If America has learned anything from foreign entanglements over the past century, surely it is this: enemy conflicts must be engaged only if our vital interests are at stake. A war worth fighting must have clear objectives and a path to victory.
Clearly, in WWII, all options save winning were unthinkable. We did win and the modern classical liberal order was created.
We had no such resolve in Vietnam. Worried about riling China and with growing domestic programs to fund, we fought not to win but for containment and so lost to a determined foe. America was humiliated, forfeiting immense blood and treasure as well as our national self-confidence.
Meanwhile, the Cold War spanned 45 fretful years during which the world became more dangerous. Neither side could afford to fall behind in the nuclear arms race when Mutually Assured Destruction was our defense against annihilation.
Ronald Reagan’s idea of actually defeating the Evil Empire turned the tide. Massive arms superiority and strategic defense weaponry convinced the Soviets that future efforts were futile.
The Middle East wars were fought without particular strategic goals and no endgame. We seem to believe we could mitigate Islamist terrorism through nation-building and intervention in centuries-old inter-tribal conflicts. We finally beat a disgraceful retreat with little to show for our losses.
Yet these lessons of history seem lost on our current administration‘s response in Ukraine. We don’t want our proxy, Ukraine, to lose but we’re not committed to winning either.
The heroic Ukrainians have fought to a virtual standoff. Yet, as a result of our indecisiveness, the outcome remains in doubt.
The seminal question was: why get involved at all? Is the Russian aggression basically a regional dustup, like our Middle East debacle? Or does a hegemonically ambitious autocrat represent an existential threat, analogous to the prelude to WW II?
Most Americans seem to realize this conflict has implications beyond the ancient Russian/Ukrainian grudges. If Russia successfully breaches Ukrainian sovereignty, it will be the end of the international rules-based order that has sustained general peace and prosperity since WWII. Moreover, if nuclear weapons or their threat are decisive, it will embolden rogue states everywhere, including China and Iran.
President Zelensky has pleaded many times for faster delivery of air defenses and anti-missile systems. Yet our aid to Ukraine has been halting and inadequate. Not until late April did the Biden administration announce it would ship 90 desperately needed howitzers.
When the US finally decided to provide Ukraine with MLR (multiple launch rocket) systems, to defend against Russia’s unremitting air attacks, only MLRs with a 70 km range, not the 300 km range necessary to reach Russian targets, were provided.
Too little, too late. Ukraine’s foreign minister lamented that if Ukraine had received more weapons earlier the situation today would be “much different… much better.
Meanwhile, the unimaginable human toll, the death, and destruction of Ukraine continues to mount. Last month, the UN development agency announce that if the war continues, an astounding 90% of Ukrainians would be at or below poverty levels.
According to the UN refugee agency, 13 million people have been displaced, which has serious political and military consequences. When Ukrainians are scattered, it makes unity more difficult and Russian control easier. A hollowed-out Ukraine also enables Russia to take more Ukrainian territory at the war’s end.
US hesitation to provide more robust help to Ukraine is based on the fear of escalation and possibly nuclear war with Russia. Some have urged Ukraine into an armistice that involves territorial concessions.
But that wouldn”t stop the bear. Instead, it would incentivize further military incursions. Over-caution could actually increase the possibility of escalation.
Biden and NATO have repeatedly ruled out direct military involvement and nuclear deployment without getting any concessions in return. Our weakness sends a message to Russia and other aggressors that threatening nuclear weapons works to soften western resistance.
The free world must decide what it stands for and how to meet this moment. If we don’t thwart Russian ambitions now, it will likely get more dangerous in the future. Ukraine, for their survival and ours, deserves protection now.
****
Thomas C. Patterson, MD is a retired Emergency Medicine physician, Arizona state Senator and Arizona Senate Majority Leader in the ’90s. He is a former Chairman, Goldwater Institute.
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Twitter suspended well-known clinical psychologist and author Jordan Peterson for “misgendering” actor Elliot Page on Wednesday.
The tweet that got Peterson suspended read “Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.”
Peterson’s daughter, Mikhaila, announced the suspension on her own Twitter, tagging Elon Musk and adding that the site is “Definitely not a free speech platform at the moment.”
Peterson used Page’s birth name and the “her” pronoun, but the Canadian actor now goes by Elliot and identifies as a man.
Twitter informed Peterson that his comments violated their rule against hateful conduct, which bars users from “promoting violence” against other people for, among other things, “gender identity.”
Peterson rose to international prominence in part because he opposed Canadian Government Bill C-16 on free speech grounds, which he arguedwould open up the floodgates for prosecuting people who refuse to use a transgender person’s preferred pronouns.
Peterson “quit Twitter” in May after what he called an ‘endless flood of vicious insults’ that he has not received anywhere else, but ostensibly had returned to the site since then.
Twitter did not respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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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Pictured: Ayatollah Ahmad Alam al-Hoda, a senior cleric in Mash’had who is considered a possible successor to Iran’s present “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons/Fars News/CC BY 4.0)
While Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are marketing their authoritarian rules as alternatives to a “moribund” Western democratic system, the Khomeinist mullahs in Tehran are also throwing their hat, sorry turban, into the ring as contenders for leading a New World Order.
An early version of the mullahs’ bid came almost 30 years ago when Hojat al-Islam Muhammad Khatami suggested that, by separating religion from politics, the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe had created a world order that fomented wars, slavery, and colonialism. The way to salvation was to restore religious control of politics by granting theologians a role in the leadership.
The new version is offered by Ayatollah Ahmad Alam al-Hoda, a senior cleric in Mash’had and one of the four or five turbaned heads considered as possible successors to Iran’s present “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The father-in-law of Iranian President Ayatollah Ebrahim Raisi, Alam al-Hoda also has close relations with the military-security apparatus often labeled as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Trying to cast himself as the ideologue of the regime, Alam al-Hoda spelled out his world vision in a lengthy sermon in the “holy city”. According to him, the era of modernism that began with the Westphalian treaties, American independence, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution is over as we enter the post-modern world.
“The world that was enslaved by modernity is crumbling,” he said. “A post-modern world is on the horizon; one that only Islamic Iran can lead.”
Alam al-Hoda claims that the United States is falling apart with some states, notably Texas, seeking secession and that Israelis are fleeing their “promised land” in ever-growing numbers.
But why should Iran emerge as the new world leader?
Alam al-Hoda’s answer is stark: Today the Islamic Republic of Iran is the only standard-bearer of true Muhammadan Islam.
Out of the 57 countries with Muslim-majority populations, Iran is “the only country which has an Islamic government in the true meaning of the term”.
Other nations need not convert to Islam to benefit from the “Islamic model”. In fact, some non-Muslim nations, notably Venezuela, have already done so.
Mohsen Shaterzadeh, former ambassador of the Iran to Venezuela, says that Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution was “inspired by the teachings of Imam Khomeini”. Chavez, who made several trips to Iran, learned how to rule a nation in a just way.
“Chávez finally came to believe in the Hidden Imam and developed a deep devotion to Supreme Guide Imam Khamenei,” Shaterzadeh says.
Iran’s “Islamic model” has also won “mass followings” in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, where the movement for establishing a “truly Muhammadan system” continues to grow.
This “we’re-the-most-beautiful” illusion of the mullahs may be dismissed as an acute form of limerence. The problem is that it prevents Iran from acquiring a realistic portrayal of itself that is not reflected in the falsifying mirror of fanatical fantasy.
A true picture of Iran under the Islamic Republic may attract some sympathy for the sufferings of a nation held hostage in a wayward ship on a stormy sea.
If you thought that was an outburst of poetic conceit, listen to what another ayatollah, Ahmad Jannati, said only last week.
“People say that because of inflation, they cannot afford more than one meal a day,” he said. “What is wrong with that? One meal is a blessing, as there are people who cannot have even that. In Islam, the rule is to bear all hardship to protect those who protect the faith it from its enemies.”
In other words, Alam al-Hoda’s “postmodern Islamic model” is “government by starvation.”
Starvation isn’t the only “blessing” that the Islamic Republic offers.
Iran accounts for 50% of all executions in the world although the country represents only 1.1% of the world population. More than 40% of all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience are in Iran.
Each year, an average of 150,000 highly-educated Iranians, among them 3,500 medical doctors, leave the country to join the estimated 8 million (almost 10% of the population) already in exile.
According to Transparency International, the Islamic Republic is also in the world’s top league for corruption. According to Tehran’s official reports, between 2016 and 2020, embezzlement and bribery rose by 300%. Only last month, a $400 million embezzlement case was reported among 85 other cases of “big corruption” being investigated.
Official reports show that some 80 unnamed but presumably powerful figures owe untold sums to state-owned banks on the basis of non-existent collateral.
Flight of capital is estimated to be between $22 billion and $30 billion a year. With Iran’s currency becoming virtually worthless and the Tehran Stock Exchange regarded as a den of thieves, even small savers try to take whatever money they have out as quickly as possible.
According to official estimates, more than 1.5 million Iranians have purchased property in Turkey, while a further 1.2 million have invested in real estate in Georgia, Armenia and Serbia.
At the same time, again according to official estimates, a quarter of Iranians live in sub-standard housing, including 13 million trapped in shanty towns.
A few weeks ago, the collapse of a tall building in southwest Iran claimed at least 80 lives. The authorities admit that the permits needed to build the tower were obtained through bribery. Worse still, the mayor of Tehran warns that there are almost 500 shabbily built towers in the capital that cannot be razed, presumably because they belong to powerful regime figures.
Iran’s position on the global life expectancy chart has fallen to 49th place compared to 38th in 1977.
Iran is also facing a downward demographic curve, with a significant number of young people unable to get married and raise families.
In 2021, then-President Hassan Rouhani’s government estimated that 25% of Iranians lived below the poverty line while another 30% had “a good life.” The remaining people were JAMS or “just-about-managing” on the edge of poverty.
Add to all that the challenges that average Iranians face in social, cultural, and political domains, and Alam al-Hoda’s “Islamic model” is unlikely to find a big market across the globe.
Those who supposedly love that model in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen are simply paid to sing its praise.
According to former Iranian Foreign Minister Muhammad-Javad Zarif, Tehran spent around $35 billion a year to feed its supporters in Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa, the four Arab capitals that Iran controls, according to Ayatollah Ali Yunesi.
Alam al-Hoda and his ilk are caught in the Walter Mitty syndrome, after a Danny Kaye film in which an ordinary man imagines himself in a series of heroic roles.
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Nothing speaks of vacation more than having empty pockets, no keys, no cell phone, no TV, and no driving.
After departing the barren landscapes of Iceland and the Faroe Islands, we arrived in the lush landscape of Norway. Scandinavia (of which Iceland and Faroe Islands are part) always fascinates as they are countries comprised largely of homogenous populations except for the recent influx of foreigners, mainly Muslims, brought to Europe by the diktat of Germany’s Angela Merkel.
Arriving in Norway was a lesson in not believing what one reads on the internet. Two things I read were that you should not look Norwegians in the eye and that they really do not like tourists with Americans at the top of the list. That would make sense since we are quite a noisy crowd who like to look people in the eye and fist-pump new acquaintances. Both points were disproved completely. We found Norwegians to be friendly and helpful and not just at hotels and restaurants. Most spoke English and well.They should since there are more people of Norwegian heritage in the U.S. than in Norway.
As much as we plan a trip, we often change our itinerary. Though Oslo is quite a beautiful city devoid of graffiti, litter, homeless, and plenty of colorful flowers sprucing up the walks through the shopping/restaurant districts, we decided we wanted to see some of the rest of Norway and their famous fjords. We let the hotel know we were jumping off for a day and going to Bergen (Norway’s second-largest city).
Train rides are a wonderful way to see large swaths of a country. It is extremely hard to do so in the U.S. because our beautiful country is so massive. For us, driving our fabulous highway system developed in the 1950’s is the way to go.
We certainly were graced with plenty of trees, unlike our previous destinations. Trees, trees everywhere. And, my God, Norway has a lot of lakes. It seemed like we were looking at one long Lake Tahoe with the water and trees. Anytime a lake ended on the left side of the train, one started on the right side.
Then the train began to get colder. And we hit an endless blanket of white even though it was late April. Many of the people on the train had skis with them and dressed accordingly. There is a reason that Norway wins the most medals by far at the Winter Olympics. It made me think of Malcolm Gladwell’s theory of 10,000 hours. These people have so much more time to practice their winter sports because they can ski and do other winter sports nearly all year round.
The fjords were the icing on the cake for the wonderful trip across Norway ending up in Bergen.
At times one must be a resolute traveler. We took a taxi to the train station, the train, a bus, the boat ride through the fjords, a bus back to the train station where the train was kaput, and the train people hired a taxi for the one-and-a-half-hour drive to Bergen. Then we got up and went to the airport where our plane was delayed three hours. I literally educated the Norwegian staff on the boat about the Bacharach-David song performed by Dionne Warwick, Trains, Boats, and Planes.
We were surprised to see many taxis in Oslo are Teslas. We talked to a driver (one of several from Pakistan) who said the cars are imported tax free and there are charging stations everywhere that take 15 minutes for a fill-up. They can go up to 500 kilometers which is about 311 miles. It is nice to know that the Pakistanis have relocated to Norway to be taxi drivers like in America. Makes you wonder if they have taxi driver training schools in Islamabad.
We took another train to Stockholm for another stay. After walking around, I asked the Beautiful Wife whether she had every read about the city being as magnificent as we found it to be. As a travel consultant, she reads all those travel magazines and blogs. The answer is no. We agreed the city is stunning and a hidden gem that few talk about. We went to a restaurant that happened to be run by a Greek who had been in Stockholm for a long time. He sat and joined us. We asked him why this city is not more renowned. He searched for the proper English words and said he thought it is because the Swedes are “humble people.” Well, the secret is out now.
Governments see something that work elsewhere and then think it will work in their municipality, county, or state. In Stockholm there is a huge population of bike, scooter (the little skinny ones like from Bird) and other kinds of devices to get around. Stockholm is a compact city. Their mass transit makes great sense. In Los Angeles bike paths are a disastrous waste. LA is so spread out the system will never work. The scooters are annoyances as they are left randomly in front of people’s homes or businesses. In the meantime, the residents of LA spent a fortune to lay out the barely used bike paths. Another idealistic failure of our local government not thought through. But they will remain until granny is riding her bike to the store.
Scandinavia once again was a fabulous experience.
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A landmark June 30 Supreme Court ruling in favor of plaintiff states in West Virginia v. EPA will have enormously profound and far-reaching separation of powers implicationslimiting de facto lawmaking powers of executive branch-controlled regulatory agencies.
Whereas certain special interest groups are vehemently criticizing the court’s 6-3 vote determination as “anti-environmental,” this is a grossly unfair mischaracterization of deliberative substance.
Rather, the majority ruling was founded on a central constitutional principle that Congress alone has legislative authority to decide major policy issues with sweeping impacts.
A related legal “Major Question Doctrine” (MOD) holds that federal agencies must point to clear authorization from Congress before exercising new significant and transformative regulatory powers.
The controversy that gave rise to this case and decision can readily be traced back to a war on coal agenda clearly articulated by then-Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama during a 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board: “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
That promise was echoed by then-presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who also pledged that, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
The subsequent Obama-Biden administration, including Clinton as secretary of state, accomplished great progress toward that goal under the auspices of its congressionally approved Clean Air Act declaring CO2 plant food a climate “pollutant.”
Although the 2015 Obama “Clean Power Plan” (CPP) that would have required states to reduce CO2 emissions from the generation of electricity primarily by forcing them to shift away from coal-fired plants never took effect, regulatory pressures were nevertheless very successful.
The U.S. coal industry lost 50,000 jobs during Obama’s first term, and another 33,000 during his second…about 11,000 in his last year alone.
By the end of Obama’s presidency, at least 400 coal mines had been shuttered.
Although the Supreme Court had blocked CPP implementation in 2016 by a 5-4 vote, the legal fight continued. After Donald Trump took office, and his EPA repealed the Obama-era plan altogether, 22 mainly Democrat states, the District of Columbia, and some of the nation’s largest cities sued back for its regulatory reintroduction.
In the recent West Virginia case joined by 18 mostly Republican-led states and coal companies, the Supreme Court ruled that CPP exceeded the authority Congress granted to EPA in the Clean Air Act which had been broadly interpreted by the agency as allowing a “beyond the fence line” approach.
Removing the original “inside the fence line” limit essentially allows EPA to fashion any “system” it chooses, leaving every energy production and user industry vulnerable to periodic politically directed White House whims which preferentially dictate winners and losers
This overreach would have allowed EPA to set standards that are impossible to meet at coal-fired plants, using a national cap-and-trade program covering all electricity production, grid management, and consumer use.
If allowed, EPA’s Clean Air Act would have been transformed to enable the agency to impose regulations cloaked as “environmental protection” that put them unaccountably in charge of our nation’s entire energy industry.
To be clear, the June 30 SCOTUS decision does not reverse the court’s earlier ruling authorizing EPA to regulate greenhouse gases — primarily interpreted to mean CO2 emissions — as “air pollutants” under the Clean Air Act.
According to the ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts: “…the only interpretive question before us, and the only one we answer, is more narrow; whether the ‘best system of emission reduction’ identified by EPA in the Clean Power Plan was within the authority granted to the Agency in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act. For the reasons given, the answer is no.”
Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion stated that while “capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,”’ the Clean Air Act nevertheless doesn’t give EPA the authority to do so.
“A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body,” he wrote.
The West Virginia v. EPA ruling comes at a particularly critical time when the current Biden administration is routinely using federal agencies under its control to unilaterally usurp and/or ignore congressional powers and authority in other major policy arenas.
Examples include Homeland Security’s transparently open illegal migrant southern border policy, Department of Interior withholdings of federal oil and gas leases and permits, and the January Supreme Court blockage of an OSHA COVID vaccine-or-test rule for employees of large private companies.
The West Virginia ruling should not, however, be viewed as exclusively a conservative victory. Looking forward, American democracy is a sure winner.
Let’s credit some wise advice from Justice Stephen Breyer, a Bill Clinton nominee generally associated with the liberal wing of the court who is retiring this very same day on June 30.
In his book “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics” (2021), Justice Breyer wrote: “The accumulation of powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
*****
This article was published by CFACT, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and is reproduced with permission.
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Attorneys for former President Donald Trump reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to Republican Arizona Senate candidate Mark Brnovich, ordering the state attorney general to stop using Trump’s “name, image, and/or likeness” in his fundraising appeals, according to The Washington Post.
“Your use of President Trump’s name, image, and/or likeness is likely to deceive individuals into believing President Trump supports, endorses, or otherwise promotes your candidacy for U.S. Senate in Arizona — he does not,” an attorney for Trump wrote to the Brnovich campaign, The Washington Post reported Monday.
The Brnovich campaign did not immediately respond to The Daily Caller’s request for comment on the matter.
Trump has repeatedly criticized Brnovich for the attorney general’s announcement in the aftermath of the 2020 election that he saw “no evidence, there are no facts that would lead anyone to believe that the election results will change.” The former president described Brnovich as a “disappointment,” claiming in his endorsement of Masters that Brnovich “understands what took place in the 2020 Presidential Election, and that it was Rigged and Stolen.”
Many Republican fundraisers use Trump’s picture and quotes in their fundraising requests, although the former president has sought to crack down on the use of his image. Trump sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Republican National Committee in March 2021, claiming that the organization did not have permission to use his name, image, and likeness for the purpose of fundraising. The RNC declined to stop, with an attorney noting that Trump is a public figure and that the organization may “refer to public figures as it engages in the core, First Amendment-protected political speech.”
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 First Amendment to the Constitution provides in clear, unmistakable language that “Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. This rule applies to the States under the Fourteenth Amendment. Although one might suppose that the clarity of the Free Exercise Clause (as it is commonly known) would deter unscrupulous politicians from restricting religious freedom, that has not been the case in California. Gavin Newsom, the far-Left governor of California, seized the opportunity afforded by the Plandemic to prohibit and outlaw religious services during the Plandemic’s duration — or at least until Newsom decided in his absolute and sole discretion to relax the restrictions. Here is a man who lacks either the wit to understand the Constitution or the integrity to be guided by it.
It was during this season of Newsom’s outlawing of the normal and customary practice of religion (that is, religious services inside a house of worship with the congregation present) that I, my wife, my son, and my mother-in-law went to a public park to pray. We took turns reciting passages from the Old and New Testaments, sang a few hymns, and engaged in silent prayer. The park was nearly deserted, and no one protested what we were doing or took steps to stop us. We were free to pray. In that regard, we were more fortunate than Joseph A. Kennedy, an almost 20-year U.S. Marine Corps veteran and a high school football coach in Bremerton, Washington. Coach Kennedy had the temerity to quietly pray to his Creator after the end of football games, and for that act he was fired by the Bremerton School District and its religion-hating apparatchiks. Had he merely taken a knee to protest alleged social injustice ala Colin Kaepernick, he undoubtedly would have been applauded by the School District and permitted to retain his position as football coach. But because prayer is not welcome at Bremerton school football events as far as these apparatchiks are concerned, he was fired.
We should all be grateful to Coach Kennedy that he did not elect to acquiesce in this gross and tyrannical violation of his right to freely exercise his religion. Instead, this man of great courage and tenacity filed a complaint against the Bremerton School District in United States District Court. After much litigation, the case made its way to the Supreme Court of the United States. On June 27, 2022, the Supreme Court determined in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that the School District had unlawfully and unconstitutionally fired Coach Kennedy for silently praying after football games.
The facts in greater detail are these. Joseph Kennedy began working as a football coach at Bremerton High School in 2008. Like other coaches across the country, he made it a practice to give thanks to God through prayer on the playing field at the end of each game. For more than seven years, no one complained about this. However, in or around September 2015, Coach Kennedy’s prayers came to the attention of Bremerton School District’s top management (ironically, as the result of positive comments made by an opposing football coach). Anxious to suppress religion and prayer to God, the District used the cudgel of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to inform Kennedy that the District was taking away his right to freely exercise his religion because that right “must yield as far as necessary to avoid school endorsement of religious activities.” In response, Coach Kennedy told the District that he sought only the opportunity to wait until the game was over and the players had left the field and then to walk to midfield and say a short, private, personal prayer. The District responded with an ultimatum on October 16, 2015: Coach Kennedy was forbidden to engage in any overt actions that could appear to a reasonable observer to endorse prayer while he was on duty. One week later, the District sent him a letter telling him he could only pray after a game if he did so behind closed doors where no one could see him. After the final game of the season on October 26, 2015, Coach Kennedy went to midfield after the players had left to engage in post-game traditions, knelt alone, and offered a brief prayer. While he was praying, other adults — but no school-age team players — joined him.
The District then placed Coach Kennedy on administrative leave, gave him a poor performance evaluation for the 2015 season (even though he had received uniformly positive evaluations every year since 2008), and declined to renew his contract.
As mentioned earlier, Coach Kennedy filed a complaint in United States District Court, and litigation ensued. The lower federal courts, siding with the School District, generally treated the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitutional as a second-class right, subservient to the prohibitions of the Establishment Clause. But the Supreme Court of the United States thought otherwise. Justice Gorsuch, writing the opinion for a 6-3 majority, held that it was unconstitutional for the School District to effectively fire Coach Kennedy for praying. The First Amendment, according to the Supreme Court, doubly protects religious speech — both the Free Exercise Clause and the Free Speech Clause protect prayers and religious speech. The Supreme Court determined that “[t]he District disciplined him only for his decision to persist in praying quietly without his players after three games in October 2015.” (Italics in the original). In the majority’s view, the Free Exercise Clause “protects not only the right to harbor religious beliefs inwardly and secretly. It does perhaps its most important work by protecting the ability of those who hold religious beliefs of all kinds to live out their faiths in daily life through ‘the performance (or abstention from) physical acts.’”
Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Breyer and Kagan. Justice Sotomayor cited Wallace v. Jaffree (1985) (mandatory moment of silence for prayer unconstitutional); Engel v. Vitale (1962) (nonmandatory recitation of one-sentence prayer unconstitutional); and Lee v. Weisman (1992) (non-denominational general benediction at a graduation ceremony held unconstitutional).
The problem, though, is that these same precedents exhibit extreme judicial hostility toward religion so overwhelming that it effectively transforms the right to freely exercise one’s religion into a second-class right, something that the Left has been doing for decades with respect to the Second Amendment right to bear arms.Stated plainly, the argument that the government is establishing a religion whenever a governmental employee offers a nondenominational prayer in public is absurd on its face.
When the Constitution was drafted and ratified, the Framers had in mind England’s establishment of the Church of England as the official state church. This has never happened in the United States of America and, moreover, has never even come close to happening on any state-wide scale. Whenever an objection is raised that a particular policy or event violates the Establishment Clause, the question that should be asked is “what religion is the government seeking to establish?” The Roman Catholic Church? The Baptist Church? The Jewish faith? The Islamic faith? Hinduism? Buddhism? Unless the proponent of the argument that the Establishment Clause is being violated can point to a specific religion that is being “established” in the 18th-century sense of such term (in other words, England’s establishment of the Church of England as the official state religion), the argument should be summarily rejected, and there should be a finding that no violation of the Establishment Clause has occurred or is occurring.
Thus, a law that provides school funding for Catholic schools but not Jewish or Hindu schools would cross the boundary and be unconstitutional, but a law providing funding for all religious schools irrespective of the denomination would pass muster. Similarly, a non-denominational invocation or prayer by a government employee at a public gathering does not violate the Establishment Clause because no particular religion is being established. Although God-hating atheists in our country undoubtedly would disagree, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment does not require us to abandon prayers to the Almighty in public discourse.
It’s time to end judicial hostility to religion and the tendency of courts to view the right to freely exercise one’s religion as a second-class right. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District goes part of the way toward this objective, but more Supreme Court case law is needed.
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 January 6 show trial is partly about persecuting political opponents. But it’s also about covering up the truth of the 2020 election.
The purpose of the January 6 committee is to further the lie that there was nothing seriously wrong with the 2020 election and to criminalize any questioning of the election. The January 6 riot gives the committee a nice hook, but that’s not what they really care about.
They want to prevent you from admitting the election was irregular, faulty, or anything less than the most perfect election in the history of mankind, and from supporting people who fought against those irregularities. In service of this goal, the January 6 committee repeatedly lied about the actual claims Donald Trump supporters have made about the flaws in the election.
The January 6 Committee is conducting a show trial, not a criminal one. Show trials, common in authoritarian regimes, are held for propaganda purposes, to punish political opponents, and to cover up the truth of what the regime has done.
Democrats’ show trial is completely one-sided. The members on the committee were appointed exclusively by Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. There are zero Republican-appointed members. In fact, Pelosi refused to allow the top Republicans Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy picked for the committee — an unprecedented violation of House rules and norms.
No one represents the accused or advocates for their rights. No cross-examination or presentation of defense has been allowed from the targets of the trial. The committee does not follow House rules on evidence or witness depositions. The so-called investigation has declared off-limits any good-faith inquiry into issues that contradict their persecution, whether a look at what led to the lack of security by Capitol police forces or a look at the legitimate concerns about the unique and novel way the 2020 election was conducted.
The show trial is deeply and profoundly un-American. This week’s “surprise” hearing has already imploded under the weight of the inaccurate testimony given by young staff assistant Cassandra Hutchinson. But last Thursday’s episode also deserves scrutiny for the lies it contained.
That hearing was focused on Jeffrey Clark, a Department of Justice (DOJ) official during the Trump administration who had proposed more aggressive investigative and legal efforts in the controversial aftermath of the 2020 election than many of his peers. Incidentally, among the growing concerns about a ream of false statements given is a report that Hutchinson also lied about Clark.
The Misdirection On ‘Fraud’
The “storyline” for the committee’s June 23 televised spectacle revolved around a letter that Clark drafted and wanted other DOJ officials to sign and send to the leadership of the Georgia state legislature. Here’s a portion of Rep. Liz Cheney’s loaded remarks about this. Before reading them, it should be noted that it has already been shown that Cheney repeatedly lied about DOJ lawyer Ken Klukowski throughout the hearing:
Neither Mr. Clark nor Mr. Klukowski had any evidence of widespread election fraud, but they were quite aware of what Mr. Trump wanted the department to do. Jeff Clark met privately with President Trump and others in the White House and agreed to assist the president without telling the senior leadership of the department who oversaw him.
As you will see, this letter claims that the US Department of Justice’s investigations have ‘Identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states, including the state of Georgia.’ In fact, Donald Trump knew this was a lie. The Department of Justice had already informed the president of the United States repeatedly that its investigations had found no fraud sufficient to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The words fraud or fraudulent were used some 50 times in Thursday’s hearing, typically in the way they’re used in the excerpt above. The Democrat-appointed members would claim that Clark was alleging election fraud and, further, that everything about the election had been fully investigated and there was no evidence of problems with the election.
There are two major problems with Cheney’s argument. First, if she had read Clark’s letter, she would have noticed that while it did discuss major identified problems with the election potentially affecting the outcome, it never once alleged fraud. Second, it is highly debatable that the problems with the election were ever competently investigated or even understood.
If you look at the actual letter Clark drafted for discussion, he referenced “various irregularities,” “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election,” and “irregularities, sworn to by a variety of witnesses.” He referenced a report arising from Georgia Senate hearings that had taken sworn testimony and affidavits from many people about the chaotic and troubling administration of the Georgia election.
The complaints included problems with ballot custody, inability to monitor vote tabulation, inadequately maintained voter lists, and the counting of ballots from ineligible voters. The testimony even included something that would become a massive concern of election integrity advocates — the private takeover of government election offices by Mark Zuckerberg-funded groups.
And Georgia really was a mess, Fulton County in particular. None of Fulton County’s respected Republican election commissioners voted to certify the election. They had numerous problems, including that the first certification vote was taken just hours after Fulton County was still finding, processing, and tabulating ballots.
During the run-off, thumb drives were accidentally left in voting machines, exacerbating their previous concerns about ballot custody and chain of command issues. The commissioners also were concerned that no chain of custody information had been provided to them, even after they asked, for the 38 drop boxes spread throughout the country. The commissioners were concerned that no meaningful efforts had taken place to verify signatures on mail-in ballots.
It is false to claim that these things were properly investigated or that, if they were, there was no evidence to support them. Many independent analysts have determined that the Zuckerberg-funded takeover of government election offices significantly affected the outcome of the election.
That was where nearly $450 million was given — with a focus on the Democrat areas of swing states — to help run Get Out The Vote efforts. In an election that came down to 43,000 votes across three states, it is not difficult to make an overwhelming case that the Zuckerberg funding alone was outcome determinative.
It would have been difficult to properly investigate that in the short time period after the election, but it’s absolutely false to say it was investigated, much less thoroughly.
More Than 12,000 Illegal Votes In Georgia
Clark also expressed in his draft letter a “troubling” concern over a lawsuit that was being slow-tracked by a Georgia judge. He urged action because, “Despite the action having been filed on December 4, 2020, the trial court there has not even scheduled a hearing on matter, making it difficult for the judicial process to consider this evidence and resolve these matters on appeal prior to January 6.”
His concern was extremely well-founded. That lawsuit, widely regarded at the time as being strong and based on legitimate election problems, ended up being vindicated. In their lawsuit, the Trump campaign claimed that tens of thousands of voters had moved without registering to vote in their new residence. To get the figures about changes of address, the campaign looked at the National Change of Address data set, a secure data set of information on people who have filed a change of address with the United States Postal Service.
Filing a change-of-address form with the post office doesn’t conclusively mean the person is no longer eligible to vote at his or her former address. Some of those address changes could be college students or military members serving elsewhere. They would still be eligible to vote at the address they changed their mail from being delivered to.
But many of them reflected permanent moves to new cities and states. In fact, with around 10 percent of the population moving each year, and inadequate maintenance of voter rolls, experts say there are literally millions of bogus registrations on voter rolls all over the country. Such a situation doesn’t necessitate fraud, but it does make the situation ripe for fraud or the illegal casting of votes.
There were around 122,000 Georgia voters in 2020 who told the Postal Service they were moving to a new county in Georgia with a “move effective date” of more than 30 days before the election and who failed to re-register in their new county in time to be eligible to vote in the general election.
The secretary of state specifically instructs, citing Georgia law, that doing this means “you have lost your eligibility to vote in the county of your old residence.” Voters are required to register in the new county. “Remember, if you don’t register to vote by the deadline, you cannot vote in that particular election,” the secretary of state instructed.
The vast majority of the 122,000 voters who moved obeyed the law and did not try to vote in their old county. But thousands of voters appeared to break the law by casting a vote in a county in which they didn’t live. Most did so by voting absentee ballot, albeit many by early in-person absentee voting rather than mail-in voting.
Nearly all of these voters appeared to have voted in the wrong state house district, and more than 85 percent appeared to have voted in the wrong state senate district. Nearly two-thirds appeared to have voted in the wrong congressional district. And all of them appeared to be illegal votes in all races, since they would be ineligible to vote by law. Those who made similar moves but did not register to vote at their new address, and therefore didn’t vote, had obeyed the law.
The issue is important because it shows “the folks who obeyed the law didn’t get to vote, and the folks who broke it did get to vote,” Mark Davis, a Republican data expert in Georgia who raised alarms about the problem, said last year. Davis was a fighter for election integrity in a state that could be lax about enforcing its basic laws. He drew attention to several problems, including vulnerabilities enabling double voting.
“For years and years and years, I’ve kind of been that nerd over there that will bore you to tears talking about election integrity,” he jokes. He’s been an expert witness in five different election cases, usually dealing with problems caused by failure to place voters in their proper municipal district or related to change-of-address issues.
Davis shared the information with the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, which has admitted the problem, although it made excuses for the admittedly illegal votes.
Incidentally, it was this lawsuit that was being discussed when President Trump told the secretary of state to “find” votes. That was wrongly characterized as the president trying to pressure someone to invent a finding of problematic votes. Here’s why.
The latest update on these illegal votes is that evidence indicates more than 12,000 illegal votes were cast in Georgia in the November 2020 general election — exceeding the 11,779 votes that separated Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The campaign knew that the problem of illegal voting may be more than the margin of victory that Biden, which would have meant that the state would grant relief.
But the campaign also knew their lawsuit was being slow-tracked and that it could take more than a year to get confirmation on the numbers without help from the secretary of state. They had also listed categories of other major problems potentially affecting the margin of victory.
They just needed the secretary of state’s office to care about enough of the illegal votes earlier. While at least this illegal voting portion of the campaign’s lawsuit was vindicated, it wasn’t vindicated in a timely enough fashion to matter.
Different Legal Strategies Are Not A Crime
The Soviet-style show trial has featured testimony from people in Trump’s administration who did not think it wise to keep challenging election results, particularly after the Electoral College had convened. I know and interviewed many of them for “Rigged,” my book on the 2020 election.
They found the post-election day legal efforts led by Trump to be poorly strategized and executed. I share details about some of those debacles in the book, particularly how Rudy Guiliani took a promising Pennsylvania case with superstar attorneys — about disparate treatment of voters — into a case about fraud, thereby ruining it. That decision also led judges in other states to get nervous and impatient about other cases.
It also increased anxiety among establishment attorneys who had previously been part of the legal effort. Many of these attorneys were also having their lives and reputations threatened by NeverTrump groups, who were posting personal information and sending mobs to harass them.
Trump administration officials had major concerns — prior to the election — about the lack of election integrity provided by the rush to widespread mail-in voting. For example, former Attorney General Bill Barr said in September 2020 that expansive mail-in voting was “playing with fire.”
But these officials also believed it wasn’t really the job of the Justice Department to pursue investigations about the issue. They were willing to look into various claims that were swirling about, but considered it to be more of a local or regional crime issue that could rise to the level of DOJ interest, rather than something that should be driven from the headquarters down.
The January 6 show trial has tried to suggest that problems with the 2020 election were thoroughly investigated. Evidence for the claim is lacking. Former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Bill McSwain has publicly said he was told by Barr to stand down from investigating, a claim Barr publicly denies. McSwain wrote Trump was “right to be upset about the way the Democrats ran the 2020 election in Pennsylvania — it was a partisan disgrace.”
He added, in a letter to Trump that was later publicized, “On Election Day and afterward, our Office received various allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities. As part of my responsibilities as U.S. Attorney, I wanted to be transparent with the public and, of course, investigate fully any allegations. Attorney General Barr, however, instructed me not to make any public statements or put out any press releases regarding possible election irregularities. I was also given a directive to pass along serious allegations to the State Attorney General for investigation — the same State Attorney General who had already declared that you could not win. I disagreed with the decision, but those were my orders. As a Marine infantry officer, I was trained to follow the chain of command and to respect the orders of my superiors, even when I disagree with them.”
Again, Barr denies this accounting. And he’s publicly said he did try to run down various allegations of fraud that were being bandied about.
Clark’s superiors at the Department of Justice did not want him to pursue his aggressive efforts, but he was also discussing the topic with their superior, the president himself. He tried to pursue a more aggressive strategy than the one that many DOJ officials thought prudent.
Reasonable people can see both sides here. Prudence — particularly so late in the game — is a huge issue. More tenacious fighting for election integrity is also virtuous. Many leaders up to and including Trump himself should have done far more — far earlier — to fight Democrats’ coordinated and widespread attacks on the integrity of the country’s election system. Many Republican officials were sounding the alarm in the months prior, but more should have been done to effectively fight before the election, including a legal strategy to fight the chaos, confusion, and corruption that was almost certainly going to occur.
But differing legal strategies are not crimes, no matter how much Pelosi and Cheney and their media bootlickers would like them to be. It is reasonable to oppose Clark’s strategy, but the letter causing so much dispute was not about fraud. It was about the many other problems affecting the integrity of the election. It was also — and it says this clearly on every page — a draft product for discussion. The letter urged state legislatures to ensure the integrity of their state’s elections when there was cause for concern. The Constitution does give that responsibility to the states.
The January 6 show trial is partly about persecuting political opponents. But it’s also about covering up the truth of the 2020 election. Turning questions about the many problems with the 2020 election into a crime is the type of thing that is done in third-world countries. Persecuting people who talk about it or try to do something about it is what you expect in corrupt authoritarian regimes. It is horrific to see it happening here.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio & Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.”
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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Editors’ Note: The following essay by The Prickly Pear’s Journalism Intern was written shortly before the historic Supreme Court decision on June 23rd in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. In that 6–3 ruling, the high court invalidated New York state’s tough concealed-carry gun permitting system with profound effects for the Second Amendment across the United States. Along with several other historic decisions announced over the past 10 days, SCOTUS has breathed life back into the U.S. Constitution for several of our fundamental rights as citizens, i.e., the First and Second Amendments, the guiding light of states’ rights (overturning Roe v. Wade) and limiting the always expanding regulatory overreach of the administrative (executive branch) state, i.e., the EPA, et al. There is much to be thankful for on this July 4th Day of Independence. Celebrate our precious liberty but resolve that as citizens of this Republic, ‘We the People’ will work to maintain it for all generations to follow.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
All the amendments are unquestionably valuable but the Second Amendment is arguably the most important. Without the Second Amendment, we would not be able to protect any of the other rights stated in the Constitution.
Many on the left claim the Second Amendment is obsolete because we no longer have militias. They are correct in saying we no longer have state or local militias. Rather, we have local, state and federal protection agencies such as police officers, National Guard, and the military. Why, then, would we need an amendment the left claims is no longer relevant in the 21st Century?
We need the Second Amendment because it was not only about a ‘well-regulated Militia’, but more essentially about ‘We the People’. The Second Amendment has two parts, dealing with two separate issues, both related to firearms.
America won the Revolutionary War in no small part because of Minute Men who were armed citizens. Minute Men were valuable because, as their name states, they were ready to fight in mere minutes. They didn’t have to ask the Continental Army for arms; they had their own. The Founders knew how valuable these men, together with the Continental Army, were to our fight. Without citizens owning guns, this fight would have been nearly impossible. The militiamen who fought and won our independence were armed citizens.
Each of the amendments were passed in the U.S. Senate and approved by the states before being added to the Bill of Rights. A proposal for the wording of the Second Amendment to the Senate could have inserted either “the common defense” or “for their common good” after “the right to keep and bear arms”. The Senate purposely rejected both of these proposals, with author and lawyer Stephen Halbrook noting “Rejection of both expressed an intent that keeping and bearing arms and assembly include private, as well as public, lawful purpose, and that the citizens, not the government, have the freedom to choose which arms to keep and for what purpose to assemble”. The Senate consciously did not limit the use of arms to defense, a common good, or the Militia. They wanted the people to make educated decisions for themselves, and the Senate knew Americans were capable of making those decisions.
The point is, the militia and the people are two different, yet related, statements within one amendment. The Founders knew the people needed guns just as much, if not more than the Militia – or today’s local, state and federal protection agencies. American citizens have the right to own firearms not to instigate violence, but to ensure peace, freedom, and safety.
How do you stop a bad guy with a gun committing a crime endangering a person or oneself? This is a question Second Amendment supporters regularly ask of gun-confiscation supporters. As Will Witt points out in a Man on the Street video, the only way to protect citizens and promote safety is to have good, law-abiding citizens with guns. This does not mean police officers, but armed citizens looking out for their families and the community.
As I learned at a Hillsdale College lecture, in a republic, the citizens are the state. Similarly, in a republic, bearing arms is a civic duty. The government is not separate from the people, the people are the government. We know how, and have the means to, protect ourselves from both domestic and foreign dangers and threats.
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, killing a total of 2,403 Americans, occurred on December 7, 1941. Only 68 of those deaths were citizen deaths. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese could have landed their forces to take the citizens of Hawaii hostage. They did not land because they knew American citizens had the right to bear arms, and many of them owned guns. They knew the gun-owning Americans could use their guns well and would fight for their families. Just the threat of an armed citizenry kept the residents of Hawaii safe.
An overwhelming majority of mass shootings transpire in gun-free zones. The only outcome of gun-free zones is the disarming of law-abiding citizens. Criminals carry out shootings in gun-free zones because, as written above, they know there will be no armed law-abiding citizens in those zones. Essentially, everyone in a gun-free zone is a sitting duck.
Yes, guns can injure and kill, but most importantly, guns protect. The gun doesn’t pull the trigger, a human does. The gun does not choose whom to kill, a human does. The naïve believe that denying law abiding citizens their constitutional right to own and possess firearms will somehow eliminate the criminal behavior and violence seen every day in our most highly gun-regulated cities and this will somehow magically fix these tragic and recurring problems. We should rather teach citizens from an early age why the Second Amendment is a fundamental right along with knowledge of gun safety and responsibility.
*****
Ellie Fromm is currently serving at The Prickly Pear as a Journalism Intern. Ms. Fromm is entering her senior year of high school and has been home schooled since preschool.
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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I’ll admit that I often look at national holidays as simply being an opportunity to spend more time with my family and forget to reflect on the reasons for the day off. With the American experiment frequently feeling like it is on the verge of collapse, we should spend some time between the 4th of July fireworks and the now way-too-expensive hotdogs to reflect on why our republic was designed the way it is and how it was supposed to function.
Though individually flawed and with many faults (as is true of all humans), the founders of this great republic collectively designed and implemented a truly brilliant form of government with separations of powers and checks and balances that strived to protect individuals from suffering under a distant despotic government.
What makes us Americans is not our race, religion, or a single defining culture but instead a shared belief in the cry for freedom put to pen 246 years ago and the resulting republican form of government secured by our constitution.
Of course, even before the dawn of our country on this continent, there have been truly horrific abuses of power and injustices born by individuals at the hands of those placed in positions of power. The most egregious stain on our country being slavery. Though some see these collective failings as reasons to blow up the institutions of our republic, they should instead serve as examples of why additional safeguards are needed to help fulfill the promise of the American experiment.
Some may believe that political expediency should guide our decisions using an ‘ends justify the means’ matrix, but the process of policy development and adherence to transparent and accountable governance is more important if we want policies to be lasting with strong public support and engagement.
It has probably been years since we read the documents that formed the basis of our governance. Though you probably don’t want homework during your 4th of July holiday, I encourage you to take some time to review these truly brilliant documents:
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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Governments, corporations, and elites have always been fearful of the power of a free press, because it is capable of exposing their lies, destroying their carefully crafted images, and undermining their authority. In recent years, alternative journalism has been growing and more people are relying on social media platforms as sources of news and information. In response, the corporate state, digital conglomerates, and the mainstream media have been increasingly supportive of the silencing and censoring of alternative media outlets and voices that challenge the official narrative on most issues.
At the recent World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, “Australian eSafety commissioner” Julie Inman Grant stated that “freedom of speech is not the same thing as a free for all,” and that “we are going to need a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online—from freedom of speech … to be free from online violence.” Meanwhile, the Canadian government is seeking to restrict independent media and the freedom of expression via the implementation of Bill C-11, which would allow it to regulate all online audiovisual platforms on the internet, including content on Spotify, Tik Tok, YouTube, and podcast clients.
Similarly, the UK is seeking to introduce an Online Safety Bill, the US “paused” the establishment of a Disinformation Governance Board following backlash, and the European Union approved its own Digital Services Act, all of which aim to limit the freedom of speech. Attempts by elites and politicians to silence dissenters and critical thinkers is not something new. In fact, history is full of examples of “the persecution of men of science, the burning of scientific books, and the systematic eradication of the intelligentsia of the subjected people.”
However, these current efforts to curtail freedom of speech and press by supposedly liberal governments are still somewhat ironic, given that even “the most intolerant of churches, the Roman Catholic Church, even at the canonization of a saint, admits, and listens patiently to, a ‘devil’s advocate.’ The holiest of men, it appears, cannot be admitted to posthumous honors, until all that the devil could say against him is known and weighed.”
The corporate state, digital conglomerates, and the mainstream media want to ensure that they have the exclusive authority to dictate people’s opinions, wants, and choices through their sophisticated propaganda techniques. To do so, they have even resorted to transforming falsehoods into truth. In fact, the word truth has already had its original meaning altered, as those who speak the truth on certain subjects are now regularly accused of spreading hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation.
Presently, truth is no “longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort, and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.”
However, modifying the definition of truth comes with the potential for great peril, as truth-seeking often contributes to human progress in that it leads to discoveries that ultimately benefit society at large. It should be noted that truth is by no means the only word whose meaning has been changed recently in order for it to serve as an instrument of propaganda; others include freedom, justice, law, right, equality, diversity, woman, pandemic, vaccine, etc. This is highly concerning, because such attempts at the “perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals” of the ruling class are expressed is a consistent feature of totalitarian regimes.
As a number of liberal-democratic governments increasingly move toward totalitarianism, they want people to forget that there is “the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.” According to them, “public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken public support.”
In fact, they believe that all views and opinions that might cast doubt or create hesitation need to be restricted in all disciplines and on all platforms. This is because “the disinterested search for truth cannot be allowed” when “the vindication of the official views becomes the sole object” of the ruling class. In other words, the control of information is practiced and the uniformity of views is enforced in all fields under totalitarian rule.
The suppression of freedom of the press, speech, expression, and thought means that current and future generations will be “deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” They are also at risk of becoming ignorant of the fact that the only way in which a person can know “the whole of a subject” is by “hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.” That is to say, current and future generations will be unaware that “the steady habit of correcting and completing” one’s own “opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it.”
At present, it is likely that the masses do not regard freedom of the press, speech, expression, and thought as being particularly important, because “the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another.” Nevertheless, no one should have the power and authority to “select those to whom” freedom of thought, enlightenment and expression is to be “reserved.”
In fact, John Stuart Mill went so far as to claim that “if all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” He further added that silencing the expression of an opinion is essentially an act of “robbing the human race,” which applies to both current and future generations. Even though the suppressors can deny the truth to people at a particular point in time, “history shows that every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.”
If current efforts to suppress freedom of the press, speech, expression, and thought to succeed, then the search for truth will eventually be abandoned and totalitarian authorities will decide what “doctrines ought to be taught and published.” There will be no limits to who can be silenced, as the control of opinions will be extended to all people in all fields. Accordingly, contemporary authoritarian policymakers need to be reminded about the crucial importance of freedom of speech, expression, and thought, which the US Supreme Court recognized in the 1957 case Sweezy v. New Hampshire when it ruled that
to impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made…. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die…. Our form of government is built on the premise that every citizen shall have the right to engage in political expression and association. This right was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Exercise of these basic freedoms in America has traditionally been through the media of political associations…. History has amply proved the virtue of political activity by minority, dissident groups, who innumerable times have been in the vanguard of democratic thought and whose programs were ultimately accepted. Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness in our society.
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The California Department of Justice broke its silence Wednesday after the names, driver’s license numbers, addresses, and other private information of thousands of gun owners in the state were leaked from a gun database.
The state Department of Justice is providing credit monitoring services for gun owners whose private information was exposed by the leak.
The leak exposed the private information of all gun owners who applied for a concealed carry permit between the years 2011 and 2021. The information exposed included the names, date of birth, gender, race, driver’s license number, addresses, and criminal history of the gun owners.
Thousands of civilians, including 244 judges and 420 reserve officers were exposed to the leak.
Information was compromised from the contents of five other gun registries, including the Assault Weapon Registry, Handguns Certified for Sale, Dealer Record of Sale, Firearm Certificate Safety, and Gun Violence Restraining Order.
“DOJ is investigating the extent to which any personally identifiable information could have been exposed from those dashboards and will report additional information as soon as confirmed,” the statement said.
The social security numbers of those on the list were not leaked, according to the DOJ.
“This unauthorized release of personal information is unacceptable and falls far short of my expectations for this department,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said. “I immediately launched an investigation into how this occurred at the California Department of Justice and will take strong corrective measures where necessary.
“I am deeply disturbed and angered,” Bonta said.
Those in possession of or using the private information leaked from the registry are guilty of a crime, the DOJ said, referring to California penal code 530.5. The code stipulates that “Every person who willfully obtains personal identifying information … shall be punished by a fine, by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, or by both a fine and imprisonment.”
Aidan Johnson, director of Federal Affairs at Gun Owners of America, told the Daily Caller the leak represented a serious lack of regard for the privacy of California gun owners.
“This ‘mistake’ by anti-gun Californian bureaucrats demonstrates either serious negligence or blatant disregard for the privacy of citizens who wish to defend themselves with a firearm in public,” Johnson said. “Gun owner registries, especially of those licensed to carry firearms in public, are a dangerous infringement on the Second Amendment.”
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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With a recession looming over the average American, the group to blame is pretty obvious, this group being the central bankers at the Federal Reserve, who inflate the supply of currency in the system, that currency being the dollar. This is what inflation is, the expansion of the money supply either through the printing press or adding zeros to a computer screen. It has gotten so bad that in the last twenty-two months, 80 percent of all US dollars in existence have been printed, from $4 trillion in January 2020, to $20 trillion in October 2021.
This is always how recessions start: the expansion of easy money, the creation of bubbles, and heightened prices caused by the devaluation of the currency supply. But recessions occurred long before the Fed’s establishment in 1913.
Were these market failures, as many are taught to believe, or were they still the fault of a central bank or government policy? How bad were pre-Fed recessions? Did they rival the Great Depression or 2008?
The Continental Dollar
During the days of the American Revolution, the Continental Congress convened to figure out how to finance the Revolution. In June 1775, Congress issued six million paper currency notes known as continental dollars in order to pay for the new army and the supplies needed to fight a war. Those who supported the Revolution would jump in line to support this new fiat currency, as it was the patriotic thing to do.
By 1780, the number of continentals in circulation had reached 241 million, and the continental had done its damage. The patriots who bought into the fiat dollar suffered the most, while people like David Hall, who by order of Congress was permitted to print out fiat bills, and the Loyalists, who kept their gold and silver specie were able to stay financially afloat.
The continental was turned back en masse, as it now held no value. Those who trusted the continental over gold were left with nothing. Certain Founding Fathers, after witnessing people’s livelihoods ruined by fiat paper money, decided to make provisions to make sure this mistake would not happen again.
Article 1 Section 10 of the US Constitution states:
No state shall make any thing but gold and silver coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.
This section would be violated throughout US history, from the Civil War to 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt confiscated US citizens’ gold and prevented them from exchanging the dollar into gold.
It’s clear what caused the failure of the continental: Congress and printing presses. This, however, would not be the last economic problem that would face America, the next major downturn came in 1819.
The Recession of 1819
After the War of 1812, state-chartered banks and the Second Bank of the United States (SBUS), which was established in 1816, expanded the money supply. Murray Rothbard’s book The Panic of 1819 notes how these state banks expanded the amount of banknotes from $46 million to $68 million in 1815. The problem was that banks printed more paper notes than there was gold specie to back them.
In fact, from 1817 to 1818, the SBUS expanded credit by 57 percent, outdoing the credit expansion in 1815–17, when it expanded credit by 25 percent. This credit expansion caused prices to rise in certain areas of the economy, such as agriculture and shipbuilding. All of these markets received the biggest loans that were granted by SBUS branches and state banks.
Eighteen eighteen spelled trouble for both the state banks and the SBUS: the money supply fell by 10 percent and there was a credit contraction of 41 percent. Foreigners and other citizens started to trade in their banknotes for specie, and many state banks refused to convert paper to gold as their gold reserves ran dry, as did the SBUS reserves.
Thomas Jefferson, who warned against central banking, gave his thoughts in a letter to John Taylor in 1816. Jefferson states:
And I sincerely believe with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; & that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
His suspicion was confirmed when in 1819 a recession ignited by the inflationary policy and agriculture and turnpike workers’ wages fell 60–80 percent.
Despite this bank failure, markets were allowed to handle the recession, or the readjustment period. Because of this, the economy bounced back quite quickly. At the start of the recession, gross domestic product per capita only fell 1.1 percent, but from the latter half of 1819 until 1824, GDP per capita grew 1.5 percent. This was before urbanization, so many still lived on farms. Even though wages fell, the recession was still nowhere as bad post-Fed recessions like the one in 1929.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 put a 55 percent tax on all foreign imports, this practically eliminated all exports. Agriculture suffered the most. Tens of thousands of farms were closed and sold for as low as $50. At the beginning of 1920, there were 28,885 banks, and by 1933, roughly fifteen thousand remained, the Federal Reserve Board of 1937 noted that two-thirds of these banks were in towns with less than twenty-five hundred people and that the majority failed.
Wages may have dropped in 1819, but the economy bounced back. It did not drag for sixteen years, nor did thousands of farms and banks fail.
Isn’t Gold Supposed to Prevent This?
Another reason why recessions during the “gold standard” days happened is that nations rejected using the simple units of measurements for weighing gold and inflated paper notes using small amounts of gold. For example, one pound of gold is sixteen ounces, sixteen ounces is 453 grams, etc.
Each nation had its own sovereign money, such as the dollar, the mark, and the franc, and while each was tied to gold, each had different exchange rates for gold. This allowed nations to go off the gold standard and inflate the currency supply.
In his book What has the Government Done to our Money? (p. 14), Murray Rothbard states:
The dollar was defined as 1/20 of an ounce of gold. It was therefore misleading to talk about exchange rates of one country to another. The pound sterling did not really exchange for five dollars. The dollar was defined as 1/20 of a gold ounce and the pound sterling was, at that time, defined as the name for 1/4 of a gold ounce, simply traded for 5/20 of a gold ounce.
Rothbard later explains how in a pure free market, gold would be exchanged directly, in grams, grains, or ounces.
Panic of 1873
Just before the American Civil War, there was around $200 million in banknotes issued by fifteen hundred state banks. In 1861 after the outbreak of the war, there was much debate on how to finance it. All options were on the table, and it seems President Abraham Lincoln chose them all.
In 1861, the Revenue Act imposed a 3 percent tax rate on incomes between $600 and $5,000. Greenbacks were introduced, and these were not backed by gold but printed on paper. Secretary of the US Treasury Salmon Chase asked Congress to approve the printing of 150 million notes, and in 1862, he got the order to do it.
Secretary Chase got two similar orders in 1863 and 1864, both equating to $150 million. By 1865, there were $835 million in both national and state banknotes, but the banks did not stop until 1873, when there was around $1.964 billion in circulation.
One of the founders of the bond system was Jay Cooke. The House of Cooke distributed Treasury bonds during and after the Civil War. Cooke also became head of the government-subsidized Northern Pacific Railroad. Cooke was fervently antigold and considered it a hard coin of a “bygone age.” The previous inflationary policies of the banks caused the House of Cooke bond system and the Northern Pacific railroad to fail, which sparked the Panic of 1873.
But even though a government-subsidized company crumbled under its own weight, the country did not fall into a long depression. In fact, the years from 1873 onward would be a very prosperous time, Rothbard notes:
The decade from 1869 to 1879 saw a 3-percent per-annum increase in money national product, an outstanding real national product growth of 6.8 percent per year in this period, and a phenomenal rise of 4.5 percent per year in real product per capita.
This was not a depression. In fact, most recessions or panics up until 1921 were over quickly because neither the government nor a central bank got involved. But in cases like the Great Recession of 2008, the Fed and government got involved.
The housing boom and bust of 2006 began because the Fed kept interest rates lower than they should have been. This contributed to the demand for housing, since lower interest rates mean lower mortgage payments. Eventually, the Fed kicked interest rates back up, which caused those who had bought houses they normally wouldn’t be able to afford to pay higher mortgages.
All the financial institutions that financed the housing boom, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, took massive losses and had to be bailed out by the US government. In the end, six million people had their homes foreclosed on, unemployment reached 10 percent, and GDP fell by 4.3 percent.
Panic of 1893
While previous examples showed the expansion of paper money outpacing the amount of specie American banks had in store, the Panic of 1893 was sparked by an expansion of silver and silver paper certificates. Hans Sennholz writes that “from 1878 on to 1893 there had been an expansion of money based on silver.”
This recession was not a matter of printing notes beyond the amount of gold banks had, but instead one of congressional meddling. In 1878, the Bland-Allison Act allowed for the Treasury to mint silver coins and issue silver certificates. In 1890, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act decreed that the government would buy 4.5 million ounces of silver every month. This expansion of silver caused the gold supply to drop because of heightened prices and the easy money legislation.
Eventually, President Grover Cleveland called a special session in Congress, pleading for the repeal of the previous silver acts to stop the drain on US gold reserves. They were repealed, which stopped the inflation of silver and allowed for a recession to readjust the market.
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 radical left is in disarray after the Supreme Court decided [last] Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade, ruling that there was no constitutional right to an abortion.
The radical left reminds us daily that women aren’t the only people who can get pregnant. Biological women who say they’re “men” can get pregnant, they say, as can those who say they’re “nonbinary.”
But as Roe fell, the sea of protest signs outside the court referred not to “birthing people” or “people who menstruate,” but instead to women, losing their rights, or politicians trying to control women’s bodies.
Gone were the endless lectures about the dozens of genders the left makes up. Instead, biological reality set in.
That would be the same biological reality that had, up until recently, been ignored by those situated in the left’s highest echelons.
Earlier in June, before Roe was overturned, Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, said she had a responsibility to all “menstruating people in Michigan” during a Zoom event.
In May 2021, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., tweeted, “Every day, black birthing people and our babies die because our doctors don’t believe our pain,” alongside a video of her testimony, in which she repeated the phrase “birthing person.”
And infamously, during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to become a Supreme Court justice, federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson declined to define what a woman is. “I’m not a biologist,” she insisted, in response to a question from Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.
Women get pregnant, give birth, and tragically, get abortions. And the overturning of Roe represented a very real change in how women could deal with pregnancies.
That’s not to say there weren’t true believers trying to spread the gospel of gender ideology around the court. But many protesters recognize that women alone have the capacity to get pregnant. And they’ve adapted their messaging to reflect that truth.
That leads to an obvious question: Why did it take Roe getting overturned for the left to acknowledge the obvious reality that women and men are different?
The answer is that it didn’t. The left didn’t suddenly wake up and realize they had been living a lie. They’ve known the whole time and cynically used gender ideology as a tool to club their political opposition and to virtue-signal.
While there are those far-out ideologues who think there is legitimately zero difference between a Lia Thomas-type “woman” and a real woman, far more likely is that these types of people are a disproportionally powerful minority that drives the narrative for the rest of the radical left.
Whether through fear or empathy, those left of center felt obligated to play into the “trans women are women” fantasy. But now that the stakes have been raised so sharply, the polite veneer of tolerance for this nonsense has faded away.
The left knows that men and women are different, and realizes the average American is aware of that fact, too. How can the left fight for women’s rights if they can’t even define what a woman is?
The demise of Roe also provides a vantage point to strike a coup de graceagainst gender ideology.
While conservatives must continue to cultivate a culture of life across the country, it’s also worth using some of our resources to buttress the reality that only women can get pregnant.
It’s a tough needle to thread, and we can’t give the left too much leeway to say abortion is exclusively a women’s issue.
The fathers whose children are slaughtered at Planned Parenthood clinics and lose out on their sons who are never born mean that, yes, men are affected by abortion, too.
But obviously, abortion impacts women more than men. And that’s why this is such a terrific opportunity. The left is stuck both ways.
Conservatives can point to the left’s inability to accurately define what a woman is as proof they’re out of touch with the American people—not just on abortion, but on reality as well.
By forcing the left to acknowledge there are fundamental differences between the sexes on the issue of abortion, the stranglehold gender ideology has on America in other spheres also grows weaker.
Conservatives can follow up our monumental victory for life with a one-two punch on the weird gender stuff.
The left is losing ground every day. With each loss, they hopefully will be forced to move back toward normalcy.
If we must keep fighting the left, I’d rather fight a left that at least knows what a woman is.
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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COVID-19 triggered lockdowns around the world never before seen. It isn’t the worst pandemic the world has seen, so why were government interventions so swift? There are really two reasons. One, broadband and laptops. Had there not been ways to continue working for the governments and remote learning to bridge education, we’d have not seen lockdowns beyond May 2020.
The second reason, tied to the first reason, is the media. The majority of the media coverage shamed any lockdown dissent and even drove it. Those that stood up to that, select states and even countries faced immense pressure from national and global media.
Within the United States, the role of the media within government policy is to critically analyze, to keep them honest. With COVID-19, open debate about risks and government interventions was shut down. For the first sixteen months of the pandemic, not only was the origination of COVID-19 not up for debate, it was suppressed and censored by major platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
As of June 2022 it’s considered more likely than not to have originated from the Wuhan lab, something even the WHO is now investigating. Reopen schools in 2020? The media put so much pressure to keep them closed that few politicians thought critically and acted to keep them open. Even with that, remote options were available and employed, fracturing education for a year and a half. In some states schools were closed for seventeen months.
A string of recent examples involve Dr. Deborah Birx. Along with Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx architected and drove the lockdowns in 2020. In 2022 Dr. Birx was on her book promotion media tour and repeatedly said we lost hundreds of thousands of lives due to poor federal actions (of which she was a part). How many interviewers pressed her for the math behind that? Zero.
After 24 months into the pandemic, fifteen months of that with vaccines and 14/24 months under President Biden, the daily COVID-19 death counts were materially identical between both administrations.
Below is an excerpt from the book COVID-19:The Science vs. The Lockdowns on how the media drove the lockdowns, gaining plenty of voter support to where politicians faced better polling by continuing lockdowns rather than opening up.
Social media has become the primary news source for more Americans than any other medium. Imagine if COVID-19 struck in the 1980s before cable television. Primary news sources were 1) network news, 2) major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post and 3) local newspapers.
Those mediums covered COVID-19 in 2020 as if it were a category five pandemic and drove opinion that schools and restaurants should be closed and everyone should be masked, perhaps even at home and in the car. They constantly reported that hospitals were lined up over capacity with sick, dying patients. However, we’d be looking around our communities not seeing much activity. We’d know it was out there, but we’d see hospitals were empty and few we knew were getting sick.
Remember, other than the four to six weeks when a community got hit, you wouldn’t know COVID-19 was a pandemic. Outside those surge periods, doctors would have assumed it was a weird or strong flu or something. The symptoms were similar to the flu, just worse if you were vulnerable enough to be hospitalized. If COVID-19 struck communities it was like a few-week hurricane, and it left a vacuum of emptiness in hospitals.
In my home town of Dallas, some well-intentioned college kids visited Parkland Hospital downtown to take care packages to frontline workers when we were in tight lockdown in April 2020. The nurse at receiving thanked them and laughed. She told them that they had no COVID-19 activity and with non-COVID-19 patients kept away, it was empty [Parkland did get a large wave in late 2020]. She walked them down darkened halls free of patients, nurses and doctors. Their voices echoed as they talked in the silence.
Nearly all major media outlets were absent any COVID-19 information suggesting the risk didn’t support the lockdowns. Fox News’ primetime shows often reported on it. Newsmax and One America News did too, but their viewership was relatively low, less than a half million viewers combined. That left 99% of America without a view from the mainstream media that maybe the lockdowns were not the best path.
Nearly all data to counter lockdowns originated with Twitter users. It largely began with Alex Berenson’s constant pouring of data to counter the models that triggered the lockdowns. Berenson began appearing on Fox News weekly in April 2020. Other Twitter users like The Ethical Skeptic (don’t laugh, he stays anonymous but the guy is a genius) and contributors to Rational Ground provided nearly all hardcore data.
If Twitter did not exist, it’s hard to imagine where data to support stopping lockdowns would have come from. Hold your thoughts on the mention of Fox News if you’re not a conservative. We need open thought and debate on something as huge as worldwide lockdowns. It was a sad state of journalism that Fox News was the only major media company to offer this, though by summer 2020 the Wall Street Journal did some quality analysis on the lockdowns. Most media outlets were very selective on their reporting on the lockdowns.
Where We Get The News
ABC’s World News Tonight leads network news with about nine million viewers nightly, followed by NBC Nightly News’s seven million viewers and CBS Evening News’s five million. Fox News typically gets about three million viewers, followed by MSNBC’s 1.5 million and CNN’s one million viewers. It’s very fair to say that—and there may be some overlap—23 million television news watchers were getting pro-lockdown, closed school, and face mask support from all programming except Fox News primetime. Online news and media sites touch hundreds of millions viewers. Below is Statista’s breakdown of the most frequented online news sources based on unique monthly visitors:
News Source
Monthly Visitors
Yahoo News
175 million
Google News
150 million
Huffington Post
110 million
CNN
95 million
The New York Times
70 million
Fox News
65 million
NBC News
63 million
The Washington Post
47 million
The Guardian
42 million
The Wall Street Journal
40 million
ABC News
36 million
USA Today
34 million
LA Times
33 million
The Atlantic self-reported that they received ninety million unique online visitors in March 2020.
There is obvious overlap of the same unique visitors to many of these news outlets. Within this breakdown, for a solid year into the pandemic, the only major news sources that were offering coverage against the lockdowns were Fox News and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. The Guardian ran a few pieces on lockdown damage, mostly harm from school closings, as did the New York Times. While the Times pushed many lockdown measures, they did some excellent reporting on school closings. In general, there’s a ratio of 845 million to 105 million, or better than 88% coverage driving continued lockdowns, school closings, and face mask mandates.
Social Media
An enormous and growing source of news Americans receive is through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Pew Research identified that 36% of U.S. adults get their news from Facebook; ninety million people of the 170 million Facebook users. About sixty million adults get news from YouTube and fifty million from Twitter. Now, most of the news on these social media platforms often originates from the news sources above. However, just like large news organizations demonstrated bias in what they reported, the social media platforms demonstrated bias in what they allowed to circulate.
Facebook
Facebook has become a primary news resource for hundreds of millions of Americans and others worldwide. They did some good too. Facebook created a vaccine finder tool used by millions to help them secure vaccines more efficiently. They also became the arbiter of COVID-19 news and what they called misinformation. Facebook removed sixteen million pieces of information that they deemed inappropriate even if they did not violate their rules, like comments and articles discouraging wearing masks or getting vaccines. They removed the Great Barrington Declaration page. Do a quick search and find the GBD and read through it – it’s short. It condemns the one-size-fits-all lockdown measures like closing schools and businesses, and rather stresses the importance of those measurably at risk to be protected, whether in a long-term care facility or at home.
Are those crazy concepts that should not be open for discussion? Kang-Xing Jin was a college friend of Mark Zuckerberg and took the lead on COVID-19 information and misinformation for Facebook. KX has no medical background, but then neither do I; that’s no showstopper to analyze data, risk, and consequence. The stickiness comes in when the giant tech companies that shape our lives can’t draw the line between misinformation and healthy debate and discussion.
Facebook pages, messages, and posted articles that promoted that kids had zero COVID-19 risk, that discouraged masks, and argued that no requirement should be made to wear masks were all at risk of censorship. They banned “misinformation” related to theories ranging from saying SARS-CoV-2 was man made to posting that it’s safer to get the disease rather than the vaccine.
As for the latter, based on VAERS (vaccine adverse event reporting system), that may have been true for those under thirty years old and was definitely true for kids eighteen and under. At a minimum, debating the risk and benefit of an emergency use authorization vaccine is legitimate. Another banned opinion is that COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the flu. As discussed, for those older it was markedly more dangerous. For babies, to at least college age it wasn’t more dangerous than the flu.
Facebook also banned anything stating that the vaccines kill or harm people. Based on the VAERS reporting, Facebook was flat-out wrong. Vaccines did, in very small but measurable cases, cause death. They caused more side effects than all other vaccines over the past couple of decades combined. They absolutely made millions sick. The J&J vaccine I took made me very sick for two days. Having said that, if you were fifty or over or at risk, taking it could make sense. For kids, the encouragement when they were at no risk was also a no-brainer; the vaccines should not have been pushed in 2021 or today. The data doesn’t support the vaccines for healthy kids under five, as the FDA is recommending approval.
YouTube
Very early on, YouTube took down videos that were critical of lockdowns or face mask mandates. YouTube took down a video interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in the spring of 2020, as well as many others that discussed overcounting of COVID-19 deaths or lockdown harms. In March 2021 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis hosted a roundtable discussion with Dr. Scott Atlas and the Great Barrington Declaration doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta. The triggering comment made was their condemnation of masking children. YouTube took down the video. Bhattacharya, who really is a gentleman, kindly made a comment that he’d love to debate the 24-year-old YouTube employee making that decision. YouTube responded to taking down the roundtable discussion with the following statement:
“We removed this video because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. We allow videos that otherwise violate our policies to remain on the platform if they contain sufficient educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context. Our policies apply to everyone, and focus on content regardless of the speaker or channel.”
The problem was the consensus of local and global health authorities were not following the science. These were not public health officials, they were zero-COVID-19 officials.
Twitter
Nearly all original content and data in challenging school closings, hospital capacity, face mask efficacy, closed restaurants and the rest of lockdown measures can be traced back to Twitter. Organized media, a good 90% of it, was driving fear through on-screen graphics and reporting. Very rarely did media outlets contextualize that: 1) the models were wrong, 2) kids were at ~0 risk, 3) mask efficacy was very iffy based on pre-COVID-19 science and the data in the U.S., 4) closing businesses didn’t do anything measurable and 5) not fully reopening schools in the fall of 2020 was insane. The data and critical thinking on these topics originated on Twitter.
Twitter began censoring like crazy after the November 2020 election. Thousands of accounts were blocked, as were millions of tweets questioning mask efficacy, vaccine safety, and anything else not aligned with the CDC. Here’s what this means. The CDC director could tweet out something like “Hospitals are overflowing in California. Please do not leave your house except when necessary.” Someone could reply with “Hospitals are not overflowing; ICUs are only at capacity at 30% of hospitals and half the hospitals don’t have 20% COVID-19 occupancy.” Bam! That tweet could be flagged or cause an account to be suspended.
Let’s suppose you think the social media companies should have suppressed lockdown criticisms. Go back to 2003. After the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan, the U.S. decided to invade Iraq. The two justifications were an affiliation to al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction residing in Iraq. There was a near-unanimous consensus within Washington D.C. that it was the right move. “Experts” said it was the right move.
In that moment my dad and I sat around watching the news and shaking our heads. At his salty near-80 years of age and a veteran of Korea, he said, “Those bastards are going to send these kids to war and they’ll get killed and for what? Iraq is no threat to America and there’s no proof they were involved in 9-11.” He never again considered himself a Republican and never looked back.
The Iraq War was a huge event in American history. Nearly every politician supported it and there was universal media support. Sound a little like the lockdowns? A huge public policy based on sketchy risk and consequence data. Now imagine if media companies banned criticism of the war – eliminating any healthy debate on something history proved to be a disaster. History will not remember the lockdowns as a proportionate response. This isn’t about freedom of speech. It’s about healthy debate on policies that have enormous consequences.
Puzzle Pieces Connected
This is why the media bias supporting mask mandates, school closings, closed restaurants and the rest of the interventions was so devastating.
COVID-19 was unlike other controversial political issues like gun control or climate change. Everyone had the same starting point, and information was on a level playing field. In this one instance more than any other, we saw how enormous the power of the media is in influencing people’s opinions and the effect that had on policy. Media coverage out of the gate condemned any thinking that closed schools were a bad idea, that open schools were not a risk. The idea that face masks did not work was condemned, and even things like criticizing the closing of indoor dining. There was no open debate.
Media Coverage
It’s still hard to understand why most media outlets were so motivated to drive panic. Many said it was over the November 2020 election. If they could convince voters President Trump did a poor job handling the pandemic, they might vote for a change. There was something to that and it probably worked, but it continued far beyond the election. Two months after the election the CDC was promoting double masking. The first media break in the dike was a shift in February toward opening schools, and in-person learning did go up significantly in the spring of 2021, too little too late for the school year.
While Yahoo News and Google News were the largest online media sources, they were not material originators of content. You can trace media influences to the large outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and to a lesser degree the Atlantic, Fox News, Huffington Post, The Guardian, and others. Their content then cascaded to larger mediums on Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Twitter.
The New York Times
The Times’ writers published thousands of articles on COVID-19 beginning in early 2020. The Times, and The Washington Post, set the narrative for news. They are foundational media sources because their writings cascade into other analyses from other writers, podcasts, and of course posts on Twitter. The Times drove enormous panic porn in 2020, energizing lockdown policies. Below are some examples.
Tom Friedman
Tom Friedman is a writer for the New York Times; he’s an A-lister. In 1989, Friedman wrote a very comprehensive and terrific book called From Beirut to Jerusalem. I read it as a college student and loved it, you should check it out even now. Friedman had nothing but disdain for President Trump.
As an opinion writer, it’s fine, healthy, and fair to offer his point of view. During the discussions of reopening the country, he made some reckless commentary about the president and the associated risks of reopening. In an April 18, 2020 column in the New York Times, the headline read “Trump Is Asking Us to Play Russian Roulette With Our Lives.”
In the piece, Friedman wrote:
‘LIBERATE MINNESOTA!’ ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN!’ ‘LIBERATE VIRGINIA.’ With these three short tweets last week, President Trump attempted to kick off the post-lockdown phase of America’s coronavirus crisis. It should be called: ‘American Russian roulette: The Covid-19 version.’’ What Trump was saying with those tweets was: Everybody just go back to work. From now on, each of us individually, and our society collectively, is going to play Russian roulette. We’re going to bet that we can spin through our daily lives — work, shopping, school, travel — without the coronavirus landing on us. And if it does, we’ll also bet that it won’t kill us.
The flaws in Friedman’s argument are numerous. Russian roulette, strictly speaking, is when you load one bullet in a revolver, spin the chamber and pull the trigger, with a fully equal one in six chance of dying. There is a haunting scene depicting this in the classic film The Deer Hunter. Russian roulette gives everyone an equal probability of dying.
COVID-19 did not give everyone an equal probability of getting sick, much less dying. With the economy on fire, hospitalizations and deaths declining and knowing who was at risk, requiring vast testing and tracing was not a reasonable requirement for opening up the country. Washington Governor Jay Inslee required just that (on May 18, 2020) to open up Washington. Apoorva Mandavilli is a medical and science journalist for the New York Times. She was one of two primary writers for the Times on the pandemic. Mandavilli wrote hundreds of articles and opinion pieces for the Times and participated in many interviews on COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021. Her reporting erred on the side of pandemic pessimism and maintaining lockdowns throughout. Headlines of articles she wrote included:
“Six Months of Coronavirus: Here’s Some of What We’ve Learned” on June 18, 2020. In this commentary, Mandavilli asserted two things that science and data wasn’t showing: that masks work and that natural infection does not result in achieving herd immunity. Herd immunity became a toxic thing to talk about in 2020, never mind that it is exactly how every historic pandemic ended. In June she also wrote that airborne transmission (versus through large droplets) isn’t a significant thing, something common sense showed couldn’t possibly be true knowing what we knew a few months into the pandemic.
“Older Children Spread the Coronavirus Just as Much as Adults, Large Study Finds; The study of nearly 65,000 people in South Korea suggests that school reopenings will trigger more outbreaks” on July 18, 2020. Headlines like this drove media, politicians and parents alike to resist reopening schools. The assertion was patently false. By the time this was written, data showed older kids were not equal spreaders, and very few had become seriously ill from COVID-19. Summer camp data showed this as discussed earlier.
“Children may carry high levels of the coronavirus, up to 100 times as much as adults, new Lurie Children’s Hospital study finds” on July 31, 2020. Not even sure what to say about this one, other than this was never happening.
“C.D.C. Calls on Schools to Reopen, Downplaying Health Risks” on July 24, 2020 with Mandavilli contributing. The analysis suggested CDC Director Robert Redfield should not have said schools should reopen fully in the fall. The writers criticized President Trump for driving home that schools should reopen and said this line of thinking was putting kids and teachers at risk. That was false; data in the moment made this obvious.
“A Parent’s Toughest Call: In-Person Schooling or Not?” on September 1, 2020. The takeaway was to not send kids back to school without elaborate precautions and interventions. The focus was on cases rather than illnesses to kids and teachers that could be at-risk. Illnesses would have been statistically zero for kids and over half the teachers.
“The Price for Not Wearing Masks: Perhaps 130,000 Lives. The pandemic death toll could be lowered by next spring if more Americans wear masks, a new analysis finds” on October 23, 2020. The journalist took a shot at Dr. Scott Atlas, as well as the president, for saying masks don’t work. You saw earlier the data comparing heavily masked areas and less masked areas. That data was obvious by summer, and suggesting masks could have such an impact was taking the lead from “experts” without any independent analysis. The data showed otherwise.
There were many more articles like these that Mandavilli wrote. There were also many articles that she wrote that were fair to the data at hand with a balanced outlook. With a trickle of panic-inducing articles resisting herd immunity and keeping kids masked and out of school, it rippled into other media and policy makers. Mandavilli displayed many times on Twitter that she preferred the lockdown culture.
Why on earth so many politicians and media figures in influential roles feel the need to vent on Twitter is a bigger mystery than COVID-19 ever was. On Saturday, March 20, 2021, Madavilli, who lives in Brooklyn, tweeted this: “We were out of house today for six hours, probably half of them in the car, and I am utterly spent. Reentry is going to be brutal.” Perhaps there’s a different perspective of what “utterly spent” means to someone that lost their job and had to bridge a learning gap with their kids that were cratering behind. Elites that kept their jobs, had resources and got to work from home embraced the lockdowns.
Jeffrey Tucker leads the Brownstone Institute and wrote Liberty or Lockdown in the summer of 2020. He observed the media playbook that was true for over a year:
Attribute economic fallout not to the lockdowns but to the virus
Deliberately confuse readers about the difference between tests, cases and deaths
Never focus on the incredibly obvious demographics of COVID-19 deaths
Dismiss any alternative to lockdown as crazy, unscientific or cruel, while acting as if Dr. Fauci speaks for the entire scientific community
Above all, promote panic over calm
The Atlantic
The Atlantic is a left-leaning print and online publication that has been around since 1857. The online COVID Tracking Project (CTP) was run by the Atlantic and provided excellent data on COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. It became the single best resource to get state-by-state data, and much of the data cited here is from there. The CTP did some excellent work. It would be easy to cite anti-lockdown reporting by the Hill or the Blaze, but we’re looking at what was impacting the thoughts of a wider group of Americans and politicians. The Atlantic did their share of reporting that supported lockdown mentality, but they also published some quality commentary on the damage of the lockdowns. If you’re a centrist or right-leaning and can get past the often-political commentaries, the Atlantic often produces some thoughtful work.
The Bad
The Atlantic published pieces with high politicization, such as “How Trump Closed the Schools,” suggesting the president’s mishandling resulted in the pandemic getting out of control, thus rendering schools unsafe to reopen. It was a major hit piece blasting the president when so many countries did worse than the U.S. with huge societal damage. Another one was “Why Republicans are Ignoring the Coronavirus.” Were they ignoring it or balancing risk and consequence policy? You can decide, but Republican-led states were less restricted, kept more kids in class and did no worse than Democrat-led states. That’s not as much fun to write about if you’re left-leaning though.
“Teachers Know Schools Aren’t Safe to Reopen” came out in August 2020. Maybe teachers all over the rest of the world were clueless compared to American teachers, but they fared no worse than those staying at home.
The Good
In August 2020 the dike broke and this strong opinion piece came out written by Chavi Karkowsky, a doctor and mom from New York, called “What We’ve Stolen From Our Kids. School provides so much more than an education.” It was a powerful and needed insight into the cost of closed schools. Seeing a major publication offer up a point of view like this felt like a real step forward. That same month the Atlantic published “We Flattened the Curve. Our Kids Belong in School.” The curve was destined to spike up seasonally in the fall, but they were right on kids belonging in school.
Other similar articles were sprinkled in throughout the rest of 2020. In January 2021 they published “The Truth About Kids, School and COVID-19.” Where the Atlantic gets some credit is that for being left-leaning, where for some reason liberals were mostly against reopening schools, the Atlantic not only demonstrated some actual journalism, they also influenced other liberal media.
Emily Oster is an economist and professor at Brown University. She is also a writer and contributor of several op-eds to the Atlantic. She wrote ““Schools aren’t Super-Spreaders: Fears from the summer appear to have been overblown,” “Parents Can’t Wait Around Forever, “The ‘Just Stay Home’ Message Will Backfire,” and the big controversial one: “Yes, You Can Vacation With Your Unvaccinated Kids.” Oster is not a conservative, embraced face masks, ran a school/COVID-19 database and is pretty darn level-headed. Check out some interviews with her on YouTube.
Her point was that unvaccinated kids are at about the same risk of getting sick or spreading COVID-19 as vaccinated adults, and that parents should get their kids out and normalize. She was right. Then she got blasted by people who knew much less than she does about the science and data. Good for her for moving us forward, and for the Atlantic for publishing good content in support of open schools that went against the liberal dogma.
The Great
Finally, the Atlantic published a very powerful piece that should be required reading for every person still embracing lockdowns and closed schools in 2021. Emma Green wrote “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown. Progressive communities have been home to some of the fiercest battles over COVID-19 policies, and some liberal policy makers have left scientific evidence behind.” This was one of the strongest analyses in the first half of 2021, because it came from a left-leaning publication. Opinions that deviate from a traditional ideology carry more weight. Highlights from Green’s masterpiece:
“For many progressives, extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump. Some of this reaction was born of deeply felt frustration with how he handled the pandemic. It could also be knee-jerk. “If he said, ‘Keep schools open,’ then, well, we’re going to do everything in our power to keep schools closed,” Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, told me.”
“Even as scientific knowledge of COVID-19 has increased, some progressives have continued to embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning.”
“In Somerville [MA], a local leader appeared to describe parents who wanted a faster return to in-person instruction as “white parents” in a virtual public meeting; a community member accused the group of mothers advocating for schools to reopen of being motivated by white supremacy. “I spent four years fighting Trump because he was so anti-science,” Daniele Lantagne, a Somerville mom and engineering professor. “I spent the last year fighting people who I normally would agree with … desperately trying to inject science into school reopening, and completely failed.” [might be worth mentioning as a percentage, the kids of “white parents” were less affected by closed schools than those of black or Hispanic kids]
To support Green’s observation, even after the CDC stopped recommending face masks for those vaccinated on May 13, 2021, A-list media figures could not let go. MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski said, “If you want to follow the science,” you should follow my lead and “still wear the mask” despite being vaccinated when you’re around possibly unvaccinated people. It’s not clear what science she was referencing.
Rachel Maddow is MSNBC’s highest-rated anchor and was reluctant to embrace the CDC recommendation. Her initial comment to CDC Director Walensky was “How sure are you because this was a really big change?” No such comment came from Maddow when kids were prevented from going to school in 2020. Maddow then shared, “I feel like I’m going to have to rewire myself so that when I see someone out in the world who’s not wearing a mask, I don’t instantly think, ‘You are a threat, or you are selfish or you are a COVID denier and you definitely haven’t been vaccinated. I mean, we’re going to have to rewire the way that we look at each other.”
The View host Whoopi Goldberg said on air, “What is it going to take you think for people to get comfortable following not just the science, but their [the CDC] own science, what is comfortable for them?” CNN’s chief political correspondent Dana Bash called the decision “very scary.” Time magazine said it was a “baffling, whiplash-inducing decision.” Politico called it “a bitter disappointment to unions and other safety advocates.” Newsweek warned of “deadly new variants” under the cover headline of “WINTER IS COMING.” CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, criticized the recommendation as well, saying the CDC “made a critical error here in surprising basically everyone with a very significant change. [Masking] is so effective and it’s not that hard to do in most situations — just to put a mask on.”
The COVID-19 Media in Summary
Were many of the pieces above cherry-picked? Was there actual balanced coverage by the networks? Did I selectively choose to pick on the Times, Post, Atlantic, Twitter, and Facebook? And you may wonder why it matters, that the press has the freedom to write whatever they choose. They do have that freedom, and that should always be supported. Most people lack critical thinking, either in natural ability or laziness preventing exploration of thought and ideas. The media knows this and catered to it. It’s no different than advertising. If you advertise something enough, you will reach critical mass awareness and eventually adoption.
Why the media so unanimously covered the pandemic like Dirty Laundry is still a mystery. Much of it was political, to keep viewers and readers addicted to [fear] porn, and because the media knew so little about what was actually happening they reported what everyone else reported. In March 2020, Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal and Molly Cook authored “Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?” Sacerdote is an economics professor at Dartmouth College, and Sehgal (Dartmouth) and Cook (Brown University) are students. What a great experience for these two students to participate in such a groundbreaking study. They uncovered what we all knew anecdotally: media coverage in COVID-19 was heavily biased promoting depression, fear and polling that resulted in maintaining lockdown measures much longer than needed.
At a time when the data showed kids were at practically no risk from COVID-19 and school reopenings were no riskier to kids and teachers than remote learning and circulating in their off time, 86% of the American media reported negative news on school reopening. 54% of the media in other English-speaking countries reported negatively on schools reopening. When looking at all COVID-19 stories since the pandemic broke, the fifteen major media players were 25% more likely than their international counterparts to disseminate negative information. This shows the majority of the media worldwide did not understand what was going on, or chose to ignore it, though much worse in the United States.
The researchers analyzed 43,000 articles associated with “vaccines, increases and decreases in case counts, and reopenings (of businesses, schools, parks, restaurants, government facilities, etc.).” Below are trends they uncovered:
“Among the U.S. major media, 15,000 stories mention increases in caseloads while only 2,500 mention decreases, or a 6 to 1 ratio. During the period when caseloads were falling nationally (April 24-June 27, 2020), this ratio remained a relatively high 5.3 to 1.” [the period of analysis for their study was 2020; anecdotally their findings certainly continued through May 2021]
No bias or negative-outlook correlation between traditional “conservative” or “liberal” media.
U.S. media was 3-8 times more likely to promote social distancing or wearing face masks than their international counterparts.
U.S. counties that relied less on national news were more likely to reopen schools in 2020. This follows some logic because higher in-person learning occurred in less urban communities.
They concluded “that there is little evidence that the negativity of the national news media causes a reduction in school reopenings.” That seems hard to believe logically. If the media were pounding on 1) the psychological impact and learning deficiency associated with remote learning, and 2) the data from what we’ve previously reviewed on kids and COVID-19 risk, polling would have driven more reopening support, politicians would have yielded to the polls and teachers unions would’ve buckled.
“The U.S. Federal Communication Commission eliminated its fairness doctrine regulation in 1987. This regulation required broadcasters to provide adequate coverage of public issues and to fairly represent opposing views. In contrast, the U.K. and Canada still maintain such regulations. On the surface, the fairness doctrine would appear most relevant to partisan bias as opposed to negativity. It may be that profit-maximizing U.S. news providers realized that they should provide not only partisan news to serve their consumers’ tastes but also negative news which is in high demand.” That’s probably true. It’s definitely a sad state of journalism.
For the context of the media serving Dirty Laundry, consider this. There were a total of 2.6 million articles scrubbed. Of those, look at the weighting of some of the reporting in the first seven months of 2020:
88,659 articles included a comment about “Trump and Masks,” “Trump and Hydroxychloroquine” or “Hydroxychloroquine”
87,550 articles mentioned “Decreases” for the whole study period
33,000 articles mentioned “Decreases” between April 24 – June 27, 2020
325,550 articles mentioned “Increases” for the whole study period
More media articles chose to comment on President Trump and his COVID-19 comments versus the very positive news when COVID-19 cases/hospitalizations/deaths were decreasing. Four times more articles were written about COVID-19 activity increasing versus decreasing.
Within their study period, between March 15 and July 31, 2020, there were 138 days of measurable pandemic case and hospitalization data. Of those 138 days, 61 had decreasing hospitalization days. Four times more articles citing increases over decreases were published while 44% of the days had a decrease. Case and death trend data was far too loose to include in this daily breakdown for two reasons. One, cases were in large part a product of testing, particularly with rapidly growing seroprevalence in the country. Two, deaths began to include probables and up to half the deaths reported any given day were backdated. By the second quarter of 2021 well over half of the reported deaths were backdated as far as summer 2020.
The Polls
Politicians are driven by three things: their party; their ideology; polls. What people think is largely driven by their experiences, their beliefs and the knowledge they acquire. It’s not likely a plethora of articles for or against abortion will change a lot of minds; they’re much more likely to reinforce beliefs. If there were 300,000 articles in a given year for gun control, it’s still very unlikely that gun owners and Second Amendment supporters would change their minds. The issues have been too ingrained for too long. COVID-19 was very different. Everyone in the world started off on the same block in 2020. In this one instance more than any other for anyone alive during the pandemic, the media had the power to shape thought. Before the pandemic, Americans’ trust in the media was only 41%. That was lower than President Trump’s approval rating. In March 2020, this was the approval rating for several stakeholders during the pandemic:
Stakeholders
Approve
Disapprove
Your hospital
88%
10%
Your state government
82%
17%
Government Health Agencies
80%
17%
President Trump
60%
38%
Congress
59%
37%
The Media
44%
55%
In the summer of 2020, 1,000 citizens from several countries were polled on the pandemic. Below is the mean percentage that the sampling showed people thought the COVID-19 death tallies were after three months of the pandemic:
Country
Population Percent that died from COVID-19
That Absolute Population Number
Actual Number of COVID-19 deaths at the time
United States
9%
29,700,000
132,000
United Kingdom
7%
4,830,000
48,000
Sweden
6%
600,000
6,000
France
5%
3,300,000
33,000
Denmark
3%
174,000
580
Now, do an online search with date parameters of July 20 – August 30, 2020 and see how many news articles featured this polling result. It’s fewer than the number of your fingers. Mean percentages of respondents thought that 9% of Americans had died of COVID-19 in three months. That’s equivalent to everyone in Texas. Isn’t that alarming? Even if the polling result was 1%, that’s over three million COVID-19 deaths, about the number of people that die in the United States each year from all causes. That’s also 50% more pandemic lives lost than the Spanish Flu caused, adjusted for population.
If we had a virus that killed 9% (or even ½ %) of the population in three months, the lockdowns would not be like what we saw. Everyone would embrace the quarantining we saw in the movies Outbreak or Contagion. This type of general understanding of the pandemic, or lack of, is why we did not see protests throughout 2020 and 2021. One, liberals are more likely to protest than conservatives and liberals were generally much more supportive of lockdowns than conservatives. Two, most people regardless of politics don’t study data beyond headlines and don’t understand the context of the COVID-19 risk.
Franklin Templeton Poll
In July 2020, Franklin Templeton published polling that showed the sad and disastrous perception Americans had of COVID-19 risk. As you view the following charts, consider there was very little coverage in the media from the CDC, and from state health agencies to level-set understanding of the pandemic. Ask yourself: if the media was giving a proper explanation of what was happening, if the CDC communicated factually what was happening, how could results like this occur?
Respondents clearly did not know the extent how age-stratified COVID-19 deaths were skewed to the elderly. They surely would not have known that a third of all excess deaths were not caused by COVID-19 but rather the lockdowns.
This poll result closely connects to what we saw earlier: the highest stress was associated with younger age groups. They were about as stressed with ~0 risk as older Americans that were at very measurable risk. Franklin Templeton commented on their findings, calling it “stunning.” Americans believed that people over 55 were about half the death victims, while it was actually 92%. They thought people under 45 years old were almost 30% of all deaths; they were less than 3%. They overestimated the risk to those under 24 by a factor of fifty.
It’s not far off from the earlier poll where respondents on average thought 9% of Americans had died from COVID-19 after three months. Poll results like this should have driven Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, and Dr. Redfield and the CDC to shout from the rooftops to educate Americans on what was happening. It should have caused responsible journalists to do special fact-based segments on COVID-19 risk and the data we had. What we heard was the sound of silence.
Gallup Polls
Gallup conducted weekly polls on sentiment around the pandemic from the beginning in March 2020 well into 2021. Never fewer than 65% of respondents felt staying home was the appropriate thing to do from the beginning and for thirteen straight months.
Dates
Better to Stay Home
Live Normal Life
What Was Happening
Mar 23-29, 2020
91%
9%
COVID-19 first hit, Imperial College projection of 2.2 million lives lost
Jun 1-7, 2020
65%
35%
Southern states were reopening, cases were decreasing
Jul 13-19, 2020
73%
27%
Sunbelt states were peaking in COVID-19 activity
Sep 14-27, 2020
64%
36%
Summer swell was over, low COVID-19 activity, most schools still closed
Dec 15, 2020 – Jan 3, 2021
69%
31%
Peak COVID-19 hospitalizations; vaccines were rolling ou
Apr 19-25, 2021
55%
45%
COVID-19 cases/hospitalizations/deaths had all hit one-year lows; vaccine supply outpaced demand
A majority of Americans did not support returning to normal life at any time since the pandemic began and into the spring of 2021. Polling after the CDC lifted indoor mask recommendations on May 14, 2021, for those vaccinated finally began to tilt the scale. COVID-19 hospitalizations began cratering in January 2021, and the pandemic by definition as we knew it was over by February. Had the media reported that, Americans would have felt more comfortable getting back to normal.
There was a potentially great segment on MSNBC in March 2021 where Chuck Todd was asking “experts” why Florida, with very few restrictions, had near-identical results to strictly locked down California. It was going great until they introduced an analysis by the LA Times that said had Florida locked down hard they would have saved 3,000 lives, and had California relaxed its restrictions they would have had 6,000 more deaths. The analysis was practically made up with no reasonable science and data behind it. Reporting like this was why America was not yet ready to move on.
On April 25,2021, with the pandemic virtually over, the respondents were asked, “How long do you think the level of disruption occurring to travel, school, work and public events in the U.S. will continue?” 95% answered with either “a few more months,” “through 2021,” or “longer than that.” That did drop from 98% in February 2021. In April 2021 a majority of remote workers and a plurality of the rest of the workers said their preference was to work remotely, not because of fear of COVID-19 but because of preference. Read: many loved lockdowns if they had a job.
MIT Student Studies
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the premier math, science and engineering universities in the world. In 2021 they released two studies around social media and “COVID-19 Skeptics.” Students from MIT and Wellesley College reported on many people I know and followed. How they viewed analytical points of view that condemned strict lockdowns were emblematic of how the media failed to report balanced context and why Americans were reluctant to return to normal life.
The first study was called “Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online” (January 2021), and the second was “The Data Visualizations Behind COVID-19 Skepticism” (March 1, 2021). The first study looked at a half million tweets that used visualization of data to support removing nonpharmaceutical interventions governments around the world had instituted for over a year.
The students enveloped people on Twitter that they perceived as viewing the pandemic as exaggerated and believed schools should be reopened (which the CDC maintained as far back as August 2020) as “anti-maskers.” You should really check out the study from undoubtedly very bright students from one of the most elite universities in the world. The lack of impartial thought, the lack of a quest to learn and be open-minded, and mostly, the inability to analyze data without predisposition is disappointing. It’s indicative of prevailing college thought all over the country, but this one hit home.
As the study classified those using charts to illustrate their cases, they broke out the following categories:
American politics and media
American politics and right-wing media
British news media
Anti-mask network of Twitter users
New York Times centric network
WHO and health-related news organizations
The two classes of media are “media” and “right-wing media.” Does that mean there’s “impartial journalistic media” and then “conspiratorial right-wing media?” The bias is that there is normal media and crazy right-wing media and then anti-maskers tweeting about the harm of lockdown interventions. This is how over 80% of the media, the CDC, and most state health agencies portrayed the environment, which made it an Everest-climb to reach an open debate.
The Twitter anti-mask network was led by Alex Berenson, the Ethical Skeptic, and Rational Ground founder Justin Hart. This is consistent with my premise that nearly all original thought condemning lockdowns as an unscientific approach were sourced on Twitter. They asserted that “anti-maskers value unmediated access to information and privilege personal research and direct reading over ‘expert’ interpretations.”
Everyone should support unmediated access to information even if they disagree with “anti-maskers” on this one. You never know when you’ll be on the other side (see Iraq War).
They grouped the anti-maskers as representing that COVID-19 was no worse than the flu. Knowing most of the high-profile Twitter users mentioned, that is flat-out false. There is a gulf between thinking COVID-19 was no worse than the flu (it was much worse for those over 50 years old) and believing lockdowns didn’t work and were unscientific. It may be that students at elite universities and those in the elite media were too detached from middle to lower class Americans and were out of touch with the consequences of the lockdowns. It may also be that they saw it as a power grab. It may mean they just weren’t that bright.
Critics of “anti-maskers” feel that processing data around excess deaths was conspiratorial. Many excess deaths were from the lockdowns. They then batched the anti-maskers as politically conservative. The face of lockdown criticism was Alex Berenson, and Berenson spent more of his life left-leaning than right-leaning. David Zweig, who wrote dozens of pieces supporting open schools, is no right-winger.
The students then wrote that “anti-maskers” argued there was an outsized emphasis on deaths rather than cases. It was quite the opposite. Everyone following this knew that the case data was fantastically overreported, that there were many times more cases, as well as hundreds of thousands of false positives, and backdated dumping. In short, the margin of error of cases on any given day had a solid 50% margin of error, though it was directionally useful. Deaths too were unreliable for reasons discussed. The “anti-maskers” usually found COVID-19 hospitalizations as the best data point to measure what was happening, and that was the most reliable metric, not cases or deaths.
The Best Ad Campaign in History
The prolific critics of the lockdowns were apolitical before COVID-19. They were as critical of Republican leaders as Democrat leaders if they supported closed schools, closed restaurants or masks outdoors (probably masks indoors too). You have to give it to the media though. They ran the most effective advertising campaign in history. They accomplished something extraordinary and it should be studied in every advertising class forever.
The media was able to convince over 50% of the people under thirty that they were at serious risk of getting sick or dying from COVID-19.
They were able to trigger more anxiety in young people than any other age group.
They were able to convince people that putting face masks on two-year old’s made sense.
They convinced parents that keeping their kids out of school for a year and a half was a good thing.
They convinced people they should wear a face mask when alone in their car, walking their dog, or hiking up a mountain.
They convinced enough of the world that they could control the spread of the virus like a dam.
If you’re sick, you should listen to your doctor. If you climb a mountain you should listen to your guide. If you need to defend your country, you listen to your generals. But if a policy is suggested that has a balance of risk and consequence, something that happens consequentially by following one direction, stop and give it thought and research.
It’s healthy to question the media, politicians, healthcare experts, or military experts. They are people like you and me, no smarter. In some cases, more informed on their specialty, but that breeds myopia. Sometimes they can get so close to something that they can’t see it clearly. Sometimes they can see it but don’t want to.
Sometimes they have an agenda. History needs to remember the lockdowns as the most harmful, ineffective public policy America and the world had ever seen. Study the data for yourself next time and reconcile any one opinion you hear with another that gives an opposing view. And anytime we get passionate about a policy, we all need to be open-minded to the consequences of a policy, as if it may be a zero-sum game.
Michael Betrus is the author of COVID-19: Lockdowns on Trial and the upcoming COVID-19: The Science vs. The Lockdowns.
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 White House is refusing to share details about its coordinated efforts to engage in a federal takeover of election administration.
President Biden really does not want the public to know about his federal takeover of election administration. Dozens of members of Congress have repeatedly asked for details, to no avail. Good government groups, members of the media, and private citizens have filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Not a single one has been responded to. All signs indicate a concerted effort to keep the public in the dark until at least after the November midterm elections. The lack of transparency and responsiveness is so bad that the Department of Justice and some of its agencies have been repeatedly sued for the information.
When President Biden ordered all 600 federal agencies to “expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process” on March 7, 2021, Republican politicians, Constitutional scholars, and election integrity specialists began to worry exactly what was up his sleeve.
They had good reason. The 2020 election had suffered from widespread and coordinated efforts by Democrat activists and donors to run “Get Out The Vote” operations from inside state and local government election offices, predominantly in the Democrat-leaning areas of swing states. Independent researchers have shown the effect of this takeover of government election offices was extremely partisan and favored Democrats overwhelmingly.
At the time the order was issued, Democrats were also hoping to pass H.R. 1, a continuation of the effort to destabilize elections throughout the country via a federalized takeover of state election administrations.
Biden gave each agency 200 days to file their plans for approval by none other than Susan Rice, his hyperpartisan domestic policy advisor. Yet fully nine months after those plans were due, they are all being hidden from the public, even as evidence is emerging that the election operation is in full swing.
Mobilizing Voters Is Always A Political Act
There are several major problems with Biden’s secret plan, critics say. It’s unethical to tie federal benefits to election activity. It’s unconstitutional to have the federal government take authority that belongs to the states and which Congress has not granted. And, given that all 50 states have different laws and processes governing election administration, it’s a recipe for chaos, confusion, and fraud at a time when election security concerns are particularly fraught.
Mobilizing voters is always a political act. Choosing which groups to target for Get Out The Vote efforts is one of the most important activities done by political campaigns. Federal agencies that interact with the public by doling out benefits can easily pressure recipients to vote for particular candidates and positions. Congress passed the Hatch Act in 1939, which bans bureaucrats and bureaucracies from being involved in election activities after Democrats used Works Progress Administration programs and personnel for partisan political advantage.
Executive Order 14019 ignores that the Constitution does not give the executive branch authority over elections. That power is reserved for the states, with a smaller role for Congress. With H.R. 1 and other Democrat Party efforts to grab more control over elections have thus far failed, Congress hasn’t authorized such an expansion.
As with previous efforts to destabilize elections, the chaos and confusion that would occur are part of the plan. The Executive Order copied much of a white paper put out by left-wing dark money group Demos, which advocates for left-wing changes to the country and which brags on its website that it moves “bold progressive ideas from cutting-edge concept to practical reality.” Not coincidentally, Biden put former Demos President K. Sabeel Rahman and former Demos Legal Strategies Director Chiraag Bains in key White House posts to oversee election-related initiatives.
Rahman serves as senior counsel at the White House office that oversees regulatory changes, meaning he approves every federal agency’s regulations and provides legal review of executive orders before they’re released. If you were looking to rush out constitutionally and ethically questionable orders, this post would be key to fill. Bains had been Demos’ director of legal strategies, helping write the paper that was turned into an executive order. He reports directly to Susan Rice, the hyperpartisan head of the Domestic Policy Council.
Rice has served in political positions in Democrat White Houses and the scandal-ridden Brookings Institution. She played a role in the spying-on-Trump scandal, blatantly lying about the same, lying about the Benghazi terrorist attack, and lying about Bowe Bergdahl’s military record.
Conservatives may be in the dark, but left-wing activist groups are fully involved in the plot. The left-wing dark money group Demos put out press releases immediately after the executive order was issued, saying it would be happy to work with federal agencies on the project.
And then the group admitted publicly that it “organized agency-based working groups and met with the staff in these agencies to provide technical expertise as they developed their initial voter registration plans, to ensure those plans reflect the knowledge and priorities of various agency stakeholders.” It also admits it “developed research and resources to assist and advance agency efforts to implement robust voter registration opportunities, including a slide deck explainer of the agencies’ potential for impact, best practices for conducting voter registration at federal agencies, and recommendations for modernizing and improving the accessibility of Vote.gov.”
All of that information should be available to oversight authorities in Congress and the American taxpayers paying for its implementation, not just the left-wing groups that produced it. Yet as of this publication date, none of it has been shared.
Biden’s plan “raises serious ethical, legal, and constitutional concerns,” wrote Rep. Ted Budd, R-N.C., along with three dozen Republican members of Congress on January 19, in a letter to the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), demanding more information by February 28 about the secret plot. It went unanswered.
The top Republican members of nine House committees and subcommittees likewise demanded information from Rice and the head of OMB in a letter they sent on March 29. They noted that election activity goes well beyond “the scope of each agency’s authorizing statute and mission.”
One of the concerns shared by the members was that Biden was directing agencies to work with third-party organizations. Nobody knows which third-party organizations have been approved by Rice for her political efforts, nor which are being used. They also asked how much money is being spent on the effort, which statutory authorities justify the election activities, and what steps are being taken to avoid Hatch Act violations. They received no response.
The Foundation for Government Accountability filed a lawsuit on April 20th to compel the Department of Justice to respond to the FOIA request for information. And the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) filed suit on June 16 to compel Justice to comply. Those suits are ongoing.
What We Know
While the White House and agencies are steadfastly refusing to share details about how they’re complying with the executive order, who they met with to develop their plans, or how they’re justifying their involvement in something Congress has not authorized them to participate in, some details are trickling out. Here are a few examples of the widespread and coordinated effort by Biden’s political appointees to meddle in the state administration of elections.
In the midst of a labor crisis, the Department of Labor boasted that it was turning 2,300 American Job Centers previously focused on helping displaced workers find jobs into hubs of political activism. These new federally funded voter registration agencies were given guidance about how to bring in organizations to conduct “voter outreach.”
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services likewise announced plans to turn community health centers into voter registration agencies, using thousands of health care facilities to focus on voter registration and turnout.
The Housing and Urban Development Department sent notice to public housing authorities that they should begin voter registration drives and participation activities. Previously, officials had been barred from electoral activities because they receive federal funding.
“It is presumed residents of public housing might disproportionately vote Democrat. … The executive order targets people receiving government benefits who might think their benefits depend on one party in power,” Stewart Whitson, legal director for the Foundation for Government Accountability, told the Daily Signal.
The Department of Education sent “dear colleague” letters to universities, telling them that Federal Work Study funds could now be used to support voter registration activities, contrary to previous guidance. The change was made without having gone through any rulemaking process to allow the change.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it’s using its child nutrition programs to push voter registration and enlisting state, local, and federally funded employees to implement voter registration drives in local schools.
The Commerce Department produced a massive, 113-page report which likely took four agency officials many hours to generate. It directs local voting board members about polling stations and poll worker training.
The tactics being used by these agencies were almost certainly contained in the plans submitted to Rice that have been withheld from investigators and overseers who had hoped to have some transparency about what the plans were. Frequently, the agencies claim the tactics are in response to the executive order, yet information about how they were developed has been withheld from the public for much of the year.
It is unclear why Biden and his political appointees are being so secretive about the work that went into their plan to engage in a federal takeover of election administration.
Whatever the case, Americans have a right to know whether these bureaucracies that are meddling in elections have experts in for each state’s election laws, what type of training is going on to ensure that state laws are being followed, whether they are allowing inspections and oversight to ensure no illegal activity, how they are determining whether a third-party group is genuinely non-partisan, whether they are allowing state investigators to approve money, and how much is being spent on this federal takeover of elections.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio & Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.“
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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“This session, let’s expand school choice any way we can,” declared Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey in his State of the State address on Jan. 10, “Let’s think big and find more ways to get kids into the school of their parent’s choice. Send me the bills, and I’ll sign them.”
Once signed into law, Arizona will reclaim its title as the state with the “most expansive ESA” policy in the nation.
Empowerment Scholarship Accounts empower families with the freedom and flexibility to customize their child’s education. Arizona families can currently use ESAs to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curriculums, online courses, educational therapy, and more.
The ESAs are funded with 90% of the state portion of Arizona’s per-pupil funding, including the additional funds for students with special needs.
Currently, about a quarter of elementary and secondary students in Arizona are eligible for an ESA, including students with special needs, students assigned to low-performing district schools, the children of active-duty military personnel, and a few other categories of students.
The Arizona Senate passed HB 2853 on Friday night on a vote of 16 to 10. Earlier in the week, the Arizona House of Representatives passed it by a margin of 31 to 26.
In 2011, Arizona became the first state to enact an ESA policy. Originally, the ESAs were limited only to students with special needs, but state lawmakers have repeatedly expanded the policy over the past decade.
There are now more than 10,000 students benefiting from the ESA policy in Arizona and about 31,000 ESA students in 10 states nationwide.
Last year, West Virginia wrested the “most expansive ESA” title away from Arizona with the enactment of its Hope Scholarship policy, which provides ESAs to all students either switching out of a public school or entering kindergarten.
Once Ducey, a Republican, signs the ESA expansion into law, Arizona will regain its “most expansive ESA” distinction, because the accounts will be available to all students, regardless of what type of school they had been attending.
As a Goldwater Institute report demonstrated, the ESA policy especially benefits students from low-income families. The typical (non-special education) award of about $6,600 covers the median elementary private school tuition and about two-thirds of the median private high school tuition.
Although Arizona does not collect data about the income levels of participating families, the Goldwater Institute looked at data on the geographic distribution of participants and found that “ESA students come from school districts with above-average and below-average poverty rates at broadly equal rates and in virtually identical proportions as traditional public school students overall.”
Additionally, the report found that “the highest concentrations of ESA usage actually occur in the most severely economically disadvantaged communities in Arizona.” Eight out of the 10 districts with the highest share of ESA students statewide have higher-than-average rates of child poverty, and the top three have child poverty rates that are more than double the state average.
The ESAs are extremely popular. According to a Morning Consult survey, 66% of Arizonans and 75% of Arizona parents of K-12 students support the ESA policy.
Nevertheless, opponents of education choice claim that, recent polls notwithstanding, the voters revealed their opposition to a universal ESA policy when they voted by an almost two-to-one margin in 2018 against Prop 305, which also would have expanded Arizona’s ESAs to all students.
However, divining the will of the voters is not so simple. Unlike the current proposal, Prop 305 had a cap on the number of students who could participate. Since the state’s Voter Protection Act requires a supermajority of at least three-fourths of the legislature to make changes to a law passed by the voters on the ballot, even ESA proponents such as the American Federation for Children opposed the measure, as it would have rendered the current program—participation caps and all—essentially set in stone.
Other critics of the program have raised concerns about the quality of education that ESA children receive. “We will not know if students are using our tax dollars … to learn anything,” fretted Democratic state Rep. Kelli Butler.
Proponents of education choice counter that the accountability under the ESA policy is even higher than in traditional district schools. “Parents are the ultimate accountability, not government,” said House Majority Leader Ben Toma, a Republican, the sponsor of the ESA expansion bill. “They know what’s best for their children, and we should trust them to do the right thing.’’
Arizona lawmakers are right to trust families. Arizona has long been a pioneer in education choice—enacting nation’s first tax-credit scholarship policy in 1997, in addition to the first ESA—and the investment in education choice is paying off.
Despite doomsday predictions about the effects that education choice would have on student performance, Arizona has led the nation in gains on the National Assessment of Education Progress over the past two decades.
When families are empowered to choose the learning environment that works best for their children and that aligns with their values, everyone benefits.
Once again, Arizona is setting an example that other states should emulate.
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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“No free man shall ever be barred from using arms to guard public liberty.” – Thomas Jefferson
The gun control debate began in the 1920s in Germany’s Weimar Republic. They mandated the registration of all firearms and the authority to confiscate them “if it was necessary for the public good.” They convinced gun owners these records would be confidential for the nation’s security.
The prime minister said these records would forever be protected from militant groups. Yet in 1933, when Adolf Hitler seized power, he used these “secret gun records” to identify, disarm, attack, and imprison opponents of the regime. It also enabled Hitler to murder 6 million defenseless Jews.
Weimar’s ill-conceived gun edict showed little insight and had one major flaw. Its most loquacious oversight was that Werner Best crafted it, a suspected conspirator and future Gestapo henchman.
“How fortunate it is for governments that the people they administer don’t think.” – Adolf Hitler
In 1938, Hitler signed The Gun Control Act to deprive Jews from owning guns. Since the Jews had registered their guns they were easily disarmed. With no weapons to fight back, they were sent to death camps and burned alive. Hitler relied on gun control to cleanse Germany with his Holocaust.
When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, it was a walk in the park for Hitler since it was illegal to own a gun in France and they couldn’t fight back. In reaction to this, days before Pearl Harbor in 1941, Congress not only affirmed our 2nd Amendment rights, it also outlawed federal gun registration.
Although America’s military might defends world liberty, gun ownership has been under attack for years. Gun control advocates say the U.S. should mimic the European nations that have strict gun control laws. But it was the well-trained army of U.S. gun owners that led to the allied victory in WWII.
In Germany, to purchase a gun, you must pass a government psychiatric evaluation. In Finland, to own a gun you must prove you’re a member of an approved gun club and pass a police review. In Italy, one must prove they need a gun and pass a criminal and mental background investigation.
In France, applicants must pass a mental health exam. In the UK and Japan, it is a felony to own a handgun. In Red China, anyone caught owning gun powder will be jailed. On the other hand, 75% of all citizens in Switzerland own guns. And they have the lowest gun-related crimes in the world.
Every nation with strict gun laws has been taken over by a tyrannical rogue leader; Adolf Hitler of Germany; Benito Mussolini of Italy; and Hirohito of Japan; or they’ve been invaded by one. But in the U.S. where it is a constitutional right to own and use guns, we are the defender of world freedom.
“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”– General George Patton
In America, the colonies demanded free speech, and gun ownership was protected before ratifying the Constitution. They demanded that those two amendments be added to the Constitution.
James Madison drafted and passed the Bill of Rights during the first U.S. Congress in NY in 1789.
In 1999, Connecticut passed the first “red flag law.” Today 18 states have followed. Red flag laws allow law enforcement, with a court order, to seize guns from anyone that a person considers a danger to themselves or others. Almost anyone can file a red flag request for almost any reason.
President Joe Biden has urged Congress to pass additional gun control laws including a red flag law. With a 224 to 202 vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed the Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order last week. This allows courts to issue extreme risk orders that ban individuals deemed dangerous from buying or owning a gun. But for this to become law, the 2nd amendment must be amended.
This is the most dangerous attack on the 2nd amendment by the federal government in history.
Within the context of red flag laws, anyone may attempt to have someone’s firearms seized with the slightest suspicion that a gun owner may pose a danger to them or to themselves. Only after proving their “innocence” before a court can a law-abiding citizen possibly retrieve their property.
A study by the RAND Corporation on states with red flag laws found that there is zero conclusive evidence that red flag laws prevent acts of gun violence. In fact, a report by CNN shows homicides across the U.S. have risen an alarming 6.2% since Biden was elected and after the George Floyd protests, riots and looting.
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” – Aldous Huxley
According to NBC, Illinois passed its red flag law in 2018, and gun crimes and homicides escalated throughout the state. In 2021, in the city of Chicago, there were 797 homicides and 3,561 shooting incidents despite Illinois’ extremely tough gun laws. Obviously, “red flag” gun control doesn’t work.
Some states allow medical professionals, school officials, and coworkers also to petition the courts. Other states only allow law enforcement and relatives to petition the courts to have guns removed from anyone they wish. In red flag states, you are guilty until proven innocent to get your guns back.
“You’re guilty until proven innocent. Perception is reality, that’s the way that it is.” – Chris Webber
The powers of the federal government are clearly defined and enumerated in the Constitution and disarming citizens is not one. In fact, the 2nd Amendment forbids the government from doing so. It specifically designates that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall never be infringed.”
James Hanstein wrote, “Our past are our lessons learned.” Our constitutional rights are not just a source of patriotic pride but the lifeblood of democracy. Our founders knew that the right of citizens to bear arms was essential to preserving their liberty. The 2nd Amendment ensures that. We need to remind our Congressmen that it was Hitler’s genocide of the Jews that led to the 2nd Great War.
The Senate has now passed the onus of “gun control” on to the states. They expand background checks, and fund school safety programs. They will also incentivize states to pass more red flag laws. Since states have almost “innumerable powers” they will pressure each state to pass stricter gun laws.
All government is local, and all liberty is too. The rubber meets the road in every state legislature. Politicians are addicted to money and easily swayed by federal gratuities. But what happens in our states ends up in DC. As states trade our gun rights for abusive “red flag laws,” citizens that do not challenge them don’t covet their freedom. They will be crying and moaning when progressives win their campaign to repeal the 2nd amendment.
“To preserve liberty, it is essential the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, how to use them.” – Richard Henry Lee
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.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-07-01 04:00:002022-07-01 04:00:00The Slippery Slope of Red Flag Gun Laws
A firm in China that uses slave labor has a better ESG score than an American firm that pays landowners who freely sell their mineral rights.
Expecting publicly traded companies to do more than simply return shareholder value — their fiduciary responsibility — is a fairly new development in Western capitalism. The idea that corporate leadership and shareholders should explicitly care about environmental, social, and corporate governance (known as ESG) issues beyond how they might affect the bottom line has been around for only about 30 years.
But now, ESG investing has become a big driver in steering capital to corporations deemed to be good stewards of subjective principles. By 2025, financial management firms that claim to invest with ESG principles are projected to account for $50 trillion of a total global value of $140.5 trillion — more than a third of managed investments.
But is ESG investing trustworthy? Does it really do what it claims to do?
MSCI is one of the world’s largest investment support services firms, with $2.1 billion in revenue. It offers an ESG rating service. I noticed that my Charles Schwab account recently started to display MSCI’s ESG ratings alongside that of the more traditional rating services — services focused on a company’s profitability.
Comparing U.S. and Chinese Companies’ Ratings
Curious, I looked into the rating of a firm I own some stock in Texas-based Brigham Minerals (NYSE: MNRL). Brigham looks for land that could produce oil and gas, and owns mineral and royalty interests in 7,909 oil wells and 688 natural gas wells in West Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming, and North Dakota. MSCI rates Brigham Minerals as a B, the sixth lowest of seven ratings that range from AAA to CCC, labeling it a “laggard” in the industry with an overall score of 2 out of 10.
I previously wrote about ESG investing’s blind spot for China three years ago in Fox Business, pointing out that investment firms playing in the ESG space were also bullish on China — a nation with terrible air and water pollution (the “E”), horrendous human rights abuses (the “S”), rampant corruption, opaque accounting standards, and rule of law only at the forbearance of the Chinese Communist Party (the “G”).
Not expecting the financial industry to have changed for the better, I looked up three China-based energy companies and compared them to Brigham Minerals. They were Xinyi Solar Holdings (OTC: XISHY), China Resources Gas Group (OTC: CGASY), and China Coal Energy Company (OTC: CCOZF). All three beat the American energy company in their overall rating.
Buying Into CCP-controlled Enterprises
Now, it’s important for investors to understand that you really can’t own shares in a Chinese corporation. When you buy shares in a corporation based in China, you’re really buying American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) that represent shares issued by companies in the People’s Republic of China. As such, your ownership rights are more theoretical than real and are subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.
Further, many Chinese firms that have ADRs traded in the United States are themselves subsidiaries of state-owned enterprises — meaning that if you buy these ADRs, you are directly investing in an entity fully controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
As an example, China Coal Energy is 58.36 percent owned by China National Coal Group, a state-owned enterprise. China Coal Energy owns 12 coal mines, 13 coal-processing plants, five coking plants, four coal mining equipment manufacturing plants, and two mine design institutes. They’re really into coal.
That makes sense, as coal is China’s largest source of energy — with the PRC having on the order of five times the size of the U.S. coal powerplant fleet in operation or in construction. MSCI rates China Coal Energy as “BB” — one step better than Brigham Minerals, with an environmental rating of 4.7 of 10 compared to Brigham’s 0.8, a social rating of 4.2 compared to Brigham’s 3.5, and a governance rating of 2.2 compared to 6.4 for the American firm. Overall, China Coal rates 3.1 out of 10 compared to 2 for Brigham.
China Resources Gas Group mostly invests in natural gas pipelines. It’s a subsidiary of China Resources Holdings Company, a state-owned company. The company got its start in Hong Kong as Liow and Company in 1938. Its purpose was to raise funds and purchase supplies for the People’s Liberation Army, then fighting the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War — and, occasionally, the Japanese as they pressed their attacks into China.
By the 1960s, due to grain shortages caused by Maoist policies, the firm was used to import vast amounts of “capitalist grain” to stave off mass starvation. MSCI generously rates China Resources Gas as an “A” — the third-best of seven grades, with better grades than Brigham in both the environment, 7.7 to 0.8, and social, 7.6 to 3.5. Only in governance does China Resources Gas fall short, earning an “average” rating of 4.6 to Brigham’s 6.4. China Resources Gas nets an overall rating of 6.3 to Brigham’s 2.
Xinyi Solar Holdings should be problematic for MSCI — after all, China’s solar power industry, a global juggernaut, is a heavy user of materials produced by slave labor in Xinjiang, a Muslim-majority region formerly known as Turkestan where the Chinese communist government has been engaged in a grinding genocide. MSCI even has a corporate statement against “modern slavery” on its website, claiming that the firm “is committed to protecting human rights globally… Specifically, the Firm strongly opposes slavery and human trafficking and will not knowingly support or conduct business with any organization involved in such activities.”
This is at odds with MSCI’s ESG rating of Xinyi Solar — an “A” — with scores of 8.1 for environment (heavy metal pollution aside, apparently), 5.6 for social, and 2.6 for governance. Overall, Xinyi scores a 6.1 of 10 compared to 2 for the Texas firm.
That a firm in China that relies on slave labor for key portions of its supply chain has a better social score than an American firm that pays landowners who freely sell them their mineral rights betrays an upside-down ethic where freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Of course, that hasn’t stopped 174 institutional owners from investing in Xinyi Solar, among the largest being JP Morgan, Invesco, and Vanguard.
Counter to ESG Goals
This leads to one last, odd ESG story. Texas lawmakers, concerned about how banks and financial institutions aggressively implementing ESG investing rules were beginning to starve Texas’s energy industry of capital, passed a law in 2021 to address the problem. Senate Bill 13 prohibited Texas’s pension and investment funds (worth about $300 billion) from investing in “financial companies that boycott certain energy companies.”
But figuring out what companies those might be turned out to be a somewhat complicated process. So, the Texas state comptroller, charged with implementing the new law, turned to… MSCI. The problem was that MSCI is guilty of pushing ESG to the detriment of domestic energy produced in Texas, forcing Texas to modify its contract with MSCI to avoid violating the new law.
Ben M. “Bud” Brigham, founder and executive chairman of Brigham Minerals and other energy companies, has been an ESG skeptic for years. He tells me that “companies innovating in free markets strive to create value for their owners which benefit all the legitimate stakeholders. This is empirically validated in America, where we enjoy unprecedented levels of clean air and clean water compared to other major economies. In contrast, ESG investing — a relatively subjective exercise — often represents the influence of illegitimate stakeholders, and therefore ends up being irresponsible, destructive, and counter to its stated goals.”
So, here’s the bottom line from the self-righteous global elites: Chinese-government-owned coal, fine; Chinese slave-provisioned solar power, good; Chinese state-owned natural gas, better; American domestic natural gas and oil, terrible.
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.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-06-30 03:58:002022-06-30 03:58:00The ‘ESG’ Scam Rates Slave-Using Chinese Firms Higher Than Clean American Energy Producers
For the third time in the last fourteen years, the Supreme Court has strongly held that the Second Amendment “is not a second-class right,” as Justice Thomas re-affirmed for the 6-3 majority in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. This decision was released the same day that the Senate passed the bipartisan “red flag” legislation, now law, that provided a person’s firearms may be temporarily confiscated without due process.
Thomas emphasizes and bases his opinion for the Court on the two well-known and recent Second-Amendment decisions. In DC v. Heller (2008), the Court ruled in a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Scalia that a District of Columbia law was unconstitutional. The law completely prohibited the possession of a handgun in the home—“where the defense of self, family, and property is most acute,” said Scalia—and required other firearms in the home to be unloaded and disassembled.
The Court ruled in Heller against probably the oldest argument supporting gun restrictions, namely, that because it begins with “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State,” the Second Amendment allowed firearm possession only for state militias and men when in service of militias. However, the Heller majority concluded that the Amendment secured an “individual right . . . unconnected with service in a militia.” In Bruen, Thomas, citing Heller, said that the “Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct.” Only four members of the current Court were members of the Court for the Heller decision.
In McDonald v. Chicago (2010), the Court in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Alito went beyond Heller and ruled that the right “to keep and bear arms” is a “fundamental” and “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” (citing the Glucksberg 1997 case), and that the Second Amendment was incorporated against and applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. Since the District of Columbia is not a state, incorporation was not an issue in Heller. Five members of the McDonald Court are still on the Court.
So, with recent and definitive rulings, even though by narrow margins, that the Second Amendment is an “individual” and “fundamental and deeply rooted” American right concerned with the defense of “self and family,” what did the state of New York try to do? In 2017, that state enacted a law requiring a hearing for a license to possess a firearm in the home before a judge or law-enforcement officer to show proof of “good moral character,” no criminal or mental illness history, and the absence of any “good cause” for denial (how was one to prove that negative?). To carry a concealed handgun in public, the law required the applicant to affirmatively prove that “proper cause exists” for such a license.
Such a requirement is so stiff that, as Justice Thomas noted in his opinion, a New York state court had ruled that “living or working in an area noted for criminal activity does not suffice” for a concealed carry permit. And other New York courts have ruled that the “proper cause” must concern a “particular threat” to the safety of that particular person, a “special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.”
As it had already done in both Heller and McDonald, the Court in Bruen reviewed at length the entire history of public firearm regulation in the states both before and since the ratification of the Second Amendment. The Court reviewed laws and customs of medieval and early modern English history, the American colonies and early American history, pre-and post-Civil War history, and late 19th and early-20th century history. Thomas observed that there have been occasional and limited restrictions on the right to bear arms, but “None of these restrictions imposed a substantial burden on public carry analogous to that imposed by New York’s restrictive licensing regime.”
It is this objective and comparative review of “the Anglo-American history of public carry,” together with the plain text of the Second Amendment that is definitive, Thomas concludes. “We reiterate that the standard for applying the Second Amendment is as follows: When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
In addition, Thomas points out that to “bear arms” is something a person does in public and therefore is a public right. No one “bears” but instead only possesses their firearms in the privacy of their homes. American citizens can bear concealed firearms in public.
The Court’s Bruen opinion is its latest, strong affirmation of the full constitutional status of a routinely disparaged or ignored constitutional right, showing that all constitutional rights are equal.
The five-opinion, 135-page decision also features a direct confrontation between Justice Alito in concurrence and Justice Breyer in dissent. Breyer begins his dissenting opinion with eight pages of an extra-legal and extended op-ed with sources cited about the contemporary need for firearms regulation. He begins with “Since the start of this year (2022), there have 277 reported mass shootings—an average of more than one per day.” To this, Alito retorts that a mass shooter will not be deterred by a law forbidding carrying “a handgun outside the home.” He also adds that the New York “law at issue in this case” did not stop the mass shooter in Buffalo, New York.
Breyer repeatedly emphasizes the use of guns in suicide. Alito replies again that the New York law preventing carrying handguns in public has nothing to do with suicide carried out in private. The same goes for the use of guns in domestic disputes. It has nothing to do with the case at hand. Back and forth it goes, with Alito arguing” that “our country’s high level of gun violence,” is itself a reason “that cause(s) law-abiding citizens to feel the need to carry a gun for self-defense,” and citing a source on his own: “According to survey data, defensive firearm use occurs up to 2.5 million times per year.”
In his final words at the end of his opinion, Justice Thomas sets out a right equal to all other constitutional rights:
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-06-29 04:05:002022-06-29 04:05:00SCOTUS Gets 2A Right: Not a Second-Class Right
