570 drop boxes used during the 2020 election were unlawfully approved by the Wisconsin Election Commission, “Only the legislature may permit absentee voting via ballot drop boxes,” the court declared. “WEC cannot. Ballot drop boxes appear nowhere in the detailed statutory system for absentee voting. WEC’s authorization of ballot drop boxes was unlawful.” State Rep. Janel Brandtjen told Just the News that hundreds of thousands of votes were cast in the illegal boxes in the 2020 race when Biden and Donald Trump were separated by less than 21,000 votes.
    2. A Foreign Intrusion. Federal authorities have confirmed that two Iranian nationals successfully hacked into a state computer election system, stole 100,000 voter registrations and used the data to carry out a cyber-intimidation campaign that targeted GOP members of Congress, Trump campaign officials and Democratic voters in the November 2020 election in one of the largest foreign intrusions in U.S. election history. The defendants “were part of a coordinated conspiracy in which Iranian hackers sought to undermine faith and confidence in the U.S. presidential election,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams declared in an indictment.
    3. The Laptop Lie: More than 50 national security experts, countless news organizations and large social media firms falsely told American voters in fall 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop with damning revelations about Biden family corruption was Russian disinformation. In fact, it was a legitimate laptop already in the FBI’s possession, and Hunter Biden was already under criminal investigation before voters cast their 2020 ballots. The false narrative had significant impact: polling shows a majority of American voters believe the pre-election censorship of the story amounted to election interference,
    4. Alleged Bribery. The former state Supreme Court justice appointed by the Wisconsin Legislature to investigate the 2020 election concluded that millions of dollars in donations to election administrators in five Democrat-heavy municipalities from the Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life violated state anti-bribery laws and corrupted election practices by turning public election authorities into liberal get-out-the-vote activists. “The Zuckerberg-funded CTCL/ Zuckerberg 5 scheme would prove to be an effective way to accomplish the partisan effort to ‘turnout’ their desired voters and it was done with the active support of the very people and the governmental institution (WEC) that were supposed to be guarding the Wisconsin elections administrative process from the partisan activities they facilitated,” Justice Michael Gableman wrote.
    5. Illegal ballot harvesting in Wisconsin. Gableman also exposed an extensive vote collection operation, known as ballot harvesting, in nursing homes in which third-party activists illegally collected the ballots of vulnerable residents, some of whom lacked the mental or physical capacity to vote or were forbidden from voting by guardianship agreements. State election regulators “unlawfully directed the municipal clerks not to send out the legally required special voting deputies to nursing homes, resulting in many nursing homes’ registered residents voting at 100% rates and many ineligible residents voting, despite a guardianship order or incapacity,” Gableman wrote in his explosive report.
    6. Ballot harvesting probe in the Peach State. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has announced he has opened a criminal investigation into allegations that liberal activists engaged in illegal ballot harvesting, collecting ballots from voters and delivering them in violation of state law. Raffensperger said he is planning to issue subpoenas to identify a whistleblower who admitted he engaged in the operation, and there could be prosecutions. The True the Vote election integrity group says in a formal state complaint that the man, identified as John Doe, admitted his role and identified nonprofits who funded it at $10 per ballot delivered. The watchdog group also claims it has assembled cell phone location records pinpointing the alleged harvesting by as many as 240 activists.
    7. Bad voter signatures? A review of Maricopa County’s mail-in ballots in Arizona’s 2020 presidential election estimated that more than 200,000 ballots with signatures that did not match voter files were counted without being reviewed, more than eight times the number the county acknowledged.
    8. 50,000 Arizona ballots called into question. An extensive audit by Arizona’s Senate officially called into question more than 50,000 ballots cast in the 2020 election, including voters who cast ballots from residences they had left. The tally in question is nearly five times the margin of Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
    9. Foreign voters found on Texas rolls. An audit of Texas voter rolls identified nearly 12,000 noncitizens suspected of illegally registering to vote and nearly 600 cases in which ballots may have been cast in the name of a dead resident or by a voter who may also have voted in another state. Officials are now in the process of removing the foreign voters and deciding whether prosecutions are warranted.
    10. Foreign voters found on Georgia  rolls. An audit by Georgia’s Secretary of State has identified more than 2,000 suspected foreigners who tried to register to vote in the state, though none reached the point of casting ballots. Raffensperger says prosecutions may be forthcoming……

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Continue reading this article at  Just the News.

TAKE ACTION

Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.

Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.

Legislation by Any Other Name thumbnail

Legislation by Any Other Name

By Peggy Little

West Virginia v. EPA is a blockbuster ruling of great consequence to the current reign of the administrative state over the lives of Americans. It restores core foundational principles that have been ignored or trampled for far too long—namely that lawmaking power is vested in Congress and cannot be usurped by agencies engaged in off-road driving. Its holding will rein in other lawless initiatives waiting in the wings, prominent among them, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent implausible assertion that Congress’s grant of power in 1933 and 1934 to regulate exchanges to ensure honest markets gives it power today to impose Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) regulations on publicly-traded companies.

How the Case Came About

This dispute about the power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was close to a decade in the making, reaching back to the Obama Administration’s 2015 adoption of a Clean Power Plan (CPP). Simply put, the question before the court was whether the EPA could deploy an obscure provision of the 1970 Clean Air Act to reconfigure what components should compose the nation’s entire electric grid. Prior to that time, the “best systems” section of the 1970 Act had only allowed EPA to set source-specific emission levels for existing coal, natural gas, and renewable energy plants. Under the Obama plan, what once had been EPA’s power to require scrubbers had now become the agency’s unilateral power to convert entire power plants from one type of energy to another—or eliminate them altogether.

The rule never went into effect because the Supreme Court issued a stay of this extraordinary power grab in early 2016. The Obama CPP was then repealed by the Trump administration in 2019 and replaced with the Affordable Clean Energy Rule (ACE) which more modestly sought to make coal-burning energy plants cleaner and more efficient. But on January 19, 2021, ACE, in turn, was struck down by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on the eve of a new administration, leaving EPA wide open to put into effect a reading of “best systems” that empowered the agency to orchestrate the composition of the energy sector.

The decision—and the dissent—both open with a scuffle over standing and mootness common in environmental litigation that veers from one President’s vision to the next. The government argued that as there was no plan in place, the Court should not rule at all. Such strategic “mooting” explains how such disputes can and do drag out for years and through changes of administration. Unfortunately, this bob-and-weave embroils the courts in a protracted dance with the Executive that shuts Congress out altogether.

Accordingly, the Court applied its mooting precedents (which provide that a policy that may recur is justiciable) to halt this decade-long waltz and reach the core question of “who decides?” national energy policy. While this justiciability question could have gone either way, the Court made the right judgment call to end this dispute because neither EPA nor the Courts possess the power to determine national energy policy. Protracted litigation based on the fiction that Congress has somehow delegated this power to the EPA only lets Congress off the hook, serving the interests of no one but the activists and the lawyers. Indeed, one of the best consequences of this case is that Congress will have to decide our energy policy to more lasting effect than “plans” imposed and replaced by politicized agency bureaucrats. And that decision will be with the consent of the governed as it must be, under the Constitution.

What is a “System”?

In West Virginia, EPA explicitly proffered and vigorously defended its 2016 reading that “best systems” permits the agency to engage in macro regulation that includes determining what site- and source-specific plants will make up the energy sector. Both the majority opinion and the concurrence refused to buy this reading of the statute. In the majority’s view, EPA can only set standards within the bounds of a given energy source’s existing “system.” To the dissent, “system” means, well, the whole power industry, with which EPA can tinker like some distant autocrat orchestrating shutdowns of coal plants, and pop-ups of wind and solar farms. The dissent even argues that the EPA could “simply require[e] coal plants to become natural gas plants under this power to determine ‘best systems.’” The majority demurs, eyebrows raised, noting that the agency has never ordered anything remotely like that, and “we doubt it could.” The 1970 Section 111(d) only empowers EPA to guide States in “establishing standards of performance” for “existing source[s],” not to direct existing sources to effectively cease to exist.”

The majority recognized that EPA’s seizure of life and death control over the power plants of America is “eyebrow raising,” invoking a well-established line of precedent which rejects such self-conferred expansions of agency power. For example, in 2000, the FDA could not self-assert power to regulate tobacco. More recently, the Court ruled that the Centers for Disease Control had been given no power by Congress to regulate state housing policy and invalidated CDC’s shocking nationwide shutdown of state court evictions. The Court must enforce these guardrails, or our polity will be at the mercy of bureaucrats gone wild, as our national experience of the plague years vividly demonstrated, at incalculable and continuing cost to Americans.

The majority also explicitly invoked the Major Questions Doctrine, which counsels that Congress must decide such major law and policy questions, not agencies straying far out of their regulatory lane. In doing so, it quoted two respected scholars of the administrative state’s witty formulation: agencies only have the powers expressly given to them by Congress, and their organic statutes are not an “open book to which the agency [may] add pages and change the plot line.”

The Court’s decision to read “system” in this narrow, sensible manner rather than endorse EPA’s grandiose vision (that, by the way, no one seriously believes Congress conferred upon it in 1970), has resulted in a firestorm. Heightened rhetoric swirls around West Virginia: President Biden described the decision as “devastating,” accusing the Court of “sid[ing] with special interests that have waged a long-term campaign to strip away our right to breathe clean air.” “Supreme Court Declares War on Governing” gasped Vanity Fair. “The U.S. Supreme Court has declared war on the Earth’s Future,” keened The Guardian. Mainstream media and the climate change clerisy have accused the Supreme Court of a meanspirited, anti-environment, military attack on the planet and administrative governance. The Twittersphere is abuzz with doomsday.

Deconstructing the Dissent

The stridency that now pervades the public discourse disturbingly starts with the first words of the dissent, which incant the almost religious tenets of the Climate Change Creed, prefaced with its solemn assertion that those tenets “are no longer subject to serious doubt.”

And what are these tenets? Unequivocal, not-to-be-questioned human influence in global warming. This malign human influence brings death, coastal inundation, and erosion, severer and severer hurricanes, floods, droughts, ecosystem destruction, and disruptions in the food supply. Children born in 2022 will witness the Eastern seaboard slide into the Atlantic. This weather may “force mass migration, political crises, civil unrest, and even state failure.” By the year 3000, 4.6 million excess yearly deaths could be caused by climate change.

The Supreme Court declined to accede to “experts” flexing unilateral power to control the energy sector.

This parade of horribles serves to distract the reader from noticing that the very next sentence of Justice Kagan’s dissent is untrue. She asserts that in 1970, “Congress charged EPA with addressing those potentially catastrophic harms” by enacting Section 111 of the Clean Air Act. Nonsense. The very text of the statutory provision provides that EPA must apply best systems to “existing sources.”

Moreover, in the 1970s, the scientific consensus was that the climate was facing another ice age, with Newsweek reporting “a significant chilling of the world’s climate, with evidence accumulating ‘so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.’ … shorter growing seasons and poor crop yields, famine, and shipping lanes blocked by ice, perhaps to begin as soon as the mid-1980s. Meteorologists … were ‘almost unanimous’ in the opinion that our planet was getting colder.” Some alarmist scientists were offering up potential solutions such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot—by human agency! So much for relying upon experts! Congress simply did not have the dissent’s apocalyptic vision in mind—at least not as to warming—in 1970. Clearing smog was Congress’ sensible and admirable goal.

Kagan’s dissent ends with a glowering scold: “The stakes here are high,” followed by: “The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.” The dissent is right that the stakes are high, but dead wrong in its unfair accusation. The majority and concurrence have insisted that Congress must be the decisionmaker on these major questions, and that neither the Court nor an “expert” agency—nor a President with a pen and phone—can be the decider.

The majority’s quiet, reasoned insistence upon observing the foundational principles of representative government and healthy skepticism of the EPA’s lunge for power—at a time when those foundational concepts are being flouted by agencies prepared to expand far beyond their remit, could not be more important and timely.

Most important constitutional cases boil down to “Who decides.” We all know that Congress is supposed to make the law. Agencies must never make such momentous decisions. The lawmaking power is vested in Congress, and it uniquely has the tools to gather facts, engage in debate, weigh the myriad interests at stake, and then legislate—or not. And it is always accountable, along with the President in the exercise of presentment power—for the outcome. In sum, this case is about one thing, and one thing only: Consent of the governed.

It’s that simple. EPA’s own calculations of the costs of the CPP acknowledged billions in compliance costs, higher energy prices, the retirement of dozens of coal-fired plants, and the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs across economic sectors. If you are a resident of West Virginia who finds your coal-powered plant shut down, jobs lost, utility costs, and gas and food prices skyrocketing by double digits, who can you blame? If the dissent had its way, these economic displacements would be imposed by distant, unaccountable bureaucrats who, by the way, may be just as fallible as any politician as to the wisdom of a plan entailing such massive scientific, social, environmental, and economic impacts. This is why law-making should be hard and made through a combination of powers of the two politically accountable branches.

Sri Lanka

Speaking of the fallibility of experts, international news would soon abound in irony. Just two weeks after the dissent’s litany of catastrophe, news of, wait for it, “significant disruptions in the food supply … mass migration … political crises, civil unrest and … even state failure” erupted from Sri Lanka. The cause, as reported by Michael Shellenberger:

The underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders … fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture and “ESG,” which refers to investments made following supposedly higher Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria. Sri Lanka has a near-perfect ESG score of 98—higher than Sweden (96) and the United States (51). What does having such a high ESG score mean? In short, it meant that Sri Lanka’s two million farmers were forced to stop using fertilizers and pesticides, laying waste to its critical agricultural sector. …

The numbers are shocking.

One-third of Sri Lanka’s farmlands were dormant in 2021 due to the fertilizer ban. Over 90 percent of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85 percent experienced crop losses. Rice production fell 20 percent and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose fivefold. All this had a dramatic impact on the more than 15 million people of the country’s 22 million people who are directly or indirectly dependent on farming.

Americans should rejoice that its Supreme Court declined to accede to “experts” flexing unilateral power to control the energy sector—to be followed in short order by ESG dominion by a Wall Street regulator. Understanding that this flawed ideology directly led to the tragic humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka is essential to the exercise of enlightened franchise by Americans refusing to submit to the wokeism that has already imposed enormous costs upon Americans. The SEC’s ESG rules suffer from the same flaws as the CPP—a lack of statutory authority, arrogation of agency power over a major—and debated—question, and enormous economic disruption that would affect nearly every aspect of the country’s economic and political future. The principles restored by the Court in West Virginia foreclose SEC’s costly ESG regulation.

The Spirit of Liberty

In 1944, as the world was engulfed in the most widespread and destructive war in history, brought on by the horrors of unchecked autocratic rule, Judge Learned Hand tried to define what comprised the spirit of liberty.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit that seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.

In other words, “Experts, bureaucrats, administrators, consider that you might be wrong!” David Mamet notes that when the experts get it wrong, it is the rest of us who pay. As he puts it, [t]he virus here is government—or at least the incompetents who advise our rulers and cannot admit the legitimacy of dissension,” an all-too-apt description of the tone and reliance upon the expertise of the West Virginia dissent. The Covid years have been a crash course in the incalculable and enduring damage caused by turning government over to experts. The humanitarian disaster in Sri Lanka is a sobering here-and-now reminder that autocratic imposition of expertise by unchecked bureaucrats comes not only at great cost to a society’s well-being and economy but also to its liberty.

*****

This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.

Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.