The J6 Show Trial Is Lying About Election ‘Fraud’ thumbnail

The J6 Show Trial Is Lying About Election ‘Fraud’

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By Mollie Hemingway

The January 6 show trial is partly about persecuting political opponents. But it’s also about covering up the truth of the 2020 election.

The purpose of the January 6 committee is to further the lie that there was nothing seriously wrong with the 2020 election and to criminalize any questioning of the election. The January 6 riot gives the committee a nice hook, but that’s not what they really care about.

They want to prevent you from admitting the election was irregular, faulty, or anything less than the most perfect election in the history of mankind, and from supporting people who fought against those irregularities. In service of this goal, the January 6 committee repeatedly lied about the actual claims Donald Trump supporters have made about the flaws in the election.

The January 6 Committee is conducting a show trial, not a criminal one. Show trials, common in authoritarian regimes, are held for propaganda purposes, to punish political opponents, and to cover up the truth of what the regime has done.

Democrats’ show trial is completely one-sided. The members on the committee were appointed exclusively by Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. There are zero Republican-appointed members. In fact, Pelosi refused to allow the top Republicans Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy picked for the committee — an unprecedented violation of House rules and norms.

No one represents the accused or advocates for their rights. No cross-examination or presentation of defense has been allowed from the targets of the trial. The committee does not follow House rules on evidence or witness depositions. The so-called investigation has declared off-limits any good-faith inquiry into issues that contradict their persecution, whether a look at what led to the lack of security by Capitol police forces or a look at the legitimate concerns about the unique and novel way the 2020 election was conducted.

The show trial is deeply and profoundly un-American. This week’s “surprise” hearing has already imploded under the weight of the inaccurate testimony given by young staff assistant Cassandra Hutchinson. But last Thursday’s episode also deserves scrutiny for the lies it contained.

That hearing was focused on Jeffrey Clark, a Department of Justice (DOJ) official during the Trump administration who had proposed more aggressive investigative and legal efforts in the controversial aftermath of the 2020 election than many of his peers. Incidentally, among the growing concerns about a ream of false statements given is a report that Hutchinson also lied about Clark.

The Misdirection On ‘Fraud’

The “storyline” for the committee’s June 23 televised spectacle revolved around a letter that Clark drafted and wanted other DOJ officials to sign and send to the leadership of the Georgia state legislature. Here’s a portion of Rep. Liz Cheney’s loaded remarks about this. Before reading them, it should be noted that it has already been shown that Cheney repeatedly lied about DOJ lawyer Ken Klukowski throughout the hearing:

Neither Mr. Clark nor Mr. Klukowski had any evidence of widespread election fraud, but they were quite aware of what Mr. Trump wanted the department to do. Jeff Clark met privately with President Trump and others in the White House and agreed to assist the president without telling the senior leadership of the department who oversaw him.

As you will see, this letter claims that the US Department of Justice’s investigations have ‘Identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states, including the state of Georgia.’ In fact, Donald Trump knew this was a lie. The Department of Justice had already informed the president of the United States repeatedly that its investigations had found no fraud sufficient to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The words fraud or fraudulent were used some 50 times in Thursday’s hearing, typically in the way they’re used in the excerpt above. The Democrat-appointed members would claim that Clark was alleging election fraud and, further, that everything about the election had been fully investigated and there was no evidence of problems with the election.

There are two major problems with Cheney’s argument. First, if she had read Clark’s letter, she would have noticed that while it did discuss major identified problems with the election potentially affecting the outcome, it never once alleged fraud. Second, it is highly debatable that the problems with the election were ever competently investigated or even understood.

If you look at the actual letter Clark drafted for discussion, he referenced “various irregularities,” “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election,” and “irregularities, sworn to by a variety of witnesses.” He referenced a report arising from Georgia Senate hearings that had taken sworn testimony and affidavits from many people about the chaotic and troubling administration of the Georgia election.

The complaints included problems with ballot custody, inability to monitor vote tabulation, inadequately maintained voter lists, and the counting of ballots from ineligible voters. The testimony even included something that would become a massive concern of election integrity advocates — the private takeover of government election offices by Mark Zuckerberg-funded groups.

And Georgia really was a mess, Fulton County in particular. None of Fulton County’s respected Republican election commissioners voted to certify the election. They had numerous problems, including that the first certification vote was taken just hours after Fulton County was still finding, processing, and tabulating ballots.

During the run-off, thumb drives were accidentally left in voting machines, exacerbating their previous concerns about ballot custody and chain of command issues. The commissioners also were concerned that no chain of custody information had been provided to them, even after they asked, for the 38 drop boxes spread throughout the country. The commissioners were concerned that no meaningful efforts had taken place to verify signatures on mail-in ballots.

It is false to claim that these things were properly investigated or that, if they were, there was no evidence to support them. Many independent analysts have determined that the Zuckerberg-funded takeover of government election offices significantly affected the outcome of the election.

That was where nearly $450 million was given — with a focus on the Democrat areas of swing states — to help run Get Out The Vote efforts. In an election that came down to 43,000 votes across three states, it is not difficult to make an overwhelming case that the Zuckerberg funding alone was outcome determinative.

It would have been difficult to properly investigate that in the short time period after the election, but it’s absolutely false to say it was investigated, much less thoroughly.

More Than 12,000 Illegal Votes In Georgia

Clark also expressed in his draft letter a “troubling” concern over a lawsuit that was being slow-tracked by a Georgia judge. He urged action because, “Despite the action having been filed on December 4, 2020, the trial court there has not even scheduled a hearing on matter, making it difficult for the judicial process to consider this evidence and resolve these matters on appeal prior to January 6.”

His concern was extremely well-founded. That lawsuit, widely regarded at the time as being strong and based on legitimate election problems, ended up being vindicated. In their lawsuit, the Trump campaign claimed that tens of thousands of voters had moved without registering to vote in their new residence. To get the figures about changes of address, the campaign looked at the National Change of Address data set, a secure data set of information on people who have filed a change of address with the United States Postal Service.

Filing a change-of-address form with the post office doesn’t conclusively mean the person is no longer eligible to vote at his or her former address. Some of those address changes could be college students or military members serving elsewhere. They would still be eligible to vote at the address they changed their mail from being delivered to.

But many of them reflected permanent moves to new cities and states. In fact, with around 10 percent of the population moving each year, and inadequate maintenance of voter rolls, experts say there are literally millions of bogus registrations on voter rolls all over the country. Such a situation doesn’t necessitate fraud, but it does make the situation ripe for fraud or the illegal casting of votes.

There were around 122,000 Georgia voters in 2020 who told the Postal Service they were moving to a new county in Georgia with a “move effective date” of more than 30 days before the election and who failed to re-register in their new county in time to be eligible to vote in the general election.

The secretary of state specifically instructs, citing Georgia law, that doing this means “you have lost your eligibility to vote in the county of your old residence.” Voters are required to register in the new county. “Remember, if you don’t register to vote by the deadline, you cannot vote in that particular election,” the secretary of state instructed.

The vast majority of the 122,000 voters who moved obeyed the law and did not try to vote in their old county. But thousands of voters appeared to break the law by casting a vote in a county in which they didn’t live. Most did so by voting absentee ballot, albeit many by early in-person absentee voting rather than mail-in voting.

Nearly all of these voters appeared to have voted in the wrong state house district, and more than 85 percent appeared to have voted in the wrong state senate district. Nearly two-thirds appeared to have voted in the wrong congressional district. And all of them appeared to be illegal votes in all races, since they would be ineligible to vote by law. Those who made similar moves but did not register to vote at their new address, and therefore didn’t vote, had obeyed the law.

The issue is important because it shows “the folks who obeyed the law didn’t get to vote, and the folks who broke it did get to vote,” Mark Davis, a Republican data expert in Georgia who raised alarms about the problem, said last year. Davis was a fighter for election integrity in a state that could be lax about enforcing its basic laws. He drew attention to several problems, including vulnerabilities enabling double voting.

“For years and years and years, I’ve kind of been that nerd over there that will bore you to tears talking about election integrity,” he jokes. He’s been an expert witness in five different election cases, usually dealing with problems caused by failure to place voters in their proper municipal district or related to change-of-address issues.

Davis shared the information with the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, which has admitted the problem, although it made excuses for the admittedly illegal votes.

Incidentally, it was this lawsuit that was being discussed when President Trump told the secretary of state to “find” votes. That was wrongly characterized as the president trying to pressure someone to invent a finding of problematic votes. Here’s why.

The latest update on these illegal votes is that evidence indicates more than 12,000 illegal votes were cast in Georgia in the November 2020 general election — exceeding the 11,779 votes that separated Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The campaign knew that the problem of illegal voting may be more than the margin of victory that Biden, which would have meant that the state would grant relief.

But the campaign also knew their lawsuit was being slow-tracked and that it could take more than a year to get confirmation on the numbers without help from the secretary of state. They had also listed categories of other major problems potentially affecting the margin of victory.

They just needed the secretary of state’s office to care about enough of the illegal votes earlier. While at least this illegal voting portion of the campaign’s lawsuit was vindicated, it wasn’t vindicated in a timely enough fashion to matter.

Different Legal Strategies Are Not A Crime

The Soviet-style show trial has featured testimony from people in Trump’s administration who did not think it wise to keep challenging election results, particularly after the Electoral College had convened. I know and interviewed many of them for “Rigged,” my book on the 2020 election.

They found the post-election day legal efforts led by Trump to be poorly strategized and executed. I share details about some of those debacles in the book, particularly how Rudy Guiliani took a promising Pennsylvania case with superstar attorneys — about disparate treatment of voters — into a case about fraud, thereby ruining it. That decision also led judges in other states to get nervous and impatient about other cases.

It also increased anxiety among establishment attorneys who had previously been part of the legal effort. Many of these attorneys were also having their lives and reputations threatened by NeverTrump groups, who were posting personal information and sending mobs to harass them.

Trump administration officials had major concerns — prior to the election — about the lack of election integrity provided by the rush to widespread mail-in voting. For example, former Attorney General Bill Barr said in September 2020 that expansive mail-in voting was “playing with fire.”

But these officials also believed it wasn’t really the job of the Justice Department to pursue investigations about the issue. They were willing to look into various claims that were swirling about, but considered it to be more of a local or regional crime issue that could rise to the level of DOJ interest, rather than something that should be driven from the headquarters down.

The January 6 show trial has tried to suggest that problems with the 2020 election were thoroughly investigated. Evidence for the claim is lacking. Former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Bill McSwain has publicly said he was told by Barr to stand down from investigating, a claim Barr publicly denies. McSwain wrote Trump was “right to be upset about the way the Democrats ran the 2020 election in Pennsylvania — it was a partisan disgrace.”

He added, in a letter to Trump that was later publicized, “On Election Day and afterward, our Office received various allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities. As part of my responsibilities as U.S. Attorney, I wanted to be transparent with the public and, of course, investigate fully any allegations. Attorney General Barr, however, instructed me not to make any public statements or put out any press releases regarding possible election irregularities. I was also given a directive to pass along serious allegations to the State Attorney General for investigation — the same State Attorney General who had already declared that you could not win. I disagreed with the decision, but those were my orders. As a Marine infantry officer, I was trained to follow the chain of command and to respect the orders of my superiors, even when I disagree with them.”

Again, Barr denies this accounting. And he’s publicly said he did try to run down various allegations of fraud that were being bandied about.

Clark’s superiors at the Department of Justice did not want him to pursue his aggressive efforts, but he was also discussing the topic with their superior, the president himself. He tried to pursue a more aggressive strategy than the one that many DOJ officials thought prudent.

Reasonable people can see both sides here. Prudence — particularly so late in the game — is a huge issue. More tenacious fighting for election integrity is also virtuous. Many leaders up to and including Trump himself should have done far more — far earlier — to fight Democrats’ coordinated and widespread attacks on the integrity of the country’s election system. Many Republican officials were sounding the alarm in the months prior, but more should have been done to effectively fight before the election, including a legal strategy to fight the chaos, confusion, and corruption that was almost certainly going to occur.

But differing legal strategies are not crimes, no matter how much Pelosi and Cheney and their media bootlickers would like them to be. It is reasonable to oppose Clark’s strategy, but the letter causing so much dispute was not about fraud. It was about the many other problems affecting the integrity of the election. It was also — and it says this clearly on every page — a draft product for discussion. The letter urged state legislatures to ensure the integrity of their state’s elections when there was cause for concern. The Constitution does give that responsibility to the states.

The January 6 show trial is partly about persecuting political opponents. But it’s also about covering up the truth of the 2020 election. Turning questions about the many problems with the 2020 election into a crime is the type of thing that is done in third-world countries. Persecuting people who talk about it or try to do something about it is what you expect in corrupt authoritarian regimes. It is horrific to see it happening here.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio & Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.”

*****

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

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Tell Me Again About White Supremacy: Texas Man Sentenced for Jihad Plot Against Trump Tower thumbnail

Tell Me Again About White Supremacy: Texas Man Sentenced for Jihad Plot Against Trump Tower

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By Jihad Watch

While Merrick Garland’s hyper-politicized Justice Department keeps hunting for terrorists at school board meetings, real terrorism continues: San Antonio’s KSAT reported Saturday that “a Gonzales County man was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for conspiring to provide material support to the foreign terrorist organization Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham/Syria, also known as ISIS.” The convict’s name is Jaylyn Christopher Molina, or rather, it was Jaylyn Christopher Molina; now’s it’s Abdur Rahim. Molina/Rahim is “accused of conspiring with a South Carolina man to provide services to ISIS by administering a chat group to share pro-ISIS propaganda and instructions on firearms training and bomb-making.” What was that you were saying again about “white supremacists” being the biggest terror threat the nation faces today?

Molina was very clear about his allegiances, writing in an online chat: “Let it be clear, I am against America. America is my enemy.” He and another American, Kristopher Sean Matthews, or rather, Ali Jibreel of Elgin, South Carolina, to commit “Netflix worthy” terror attacks at Trump Tower and the New York Stock Exchange, which they thought would gain them “rock star status.”

Molina wrote: “We need to stick together, we need to defeat them, we need to take a lot of casualties, a lot of numbers.” Matthews stated: “I would hit places like that to send a message.” According to the legal complaint against the pair, Molina “also described attacking communications centers and plans to ‘fortify a town barrier and establish the first bases or establish a HQ.’” Both Molina and Matthews pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS), discussed traveling to Syria to join up with the jihad group, and even tried to make contact with an ISIS operative who would help them get there. Molina pursued his jihad online, posting instructions on how to train to handle an AK-47 along with directions on how to build a bomb.

This raises a question that has come up many times before, but has never been answered: why do so many converts to Islam come to hate their own country? Nor are Matthews and Molina by any means the first Americans converted to Islam to try to join ISIS. Spc. Hasan Edmonds, a Muslim member of the U.S. Army National Guard, was arrested in 2015 at Chicago’s Midway Airport; he had been planning to join the Islamic State. His cousin, Jonas “Yunus” Edmonds, was arrested as well. They had allegedly been plotting a jihad attack against a U.S. military facility — making Hasan Edmonds the latest in a long line of people who convert to Islam and then turn traitor.

Is it just a coincidence that so many converts to Islam come to regard the country in which they were born and raised, the land of their families and forefathers, as an enemy? Or is there some connection?

Hasan Edmonds clearly believed that his new religion required a shift of his allegiance. “I am already in the American kafir [infidel] army,” he told an informant in January, “and now I wish only to serve in the army of Allah alongside my true brothers.”

Other American converts to Islam who have turned traitor include Sgt. Hasan Akbar, an American engineer from the 101st Airborne Division, who murdered Capt. Christopher Scott Seifert and Maj. Gregory Stone, wounding fifteen others in a grenade and small-arms attack in northern Kuwait on March 22, 2003. As he committed his murders, he yelled, “You guys are coming into our countries, and you’re going to rape our women and kill our children.”

Yet Akbar was not Iraqi or Kuwaiti. He was an American from Los Angeles. But when he became a Muslim, any allegiance he may have had to America was gone. Likewise in the cases of al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn and the Marin County Mujahid, John Walker Lindh, both of whom converted to Islam and ended up waging war against the country of their birth on behalf of its enemies.

All the major Muslim organizations in the United States condemn ISIS. So why, when Jaylyn Molina and Kristopher Matthews converted to Islam, did they fall prey to its supposedly twisted and hijacked understanding of Islam? Why wasn’t the peaceful, tolerant, true Islam that everyone assumes converts to Islam are taught in American mosques able to withstand a challenge from the supposedly un-Islamic vision of ISIS? Why aren’t the mosques they attended being investigated? Why am I the only person in the country asking these questions?

There is another question as well: what if Molina and Matthews had succeeded in carrying out a large-scale jihad massacre at Trump Tower? How many Leftists would stand up and cheer because the killing took place at a site that had Trump’s name on it? Can anyone really doubt that this would have brought out the Left’s enthusiastic bloodlust?

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Military Went Woke. Now It Can’t Find Recruits. thumbnail

The Military Went Woke. Now It Can’t Find Recruits.

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By Jihad Watch

The transgender pronouns, diversity training, and lesbian wedding ads aren’t working. 

The military is facing the worst recruiting environment since the end of the Vietnam War.

The Army is at only 40% of its recruiting numbers for the fiscal year despite raising its maximum enlistment bonus from $40,000 to $50,000. It now offers new recruits up to $10,000 for showing up to basic training in 30 days. And is no longer even asking them for a high school diploma.

“We’ve never offered $50,000 to join the Army,”  Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, head of U.S. Army Recruiting Command, said.

While the Army runs anime lesbian wedding ads, it’s pushing away the recruits it needs, young patriotic men from traditional backgrounds. When the Biden administration’s brass decided to mandate vaccinations, they automatically rejected the 60% of potential recruits who aren’t.

By Obama’s second term, male Army ROTC cadets were being forced to march in women’s high heels. Under Biden, that escalated to mandatory transgender pronoun training while figuring out living arrangements for men who suddenly decide that they’re really women.

The Army has stopped worrying about winning wars and is instead working to establish the “Army as a global leader in DEI”. That’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Obama’s Army Secretary Eric Fanning’s had already ordered mandatory implicit bias training for “soldiers and employees in senior leadership and management positions”. The Army is now preparing for the prospect of accommodating men in women’s housing and deploying HIV positive men.

While the Army brass complains that it can’t find recruits, even with gay wedding ads, transgender housing and HIV positive deployment, it’s been kicking out unvaccinated soldiers.

In February, it reported that commanders had  “relieved a total of six Regular Army leaders, including two battalion commanders, and issued 3,073 general officer written reprimands to Soldiers for refusing the vaccination order.” As of June, 60,000 Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers are unvaccinated. That’s 12% of the Army Guard and 10% of the Army Reserve.

“Army readiness depends on soldiers who are prepared to train, deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth claimed. “Unvaccinated soldiers present risk to the force and jeopardize readiness.”

HIV positive soldiers don’t present a risk or jeopardize readiness, but unvaccinated soldiers do.

Instead of spending $684 million on recruitment, and a $4 billion 10 year contract with Omnicom, one of whose subsidiaries worked on the Biden campaign, the Army could try to stop actively alienating and firing the young men actually willing to fight and die on the battlefield.

And maybe then the Army might be able to stop lowering standards and issuing moral waivers for criminal records. Or forcibly extending the assignments of recruiters and making them work on federal holidays in the hopes of recruiting 60,000 active duty soldiers.

A Quinnipiac poll earlier this year found that only 40% of Democrats would stay and fight if America were invaded, while 52% would run away. 68% of Republicans would stay and fight. 70% of men would stay and fight in contrast to, understandably, 40% of women, and 61% and 57% of Hispanic and white people would stay and fight, in contrast to only 38% of black people.

Polls like these provide obvious common sense guidelines as to whom to recruit. Instead the woke army, like the rest of the woke military, keeps trying to recruit the wokes who don’t want to fight for their country and don’t even think their country is worth fighting for.

While the Army is the most troubled of the military branches, the Air Force is 4,000 personnel underwater.

“We have warning lights flashing,”  Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas warned. “Our ‘qualified and waiting’ list is about half of what it has been historically.”

Good thing the Air Force, like other branches, is screening recruits for “extremism” and the unvaccinated, and focused above all else on increasing its diversity quotas. The Air Force is less interested in recruiting in the South and bemoans the fact that 86% of Air Force aviators are white men. And those are exactly the people whom the Air Force brass no longer want.

“As Airmen in the U.S. Air Force, it’s our duty to acknowledge our biases whether we realize they exist or not,” airmen who are accused of being racist because they’re white are being told.

No wonder there are warning lights flashing in recruitment.

Navy recruiters are focused on the popularity of Top Gun Maverick to bring in new recruits. But the hit Tom Cruise movie has little relationship to the reality of a woke Air Force whose racialist brass are obsessed with critical race theory and whose planes don’t actually fly.

In the movie, the pilots fly F/A-18s and no one screams at them about their pronouns and their unconscious racial biases. Or their vaccination status. In real life, F/A-18E/F’s have a 51% mission capable rate. And the Navy’s woke leadership is focused on fighting “systemic racism:”

The Navy is offering a $25,000 “quick ship” bonus to recruits. “The Navy is the only U.S. military branch currently offering this high of an enlistment bonus for any new enlistee,” it brags, and suggests that the “the enlistment bonus could be as high as $50,000.”

But the Navy, like the Army and other services, can’t buy its way out of a morale crisis.

The United States military is never going to win a bidding war against corporations. Amazon warehouse team members make more than starting recruits. And they’re generally less likely to die. The only real military recruiting edge is a patriotic commitment to defending your country.

Military recruiters blame a national manpower shortage and their advertising strategy follows the familiar one of corporations going woke, appealing to the perceived wokeness and narcissism of Gen Z. Major corporations are being roiled by the radical activists they have recruited this way who are demanding that corporate leaders adopt not only their values but their agenda. Or else.

The brass trying to dress up the military in woke colors to make it appear that it shares their values are writing a big blank check that no one, not even Gen. Milley, wants to cash.

The Obama and Biden administrations appointed brass who gutted the services and replaced patriotic and nationalistic values with woke virtue signaling and radical politics. Now they’re discovering that when jobs are going begging, no one wants to join a woke military.

Patriots don’t and wokes won’t either.

Wokes willing to die for a cause are a lot more likely to join riots than the military. Those who see the military as serving their cause are, like actual white supremacists, exactly the kinds of “dangerous extremists” who are just joining up to gain experience for domestic terrorism.

There is a solution to the recruiting crisis. It doesn’t involve spending hundreds of millions on ad campaigns or anime lesbian weddings. The place to start is with the reasons for serving.

In the aftermath of the disgraceful Afghanistan retreat and of a War on Terror that has been effaced by political correctness, military service appears more senseless to many than it did after Vietnam. And in a nation riven with division, the military has come to reflect those divisions, with its brass firmly putting their thumbs on the partisan scale and adopting the leftist ideas and woke cultural values that are hostile to the majority of the men under their command.

The military, like so many institutions, went woke, now it’s finding out that woke leads to broke.

Rebuilding morale begins with a renewed commitment to national values and patriotism, to serious warfighting and meritocratic striving, and to a culture built on teams, not racial divisions.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center’s pamphlets, “Disloyal: How the Military Brass is Betraying Our Country” and “How Obama and Biden Destroyed the Greatest Military the World Has Ever Seen” charted the shape of the crisis. Our military can be rebuilt, but it will take cleaning out the brass who were put in charge to dismantle it and transform it into another failed leftist operation.

And while the woke brass stay, the recruits stay away.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Yes, Biden Is Hiding His Plan To Rig The 2022 Midterm Elections thumbnail

Yes, Biden Is Hiding His Plan To Rig The 2022 Midterm Elections

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By Mollie Hemingway

The White House is refusing to share details about its coordinated efforts to engage in a federal takeover of election administration.

President Biden really does not want the public to know about his federal takeover of election administration. Dozens of members of Congress have repeatedly asked for details, to no avail. Good government groups, members of the media, and private citizens have filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Not a single one has been responded to. All signs indicate a concerted effort to keep the public in the dark until at least after the November midterm elections. The lack of transparency and responsiveness is so bad that the Department of Justice and some of its agencies have been repeatedly sued for the information.

When President Biden ordered all 600 federal agencies to “expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process” on March 7, 2021, Republican politicians, Constitutional scholars, and election integrity specialists began to worry exactly what was up his sleeve.

They had good reason. The 2020 election had suffered from widespread and coordinated efforts by Democrat activists and donors to run “Get Out The Vote” operations from inside state and local government election offices, predominantly in the Democrat-leaning areas of swing states. Independent researchers have shown the effect of this takeover of government election offices was extremely partisan and favored Democrats overwhelmingly.

At the time the order was issued, Democrats were also hoping to pass H.R. 1, a continuation of the effort to destabilize elections throughout the country via a federalized takeover of state election administrations.

Biden gave each agency 200 days to file their plans for approval by none other than Susan Rice, his hyperpartisan domestic policy advisor. Yet fully nine months after those plans were due, they are all being hidden from the public, even as evidence is emerging that the election operation is in full swing.

Mobilizing Voters Is Always A Political Act

There are several major problems with Biden’s secret plan, critics say. It’s unethical to tie federal benefits to election activity. It’s unconstitutional to have the federal government take authority that belongs to the states and which Congress has not granted. And, given that all 50 states have different laws and processes governing election administration, it’s a recipe for chaos, confusion, and fraud at a time when election security concerns are particularly fraught.

Mobilizing voters is always a political act. Choosing which groups to target for Get Out The Vote efforts is one of the most important activities done by political campaigns. Federal agencies that interact with the public by doling out benefits can easily pressure recipients to vote for particular candidates and positions. Congress passed the Hatch Act in 1939, which bans bureaucrats and bureaucracies from being involved in election activities after Democrats used Works Progress Administration programs and personnel for partisan political advantage.

Executive Order 14019 ignores that the Constitution does not give the executive branch authority over elections. That power is reserved for the states, with a smaller role for Congress. With H.R. 1 and other Democrat Party efforts to grab more control over elections have thus far failed, Congress hasn’t authorized such an expansion.

As with previous efforts to destabilize elections, the chaos and confusion that would occur are part of the plan. The Executive Order copied much of a white paper put out by left-wing dark money group Demos, which advocates for left-wing changes to the country and which brags on its website that it moves “bold progressive ideas from cutting-edge concept to practical reality.” Not coincidentally, Biden put former Demos President K. Sabeel Rahman and former Demos Legal Strategies Director Chiraag Bains in key White House posts to oversee election-related initiatives.

Rahman serves as senior counsel at the White House office that oversees regulatory changes, meaning he approves every federal agency’s regulations and provides legal review of executive orders before they’re released. If you were looking to rush out constitutionally and ethically questionable orders, this post would be key to fill. Bains had been Demos’ director of legal strategies, helping write the paper that was turned into an executive order. He reports directly to Susan Rice, the hyperpartisan head of the Domestic Policy Council.

Rice has served in political positions in Democrat White Houses and the scandal-ridden Brookings Institution. She played a role in the spying-on-Trump scandal, blatantly lying about the same, lying about the Benghazi terrorist attack, and lying about Bowe Bergdahl’s military record.

Rice is described as President Obama’s “right-hand woman,” and it’s been said she was “like a sister” to the former president. She was his National Security Advisor at the same time Hunter Biden was hitching rides on official White House aircraft to other countries for meetings with oligarchs and corrupt government officials. She spread conspiracy theories about the law enforcement officers in Portland during the violent BLM riots that besieged the city. Most worrisome, she was briefed on the Clinton campaign’s Russia collusion hoax, which was used to destabilize the 2020 election and question its illegitimacy.

Leftist Groups Know Exactly What’s Going On

Conservatives may be in the dark, but left-wing activist groups are fully involved in the plot. The left-wing dark money group Demos put out press releases immediately after the executive order was issued, saying it would be happy to work with federal agencies on the project.

And then the group admitted publicly that it “organized agency-based working groups and met with the staff in these agencies to provide technical expertise as they developed their initial voter registration plans, to ensure those plans reflect the knowledge and priorities of various agency stakeholders.” It also admits it “developed research and resources to assist and advance agency efforts to implement robust voter registration opportunities, including a slide deck explainer of the agencies’ potential for impact, best practices for conducting voter registration at federal agencies, and recommendations for modernizing and improving the accessibility of Vote.gov.”

All of that information should be available to oversight authorities in Congress and the American taxpayers paying for its implementation, not just the left-wing groups that produced it. Yet as of this publication date, none of it has been shared.

Biden’s plan “raises serious ethical, legal, and constitutional concerns,” wrote Rep. Ted Budd, R-N.C., along with three dozen Republican members of Congress on January 19, in a letter to the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), demanding more information by February 28 about the secret plot. It went unanswered.

The top Republican members of nine House committees and subcommittees likewise demanded information from Rice and the head of OMB in a letter they sent on March 29. They noted that election activity goes well beyond “the scope of each agency’s authorizing statute and mission.”

One of the concerns shared by the members was that Biden was directing agencies to work with third-party organizations. Nobody knows which third-party organizations have been approved by Rice for her political efforts, nor which are being used. They also asked how much money is being spent on the effort, which statutory authorities justify the election activities, and what steps are being taken to avoid Hatch Act violations. They received no response.

The Foundation for Government Accountability filed a lawsuit on April 20th to compel the Department of Justice to respond to the FOIA request for information. And the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) filed suit on June 16 to compel Justice to comply. Those suits are ongoing.

What We Know

While the White House and agencies are steadfastly refusing to share details about how they’re complying with the executive order, who they met with to develop their plans, or how they’re justifying their involvement in something Congress has not authorized them to participate in, some details are trickling out. Here are a few examples of the widespread and coordinated effort by Biden’s political appointees to meddle in the state administration of elections.

  • In the midst of a labor crisis, the Department of Labor boasted that it was turning 2,300 American Job Centers previously focused on helping displaced workers find jobs into hubs of political activism. These new federally funded voter registration agencies were given guidance about how to bring in organizations to conduct “voter outreach.”
  • The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services likewise announced plans to turn community health centers into voter registration agencies, using thousands of health care facilities to focus on voter registration and turnout.
  • The Housing and Urban Development Department sent notice to public housing authorities that they should begin voter registration drives and participation activities. Previously, officials had been barred from electoral activities because they receive federal funding.
  • “It is presumed residents of public housing might disproportionately vote Democrat. … The executive order targets people receiving government benefits who might think their benefits depend on one party in power,” Stewart Whitson, legal director for the Foundation for Government Accountability, told the Daily Signal.
  • The Department of Education sent “dear colleague” letters to universities, telling them that Federal Work Study funds could now be used to support voter registration activities, contrary to previous guidance. The change was made without having gone through any rulemaking process to allow the change.
  • The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it’s using its child nutrition programs to push voter registration and enlisting state, local, and federally funded employees to implement voter registration drives in local schools.
  • The Commerce Department produced a massive, 113-page report which likely took four agency officials many hours to generate. It directs local voting board members about polling stations and poll worker training.

The tactics being used by these agencies were almost certainly contained in the plans submitted to Rice that have been withheld from investigators and overseers who had hoped to have some transparency about what the plans were. Frequently, the agencies claim the tactics are in response to the executive order, yet information about how they were developed has been withheld from the public for much of the year.

It is unclear why Biden and his political appointees are being so secretive about the work that went into their plan to engage in a federal takeover of election administration.

Whatever the case, Americans have a right to know whether these bureaucracies that are meddling in elections have experts in for each state’s election laws, what type of training is going on to ensure that state laws are being followed, whether they are allowing inspections and oversight to ensure no illegal activity, how they are determining whether a third-party group is genuinely non-partisan, whether they are allowing state investigators to approve money, and how much is being spent on this federal takeover of elections.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio & Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.“

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

Biden’s Handlers Alter Federal Laws to Make it Easier for Terrorists to Enter the United States thumbnail

Biden’s Handlers Alter Federal Laws to Make it Easier for Terrorists to Enter the United States

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By Jihad Watch

The Biden Admin Just Made It Easier for Terrorists To Enter the United States

by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, June 29, 2022:

The Biden administration altered federal law to make it easier for individuals who have worked with designated terrorist groups to legally enter the United States.

The State and Homeland Security Departments last week amended federal immigration laws to allow foreigners who provided “insignificant material support” to designated terror groups to receive “immigration benefits or other status,” according to the policy published in the Federal Register but not formally announced by the administration. Examples of individuals who would fall into the new category, according to the announcement, include individuals who provided “humanitarian assistance” or “routine commercial transactions” to terror groups.

The policy shift is fueling concerns that the Biden administration wants to make it easier for individuals who work with or for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force that has killed hundreds of Americans, to enter the country. Notice of the change came several days before the Biden administration and hardline Iranian government resumed talks aimed at securing a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal.

A State Department spokesman said the law was amended to help vulnerable Afghans, who might have inadvertently worked with terror groups, gain refuge in the United States following the Biden administration’s bungled withdrawal that left the Taliban in power. Lawmakers and former U.S. officials, however, say the new regulations are so broadly written that they would apply to organizations like al Qaeda and the IRGC. The policy change is also raising red flags as U.S. officials, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, face credible death threats from Iran.

The rule does not specifically mention Afghanistan but is written to cover all U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as the IRGC and al Qaeda, experts told the Free Beacon. The Taliban is not designated as a foreign terrorist organization, leaving lawmakers and former U.S. officials concerned the changes extend far beyond vulnerable Afghans and cover those tied to some of the globe’s most violent terror groups.

Gabriel Noronha, a State Department special adviser for Iran during the Trump administration, said that “the Biden administration is claiming this regulation is all about Afghanistan, but they didn’t even mention Afghanistan once in their action, and have made no serious attempt to limit the scope to the situation there.”

“Instead,” said Noronha, who is a fellow with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America think tank, “this looks like a massive watering down of our immigration restrictions against members of terrorist organizations.”

The State Department says the changes are limited to Afghanistan, but would not say why the country is not mentioned once in the new order….

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

RELATED VIDEO: This Week In Jihad with David Wood and Robert Spencer.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Foreign Funding of Nonprofits Goes Unchecked

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By Sarah Lee

Think tanks and universities are taking millions in foreign donations, and Biden has no interest in imposing transparency.

The University of Pennsylvania received more than $15 million in anonymous donations from China in 2018, the same year it announced the founding of its Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. This is just one high-profile example of a question that has been bubbling behind the scenes in think tanks and universities for several years: How has new, massive, unreported foreign funding flowing into America’s intellectual infrastructure shaped the country’s approach to governing, national security, and even cultural affairs?

Following on the heels of a 2020 Trump administration report excoriating universities—including Harvard and Stanford—for failing to report $6.5 billion in foreign funding, two new pieces of legislation have been introduced since Biden’s election that would address the influence of foreign spending in the academic, nonprofit, and think tank sectors.

Welcome to an age of heightened concerns over foreign money flowing into America’s institutions, both private and nonprofit. It has led to debates over donor transparency, intellectual and academic theft, lobbying and election integrity, and the proper role of charity in American civic and political life.

Conservatives tend to like the idea of donor privacy, especially in this era of cancel culture. But the calculus changes a bit when you consider how foreign entities might be using U.S. nonprofits to influence public policy, notes Michael E. Hartmann, a senior fellow of the Capital Research Center and co-editor of The Giving Review.

“The legal structure of American tax-exempt nonprofitdom has always wrestled with how to manage what are often the competing desires for transparency and donor privacy,” Hartmann says. “Historically, there hasn’t seemed to have been as much tension between transparency and foreign funding of nonprofits—that is, non-American funding of American nonprofits—[but] the whole set of underlying considerations with which to wrestle…is just so appreciably different than the regular old domestic ones.”

Republican legislators seem to agree that the question of transparency becomes a bit more fraught when foreign interests are involved and national security concerns are raised. Particularly if the disclosure rules are being outright flouted, as was the case with the 12 universities mentioned in the 2020 Trump administration report.

On the Senate side, one attempt to address the problem is to strengthen the Higher Education Act of 1965, specifically Section 117 dealing with disclosure requirements of foreign gifts and contracts. Republican Senators Tom Cotton, Bill Hagerty, Marsha Blackburn, and Tim Scott are all attached to the legislation they are calling the “Foreign Funding Accountability Act,” which, according to a joint release, will attempt to “combat malign foreign influence in American colleges and universities.”

Senator Cotton, who in 2021 released a report on “decoupling” from China, said the reason for the legislation is simple: If China wants to win a new economic Cold War, they will need to harness the “traditionally open research” on U.S. college campuses to give them a “competitive advantage in all innovative fields,” including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and quantum research.

“The CCP has patiently cultivated its de facto allies on college campuses across the country, offering prestigious fellowships, in-kind gifts, and donations to lure professors and universities into sharing information,” Cotton said.

“Just like every other member of the ‘China Lobby,’ from multinational corporations and Hollywood executives to NBA stars and large banks, colleges and universities have lined their pockets with Chinese cash for years and don’t want to stop any time soon,” he explained. “The China Lobby opposes anything that might hurt their bottom line. And they know that transparency about their Chinese cash binge will bring tough questions from Congress and a real effort to stop the inflow of Chinese money.”

Cotton said he doubts universities are in the dark about what these foreign gifts are intended to inspire.

“I find it hard to believe that they’re ignorant of what the CCP wants from them,” he said. “For example, MIT, Princeton, [and] Yale have all accepted millions from a Chinese tech billionaire, Ma Huateng, the founder of Tencent. His company actively censors the internet in China and is at the forefront of China’s efforts to dominate A.I. It doesn’t take a college education to suspect something is up.”

As a solution, Cotton’s legislation attempts to impose reporting requirements, which the Trump administration had established for a short period following their 2020 report. But, as Cotton noted, the American Council on Education wrote a letter to President Biden begging them to halt the reporting requirement on foreign gifts.

“And of course, the Biden administration has caved to this,” Cotton said.

Over on the House side, Republicans are also proposing a disclosure system for nonprofit think tanks (often attached to academic institutions) similar to the ones universities had before Biden caved.

Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas introduced the “Think Tank and Nonprofit Foreign Influence Disclosure Act” in March, which he said is an important first step in getting a handle on the “undeniably rampant corruption in the non-profit sector that must be addressed.”

“Americans and Congress deserve to know if the radical climate groups advocating to shut down the Keystone pipeline are funded by Russia or Russian-backed entities,” Gooden said. “Russia has clearly benefited from the Biden administration crippling the U.S. energy sector, and we must know if the climate groups pushing for this have been doing Russia’s bidding.”

“Foreign nations will no longer be able to hide their agenda behind the non-profits they fund,” Gooden continued. “Both our adversaries and our allies will have to be transparent about the groups they support and will have to explain why they support those groups’ agenda.”

Gooden’s bill would require the U.S. Treasury Department to make “publicly available in a searchable database information relating to such gifts and contributions received from foreign governments and political parties.” This would mimic the database created in June 2020 by the Department of Education to record gifts of $250,000 or more (Cotton’s Senate bill would lower this threshold to $25,000 or more).

Gooden’s bill would also require disclosure of think tank or similar nonprofit funding of over $50,000 a year from “foreign governments, foreign political parties or foreign military entities.” Gooden is particularly concerned about the foreign funding alleged to be flowing into the environmental sector, which the Capital Research Center has calculated, based on a report from The Center for International Policy, is part of over $174 million in foreign funding to major U.S. think tanks.

More transparency of foreign funding in the energy and environmental sector might almost put some environmental activist groups out of business, Gooden predicts.

“If the flow of foreign funding is cut off to radical environmental groups, they will no longer have the resources to advocate for economy-crippling green energy and Green New Deal priorities,” Gooden said.

The question of what to do about foreign funding of public policy is not reserved for the right side of the political aisle. While Republicans focus on the nonprofit sector and universities, Democrats have also begun to train a powerful eye on the corporate sector, with a focus on election interference rather than public policy.

In 2021, Democrats reintroduced a bill called “Get Foreign Money Out of U.S. Elections,” which would “block foreign-owned corporations from spending company funds to influence U.S. elections.”

The bill would “extend the federal ban on political donations from foreign nationals to multinational companies that are at least partially owned by foreign nationals,” the Hill reported in December.

While these legislative proposals are ongoing, conservatives have not forgotten the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

In early 2020, the Department of Justice issued an advisory opinion that clarified the rules regarding when a U.S. nonprofit that receives foreign government funding must register as a foreign agent. This led more than a dozen of the nation’s most well-known advocacy groups to warn that FARA registration was a potential threat to free speech and could threaten their mission.

“Being labeled as a foreign agent under FARA would put our neutrality and independence in jeopardy,” the International Foundation for Electoral Systems said in comment.

Given the problem of potentially malign influence outlined above, and the obvious truth that both sides of the political aisle recognize the potential for foreign interests to be in conflict with domestic policy, FARA reform may be the easiest—and quickest—path to change.

“Congress could certainly try to clarify that which is necessary for a foreign-funded nonprofit to have to register under FARA, as I know some are strongly urging,” Hartmann said. “It’s hard to imagine that there’d be a serious objection from donor-privacy advocates to something like this, much less that any such objection would carry the day among policymakers.”

*****

This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

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

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

Frustrated Detectives Leaving ‘Insane’ NYPD En Masse, Have ‘Had Enough’ thumbnail

Frustrated Detectives Leaving ‘Insane’ NYPD En Masse, Have ‘Had Enough’

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By The Geller Report

G-d help us. The Democrats are destroying our civilization, the basic social fabric of our life.

DiGiacomo, the Detectives Endowment Association president, said cops feel demoralized because of a lack of support from politicians.

“It’s simple,” he said. “Detectives are retiring in historic numbers because they have no support from politicians who care more about criminals than cops and the New Yorkers they protect.”

Frustrated detectives leaving ‘insane’ NYPD en masse, have ‘had enough’

By Tina Moore, NY Post, June 28, 2022:

More than 100 NYPD detectives have retired in June — and another 75 plan to put their papers in next month — as many become frustrated by revolving-door justice and rules that hamstring them in the Big Apple, officials and detectives told The Post.

“That’s going to have a major impact on investigating crimes,” Detectives Endowment Association president Paul DiGiacomo said. “The detective squads are down now as we speak and are investigating more cases. It’s going to have an impact on public safety.”

So far this year, 250 detectives have retired, leaving the total number at about 5,600, which is nearly 2,000 less than two decades ago.

There were 794 detective retirements during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 — and that number dropped down to 395 in 2021. Sources said 100 retirements in just one month is a large number for the NYPD.

The Post also reported earlier this month that cops in general were leaving the force in record numbers.

At his NYPD walkout ceremony at the 105th Precinct stationhouse Tuesday, Queens Detective Jason Caputo, 51, said he had “had enough.”

Detective Jay Caputo retired from the NYPD’s 105th Precinct after serving 25 years.

Detective Jay Caputo retired from the NYPD’s 105th Precinct after 18 years with the NYPD.

Daniel William McKnight

“To know me is to know I love the job in and out, but it’s not the same job I joined,” said Caputo, who is leaving after 18 years in the NYPD, and thus not getting his maximum pension, which kicks in after 20.

“The no-bail law was a big thing with me,” he said. “It’s not even really crimefighting anymore. You arrest somebody for assault 2 with a weapon and then the person is back at the precinct getting his property the next day. They’re not locking anyone up, even those with records. Pay your debt to society. You broke the law.”

Caputo said he also worried about making arrests and running into problems with city laws, such as the one prohibiting officers from putting pressure on a person’s diaphragm.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Blackburn To Introduce Legislation Backing National Guard Members Set To Be Fired Over COVID Vaccine Refusal thumbnail

EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Blackburn To Introduce Legislation Backing National Guard Members Set To Be Fired Over COVID Vaccine Refusal

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By The Daily Caller

Republican Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn will introduce legislation Thursday that would ban federal funds from being used to implement any requirement that a National Guard member must receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

The legislation, first obtained by the Daily Caller, comes as up to 40,000 U.S. Army National Guard members are set to be fired Thursday for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Blackburn said she is introducing the legislation to protect the 40,000 guardsmen and said firing them would be a threat to U.S. national security.

“Our servicemembers are the bedrock of America,” Blackburn told the Daily Caller before introducing the legislation. “Firing 40,000 Guardsmen for refusing the COVID vaccine would be both a complete disgrace and a threat to our national security. I am honored to stand beside our National Guardsmen and women by introducing this legislation to protect them from President Biden’s forever pandemic.”

READ THE LEGISLATION HERE: 

(DAILY CALLER OBTAINED) — … by Henry Rodgers

“We’re going to give every soldier every opportunity to get vaccinated and continue their military career. Every soldier that is pending an exemption, we will continue to support them through their process,” Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen, director of the Army National Guard, said in an Associated Press interview regarding the vaccine mandate. “We’re not giving up on anybody until the separation paperwork is signed and completed. There’s still time.” A number of House Republicans have introduced legislation to put an end to vaccine and mask mandates. In late September, a group of House Republicans introduced a bill that would prohibit federal agencies from implementing vaccine mandates.

The Daily Caller contacted the Department of Defense (DOD) and the White House about this legislation and about the jobs of the 40,000 National Guardsmen who remain unvaccinated. White House Press Sec. Karine Jean-Pierre would not answer the questions and referred the Caller to the Army. The DOD did not immediately respond.

AUTHOR

HENRY RODGERS

Senior Congressional correspondent. Follow Henry Rodgers On Twitter

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Supreme Court Greenlights the Continuation of Biden’s Border Crisis

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By Federation for American Immigration Reform

(June 30, 2022, Washington, D.C.) — The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) issued the following statement in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Biden administration’s improper termination of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, also known as “Remain in Mexico.”

“When fully active under President Trump, MPP required many illegal border crossers to remain in Mexico while they waited for an immigration judge to consider the merits of their applications, many of which were dubious asylum claims. Thus, MPP effectively cut off the strongest pull-factor for illegal immigration – the near-guarantee of being released into the interior of the United States after apprehension by a border patrol officer. MPP was an obstacle to the Biden administration’s mass immigration agenda so they fought to end it.

“By ending MPP how and when they did, the Biden administration put the American public and migrants at risk, all while footing enormous bills to state and local taxpayers who must provide benefits to aliens released into their communities. The Court’s decision today, however, perpetuates this status quo and will allow the government to continue releasing inadmissible aliens into the United States, in direct violation of federal law.

“The Biden administration chose to terminate MPP knowing that their decision would allow them to violate other immigration laws. In the absence of a fully-operational MPP program, DHS unlawfully chooses to release thousands of inadmissible aliens into the United States resulting in further incentives that encourage mass illegal immigration across the Southern border.

“Today’s Supreme Court ruling highlights the need for Congressional action to mandate MPP and secure our southern border. Courts cannot be relied on to reign in the Biden administration’s relentless flouting of immigration laws. Congress must step forward with needed reforms to stop this historic border crisis.”

EDITORS NOTE: This FAIR press release is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Climate Realism On The Rise?

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By H. Sterling Burnett

As a climate and energy realist, in my heart of hearts, I dream of the day when the public recognizes climate change will not bring on an end to the world as we know it, or even a long-term net decline for human civilization. That’s what the data and the best science show, despite the claims of corporate media, alarmist activists, heads of corporations, and politicians who profit in terms of money and power by spinning the climate change end-of-the-world fairy tale. Sadly, the public rarely gets to hear this truth.

A few notable instances of the very unalarming facts about climate change getting through on a large scale in the past few years are the release of several bestselling books by prominent liberals advocating what they consider to be reasonable climate policies: Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never, Steven Koonin’s Unsettled, and Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm. Sticking strictly to climate science, not policy, Heartland’s own Climate at a Glance for Teachers and Students has also sold well on Amazon. However, despite the success of these publications among the literati and the reading public, I’d be surprised if these books combined sold more than a million copies in the United States, which has a population of more than 330 million people, or a few million copies among the eight billion people worldwide. Sadly, I suspect more people are exposed to false climate alarm stories in the mainstream media every day in the United States than have been reached by all these books in the past two years since the first one’s release.

Still, hope springs eternal and climate realists keep on plugging away, trying to breach the nearly impregnable wall of climate change disinformation erected by powerful corporate, media, and political elites. Every so often, the realists score a direct hit, making the climate/energy realist case so powerfully that even the mainstream media and elite journals take notice. This occurred recently when The New York Times Magazine (NYTM) published an interview with eminent scientist Vaclav Smil, Ph.D., discussing his book How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going.” (You can’t get more mainstream and yet elitist than the NYTM.) Another direct-realist hit on the edifice of climate alarm came with the publication of the article “Russia’s War Is the End of Climate Policy as We Know It,” in the journal Foreign Affairs, by Ted Nordhaus.

Both Smil and Nordhaus have far more confidence than I that human activities are causing potentially dangerous climate change. Although I disagree to some extent with their assessment of the dangers of climate change, their “realpolitik” analyses of the infeasibility of the net-zero energy transition in the 2030-2050 timeline are powerful and accurate.

Despite continual cajoling by the NYTM interviewer, who basically framed the same question again and again and again, pleading for Smil to concede climate change is such an imminent disaster world leaders must forcibly decarbonize our energy systems nearly immediately, Smil refused to rise to the bait. His consistent answer, based on his assessment of the world’s energy needs and the material requirements necessary to meet net-zero in the short term, was that this goal is physically and politically impossible. Smil also made clear that the threat posed by climate change does not justify such a dramatic forced transition.

For Smil, the four pillars of modern civilization are cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia, each of which requires huge amounts of fossil fuels to produce. Therefore, he concludes, those calling for rapid decarbonization to combat global warming are dangerously foolish. “I’m looking at the world as it is,” Smil, told the NTYM interviewer, continuing,

The most important thing to understand is the scale. … [A]ccording to COP26, we should reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030 as compared with 2010 levels. This is undoable because there are just eight years left, and emissions are still rising. People don’t appreciate the magnitude of the task and are setting up artificial deadlines which are unrealistic. …

What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

I’m all for goals but for strict realism in setting them.

For Smil, radical actions to cut carbon dioxide emissions steeply and immediately are neither justified by the problem—because other problems are at least as dire as climate change, and they require fossil fuels to solve—nor are they possible, even if they were justified. It’s a matter of both physics and realpolitik, the latter meaning an honest assessment of the fact that people around the world do and will continue to want to better their lives by their own understanding of what constitutes a better life.

Smil’s assessment coincides with that of Ted Nordhaus, the cofounder (with the above-mentioned Michael Shellenberger) and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, and a co-author of An Ecomodernist Manifesto. Nordhaus’s article in Foreign Policy is a realist shot across the bow explaining how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is opening eyes to the basic energy truth that fossil fuels are still vital to the world:

[T]he headlong rush across Western Europe to replace Russian oil, gas, and coal with alternative sources of these fuels has made a mockery of the net-zero emissions pledges made by the major European economies just three months before the invasion at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Instead, questions of energy security have returned with a vengeance as countries already struggling with energy shortages and price spikes now face a fossil fuel superpower gone rogue in Eastern Europe.

In the decades following the end of the Cold War, global stability and easy access to energy led many of us to forget the degree to which abundant energy is existential for modern societies. Growing concern about climate change and the push for renewable fuels also led many to underestimate just how dependent societies still are on fossil fuels. But access to oil, gas, and coal still determines the fate of nations. Two decades of worrying about carbon-fueled catastrophes—and trillions of dollars spent globally on transitioning to renewable power—haven’t changed that basic existential fact. …

Given the scant effect international climate efforts have had on emissions over the past three decades, a turn back toward energy realpolitik—and away from the utopian schemes that have come to define climate advocacy and policymaking worldwide—could actually accelerate the shift to a lower-carbon global economy in the coming decades. …

The capacity to adapt to rising temperatures and extreme weather events rose significantly … as evidenced by the continued decline in weather-related deaths. But this was not due to any U.N.-led efforts to fund climate adaptation, which never materialized. What made people all over the world more resilient to climate extremes was better infrastructure and safer housing—the product of economic growth powered by cheap fossil fuels.

The geopolitical, technological, and economic competition that characterized the Cold War had more success in reducing the carbon intensity of the global economy than climate policy efforts have had since.

Nordhaus goes on to explain:

The world’s renewable energy economy is deeply entangled with geopolitically problematic supply chains. Huge parts of the world’s supplies of silicon, lithium, and rare-earth minerals rely on China, where solar panels are produced by Uyghur slave labor in concentration camps. The idea that the crisis might be resolved by choosing Western dependence on Chinese solar panels and batteries over Western dependence on Russian oil and gas reveals just how unserious the environmental movement’s pretensions to justice, human rights, and democracy really are.

For Nordhaus and Smil alike, the appropriate response to climate change is to acknowledge the reality of the importance of fossil fuels to continued economic prosperity for the present, while delivering better options through the market—which responds to price signals through efficiency gains and technological innovation—far faster and more effectively than government-mandated energy shifts. Smil states,

at the same time we are constantly transitioning and innovating. We went from coal to oil to natural gas, and then as we were moving into natural gas we moved into nuclear electricity, and we started building lots of large hydro, and they do not emit any carbon dioxide directly. So we’ve been transitioning to lower-carbon sources or noncarbon sources for decades. Moreover, we’ve been making our burning of carbon much more efficient. We are constantly transitioning to more efficient, more effective and less environmentally harmful things.

Nordhaus notes the Russian war is increasingly making it clear to countries that climate change is not “the main event,” energy security is, and the latter can be achieved while improving economic conditions in the poorest countries and respecting human rights:

But climate and energy policies, especially in the West, may shift significantly from subsidizing demand (for things like solar panels and electric vehicles) to deregulating supply (of things like nuclear power plants and high-voltage transmission lines). A shift of this sort—away from subsidizing specific green technologies favored by activists and lobbyists and toward enabling the broader technological, regulatory, and infrastructural basis for the energy transition—would put clean energy policies on much firmer economic footing. And it would better align climate objectives with energy security imperatives.

People around the world face many problems. Climate change is only one among many, and as Nordhaus and Smil point out, it is probably not the most pressing.

Nordhaus and Smil provide clear-eyed assessments of the physical, economic, and political limits of the energy transition demanded by climate alarmists on the timetable they have laid out. These analysts’ acknowledgments of the benefits fossil fuels have delivered, and the inequities and harms that would result from an attempt to go net-zero by 2030 or even 2050, are a refreshing appraisal from scholars whom alarmists cannot in any way smear as “climate deniers.”

In my heart of hearts (foolish though it may be), I still hold out hope this truth can get through the daily background noise of climate alarm.

*****

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

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The ‘ESG’ Scam Rates Slave-Using Chinese Firms Higher Than Clean American Energy Producers thumbnail

The ‘ESG’ Scam Rates Slave-Using Chinese Firms Higher Than Clean American Energy Producers

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By Chuck Devore

A firm in China that uses slave labor has a better ESG score than an American firm that pays landowners who freely sell their mineral rights.

Expecting publicly traded companies to do more than simply return shareholder value — their fiduciary responsibility — is a fairly new development in Western capitalism. The idea that corporate leadership and shareholders should explicitly care about environmental, social, and corporate governance (known as ESG) issues beyond how they might affect the bottom line has been around for only about 30 years.

But now, ESG investing has become a big driver in steering capital to corporations deemed to be good stewards of subjective principles. By 2025, financial management firms that claim to invest with ESG principles are projected to account for $50 trillion of a total global value of $140.5 trillion — more than a third of managed investments.

But is ESG investing trustworthy? Does it really do what it claims to do?

MSCI is one of the world’s largest investment support services firms, with $2.1 billion in revenue. It offers an ESG rating service. I noticed that my Charles Schwab account recently started to display MSCI’s ESG ratings alongside that of the more traditional rating services — services focused on a company’s profitability.

Comparing U.S. and Chinese Companies’ Ratings

Curious, I looked into the rating of a firm I own some stock in Texas-based Brigham Minerals (NYSE: MNRL). Brigham looks for land that could produce oil and gas, and owns mineral and royalty interests in 7,909 oil wells and 688 natural gas wells in West Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming, and North Dakota. MSCI rates Brigham Minerals as a B, the sixth lowest of seven ratings that range from AAA to CCC, labeling it a “laggard” in the industry with an overall score of 2 out of 10.

I previously wrote about ESG investing’s blind spot for China three years ago in Fox Business, pointing out that investment firms playing in the ESG space were also bullish on China — a nation with terrible air and water pollution (the “E”), horrendous human rights abuses (the “S”), rampant corruption, opaque accounting standards, and rule of law only at the forbearance of the Chinese Communist Party (the “G”).

Not expecting the financial industry to have changed for the better, I looked up three China-based energy companies and compared them to Brigham Minerals. They were Xinyi Solar Holdings (OTC: XISHY), China Resources Gas Group (OTC: CGASY), and China Coal Energy Company (OTC: CCOZF). All three beat the American energy company in their overall rating.

Buying Into CCP-controlled Enterprises

Now, it’s important for investors to understand that you really can’t own shares in a Chinese corporation. When you buy shares in a corporation based in China, you’re really buying American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) that represent shares issued by companies in the People’s Republic of China. As such, your ownership rights are more theoretical than real and are subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.

Further, many Chinese firms that have ADRs traded in the United States are themselves subsidiaries of state-owned enterprises — meaning that if you buy these ADRs, you are directly investing in an entity fully controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

As an example, China Coal Energy is 58.36 percent owned by China National Coal Group, a state-owned enterprise. China Coal Energy owns 12 coal mines, 13 coal-processing plants, five coking plants, four coal mining equipment manufacturing plants, and two mine design institutes. They’re really into coal.

That makes sense, as coal is China’s largest source of energy — with the PRC having on the order of five times the size of the U.S. coal powerplant fleet in operation or in construction. MSCI rates China Coal Energy as “BB” — one step better than Brigham Minerals, with an environmental rating of 4.7 of 10 compared to Brigham’s 0.8, a social rating of 4.2 compared to Brigham’s 3.5, and a governance rating of 2.2 compared to 6.4 for the American firm. Overall, China Coal rates 3.1 out of 10 compared to 2 for Brigham.

China Resources Gas Group mostly invests in natural gas pipelines. It’s a subsidiary of China Resources Holdings Company, a state-owned company. The company got its start in Hong Kong as Liow and Company in 1938. Its purpose was to raise funds and purchase supplies for the People’s Liberation Army, then fighting the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War — and, occasionally, the Japanese as they pressed their attacks into China.

By the 1960s, due to grain shortages caused by Maoist policies, the firm was used to import vast amounts of “capitalist grain” to stave off mass starvation. MSCI generously rates China Resources Gas as an “A” — the third-best of seven grades, with better grades than Brigham in both the environment, 7.7 to 0.8, and social, 7.6 to 3.5. Only in governance does China Resources Gas fall short, earning an “average” rating of 4.6 to Brigham’s 6.4. China Resources Gas nets an overall rating of 6.3 to Brigham’s 2.

Xinyi Solar Holdings should be problematic for MSCI — after all, China’s solar power industry, a global juggernaut, is a heavy user of materials produced by slave labor in Xinjiang, a Muslim-majority region formerly known as Turkestan where the Chinese communist government has been engaged in a grinding genocide. MSCI even has a corporate statement against “modern slavery” on its website, claiming that the firm “is committed to protecting human rights globally… Specifically, the Firm strongly opposes slavery and human trafficking and will not knowingly support or conduct business with any organization involved in such activities.”

This is at odds with MSCI’s ESG rating of Xinyi Solar — an “A” — with scores of 8.1 for environment (heavy metal pollution aside, apparently), 5.6 for social, and 2.6 for governance. Overall, Xinyi scores a 6.1 of 10 compared to 2 for the Texas firm.

That a firm in China that relies on slave labor for key portions of its supply chain has a better social score than an American firm that pays landowners who freely sell them their mineral rights betrays an upside-down ethic where freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Of course, that hasn’t stopped 174 institutional owners from investing in Xinyi Solar, among the largest being JP Morgan, Invesco, and Vanguard.

Counter to ESG Goals

This leads to one last, odd ESG story. Texas lawmakers, concerned about how banks and financial institutions aggressively implementing ESG investing rules were beginning to starve Texas’s energy industry of capital, passed a law in 2021 to address the problem. Senate Bill 13 prohibited Texas’s pension and investment funds (worth about $300 billion) from investing in “financial companies that boycott certain energy companies.”

But figuring out what companies those might be turned out to be a somewhat complicated process. So, the Texas state comptroller, charged with implementing the new law, turned to… MSCI. The problem was that MSCI is guilty of pushing ESG to the detriment of domestic energy produced in Texas, forcing Texas to modify its contract with MSCI to avoid violating the new law.

Ben M. “Bud” Brigham, founder and executive chairman of Brigham Minerals and other energy companies, has been an ESG skeptic for years. He tells me that “companies innovating in free markets strive to create value for their owners which benefit all the legitimate stakeholders. This is empirically validated in America, where we enjoy unprecedented levels of clean air and clean water compared to other major economies. In contrast, ESG investing — a relatively subjective exercise — often represents the influence of illegitimate stakeholders, and therefore ends up being irresponsible, destructive, and counter to its stated goals.”

So, here’s the bottom line from the self-righteous global elites: Chinese-government-owned coal, fine; Chinese slave-provisioned solar power, good; Chinese state-owned natural gas, better; American domestic natural gas and oil, terrible.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

SCOTUS Gets 2A Right: Not a Second-Class Right

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By Thomas Ascik

For the third time in the last fourteen years, the Supreme Court has strongly held that the Second Amendment “is not a second-class right,” as Justice Thomas re-affirmed for the 6-3 majority in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. This decision was released the same day that the Senate passed the bipartisan “red flag” legislation, now law, that provided a person’s firearms may be temporarily confiscated without due process.

Thomas emphasizes and bases his opinion for the Court on the two well-known and recent Second-Amendment decisions. In DC v. Heller (2008), the Court ruled in a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Scalia that a District of Columbia law was unconstitutional. The law completely prohibited the possession of a handgun in the home—“where the defense of self, family, and property is most acute,” said Scalia—and required other firearms in the home to be unloaded and disassembled.

The Court ruled in Heller against probably the oldest argument supporting gun restrictions, namely, that because it begins with “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State,” the Second Amendment allowed firearm possession only for state militias and men when in service of militias. However, the Heller majority concluded that the Amendment secured an “individual right . . . unconnected with service in a militia.” In Bruen, Thomas, citing Heller, said that the “Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct.” Only four members of the current Court were members of the Court for the Heller decision.

In McDonald v. Chicago (2010), the Court in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Alito went beyond Heller and ruled that the right “to keep and bear arms” is a “fundamental” and “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” (citing the Glucksberg 1997 case), and that the Second Amendment was incorporated against and applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. Since the District of Columbia is not a state, incorporation was not an issue in Heller. Five members of the McDonald Court are still on the Court.

So, with recent and definitive rulings, even though by narrow margins, that the Second Amendment is an “individual” and “fundamental and deeply rooted” American right concerned with the defense of “self and family,” what did the state of New York try to do? In 2017, that state enacted a law requiring a hearing for a license to possess a firearm in the home before a judge or law-enforcement officer to show proof of “good moral character,” no criminal or mental illness history, and the absence of any “good cause” for denial (how was one to prove that negative?). To carry a concealed handgun in public, the law required the applicant to affirmatively prove that “proper cause exists” for such a license.

Such a requirement is so stiff that, as Justice Thomas noted in his opinion, a New York state court had ruled that “living or working in an area noted for criminal activity does not suffice” for a concealed carry permit. And other New York courts have ruled that the “proper cause” must concern a “particular threat” to the safety of that particular person, a “special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.”

As it had already done in both Heller and McDonald, the Court in Bruen reviewed at length the entire history of public firearm regulation in the states both before and since the ratification of the Second Amendment. The Court reviewed laws and customs of medieval and early modern English history, the American colonies and early American history, pre-and post-Civil War history, and late 19th and early-20th century history. Thomas observed that there have been occasional and limited restrictions on the right to bear arms, but “None of these restrictions imposed a substantial burden on public carry analogous to that imposed by New York’s restrictive licensing regime.”

It is this objective and comparative review of “the Anglo-American history of public carry,” together with the plain text of the Second Amendment that is definitive, Thomas concludes. “We reiterate that the standard for applying the Second Amendment is as follows: When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

In addition, Thomas points out that to “bear arms” is something a person does in public and therefore is a public right. No one “bears” but instead only possesses their firearms in the privacy of their homes. American citizens can bear concealed firearms in public.

The Court’s Bruen opinion is its latest, strong affirmation of the full constitutional status of a routinely disparaged or ignored constitutional right, showing that all constitutional rights are equal.

The five-opinion, 135-page decision also features a direct confrontation between Justice Alito in concurrence and Justice Breyer in dissent. Breyer begins his dissenting opinion with eight pages of an extra-legal and extended op-ed with sources cited about the contemporary need for firearms regulation. He begins with “Since the start of this year (2022), there have 277 reported mass shootings—an average of more than one per day.” To this, Alito retorts that a mass shooter will not be deterred by a law forbidding carrying “a handgun outside the home.” He also adds that the New York “law at issue in this case” did not stop the mass shooter in Buffalo, New York.

Breyer repeatedly emphasizes the use of guns in suicide. Alito replies again that the New York law preventing carrying handguns in public has nothing to do with suicide carried out in private. The same goes for the use of guns in domestic disputes. It has nothing to do with the case at hand. Back and forth it goes, with Alito arguing” that “our country’s high level of gun violence,” is itself a reason “that cause(s) law-abiding citizens to feel the need to carry a gun for self-defense,” and citing a source on his own: “According to survey data, defensive firearm use occurs up to 2.5 million times per year.”

In his final words at the end of his opinion, Justice Thomas sets out a right equal to all other constitutional rights:

SCOTUS: The Second Amendment is NOT a Second Class Right

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By Thomas Ascik

For the third time in the last fourteen years, the Supreme Court has strongly held that the Second Amendment “is not a second-class right,” as Justice Thomas re-affirmed for the 6-3 majority in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. This decision was released the same day that the Senate passed the bipartisan “red flag” legislation, now law, that provided a person’s firearms may be temporarily confiscated without due process.

Thomas emphasizes and bases his opinion for the Court on the two well-known and recent Second-Amendment decisions. In DC v. Heller (2008), the Court ruled in a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Scalia that a District of Columbia law was unconstitutional. The law completely prohibited the possession of a handgun in the home—“where the defense of self, family, and property is most acute,” said Scalia—and required other firearms in the home to be unloaded and disassembled.

The Court ruled in Heller against probably the oldest argument supporting gun restrictions, namely, that because it begins with “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State,” the Second Amendment allowed firearm possession only for state militias and men when in service of militias. However, the Heller majority concluded that the Amendment secured an “individual right . . . unconnected with service in a militia.” In Bruen, Thomas, citing Heller, said that the “Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct.” Only four members of the current Court were members of the Court for the Heller decision.

In McDonald v. Chicago (2010), the Court in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Alito went beyond Heller and ruled that the right “to keep and bear arms” is a “fundamental” and “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” (citing the Glucksberg 1997 case), and that the Second Amendment was incorporated against and applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. Since the District of Columbia is not a state, incorporation was not an issue in Heller. Five members of the McDonald Court are still on the Court.

So, with recent and definitive rulings, even though by narrow margins, that the Second Amendment is an “individual” and “fundamental and deeply rooted” American right concerned with the defense of “self and family,” what did the state of New York try to do? In 2017, that state enacted a law requiring a hearing for a license to possess a firearm in the home before a judge or law-enforcement officer to show proof of “good moral character,” no criminal or mental illness history, and the absence of any “good cause” for denial (how was one to prove that negative?). To carry a concealed handgun in public, the law required the applicant to affirmatively prove that “proper cause exists” for such a license.

Such a requirement is so stiff that, as Justice Thomas noted in his opinion, a New York state court had ruled that “living or working in an area noted for criminal activity does not suffice” for a concealed carry permit. And other New York courts have ruled that the “proper cause” must concern a “particular threat” to the safety of that particular person, a “special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.”

As it had already done in both Heller and McDonald, the Court in Bruen reviewed at length the entire history of public firearm regulation in the states both before and since the ratification of the Second Amendment. The Court reviewed laws and customs of medieval and early modern English history, the American colonies and early American history, pre-and post-Civil War history, and late 19th and early-20th century history. Thomas observed that there have been occasional and limited restrictions on the right to bear arms, but “None of these restrictions imposed a substantial burden on public carry analogous to that imposed by New York’s restrictive licensing regime.”

It is this objective and comparative review of “the Anglo-American history of public carry,” together with the plain text of the Second Amendment that is definitive, Thomas concludes. “We reiterate that the standard for applying the Second Amendment is as follows: When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

In addition, Thomas points out that to “bear arms” is something a person does in public and therefore is a public right. No one “bears” but instead only possesses their firearms in the privacy of their homes. American citizens can bear concealed firearms in public.

The Court’s Bruen opinion is its latest, strong affirmation of the full constitutional status of a routinely disparaged or ignored constitutional right, showing that all constitutional rights are equal.

The five-opinion, 135-page decision also features a direct confrontation between Justice Alito in concurrence and Justice Breyer in dissent. Breyer begins his dissenting opinion with eight pages of an extra-legal and extended op-ed with sources cited about the contemporary need for firearms regulation. He begins with “Since the start of this year (2022), there have 277 reported mass shootings—an average of more than one per day.” To this, Alito retorts that a mass shooter will not be deterred by a law forbidding carrying “a handgun outside the home.” He also adds that the New York “law at issue in this case” did not stop the mass shooter in Buffalo, New York.

Breyer repeatedly emphasizes the use of guns in suicide. Alito replies again that the New York law preventing carrying handguns in public has nothing to do with suicide carried out in private. The same goes for the use of guns in domestic disputes. It has nothing to do with the case at hand. Back and forth it goes, with Alito arguing” that “our country’s high level of gun violence,” is itself a reason “that cause(s) law-abiding citizens to feel the need to carry a gun for self-defense,” and citing a source on his own: “According to survey data, defensive firearm use occurs up to 2.5 million times per year.”

In his final words at the end of his opinion, Justice Thomas sets out a right equal to all other constitutional rights:

Energy Shortages and Inflation The New Norm as Refinery Closures Outpace Construction thumbnail

Energy Shortages and Inflation The New Norm as Refinery Closures Outpace Construction

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By Ronald Stein

Editors’ Note: Progressives have played a coy game. As they over-regulate the energy business, denigrate the industry, have their allies in the environmental organization tie the industry up with lawsuits, and deny capital for expansion with their friends in the ESG movement; they grin like the proverbial Cheshire cat when energy costs soar far faster than the general rate of inflation. Grinning through their teeth they blame the industry, blame Putin, and blame us for wanting reasonably priced oil and gas. But you can’t shut down capacity as demand is expanding and expect lower prices. That defies all economic logic. Voters need to remember that this strangulation of energy is all part of the Progressive/Democrat plan to control your lives, make you more dependent on them, and reduce your standard of living. Some might say that is unfair on our part; it is the save the environment. If that were true, why would they permit capacity to be built elsewhere? Why are Chinese emissions better than ours? They aren’t and the earth can’t tell the difference. If anything, US energy corporations are more diligent in protecting the environment than most foreign operators. No, the energy crisis is contrived by Democrats for political control, not to save the earth. Further, it leaves us vulnerable to foreign producers, many of whom are bad actors. For a better economy, a better environment, and for national security, we need to get off the back of our domestic energy industry.

With worldwide refinery closures outpacing new construction, shortages and inflation are likely to be the new norm that inflicts regressive expenses upon those that can least afford it, as control of the worldwide refining industry shifts to Asia and Europe.

As the world has become impassioned with increasing its electricity generation from wind turbines and solar panels from breezes and sunshine, the world is silently slipping into a future of shortages and inflation as society’s demands for all the products and fuels manufactured from crude oil are exceeding the supply available from the dwindling number of refineries.

There were almost 700 oil refineries in the world as of January 2020, but as a result of continuous over regulations, permitting delays, aging equipment,  and the worldwide support of the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) to divest in fossil fuels, the right operating model and level of integration will be crucial for survival and sustained profitability of refineries.

In 2019 there were 135 refineries in the U.S.  but five facilities were shuttered during the last two years.

Each refinery location is a business that needs to make business decisions. Consequently, one in five oil refineries is expected to cease operations over the next five years. One in five is 20 percent, or almost 140 refineries expected to be shuttered worldwide, resulting in a 20 percent decline in the products manufactured to meet the ever-increasing demands from society.

There are over 100 new refineries under construction, with most of them in Asia with 88, Europe with 12, and North America with 10. Asia is the region with the greatest number of future petroleum refineries. As of 2021, there were 88 new facilities in planning or under construction in Asia. By comparison, Europe is set to see an addition of 12 petroleum refineries, and North America is set to see an addition of 10. The amount of oil fed through refineries in Asia has significantly increased in the past three decades as demand for petroleum products surged in developing countries such as China and India. China is on track to succeed the United States as the country with the greatest oil refinery throughput.

While worldwide demand for the products made with oil derivatives and fuels manufactured at refineries continues to increase, the upcoming closures of manufacturers over the next five years will significantly reduce the supply of those items and place tremendous pressures on continuous shortages and inflation.

Renewables can only generate electricity, and intermittent electricity at best. The undisputable science is that renewables CANNOT manufacture any of the oil derivatives that are the basis of the thousands of products that are the foundation of societies and economies around the world. In fact, renewables cannot exist without crude oil as all the parts of wind turbines and solar panels are made with oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

Here is a reminder of what is manufactured from oil that did not exist before 1900 that is needed to support the growing demands of the world’s economy and for the health and well-being of the world’s eight billion residents:

Fuels for the:

  • 50,000 heavy-weight and long-range merchant ships that are moving products throughout the world.
  • 50,000 heavy-weight and long-range jets are used by commercial airlines, private usage, and the military.
  • The 290 million registered vehicles in the U.S. as of 2021, were comprised of about 56 percent trucks, 40 percent cars, and 4 percent motorcycles.
  • The cruise ships now move twenty-five million passengers around the world.
  • The space program.

Oil derivatives to make thousands of products such as:

  • Tires for the billions of vehicles.
  • Asphalt for the millions of miles of roadways.
  • Medications and medical equipment.
  • Vaccines.
  • Communications systems, including cell phones, computers, iPhones, and iPads.
  • Water filtration systems.
  • Sanitation systems.
  • Fertilizers that come from natural gas help feed billions.
  • Pesticides to control locusts and other pests.
  • Wind turbines and solar panels are all made with products from fossil fuels.

With worldwide refinery closures outpacing new construction, shortages and inflation are likely to be the new norm that inflicts regressive expenses upon those that can least afford it.

*****

This article was published by CFACT, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

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

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

Up to 40,000 Unvaccinated Army Guard Troops at Risk of Dismissal as Deadline for Vaccine Mandate Looms thumbnail

Up to 40,000 Unvaccinated Army Guard Troops at Risk of Dismissal as Deadline for Vaccine Mandate Looms

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By The Geller Report

The Democrat party of treason will destroy the military the same way they destroyed the air travel industry. They did this to the pilots, hence the current pilot shortage.

Up to 40,000 Unvaccinated Army Guard Troops at Risk of Dismissal as Deadline for Vaccine Mandate Looms

By Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit, June 25, 2022:

According to AP, up to 40,000 Army Guard troops are still unvaccinated and at least 7,000 are at risk of being dismissed after refusing to take the experimental Covid vaccine, as the deadline for shots looms.

“According to data obtained by The Associated Press, between 20% to 30% of the Guard soldiers in six states are not vaccinated, and more than 10% in 43 other states still need shots,” the news outlet reported.

Below are the data from AP:

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE AP CHART

Around 7,000 national guards have requested exemptions which are almost all for religious reasons.

In an interview with AP, the director of the Army National Guard Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen said, “We’re going to give every soldier every opportunity to get vaccinated and continue their military career. Every soldier that is pending an exemption, we will continue to support them through their process.”

“We’re not giving up on anybody until the separation paperwork is signed and completed. There’s still time,” Jensen added.

Last year, the Oklahoma National Guard announced that they will not impose Biden’s COVID vaccine mandate.

Army Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino wrote in a memo that “no negative administrative or legal action will be taken” against anyone who doesn’t get the vaccine.

Biden Pentagon responded and threatened the Oklahoma National Guard for not forcing all members to take the controversial COVID vaccines. The Pentagon threatened the careers of the guard members in the state and announced the state statute may jeopardize their status.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott sued Joe Biden and the Pentagon over its military vaccine mandate last March 2022.

Over 40% of the Texas National Guard are refusing to get the Covid vaccine.

Oklahoma National Guard defies Pentagon, won’t impose COVID-19 vaccine mandate | Just The News https://t.co/Z6BiA0nLxw

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) November 13, 2021

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: TOPGUN Graduates, Hundreds of Pilots Face Punishment Over Mandate

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

US and NATO Lack Capability To Supply A Long War thumbnail

US and NATO Lack Capability To Supply A Long War

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By Center For Security Policy

As weapons inventories dwindle, there’s little chance the West today can build a surge hardware-making capacity

The long and short of it is that, while the US and NATO can fight a short conflict, neither can support a long war because there’s insufficient equipment in the now-depleted inventory and the timelines to build replacement hardware are long.

Despite a history of having done so before, starting in 1939, there is little chance that the US today can put in place a surge capacity, or that it any longer knows how to do so if it is even feasible.

Based on those circumstances alone – and there are additional, compelling reasons – the US and NATO should be thinking about how to end the war in Ukraine rather than sticking with the declared policy of trying to bleed Russia.

Let’s start by looking back at a time when the United States did know how to plan for surge weapons-building capacity.

WW2 precedent

In 1939 the Roosevelt administration, with Congressional support, passed the Protective Mobilization Act.  Ultimately this would lead to the creation of a War Production Board, the Office of Production Management and the marshaling of US industry to fight the Nazis and Japanese

In 1941 the President declared an unlimited national emergency, giving the administration the power to shift industrial production to military requirements. Between 1940 and 1945, the US supplied almost two-thirds of all war supplies to the allies (including the USSR and China) and for US forces – producing some 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces (all types) and 86,000 tanks (light, medium and heavy).

Russia faced an altogether more difficult challenge because after Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941 much of Russia’s defense industrial infrastructure was threatened.  Russia evacuated 1,500 factories either to the Ural Mountains or to Soviet Central Asia.  Even Lenin’s body was moved from Moscow to Tyumen, 2,500 km from Moscow.

Notably, Stalin Tank Factory 183 would be moved from Kharkiv, now a contested city in the Ukraine war, to the Urals, rebranded as Uralvagonzavod and situated in Nizhny Tagil. The facility had been a railroad car maker, so it was suitable for tank manufacturing. The tank factory relocation was managed by Isaac Zaltzman.

Originally published by Asia Times

AUTHOR

Stephen Bryen

Senior Fellow

EDITORS NOTE: This Center for Security Policy column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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New Museum Bears Witness to Communism’s Horrors, Honors Its Victims

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By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

In total, more than 100 million have been killed under communist regimes in the past 100 years.

In the heart of Washington, D.C., behind the doors of a building not unlike the others with which it shares a block, lies a most visceral testament to the horrors of communism—a political ideology still all too dominant in the world today.

The new museum, from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, has been in the works for many years. It opened to the public on Monday.

Entering it is like walking into a vault. Or possibly a tomb. Passing by a wall with large, embossed words reading, “REMEMBERING the victims of Communism,” the space quickly darkens and narrows.

Pictures and small video screens containing images of regimes and victims alike emblazon it, evoking a somber tone. Beyond those images, on a larger screen, a six-minute film lays out the rise of Vladimir Lenin and the Soviet Union as a communist power.

The room then funnels visitors into the world of the gulag. Here, there are artifacts from the notorious Soviet prison camps, physical remnants of the millions of Russians who passed through them. In one case sits a teddy bear and next to it a “valenki”—a felt boot that shod gulag prisoners.

There’s also a replica of “black bread,” an oblong, charcoal-colored loaf that gulag prisoners relied on for sustenance. Small measurements show how much of a loaf would be doled out as rations to each prisoner, depending on their docility or misbehavior.

From 1934 to 1947, an estimated 10 million were sent to the camps. Another estimate puts fatalities between 1.2 million and 1.7 million from 1918 to 1956.

An informational panel explains how Josef Stalin, the longest reigning leader of the Soviet Union, intentionally used a famine to starve more than 3 million Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. Some estimate the death toll reached 7 million.

In total, the museum estimates, more than 100 million have been killed under communist regimes in the past 100 years.

On one wall runs a film, a slideshow of simple, hand-drawn images depicting the hardship of life in gulags, prisons, and work camps from communist regimes around the world. The images were etched by the survivors. Testimonies of what other survivors witnessed while imprisoned are read aloud as the images scroll.

“Every case where [communism] has been tried, it leads to mass atrocities,” Ambassador Andrew Bremberg, the president and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told me. “Truly, the worst examples of human suffering in history in terms of the most brutal, mass-murdering regimes.”

A broader scope of the suffering is played out in the museum’s largest space. There, a film animates the history of communism’s spread across the globe, detailing which nations fell to it. In one corner, the number of fatalities under communism, as well as those subjugated by it, rolls ever upward.

Informational panels throughout the museum detail specific atrocities, such as Pol Pot’s genocide of the Cambodian people, which wiped out 25% of the population of the Southeast Asian nation, and Mao Zedong’s failure in collectivizing China’s agriculture, resulting in a famine that killed anywhere from 20 million to 43 million people.

Juxtaposed to those are stories—written out and accompanied by photographs—of resistance to communism, ranging from peaceful demonstrations to armed uprisings: the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968, and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 in Beijing, to name a few.

Bremberg said that the former two examples, while lesser known, are of equal importance to Tiananmen Square.

He also cited a statistic woven throughout the museum: 1.5 billion. That’s the estimated number of people still living under communism. The largest communist nation today is China, accounting for the vast majority of that number.

The Chinese Communist Party, which rules over the country, has subjugated more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims, an ethnic minority, to reeducation camps, forced sterilization and abortions, forced labor, and surveillance. It’s genocide on an industrial scale.

Last year, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation received a series of leaked internal documents belonging to the Chinese Communist Party. The findings offer damning evidence of its coordinated efforts against the Uyghurs. You can learn more about them here.

Several nations formerly under communist control, such as Poland, also have museums recounting their own stories of existence under communism. None, however, offer a singular snapshot of its global impact like the new one in Washington.

“There’s nothing like this in the world,” Bremberg said. “It’s extremely important to have this in our nation’s capital. We have millions of tourists, particularly school groups, that come through that really need to learn this, because communism is a horrible evil.”

Although research has shown that up to 1 in 3 millennials view communism favorably, Bremberg thinks it’s the failure to explain the legacy of the ideology—certainly not life under such an ideology—that has given it such an appeal.

“What we’re really trying to do is put the face of the victims of communism forward as a way of educating people,” Bremberg said. “You can draw a pretty obvious conclusion that this is a horrible system of government.”

“[It’s] the scourge of the 20th century, and unfortunately still with us in the 21st century,” he added. “If we want to prevent that from costing untold lives in the future, people need to learn about the crimes of communism … through the experience of its victims.”

Adjacent to the museum’s exit stands a wall visitors pass by before leaving. It’s covered in a patchwork of portraits—the faces of those who have fought back against communism.

Amid the portraits, there are two simple words: “Remember us.”

This piece was republished with permission from the Daily Signal.

AUTHOR

Philip Reynolds

Philip Reynolds is a digital specialist at The Heritage Foundation.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Strong Families Are Worth Defending

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By Thomas C. Patterson

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a landmark report in which he contended that the rising number of black families headed by unmarried mothers would reduce the prospects for Blacks to rise out of poverty, in spite of that era’s landmark civil rights legislation.

Moynihan was furiously denounced for his efforts. But he was proven right and he would be even more correct making the same observations today.

It’s been a tough half-century for families. Although Moynihan focused his concerns on Blacks, family breakdown correlates as much with income level as it does with race.

Because there are more low-income Blacks, more black children are raised by single mothers, but the overall percentage of births to unmarried women has gone from 5% in 1960 to 40% today. In 1970, 84% of US children spent their entire childhood with both biological parents. Today, about half do.

Partly because of the withering criticisms directed at Moynihan, the chattering classes have mostly avoided the issue of family deterioration, at least until recently. But the consequences have been enormous.

Harvard economist Raj Chetty analyzed the causes of income disparity and concluded that “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.“

In fact, there is scant evidence that race or racial discrimination causes the multiple economic and societal problems associated with family breakdown. Government spending doesn’t seem to have any effect, nor even does education explain the income gap. It is family status itself.

So what caused families, long our core civic institution and the means for passing on our values, to falter? There’s no easy answer, of course, but scholars note a sea change in our views of almost everything that began about the middle of the last century.

Especially in developed countries, people became more anti-authoritarian and more critical of traditional rules and roles. Views about sex outside of marriage, divorce, cohabitation, and single parenthood significantly changed.

It wasn’t all bad. Many of the changes extended civil rights and created a more fair society. But some of the “progress” has been tough on the kids.

For example, it’s not judgmental, just descriptive, to note that the increase in cohabitation has resulted in more unstable family structures.

Even with children, cohabiting couples break up faster and more often than married couples. Unmarried fathers are even less likely than divorced dads to form lasting bonds with their children. What may appear to be simply a matter of documentation can have a profound impact on the well-being of children.

Changing mores regarding sex before marriage has resulted in millions of young women bearing children for which they have made no financial or other preparations.

It’s not judging, it is the essence of caring for each of us to do a better job of informing these potential mothers of the catastrophic lifelong consequences of their casual decisions, both on themselves and the new life they are bringing into the world. We should also do a better job of making unwed fathers, many of whom openly boast about the children they are not raising, accountable for the consequences of their actions.

As Ronald Reagan might say, the government is not the solution to this problem. It is the problem. There’s no question that the Great Society welfare rules, requiring recipients to be unmarried and unemployed to qualify for benefits, led to countless women making the sensible decision to “marry the government“ rather than the uneducated, undependable father.

The government has also mortally harmed families by taking over many of their traditional functions, especially care of the young and the aged. Families traditionally stayed together to assure that those unable to provide for themselves would be sustained.

Today, it is assumed that the elderly are entitled to be cared for by the government. Some adults are known to simply walk away from their families because they don’t see the need.

We need sound strong families for all Americans, not only the wealthy and privileged. It would help if the government did less harm. But we need to do a better job of protecting and prioritizing our families, respecting the outsized role they play in making our country strong and our lives worthwhile.

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Pro-Abortion Protest Turns Violent: Lawmakers ‘Held Hostage’ In Arizona Capitol thumbnail

Pro-Abortion Protest Turns Violent: Lawmakers ‘Held Hostage’ In Arizona Capitol

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By The Daily Caller

Lawmakers were instructed not to exit the Arizona state capitol as protestors gathering outside the building created a “hostage” situation late Friday night into early Saturday morning.

“Violent anti-abortion protestors attempts of an insurrection at the Arizona State Senate were thwarted Friday night, thanks to the swift action from local and state law enforcement,” the Arizona State Senate said in a press release.

“Protesters threatened to break the AZ Senate entryway glass,” Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers tweeted.

Police used tear gas to disperse the protestors and regain control of the building, according to Fox News.

“We are currently there being held hostage inside the Senate building due to members of the public trying to breach our security,” State Senator Kelly Townsend wrote on Twitter. 

State Senator Warren Peterson said several of his fellow Senators were armed.

Feeling safe at the Capitol as I sit by 3 of my fellow senators who are armed. pic.twitter.com/N300F9JAVl

— Warren Petersen (@votewarren) June 25, 2022

One Senator compared the violence to the breach of the United States Capitol that occurred on January 6, 2021.

“I expect a J24 committee to be created immediately,” she said on Twitter.

“Extremist demonstrators made their way to the entrance of the Senate building and began forcibly trying to make entry by breaking down windows and pushing down doors,” according to the Arizona State Senate press release.

WATCH: Chaotic scenes during pro-choice rally at the Arizona Capitol, forcing the Senate to go into recess pic.twitter.com/9xk257UsJF

— BNN Newsroom (@BNNBreaking) June 25, 2022

According to the press release, the air circulation system in the building pulled the tear gas deployed on the demonstrators into the Senate chambers, preventing lawmakers from returning to the Senate floor.

“Senate proceedings were moved to another room in the building.”

Senate President Karen Fann thanked law enforcement for responding quickly to the situation.

“We are incredibly thankful for our local law enforcement who quickly intervened during what could have been a destructive and dangerous situation for our members, staff and public inside the Senate,” Fann said.

AUTHOR

SARAH WEAVER

Staff writer.

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Recap: Day one of the abortionist insurrection… pic.twitter.com/Y5YhvVAMIG

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Big Hedge Fund Citadel Moving From Chicago to Miami Following Democrat Crime Spike thumbnail

Big Hedge Fund Citadel Moving From Chicago to Miami Following Democrat Crime Spike

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By The Geller Report

Just last month Boeing announced that they are leaving Chicago as well. The radical mayor of Chicago refuses to take any action to keep her citizens safe. As such, we could be seeing the beginning of a corporate exodus from the iconic Windy City.

Ken Griffin Moving Citadel From Chicago to Miami Following Crime Complaints

By WSJ, June 23, 2022

Billionaire Ken Griffin is relocating his big hedge-fund firm Citadel from Chicago to Miami, the third major employer to announce  from Illinois in the past two months.

In a letter to employees Thursday, Mr. Griffin said he had personally moved to Florida—a state that doesn’t collect personal income tax—and that , Citadel Securities, would also transfer. He wrote that he views Florida as a better corporate environment and though he didn’t specifically cite crime as a factor, company officials said it was a consideration……

AUTHOR

Geller Report Staff

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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