Abortion Is Built on Fraud: A Response to The New York Times thumbnail

Abortion Is Built on Fraud: A Response to The New York Times

By Sarah Parshall Perry

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Editors’ Note: The following article is an accurate fact check on the lies of the pro-abortion industry. In Arizona, Prop 139 is based on these lies. Political advertising on the television by the abortion industry claim an “abortion ban” in Arizona – an outright lie. We urge all readers to deliver a resounding and strong NO on Prop 139 to prevent Arizona from becoming one of the most radical abortion states in America with virtually unlimited abortion to the time of birth.  

In an essay published by The New York Times and titled “Abortion Pills Are Safe. Post-Roe America Isn’t,” Dr. Chavi Eve Karkowsky, a physician who practices maternal-fetal medicine, demonstrates that the campaign for unlimited abortion is as fraudulent and deceptive as ever.

From the beginning, the “right” to abortion was built on fraud. Abortion advocates pushed states to repeal their pro-life laws with baseless claims about illegal abortions.

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The claim that “thousands” of women died from illegal abortions began in the 1960s and persists even today. The National Center for Health Statistics says the real number was just 36 in 1973—the year that the Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade decision. The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column gave Planned Parenthood its worst rating of “Four Pinnochios” for that lie.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court created a fictional account of abortion history that long ago was exposed as radically revisionist. The strategy behind Roe was built on so-called “scholarship” that even the pro-abortion lawyers believed strained credibility.

Pro-abortion historians since Roe have tried to maintain the fiction, deliberately erasing the 19th-century feminists and physicians who opposed abortion from their duplicitous narrative.

Since 2022, when the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade with its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortion advocates have achieved most of what they said they want. All but four states banned abortion from conception in 1973; 14 states do so today. No state allowed abortion until birth before Roe; nine states do so now.

Even the most restrictive post-conception abortion ban, at six weeks, covers barely half of abortions. The laws in effect in 1973 prohibited more than 90% of abortions; the laws in effect today allow more than 80%.

The cataclysmic fallout of Roe’s overturning—a narrative pushed by the abortion lobby—has not, in fact, come to pass. Though based on her writing, one would be hard pressed to think that Dr. Karkowsky thinks otherwise.

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Back to Karkowsky’s essay in The New York Times. The physician professes concern that women are using abortion drugs “far from the supervision of qualified medical providers.” But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration previously required such supervision for more than 20 years after approving mifepristone, the primary abortion drug, in 2000.

That was the case until the Biden-Harris administration deregulated the abortion pill mifepristone in 2021, ostensibly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, the action made the pill easier to get, more dangerous, and less predictable in its effects.

Among the changes: The federal government eliminated the requirement of an in-person doctor’s visit to secure the abortion pill, expanded use of the pill from seven to 10 weeks’ gestation, and allowed women to obtain pills by mail.

This was foolhardy.

For a drug with known and serious potential side effects (including incomplete abortions, severe bleeding, failed abortions, and infection), the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory determinations made a dangerous pill even more dangerous.

In fact, FDA’s own warning label on mifepristone states that complications from using the abortion pill can reach a frequency of between 2.9% and 4.6%. In 2023 alone, that represents nearly 20,000 emergency room visits for medication abortion patients.

And now there’s an active disinformation campaign by abortion advocates about what state pro-life laws say and how they apply.

Take Kate Cox, for example. The Texas woman claimed the state’s pro-life law didn’t allow her to obtain an abortion after she learned that her unborn child had a serious abnormality. It turns out, as the Texas Supreme Court explained, hers was also a fraudulent tale.

Cox’s doctor, an abortion advocate, chose not to make the medical finding that, under the Texas statute, would have allowed her abortion. Cox’s lawyer, supplied by the Center for Reproductive Rights, then filed an unnecessary request for a court order that, thanks to the lawyer’s decision, was certain to be denied.

Many people believed Cox’s claim that she had no choice but to leave Texas to get an abortion when the truth is that she participated in a legal hoax to sow seeds of confusion and doubt about the state’s pro-life law.

Abortion advocates spin other fraudulent yarns. They claim that laws prohibiting abortion also block medical care for miscarriage or ectopic pregnancies. Others say pro-life laws require that a pregnant woman literally be at death’s door before a doctor may treat her for complications.

None of these claims is true. Not one.

Although the media often neglect to mention it, every state in America—including states with near-total restrictions on abortion—has an exception for the “life of the mother.” And states uniformly require doctors to use their “best medical judgement” in emergency cases to ensure that the pregnant woman is safe.

Abortion advocates such as Karkowsky seek to separate women who want to use abortion drugs from any necessary connection to doctors or medical facilities. Then they complain that women such as Amber Thurman and Candi Miller in Georgia are dying from using abortion drugs without adequate medical attention.

That’s like someone killing her parents and then asking for leniency because she’s an orphan.

The fact of the matter is that Thurman and Miller died from a combination of complications related to the de-regulated abortion pill (made more accessible and dangerous by the Biden-Harris administration) as well as simple medical malpractice—not from Georgia’s commonsense abortion restrictions.

The pro-abortion lobby, legacy media, and abortion practitioners are lying to you—both on the impact of state abortion laws and the purported inability to receive safe “reproductive care.” The entire abortion industry is, after all, built on fraud.

Americans would do well to ignore the hype.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment: New Exposés Shed Light on Male Inmates Being Housed in Women’s Prisons in Washington and Minnesota thumbnail

Cruel and Unusual Punishment: New Exposés Shed Light on Male Inmates Being Housed in Women’s Prisons in Washington and Minnesota

By Editors of The Independent Women’s Forum

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Editors’ Note: Democrats attempt to portray themselves as the “party of women.” Their extreme views, however, are erasing the concept of womanhood and the legal protections that have been provided in law. This has become one of the leading “sleeper issues” of this election cycle. Housing men in women’s prisons is just one example. The destruction of women’s sports is another. Female voters need to consider the trade-offs between compromising on abortion and fealty to Democrats and the loss of womanhood itself. Only a small percentage of women are affected by abortion laws. Still, all women and girls are affected when they lose their legal status when public safety is degraded, when war looms, and when the economy is in bad shape.

“The women are scared to speak up.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – IW Features, a storytelling platform of Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), announced two new exposés as part of its exclusive series, Cruel & Unusual Punishment: The Male Takeover of Female PrisonsThe episodes are about former Seattle, Washington, jail nurse Olivia* and long-time Minnesota prison teacher, Alicia Beckmann. *A pseudonym has been used to protect Olivia’s identity. 

Olivia worked as a correctional nurse for five years at Seattle’s King County Correctional Facility, where she served incarcerated women. King County Correctional Facility allegedly brushed aside complaints from female inmates who were enduring both sexual harassment and misconduct by transgender-identifying male inmates.

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Olivia is now sounding the alarm on the fact that women in jails and prisons face unacceptable risks from gender self-identification policies, such as Washington state’s DOC 490.700 Transgender, Intersex, and/or Gender Non-binary Housing and Supervision. The policy allows convicted men who “self-identify as transgender, intersex, and/or gender non-binary” to transfer to women-only facilities like King County Correctional Facility.

Olivia told IW Features, in part:

“Jails and prisons are unlike any community setting. Prisoners have no privacy, no ability to choose their roommates, no self-defense measures other than their own bodily strength. These attributes alone make female prisoners especially vulnerable, but one can imagine how this vulnerability is increased when facility policies allow male prisoners to transfer to female units largely based on their word.” 

Read Olivia’s story on IW Features here.

Alicia Beckmann, a Minnesota native, was about to celebrate her tenth anniversary working for Minnesota Correctional Facility––Shakopee, the state’s only facility for female offenders.

That’s when she was “blindsided” by the sudden presence of male inmates, Christina Lusk and Bradley Sirvio.

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Lusk and Sirvio were the first two men to arrive at Shakopee and were assigned to the women’s facility in the wake of a 2023 discrimination lawsuit filed by Lusk. Lusk was represented by the radical left-wing nonprofit Gender Justice and sued the state in order to be transferred to Shakopee. Lusk even secured a taxpayer-funded vaginoplasty and breast “revision” procedure to affirm his transgender identity.

Lusk’s lawsuit garnered national attention because Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s administration sent more than $500,000 of taxpayer money to Gender Justice.

The Walz administration a year later implemented the “Management and Placement of Incarcerated People Who Are Transgender, Gender Diverse, Intersex, or Nonbinary,” a policy that allowed at least four more men, including convicted murderers, to transfer to Shakopee based on their self-declared gender identity.

Beckmann told IW Features, in part:

“The women are scared to speak up. Many women are incarcerated because of the men they spend their time with, and we all have freedom of choice, but I guarantee that probably 75% of our population committed a crime because there was violence against them by a man, or they felt coerced into doing something for that man.”

Read Alicia’s story on IW Features here.

Andrea Mew, IW Features Manager at Independent Women’s Forum, said: “Misguided gender policies erode critical protections for women in jails and prisons, proven by testimonies from brave whistleblowers like Alicia Beckmann and Olivia*. It’s not easy to come forward with the unsavory truth when you’re under immense pressure to adhere to the narrative, but Alicia and Olivia put principle over political correctness. When even those who are trusted with rehabilitation are discouraged from raising legitimate concerns about female inmates’ safety, you have to ask yourself… who is really benefiting from these woke policies? Certainly not the women being re-traumatized and stripped of their safety, dignity, and fundamental rights.”

*****

This article was published by the Independent Women’s Forum and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Ladies, You Don’t Have To Vote For Kamala Harris thumbnail

Ladies, You Don’t Have To Vote For Kamala Harris

By Jennifer Galardi

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Editors’ Note: If one is watching the political ads in Arizona, it is abortion, abortion, abortion.  The linkage of abortion to “women’s rights” is troublesome. There is no unlimited right to kill another human being just to achieve one’s goals in life. No one has the right to take another life except in self-defense. But, we accept that most people support abortion. Arizona has a reasonable compromise abortion law, not an abortion ban, as the Democrats contend. All that is asked is that women do not wait more than 15 weeks until the baby can feel pain before killing it. That is not entirely satisfactory from a philosophical standpoint, but given where we are in the culture, it is a reasonable solution to a contentious problem. But that is not good enough for Democrats. They want no limitations on abortion as a litmus test for “supporting women” and getting their vote. Yet, at the same time, Democrats push transgender philosophy that defines womanhood out of existence. We don’t think abortion alone is a reason to support Kamala Harris or vote against Kari Lake, or vote for Proposition 139. Women need a good economy, liberty, secure borders, and public safety, just like everyone else does. And need we add, half the babies aborted would grow up to be women.

Harris, like most female Democrat politicians, relies on one issue and one issue alone to shore up votes from women: abortion. 

Abortion is the only reason Harris has given women to vote for her — and it’s not enough.

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Donald Trump, on the other hand, has given women many reasons to vote for him. This week, while Kamala Harris was offering pithy and empty condolences to the families of women murdered by illegal immigrants, Donald Trump dedicated an hour to addressing female voters’ concerns.

At a Georgia town hall on Wednesday, Trump tackled questions from an exclusively female audience, addressing their worries about everything from the dangers of illegal immigration to the high cost of food and child care to women’s safety. When one woman asked how quickly Trump could remove the threats that arise in sanctuary cities so women and children could live free of fear, Trump replied, “We are going to end all sanctuary cities immediately.”

He also offered more details about how he would be women’s “protector.” As he stated in a speech last month in Pennsylvania: “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger. … You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today.”

Trump’s reassurances should be music to women’s ears as they struggle with the devastating effects of the Biden-Harris administration.

The Effects of Biden and Harris

For example, the Biden-Harris administration rewrote Title IX, allowing men to compete in women’s sports and permitting them to infiltrate women’s-only spaces.

This administration’s open border policies have also led to avoidable violent crimes due to an influx of illegal immigrants, many of whom were criminals before they ever unlawfully crossed our border. This puts our most vulnerable, women and children, at high risk of attack — women like Augusta University nursing student Laken Riley, 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin, not to mention the women and children living in the apartments taken over by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

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Yet when Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked Kamala Harris if she owed an apology to the families of the young ladies brutally abused and killed by illegal immigrants, she responded with a delayed and reluctant “sorry” and that she “feel[s] awful” for the loss of their lives. She expressed no regret, however, for reversing Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy or other measures he took to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.

When asked about her support for taxpayer funds being used for inmates who want transgender surgeries, she told Baier the issue “is really quite remote.”

But it’s a real issue, and endorsing dangerous male criminals being housed with female inmates, allowing boys onto girls’ sports teams, and instilling LGBT agendas into schools and even foreign policy initiatives are not remote. Biden and Harris’ policies significantly affect vulnerable girls and women. They weaken family ties and sow discord between parents and children. They neuter our military and make America look weak on the world stage.

The policies Harris would continue into her presidency not only harm women but seek to erase our very essence. Still, Harris, like most female Democrat politicians, relies on one issue and one issue alone to shore up votes from women: abortion.

How Democrats Deceive Women

Democrats have been good at convincing women that the only right that matters is the ability to kill their unborn children and that the freedom to get an abortion for any reason, at any time during their pregnancy, is the ultimate reason for voting. This, they claim, is female empowerment of the highest order.

I was one of the women who fell for this ruse. After moving to Los Angeles, I abandoned many of the traditional values instilled in me during my youth including my pro-life views. I became convinced that women’s equality meant having sex like men, without giving any thought to the sanctity and true purpose of the most intimate act between a man and a woman. My heart always knew differently. Every one-night stand and encounter devoid of love left me heartbroken and devastated.

Now I see Democrats’ play for women’s votes for what it is: deception.

Abortion Is Not Empowering

Abortion is not empowerment. It is bondage. Yet it’s the only thing that the party that can’t even define what women are, much less protect them, has to offer. Yet Harris’ double-digit lead over Trump with women shows many still cling to the abortion issue.

True female empowerment comes from our awesome ability to nurture and protect another human in our wombs. It comes from understanding our bodies and monthly cycles so well that we can even plan our families naturally if we aren’t prepared to handle the responsibilities of having a child. Many women seem to think restraint and control of sexual desire before a baby is conceived should be left to men alone, when we also have the power to say no. In fact, the freedom women have to turn down men they think are unsuitable for marriage or providing a safe, healthy home for children is one of the greatest ways we can exert control over our lives.

Freedom comes with taking responsibility for our choices and their consequences. It requires thinking for ourselves, no matter how politicians try to manipulate and confuse us. That is what is on the ballot next month, ladies, so choose wisely.

And no, you don’t have to choose Kamala Harris just because she’s a woman.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Weekend Read: How Democrat Activists Buy Elections By Taking Over Local News thumbnail

Weekend Read: How Democrat Activists Buy Elections By Taking Over Local News

By Mark Hemingway

Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes

In recent years, hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment has poured into local media, but the lion’s share is coming from left-wing activists with overtly ideological and partisan agendas.

American journalism has experienced a spectacular collapse in the last 25 years — daily newspaper circulation has declined from over 60 million subscribers to just over 20 million. And the trend is accelerating: According to the Pew Research Organization, the average monthly number of unique visitors to the websites of the country’s top 50 newspapers plummeted 20 percent in one year from 2021 to 2022.

At the same time, the remaining readership expresses a historically low level of faith that the news they are getting is accurate. Just 32 percent of Americans say they have a “great deal or a fair amount of trust” in the media, according to polling from Gallup.

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If there is a bright spot here, polling has long shown that American consumers trust local media more than the national press. “In 2021, Americans were 17 points more likely to say they trust reporting by local news organizations ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ than to trust reporting by national news organizations,” notes a survey done by Gallup and the Knight Foundation. But the rapid consolidation of the news industry has adversely affected the level of trust in the news Americans are consuming.

Local news organizations, however, have been hit especially hard by the decline in readers. Many have folded, cut staff, been purchased by private equity firms, or absorbed by national news organizations, which has diminished their editorial independence.

In recent years, hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment poured into local media in what appears to be a salutary injection of faith in the power of the community or regional press. However, the lion’s share of these investments is coming from sources some worry will further undermine trust in the media — progressive foundations and left-leaning activists who have overtly ideological and partisan agendas. While conservative donors also support news outlets (including RealClearInvestigations), their contributions are far smaller than those coming from the left — contributions large enough to radically remake the local news landscape. Significant examples of that largesse include:

  • The MacArthur Foundation’s launch of its “Press Forward” initiative last fall, which committed to spending $500 million over the next five years to “enhance local journalism at an unprecedented level to re-center local news as a force for community cohesion; support new models and solutions that are ready to scale; and close longstanding inequities in journalism coverage and practice.”
  • The National Trust for Local News’ 2021 announcement of its goal of amassing $300 million for a “non-profit newspaper company dedicated to protecting and sustaining community news … [to] publish sustainable community newspapers that safeguard the public trust, elevate the facts, empower communities with solutions, and foster a strong sense of place.” Last year, the National Trust for Local News quietly acquired Maine’s largest paper, The Portland Press-Herald, along with 22 other newspapers in the state.
  • The creation of States Newsroom, which was founded just six years ago with the goal of “nonpartisan coverage of state policy,” and has already formed partnerships with local outlets in all 50 states. Its stated mission is “hard-hitting reporting and commentary to change the political debate.”
  • The creation of The American Journalism Project, which describes its mission as “venture philanthropy,” has committed $55 million to “rebuilding local news.”

RealClearInvestigations reached out to States Newsroom, National Trust For Local News, American Journalism Project, and Courier Newsroom. None of them responded to a request for comment.

Meet the Funders

While not all the funding sources for these projects are expressly partisan, to the extent the funding of these new local journalism initiatives is publicly known, some of the biggest donors and foundations on the progressive left are closely associated with them. These donors had little previous interest in local journalism and have a track record of supporting initiatives that are ideological or partisan — or both. 

The MacArthur Foundation, for instance, in addition to its $500 million Press Forward initiative, also provided funding for the National Trust for Local News and The American Journalism Project. Long known for funding left-wing causes, MacArthur endorsed one of the most politically controversial works of advocacy journalism in the last decade. The foundation awarded one of its generous $800,000 “Genius Grants” to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the architect of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which claimed that the year enslaved people were first brought to Virginia was the “true founding [date] of America,” not 1776. The 1619 Project received scathing criticism from some of America’s most eminent historians and one of the 1619 Project’s own fact-checkers, and entire essays in the project were so factually incorrect that there were calls for them to be retracted entirely.

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The MacArthur Foundation also supports the National Trust for Local News, which has also received financial support from two of the largest sources of left-wing political funding — the Tides Foundation and the Open Society Foundations.

The Tides Foundation, a “donor-advised” fund, allows contributors to direct where the money goes. By acting as an intermediary, Tides obscures the original source of the funds, making it what transparency advocates call a “dark money” group. Tides is one of the largest dark money operations and spent $854 million in 2022 alone. It donates millions in grants to pro-Democrat get-out-the-vote operations, abolishing pretrial bail even for defendants charged with violent crimes, and pro-Hamas demonstrations following the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack in Israel.

The Open Society Foundations network was created by leftist billionaire megadonor George Soros. According to NBC News, between 2020 and 2023, “Soros’ contributions to political campaigns and causes since January 2020 [amount] to roughly half a billion dollars — at the least — most of it steered through dark money nonprofit groups and going largely toward political causes aligned with the Democratic Party.” In addition to funding the National Trust for Local News, Soros also has the power to influence local news consumption after his family office recently purchased a large stake in 227 radio stations across the U.S.

Both the National Trust for Local News and States Newsroom have received funding from controversial Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, who has spent nearly half a billion dollars on American left-wing causes. Between 1990 and 2006, Wyss gave almost $120,000 to candidates and political committees despite it being illegal for foreign nationals to spend money on U.S. elections. Wyss was never punished because the statute of limitations had passed by the time the Federal Elections Commission investigated his illegal donations.

In 2021, Wyss partnered with another influential Democratic donor, hotel magnate Stewart W. Bainum Jr., in an unsuccessful attempt to purchase Tribune Publishing, which then owned the Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, and the Baltimore Sun among other newspapers and media properties.

In addition, some of the largest donations to The American Journalism Project are from the foundations of high-profile Democratic megadonors. The Emerson Collective, funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, owner of The Atlantic and one of the largest shareholders in Disney/ABC, has given in excess of $5 million. Also, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s The Democracy Fund and the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund of the eponymous Craigslist founder have given The American Journalism project donations somewhere between $1 million and $5 million. 

For her part, Powell Jobs has built out a well-funded network designed to explicitly advance the policy goals of the Democratic Party.

In addition to numerous political causes, Omidyar has long funded journalism efforts — he provided the seed money for the left-wing news site The Intercept, and Democracy Fund has given sizable grants to the Defending Democracy Together Institute, which is closely associated with the online anti-Trump outlet The Bulwark.

In 2020, Newmark publicly committed to a $200 million media campaign aimed at swaying the presidential election while alleging that “foreign adversaries” were controlling the Trump White House. Relatedly, Google and Facebook are also major donors to The American Journalism Project, and both companies have received heavy criticism for election meddling and censoring information on Covid and various political topics that later turned out to be accurate.

Ironically, perhaps no single man is more responsible for the death of local media than Newmark, as it was Craigslist that destroyed classified advertising, a major source of revenue for newspapers. “I’m very concerned about jobs for journalists, and the future of local journalism, and had always guessed that Craigslist might have an effect,” Newmark told the Press-Gazette in 2021.

Laundering Political Points of View

Despite the fact that so many partisan and ideological funders are behind these efforts, media critics say that alone is not reason enough to dismiss these initiatives to support local journalism.

Steve Krakauer, a former CNN producer and author of Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned its Principles and Lost the People, points to the hypocritical outrage in the national press when a major Republican donor recently bought the Baltimore Sun earlier this year. Although the new owner said he had no plans to politicize the news and wanted “to return the paper to localism,” NPR claimed his purchase of the paper “sparked outrage and bafflement” among “some Baltimore residents.”

Commentary of this sort rarely attends the acquisition or major financial support of a media source by wealthy individuals and outfits on the left. “Just because someone is coming from a political point of view, whether from the right or the left, they shouldn’t be immediately dismissed as someone who can’t have an objective news organization,” says Krakauer.

The infusion of nonprofit money reflects the economic reality that newspapers’ traditional reliance on advertising and subscription revenue has become an increasingly unsustainable business model.

A growing concern is that the content of these new progressive donor-funded local news sites slants liberal in ways that many of the old independently owned regional newspapers that were accountable to their subscribers for revenue did not.

Even the perception that progressive donors with national priorities now control large swaths of local media threatens to erode confidence in the media at a time when there’s too little trust left. And this mistrust has a well-documented and worrisome partisan component documented by Gallup.

Pew also notes that media distrust isdriven by a decline among Republicansand “the percentage of Republicans with at least some trust in national news organizations has been cut in half — dropping from 70% in 2016 to 35% [in 2021].”

Krakauer notes that when Republican news consumers learn that George Soros was involved in taking control of nearly every major newspaper in Maine — a state with the potential to be decisive in a national election — it is reasonable for them to believe that partisans are taking over a space that “has not been traditionally seen as political and partisan.”

Michael Watson, the author of a report on the left-wing incursion into local news for the right-leaning Capital Research Center, argues that media bias is often exhibited in structural issues that aren’t always obvious from reading day-to-day reporting.

“During the 20th-century heyday of the metropolitan-liberal commercial press, well-resourced regional and local newspapers — through their coverage decisions, investigative journalism projects, and editorial voice — could set the tone for local and state-level policy discussions,” observed Watson. “They had the power to decide what issues were worth considering and what perspectives would be given legitimacy. The fracturing of the media world in the 21st century has given that power to everyone and no one — and it is a power the institutional left is prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to retake.”

Watson also says it’s hard to deny that progressive funders of these local news initiatives see journalism as a vehicle to achieve their political goals. “The philanthropic sector recognizes the need to strengthen American democracy and is beginning to see that progress on every other issue, from education and healthcare to criminal justice reform and climate change, is dependent on the public’s understanding of the facts,” said the president of the MacArthur Foundation in the press release announcing their $500 million Press Forward initiative.

“When you read that, you think ‘Aha!’” says Watson. “Because if I may be aggressively cynical, if you control the public’s understanding of the facts, you control every other issue.”

Courier Newsroom: A Case Study

Courier Newsroom provides a case study of this phenomenon. For years now, Courier has been running ersatz news websites in swing states with the intent to manipulate voters. At first glance, one of its publications, the “Virgina Dogwood,” could easily be mistaken for just another local news website. With headlines such as “Inside scoop: 10 unique VA ice cream shops to visit for National Ice Cream Month” and “Get nimble with these adult gymnastics classes in Virginia,” it seems like a fairly innocuous source of information for residents of the Old Dominion.

A closer look, however, reveals something else. At least half of the stories on its homepage recently were about national politics and had little or nothing to do with local Virginia issues. With headlines such as “Trump’s policies would cause inflation to surge, economists say” and “Allegations of sexual assault, animal cruelty emerge in new RFK Jr. report,” the majority of the stories are obviously calculated for the electoral benefit of the Democratic ticket. Unlike a traditional publication, the website is very sparse, has no logo or illustrated masthead, its graphic design is an afterthought, and there’s almost no advertising.

On Sept. 23, two X accounts affiliated with Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign — “Kamala HQ” and “Kamala’s Wins” — reposted a headline from another of Courier’s regional outlets, “Keystone Newsroom,” asserting that the Polish community of Pennsylvania had endorsed her campaign — the implication being that Harris had broad support from a prominent ethnic group in a crucial swing state. In reality, the article was just touting an endorsement letter signed by a number of known partisans.

Courier Newsroom describes itself as “a pro-democracy news network that builds a more informed, engaged, and representative America by reaching audiences where they are online with factual, values-driven news and analysis.” In addition to Virginia and Pennsylvania, Courier runs similar misleading websites in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Nevada, and New Hampshire. 

Courier’s real plan isn’t necessarily building “a more informed, engaged, and representative America.” According to a 2019 Bloomberg profile, since its inception five years ago, Courier has been instrumental in “the left’s plan to slip vote-swaying news into Facebook feeds.”

Courier Newsroom was created specifically to blur the line between political advertising and journalism. Unlike campaigns and political action committees, media outlets aren’t subject to Federal Election Committee rules and reporting requirements — in 2020, the FEC dismissed a complaint against Courier alleging that it should be forced to register as a PAC. Many social media platforms also have rules restricting political advertising, rules that Courier can get around by presenting itself as a for-profit media outlet.

“Courier publications aren’t actually traditional hometown newspapers but political instruments designed to get them to vote for Democrats,” observes Bloomberg. “And although the articles are made to resemble ordinary news, their purpose isn’t primarily to build a readership for the website: It’s for the pieces to travel individually through social media, amplifying their influence with persuadable voters.”

Courier has hired ex-Facebook employees and spent millions of dollars promoting its stories on Facebook and Instagram feeds using targeting tools with the goal of effecting specific election outcomes. According to Wired magazine, one metric Courier relies on to gauge success is how much they spend on Facebook ads per vote gained.

‘Hyperlocal Partisan Propaganda’

Courier Newsroom is the brainchild of Tara McGowan, a former journalist who worked at “60 Minutes” and CBS News who went on to work on Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. In 2017, McGowan founded Acronym, a digital political strategy firm that’s been a major player in liberal politics and is responsible for incubating Courier.

Acronym was the sole investor and shared an office with another digital firm known as Shadow, which developed the vote-counting app used by the Democratic Party in the 2020 Iowa caucus. The app crashed as they were counting votes in the caucus, and after days of uncertainty, future Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg emerged from the Iowa caucus with more delegates than Bernie Sanders, even though Sanders won the popular vote.

Those doubting the results quickly pointed to some major conflicts of interest. McGowan was married to Buttigieg strategist Michael Halle, and Shadow had recently been paid to do work for both the Biden and Buttigieg campaigns. The fiasco led the chair of the state party to resign and many prominent Democrats to openly question the results of the caucus, and the defeat of Sanders, a candidate disfavored by the Democratic Party establishment, helped Biden come from behind to beat his chief rival in the primary and eventually win the presidency.

McGowan no longer works at Acronym, though she has remained the publisher of Courier Newsroom after Acronym divested its stake in Courier in 2021. As for what McGowan is doing with Courier, media critics do not mince words.

“Tara McGowan and Courier are not trying to have an objective news organization, play it straight, and serve the people of whatever local audiences that they’re trying to serve,” says Krakauer. “They are trying to launder political points of view into what is perceived as an objective news organization, which is about the worst thing you can do.”

There have also been other ethical questions raised about Courier’s funding. Despite a lengthy “Ethics & Standards” statement on all of its publications that notes, “Our coverage is not determined by our funders,” NOTUS reports that from 2021 to 2022, Courier received $250,000 from Planned Parenthood at the same time it was “promoting content about what the election means for abortion access.”

Acronym and Courier have also attracted the financial support of the familiar roster of liberal players. Along with George Soros, Acronym has been supported by billionaire Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and a prominent Democratic donor.

In 2018, Hoffman publicly apologized after it was revealed that he funded a firm, New Knowledge, which spread misinformation that may have helped Democrats narrowly win a senate race in Alabama. According to The New York Times, New Knowledge “created a Facebook page intended to look like the work of conservative Alabamians, and used it to try to split Republicans and promote a conservative write-in candidate to take votes from [Republican candidate Roy] Moore.”

New Knowledge also created fake social media accounts to make it appear that Moore was supported by Russians — a ruse that the Times notes “drew broad news media coverage.” After his funding of New Knowledge came to light, Hoffman declared, “I categorically disavow the use of misinformation to sway an election.” His subsequent funding of Acronym and Courier suggests that his disavowal isn’t so categorical.

It has been widely reported that Laurene Powell Jobs, through her Emerson Collective foundation, has funded both ostensibly legitimate local news initiatives as well as Acronym and Courier. Powell Jobs, who owns The Atlantic, one of America’s most influential magazines, is best friends with Kamala Harris, according to The New York Times. Nonetheless, she has received fawning coverage for her media investments. One CNET article declared, “Laurene Powell Jobs invests in news because she worries about democracy,” and a New York Times profile was headlined, “Can Laurene Powell Jobs Save Storytelling?

The right-leaning website The Free Beacon was almost alone in running a critical column about her funding of Acronym and Courier. “The state of Powell Jobs’s investments — media properties faltering as a fake news operation takes off — flies in the face of her carefully curated image as a friend to the free press,” observed Charles Fain Lehmann.

But if disguising political ads as news stories seemed like a novel, if troubling, approach when Courier launched five years ago, now it’s become standard operating procedure. Just last month, Axios reported that “the number of partisan-backed outlets designed to look like impartial news outlets has officially surpassed the number of real, local daily newspapers in the U.S.,” and 45 percent of these publications “are targeted to swing states — a clear sign that they’re designed to influence politics.” The article did not note that Powell Jobs, who is a major Axios investor, has funded such operations.

Axios did note that progressives are not alone in creating deceptively partisan news sites. “The vast majority of the [partisan] sites observed are backed by Metric Media, a conservative network traced back to media entrepreneur Brian Timpone, who has links to conservative donors,” reports Axios. “Most of the Metric Media sites don’t include much information about the sites’ funders or management. The stories typically lack bylines and many are outdated or marked as ‘press release submissions.’” Though Metric Media tries to fly under the radar, it was the subject of a critical New York Times investigation in 2020.

By contrast, McGowan has been the subject of numerous media profiles in glossy magazines that flirt with promoting her work. Fast Company praised her as the “Democratic operative who beat Trump” and declared that boosting deceptively labeled news in front of voters is “an idea that will outlive Courier, despite the criticism.”

That was written four years ago, and it appears Courier’s pioneering work in using deceptively branded news to influence elections has proven stubbornly influential. As recently as July 7, Semafor reported that Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias — famous for his significant role in paying for the “Steele Dossier,” which launched thousands of erroneous media reports claiming President Trump was compromised by the Russian government — was fighting off attempts by Arizona regulators to require a pro-abortion news site run by a Democratic front group to be subject to campaign finance laws. It appears partisan sites masquerading as journalism are going to be part of American elections for the foreseeable future.

*****

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

Image credit: Wikipedia Screenshot

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Urgent Need To Return To Reagan Style Fusionism thumbnail

The Urgent Need To Return To Reagan Style Fusionism

By Neland Nobel

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

“The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is an 80 percent friend and not a 20 percent enemy”–Ronald Reagan

Kari Lake is the US candidate for Senate in Arizona. Trump is the candidate for President. Arizona is a critical swing state for the national election, and the Senate seat is also essential in this state.

If Trump can win with a substantial margin, Republicans could take a working majority in the Senate.  This will be very important to the new incoming President if he is to accomplish significant things in his second and final term.  In addition, a solid win in Arizona might be enough to carry Lake across the finish line.

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Trump could be the first President since Grover Cleveland to win a term, lose, and then win a second nonconsecutive term. As such, he is a lame duck to start with, and so if the MAGA agenda is to continue after his final term, other Republicans will have to carry it forward.

However, for Kari Lake and Trump to win, the divisions within the Republican Party need to heal.  Trump is leading the state in most polls, but Lake is behind.  How can that be?  Because many Republicans and Independents are not entirely behind Lake.

Some remnants of the McCain political machine are still upset with her because of her primary election victories. However, to their credit, Karrin Taylor Robson and former Governor Doug Ducey have endorsed Lake.

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We say to their credit because they have put hurt feelings aside for the benefit of their party and country.  They are applying the 80% Reagan rule.

However, during Reagan’s time, there were considered to be three legs to the “conservative” stool: the religious right and social conservatives, the more libertarian, free-market-oriented budget balancers, and the anti-communist foreign policy interventionists.

They did not always see eye to eye, and seeing the apparent stress in the movement, in the 1960s, a long-time leader of the conservative movement, Frank S. Meyer, coined the term “fusionism.”  This means that while each of the legs had its agenda, there was enough common ground for conservatism to unite toward common goals.

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That fusionism reached its apex with Ronald Reagan’s election, who promoted the 80% principle, as noted in his quote, which began this essay.

However, after the success of bringing down the Soviet Empire, conservatism, to an extent, lost the fusionist glue that kept the movement together.

To be frank, Conservatism never really succeeded in rolling back the government and returning more power to the states. It never succeeded in balancing the budget. In fact, multiple Republican Administrations ran up deficits or signed on to the Democrats’ deficits with only a modicum of resistance.

The muscular international anticommunism morphed into neo-conservative interventionism based on the idea of spreading democracy to those who had not chosen it.  For a time, it put up resistance to radical Islamism as well.  However, since the war on terror had a large component of religious disagreement, many conservatives fell away from the fight because they were not well grounded in the major religions of the West or simply didn’t want to anger a billion Muslims. They also were not prepared for a new ideological war against troublesome elements of Islam.

The result has been the general failure of Conservatism after the fall of Soviet Communism—not just failure but also confusion. For example, large elements of the Republican leadership supported the de-industrialization of the US and participated in the very profitable rise of China.

The libertarian wing argued that free trade with China would democratize China and other countries.  In a sense, they had as much romance about spreading democracy through markets as foreign policy interventionists believed military force could do.

Both were wrong.  China has turned back to militant Maoist communism with a huge arms build-up, free trade partner Mexico is turning into a socialist narco-state, and Canada has veered sharply to the left both politically and socially.

Ideas supporting freedom are in retreat throughout much of Europe and the Americas.  And the once-feared enemy of  Soviet communism, while dealt a terrific blow with the fall of the Soviet Union, has made a comeback in US domestic politics, which is genuinely frightening.

Conservatism became pretty much a holding action.  Looking over the past 30 years, it has not held very well at all.  Except for some progress on defending the Second Amendment, School Choice, and confirming some critical Supreme Court appointments, it is hard to think of any significant conservative victories.

Frustrated by this “retreat with dignity” approach, the Conservative movement undertook a realignment. It started with the Tea Party movement coalescing around an unlikely blue-collar billionaire, Donald Trump.

His style was brash, and he had no political experience.  In a bruising primary, he eliminated one rival after another, insulting many established party functionaries along the way.

This “new conservatism” has become less tolerant of constant defeat and wants candidates to fight rather than be polite.  This includes tax cuts, immigration control, a muscular military, de-regulation, originalist judges, and the reorienting of policy to put the interests of America and American citizens first.

On social issues, they want reasonable controls on abortion when the baby can feel pain or is viable.  They do not embrace CRT, DEI, ESG, and extreme environmentalism and want to see these programs and approaches removed from government.  Private individuals and organizations are free to behave according to these ideas, but not the government, which uses force and compulsion.

Some conservatives do not like this new MAGA agenda because some proponents can be rude and assertive.  They don’t like this “style” of politics but prefer the older, more refined. They also do not like the idea of pulling away from “free trade” and embracing tariffs.

Speaking for ourselves, we think this group believes by defending the lopsided “managed trade” regime, they are helping “free trade.”  We think they are wrong on this.  In an ideal world, if there were no existential enemies, if there were no government subsidies or industries, and all nations traded without tariffs, we would prefer the principles of free trade. However, free trade clearly does not describe the real world as it operates today.

Still, others do not like Trump’s lack of spending control in his first term and his unwillingness to reform Social Security and Medicare through entitlement reform. Yours truly falls within this camp. Remember the call to “repeal and replace” Obamacare?  Calls for gutting Obamacare and moving towards a balanced budget are rarely heard today either among Republican Party old timers or the new MAGA advocates.

Given the two parties’ proximity, repeal of ObamaCare or entitlement reform must wait. We just don’t have the votes. It’s better to accomplish something than nothing, like secure the border, de-regulate, and get CRT and DEI out of the military and FEMA.

Turning back to the Arizona Senate race, Kari Lake satisfies the 80% Reagan rule.  For the most part, she has embraced the MAGA agenda.  To not support her wholeheartedly because of pique over the primaries or her rhetorical bombast misses the point.  She supports the MAGA agenda, which is now transcendent within the Republican Party.

If you don’t vote for her, you get Reuben Gallego, a hard leftist.  Yes, Kari Lake can be abrasive, but take a look at who backs Gallego.

Therefore, never-Trump Republicans need to adhere to the Reagan 80% rule and get on board.  It will be a very narrow election.  Every right-of-center vote from disgruntled Republicans and Libertarians is needed.

Once Trump is elected, he will serve only one term. You will be able to exercise your voice once again to shape the party, but you will have no influence at all if the Democrats win.

You say you admire Reagan.  Good, now act like him.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

URGENT MESSAGE: Petty Grievances Can Wait, Arizona’s Future Can’t thumbnail

URGENT MESSAGE: Petty Grievances Can Wait, Arizona’s Future Can’t

By Neland Nobel

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

“The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is an 80 percent friend and not a 20 percent enemy” ~Ronald Reagan

Kari Lake is the US candidate for Senate in Arizona. Trump is the candidate for President. Arizona is a critical swing state for the national election, and the Senate seat is also essential in this state.

If Trump can win with a substantial margin, Republicans could take a working majority in the Senate.  This will be very important to the new incoming President if he is to accomplish significant things in his second and final term.  In addition, a solid win in Arizona might be enough to carry Lake across the finish line.

Trump could be the first President since Grover Cleveland to win a term, lose, and then win a second nonconsecutive term. As such, he is a lame duck to start with, and so if the MAGA agenda is to continue after his final term, other Republicans will have to carry it forward.

However, for Kari Lake and Trump to win, the divisions within the Republican Party need to heal.  Trump is leading the state in most polls, but Lake is behind.  How can that be?  Because many Republicans and Independents are not entirely behind Lake.

Some remnants of the McCain political machine are still upset with her because of her primary election victories. However, to their credit, Karrin Taylor Robson and former Governor Doug Ducey have endorsed Lake.

We say to their credit because they have put hurt feelings aside for the benefit of their party and country.  They are applying the 80% Reagan rule.

However, during Reagan’s time, there were considered to be three legs to the “conservative” stool: the religious right and social conservatives, the more libertarian, free-market-oriented budget balancers, and the anti-communist foreign policy interventionists.

They did not always see eye to eye, and seeing the apparent stress in the movement, in the 1960s, a long-time leader of the conservative movement, Frank S. Meyer, coined the term “fusionism.”  This means that while each of the legs had its agenda, there was enough common ground for conservatism to unite toward common goals.

That fusionism reached its apex with Ronald Reagan’s election, who promoted the 80% principle, as noted in his quote, which began this essay.

However, after the success of bringing down the Soviet Empire, conservatism, to an extent, lost the fusionist glue that kept the movement together.

To be frank, Conservatism never really succeeded in rolling back the government and returning more power to the states. It never succeeded in balancing the budget. In fact, multiple Republican Administrations ran up deficits or signed on to the Democrats’ deficits with only a modicum of resistance.

The muscular international anticommunism morphed into neo-conservative interventionism based on the idea of spreading democracy to those who had not chosen it.  For a time, it put up resistance to radical Islamism as well.  However, since the war on terror had a large component of religious disagreement, many conservatives fell away from the fight because they were not well grounded in the major religions of the West or simply didn’t want to anger a billion Muslims. They also were not prepared for a new ideological war against troublesome elements of Islam.

The result has been the general failure of Conservatism after the fall of Soviet Communism—not just failure but also confusion. For example, large elements of the Republican leadership supported the de-industrialization of the US and participated in the very profitable rise of China.

The libertarian wing argued that free trade with China would democratize China and other countries.  In a sense, they had as much romance about spreading democracy through markets as foreign policy interventionists believed military force could do.

Both were wrong.  China has turned back to militant Maoist communism with a huge arms build-up, free trade partner Mexico is turning into a socialist narco-state, and Canada has veered sharply to the left both politically and socially.

Ideas supporting freedom are in retreat throughout much of Europe and the Americas.  And the once-feared enemy of  Soviet communism, while dealt a terrific blow with the fall of the Soviet Union, has made a comeback in US domestic politics, which is genuinely frightening.

Conservatism became pretty much a holding action.  Looking over the past 30 years, it has not held very well at all.  Except for some progress on defending the Second Amendment, School Choice, and confirming some critical Supreme Court appointments, it is hard to think of any significant conservative victories.

Frustrated by this “retreat with dignity” approach, the Conservative movement undertook a realignment. It started with the Tea Party movement coalescing around an unlikely blue-collar billionaire, Donald Trump.

His style was brash, and he had no political experience.  In a bruising primary, he eliminated one rival after another, insulting many established party functionaries along the way.

This “new conservatism” has become less tolerant of constant defeat and wants candidates to fight rather than be polite.  This includes tax cuts, immigration control, a muscular military, de-regulation, originalist judges, and the reorienting of policy to put the interests of America and American citizens first.

On social issues, they want reasonable controls on abortion when the baby can feel pain or is viable.  They do not embrace CRT, DEI, ESG, and extreme environmentalism and want to see these programs and approaches removed from government.  Private individuals and organizations are free to behave according to these ideas, but not the government, which uses force and compulsion.

Some conservatives do not like this new MAGA agenda because some proponents can be rude and assertive.  They don’t like this “style” of politics but prefer the older, more refined. They also do not like the idea of pulling away from “free trade” and embracing tariffs.

Speaking for ourselves, we think this group believes by defending the lopsided “managed trade” regime, they are helping “free trade.”  We think they are wrong on this.  In an ideal world, if there were no existential enemies, if there were no government subsidies or industries, and all nations traded without tariffs, we would prefer the principles of free trade. However, free trade clearly does not describe the real world as it operates today.

Still, others do not like Trump’s lack of spending control in his first term and his unwillingness to reform Social Security and Medicare through entitlement reform. Yours truly falls within this camp. Remember the call to “repeal and replace” Obamacare?  Calls for gutting Obamacare and moving towards a balanced budget are rarely heard today either among Republican Party old timers or the new MAGA advocates.

Given the two parties’ proximity, repeal of ObamaCare or entitlement reform must wait. We just don’t have the votes. It’s better to accomplish something than nothing, like secure the border, de-regulate, and get CRT and DEI out of the military and FEMA.

Turning back to the Arizona Senate race, Kari Lake satisfies the 80% Reagan rule.  For the most part, she has embraced the MAGA agenda.  To not support her wholeheartedly because of pique over the primaries or her rhetorical bombast misses the point.  She supports the MAGA agenda, which is now transcendent within the Republican Party.

If you don’t vote for her, you get Reuben Gallego, a hard leftist.  Yes, Kari Lake can be abrasive, but take a look at who backs Gallego.

Therefore, never-Trump Republicans need to adhere to the Reagan 80% rule and get on board.  It will be a very narrow election.  Every right-of-center vote from disgruntled Republicans and Libertarians is needed.

Once Trump is elected, he will serve only one term. You will be able to exercise your voice once again to shape the party, but you will have no influence at all if the Democrats win.

You say you admire Reagan.  Good, now act like him.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Prop 139 vs Psalm 139 thumbnail

Prop 139 vs Psalm 139

By Neland Nobel

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

The topic the Democrats are using most effectively against Kari Lake and other Republicans remains abortion.  Numerous media ads proclaim, “Vote against the abortion ban,” by supporting Proposition 139.

But there is no abortion ban.  There is, instead, a restriction against abortion after 15 weeks, a reasonable cut-off point wherein the baby is likely to feel pain.

Women have all kinds of choices about when to get pregnant and by whom.  They have a complete selection of a wide range of medications and devices to avoid pregnancy.  Involuntary pregnancy, such as rape and incest, is a tiny portion of abortions, but it is always trotted out.

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The law in Arizona seems quite reasonable.  If birth control fails and pregnancy results, all that is being asked is to take action before the baby feels pain.  Many abortions tear the baby limb from limb, so it seems reasonable not to cause a developing human such pain.

Many supporters of abortion seem more concerned with animal welfare and rights than those developing human babies. We find that hard to fathom.

Yes, a developing human is not a clump of cells. At first, it may look like a guppy, but it will never be a guppy.

When the sperm penetrates the egg, human DNA from mother and father, and likely even more distant relations, is embedded in the fetus.  That baby is a product of human reproduction and will only develop into a human being.  It will not become a cucumber or a wombat.  In time, it will be capable of independent life.

Although the baby in its early stages may be undeveloped human life, it is human life, and it, therefore, deserves attention and protection.  But as our photo suggests, if a developing baby in its early stages can derive comfort from sucking its thumb, might it not reasonably feel pain?

While residing in the mother, it is not a part of the mother’s body.  Hence, it has nothing to do with the mother having “control” of her body.  She had that control of her body (or lack thereof) prior to becoming pregnant, but once the baby is there, another human life is now in the equation.

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Any parent will tell you the wonder of knowing that you have created a new life. Even entirely secular people know something very special and extraordinary is taking place.

Ironically, Psalm 139, is the same number as the Proposition that wants unlimited and unrestricted ability to kill human life.  In part, the Psalm reads:

I could ask the darkness to hide me
    and the light around me to become night—
12   but even in darkness I cannot hide from you.
To you the night shines as bright as day.
    Darkness and light are the same to you.

13 You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body
    and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
    Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.
15 You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,
    as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.

16 You saw me before I was born.
    Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
    before a single day had passed.

For the religious, conception is the first contact we have with the Almighty, who formed all of us in the womb in utter seclusion.  And yes, we are all “wonderfully complex.”

This is not a chicken gizzard to be thrown in the trash.  This is a human being.

Prop 139 is an extreme measure, overriding the legislature in a one-time vote to alter the Constitution of the State.  In so doing, it precludes rational and humane discussion about when and under what circumstances we should take the life of the baby.

Public opinion today is in favor of allowing abortions.  We accept that reality. However, they should be conducted in a way that respects life and minimizes cruelty and pain.  Thus, there should be reasonable limitations on the procedure. In that regard, Arizona’s abortion law is reasonable. We know that is insufficient for many, but that is where we are politically.

More assistance should also be given to women who can’t keep the baby because of life circumstances. Many couples are looking to adopt.

However, Prop 139 is an extreme and unnecessary measure.  The Prickly Pear urges you vote NO against this measure.

So, when thinking about Prop 139, read the words of Psalm 139.  Which do you think is more respectful of precious life and humane in its outlook?

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Pro-Life Advocates Warn Of ‘Deceptive’ Abortion Measures On The Ballot In Red States thumbnail

Pro-Life Advocates Warn Of ‘Deceptive’ Abortion Measures On The Ballot In Red States

By Leif Le Mahieu

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Editors’ Note: This important warning for pro-life voters is critical to prevent the extending of abortion through late-term pregnancy in many states. For our Arizona readers, this means a resounding NO on Proposition 139. Despite the proposition’s deceptive language, in reality it translates to abortion through all of pregnancy and other major pro-abortion changes making Arizona into one of the most radical abortion states in America. Huge out-of-state funding by the likes of Planned Parenthood should not drive this ballot proposition into being a permanent alteration of the Arizona Constitution with little chance of it ever being reversed.

‘This very ambiguous wording is going to lead to many abortions long after the time of viability.’

Pro-life activists are warning about “deceptive” ballot initiatives that could pave the way for unlimited abortion in red states if approved by voters in November.

The ballot initiatives employ deceptive language, like saying a measure would allow abortion up to the point of “viability” — but lets pro-abortion doctors determine what “viability” means. Other ballots would permit abortions for “mental health” reasons, another broad category that could be interpreted to expand abortion.

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“A lot of deception on the side of the [abortion] proponents because they know that if they were honest about their ultimate goal, which is to repeal not just the gestational limit but all these other laws like no taxpayer funding for abortion, like parental consent, like informed consent, that voters would never support that,” SBA Pro-Life America policy director Katie Glenn Daniel told The Daily Wire. 

Pro-life activists face a massive funding disadvantage in the 10 states where abortion is on the ballot, including New York, Florida, and Arizona. The language on the Florida ballot says that there can be no pro-life protections “before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

In Montana, the language would block protections before “viability,” which is defined as “the point in pregnancy when, in the good faith judgment of a treating health care professional and based on the particular facts of the case.”

Dr. Ingrid Skop, a researcher with the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, said that allowing the doctor to define viability was dangerous. She said that since the abortionist’s goal is to end the life of the unborn baby, he will decide that the “baby will never be viable because I am going to end his life.” 

“So we can see that this very ambiguous wording is going to lead to many abortions long after the time of viability for reasons most Americans would not consider to be a compelling reason for ending human life,” Skop told The Daily Wire.

Other ballot initiatives de-emphasize abortion, to make voters think they’re only deciding on less controversial components. Missouri’s abortion ballot measure includes guarantees to things like miscarriage care and fertility treatments, which are not prohibited by any state law. This strategy paid off for pro-abortion activists in Ohio last year, where voters passed a ballot measure expanding abortion rights thanks in part to ambiguous language.

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“By making these ballot initiatives worded in such a deceptive way people think to themselves, ‘Oh I must have to vote for this in order to allow a mom to get emergency care,” Skop said. 

Skop added that many of the ballot initiatives also include vague provisions on abortions that are necessary for “health of the mother,” once a defined medical category that has now grown to include mental, financial, social, and familial factors. Abortions measures in states including Missouri and Nevada have “mental health” as a justification for an abortion…..

*****

Continue reading this article at the Daily Wire.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

While Hurricane Victims Suffer, Kamala Makes Time For Podcast Famous For Giving Girls Blowjob Advice thumbnail

While Hurricane Victims Suffer, Kamala Makes Time For Podcast Famous For Giving Girls Blowjob Advice

By Mary Rooke

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Editors’ Note: When we first read this, we had real concerns about running it in our publication. However, after thinking about it, our job is to deliver the truth, as painful and disgusting as it might be. We had no knowledge of this podcast or the topics promoted. The American people need to know what Kamala Harris thinks is a proper venue to be interviewed, especially when the nation faces a national emergency from Hurricane Helene and now the likely devastation of Hurricane Milton. Her administration already has made quite a fetish out of catering to sexual extremists, but the crassness of this site should be revelatory for many.  We read that large numbers of ‘Christians’ did not vote last time. We wonder what kind of behavior from our officials fails to motivate them. It is not just the political direction the nation is taking; for many, it is deeper than that. We seem headed in the wrong direction morally. The Vice President and possible future President should not be appearing on such shows. Voters know that a nation, somewhat like a fish, rots at the head first. Those who run for high office should be held to a higher standard. Mr. Trump is not perfect in that regard, but it is interesting that his infractions are minor compared to what is revealed in this article.

While American citizens are desperately trying to stay alive and rebuild their communities from Hurricane Helene, Vice President Kamala Harris was interviewed by a podcast host famous for teaching young women how to be sluts.

The Harris campaign confirmed that, while Americans were fighting for their lives in storm wreckage, she sat down for a pre-taped interview set to air next week with the Call Her Daddy podcast, featuring host and creator Alex Cooper, who typically talks to various celebrities and “experts” about sexually charged topics, like how to give the perfect blowjob.

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Naturally, one might ask: Why is the Democrat nominee for president sitting down with the nation’s leading whore-pod, and how is this connected to hurricane victims? (WATCH: New Daily Caller Documentary ‘Selling Sex’)

The answer is that when desperate Americans called her for help, Harris was too busy with Call Her Daddy to answer. The Biden-Harris response to the devastating natural disaster has been an undeniable failure. People living in the Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia are still stranded without food, running water, electricity or medications. The administration says it’s doing all it can to help Americans living in the devastated areas. Still, residents and emergency responders claim the federal government’s response is not just lacking, but wholly inadequate. (ROOKE: Walz Solidifies Harris Policy Position That Would Transform Country As We Know It)

The heroes on the ground even report that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are impeding rescue efforts. Starlink founder Elon Musk announced Friday that federal agencies prevented him from delivering internet capabilities to the area.

So, while all of this is happening in real America, it seems the only thing Harris is focused on is ensuring that she secures the women’s vote. Call Her Daddy was Spotify’s number two podcast in 2023 and the most listened-to among women. Harris will reportedly talk about “reproductive rights and abortion, along with other issues important to women in the upcoming election,” Axios reported. (ROOKE: Democrats’ ‘New Masculinity’ Will Keep Turning Away Critical Voting Bloc)

A recent episode featured actress Heather McMahan discussing blowjob techniques and “hall passes” (a euphemism for infidelity). These types of discussions are not a one-off. Most of her episodes are about sexual positions, cheating, and threesomes. It’s a one-stop shop for women to praise degenerate sexuality.

Meanwhile, men, a demographic Harris struggles with, are listening to podcasts that talk about national security, health, science and economics. One can only wonder if Harris is too scared to go on shows popular with men, like The Joe Rogan ExperienceThe Huberman Lab and The Tucker Carlson Show, because the topics discussed on these podcasts are too complex. She wouldn’t be able to cackle her way through tough questions about why Hurricane Helene victims were left to rot while she fundraised in sunny California.

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It’s clearly much easier for a vapid woman with no substantive thought in her brain to talk about sex work. But Harris isn’t just any vapid woman — she’s running to be the next president of the United States. She wants to hold the most important elected office in our country (arguably the world). Her decision to tape an hour-long episode on a whore-pod to discuss abortion is not only insulting to Americans living in the Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia, but it’s also a stark reminder that our country is run by people who hate it.

Democrats are desperate to make this election about the ability of women to murder their children. They need women to come out to vote in droves with one topic on their minds: abortion. Harris’s appearance on Call Her Daddy is the perfect way to distract American women from her abject failure with the economy, illegal immigration, safety, and most recently hurricane relief. This shouldn’t be that hard, considering most female voters rank abortion as their number one issue in this election cycle.

While it’s probably not that big of a shock that former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s ex-girlfriend chose to talk about abortion on the nation’s top blowjob podcast, it’s undeniable that Americans deserve better, especially from someone who wants to be president. Harris seems to have forgotten that Democrat women aren’t the only ones affected by her leadership. While leftists want abortion over competent governing, the rest of the nation would rather her focus on issues at home.

At any other time in our nation’s history, a presidential candidate doing this would be disqualifying. But once again, Harris shows us that she is incapable of handling the basic requirements of the presidency. So, instead of getting a one-on-one, hard-hitting interview, Americans will hear her laugh about sex and abortion.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

On Abortion, Kamala Harris Is the Extremist thumbnail

On Abortion, Kamala Harris Is the Extremist

By David Harsanyi

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

At one point during the Sept. 10 presidential debate, former President Donald Trump accused Democrats of not only supporting unlimited third-trimester abortions, but the “execution” of babies after birth.

Once Trump wrapped up his rant, Linsey Davis, one of the ABC News moderators, “fact-checked” the former president, helpfully noting that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

If Trump had been better prepared, he could have pointed out that a senator named Kamala Harris, while running for president in 2020, opposed legislation that would have compelled doctors to provide infants who survive abortions the basic care they would to any other human being in distress. So, not exactly “executing” babies. Just negligent homicide.

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And ironically, it’s because the contemporary Left’s position on abortion is so morally unfathomable that the media can gaslight voters.

The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, after all, simply required medical professionals to “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age.” Yet Harris and 40 other Democratic senators opposed it.

Most Democrats, however, argued the bill was superfluous because this sort of thing never, ever happens—just like the late-term abortions of viable babies never happens. Tragically, this is untrue.

Just ask Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate. The Minnesota governor might not believe free speech is an absolute right, but he has no problem making abortion one. Indeed, Walz overturned laws prohibiting coercing of women into abortions. He defunded pregnancy centers. He removed requirements for informed consent on abortion—or any consent, for that matter. And then he stripped any protections for babies who survived abortion attempts. Five babies were left to die in 2021.

Notwithstanding Harris’ contrived laugh mocking the very notion she supports unfettered government-funded abortion from conception to delivery, as it stands, seven states, as well as Washington, D.C., have no gestational limits on the procedure. One allows abortions in the third trimester. Sixteen allow abortions after viability.

Indeed, during the debate, Trump was compelled to do the job of the ABC News moderators when he asked Harris to name a single restriction she supported. The vice president’s word salad offered none. Harris, instead, claimed she wanted to codify the “protections” of Roe v. Wade.

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Let’s remember two things about this misleading talking point.

First, by the time Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was decided, Roe had no enforceable protections. Zero. When the Atlantic interviewed the Colorado butcher Warren Hern last year, he’d already spent 50 years terminating the lives of completely viable babies in the third trimester. He did it under Roe v. Wade.

Hern also admitted most of his victims were physically healthy—which is unsurprising. Not long ago, the Charlotte Lozier Institute found that most medical literature showed late-term abortions weren’t sought because of “maternal health complications or lethal fetal anomalies discovered late in pregnancy” despite what we are incessantly told by activists.

A pro-choice Guttmacher Institute study similarly found that most late-term abortions were not “for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” (As far as I can tell, they’re no longer conducting inquiries into this inconvenient matter.)

It’s difficult—purposefully so, one imagines—to calculate how many viable babies are aborted every year. It’s probably around 1.3% of the total—which is to say thousands, perhaps over 8,000, viable babies are killed every year. Most, if not all, having nothing to do with “saving the mother’s life.” (There’s no law anywhere in the country that bars a doctor from protecting the life of the mother.)

There are far more healthy babies terminated than school shooting victims every year. And Democrats want to enshrine the practice into law.

Of course, sometimes these decisions are often fraught with complicated ethical questions. No one should diminish this reality. It’s not the pro-lifer who treats the issue frivolously.

Two, Democrats want to go way beyond codifying Roe. The Women’s Health Protection Act, for instance, would not only have made it impossible to enforce any fetal viability limits, but it would have unconstitutionally overturned hundreds of existing state laws, including ones banning sex-selective abortions, protecting conscientious objectors, upholding parental or guardian notification for minors, and many others.

On abortion, there is only one extremist on the ballot.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Meta’s New Policy Could Erase Women thumbnail

Meta’s New Policy Could Erase Women

By Editors of The Independent Women’s Forum

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Sex-Based Speech is not harassment.

Meta (Facebook and Instagram) has almost 4 billion active users and moderates content based on Community Standards. Its “Bullying and Harassment” Community Standard generally requires removal of targeted bullying against children and bullying that the victim specifically asks to be removed. This means that videos of trans-identifying men entering women’s sports and spaces, or generally identifying these males as males, is allowed on Meta platform. And for good cause. Frank discussion about and the visualization of trans-identifying males in women’s sports and spaces has been crucial to protecting women, and preserving truth itself.

But all that may change.

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Meta’s Oversight Board is considering removing two videos that currently abide by Community Standards: one of a trans-identifying male in a women’s bathroom, who asserts a right to be there, and another of a male winning a women’s athletic competition, upsetting many participants and their parents. We believe these two videos are here and here

In this removal process, the Oversight Board is considering “policy recommendations” that would better consider “the rights of transgender people, especially for access to single-sex spaces and participation in sporting events.” The Oversight Board’s removal decisions are final. Its policy recommendations are not final, but extremely influential to changing Meta’s Community Standards.

The stakes could not be higher. If truthful, real-life discussions about biological sex are banned from Meta, the uniqueness of womanhood, not to mention the progress of women, will be eroded. A speech-prohibitive policy would cripple any large-scale movement to protect women’s sports, domestic abuse shelters, prisons, or overnight camps. But censoring the truth has consequences far beyond this. Threatening the reality of sex works to dissolve the very fabric of our society.

Independent Women’s Forum plans to submit comments on behalf of women and men across this country who wish to speak honestly on this topic. Use this form to tell Meta why this speech matters to you, this country, and our future generation. 

The Left will say that leaving these sorts of videos up threatens lives. That’s dangerous and false, but it’s incredibly weighty. The trans-identifying population is online and does have a high suicidality rate, and Meta is cognizant of that. Those in favor of women, truth, equal dignity, civilization, speech, inner peace, and happiness must be equally serious.

To that end, the best type of comment could address, for example:

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  • How sex-based speech (including videos) protects women;
  • How sex-based speech informs the public to best accommodate both trans-identifying individuals and women in tandem;
  • How censorship of sex-based speech would cause harm in ways the Board may not be thinking about;
  • How sex-based speech is not harassment;
  • How social transition ultimately harms many trans-identifying individuals; or
  • That Meta would lose credibility as an organization for taking such an extreme position.

While comments should recognize the enormity of the consequences, be compassionate, persuasive, and thoughtful in your entries.

*****

This article was published by the Independent Women’s Forum and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

If You Think Trump Is The Abortion Extremist, You’ve Bought Democrat Propaganda thumbnail

If You Think Trump Is The Abortion Extremist, You’ve Bought Democrat Propaganda

By Margot Cleveland

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

The Harris-Walz campaign and abortion apologists continue to deceive Americans, both about Trump’s pro-life positions and the consequences of abortion initiatives.

Florida’s Amendment 4 ballot initiative is not about overturning the state’s six-week abortion ban. It is about inscribing an unlimited, unregulated access to abortion-on-demand for the entire nine months of pregnancy into the state constitution.

Trump knows this, which is why he is voting “no” on Amendment 4. Yet the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign and abortion apologists continue to deceive Americans, both about Trump’s position and the consequence of abortion initiatives. Now, prolifers have a unique opportunity to use the focus on Trump to counter the left’s lies.

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Trump’s recent pronouncements on abortion policy have left many prolifers distraught. But rather than denounce Trump and hand the Oval Office over to Kamala Harris—the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever—the prolife movement should use the media attention Trump has brought to the issue to expose the falsehoods abortion apologists and the press continue to sell to the American public.

Prolife politicians and activists should begin with the fraud the left and the propaganda press are peddling over Florida’s Amendment 4 ballot initiative. Branded a “Right to Abortion Initiative,” the ballot initiative, if passed, would create a state constitutional right to abortion through birth. Of course, that’s not how abortion apologists portray Amendment 4, as demonstrated by both the Harris campaign and the legacy press’s response to Trump’s recent announcement that he would vote against the initiative.

On Friday, before taking the stage at a Pennsylvania rally, Fox New’s Bryan Llenas asked Trump whether he would “be voting yes or no on Amendment 4 in Florida.” Trump answered: “So, I think six weeks, you need more time than six weeks. I’ve disagreed with that right from the early primaries, when I heard about it, I disagreed with it. At the same time the Democrats are radical because the nine months is just a ridiculous situation, where you can do an abortion in the ninth month… And all of that stuff is unacceptable, so I’ll be voting ‘No’ for that reason.”

Notwithstanding that Trump reiterated his opposition to Florida’s six-week abortion ban, the Harris campaign posted on its X account, @KamalaHQ, “Trump says he will vote to uphold Florida’s 6-week abortion ban.” Harris then used her personal account to amplify the lie, sharing the @KamalaHQ post and adding, “[n]ow he’s voting for an abortion ban in the state where he lives.”

Soon after, the Harris-Walz campaign dispatched a statement from Kamala repeating the fabrication: “Donald Trump just made his position on abortion very clear: He will vote to uphold an abortion ban so extreme it applies before many women even know they are pregnant.”

Given that Trump was on video—the very video shared by the Harris campaign—expressly opposing Florida’s six-week abortion ban, one would think the public would see through the vice president’s lies. But that ignores the reality that the press overwhelmingly supports not merely the Harris-Walz campaign but also Democrats’ extreme position of abortion-on-demand.

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Thus, on Sunday we saw NBC’s Kristen Welker repeat the false narrative about Trump’s position on Florida’s six-week abortion ban on “Meet the Press.” After noting that “abortion is front and center this week,” Welker began her questioning of Republican Sen. Tom Cotton about abortion by representing that Trump “now says he’s going to vote to keep Florida’s six-week abortion ban in place, a law he once described as ‘terrible.’”

Unfortunately, after having previously corrected the many falsehoods Welker told about the Biden-Harris administration withholding arms shipments to Israel, the Arkansas senator skipped over the “Meet the Press” host’s fraudulent framing of Trump’s comments.

Yet given that, as Welker noted, abortion is “front and center,” every prolife advocate should use the focus on Trump’s comments about the six-week abortion ban to wake up Americans to what the various state constitutional initiatives do—which is install a regime of abortion-on-demand throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy.

The video of Trump stating his opposition to Amendment 4 made that point, but as Harris and the propaganda press quickly showed, they will nonetheless continue to deceive Americans, here, by pretending Amendment 4 is a ballot initiative about Florida’s six-week abortion ban. It is not.

To the contrary, the ballot initiative would add Amendment 4, entitled, “[l]imiting government interference with abortion,” to the Florida constitution. That provision states that other than parental notification laws, “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

If Amendment 4 passes, Florida’s constitution would prohibit the state legislature from passing any laws that “delay” or “restrict” abortions before 22 weeks of pregnancy, including informed consent laws or waiting periods. Further, even after the baby can survive on her own outside the womb, the Florida constitution will prohibit any ban on abortion.

Prolifers need to make this point, but only after first explaining the nonsense of the idea that a post-viability abortion is ever needed. Post-viability, the proper standard of care to treat a serious medical condition is the prompt delivery of the baby—not the prolonged late-term abortion procedure. The only purpose a post-viability abortion serves is to ensure you have a dead baby, instead of delivering a live one.

If adopted, Florida’s ballot amendment will ensure precisely that, even for full-term fetuses. That’s because Amendment 4 prohibits the state legislature from delaying or restricting abortions where the women’s health-care provider concludes the abortion is necessary to protect the patient’s “health.” Voters should recognize that the amendment speaks of a patient’s “healthcare provider,” not a licensed doctor, leaving the determination to a wide variety of individuals in the health care field.

More significant is the initiative’s use of the word “health,” which reaches an unlimited array of justifications for an abortion that most Americans would not consider health-related. For instance, the World Health Organization advises that “countries permitting abortion on health grounds should interpret ‘health’ to mean ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.’” Thus, even economic strain or the desire to keep a partner happy provide a supposedly “health”-related justification for a post-viability abortion.

Further, even if a court might limit the meaning of “health” to “physical” and “mental” health, abortion until the moment of birth would remain constitutionally protected by Amendment 4. That’s because the abortionist deciding whether the woman needs an abortion to protect her “mental health” can always rely on the American Medical Association’s position that women suffer worse mental health outcomes from being denied an abortion than from obtaining an abortion.

Trump is absolutely right, then, when he said that Amendment 4 is “radical because the nine months is just a ridiculous situation, where you can do an abortion in the ninth month.” Yet that is precisely what the Harris-Walz ticket supports. Also, unlike Trump, who has also denounced Florida’s six-week abortion ban, Vice President Harris has never professed that it is ever too late for an abortion.

Here, for all Harris’s efforts to paint Trump as an abortion extremist, it is the vice president, Democrats, and their supporters in the press who advance the extreme position of legal abortion until birth. In fact, the overwhelming majority of countries ban abortion on demand in the second trimester, with the United States “one of only 15 countries in the United Nations that permit abortion on demand past 15 weeks of gestation. . .” Polls also show that 65 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be banned at 20 weeks or before.

Trump’s view that the six-week ban is too early likewise coincides with public opinion, with only 36 percent of surveyed Americans supporting a ban at six weeks. While prolife advocates understandably object to such early abortions as they, like all abortions, end an innocent human life, Trump is not the problem: He is merely a mirror reflecting societal views shaped by 50-plus years of abortion advocacy dehumanizing the unborn.

Thus, rather than focus on the Republican candidate’s imperfect views, pro-life politicians and advocates would better serve the interests of the unborn by co-opting the media attention spurred by Trump’s comments on both the six-week abortion ban and Amendment 4 to counter the lies of the Harris-Walz campaign that the propaganda press will continue to parrot until November.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Independent Women’s Law Center Files Amicus Brief in Sixth Circuit Against Ohio Schools’ Forced Pronoun Policy thumbnail

Independent Women’s Law Center Files Amicus Brief in Sixth Circuit Against Ohio Schools’ Forced Pronoun Policy

By Editors of The Independent Women’s Forum

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Independent Women’s Law Center (IWLC), alongside the Manhattan Institute, on Monday filed an amicus brief before the en banc Sixth Circuit to challenge one of Ohio’s largest school district’s policies that require students to profess the belief that men can become women, including by using “preferred pronouns.” IWLC argues the school board’s pronoun policies violate the First Amendment by forcing many students to speak contrary to their beliefs that sex is binary, and women are biologically distinct from men. The brief emphasizes that using biologically accurate sex-based pronouns is necessary to preserve females’ private spaces.

In Parents Defending Education v. Olentangy Local School District, the pro-parent group sought relief from the policies, arguing they violate the First Amendment. The District Court for the Southern District of Ohio denied the pro-parent group’s request for a preliminary injunction, concluding that biologically accurate pronouns create “a threat of physical harm” among other things. On appeal, a Sixth Circuit panel upheld the decision of the district court, and Parents Defending Education has filed for a rehearing before the entire Sixth Circuit.

“Forcing the use of the biologically incorrect pronouns is the first step towards allowing males to intrude on females’ private spaces, including locker rooms, restrooms, social clubs, and living quarters,” IWLC says in the brief. For example, in IWLC’s case Westenbroek v. Kappa Kappa Gamma, Kappa leadership asserted that “woman” in Kappa’s bylaws meant “man.” The brief continues, “Using female pronouns for males endorses and reinforces the harmful falsehood… that the term ‘women’ can mean men. Males who refer to themselves as female then can and do insist on access to all girls’ and women’s spaces and programs.”

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IWLC argues that saving female pronouns for females preserves women’s sports by dismantling the idea that some males are females. In contrast, the Ohio school board’s “policies would lead to the normalization of boys in girls’ spaces, severely harming those girls,” IWLC concludes in the brief.

“In any society that respects female empowerment, girls should be permitted to acknowledge biological sex in schools, which is not only in line with reality, but is necessary to preserve sex-based spaces, rights, and privacies. Schools cannot force us to play the pronoun game, which only leads to the dissolution of protections for women,” said May Mailmandirector of Independent Women’s Law Center. 

“There are two sexes—male and female—and this shouldn’t be a matter of controversy. Contrary to popular myth, no one can change his or her sex, and the movement to erase the legal significance of sex, including the use of biologically incorrect pronouns, leads to the erasure of women,” said Beth Parlatosenior legal advisor of Independent Women’s Law Center. 

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“I’m delighted to partner with IWF on this brief. Schools should simply not be punishing common word usage based on deeply held personal beliefs and scientific evidence,” said Ilya Shapirodirector of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Mr. Shapiro was recently investigated by his employer, Georgetown University, for speaking on a matter of important public debate and is an advocate for free speech.

A copy of the amicus brief can be found here.

*****

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This article was published by the Independent Women’s Forum and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Progressive Case for Parenthood thumbnail

The Progressive Case for Parenthood

By Elizabeth Grace Matthew

Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice is an ambitious book that addresses arguably the most pressing questions of both our time and all time: Are people good? Is life worth living? What does it mean to be a parent? What is motherhood, what is fatherhood, and how are these roles similar and different?

In four lengthy chapters, bookended by personal essays that serve as the evocative introduction and conclusion, authors Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman methodically walk readers through the sociological and cultural factors that are, they argue, responsible not only for America’s marked decrease in the birth rate but also for the introduction of a new kind of widespread indecision around the philosophical idea and the practical matter of parenthood. Drawing on interviews with mostly 30-something prospective parents and non-parents—as well as on personal anecdote, feminist theory, literature, and philosophy—Berg and Wiseman ultimately make what amounts to a progressive, secular case for the goodness and worth of parenthood by way of a progressive, secular case for the goodness and worth of humanity itself.

The New Parenthood Ambivalence

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This argument is unique and fresh, on multiple counts. To start, most arguments for having and raising children (my own included) are conservative in some sense, predicated on the religious understanding of children (and, by extension, of people) as “immortal beings.” In different ways and to different extents, other recent books endorsing (larger) families and (more) parenthood—most notably, Family Unfriendly by Timothy Carney and Hannah’s Children by Catherine Pakaluk—are premised on the belief that religious community and family prioritization are mutually reinforcing.

Berg and Wiseman are outliers in this regard. They also break from their own progressive milieu to argue that nearly everything about the way that today’s secular 20- and 30-somethings tend to approach (or not) love, marriage, and family formation is flawed and fouled on its own terms.

The authors challenge several tenets of what has become the conventional unwisdom of college-educated millennials and Gen Zers. First, they take issue with the popular assumption that “slow love”—as seen in today’s courtship rituals, in which one “must suppress the desire to have kids” if one wishes to “date authentically”—is the truest love. Dating divorced from any idea of household or family formation seems, to Berg and Wiseman, rather counterproductive. Second, they address the modern tendency to view parenthood (and motherhood especially) as a totalizing identity that razes any prior identity. This unnuanced perspective, they argue, currently presents a more significant impediment to parenthood than any economic obstacle. The authors acknowledge that this view of parenthood as a totalizing identity now transcends political identification and might in fact be strongest among the very secular progressives who view childbearing as just one more lifestyle choice. In other words, for young people who lean left today, unlike for older generations, parenthood is not inherently worthwhile in and of itself. In part, as a result, there is now an assumption that if one does choose to have children, motherhood is justified by its resemblance to self-imposed martyrdom.

Third and finally, Berg and Wiseman explain how moral, environmental, and political concerns give young people pause: they worry about human cruelty, violence, the environmental impact of family life, and also about women’s political and social inequality with men.

There are very real merits to the authors’ approach, but it is ultimately insufficient to quell the existential ambivalence about parenthood plaguing many of my fellow 30-somethings. In the end, Berg and Wiseman do persuade readers that many of the personal trends, political considerations, and philosophical arguments militating against parenthood fall short. They do not, however, provide any holistic or convincing answer to the provocative question posed by their title: What are children for?

Slow Love in the Fast Lane

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Berg and Weissman offer an excellent window into the “slow love” that constitutes a new norm among the young (and not so young) people comprising today’s dating market. Apparently, “personal, romantic compatibility” is considered by many to be at odds with the “search for a co-parent.” Online dating helps to foster the illusion that there is a person out there who could offer “super compatibility” and assumes a landscape in which daters scoff at compromise and are unwilling, when it comes to romantic partners, to accept the truism that “people aren’t perfect.”

Egg freezing now provides women who can afford it—and even those who struggle to do so—with the equivalent of a requested extension in the search for a life partner. So, today, Berg and Wiseman explain, many young women will throw a “‘93rd percentile match’ back into the pool so that they could wait ‘just a little bit longer’ and find someone ‘that’s even just a little bit better.’”

Among those who are not so young, the question of motherhood becomes not so much about what one will take on—but about what one will give up.

Women might know better if they listened to psychologist Lori Gottlieb, who made the case for “settling for Mr. Good Enough” in 2011’s Marry Him. And young people of both sexes might benefit greatly from a read-through of Brad Wilcox’s 2024 Get Married (a thesis of a title if ever there was one).

This is to say that the argument for speeding up the mating and family formation game—especially for women—is not new.

What Berg and Wiseman offer more than anything else is permission: For young women to think about family formation in tandem with romantic compatibility, and for young men to think about family formation at all.

I was genuinely unaware that such a writ was needed (at 36, I have been married for nearly 12 years and a mom for 10, so I would not know). But if young people need a secular blessing in concert with a reproductive science lesson, then good for these authors for attempting to offer both. That said, I do not think that one can get at the root of this “slow love” problem without addressing a broader “slow adulthood” problem that seems to encompass far more than the search for a partner. This is outside the scope of Berg and Wiseman’s project, but it seems to me that ambivalence about all responsibility, of which marriage and parenthood are the gravest, amounts to a contagion among much of today’s youth—whose future ranks are dwindling due to a failure to differentiate themselves from children by having some.

Meanwhile, among those who are not so young, the question of motherhood becomes not so much about what one will take on—but about what one will give up.

What Kind of Mother Will You Be?

In season four of Sex and the City, law firm partner Miranda Hobbes gets unexpectedly pregnant with her bartender ex-boyfriend. It is well-established that Miranda was not prepared for motherhood, both in the specific sense that she wasn’t intending to conceive a child and in the broader sense that she is not what passes for “maternal.” The series’ original foil—women who get married, move to the suburbs, and dote on their children in a saccharine, darkly humorous, and self-abnegating way—are Miranda’s polar opposites. Well into her thirties, Miranda exemplifies the ambivalence about motherhood explored at such length by Berg and Wiseman.

As Miranda’s due date nears, the overworked attorney still has not prepared either her home or her heart for forthcoming responsibilities. In a revealing bit of dialogue, comparatively “normie” Charlotte, who is not ambivalent about motherhood at all, presses the mom-to-be: “There are a million questions to answer before the baby ever gets here! Do you have a birthing plan? Do you know what kind of a mother you want to be?” Miranda, taken aback by these questions, replies: “Yes! I plan to be … a good mother!” Charlotte counters: “But, a marsupial mom, or a stroller mom? Will you be breastfeeding or bottle feeding? And what about baby proofing?” She pushes on: “Because once you have that baby, it’s not just you anymore. You’re not going to be able to control everything.”

Of course, Charlotte wants to help. And Miranda’s deadpan reply to her friend’s detailed queries—“I plan to be a good mother!”—is funny. But it’s not so funny when this sort of third-degree interrogation happens not in conversation with a friend during the third trimester of pregnancy but within one’s own consciousness in a way that makes parenthood seem utterly overwhelming.

In other words, what Charlotte said was: “Once you have that baby, it’s not just you anymore. You’re not going to be able to control everything.” But what Miranda heard was: Once you have that baby, you’re not you anymore. You’re not going to be able to control anything.

When college-educated women increasingly view motherhood as a morally neutral lifestyle choice rather than an innately good vocational purpose, that choice becomes one that they must justify by excelling at it according to an often silly and pointless societal rubric. And if this means sacrificing everything else that they are, believe, and enjoy, so be it. “You made that toddler bed,” says a culture that simultaneously disdains and sanctifies motherhood. “Now lie beside it until your child falls asleep even if it means you can never do anything else ever again.”

Who would voluntarily sign up for that?

As Berg writes in a lovely reflection on mothering her daughter, which serves as the book’s conclusion: “The assumption of obligatory identity change can imply that our myriad other identities will necessarily be flattened, or even lost. For prospective mothers, this can make the decision of whether to have children that much more daunting.” Berg makes the case for parenthood among women like herself—the “Mirandas,” who will not and likely cannot subsume all of our other interests and concerns to a version of modern maternalism in which “good mother” becomes our identity. Berg admits that she “used to believe that the inability to enjoy one’s child, wholly and completely, was a sign of personal failure.” She no longer believes that. Yet, she is glad to be her daughter’s mother, even though she doesn’t enjoy mothering all the time and does not embroider, say, the mind-numbing constraint of sleep training with some new definition of liberty that renders parenthood counterintuitively freeing. Brava.

Any case for parenthood that does not involve purpose and vocation is really no case at all.

But there is a sacred cow of modern parenthood that goes unchallenged in Berg’s essay, even though challenging it would strengthen her argument: That having children must be “disordered” and endlessly accommodating. Here is how Berg describes time with her daughter: “Pajamas off! Pajamas on! New socks, night socks, no socks. Yes hat, no hat, always hat, not that hat. Slippers on, slippers off, slippers in bed, slippers in bath, slippers to daycare. … Bread, no bread, cheese, no cheese, milk in bottle, coffee in bottle, now we drink the bathwater.” And so on.

I have four children, three of whom have gone through the toddler and preschool years in which such matters can become sources of contention. Here’s what that sounds like in my house: Kid: “No hat!” Mom: “Yes hat.”

When the strongest willed of my sons was two and three, such an exchange might lead to an hour-long tantrum. That was okay. I marveled at his spirit—I still do. And I got AirPods.

It is much easier to enjoy one’s children if one recognizes that parents, not children, are in charge. Moreover, the kind of parental authority that makes children likable is good for children themselves. Indeed, “civilizing the feral” is an apt tagline for a “past conception” of “having children” grounded in Augustinian reality rather than in Rousseauian fantasy.

Contra Berg and Wiseman, we can indeed “recover” and “resuscitate” such past conceptions if we so choose. But they are right that it won’t be easy.

After all, it’s not just the retention of pre-parental identity that makes parenthood more appealing. It’s also the establishment of parental authority that makes it much easier to have and enjoy not just one child, but a bunch of them. This is what one would argue for if one was really invested in human life for its own sake, rather than in parenthood as a lifestyle choice.

To Life, to Life, L’Chaim?

Berg and Wiseman make a case for the essential goodness of humanity that ultimately relies on a sort of “gotcha” about the existence of people that I am not sure their progressive friends will readily accept. “If,” the authors contend in the book’s philosophically and literarily thick final chapter, “it is wrong for anyone to bring a child into the world in the present, it has been wrong for everyone to have brought a child into the world in the past. … Every single human being … was born out of a grave moral failure.”

Well, not necessarily. Many progressives who view human reproduction as wrong might contend in response that we know better now—both about how to prevent pregnancy and about humans’ adverse impact on the environment—than we did 100 years ago. In this light, it is entirely possible to view your grandmother’s birth as an unfortunate accident but your nonexistent child’s nonbirth as a mortal wrong averted.

Beyond this questionable argument, Berg and Wiseman more astutely point out that feelings of moral unease about human reproduction related to war, poverty, violence, suffering, and climate change typically exist alongside ambitions to better a world in which one already assumes the existence of future humans. This is true enough. Even truer is the realization that “however difficult the going gets, however much we complain and protest, most of us still treat our lives not only as valuable but as precious.” Therefore, “the answer to the question of whether life is good does not really await our decision to have children.”

Yet, Berg and Wiseman do not endorse parenthood broadly or unequivocally. “The decision to have children,” they contend, is “as personally consequential as it is philosophically profound. … Only you can determine whether it is the right one for you.” So, at bottom, for all their book’s sophistication and insight into the shortcomings of exactly this approach, Berg and Wiseman are talking about parenthood as a mere lifestyle choice after all. Ultimately, for them, it cannot be anything else because they have no transcendent conception of what either children or people are for.

Of course, some worthy purposes and vocations do not involve parenthood. But any case for parenthood that does not involve purpose and vocation is really no case at all.

Indeed, Berg and Wiseman’s secular argument in favor of having children is perhaps the best that can be made. And it amounts to: To life, to life—if it’s right for you.

Not quite the same ring to it. But better, I guess, than nothing.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Talk to Young Ladies

By Neland Nobel

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

A recent poll conducted by McLaughlin and Associates for the Media Research Center showed that most Democrats and Independents did not know the policy positions taken by Kamala Harris.  These folks will be voting, canceling out the votes of those who are informed.

Is this a case of benign detachment or willful ignorance?  It may be some of both but likely it is also just a matter of habit in the way they access information.

71% did not know that Kamala Harris has backed defunding the police and that she actively raised bail money for rioting BLM members.

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75% did not know she backed the radical Green New Deal.

71% did not know she had backed reparations.

75% did not know Kamala Harris was judged the most liberal Senator.

77% did not know she has advocated the abolishment of ICE to protect the border.

72% did not know she was the “Border Czar”,  and put in charge of the crisis at the Southern Border.

86%  did not know she had backed the idea of having death row inmates vote.

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How can such appalling ignorance be so pervasive in a world swimming in information?

Well, the answer comes with further examination of where they likely get information.  Just over half said they get their information on politics from broadcast television.  Cable news got 41% and social media a little over 34%.

The chokehold progressives have on most of broadcast journalism and social media is very evident. This is largely true of local television news as well. Politically speaking, you are what you read and hear and not enough young people are reading independent or citizen journalism but depending largely on corporate journalism such as ABC News, owned by Disney.

Despite the recent controversy over Amazon’s Alexa, only about 17% got their information from search engines.

There also is a particular subset of the “greatest ignorant generation”, that either does not know much or is trending leftward, and that is young women.

Unmarried young women in particular have been trending Democrat in the past few years, and many hold this for the failure of the “Red Wave” a few years ago to materialize in the last election cycle.

According to Joel Kotkin, a keen observer of social trends, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade childless urban women are joining African Americans as the most dependable block of voters for Democrats.

This is not just a problem of ignorant youth. Young men are trending more conservatively while women are headed in the other direction.

This might be caused by the dominance of 4th wave feminism in our culture, encouraged by DEI initiatives, and the fact many more women are attending college than men.  Colleges and universities are reliable incubators of radical feminism.

Still, that does not account for why even being a feminist, they don’t know Kamala Harris has urged defunding of the police and has been largely responsible for letting in hoards of criminal and mental patients, many of whom prey on young women.  Nor do they seem to connect Bidenomics with the reality of rising rent and food prices, which affect women just as surely as men.

It may be that since Kamala Harris is a woman, and a woman of color, that is sufficient for them because it hits their tribal feminism button and they don’t need further information.  We say tribal button because Kotkin believes this is all linked to the rise of identity politics, which is the main selling point of Democrats and progressives.  This “group consciousness” becomes important because the well-being and treatment of women, generally speaking, becomes critical to their own lives.  It is sort of the political manifestation of Taylor Swift’s lyrics.

That is why many advise Trump not to attack Kamala or call her stupid even though she attacks him on a personal level.  Just show the facts and her positions, and let the voter intuit that she is stupid.  But it is not clear even that hits the primordial emotions of the sisterhood in quite the right way.

Married women, by contrast, are much more conservative, and that is true even in blue states.  So this gets confusing.  It is not just that they are female, it is that they are unmarried and in many cases, dependent on the state for support.  Such women may not have a high opinion of men (because they have not found a good man), but they have a high opinion government. Remember the government-produced videos on the life of Julia?

Why would married women be more informed than unmarried women?  They both are concerned about women, aren’t they?  Maybe the reality of having a husband and children makes one think of the broader needs of society and the climate in which to have a family, while the unmarried are focused on themselves.  This exclusive focus on the self makes one oblivious to information that is available.

It is not clear how to break through to this cohort of people.  Certainly, inflation, a ruptured border, and a crime wave are not good for young women any more than it is for anyone else.  Inflation and personal safety should be issues that strike close to home.

It is also quite obvious that if men can pretend to be women, replace women, and reduce real women to “birthing persons”, the whole idea of womanhood, or women’s rights is being obliterated.  This is a huge threat to women being presented by the Left and young women need to understand this.

Trump’s position on abortion is nuanced and he is not a purist.  This has raised the ire of the right-to-life movement, but he is not an extremist on the issue, but he is perceived to be. He wants it largely left to the states.  Most Republicans are resigned to abortion today but want to see limitations, such as not killing the baby when it has reached viability or can feel the pain of being torn limb from limb.  This is not an ideal position from which to argue that the state should protect life, but that is where we are in our culture right now. But surely young women can understand that if you want an abortion, don’t cause the baby to suffer a horrible and painful death. Is that too much to ask?  They would not do that if they wanted to be free of their cat, would they?

Democrat advertising plays a role in this but some just regard Trump and Republicans as somehow as anti-women, even though he has always given women key roles both in his business enterprise and in his political operation.

As some commentators have noted, Trump has lost points over Stormy Daniels, an affair with a side chick.  What seems to be lost on many is that Kamala’s rise to power was functioning as that “side chick”.

Thus, we think arguing safety, a good economy, low inflation, no needless wars, and exposing the agenda of the radical transgenders, should resonate with women, but we could be wrong. Their feelings of group empowerment over having a woman elected may subsume all other factors.

We think of the famous quip from Will Rodgers: ” There are two ways of arguing with a woman. Neither work”.  That of course, is a male-centric observation.

It would seem that conservative women talking to young women would be particularly helpful, as older males might be perceived as condescending. Thus, conservative women need to reach out like never before to younger women.  Your life experience and empathy might have more influence than you think.

Reject the cynicism. If you have the opportunity to interact with young women and engage in a discussion, do so in a respectful way and tell them the future of the country may hinge on their decision.

It does in more ways than just the coming election.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Subverting the American Family

By Auguste Meyrat

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

The Right must prioritize the basic pillars of society above all other considerations.

A recent Pew study found that less than half of Americans (39 percent) believe that “society should prioritize marriage and having children.” The sentiment is not consistent across the electorate. Among Democratic supporters, 81 percent believe society should have other priorities, while 59 percent of Trump supporters believe that marriage and children are important for society.

Considering that the nuclear family is the foundation of Western civilization, this trend should alarm everyone. As Aristotle rightly argued over two millennia ago, family formation precedes the formation of any kind of polity. While governments, welfare programs, and good fortune come and go, families remain the stabilizing force that sustains individuals and enables communities. This is why societies without strong families inevitably become destitute, degenerate, and dangerous—as well as decrepit and depopulated over time.

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So why have so many on the Left and Right become so indifferent to family? Have material conditions in the twenty-first century improved so much that the family has become unnecessary? Has the average American family become so dysfunctional that a substantial number of adults would rather do away with the whole idea? Has technology corrupted social interaction to such a degree that men would rather content themselves with AI girlfriends and pornography while women endlessly scroll through addictive social media apps and celebrate spinsterhood?

Some of these factors play a role, but a deliberate media and educational campaign to turn Americans away from family started decades ago and has had a major impact on the American attitude toward marriage. From the nineties onward, popular programming has glamorized single life and disparaged family life. Sitcoms like SeinfeldFriendsFrasier, and The Office made being child-free attractive, cool, and funny. By contrast, shows like The SimpsonsSouth ParkKing of the Hill, and Everybody Loves Raymond made family life seem humiliating at best, and outright trashy at worst.

Added to this is the war on romance in film. Men and women can work together, kick butt together, and maybe go to bed together, but they can’t really fall in love with one another. What was once common to see in movies has disappeared entirely. A spirit of cynicism has taken over, sweeping the themes of marriage, family, and even basic courtship into the ash heap of history.

At the same time, children’s entertainment has followed the same course. Most Disney princesses barely have a family and usually assemble their own family with the friends they meet on their adventures. In the past decade, even this makeshift family narrative has been substituted with the narrative of the girlboss, who gradually realizes she doesn’t need anyone to thrive. No longer do girls grow up with the dream of meeting their prince, marrying, and having children like Cinderella or Snow White; now they hope to dominate others like Elsa or Moana.

Online media fads promote single, child-free living. DINKs (dual-income, no kids) and DINKWADs (dual-income, no kids, with a dog) have taken to Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to tout the fabulous lifestyle which allows them to travel more, drink more, and enjoy various delicacies at Costco. Those in the queer community also like to flaunt their newfound freedom in rejecting the traditional family and glorifying lust, winning over a sizable portion of young adults in the process.

Educational institutions adopt agendas that propagandize against family life. Many schools in blue states, as well as most universities across the country, actively promote countercultural values that undermine parental authority and dissolve family ties. The nuclear family and conservative parents are cast as the enemy while school officials and leftist advocates are presented as allies and surrogate parents.

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Even schools in conservative areas tend to take the place of family, usually with the idea of promoting school spirit and boosting student morale. In most suburban schools (including those where I’ve taught) it’s common for students to spend most of their waking life at school, busy with coursework and extracurricular programs, and treat it like their home. All too often, unless they’re part of a church, these students miss out on developing social skills and never seriously think of marriage or family.

It’s tempting to think that this public crusade against the family is merely incidental to modern culture, but there’s more reason to believe that it is purposeful. Citing the work of Soviet defector and propaganda expert Yuri Bezmenov, Somali-born activist and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues in The Free Press that American culture is being collectively subverted. Through a massive, decades-long information operation, the values and beliefs that once defined America are being inverted to promote a revolutionary cause.

According to Bezmenov, subversion is a four-stage process: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. Demoralization, which involves disillusioning people on core values, takes the longest amount of time and effort. Once a population is demoralized, it enters a shorter period of destabilization in which the legal and social framework of a country unravels, power struggles emerge, and society is fragmented into factions. This leads to a period of crisis where civilization breaks down altogether, allowing for a new regime to be normalized and accepted.

This dynamic applies to the American family. The younger generations, especially Millennials and Zoomers, have been thoroughly demoralized in their perception of marriage and raising children. This has led to a destabilization period in which alternative lifestyles, sexual exploitation, and childless households are becoming widespread. Soon enough, America will face the crises of depopulation, mass abortion, assisted suicide, and the full loss of parental authority. In its place, the new normal will be the state and large businesses raising children and regulating reproduction through unnatural means (i.e., surrogacy, IVF, cloning, and artificial wombs).

The twenty-first century is becoming a real-life Brave New World. Indeed, the most farfetched elements of Huxley’s great and prescient book, having to do with eugenics and synthetic human reproduction, are the ones that will become normalized. Accordingly, those who still marry and have large families the natural way will be increasingly marginalized by a majority of childless adults who will make family life impossible in the city. First, these families will flee to the suburbs and then the exurbs, and will finally reside in self-contained enclaves in the wilderness—much like the “reservations” in Brave New World. Meanwhile, the majority of people in this fully subverted culture will vainly try to reverse decline by importing more immigrants from the Third World and relying on AI to keep up their quality of life.

Consciously or not, avoiding this outcome is what unites conservatives more than anything else. As for progressives, it’s clear that the great majority either have no clue about the process or accept—and even celebrate—it as a necessary and salutary development. Whatever their position, far more Americans need to see the current situation for what it is and reject the demoralizing lies told about marriage and having children. Only then can we successfully address a destabilizing demography and the major crises that follow.

It’s vital to understand that all of this is happening in the cultural realm. Nations hoping to boost their birth rates and avoid population decline need to foster an authentic pro-family culture. Desperate pro-natalist policies that bribe mothers with tax credits and stimulus checks are bound to fail when the most influential voices have declared that marriage is meaningless and having children will make people unhappy. So long as those voices continue informing the consciences of society’s young adults, the population will continue to be deluded. Thus, for the sake of civilization’s future, and for the sake of today’s confused and lonely men and women, let the truth be known: if you want society to continue, you should indeed prioritize marriage and children above everything else.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

What Happened to My Party? thumbnail

What Happened to My Party?

By Joel Kotkin

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

The Democrats need to appeal to Main Street America.

I grew up among people who worshipped the key pillars of the twentieth-century Democratic Party: the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt, and the great public works project known as New York City. The Democrats then were the party of progress—of new roads, bridges, ports, factories, and laboratories. They were also the party of national defense, a holdover from the triumph of World War II that was sustained by a fear of Communist aggression.

But the Democratic Party’s recent evolution contrasts sharply with its glory days. Today, the Democrats are losing out among some of the party’s core constituencies, notably those who work with their handsLatinosJews, Asians, and even some African Americans. In their new configuration, the Democrats function as an electoral cabal forged by an alliance between the business elite, the professional classes, the federal bureaucracy, and dependent voters.

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If anything, the Democrats synchronized swimming of the past month could only occur in a party largely uniform in its core constituencies and essential beliefs. They shift positions and allegiances through technology and media controlusing influencers to hide troublesome past positions with a dexterity that a Communist vozdh like Joseph Stalin would have appreciated.

The new mindset is obvious considering the Democrats’ embrace of censorship in alliance with the tech oligarchs, who have been long-time backers of Kamala Harris, and the universities, another bulwark of progressive power. It also builds upon the assumption that the experts embraced by progressive voters should be allowed free reign since they know better than the masses.

The keys to understanding the increasingly authoritarian Democratic Party are threefold: class, racial politics, and sexual politics. As someone schooled in Marxist theory, I tend to place the class component first. In the past, Democrats were a party that appealed to “the little people” like factory hands, small shopkeepers, yeoman farmers, skilled mechanics, and artisans. Democrats from Kennedy to Clinton focused on private sector growth as a means to achieve upward mobility for middle- and working-class Americans.

But in the new Democratic policy world, most employment growth has been focused on government and public-funded health care. And the Democrats’ electoral base is largely those professionals who benefit from an expanded regulatory state.

The differences between the professional urban elect, who tend to cluster in college towns and dense big cities, and the bulk of the population are enormous. Indeed, a recent Rasmussen study of high-earning, grad-degree urban professionals found that their views on a host of issues such as restrictions on meat, gas, and free speech differ widely from most Americans.

These professionals, many of whom work in elite business services, prosper while the working and middle class that was once the Democratic base suffer. The inflation under Biden has been particularly hard among the less affluent. Overall, one in four Americans fear losing their job in the next year while roughly half of all U.S. adults surveyed now think the vaunted American Dream, as epitomized by opportunity for home ownership, has become unreachable, particularly in coastal cities.

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It’s hard to see how a Harris-Walz regime would help address any of this. Both Harris and Walz have long embraced draconian climate regulation, with Harris even calling for the need to reduce population due to climate change.

Wherever these policies are implemented, as in California, the results for blue collar workers in terms of household costs and jobs tend to be disastrous. The pain is likely to spread soon if the U.S. auto industry, including GM, which Democrats once claimed would bring 10,000 new jobs to Michigan alone, continues to lay off workers to prepare for the forced march to electric vehicles. Overall, manufacturing is already in a recession.

The second leg of the current Democratic Party is racial politics. Having lost much of the old white working class, Democrats have focused on gaining non-white voters. The black political elite, in particular, helped elect Obama twice, nominated and elected Joe Biden, and were the force that elevated the formerly underwhelming Kamala Harris to the vice presidency.

To be sure, winning minority votes are clearly a key to future political success as they move toward being an absolute majority by mid-century. But the appeal to these voters has changed from a focus on equality of opportunity to the politics of racial redress. Democratic Party leaders endorse, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves.

The “anti-racist” ideology so prevalent on college campuses and in the media has thrived in the new Democratic order. The Biden Department of Education embraces these ideas, with one top official having described democracy as being “built on white supremacy”; Biden’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has a similar focus.

Yet to play the race card, Democrats cannot just rely on black voters. To win in the future, they will have to add the much faster growing ranks of Asians and Latinos to the mix. Taken together, the Democrats’ control of “people of color” would all but guarantee victories into perpetuity.

But even among blacks, particularly young males, the bloody banner of race is losing out to the more immediate challenge of making a living. Blacks under Bidenomics have stagnated, and barely half approve of Biden’s performance, a very low number for an overwhelmingly Democratic group. Trump, at least until Harris’s impending nomination, was making unprecedented gains among blacks, achieving a remarkable 30 percent level of support among black male voters according to an April 2024 Wall Street Journal survey.

The shifts among Latinos are even more startling. Although most minority voters will support Harris, Republican support among Hispanic voters has grown by ten points since 2018. Trump now polls close to even, or even slightly ahead, with the largest of the growing demographic groups in the nation. That represents a dramatic change. In recent elections, Barack Obama won roughly 70 percent of the Latino vote.

A similar trend may be soon seen among Asians, who are now the U.S.’s fastest growing minority. As their numbers increase from almost 12 million in 2000 to more than three times that number by mid-century, they are showing growing unease with Democrats. Asian support for Trump rose from 27 percent in 2016 to 31 percent in 2020.

A particular sticking point is affirmative action, a policy Harris and the refashioned Democratic Party passionately embrace. Three-quarters of all Asian adults (76 percent) say race or ethnicity should not factor into college admissions decisions, and they voted decisively against a referendum to restore quotas in California.

And then there are the Jews. Democrats usually win something close to 70 percent of the Jewish vote. Though Jews are far less numerous than blacks and Asians, their financial support and political acumen are critical to the Democratic Party, as William Domhoff pointed out in his 1972 book Fat Cats and Democrats.

Yet as Democrats appeal to pro-Hamas voters and aligned groups like the teacher’s unions, they are turning off a sizable number of Jewish voters and contributors. In 2020, according to some estimates Trump gained almost a third of the Jewish vote, a six percent increase from 2016. A recent Siena poll suggested Trump had taken a lead among New York’s large Jewish population.

The third leg of the modern Democratic Party rests on sexual politics. Of course, the existence of a political gender gap is nothing new—but, according to recent Gallup surveys, it is now five times bigger than in 2000. Survey data has found that from 1999 to 2013, about three in ten women aged 18 to 29 consistently identified as liberal—which rose to 40 percent in 2023. Crucially, Gallup interprets these changes as “stronger-than-average pro-liberal shifts,” particularly at elite colleges. Some of this can be traced to issues like abortion. Also, married women are far more likely to lean center-right than their unmarried and childless counterparts.

In contrast, young men are increasingly supportive of Donald Trump, reflecting deep dissatisfaction with the Democrats’ economic agendaRecent polling suggests that young voters, particularly from the working class, are shifting away from the Democrats, who won their votes easily in 2020.

In the short term, the Democrats will benefit from the decline in marriage, family formation, and birthrates—and the rise of so-called “cat ladies.” But in the long term, this could prove a problem, as there are much higher birth rates in red states than blue ones, which demographer Lyman Stone has called the “conservative fertility advantage.”

In today’s demographics, Democrats could put together a majority coalition even as they continue to hemorrhage working-class voters due in part because independent and suburban voters, particularly women, tend to dislike Trump. But over time, the long term prognosis for the GOP improves as Democrats are forced to appease minorities, gender radicals, and anti-Israel activists, who are likely to be a disruptive presence at the Democratic National Convention and throughout the rest of the 2024 campaign.

Ironically, a Harris victory could prove over time an unmitigated disaster for Democrats, particularly once there is no Trump to rally against. The Harris-Waltz regime would likely be Bidenism on steroids, accelerating welfare spending, weakening national defense, and, wherever possible, raising the level of regulation and taxes. The disorder of Democratic-controlled cities won’t provide a great advertisement for progressive policies.

The key is whether conservatives can use these failures to appeal to groups outside the MAGA core. There are signs that minority voters are restless, backing more moderate candidates in Buffalo and Seattle. Similar shifts have taken place in Virginia, which saw the election of a Jamaican-American as lieutenant governor and a Cuban-American as attorney general.

But perhaps the real battle, particularly if Harris loses, may come within the Democratic Party, sparked by the vehemence of anti-Israel Democrats as well as Biden’s feckless policies. Mainstream Democratic Jews have already deposed two members of the radical “squad” and are aiming at more. The successful victories by moderates in the Democratic stronghold of San Francisco, with similar efforts underway in Los Angeles and Oakland, make clear that even big city voters have had it with deep blue politics.

Whether this winter or four years hence, the Democrats will need to recalibrate their political approach. As a fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council’s policy think tank, I saw how the party was able to recover from the disasters of the McGovern and Mondale campaigns. The key challenge then, like now, is to reconnect the party with the denizens of Main Street America and the heartland, notably parents, suburban-dwellers, and upwardly mobile minorities.

Of course, as the old Yiddish saying has it, from my lips to God’s ears. Party reform is possible but will take a prolonged struggle in the years following the 2024 election, and victory is far from assured. So for the time being, I am staying as I have been for years—a homeless, former Democrat.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

‘Pull Off A Leg Or Two’: Planned Parenthood Staff Discuss Harvesting Baby Parts In Unsealed Footage thumbnail

‘Pull Off A Leg Or Two’: Planned Parenthood Staff Discuss Harvesting Baby Parts In Unsealed Footage

By Jordan Boyd

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Editors’ Note: As we read this, we could not help but reflect on how extreme ideology, in this case radical feminism, can short-circuit the normal moral wiring of the human being. Not only do they seem impervious to the pain they are causing the child (tearing them limb from limb), but they actually have developed a gallows humor to keep the reality of what they are doing (killing babies) from penetrating the psyche. It is not so different from Nazi guards at a concentration camp, that had to somehow justify what they were doing so that they could sleep at night. Making a lampshade out of human skin becomes, just a lampshade to be sold. Extracting gold teeth is just a mining endeavor. Planned Parenthood sells body parts to help the human race deal with disease. The ability of the human to justify atrocious action, fueled by ideological fervor, remains remarkable. Progressives who are eager to micro-manage and regulate our lives for the benefit of the “environment” cannot see any need whatsoever to regulate the killing of human babies.

Newly unsealed footage that had previously been seized by Kamala Harris shows Planned Parenthood staff discuss harvesting baby parts and organs.

Newly released footage captured by undercover journalists in 2015 shows Planned Parenthood staff discussing the process of harvesting aborted baby parts and allegedly exposes a scheme to traffic them.

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David Daleiden, project lead for the Center For Medical Progress (CMP), recorded the damning footage in 2015 at the National Abortion Federation’s (NAF) commercial trade show in San Francisco.

A court injunction stemming from California Attorney General-turned-Vice President Kamala Harris’ prosecution of Daleiden previously blocked the release of the footage. Thanks to a congressional subpoena and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., however, Daleiden was finally permitted to post hours of footage allegedly exposing Planned Parenthood’s gruesome practices nearly a decade after he collected it.

In the clips, Daleiden and one of his CMP colleagues who posed as representatives for a fake tissue procurement startup called BioMax, are heard discussing the sale of fetal body parts with individuals identified as Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast (PPGC) Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ann Schutt-Ainé and Vice President of Abortion Access Tram Nguyen.

“You have to come and play with our tissue and see if it’s cool enough for you,” Nguyen said at the beginning of the video.

Later in the clip, Nguyen brags about PPGC’s reputation as being “a little bit different than other providers.

“I’m like, ‘Yeah, I have like a leg for you.’ I’m like, oh sh-t, if other people were to hear me, they’d be like, you are f-cking evil,” she said.

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Prior to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision in 2022, the Houston facility allegedly employed several abortionists who were willing to kill babies well into the second trimester.

“If you want more intact ones, she’s the one you kind of need to talk to,” Nguyen said of Schutt-Ainé.

In an effort to deliver PPGC’s alleged clients the most desirable body parts but skirt the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, Schutt-Ainé claimed she does much of her dismemberments at the edge of the womb.

“If I’m doing a procedure, and I’m seeing that I’m in fear that it’s about to come to the umbilicus [navel], I might ask for a second set of forceps to hold the body at the cervix and pull off a leg, or two, so it’s not PBA,” Schutt-Ainé said.

The abortionist said her facility, on average, harvested five to 10 samples per week.

“Thirty to 50 is like a good number for the month,” Nguyen explained.

A bad sample, Nguyen said, only happened when those executing the unborn baby were forced to “hurry up” the gruesome procedure. She recalled one such example with a 16-year-old girl.

“Whereas like other days, it’s like more intact, where it’s, like, maybe only, like, an arm that’s disarticulated,” Nguyen concluded.

After the CMP’s plant noted that organs like the liver and thymus appeared to be in high demand by lab wholesalers, Schutt-Ainé confessed she adapted her abortion method to better preserve lucrative corpse pieces.

“You told me about the proposition, and so now every time I do a D&E [dilation and evacuation abortion], I’m like, ‘Oh, there’s some lungs, there’s some kidneys,’” Schutt-Ainé explained, before telling an unnamed coworker in the frame that she will eventually be “desensitized for playing with tissue.”

In another video, Schutt-Ainé claimed she could harvest livers and hearts “without too much difficulty at all” as long as the mother’s cervix is well dilated.

“When you have good dilation, a cervix that’s either well-dilated and/or just softer and more pliable, then as you bring the fetus down, you can get more of it out before disarticulation occurs,” she explained.

Schutt-Ainé and Tram also detailed how they use up to four forceps “passes” to scrape a baby’s remains out of the uterus to avoid scrutiny about whether it was a partial-birth abortion.

“If I’m doing a procedure, and I’m seeing that I’m in fear that it’s about to come to the umbilicus [navel], I might ask for a second set of forceps to hold the body at the cervix and pull off a leg, or two, so it’s not PBA,” Schutt-Ainé claimed.

After the videos were taken, CMP’s front company reportedly sent PPGC a contract offering thousands of dollars per organ. Tram and other staff members were allegedly “trying to move forward with the sales.”

When Daleiden accused Planned Parenthood of allegedly selling aborted babies’ body parts, especially those executed in the second and third trimesters, for commercial profit, the abortion giant repeatedly denied it. Instead, Planned Parenthood claimed the videos were “doctored” and said it only donates a small percentage of fetal tissue to various organizations conducting scientific research.

NAF, similarly, issued a statement expressing support for handing out tissues from abortions “with the potential to help millions of Americans suffering from diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, muscular dystrophy, leukemia, and other serious medical conditions.”

“There is no financial gain for women or health care providers involved,” NAF claimed.

These claims fueled lawfare by Harris, who colluded with Planned Parenthood and NAF to target Daleiden for exposing the abortion giant, according to his attorneys. Part of the prosecution involved a raid on Daleiden’s house, where investigators allegedly seized footage further implicating the abortion giant and handed it over to Harris’ abortion campaign donors.

To this day, Daleiden still faces eight felony charges and possible jail time for allegedly recording videos without permission and using a fake ID to maintain access to abortion facilities.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Arizona Voters Will Be Voting On Abortion In November thumbnail

Arizona Voters Will Be Voting On Abortion In November

By Madeline Armstrong

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Arizona for Abortion Access, an organization working to put abortion access in Arizona’s constitution, officially received a place on the November ballot – Prop. 139.

This proposition states that an individual is entitled to an abortion until fetal viability and in some cases afterwards if it is essential to the individual’s physical and mental wellbeing.

Although having over 577,000 verified signatures from Arizona voters, their place on the ballot is not quite secure. They have two lawsuits that could unseat their initiative. The first of which they filed against the Arizona Legislature after being denied their request to change the language on the informational pamphlets sent out along with the ballot to say “fetus” instead of “unborn human being.”

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“Unborn human being is language that is used frequently by anti-abortion folks and we feel that description falls outside of the law’s requirements that it be neutral,” said Chris Love, spokesperson for Arizona for Abortion Access.

Arizona for Abortion Access won the initial legal battle, but the legislature appealed, leaving up to the Supreme Court to decide.

“The ruling is just plain wrong and clearly partisan if the language of the actual law is not acceptable,” said Speaker Ben Toma. “The judge should run for the legislature if he wants to write the law. We are appealing.”

According to the Secretary of State’s Office, the pamphlet must be submitted by Aug. 29 in order to make it on the November ballot, meaning that the appeals will have to be resolved by then.

Additionally, a pro-life organization, Arizona Right to Life, sued Arizona for Abortion Access with two claims. One being that those circulating the petitions to gain signatures were unqualified to do so, and the other being that the description of the amendment on the petition was “misleading.”

Arizona Right to Life dropped the claims that the circulators were unqualified and Arizona for Abortion Access won the lawsuit regarding the accuracy of the petition summary.

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Arizona Right to Life appealed and that will also be determined by the Supreme Court.

“This appeal shows yet again that they are willing to do and say anything — no matter how desperate or dishonest — to deprive Arizonans of their right to direct democracy,” reads a news release from Arizona for Abortion Access. “We’re hopeful the Arizona Supreme Court will grant us a fair and unbiased review and allow Arizona voters to have their say at the ballot box.”

However, if the court does vote that the 200-word summary was misleading, therefore discounting the votes needed to get the initiative on the ballot, Prop. 139 could be removed.

“They’re not being completely honest with Arizona voters,” said Cindy Dahlgren, communications director for It Goes Too Far. “They’re not being upfront with exactly what this amendment would do. They’re leaving out a lot of very important points.”

It Goes Too Far is an oppositional campaign that spreads awareness about the possible dangers of Arizona for Abortion Access Amendment, according to Dahlgren.

Dahlgren said that the campaign is made up of people with lots of different views, but they have all come together in opposition of this one ballot measure.

“We have this one thing that we agree on – that this amendment goes too far,” Dahlgren said.

The thing Dahlgren pointed out as being problematic is that the wording is too vague in the amendment, leaving room for question. For example, the verbage states that, “no regulation can infringe on an individual’s abortion decision.” Something that Dahlgren believes could be unsafe for women if safety standards are not enforced.

Additionally, the amendment uses the term, “healthcare provider” instead of “doctor,” which she also believes is unsafe, opening up the ability to perform abortions to people who are not certified to do so.

“Proposition 139 is endorsed by more than 40 statewide organizations ranging from physicians’ groups, faith communities, veterans organizations, political advocacy non-profits, nonpartisan advocacy groups, Latino-community organizations, and many more,” reads the Arizonan for Abortion Access press release. “We are supported by voters in every political party and across all ages, backgrounds, and demographics who know Arizona patients deserve the freedom to make decisions about pregnancy and abortion with their doctors and families – not with politicians.”

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Problem With Cat Ladies Is Not the Cats- Part I thumbnail

The Problem With Cat Ladies Is Not the Cats- Part I

By Neland Nobel

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Republican Vice-Presidential candidate J.D. Vance has caught a lot of flak for his remark about childless cat ladies. He seems to have touched a nerve.

The issue is not that they have cats, it is that a growing proportion of women have chosen not to have families. By extension, an increasing number of men agree with their wives. Why is that?

However, Vance has started a worthwhile conversation about the plummeting birth rate and the fact that so many women choose not to have children and prefer to pour their affection into pets. So, we decided to touch this nerve directly and air some important differences in our politics.

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Understand, we completely agree that women and men have the right to make their own choices on these matters. We only wish that those who wish to be childless not be so hostile to those who do wish to have families.

And, in a collective sense, we need to appreciate that those who choose to have children have made a more important societal contribution than those who choose not to have children.

At the risk of offending some Hollywood starlets, Vance pointed out the obvious truth, that to have a civilization that continues, one that can care for its elderly and defend itself, a society needs children. It is children who grow up to be scientists, steel workers, soldiers, taxpayers, and diplomats.

To have an impact on the world, you first have to show up. Amazingly, such an obvious truth is controversial in some quarters.

Most industrialized countries are experiencing plummeting birth rates as well, although until recently, the US was doing better than most. Sadly, that is no longer the case.

You need about 2.1 children per family for population stability. Today, many Western countries are in the range of 1.2 to 1.6. At 1.6, the population will fall by half in just 40 years. The US is currently at 1.66.

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The question is why? It most likely is a mixture of economic policies, social policies, and spiritual positioning that are largely being undermined by the Left and its political arm, the Democrat Party.

As the states of this union often act as laboratories for social policy and attitudes, let us see which five states have the lowest birth rates and those that have the highest.

Lowest Birth Rates

  1. Vermont: 44.9 live births per 1,000 people
  2. Rhode Island: 48.3 live births per 1,000 people
  3. Oregon: 48.9 live births per 1,000 people
  4. Massachusetts: 49.0 live births per 1,000 people
  5. New Hampshire: 49.9 live births per 1,000 people

Highest Birth Rates

  1. South Dakota: 68.6 live births per 1,000 people
  2. North Dakota: 66.7 live births per 1,000 people
  3. Alaska: 64.9 live births per 1,000 people
  4. Nebraska: 64.4 live births per 1,000 people
  5. Utah: 63.6 live births per 1,000 people

Do you see any patterns in the data? Isn’t Bernie Sanders from Vermont?

It is often said that couples are not having children because of the cost of raising a family. However, looking at the list of states, it would be hard to make that argument. For example, Alaska is very expensive as a place to live. Are costs that much lower in Utah than in Vermont?

And what makes a state “expensive”? Would high taxes and heavy regulations play a role? How about high food prices, high gasoline prices, and high electricity bills? What political party embraces policies that force all of these costs higher? It seems rather obvious that there are political differences among these states, with the low birth rate states in Democrat-run states and the higher birth rate in Republican states.

Thus, if you believe economics impedes having children, then policies of free competition, low taxes, low regulation, and currency stability should help families. We should want job growth and higher productivity to support higher wages and lower housing costs.

Democrat policies fail on all those fronts. Large sections of the environmental movement now want dis-growth.

But while economics plays a role, is it the major factor?

If economics makes the primary difference, here is a thought challenge:  We take a similar group of people in an expensive state (Jews in New Jersey) and look at the birth differentials.  This is the same ethnic/religious group, the same gene pool,  in the same high-cost urban environment, and look at the difference in birth rates between religious Jews and secularized Jews.  We choose them because of their similarities, not differences, to eliminate as best we can independent variables.

The birth rates among Jewish communities in New Jersey show significant differences between Reform and Orthodox Jews.

  1. Orthodox Jews: The average Orthodox Jewish household tends to have significantly higher fertility rates. Orthodox Jewish families in New Jersey, particularly in areas like Lakewood, have an average of around 4.1 children per family​ (Jewish Exponent)​​ (Pew Research Center)​.
  2. Reform Jews: In contrast, Reform Jewish households have much lower fertility rates, averaging around 0.5 children per household​ (Pew Research Center)​​ (Pew Research Center)​.

As mentioned before, it takes 2.1 children per household to maintain population stability. At 0.5, Reform Jews will cease to exist fairly soon.

A group of people will cease to exist, largely by their own actions. This is a rather sobering development.

As mentioned before, if you expect to influence the world, you first have to show up.

Because our example removes many independent variables, the difference suggests that there is an important spiritual/religious element to having children that is far more critical than economics.

On the contrary, Reform Jews tend to have higher incomes compared to their Orthodox counterparts yet have far fewer children. According to a Pew Research Center survey, Orthodox Jews, particularly those in the Haredi community, have lower levels of formal secular education, which correlates with lower household incomes. Only 17% of Orthodox Jews have postgraduate degrees, compared to 30% of both Conservative and Reform Jews​ (Pew Research Center)​​ (Pew Research Center)​.

This data suggests that while economics plays a role, it is a choice couples make to have children, despite the costs. Further, more religious mothers tend to stay home and care for children, depriving the household money of the earnings of a working mother, although childcare costs are eliminated.

Women who leave the workforce for decades to have children tend to earn less than men and also gravitate towards careers with greater flexibility in hours and ease of re-entry into the workforce. A teacher can leave for a decade, and re-enter teaching. It is difficult for an accountant or doctor to leave the profession for a decade, and still be up to date with all the changes occurring in the profession.  The supply of teachers will tend to be larger than the supply of doctors because of this relative ease in entering, leaving, and re-entering the profession.

Because women often leave the workforce for an extended period for children, society needs to recognize, logically, that women would earn less than men. Being a mom is an economic trade-off and a valuable one that may not be expressed in monetary terms.

Not surprisingly, the two groups within the same community divide along party lines.

Reform Jews

  • Tend to be Democrats: Reform Jews are generally more liberal and are more likely to align with the Democratic Party. This political tendency is influenced by their progressive views on social issues, such as LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and social justice.
  • Political Leaning: According to the Pew Research Center, a significant majority of Reform Jews identify as Democrats or lean towards the Democratic Party. The survey shows that about 80% of Reform Jews identify as Democrats or lean Democratic​ (Pew Research Center)​​ (URJ)​.

Orthodox Jews

  • Tend to be Republicans: Orthodox Jews, especially those in the Haredi community, are more likely to identify with the Republican Party. Their political orientation is shaped by Biblical values, particularly on issues like religious freedom, education, and family values.
  • Political Leaning: The same Pew Research Center survey indicates that a majority of Orthodox Jews, about 57%, identify as Republicans or lean towards the Republican Party​ (Pew Research Center)​​ (URJ).

These political affiliations reflect broader differences in social and cultural values between the two groups. While ethnically the same group, living in the same environment, attitudes toward life are quite different.

In short, it would appear liberal Jews are so interested in Tikkun (going forth to reform the world) that they have forgotten to reproduce.

Be sure to read part II of this article.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.