Democrats Don’t Want You To Know How Moderate Trump’s Abortion Stance Is thumbnail

Democrats Don’t Want You To Know How Moderate Trump’s Abortion Stance Is

By David Harsanyi

Come to think of it, the GOP’s federal bill is also pretty moderate.

Abortion on demand, for any reason, until birth, funded by taxpayers.

That’s the modern left’s position on the issue. Democrats are so dug into their extremism that they can’t even support bills that compel “doctors” to keep babies who survive a homicide attempt alive.

Perhaps most American voters don’t care enough. Maybe most voters aren’t even aware of the modern left’s radicalism. The political media might be plagued by partisan mediocrity, but when it comes to abortion, they have demonstrated an unmatched competency in misleading the public.

This week, Donald Trump released a statement contending that the abortion issue should be left to the states and refused to endorse any federal law. Because his position is inconveniently restrained, the Joe Biden campaign was compelled to focus on the former president’s flip-flops on the issue.

And virtually every outlet followed the president’s lead, zeroing in on Trump’s inconsistency. The Washington Post laid out “How Trump’s abortion stance has shifted over the years.” NBC News wrote up a “A timeline of Trump’s many, many positions on abortion.” “Why Trump Will Keep Flip-Flopping on Abortion in 2024,” explains a Time magazine headline. “13 times Trump’s abortion position shifted over the last 25 years,” appeared on CNN. And so on.

Fair enough. Trump is obviously taking a politically expedient position meant to diffuse the issue among independents and moderates. And it’s no great pronouncement to say that Trump isn’t any kind of social conservative. Whatever he believes or doesn’t, the former president worked with pro-life and pro-Constitution groups to put three originalist judges on the court because his constituents wanted him to do it. That court, perhaps the last properly functioning institution in the country, overturned one of the most preposterous and deadly decisions in American history.

Guess what? Biden is also a transactional politician. His goal is to delegitimize the court and Constitution and compel states to accept the Democrats’ maximalist position.

What no major media outlet, as far as I can tell, even bothered to point out was that Biden has also radically changed his position on abortion, from supporting virtually every restriction in the ’70s and ’80s — including overturning Roe v. Wade and handing the issue back to states — to taking a “middle-of-the-road” approach as vice president to Barack “above my paygrade” Obama, to now supporting abortion without any limits until birth.

Even during the 2020 campaign, Biden was still pro-Hyde Amendment — a law that bans direct government funding for abortion. This position, if we trust polls, is still popular. But it only took two days of criticism from progressives on social media to convince this feckless, weak man to capitulate to the far left and “denounce” the amendment.

“On Abortion, Trump Chose Politics Over Principles,” says The New York Times this week. When Biden had his abrupt reversal on Hyde in 2020, the Times assured readers the candidate had “grappled for decades with his views on abortion rights.”

We all know politicians are only permitted to “evolve” toward a pro-abortion position. It is odd, though, that every time Biden “grapples” with an issue — and he’s wrestled with virtually every one of them — he somehow always ends up precisely in the most politically convenient place. Weird how that works out.

In any event, as a pro-lifer, I find Trump’s milquetoast triangulation on the issue cowardly and completely expected — presidential candidates always moderate their positions for the general election. As a compromise, however, it is well within the norms of American governance. States should be making most of the decisions about how they conduct business.

Yet, Democrats like Bill Kristol claimed Trump’s waffling was “classic authoritarianism,” because they have completely lost the ability, it seems, to say anything else. We often hear the left argue that restricting abortion is an attack on “democracy.” Abortion, mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, is not a right. It is perfectly within our norms — nay, within the constitutional order — to empower voters in states, or even nationally, to decide the issue for themselves.

Anyway, if waffling on abortion is authoritarian, Bill Kristol is Benito Mussolini.

(Trump’s abortion statement, incidentally, came the same day Biden announced a new student loan “forgiveness” plan — ignoring Congress, defying the Supreme Court, breaking millions of private contracts, and unilaterally demanding taxpayers foot the bill. This unconstitutional vote-buying scheme doesn’t seem to bother any of our self-appointed defenders of democracy.)

For both constitutional and practical reasons, I believe the abortion fight is better fought on the state level. But, at the same time, Dobbs does not restrict federal action. And it must be noted that Democrats have zero compunction ramming through national abortion policy. It is difficult to maneuver locally — which, let’s face it, the GOP can barely do as it is — while Democrats work to make maximalist abortion legislation the law of the land.

And we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that even the GOP federal position is far more reasonable than anything Democrats propose. Trump wants to avoid the debate, but Lindsey Graham’s “Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children from Late-Term Abortions Act” would have limited abortions past 15 weeks of pregnancy (which is when the vast majority of abortions take place, we are constantly informed) and included exceptions for rape and incest, protections for the woman’s life, and prohibitions from prosecuting women seeking abortions.

Democrats keep calling Graham’s bill a “ban,” when it’s clear it comports with the view of a large swath of voters, who do not believe in complete bans or complete license to kill human beings.

Though you’d never know it from the news.

*****

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

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot Forbes

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.

NAIA’s New Rules On Transgender People In Women’s Sports Rebuke The Left’s Insanity thumbnail

NAIA’s New Rules On Transgender People In Women’s Sports Rebuke The Left’s Insanity

By Kaylee McGhee White

The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, one of college sports’ governing bodies, announced this week that it would not allow male-bodied athletes to compete in women’s sports, pointing to the importance of “fair and safe competition for all student-athletes.” The decision is a welcome relief in a society that refuses to see sense on this topic.

The NAIA governs 249 smaller, mostly private colleges whose athletic programs would rank in the NCAA‘s Division 2 or 3 categories. Notably, the NAIA’s new rule on transgender participation comes after the NCAA declined to clarify or revise its own guidance on whether to allow transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports. As it stands, the NCAA mandates a sport-by-sport approach that depends largely on what other athletic governing bodies have already decided.

The NCAA’s refusal to issue clear rules on this is driven by cowardice. As the NAIA made clear this week, the question of transgender participation in women’s sports is not complicated. It’s actually quite simple. Should men who identify as women but still enjoy the physical and hormonal advantages of being men compete against comparably disadvantaged women? And should women be required to place themselves at risk in their private spaces and in sporting events to accommodate these men?

The answer to any person whose common sense hasn’t been pummeled into submission by the Left would, of course, be “no.”

That answer is also backed by legal precedent. And the NAIA’s ruling reflects this fact. “For us, we believed our first responsibility was to create fairness and competition in the NAIA. … We also think it aligns with the reasons Title IX was created. You’re allowed to have separate but equal opportunities for women to compete,” NAIA President Jim Carr explained.

Indeed, that is the very reason Title IX was passed — to ensure that women were granted privacy, safety, and fair competition, all of which are now being undermined by a radical ideology that cares only about its own power.

The NAIA took all of this into consideration as it debated how to deal with transgender athletes. According to the head of the NAIA Council of Presidents, Amy Novak, the governing body “spent nearly two years reviewing research, meeting with experts to better understand potential policy challenges, and obtaining feedback from multiple membership groups.” And all of the evidence pointed to one very simple solution: Men, no matter how they “identify,” cannot and should not be allowed to compete against women.

The result is a clear set of guidelines and expectations, approved in a unanimous vote by the NAIA’s Council of Presidents, that leaves no room for equivocating. Unlike the NCAA, for example, the NAIA’s standards do not make exceptions for male-bodied athletes who stop taking testosterone and reach a certain hormonal threshold. Men will not be allowed to compete against women — period. The rules also bar female athletes who start taking testosterone from competing in women’s sports.

This is an excellent step toward busting the Left’s gender insanity and an example bigger sports organizations should follow. Again, the question at the heart of this debate is quite simple: Do women have a right to safety and fair competition or not?

*****

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.

Weekend Read: Artificial Intelligence thumbnail

Weekend Read: Artificial Intelligence

By Conlan Salgado

As human beings we name things. We classify objects and persons. These activities are the foundation of our pursuit of understanding: categorization. It may be that in classifying ourselves as homo sapiens—intelligent hominids—we set ourselves up for perpetual misunderstanding of ourselves. Lately some members of homo sapiens have convinced themselves that they have created intelligent machines, which they refer to as artificially intelligent – already projecting themselves onto their creations. More importantly, they claim that some of these machines are super-intelligent. These humans, unfortunately, possess significant power.

Many of them, such as the academic Yuval Noah Hararri, are powerful players at world-shaping institutions such as the WEF. They have already announced, with discomforting enthusiasm, how this technology will be the next great revolution in social planning, social engineering, social media censorship, giant data collection and analysis, new levels of digitization and technological centralization. The ability to generate facts, narratives, and images which serve/promote a particular ideology, and then to monopolize digital spaces for the inundating of these facts, narratives and images, will be categorically different from what we have previously witnessed.

Covid-19 was the most censored event in human history, due to intelligence community use of language-learning AI to censor online posts and information. With a totally digitized and centralized world, people will live in a matrix of carefully curated information: they will live as non-fictional characters in a fictional and digital world.

All of these radical and terrifying transformations—many of them already underway—are predicated on a more fundamental transformation in self-understanding, in who human beings are as. . .well, human beings. Thus, before attempting to cut through the much thornier territory of AI’s effects on political freedom, internet freedom, information integrity, etc., I will address the critical question of whether artificial  intelligence is intelligent in the human sense, and therefore, whether they represent a revolutionary revision in how we should view ourselves. The concise answer IT DOES NOT. AI is not intelligent in the human sense. AI is not conscious. AI does not understand language (semantically or syntactically), nor does it comprehend meaning. It has no unified perception.

A chatbot like ChatGPT does not understand language; rather, it has been fed about a trillion data points and has been programmed to analyze these word-and-image data points to predict which word would most reasonably follow the previous word. Because of the size of the data inputs, and due to the computational power of the algorithm, the chatbot’s predictions are almost always correct, giving the appearance of ChatGPT “using” or wielding language intelligently. The mechanism by which a chatbot uses language to “speak intelligibly” is completely un-mysterious. It is computational in nature, which is no surprise, since algorithms compute. That said though, it does not diminish the awesome, and potentially authoritarian, computational power of the technology.

Language is a universal and intuitive possession of human beings. The mechanism by which a unified field of perception arises—consciousness—and the mechanism by which human beings understand syntactical and semantic meanings is mysterious. As regards consciousness, the mechanism is entirely mysterious.

Unfortunately, consciousness is the very structure of our understanding, so we cannot claim to understand human beings without understanding consciousness. At the center of each of our understandings is an “I”, whom we identify with, whom we experience as free, whose every thought is our thought, whom we value intimately, whose inner life is our inner life, and whose every concern is our every concern. Therefore, the very act of understanding, for a human being, means to bring something in contact with this “I”, and to begin to value that something in relation to this “I”.

No such activities or types of understanding or self-understanding may be ascribed to any AI, for the simple reason that AI is not conscious, nor possesses a sense of self. Therefore, since consciousness is ground zero of human understanding, emotion, and perception, AI is not a true or proper analogue of human intelligence, nor does it solve the mystery of consciousness, nor does it prove that minds are simply algorithms, nor does it prove that human intelligence is pre-programmed through evolution and therefore free will is an illusion. And yet, the secularist, anti-humanist elites are using AI as a premise to project two very damaging, very wrong and very dangerous conclusions.

First, they are claiming that AI shows intelligence is computational and algorithmic, and that with the advent of intelligent machines, human uniqueness as an “intelligent species” is no longer applicable. Furthermore, because AI creates its ‘intelligence’ as algorithmic and pre-programmed, human intelligence is similarly algorithmic and pre- programmed from millions of years of evolution, so therefore, if computers are not free, neither are human beings. Obviously, much of this is simply false in light of what is written above, but the obfuscations are so blinding, a deeper analysis is needed.

The story reaches back to the Enlightenment, and the age of empiricism which it fostered and which followed it when empirical science, due partly to its unprecedented success in answering natural philosophy questions, became the paradigm of true knowledge. Because empirical science became the paradigm of true knowledge, other forms of knowledge and knowing were excluded, such as revelation, intuition, a priori knowledge – entire disciplines lost great epistemological authority or prestige, including theology and philosophy, particularly metaphysics. All realities which could not be known through the methods of empirical science were now to be categorized as non-realities, or at best, useful fictions: God, objective moral duties and laws, beauty, spirit, goodness and meaning (in the ontological sense of both words), etc.

Of course, simply saying that human beings did not need an objective meaning to their lives did not mean that people stopped looking for meaning. It only meant that people took those existential urges, which had been previously satiated by religion, and looked for them to be satiated by another meta-societal enterprise: politics. The 20th century was the century of state religions and political doctrines of faith, prophets and high priests of the proletariat; instead of dying for God, people died for ideas such as equality, or “social justice”. Instead of killing in the name of God, people killed millions of others in the name of equality, or the “common good” or “social justice”. Political policies became infallibly divined dogmas, and those who spoke out against these policies were declared heretics, and killed, or locked away.

Human nature, human history, human experience, literature, art, culture—all of these tell us that meaning is real, that it must be sought by us, that we must find some sort of transcendent meaning if we are to declare our own lives “worth living”. My point is simply this: very recently in our history, human beings allowed the outrageous success of the scientific method to justify excluding all other forms of knowledge as trivial. This exclusion of religious ways of knowing did not actually do away with an deep religious urges; indeed, they resurfaced with particular ferocity in the 20th century. However, this exclusion of religious ways of knowing did lead to a deliberate obfuscation of who we are as human beings, and what we need to make ourselves make sense. This engendered the lie that human beings did not need to believe in a higher power or purpose, which in turn led to people transforming non-religious activities into quasi-religious systems, which in turn led to the absolutizing of politics, which in turn led to authoritarianism, which in turn led to mass murder.

Similarly, AI may convince us that man is not free, that his intelligence is simply a naturally programmed algorithm, but this will not make it so. Human beings will continue to need freedom, even if it is withheld from them. It may be, for example, that the creation of AI algorithms convinces many people that the human brain is also an algorithm, and that like other algorithms, it can be cracked, and that therefore, the human mind is not free. Perhaps, then, free speech is a myth and need not be a protected right. Perhaps rights in general are fictions, perhaps liberal democracy and representative government is a “myth”, an illusion based on the outdated idea that minds are free and not biologically programmed algorithms. Perhaps elections themselves are a silly exercise, a waste of time. To assume that because our machines are not free, we are not free, is to destabilize the human identity on a fundamental level.

This brings me to another point, which Henry Kissinger touched on in a fine essay for the Atlantic  on the topic of AI:

“Through all human history, civilizations have created ways to explain the world around them—in the Middle Ages, religion; in the Enlightenment, reason; in the 19th century, history; in the 20th century, ideology.”

Unfortunately for us in the 21st century, as a society, we have rejected so many of our best ways of explaining ourselves and the world around us. As I mentioned, only science is considered true knowledge, and ever since Bacon, science has been conceived of as a technologically driven enterprise, leading to—especially in the 20th century— unprecedented technological leaps forward.

We have made science and its technology into our ideology, and we have made that ideology into our “way of truth”. Put another way, we understand ourselves, as a society, primarily though exercises of technology. This drives home, on a deeper level, the fact that so many secularist, anti-humanist elites view AI as revealing deep truths about human intelligence and the mystery of consciousness. They view AI as a technological mirror. In creating a machine which can wield language seemingly meaningfully, we created a mirror of our own meaning-making intelligence! Except we didn’t.

AI computes; it does not emote, it does not relate on a first-person basis, it does not unify perceptions, memory, abstractions and other data in an exercise of imagination which generates genuine self-understanding and self-reflection, or genuinely creates value and meaning. Emoting, relating, unifying in the sense above described is a uniquely human activity. The fact that this cannot be clearly seen indicates how desperately we need other ways of explaining ourselves outside the practice of science and technology.

Additionally, and in corroboration with the preceding point, AI has given rise to a whole slew of utopian predictions and progressive ecstasies about untold convenience, efficiency, and inter-connectedness. From talks about it curing cancer, to combatting dis- and misinformation, to enhancing human cells and brains, AI has been greeted with much the same buffoonish excitement that “scientific expertise” was greeted with in the 19th and 20th centuries, and here, I believe, a useful comparison can be drawn.

For obvious reasons, as science became more and more ascendant over the 18th and 19th centuries, the process of “scientizing” all the different fields of knowledge began. A science of society, for example, was established, now known as “sociology”; a science of the soul was established, now known as psychology. Science holds sole epistemological authority, and so as many disciplines as possible try to cast themselves as sciences. In the 19th century especially, the early sociologists and positivists believed that the optimal governing body of society was a group of social scientists, or experts in the science of society (in the case of Comte, he opted for the financial elite instead of sociologists). These experts would use their superior knowledge, intelligence, and information to scientifically deduce policies and scientifically plan society (such as  the Covid-19 response!). These radical notions were taken in by progressivism, eventually coming to be embodied in modern, supermassive, supposedly neutral and expertise-driven bureaucracies.

Second, the epoch of AI allows for an even more utopian version of this same, 19th century fallacy, for, if we should entrust society to the planning of human intelligences with limited information and computing ability, how much more ought we to trust the planning of society to a super-intelligence with almost no information horizon and unbelievable computing power? AI is the impartial, super-intelligent, super-computing expert we’ve all been waiting for!

For example, here is a brief excerpt from WEF’s Agenda 2023:

“Shopping? I can’t really remember what it is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now. When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people.” Here we have WEF fantasizing about AI bringing about both large-scale restructurings of society and even determining the actions of individual persons: “sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me.”

One senses a strong flavor of Marxist thought in this.

Perhaps the most immediate way AI is re-planning and re-organizing society is through its massive censorship utilizations. As aforementioned, language learning algorithms were used during Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 election to censor any posts having certain words or phrases associated with dissenters: antivaxx, Hunter Biden laptop, side effect, etc. Millions of posts were deleted by an AI algorithm which had been programmed to censor specific speech categories or words. AI took away the first amendment in real time from thousands of individuals, perhaps millions. Social media censorship certainly impacted the outcome of the 2020 election, and in this way, we can affirm that AI is already helping to determine who is and is not running this country. A computer algorithm helped choose the president!

The future, alas, looks to be less free than the past. Time Magazine poses this scenario:

“But as the integration of GenAI becomes ubiquitous in everyday technology it is not a given that search, word processing, and email will continue to allow humans to be fully in control. The perspectives are frightening. Imagine a world where your word processor prevents you from analyzing, criticizing, lauding, or reporting on a topic deemed “harmful” by an AI programmed to only process ideas that are “respectful and appropriate for all.”

It is undeniable that as the world becomes increasingly digitized, cultural spaces will be increasingly digital, and culture wars will be digitally waged wars. AI is not a digital enemy one wants to be fighting, but it looks as if this may be the fate of all free-speech advocates.

Technology has also impacted and changed individual human behavior in dangerous ways which cannot be understated. For example, the constant presence of image-generating machines has almost certainly stunted imagination in young people, and with the advent of AI image generators with extreme bias, this coddling and indoctrination of the young American mind will be constant.  A terrifying example of this is the recent Google’s Gemini programming of reality and history for our younger generations.

More concretely, as Kissinger observes here, it has encouraged bad intellectual habits:

“Users of the internet emphasize retrieving and manipulating information over contextualizing or conceptualizing its meaning. They rarely interrogate history or philosophy; as a rule, they demand information relevant to their immediate practical needs. In the process, search-engine algorithms acquire the capacity to predict the preferences of individual clients, enabling the algorithms to personalize results and make them available to other parties for political or commercial purposes. Truth becomes relative. Information threatens to overwhelm wisdom.”

Twitter has given rise to bite-sized history, which cannot be history at all. Social media has exacerbated the replacement of arguments (generally long and complicated) with slogans (much catchier, much simpler). Technology, in fact, has changed what it means to be human, for more and more people are relating to non-human, non-conscious, unfeeling, unthinking pieces of metal as if they are friends, or mentors, or parents. iPhones have replaced conversation in most social situations. I am a college student, I should know. Social media is replacing old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood friends. Works of art, which used to be valuable partly because they were acts of communication between human beings, or because they were self-reflections and genuine instances of self-knowledge, are now being generated by machines and algorithms which do not understand the human condition, or know what it is like to be embodied, or feel grief, or feel humiliation, or feel alone—choose any of the numerous human impetuses to create. Even art is no longer humans teaching the art of being human to other humans, but rather machines teaching the art of being human to humans.

The truth is, to understand technological agency, we must understand human agency, for technology is merely the artifactualizing and typically the automatization of human agency and intention. AI is unique technologically, because it artifactualizes mental agency, as opposed to physical agency. AI is intelligent to the extent that we have encoded our own intelligence in binary instructions, which the computer can decode, and therefore mimic intelligent behavior. Technology has allowed human agency to work on the world even in the absence of human beings, since we can capture or “artifactualize” our agency in machinery, and then automatize the machinery constantly to apply that agency.

Sadly, at this point, many of the people coding the computers have stopped acting intelligently, so our technology now artifactualizes and force-multiplies our stupidity and biases, again precisely as the launch of  Google Gemini demonstrated. We are left with the fearsome and dangerous summarizing thought that “there is machinery to this madness!”

*****

Conlan Salgado, is a college junior. He is an astute political observer and highly informed conservative. America needs more young patriots and gifted writers to awaken citizens to the existential danger our nation faces in the decades-long political war with a radical leftist party and culture increasingly out-of-control. We recommend all of his superb writings. Access Conlan Salgado’s essays in The Prickly Pear here.

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 Attorney General Says She Won’t Enforce State Supreme Court Ruling Banning Abortion thumbnail

Arizona Attorney General Says She Won’t Enforce State Supreme Court Ruling Banning Abortion

By Arjun Singh

Democratic Attorney General Kristin Mayes of Arizona announced on Tuesday that she would not enforce a ruling from her state’s supreme court upholding an 1864 law that bans most abortions.

On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a law criminalizing abortions, except in cases where necessary to save the mother’s life, may be enforced following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, which ruled that there is no constitutional right to an abortion. Mayes, one of the named parties in the case, subsequently issued a statement on X condemning the decision while claiming that her prosecutors would not enforce the law against doctors and women seeking abortions. (RELATED: Arizona Supreme Court Rules Near-Total Abortion Ban Can Go Into Effect)

“[L]et me be completely clear, as long as I am Attorney General, no woman or doctor will be prosecuted under this draconian law in this state,” wrote Mayes. “Today’s decision to re-impose a law from a time when Arizona wasn’t a state, the Civil War was raging, and women couldn’t even vote will go down in history as a stain on our state.”

“Absent the federal constitutional abortion right…there is no provision in federal or state law prohibiting [the 1864 law]’s operation. Accordingly, [it] is now enforceable,” wrote Justice John R. Lopez, an appointee of former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, for the court’s four-member majority. While the court’s entire bench was appointed by Republican governors, two of its members — Chief Justice Robert Brutinel and Vice Chief Justice Ann Timmer — dissented from the decision.

Republican leaders of the Arizona House of Representatives, which is empowered to impeach officials under the state constitution, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

*****

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

Image Credit: YouTube 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 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.

Is Learning Standard “White” English Oppressive for Black Students? thumbnail

Is Learning Standard “White” English Oppressive for Black Students?

By George Leef

Among the many destructive ideas loose in American education is that black students should not be expected to master standard English because doing so is demeaning and demoralizing for them. Standard English is part of the power structure of “whiteness” that must be overthrown before we can have an equitable society. Professors at esteemed universities are making that argument and it appears to be catching on. Faculty who want to prove their “anti-racist” dedication are changing their teaching and grading to avoid penalizing black students who, after all, already face terrible obstacles in a society that supposedly looks down on them.

The most prominent advocate of this position is University of Michigan professor April Baker-Bell. In her view, “traditional approaches to language education do not account for the emotional harm or consequences these approaches have on Black students’ sense of self and identity.”

Before we go any further, do all black students suffer emotional harm if their English is corrected? There are many black scholars who write in perfect English. I don’t think either Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams ever decried their anguish at having to adopt standard English in their academic work. Professor Baker-Bell herself appears to have overcome the “emotional harm” of writing in standard English. It’s hard to believe that any of those academics would have been better off if teachers and professors had said to them, “Your writing is fine; it’s authentic. No need for you to adjust to the needless, old-fashioned rules of standard English.”

Another advocate of allowing black students to keep “their” language is Professor Asao Inoue of the University of Washington at Tacoma. In his book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future, Inoue contends that writing instructors should evaluate students based on their “effort” in writing and not on whether they succeed in producing perfect or even acceptable standard English work. In his view, black students must be handled with kid gloves lest they think that “white” America is looking down on their preferred manner of communicating. Once we get over that, we can have a just future.

Are those ideas good? Will it help make for a socially just country if we allow blacks to write as they’re used to? There is some disagreement over this, and not just from white professors.

One dissenter is Professor Erec Smith, who teaches at York College. He has written a book entitled A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition and in it, he makes a devastating attack on the notion that it’s wise to give black students a pass when they write poorly.

First, Smith (who is black) doubts that black students are so caught up in their identity that it would be harmful for them to change the way they communicate. He observes that many blacks have mastered standard English without any apparent suffering. A particularly telling case is W.E. B. DuBois, who is known for his opposition to the racist attitudes of 19th and 20th century America.

Smith relates that when DuBois was a student at Harvard, he once received a low grade on an English paper. That bothered him, but he had the good sense to realize that the grade had nothing to do with his race and that if he wanted to make his criticism of society as effective as possible, he needed to make his writing the best it could be.  So he bore down in that course and signed up for other English courses that would sharpen his writing skills.

DuBois, in short, saw standard English as a tool he could use to help accomplish his objectives. Mastering it would empower him.

Conversely, the “anti-racist” writing notions abounding today disempower black students. Smith argues that the likes of Baker-Bell and Inoue allow blacks to retreat into self-pitying victimhood. Doing so solves no problems in America and actually gets in the way of constructive actions. Obsessing over “white privilege” doesn’t help black students succeed.

Another dissenter is Professor Jason D. Hill of DePaul University. In his article “The New Ebonics Movement and the Elimination of Whiteness,” Hill excoriates the “anti-racist” educators. He states that their ideas are “rooted in the de-colonialist and Anti-Western civilization agendas that seek to eradicate from school curricula any European universal foundations that underlie pedagogy, method and content.” That stance is politically expedient for them, but their hostility to teaching standard English will only damage the prospects for black students as they compete for jobs against others, including immigrants, who speak and write in better English.

The costs of this attack on language competency fall on black students, not on these “anti-racist” professors. Hill observes that they “are paid large sums to lecture white progressives on how they should alter their pedagogical styles to expurgate standard English requirements.” They desire to serve “as a managerial vanguard over Black victimization and suffering.”

Where would the “anti-racist” educators be if black students were able to improve their use of language so that they could obtain good jobs and no longer feel victimized by “white” society? They wouldn’t be nearly so famous and would have to do more of the onerous work of correcting student papers.  Not a good trade.

And if composition instructors don’t correct black students on their poor English, what is the point of having classes? As Professor Smith observes, with the “anti-racist” approach, “Nothing exists to master; nothing is there to be taught.” Black students will like the high grades they receive for their efforts, but the time and money spent will have been for naught.  W.E.B. DuBois would be disgusted.

I’d like to point out that getting language right isn’t the only aspect of life where learning to do things “the right way” matters. Consider music. If a black pianist wants to have a career in classical music (which is often attacked as oppressively “white,” but strangely enough, some black musicians still desire to succeed in it), he will have to master performance conventions developed in white Europe centuries ago.  Is that a painful affront to his identity? If he thinks so, he’ll have to set his sights on a different career, but if he loves the music, he’ll eagerly learn how to play Bach and Beethoven the right way, not as he might instinctively prefer. Many have done so.

The notion that black students are somehow harmed by insisting that they master standard English is one of those many ideas so ridiculous that only a university professor could ever believe it.

*****

This article was published by AIER, The American Institute for Economic Research, 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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Honey Am I Male?

By Craig J. Cantoni

In advance of an upcoming elective surgery, I have been on the phone with personnel from a local Tucson hospital to provide my medical history, insurance coverage, and other required information. The hospital does a great job and its employees are personable, professional, and thorough.

A charming woman asked me on one of the calls what my gender identity is.

Before answering the question, I said, “I know you’re required to ask the question, but I bet you get a lot of grief over it.”

She responded with a sigh, “For sure.”

The question is silly on more than one level, but particularly so in light of the fact that the surgical procedure in question can only be done on men who are biologically male, have all of their natural appendages, and want to keep all of them.

Anyway, I answered the question by saying, “I am a male.” Then I added, “But let me get a second opinion from my wife, who is standing here.”

“Honey, am I a male?”

She answered, “You’re not only a male but also an Italian stallion.”

Okay, that’s not what she said, but I’m not going to lose more of my male pride by repeating what she actually said.

After chuckling, the hospital employee said, “I’m required to ask a related question: What are your preferred pronouns?”

All kinds of smartass answers came to mind, but not wanting to exceed the patience of the employee, I replied, “he, him, his.”

Reflecting on the conversation, I am struck by how the idea of tolerance—of living and let live—has morphed into a national fetish for fairness and a mass pathological fear of possibly being seen as insensitive, intolerant, and unenlightened.

Small but vocal groups, claiming to be victims of horrendous injustices, have people and institutions jumping through hoops, engaging in inane communications, and wasting time and money in keeping records of the inanities so as not to be sued or canceled.

And it’s happening with regard to many more issues than just gender identity.

In going along with the silliness and being powerless to do anything about it, I feel like a gelding instead of a stallion.

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.

Am I Male? thumbnail

Am I Male?

By Craig J. Cantoni

In advance of an upcoming elective surgery, I have been on the phone with personnel from a local Tucson hospital to provide my medical history, insurance coverage, and other required information. The hospital does a great job and its employees are personable, professional, and thorough.

A charming woman asked me on one of the calls what my gender identity is.

Before answering the question, I said, “I know you’re required to ask the question, but I bet you get a lot of grief over it.”

She responded with a sigh, “For sure.”

The question is silly on more than one level, but particularly so in light of the fact that the surgical procedure in question can only be done on men who are biologically male, have all of their natural appendages, and want to keep all of them.

Anyway, I answered the question by saying, “I am a male.” Then I added, “But let me get a second opinion from my wife, who is standing here.”

“Honey, am I a male?”

She answered, “You’re not only a male but also an Italian stallion.”

Okay, that’s not what she said, but I’m not going to lose more of my male pride by repeating what she actually said.

After chuckling, the hospital employee said, “I’m required to ask a related question: What are your preferred pronouns?”

All kinds of smartass answers came to mind, but not wanting to exceed the patience of the employee, I replied, “he, him, his.”

Reflecting on the conversation, I am struck by how the idea of tolerance—of living and let live—has morphed into a national fetish for fairness and a mass pathological fear of possibly being seen as insensitive, intolerant, and unenlightened.

Small but vocal groups, claiming to be victims of horrendous injustices, have people and institutions jumping through hoops, engaging in inane communications, and wasting time and money in keeping records of the inanities so as not to be sued or canceled.

And it’s happening with regard to many more issues than just gender identity.

In going along with the silliness and being powerless to do anything about it, I feel like a gelding instead of a stallion.

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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The Cut Flowers Civilization

By Ben Shapiro

This week, famed British atheist Richard Dawkins explained that he was a “cultural Christian.”

Praising civilization in the United Kingdom, Dawkins stated:

I do think that we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian. I’m not a believer. But there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian. And so, you know, I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.

Dawkins went on to praise Christianity as a “fundamentally decent religion in a way that I think Islam is not.”

Dawkins’ case for Christianity—a case made on the basis of utility—is nothing new. It was made long ago by Voltaire, an acidic critic of the church who famously averred, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

But the problem with the utilitarian case for religious belief is that it doesn’t animate religious believers. It is simply impossible to build a civilization on the basis of Judeo-Christian foundations while making the active case as to why those foundations ought to be dissolved.

In fact, Western civilization has doomed itself so long as it fails to reconnect to its religious roots. Philosopher Will Herberg wrote:

The moral principles of Western civilization are, in fact, all derived from the tradition rooted in Scripture and have vital meaning only in the context of that tradition. … Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice and personal dignity—the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality.

We are a cut flowers civilization.

And eventually, cut flowers die.

That has never been more obvious than this week, when the Biden administration decided to honor the newly invented Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday. Gender ideology is a symptom of our society’s reversion to gnostic paganism, in which unseen, chaotic forces buffet us about, and in which nature is directly opposed to the freedom of our disembodied essences.

It is no wonder that gender ideology is opposed by every mainstream traditional religion.

Yet claiming that this magical holiday could not be moved, the White House issued a variety of statements in celebration of radical gender ideology, including a deeply insulting statement from the president of the United States citing the book of Genesis to the effect that transgender people are “made in the image of God”—ignoring the last half of the biblical verse, which reads, “male and female he made them.”

What better time than Easter, the holiest day in the Christian calendar, to pay homage to an entirely new religion?

Richard Dawkins is obviously correct that a civilization rooted in church is better than a civilization rooted in an alternative set of values. But in reality, the churches cannot be empty; they must be full. The cathedrals that mean Britain to Dawkins must ring with the sounds of hymns in order to maintain their holiness and their importance; otherwise, they are merely beautiful examples of old architecture, remnants of a dead civilization preserved in stone.

But our civilization must live. And that means more than cultural Christianity. It means re-engaging with the source of our values—the Scriptures that educated our fathers and grandfathers.

*****

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

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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 Tailspin of American Boys and Men

By Brenda M. Hafera

American males are turning off, and tuning and dropping out.

Many boys and men are struggling to flourish in their roles as sons, students, employees, and fathers, and to achieve the sense of purpose that comes from being rooted within marriages, communities, churches, and country.

Much of the literature on the boy crisis contains impressive, even essential social science work that clearly demonstrates that boys and men are falling behind. My recent essay, “Men Without Meaning: The Harmful Effects of Expressive Individualism,” is an attempt to distill this literature and explore how expressive individualism—the notion that the inner self is the true self and is radically autonomous—plays a central role in the boy crisis.

The ascendance of expressive individualism, which can be traced to the Sexual Revolution, is partially responsible for the breakdown of marriage and has gained a foothold in religious institutions. Among others, it combines the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, who divorced sex from gender; psychologist Sigmund Freud, who elevated human sexuality as central to identity; and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that man is innocent and corrupted by society.

Political scientist Warren Farrell and counselor John Gray’sThe Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It is the go-to text for understanding the dad deprivation that is the primary cause of the boy crisis. It lays out how a dad’s presence can positively impact a child’s scholastic achievement, verbal intelligence and quantitative abilities, and development of trust and empathy. Likewise, it shows that the absence of a father’s presence increases the likelihood that a child will drop out of school, commit suicide, use drugs, become homeless, end up in poverty, develop hypertension, and be exposed to or commit bullying and violent crime, including rape.

Fathers, like mothers, contribute in unique and indispensable ways to the raising of children. One example is through play, which helps children develop, learn the limits of their bodies, and properly channel aggression. According to, “Theorizing the Father-Child Relationship: Mechanisms and Developmental Outcomes”: “Children seem to need to be stimulated and motivated as much as they need to be calmed and secured, and they receive such stimulation primarily from men, primarily through physical play.”

Dad deprivation is especially disastrous for boys. As mimetic creatures, theoretical arguments about masculinity and virtue fall short of a father’s lived witness of their mastery. Boys learn how to become good men by imitating a good man, and the mentors of their lives are their fathers.

Thanks to expressive individualism’s effect on our moral imagination, however, today many people dismiss the benefits of embodied play and assume that fathers and mothers are interchangeable. We have accepted the premises that the mind and body are disconnected and the body is unimportant.

Expressive individualism has also changed the way we think about marriage, making it more fragile. Marriage is no longer geared towards the character formation of each spouse and to providing a loving environment for the raising of children, but rather is now primarily viewed as a means to achieving emotional satisfaction and personal improvement. Rather than both husband and wife sacrificing for the good of the marriage, each spouse aims separately to achieve his and her personal subjective idea of “self-actualization.”

As Andrew Cherlin, a sociology and public policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, articulates in The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, marriages based on expressive individualism involve:

Growing and changing as a person, paying attention to your feelings, and expressing your needs…[M]arriages are harder to keep together, because what matters is not merely the things they jointly produce—well-adjusted children, nice homes—but also each person’s own happiness.

Over twenty years ago, in The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men, philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers drew attention to the fact that boys were falling behind in school. Some of the precipitating causes were newer, such as zero-tolerance policies, the decline of free play and recess, and the rise of a self-esteem centered safety culture. Others reach back much further. Our education system, in many ways, is not designed for boys. Simultaneous shifts in our economy have lengthened the time spent in school and raised the stakes of getting an education.

On average, the energy level of boys makes it difficult for them to sit still for long periods. They can be unorganized and frustrate their teachers, who factor behavior into grading. Perhaps some teachers, mired in expressive individualism, expect girls and boys to behave the same, as “boys on average receive harsher exclusionary discipline than girls for the same behaviors.” In truth, as senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institute Richard Reeves writes: “The parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, future orientation, sometimes labeled the ‘CEO of the brain,’ are mostly in the prefrontal cortex, which matures about 2 years later in boys than in girls.”

The progressive style of education, relying on Rousseau’s romantic vision and promulgated by reformers like John Dewey and others, contends that theoretically children should direct their own educational trajectory. This has been particularly harmful to boys. Approximately since the 1970s, as Sommers writes, children have been treated as their “own best guides in life. This turn to the autonomous subject as the ultimate moral authority is a notable consequence of the triumph of the progressive style over traditional directive methods of education.”

Changes in education were greeted with changes in the economy itself. Precipitated by free trade and automation, America is now a global knowledge economy. Overall, those most negatively impacted have been men without much education. According to “The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men”: “Between 1973 and 2015, real hourly earnings for the typical 25-54 year-old man with only a high school degree declined by 18.2 percent, while real hourly earnings for college-educated men increased substantially.” American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis details how over seven million men ages 25-55 have checked out of the workforce. Such men often receive disability payments or are living with a relative who serves as a source of income.

These disengaged men are spending a great deal of time in front of screens that promote disembodied expressive individualism. This includes an average of 5.5 hours of movies and TV per day, not to mention the rise of exceedingly popular online pornography. Some estimate that Gen Z boys are being exposed to porn at the average age of nine. Studies indicate that pornography rewires the brain, causing boys and men to desire more and more novel content rather than a relationship with a real woman. Male employment is often tied to family structure, and marriage rates for low-income men have declined, demonstrating the unique causes and reinforcing mechanisms of the boy crisis.

The devastating impact of the opioid epidemic is another factor. Some estimate that it could account for 43 percent of the decline in male labor force participation from 1999 to 2015. During that time, the number of overdoses quadrupled, and men made up almost 70 percent of such deaths. The incarceration rate has also risen, and years behind bars reduce the likelihood of finding employment.

These phenomena are not equally distributed across the country, and some have hypothesized that increased deaths of despair (deaths from suicide, overdose, etc.) “among less-educated middle-age Americans might be rooted in ‘a long-term process of decline, or of cumulative deprivation, rooted in the steady deterioration in job opportunities for people with low education.’” The second leading cause of death for American men under 45 is suicide.

All this has left many men without purpose and hope. The boy crisis both reflects and contributes to the broader crisis of America and the West, in no small measure driven by the expressive individualism that has left men and women disconnected from relationships, human nature, and objective truth. America and the West are running on the fumes of our heritage, no longer able to articulate our principles or the gratitude we owe the past.

For much of history, human beings have been most willing to give the last measure of their devotion for what truly provides identity: God, family, and country. Each of these encompasses the individual, pulling him out of himself and toward a life of sacrifice, responsibility, and devotion. Expressive individualism is a stark deviation from the traditional understanding that freedom and virtue are intertwined. As articulated in the classic work Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life: influenced by modern psychological ideals, to be free is not simply to be left alone by others; it is also somehow to be your own person in the sense that you have defined who you are, decided for yourself what you want out of life, free as much as possible from the demands of conformity to family, friends, or community.

Solutions to the boy crisis must counteract such messaging and ideas, putting forth a substantive view of marriage, revitalizing religious institutions, and honoring fatherhood and male mentorship as fundamental sources of meaning. They will reestablish a proper understanding of the human person and the ties between happiness and virtue. Sadly, there are no silver bullet solutions to these issues. The devastation is far-reaching and multitudinous, and the work we have to do matches the price we have paid.

*****

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

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Feds Have Showered Blue State With Tax Dollars to Fix Homelessness. It Keeps Getting Worse.

By Robert Schmad

A plethora of federal agencies have spent well over $200 million attempting to alleviate homelessness in Washington state over the past 17 years, only for the number of people living on the streets to keep rising.

Federal agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Health and Human Service, among others, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since 2007 on grants to third parties intended to mitigate homelessness in Washington, federal spending data shows. Despite the nine-figure sum of taxpayer dollars spent, the number of homeless people in Washington grew by about 20% between 2007 and 2023, according to a report produced by HUD.

Washington had the third-highest raw increase in its homeless population between 2007 and 2023, according to HUD. California and New York were the first and second-highest, respectively.

An estimated 20,036 individuals were living in Washington without permanent shelter as of 2023, according to HUD. Washington’s rate of homelessness was among the highest in the nation in 2023.

The federal government has over the years attempted to assist Washington state with its mounting homelessness problem, with little to show for it.

The federal government spent heavily in Washington state during the COVID-19 pandemic, only for the number of homeless individuals in the state to grow by 15.6% between 2020 and 2022, according to HUD.

For instance, the VA has given nearly $120 million to third-party organizations to assist homeless veterans since 2007, much of which was paid out during the pandemic, according to federal spending records. Despite this injection of cash, Washington had the fifth-highest rate of veterans experiencing unsheltered homelessness as of 2023, according to HUD.

Unsheltered homelessness refers to people who primarily spend their nights at “a public or private place not designated for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for people,” according to HUD.

In a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation, a spokesperson for the VA acknowledged that the number of homeless veterans increased in Washington between 2022 and 2023.

In response to the increase, “VA health care systems covering Washington State (Puget Sound, Spokane, Walla Walla, and Portland) housed a combined total of 2,238 homeless Veterans,” the spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“This was possible, in part, due to nearly $15.6 million in grants and contracts awarded to local organizations.”

Some states, like Texas and Florida, reduced their homeless populations during the pandemic, according to HUD. Florida saw homelessness drop by 5.6% and Texas reduced its homeless population by 10.3%.

In addition to growing, Washington’s homeless population also lacks access to temporary shelters at higher rates than most the country.

Washington had the ninth-highest rate of homeless people lacking temporary shelter, according to HUD. High rates of unsheltered homelessness in Washington persist despite considerable federal spending aimed at providing them with places to stay.

HUD has spent over $70 million in Washington on its emergency shelter grant program for the homeless since 2007, federal spending records show. HUD spent a further $60 million in Washington implementing its supportive housing program for the homeless.

“In the most recent System Performance Measures, communities across the country have seen reduced lengths of stay in homelessness and low rates of returns to homelessness,” HUD told the Daily Caller News Foundation when asked about its grant spending.

“By and large, the recent rise in homelessness in most communities is more attributable to the rise in the number of people who are becoming newly homeless, than any challenges with system performance.”

Officials have cited rising rents and the end of pandemic-era housing assistance and protections as contributing to the recent rise in homelessness, The Associated Press reported.

Many vulnerable people are living on the streets in Washington, despite federal funds being allocated to provide them with permanent housing.

Washington has a sizable population of young people living on the street, according to HUD. There were 2,026 homeless people under the age of 25 unaccompanied by a parent or guardian in Washington as of 2023.

The number of unaccompanied homeless youths in Washington grew by 12.4% between 2022 and 2023, according to HUD.  The Seattle area had the third-highest number of unaccompanied homeless youths in the country in 2023.

Between 2022 and 2023, HUD spent more than $7 million in Washington through its youth homelessness demonstration program, which was intended to alleviate homelessness among young people by providing the population with assistance in acquiring housing or shelter.

Homelessness in Washington is not distributed uniformly across the state.

Roughly half of Washington’s homeless reside in the Seattle area, according to HUD. The federal government has, in recent years, targeted the region in an attempt to quell homelessness.

HUD approved over $40 million in funding for the King County Regional Homeless Authority between 2022 and 2023, according to federal spending records. The King County Regional Homeless Authority is an independent government agency that relies on “data, proven practices, and principles of social justice and racial equity” to “significantly decrease homelessness throughout King County,” according to its website.

“Homelessness disproportionately harms people of color,” the agency’s website reads. “We use an equity-based decision making framework to proactively dismantle structural racism and advance equity.”

The King County Regional Homeless Authority’ total budget was $253.3 million in 2023, according to a document produced by the agency. The Seattle region had the third-most homeless people of any area in the United States as of 2023, per HUD.

The influx of migrants and asylum-seekers into Washington, rising living costs, a lack of shelter services, and the end of pandemic aid are all contributing factors to rising homelessness in the state, University of Washington associate professor Gregg Colburn told The Seattle Times.

Despite recent setbacks, the majority of Seattle residents are optimistic that the city will make progress toward reducing homelessness over the next couple of years, according to a Seattle Times/Suffolk University poll conducted in June 2023.

The King County Regional Homeless Authority and HHS did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

*****

This article was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation 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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Sex Politics

By E.J. Hare

With the sudden re-emergence of Christine Blasey Ford, who tried to derail Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court with baseless accusations of sexual assault, the Democrats are clearly wasting no time in trying to get more white women back into their fold. They are looking to make the extremely nuanced case to white women, a pivotal demographic in this year’s election, as in every recent election, that Trump and his friends are all rapists.

White women—married ones especially—have confounded Democrats and the liberal press in their stubborn refusal to vote consistently “in their own interest.” Following Trump’s victory in 2016, early reports that 52 percent of white women had voted for the Orange Beast infuriated Democratic pollsters and reporters, who have spilled ink debunking the figure, derived from some exit polls. It’s true that white women didn’t actually vote for Trump by such a broad margin, but he did win a plurality of the segment—enough, in other words, to help him win. According to Pew, white women gave Donald Trump 53 percent of their votes in his losing effort in 2020.

As much as Democrats signal publicly that black women are the “backbone” of their party (as described by former DNC chair Tom Perez) and the most important demographic in their coalition of the fringes, they know that white women—39 percent of the electorate—are critical to their success in 2024. Consequently, their messaging is tailored to white women above all others.

In the 2022 midterm elections, outcry against the Dobbs ruling built the margin among white women that delivered the Senate to Democrats and mitigated what looked to be an impending disaster in the House. But while Donald Trump appointed the justices who make up the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, he rarely speaks with any passion about the issue. Republicans chose not to defend Dobbs as a state’s rights issue that did not limit access to abortion for women in deep blue states. Blue cities’ ongoing struggles with crime, decaying quality of life, and progressive prosecutors working hard to keep criminals out of jail are not yet a major concern for suburbanites beyond the reach of urban progressive ideologues.

Even apart from abortion, an issue that white, college-educated women remain more passionate about than any other group—while continuing to personally choose to abort their own babies less than they have in the past, and far less frequently than black women—the Democrats’ emphasis on racial equity and trans ideology is tailored to the sort of suburban women who signal their allegiance to liberal orthodoxy by planting “In This House” signs on their front lawns.

Media observers and liberal Democrats have latched onto another issue of import: education. But on this front they may have miscalculated, elevating teachers’ unions over white women, the demographic whose votes they desire above all in 2024. The Left savagely went after the “Karens” of Moms for Liberty, a grassroots organization with over 100,000 members who hail from almost every state. The group was formed in 2021 in opposition to public school Covid policies, as well the institutionalization of trans advocacy as part of the curriculum. Moms for Liberty is part of the larger “parents rights movement” which the Guardian described as “housewife populism,” and is bitterly opposed by the teachers’ unions that are a core constituency of the Democratic Party. Democratic elected officials and activists have condemned Moms for Liberty as a white supremacist hate group, and they clearly feel affronted that women may oppose key parts of the larger progressive agenda.

Like in the two previous presidential elections, Democrats are also highlighting former President Donald Trump’s proclivity for personal insults directed at women like Rosie O’Donnell and E. Jean Carroll, which does not help him with the mature, married women (who tend to vote for the GOP) he must persuade to support him if he is to have any chance for re-election. These women are uncomfortable with the chaos that often surrounds Trump, and he rarely projects the calm and reliability that most appeals to them.

Former Massachusetts GOP chair Jennifer Nassour recently argued in the New York Post that Trump’s harsh, personalized insults and tendency to bully turns off many women, pointing to a Quinnipiac poll that found women overall support Biden over Trump by a 58-36 margin.

Though vice presidential nominees are rarely if ever decisive factors in an election, Trump may benefit substantially from choosing a mature, thoughtful woman to temper his impetuous abrasiveness. Pro-Trump New York Congresswoman Nicole Maliotakis and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem could fit the bill.

If Trump can soften his perception among women—unlikely as that may be—or temper his image with a female running mate, he may be able to bring home the married, white female voters who were essential to his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton. Democrats will seek to emphasize Trump’s insensitivity and squeeze every vote out of the Dobbs decision while avoiding scolding women for not supporting them in the past, as when Madeline Albright said in the midst of Hillary’s unsuccessful campaign that there is a “special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” The mature, white American women who make up the country’s largest voting demographic will undoubtedly be pivotal in choosing our next president.

*****

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.

England Banning Puberty Blockers for Kids Will ‘Save Lives,’ Experts Predict thumbnail

England Banning Puberty Blockers for Kids Will ‘Save Lives,’ Experts Predict

By Mary Margaret Olohan

England’s National Health Service has declared that there’s not enough evidence of “safety and clinical effectiveness” for children and young people to be given puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria.

“Puberty blockers (gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogues) are not available to children and young people for gender incongruence or gender dysphoria, because there is not enough evidence of safety and clinical effectiveness,” the NHS notes on its site.

“From the age of 16, teenagers who’ve been on hormone blockers for at least 12 months may be given cross-sex hormones, also known as gender-affirming hormones.”

The NHS explicitly states that these hormones cause irreversible changes, including maturing girls’ development of breasts, the breaking or deepening of a person’s voice, and temporary or even permanent infertility.

The news broke on Tuesday, Detrans Awareness Day, a day on which detransitioners share their stories of transition regret, warning others to avoid falling into the medical and therapeutic manipulations they experienced. Detransitioners are individuals who sought to transition to the other gender before ultimately realizing that that’s not possible.

“I am in full support of what the United Kingdom is doing now,” detransitioner Abel Garcia told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “I agree that we need to keep children safe, and I’m glad to hear that children in the United Kingdom are able to live healthy lives, at least through the stages of human puberty—which is a human right.”

Detransitioner Prisha Mosley similarly praised the news.

“It’s an incredible step in the right direction,” she told The Daily Signal. “It shows that politicians have finally been listening to what experts and detransitioners have been saying for years.”

Leaders in the movement combating gender ideology in the United States were quick to celebrate the news, emphasizing that European eyes are being opened to the dangers of indiscriminately greenlighting gender transitions for minors.

“It is only a matter of time before the American health care establishment follows the science and the wisdom of the National Health Service and begins to save children from this damaging enterprise called ‘gender-affirming care,’” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the organization Do No Harm, told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “Children simply cannot give informed consent for these procedures.”

Jay Richards, the director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, celebrated the news while emphasizing that “gender-affirming” interventions are often “sex-erasing.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“Gender-transition partisans have claimed for years that these drugs are reversible pause buttons for gender-dysphoric kids,” he explained. “In fact, they are very often irreversible, fast-forward buttons. We know they can harm bone and even brain development in children and put kids on a different timeline from all their peers.”

“And worst of all,” Richards added, “they usually serve to lock many kids into the transition pathway who might otherwise have resolved their feelings of gender discordance if they’d been allowed to go through natural puberty.”

Harmeet Dhillon is the CEO and founder of the Center for American Liberty, a law firm representing a number of young women like detransitioner Chloe Cole, who underwent transgender “treatment” in the United States, including puberty blockers and the removal of healthy breasts.

“It’s encouraging to see that increasingly in Europe, including this most recent decision from the U.K., both scientists and government officials are acknowledging that the risks and uncertainties of prescribing puberty blockers to children outweigh the demands of transgender extremists,” Dhillon said.

She added: “Great Britain’s decision will save lives and stem the destruction wrought by the junk-science peddlers claiming that a child is ever born in the ‘wrong body,’ or that gender is a social construct independent of binary sex.”

Richards likewise emphasized that the NHS’ move will have international effects.

“The NHS has shown intellectual and moral courage at following the evidence where it leads, rather than surrendering to a fashionable ideology that prevails because of marketing, intimidation, and institutional capture, rather than through evidence-based medicine,” he said. “The largest NHS decision serves as a rebuke to doctors’ lobbies like the [American Academy of Pediatrics] and Endocrine Society, which continue to push these harmful interventions for kids, despite the mounting evidence against them.”

Brandon Showalter, a journalist with the Christian Post who covers gender ideology and hosts the “Generation Indoctrination” documentary podcast series, is glad to see the NHS dialing back in this manner. But there’s far more work to be done, he said.

“This entire scourge is predicated on a lie that it is possible to be ‘born in the wrong body,’” he said. “While some children will certainly be spared the horror of what blockers do to the body, the entire protocol of so-called ‘gender affirming care’ needs to be dismantled because it is impossible for any human to be the other sex, and therefore, any medical treatment that lends credence to a lie will, of course, be irretrievably flawed from the start.”

Showalter stressed the need to care for those “with mental health issues and distress over their sex.”

“But that doesn’t mean cross-sex hormones, or an irreversible surgery,” he said. “Restricting the use of blockers is but the first step in the reckoning over this enormous medical scandal.”

Prominent pro-LGBTQ organizations, including the ACLU and GLAAD, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

*****

This article was published by 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 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 Real Purpose Behind Biden’s SOTU Speech thumbnail

The Real Purpose Behind Biden’s SOTU Speech

By Marvin A. Treiger

“It was a word salad on speed.”
Dr. Carol Lieberman, forensic psychiatrist

Biden’s speech achieved the singular objective Jill and his other handlers had set for Joe’s speech in spades. Their objective was simple. Keep the Democratic hounds from bumping him from the ballot. The whole performance was designed to ward off the growing internal movement in Democratic circles to get rid of him.

To hell with anything else and everybody else. I think, given his innumerable weaknesses, one must conclude their strategy succeeded brilliantly. I, for one, was delighted to see things turn out as they did. We should not want to get rid of him.

He may even achieve a tiny and momentary bump in the polls. Also, fine. Then for sure, they can’t run him out of town. As the campaign progresses the fundamentals of his incapacity will grow and get ever more socked into the public consciousness than even now, which is really saying something.

No, to repeat, for the present it is far better for him (and for us) that he remains suspended in limbo rather than drop into the nether reaches of Hell.

Obama and His Minions

At the top of the list of those done with Biden is Obama. He despised Biden during his own Presidency and, if anything, has only deepened his disdain for the man or what’s left of him. Obama sends out subtle messages while he unleashes his main guy.

David Axelrod bluntly stated that Biden “should get out of the race,” and in another interview said he should “get going or get out”. There are other doubters in positions of power especially now that Trump is slowly expanding his lead over the incumbent to 5% (48% to 43%) in the most recent N.Y. Times/Siena poll.

Add to that the certain likelihood that Biden will decline further in the coming months and you can feel the panic growing within the radical constituencies.

So did Jill get what she wanted with her damn the torpedos strategy? I have to answer: Yes, I’m not complaining.

Jill, above all, and Joe’s other handlers stage managed, as best they could, Biden’s performance in the State of the Union message to serve that singular objective that he remains the Democratic candidate.

The Speech Itself

The speech was fascistic enough for the Radical Left with implicit cries for Civil War. This was done by way of analogy with internal “threats” to democracy being on a par with Lincoln’s situation on the eve of his election. Red meat for the revolutionary radicals.

The Leftists loved Biden attacking and insulting the Supreme Court over Roe accusing them of being partisan and political while they had to sit through it all stoney faced. The progressives loved his overturning of norms of civil discourse at every opportunity. All this was done with his mouth imitating a Gatling gun to the point of incomprehensibility – but they didn’t care.

At the same time, he led off with FDR and hit many of the traditional Democratic platitudes such as taxing the 1,000 billionaires (not mentioning that the vast majority of them are Democrats who rely on his growing corporatism). 

He also promised giveaways for the poor and compassion for the needy. Of course, with trillions in deficit and the interest on the debt approaching 1 trillion yearly, there is no money for these notions without continuing the march to impoverish the majority. What was the point?

The point was he wished to reassure the sleepy, moderate, traditional voters that, in fact, the Democratic Party was still their home and he was still their champion. These comforting allusions to old-time themes were there to hold the duped base of the Party in his camp and to remind them of him. Remember, good old Joe from Scranton.

Hyped up on drugs, he didn’t collapse. Instead of a meandering, lost, demented old man, he channeled an angry old man shouting all the while but, one must say, energetically. Just what his base wants to hear to counter the national narrative. Joe Scarborough said “it was the best Biden ever” using hyperbole to inoculate Biden from the reality of the going image of someone doddering on his last legs. Of course, Biden can’t keep that up and if his handlers push him to do so, they should be prosecuted for elder abuse. It won’t happen.

All this was designed to be just enough to ward off the detractors in his tent. And I think it worked. Now, his opposition, aside from a sudden health crisis or who knows what may have to use the Convention to get rid of him last minute. Great. Better then, than tomorrow. The Convention will be too late to turn the Trump tide.

But, for the rest of us, it consolidated all of what we already know and strengthened our fortitude without reversing the quiet doubts in the minds of the yet undecided.

Strangely, conservative columnists and pundits seemed to miss wholesale the fact and the importance of the power maneuvers represented by Jill and her cronies that were the decisive intent for the night. Nobody wrote about it even as they penned fine and discerning essays.

Nothing on this from P.J. Media’s Stephen Kruiser; nor from Daniel Greenfield (whom I love). Ace reporter Byron York missed this point as did Daniel Flynn of American Spectator. Matt Margolis of P.J. Media went in another direction and Kimberly Strassel bemoaned the choices before us while the WSJ editorial Board counseled Biden on the speech he should have given.

I’m far from recommending a “council of perfection” to anyone but this was right in front of our noses for anyone to see.

We’ll see what the polls show. It could be, absurd as it might sound, that Biden stays even or gains a point or two. No problem. It can’t last but it does assure he will not be ousted.

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.

ROOKE: Leaked Docs Reveal The Trans Cult Is Going Even Further Than We Ever Knew thumbnail

ROOKE: Leaked Docs Reveal The Trans Cult Is Going Even Further Than We Ever Knew

By Mary Rooke

An environmental group released leaked documents from the world’s top organization of doctors determining the correct course on youth and adult transgender healthcare late Monday.

The findings inside the WPATH Files published by Environmental Progress expose the sinister reality of this pseudoscience that has captured American children and goes far beyond anything we could have imagined.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) is the leading organization that most doctors, hospitals, and clinics look to for guidance on the proper treatment for children and adults who present to medical professionals with gender dysphoria.

Screenshot Environmental Progress WPATH Files

Even just three years ago, the understanding of the transgender craze was largely mistaken as affecting a small number of confused children and adults. However, the massive increase of people (and young girls in particular) identifying as “trans” has made it a household topic. It is the result of a social contagion that makes otherwise healthy children believe they were born in the wrong body and the only corrective action to fix the issue is to chemically and surgically alter their bodies.

Most families in America have not gone untouched by the trend of children expressing the desire to change their “gender identity.”

At the heart of the issue is whether parents can trust the medical information that is given to them by their doctor. The documents clearly show they cannot. (ROOKE: American Parents Stood Up To The Trans Cult And Won Big In Maine)

In a conversation over medical recommendations for permanent surgical procedures, professionals in the field lamented that some surgeons required two authorization letters to proceed with surgically removing the breasts of a minor girl, according to the report. The doctors called the requirement to make sure the girl suffered from gender dysphoria “gatekeeping,” a term progressive activists use when someone of sound mind is concerned about the drastic actions being taken.

Screenshot Environmental Progress WPATH Files

One doctor promised to help write the second letter if a different signature was needed to get the surgery approved, even though it’s clear they have never treated the patient in question.

Screenshot Environmental Progress WPATH Files

In multiple instances throughout the report and transcript of the videos meetings, the world’s top minds in transgender medicine agree that there is simply no way minors can give informed consent to be placed on hormone blockers, cross-sex hormones, or even surgeries that remove healthy sex organs such as breasts, penises and uteruses.

This seems like an obvious conclusion to anyone who has been around children for extended periods, but what has not been admitted before is that most parents responsible for determining the healthcare decisions for their confused children are also not capable of making an informed decision because they lack the biological knowledge to do so.

“But what really disturbs me is when the parents can’t tell me what they need to know about a medical intervention that apparently they signed off for,” Dianne Berg admitted, according to the transcript.

A conversation between medical professionals concerned about informed consent encapsulates the worry that parents are making permanent decisions for their children based on unproven science that is getting people maimed, sterilized and killed.

Unequivocally, parents have a divine right to determine their children’s healthcare needs. This was never questioned until recently when progressive activists started a political revolution by fighting to tear down these protections.

Part of this attack stems from forcing parents into a corner. More and more states are enacting policies that rip children from their protective parents if they refuse to go along with the “affirmation” model. Adhering to this thought requires acceptance of their child’s false gender identity, even if that means hormone blockers, cross-sex hormones, and permanent surgeries.

Screenshot Environmental Progress WPATH Files

Most parents understand their children require therapies that don’t accept the delusions that a child is born in the wrong body and needs medical intervention to “fix it.” Still, if these parents search for other options (thanks to Transgender activists), the state will consider them abusers.

Another leg of the revolution against parental protections has been the attack on American children through the radicalization of the U.S. education system. Many schools adopt policies that allow children to socially and sometimes medically transition to their preferred gender without their parent’s knowledge or consent. These guidelines cause real-life harm and force parents out of the discussion about serious and life-altering topics. (ROOKE: I’d Like To Thank Joy Reid. Her Open Endorsement Of Porn For Kids Makes My Job Easier)

For a long time, the medical community painted hormone blockers and other hormonal treatments as reversible or non-permanent fixes for children to “try out” being part of the opposite sex.

The report shows that these procedures are neither of those and, in fact, cause lifelong medical complications such as infertility, lack of orgasm and a newly discovered increase in developing possible cancerous masses.

WPATH President Marci Bowers admitted that the effects of puberty blockers on fertility and sexual satisfaction when these children get into adulthood have not been adequately studied, according to the report.

“We do not fully understand the onset of orgasmic response, and blockers make this a major question. Fertility and more problematic surgical outcomes at adulthood are also concerns,” Bowers said in the WPATH forum.

“The fertility question has no research that I’m aware of as puberty onset allows for fertility options while blockers preclude those opportunities,” she added. “The orgasmic response question is thornier and observational based largely upon the growing cohort of puberty blocked individuals seeking gender affirming surgical care years later (le. now, with our office providing that care to a large number). To date, I’m unaware of an individual claiming [the] ability to orgasm when they were blocked at Tanner 2.”

As adults, we understand the reality of not being able to have children or experience a full sexual relationship with a spouse. Still, there is no way to fully grasp the gravity of this loss at 13 years old or if the medical field is telling parents that these blockers are simply buying their child time to work out their confusion.

Screenshot Environmental Progress WPATH Files

Even worse, it seems cross-sex hormones are known to cause more problems than just a change in voice and added breast tissue. The risk for prolonged usage for women is pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), cardiovascular health, and even death.

Many medical professionals documented in the WPATH Files noted having cases with several of these issues.

“For example, in the discussion thread dated March 24, 2022, a nurse practitioner asked about a ‘young patient’ who developed pelvic inflammatory disease after three years of testosterone. The natal female ‘has atrophy with the persistent yellow discharge we often see as a result,’ the nurse wrote. Vaginal atrophy is the thinning, drying, and inflammation of the vaginal walls that occurs when a woman has less estrogen, typically after menopause. For many women, vaginal atrophy not only makes intercourse painful but also leads to distressing urinary symptoms,” according to the report.

Screenshot Environmental Progress WPATH Files

“In December 2021, a doctor described a 16-year-old patient who had developed large liver tumors after being on norethindrone acetate to suppress menstruation for several years and testosterone for one year. ‘Pt found to have two liver masses (hepatic adenomas) – 11x11cm and 7x7cm – and the oncologist and surgeon both have indicated that the likely offending agent(s) are the hormones,’ the doctor wrote,” the WPATH Files reported.

“Another doctor replied to this with an anecdote about a female colleague who, after about 8-10 years of taking testosterone, developed hepatocarcinomas. ‘To the best of my knowledge, it was linked to his hormone treatment,’ said the doctor, who had no more details because the cancer was so advanced that her colleague died a couple of months later,” according to the report.

This is medieval torture in a modern medical setting using American children as the subjects. These doctors admit the procedures are theories with insufficient medical data to prove the outcome is beneficial. The obligation our medical field has to “do no harm” is completely ignored when it comes to gender healthcare. The only logical move forward is for the U.S. government to launch investigations into the mistreatment of these patients to ensure this deadly ideology doesn’t capture more children.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Caller News Foundation 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.

Weekend Read: They Got Us, Right Where They Want Us thumbnail

Weekend Read: They Got Us, Right Where They Want Us

By Peachy Keenan

Open borders Christians wage open warfare on Americans.

Social media lit up with commentary after a bizarre commercial for a group called “He Gets Us” aired during Sunday’s Super Bowl.

The ad, which you can watch here, consists of still images that depict BLM- and DEI-approved progressive archetypes getting their feet washed by other people, like cops. A white priest washes the feet of a gay black man who took off his rollerskates for the honor. A tattooed gal has her feet washed by a white woman outside the doors of an abortion clinic. Another white lady gazes beatifically at a hijabi while she washes her Muslim feet. Just as Jesus would have wanted.

The nauseating ads were produced by a far-leftwing ad agency and paid for by a group of white Christian boomers who run a charitable organization called “Come Near.”

These are the useful idiots of Christianity, attempting to turn Jesus Christ into a blue-haired, nose pierced BLM-style social justice warrior.

He just wants us to love each other.

He just wants you to get on your knees—to make it easier for the angry mobs to curb stomp you into submission.

Lib Catholics vs Conservative Catholics

I was asked to speak at a conference for Catholic women a few weeks ago. The topic was how to be a woman, a wife, a mother, and a Catholic in modern-day society. Sounds great, I told the organizers, I’m in!

About a week before the event, some “He gets us” types from outside that parish, and a few local parishioners, complained about me to the priest in charge.

Their complaint? I posted “hate speech” on the internet. One white lefty grandma found some of my tweets about the immigration crisis. In one of these, I expressed my frustration, despair, and exhaustion after witnessing millions of hooligans from around the world illegally running across our border, flouting our laws, burdening our police, and wreaking mayhem and violence in our cities.

There has been a constant flood of news stories about new arrivals from around the world raping, killing, selling fatal drugs, killing innocent people in DUI crashes, stealing, looting, and other insanities.

But this wave of violence sweeping the country doesn’t bother the Open Border Christians. They have turned a blind eye to the human suffering inflicted not just on regular Americans, but on the children getting sold, stolen, raped, trafficked, drugged, and abused by the immigration machine. Numerous videos show men clutching terrified toddlers who aren’t their children and can’t answer where they came from. Many children are drugged and turned into easy-to-transport luggage. Why? Because our viciously stupid border policies give “families” a free ticket anywhere they want to go. “Families” get to skirt regulations and are ushered to the front of the line.

None of this bothers the Open Borders Christians, however. The only thing that bothers them is “mean tweets” and closing the borders to criminals. 

The only thing that finally rouses the little old ladies of liberalism to action is another woman daring to express an opinion that unmitigated, infinite illegal immigration from third-world countries is not a great idea. That it might be negatively affecting our national security and our citizenry. Gasp!

One woman confronted me on Twitter/X. She asked me how I could be so cruel to my “fellow Catholics.”

Ah, that must be why all the Congolese, Yemeni, and Chinese immigrants are running through the hole in the border wall: They’re late for Mass!

Rape and murder of innocents: It’s what Jesus would have wanted, bigot.

One mean tweet: AND YOU CALL YOURSELF A CHRISTIAN!?

I wrote about the “and you call yourself a Christian” attack radical leftists have been using against closed-border conservatives in 2019, for this publication.

One of the main tweets that got me in trouble with the Catholic Karens referred to some of these third-world countries of origin as “shithole countries,” which of course is a Trump phrase that got him in hot water back in the day. Did you know Catholic women are not ever allowed to use the S-word? The priest in question was dismayed at my “profanity.” Would a man be treated this way if he dared to use the S-word? I have my doubts. I think they really thought I’d be dropping F-bombs and mofos on the good Catholic women of this parish.

Thank goodness he can’t hear me when I’m driving in L.A.

One woman told me that it was terrible to use the word “shithole countries” because the parish I was speaking at was founded by a Mexican family. I asked her the obvious question: “What does it say about you that when you hear the word ‘shithole’ you immediately think of Mexico?”

Here are some other actual quotes these biddies sent to the priest:

“As a member of this Catholic community, I would like to bring to your attention the thoughts of one of the presenters involved in the workshop you are hosting. You can see her words, posted this weekend, in the attachments. This kind of speech does not belong in a Catholic church setting. It is hate speech. ‘All are welcome’ is our song, immigrants included.”

“Looking at her work it seems that she has definite confrontational approaches to life expressing fear about our culture and society and embracing an ‘us and them’ mentality contrary to the message of the gospel.  

“It saddens me to think this is being supported in our parish.” 

The priest responded that he “shared the concern” but was willing to let the conference proceed, with some ground rules.

I was then given three ground rules I had to agree to in order to appear:

  1. No political soapboxing and no naming of persons.
  2. No speaking ill of immigrants.
  3. No speaking ill of fat people.

Regarding that last point, it turned out that the priest in question, whom I had never met, was “of size” and so one of his kind, sensitive parishioners had sent him something I’d said about fat people. Imagine doing that.

Me? Fat shame? It’s true that in a recent Substack post, I referred to LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman as “Mr. Big,” but that was because he funded the E. Jean Carroll fake rape case and is funding Nikki Haley.

I also referred to the truly despicable New York DA Alvin Bragg as the “fat blue line” of law enforcement. He deserved it, sorry.

My rule is that I would never, ever shame anyone for their looks—unless they’re also evil and wish me dead, in which case everything is fair game.

To prove this, may I offer into the record the time I came to the defense of a cuddly midwestern mama who got brutally fat-shamed on Twitter for posting a video of her prepping a fattening cheesy casserole for her kids. I wrote, “I will not allow anyone to fat-shame tater tot mom. She’s got babies, she’s going through it right now. Anyway, what do you care? She found someone who thinks she’s cute enough to cuddle. You’re going to miss blunt midwestern moms who make comfort food in wood paneled kitchens when they’re gone.”

My opinion on weight is pretty basic: morbid obesity is bad for you and the country and will keep you from meeting a spouse and being happy. If you’re not obese but you gain some weight after having kids or getting older, that’s called being human.

Anyway, I did the conference, and it was great. They thought they’d get 50 women. They got almost 200. It was standing room only, no one heckled me, and many people came up to me after to thank me for coming. I was a hit! You can read my entire speech here if you’re interested. I didn’t talk about immigration or fat shaming once!

Unfortunately, I was not able to thank the priest for letting me come, since he “was busy” and didn’t show. Ah well!

Open Borders Christians Are a Menace to American Society

Why is it that Open Borders Christians are so committed to allowing America to be raped and pillaged by millions of illiterate third-worlders who care nothing for our laws, values, time-honored traditions, or morals? 

Google “crimes committed by illegals” and you will see a long list of recent shootings, lootings, rapes, and more. A gang of Venezuelans was just videoed kicking the sh*t out of two NYPD officers, and Fat Alvin Bragg let them walk. The attempted cop killers hopped a bus to California “using fake names to obtain bus tickets from a Catholic charity based in New York.“ Um, hello!

Ah, those wonderful, God-fearing Catholic charities, doing the Lord’s work by providing free getaway cars to violent thugs.

I started doing some more digging. The entire illegal immigrant pipeline, from the airports in Turkey and Dubai that are sending them to South America and Central America, to the Darien Gap, across the border and into our cities is being funded by Christian and Catholic NGOs. When you learn about the betrayal Catholic and Christian NGOs have been committing, for decades, to the rights and privileges granted by America, you will go mad.

The recent failed federal “border control” [sic] bill included almost $2 billion to religious organizations to “help migrants,” which often means helping migrants break the law.

Investigative reporter James O’Keefe recently exposed Catholic Community Services of Tucson, Arizona as facilitating the illegal entry of gang members into the country.” 

“Casa Alitas offers shelter, necessities and travel assistance to asylum seeking families. Our guests arrive for a short stay, after their release from Border Patrol and [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)] detention,” the website continues. “We help our guests find safe harbor, and reunite with loved ones across the U.S.,” it claims.

There are many organizations like this, taking money from their parishioners and the federal government and funneling it directly to illegal aliens.

The Heritage Foundation did its own deep dive and found that there is a “large network of nonprofits, non-governmental organizations, NGOs for short, down at the border…acting as a massive way point and resettlement program. Basically, what happens is border patrol turns over overflow of illegal aliens to facilities on the border. These NGO facilities then take care of lodging and care and travel to disperse legal aliens throughout the country.”

Heritage also ripped the mask off the mighty Catholic Charities organization:

They’re really the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to this. They are deeply involved in facilitating the travel of illegal aliens throughout the country. But it doesn’t end there. These NGOs are also involved in lobbying the Biden administration and our Congress to keep the border wide open. It’s this full-scale operation where they’re not only involved in the border, but they’re involved in D.C. making sure the border stays open through policy and support to the Biden administration. A lot of their staffers and people connected in those NGO networks are in the Biden administration. And it’s not just in America. This is an international issue. Mass migration is something that’s pushed by NGOs across the world. When illegal aliens make the journey to the border, they often stop at NGO facilities along the way, they have a presence in Mexico. There are lawyers that help illegal aliens file frivolous asylum claims. They’re involved in the push out of certain countries.

If we found out Al Qaeda was providing billions to flood the country with illegals from terrorist hotbeds, we’d be upset, right? These charities have nicer brands, but their destructive goals are the same. Catholic Charities is a socialist terror organization working to undermine this country, subvert our “sacred democracy,” and diminish our citizens. It must therefore be defunded, prosecuted, and banned from operating inside the United States. Parishes and Christians who care about the poor should find other charities to support directly. Yes, I am totally in favor of helping feed and clothe the poor, support orphans, and support Catholic schools and parishes around the world. I’m not in favor of supporting terror, criminality, or a foreign invasion across our southern (and northern!) border. Cry more!

The institutional Catholic and Christian charities involved in exacerbating our immigration crisis must be stopped (but won’t be). They are helping our enemies execute a silent coup right under our noses, and use Christianity as a shield, an impenetrable force field, to deflect all criticism and examination. They call you “racist” and “hateful” when you dare to object to their goals, which are obviously designed to hurt loyal American citizens in favor of the globalist hordes.

And if you dare object, the parish Karens will come at you shrieking “and you call yourself a Christian!”

Yes, I call myself a Christian. Yes, I love my neighbors. I love them so much I want to keep them safe from getting inundated with unvetted illegals from—I’m gonna say it—shithole countries.

By shithole country, I mean a country where women have no rights. Where children are routinely beaten, abused, and raped. Where poverty and illiteracy are the rule. Where theft is a way of life. Where basic hygiene, dentistry, and disease prevention are unknown. Where human life is cheap. After all, millions of people are not fleeing these countries because they’re wonderful. They’re fleeing them because they’re shitholes!

We either have a country or we don’t. If we open our doors to every human being from a shithole country, we will soon become the biggest shithole country in the world with seven billion new arrivals. Don’t like it? Go to these other places and make them better. Not everyone alive can live here. Once the new arrivals outnumber us, it’s over for good, and there will be no more places to emulate.

I am done having my devout religious beliefs used as a skin suit by Soros-funded globalists who want to use it as a disguise while they overthrow “our sacred democracy” from within. I am not in favor of having my Catholicism used as a club to beat me to death.

And they won’t have to! I fully expect to get beaten to death one day by one of the sacred illegal immigrants they sent to my neighborhood.

Believing in the “He gets us” version of Christianity is going to get us all killed.

*****

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.

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Weekend Read: Still Spiraling Down

By Craig J. Cantoni

The state of American society and culture 30 years after the publication of “Defining Deviancy Down.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s essay, “Defining Deviancy Down,” was published in the 1993-1994 Winter edition of The American Scholar.

It was certainly scholarly. It was also accurate, prescient, courageous, politically incorrect, and subsequently ignored by policymakers, social justice activists, media, the intelligentsia, and the many organizations that depend on socioeconomic problems remaining unsolved.

Incalculable human misery and social upheaval have resulted from the essay being ignored.

The essay’s main points will be summarized momentarily, but first, some biographical information on Moynihan and his other writings.

Moynihan’s Other Writings

Moynihan was a social scientist at the U.S. Department of Labor and became an assistant secretary of the department under Lyndon Johnson, before going on to become a U.S. Senator (D, NY). Considering how far left the Democrat Party has moved, he probably would be seen as a right-winger today.

He is most remembered for his controversial paper of 1965, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” He warned of the terrible socioeconomic consequences of the rise in single-parent families in Black communities and advocated for public policies that would stop the trend instead of accelerating it

He is less remembered for a book that he co-authored with Nathan Glazer, a book that was first published in 1963 and updated and republished in 1970: Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. As the book made clear, all of these groups were at one time seen as disadvantaged minorities, and, as I have written many times, my ethnic/racial group of Italians, was seen as non-White.

Now, through some sort of social and epidermal alchemy, Italians are seen as not only White but also racist, privileged, and responsible for colonialism and slavery. To paraphrase Santayana, those who don’t know history make fools out of themselves with such new and ignorant stereotypes—and some of the fools become highly paid directors of diversity and inclusion.

In the Introduction of the second edition of Beyond the Melting Pot, Moynihan wrote a prescient statement that especially resonates today: “In 1969, we seem to be moving to a new set of categories, black and white, and that is ominous. On the horizon stand the fantastic categories of the ‘Third World,’ in which all the colors, Black Brown, Yellow, and Red . . . are the favored terms for Negro, Mexican-American and Puerto Rican, Chinese and Japanese, and American Indian.”

He referred to this as “a biologically and humanly monstrous naming,” a naming that was “being used to divide the nation into the oppressed and the oppressing Whites.” Talk about prescient! He wrote these words 55 years ago.

Defining Deviancy Down

What Moynihan meant by the phrase “defining deviancy down” in his essay of 30 years ago, was how Americans have become accustomed to alarming levels of crime and destructive behavior, due to redefining what is normal. Today, we are even more accustomed to social pathologies.

Take homelessness. The word “homeless” has been replaced with the euphemism “unsheltered,” as if the use of a supposedly kinder and gentler word will somehow reduce the staggering number of human beings living and dying on the street like animals in American cities.

Moynihan warned 30 years ago about increasing homelessness, er, unsheltered people. He traced much of the problem to a movement that began in the early 1960s to deinstitutionalize people with mental disorders; that is, to release them from mental hospitals. In place of mental hospitals, the National Institute of Mental Health recommended the building of 2,000 community-based mental health centers or one per 100,000 population. President John F. Kennedy endorsed the idea and signed the Community Mental Health Centers Act on October 31, 1963. He gave the signing pen to Moynihan.

The goal was never reached, however. Construction funds were made available for only 482 of the centers, not the 2,000 that had been recommended. Soon after, the program would be forgotten and left unfunded while mental hospitals continued to be emptied. For example, in 1955, in New York State, there were 93,314 adult residents of mental hospitals; but by 1992, there were only 11,363.

Moynihan wrote:

“Professor Fred Siegel of Cooper Union observes: “In the great wave of moral deregulation that began in the mid-1960s, the poor and the insane were freed from the fetters of middle-class mores.” They might henceforth sleep in doorways as often as they chose. The problem of the homeless appeared characteristically defined as persons who lacked “affordable housing.

Another very serious social problem had become normalized and unaddressed when Moynihan wrote “Defining Deviancy Down,” namely, the high percentage of broken homes and single-parent households. He had predicted the problem 29 years earlier in “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” In the intervening years, the problem had metastasized in not only Black families but also White families, although to a much lesser degree in White families.

The evidence is overwhelming that behavioral issues, poor grades, medical problems, and crime have increased in lockstep with the increase in single-parent families, especially fatherless ones.

The above statement needs to be modified, to avoid being pilloried as insensitive and judgmental. Many children who grow up without two parents in the house do just fine in life, and many successful people have come from single-parent families, including presidents of the U.S.

Moreover, being a single parent does not warrant the wearing of a scarlet letter or being committed to a home for unwed mothers, as was the case long ago. Nor is it good for a parent or a child for a parent to stay in an abusive relationship.

While the above caveats are true, it’s also true that American society is reaping the destructive effects of decades of cultural rot, in which time-tested norms and traditions regarding marriage and child-rearing have been discarded for avant-garde notions of self-fulfillment and self-actualization. This dramatic shift has been enabled by government policies, reinforced by pop culture, and blessed by the intelligentsia, who pooh-pooh monogamy and marriage as bourgeois artifacts while embracing those artifacts in their own lives.

Glaring contradictions now abound. Society rightly tries to stop children from smoking or riding a bicycle without a helmet, but at the same time tolerates children being caught in the crossfire between gangs of fatherless thugs in inner cities, children being abused by the Lotharios who take turns shacking up with mom, toddlers being hospitalized for a drug overdose after swallowing mom’s narcotics, babies being born with narcotics in their system, and students being poorly educated in schools overrun with disciplinary problems and an attitude that learning is for sissies or a White thing.

Social scientists deal with averages, normal distributions, standard deviations, correlation coefficients, and cause and effect. They focus on society or communities at large, not on individual cases or exceptions. As such, they can appear heartless.

Of course, individuals suffer when social pathologies spread across a community. As Moynihan wrote:

“From the wild Irish slums of the nineteenth-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected, it is very near to inevitable.”

Moynihan also mentioned studies by the Progressive Policy Institute, showing that the relationship between single-parent households and crime is much stronger than the relationship between race or poverty and crime.

Then there are the effects on learning. The higher the incidence of single-parent households in a community or school district, the lower the academic results and the higher the disciplinary problems. Moynihan referenced a 1992 study, “America’s Smallest School: The Family.” The study made the case that a parent-pupil ratio is a better predictor than other ratios of how students in a given school will perform academically. It’s a better predictor than the ratio of teachers to students or the ratio of school spending to students.

This would explain why certain Asian nationalities have low crime and high academic results in spite of being poor: They have a low percentage of two-parent families—just as Whites and Blacks used to have.

The most troubling aspect of all this to Moynihan was the acceptance by government and society that the social pathologies were normal and not a calamity. The attitude seemed to be in his time and seems the same today that nothing can be done about the root problem of single-parent families. Even more damning, there are huge numbers of bureaucrats, nonprofit organizations, for-profit businesses, school districts, counselors, teacher unions, and many others whose funding, revenue, or livelihood depend on the problem not being solved.

I’ll close below with my thoughts on what has been wrought by the failure to address the root problem.

Failing to Address the Root Problem

You probably know the story of how cars used to be made in America until the Japanese gave the auto industry a rude awakening. Quality problems were ignored throughout the manufacturing and assembly processes. They were passed unfixed from one operation to the next, accumulating in numbers along the way and generating rework and waste, until the final product, a finished car, was shipped with defects to dealers—where some of the defects were fixed—and then sold with the remaining defects to customers.

Tragically and immorally, we’re doing something similar with human beings.

I’ll use Blacks as an example, although tens of millions of Whites, Latinos, and others also suffer from the root problem of widespread single parenthood. The focus on Blacks is not because I’m a racist but because the problem is the most serious with Blacks, and also because Blacks, in particular, suffer from paternalism and the racism of low expectations.

The process begins with the fallacy that the high percentage of Black single-parent families is due almost entirely to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. That fallacy has been debunked by Thomas Sowell and others with statistics showing that the percentage of single parenting was much lower prior to the advent of the War on Poverty in the sixties (see Sowell’s book, Social Justice Fallacies).

As mentioned earlier, a high crime rate is one of the downstream problems caused by a high percentage of single-parent families. High crime in turn has caused high arrest rates for Blacks, which in turn has generated claims of racism, which in turn have led to demands to defund the police and to cut back on prosecutions, which in turn, in a vicious circle, have increased the crime rate in Black communities.

The high crime also has resulted in businesses, including supermarkets, vacating crime-ridden communities, thus leaving so-called food deserts behind and adding to the problem of obesity and diabetes as residents consume junk food from fast-food outlets and convenience stores.

Learning and behavioral problems in schools are other downstream problems emanating from a high percentage of single-parent families. As with crime, the behavioral problems lead to claims that Black students are being disciplined more than other races because of racism, which in turn leads to backing off of discipline, which in turn leads to an increase in misbehavior, classroom disruptions, or worse.

Poor grades are also blamed on racism, which in turn leads to grade inflation and such demands as eliminating algebra in grade school for kids who do well in math because this supposedly discriminates against Blacks. A similar lowering of standards occurs in high school, then in college admissions, and then, under the doctrines of diversity, equity, and inclusion, in hiring for jobs in government and industry.

This results in a double whammy: Blacks end up in positions for which they are not qualified, and very well-qualified Blacks have to overcome an unwarranted stigma that they got their job through affirmative action and not merit.

At the same time, because American K-12 students rank poorly on international tests in math and reading, there is an incessant demand for increased K-12 spending, smaller class sizes, the latest technology in the classroom, and the pedagogical fad of the day. There is not a similar demand to do something about the root problem.

The problem hasn’t even come up in the current presidential race.

And that’s why American society is still spiraling down.

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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Beware Those Who Intentionally Use Words To Lie

By Thomas C. Patterson

The word “liberal” was once considered a compliment. It meant fair, principled, and thoughtful. The Age of Enlightenment was birthed by “classical liberals” with their then-fantastical notions about government by consent of the governed, legal equality of all, and individually owned rights.

Later as ideologies like collectivism and class oppression gained favor among the intelligentsia, the word “liberal” was hijacked and mangled beyond recognition. It was used to describe almost anything from well-meaning do-gooders to hard-bitten class warriors, from big government socialists to tyrants who silence and ostracize their opponents, for the good of society.

With time, “liberal“ lost favor. When the label became a political epithet, Leftists dropped it like a hot potato, moving on to “progressive” as their new favorite label, even though “socialist” and “Marxist” are also accurate.

Here’s the point: in the unceasing war of democratic persuasion we call politics, what you say often matters less than how you say it and the phrasing you use. Somehow, the Left always seems ahead in the game of word messaging.

Take abortion. Since the heyday of the eugenics movement, Democrats have generally been for abortion, and Republicans have not. The two sides were labeled pro-abortion and pro-life.

Eventually, Democrats, realizing that “pro-abortion” was off-putting to many, changed their label to “pro-choice“ which made the decision to terminate a pregnancy seem more like a normal consumer transaction. “Pro-life“ came to mean that Republicans demanded all babies must be carried to term.

Most Americans are abortion centrists, willing to support legal abortion up to 12 weeks or so. Yet Gallup polls reveal that 60% of “pro-choice“ Democrats believe abortion should be legal at any time until the moment of birth, while less than a quarter of “pro-life“ Republicans believe all abortions should be prohibited. Thus the Left, by the adroit use of labels, is able to obscure the fact that their views on abortion are much further from the mainstream than are Republicans’.

“Racist“ might be the most abused word in the language. During the civil rights movement, there was a broad consensus that “racism“ meant the practice of judging fellow humans by their skin color rather than by the “content of their character”.

But even as race relations broadly improved, for race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, that definition wasn’t good enough. They denied that color blindness was a positive goal in itself. They insisted instead that racial identity was our defining, inherent attribute that explained virtually all human behavior.

In support, the media and the Left subtly changed the language around racial equality. Equality before the law is a precious right bequeathed to all Americans under the Constitution. As a substitute, the Left devised a new definition for “equity“, now meaning equality of outcomes, a supposedly superior goal that assures permanent employment for the professionals in the field.

Nevertheless, the SAT, welfare reform, legitimate law enforcement, and anything smacking of merit were all deemed racist. Consequently, today the charge of “racism” has lost much of its coherence. “Playing the race card” is recognized as being bereft of real arguments for your point. Worse, if all racial discrepancies are blamed on “racism”, then the hard work of addressing the real causes of racial inequality can be deflected.

Institutions typically don’t like to admit that they use gender and racial discrimination in personnel decisions. Rather than come clean about their practices, however, they adopted the term “affirmative action” which did exactly the same thing. A majority of Americans are neither fooled nor amused.

There is obviously a world of difference between the legal immigration that has nurtured and defined America and the tsunami of lawlessness now plaguing us. Yet media commentators use “immigrant” to describe lawbreakers and lawful immigrants alike as if only bigots believe there are real differences.

Finally, congressional bills are often given intentionally deceptive names. The Inflation Reduction Act was a recent laughable example. The bill was actually a package of green subsidies still chasing the climate chimera and other outrageous handouts that had zero possibility of reducing inflation.

Words can be powerful tools in the pursuit of truth or falsehood. Classical liberals should call out those who deliberately use words to lie.

*****

Thomas C. Patterson, MD is a retired Emergency Medicine physician, Arizona state Senator and Arizona Senate Majority Leader in the ’90s. He is a former Chairman, Goldwater Institute.

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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The Abortion Access Amendment Is Getting Most Of Its Funding From Outside Arizona

By Katarina White

It’s bad enough that the abortion lobby is fully committed to its disturbing agenda to enshrine abortion up until birth in the Arizona Constitution. But now, it appears, that the overwhelming majority of the funding to get this measure on our ballot in November isn’t even coming from within our state.

I recently examined the campaign finance reports for both Q3 and Q4 of 2023 for Arizona for Abortion Access (the group driving the campaign for this constitutional amendment) and noticed a concerning trend. Most of the dollars being raised to support this campaign are coming from groups outside Arizona.

In Q3 (July 1 – September 30), the campaign’s funding landscape revealed that individual Arizonans contributed just $12,202 while corporations and LLCs based in Arizona contributed just over $87,000. That’s a total of just over $99,000 coming from inside our state for this ballot measure. So, how much funding came from outside Arizona? More than $2.3 million! If you do the math, that means a mere 4% of the total financial backing for the Arizona Abortion Access Amendment is coming from within our state while 96% of the funding has been injected from the outside. In a campaign that should be driven by local voices, this difference is not only staggering, it’s alarming.

Adding to this disconcerting narrative, the Q4 (October 1 – December 31) data continues this disheartening trend. Despite an increase in contributions from Arizona individuals and corporations—totaling $1,133,282 and constituting 33% of total contributions—the specter of external interference looms ominously. Contributions from outside Arizona commanded a 67% share during Q4 for a total of $2,244,207. Additionally, the number of out-of-state individual contributions, 186, surpassed the count of individual contributions from Arizona, 112.

Compounding these concerns is the revelation that the largest business contribution from both quarters comes from an organization named The Fairness Project, a Washington, D.C.-based entity. Ironically, The Fairness Project champions direct democracy for ballot measures, emphasizing collective decision-making by the public. And yet, the group paradoxically channels significant funding from outside Arizona to influence the state’s constitutional trajectory. In the November 2023 election in Ohio, where voters were deciding on enshrining abortion as a fundamental right in the state, the Fairness Project contributed a staggering $2.2 million to the Ohio United for Reproductive Rights Campaign.

Overall, the Ohio United for Reproductive Rights Campaign garnered a substantial $23,820,999 in out-of-state funding—83% of their total funding. Unfortunately, this substantial financial support played a pivotal role in the passage of the initiative, leading to the tragic amendment of abortion as a fundamental right in Ohio. This alarming pattern of out-of-state funding continues in Arizona, where the Fairness Project has contributed $3,124,502 to the Arizona Abortion Access Campaign, constituting 54% of the total income in both Q3 and Q4.

Arizonans stand at a pivotal juncture, facing not only the potential erosion of our constitutional values but also the disturbing reality that external forces are actively shaping our state’s destiny. Even worse, at the core of this issue is the shocking possibility of embedding in our state’s constitution the unconstrained authority to terminate pregnancies right up until the moment of birth—an appalling decision of profound consequence.

Now, the people of Arizona must decide. Will you allow external forces to determine the course of our constitutional future and allow abortion up to birth? Or will you decline to sign this amendment and stand for life?

*****

This article was published at AZ Free News and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

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Representatives of the Uyghur Community to Speak at Chandler Event

By David Wanetick

Editors’ Note: The presentation of Plight of the Uyghurs by Davos in the Desert will be virtual on Monday, February 12th from 6:45 – 8:00 PM (Mountain Time). Registration for this informative and important presentation can be accessed here

The word “genocide” has been hurled around so much and so loosely in recent months that much of the public has built up an immunity to a term that should make the hair on the backs of our necks stand up. However, almost no one is talking about the most profound genocide that is currently taking place anywhere in the world. That is the systematic annihilation of the Uyghurs, the Turkic Muslim people residing in Xinjiang, China. Chandler residents will have an opportunity to listen to two leading Uyghurs discuss the Plight of the Uyghurs at a Davos in the Desert meeting in Chandler on February 12.

So why do I claim that Uyghurs are targeted for genocide at the hands of the Chinese government?

Because Uyghur women from 18 years of age to those far past child-bearing age are subjected to forced sterilization and IUD placement. According to my discussions with Muetter Iliqud, a human rights lawyer and researcher at the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database, not even women in their mid-fifties who vowed never to become pregnant have been spared from being neutered. As a result, birth rates have plunged between 80% and 90% in some rural areas of Xinjiang.

Since 2016, 900,000 Uyghur children have been separated from their parents and sent to orphanages where they are raised as Hun Chinese, according to Abdulkaim Idris, Executive Director of the Center for Uyghur Studies. Their immersion in Mandarin is so thorough that they forget their mother tongue.

Forced marriages are another means to de-Uyghurize Xinjiang.

As many as three million Uyghurs, or 25% of the population, are condemned to time in so-called “re-education camps”. In these detention facilities, women are routinely gang raped and men are savagely beaten. Tours in the “re-education centers” are usually for 60 days but easily last for a year for those who fail to demonstrate good behavior. Laboratories to facilitate involuntary organ transfer are located nearby. A further 13,000 Uyghurs have disappeared or been impressed into forced labor, where conditions are even worse. The release rate from these slave labor camps is only 4%.

The remaining 75% of the Uyghurs live in what can best be described as open-air prisons, where they are vulnerable to arrest for any reason at any time. Their every move is captured on surveillance cameras outside of their homes and inside their homes. As if this wasn’t enough, Mr. Idris notes that 1.1 million Hun Chinese have been sent to live with Uyghurs in their homes. Often, these uninvited male guests appear when the Uyghur husbands have been banished. They are not prohibited from sleeping in the same beds as the Uyghur women. These informants report to police when their Uyghur hosts abstain from eating pork or drinking alcohol, which are sufficient reasons to send them to detention facilities.

Why is Chandler-based Davos in the Desert running an evening event highlighting the plight of the Uyghurs? First, Davos in the Desert does what it can to put a spotlight on some of the world’s most oppressed people. Our Gala featured Yeonmi Park, a notable North Korean defector. More recently we ran a program that brought attention to the terror that Hamas inflicts on the people of Gaza.

Secondly, Davos in the Desert is an anti-globalist organization that is highly concerned about the globalists’ plans to micromanage our lives. Authorities in places like the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and the World Health Organization are scheming to dictate the foods we eat, the distances we can travel, the kinds of home appliances we can use and the vaccines that we are required to inject into our bloodstreams. They wish to track every movement we make through tools such as vaccine passports and digital currencies. Our Lockdown Nation conference, to be held a week before our Plight of the Uyghur event, will highlight that if we allow unelected and unaccountable authorities to make all of our decisions for us, we will soon end up like the Uyghurs.

*****

David Wanetick is the CEO of Davos in the Desert, an unapologetically and stridently anti-globalist movement.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

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Joe Biden is a Terrible Father and a Lousy Liar

By Bruce Bialosky

As we lurch into the 2024 election year, it is imperative we confront the naked truth about the potential contestants for the grand prize of President of the greatest country ever. Though it is often stated that family is off limits in political discussion, I believe that ship has sailed for President Biden – he is a lousy liar and a terrible father.

That flies in the face of what we are told on a daily basis by the current White House staff and their sycophants in the Legacy Media. How many times has the current press secretary told us that Joe Biden loves his son? And the point is? The parents of the Columbine murderers loved their children. Did that exonerate them from being atrocious parents? How could they not know what those kids were doing in their own homes?

Any honest parent knows there are struggles with raising children. There is a difference of opinion as to when that parenting ends. Some believe that once they are “grown” parenting ends. Others like me believe it ends on your deathbed and may go beyond that.

Certainly, what constitutes parenting has evolved over the years. What you do with a six-year-old versus a thirty-six-year-old is extraordinarily different. If you have done things well, you become trusted advisors to your children. I believe every once in a while, when necessary, you need to step in and nicely say, “Are you out of your mind? Don’t do that.”

We hear all the stories about the family traumas that President Biden has had. No civil person would wish that on anyone. God bless him for the tragedy he has dealt with, and we should all respect him for having the strength to forge forward.

Hunter Biden was and is a disaster. He is an embarrassment to his family and our country. He exposed his father, who was then a heartbeat from the presidency to untold potentially disastrous situations with total disregard for his father and his family. One cannot blame it just on drugs. Hunter was apparently coherent enough to make deals with people who speak other languages other than English in order to line his pockets with bundles of cash. His documentation made clear his father was part of that.

Do you think Joe had no idea what was going on? Do you think he was shocked to see the famous picture of his drugged-out son with the cig hanging from his lips? If he wasn’t aware, then he was negligent as a parent. If he was aware, then he was negligent for not giving Hunter greater attention and guidance.

To me, Biden was always more focused on his political career and his perverse drive to capture the grand prize – the presidency. What was going on with son was the second fiddle. Maybe third.

When Joe Biden decided to run for President his people around him should have done what every significant campaign does – opposition research on their own candidates. They don’t want any nuclear bombs dropped on their campaign. They had to know the status of Hunter and they must have disclosed that to his father. Biden and his wife knew everything Hunter exposed their campaign to with his reckless behavior.

Hunter was using his relationship with a U.S. Senator who became the Vice-President. Somehow Hunter got through law school, but we can guess that he plied his biggest asset at the time – his influential U.S. Senator father – to get through his schooling.

Hunter went to work at a law firm and decided that glad-handing on his father’s name was a better way to make money than actually working. Yet Joe never shut it down.

While Hunter was doing these deals, his father was fully aware. My God, Hunter flew with him to China on Air Force Two and returned home with a deal. Did Joe tell his son not to use his name to flush money out of people’s hands — particularly questionable people like some who gave him money? Did he tell Hunter that it was highly improper to take money from Burisma, that it would look like a bribe? No Joe went along with the game and threatened the Ukraine government with withholding $1 billion if they didn’t fire the prosecutor Burisma wanted gone.

I have advised my male clients that the most important word they can use with their children is simple – NO. Joe apparently doesn’t know how to say that to Hunter. He doesn’t know how to say that about his poor living habits or his sleazy foreign deals. That amounts to being a terrible father.

Joe tells us these things never happened. He is the President of the United States, and his dysfunctional son left his laptop at a repair shop and never claimed it. The laptop’s information signified corruption at the hands of a dreadful human being. Instead of telling his son to own up to it, he lies about it and goes along with Hunter’s lies. It is the old story – don’t believe your eyes; believe us.

Add to this the most curious case of the Vice-President whose son does not file tax returns declaring these millions of dollars of ill-gotten gains. You would think with Joe railing against all those people not paying their “fair share” he would make sure Sonny Boy filed his returns timely and paid his taxes. When he becomes President, his staff then allows two years of Hunter’s offense to expire in order to exceed the statute of limitations. I have been a CPA for 45 years and never once did the IRS let any client’s statute of limitation expire without filing a waiver. Then Biden tells us he loves his son, and he hasn’t done anything wrong.

His son stands in front of the U.S. Capitol building as he defies the same kind of subpoena defied by someone else and Joe said simply arrest that other guy. Otherwise, the law is different for my son. Pathetic parenting especially for the President. Then Joe lied about the entire matter.

There’s no need to go on. We talk a lot about the candidates. We must have clarity about the character of the people running. Joe Biden is a terrible father and a lousy liar.

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This article was published by Flash Report and is reprinted with permission granted by the author.

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