Dems Smell Blood In The Water After Arizona Abortion Ruling. Republicans Are Scrambling To Respond thumbnail

Dems Smell Blood In The Water After Arizona Abortion Ruling. Republicans Are Scrambling To Respond

By Mary Lou Masters

Editors’ Note:  We think the authors are spot on. Abortion is a big issue for Arizona and we have offered our own take that we think is helpful in thinking about the matter. We don’t think the compromise we suggest will satisfy all, but that is the difference between the political realm and the spiritual realm. What is clear to us is that those who support life have a lot more to lose if there is a thundering Democrat victory. Not only will it set back the immediate cause for life, but it will allow the radical Democrats to re-define the family, sex, and impose the transgender agenda on our school children. For those urban women moved by the abortion issue, we have to make it clear how threatening the Democrats are to women. What after all, do women’s rights mean if you define women out of existence? A Democrat victory will attack school choice and parental rights, as well as bankrupt the nation’s finances. A Democrat victory will shred women’s competitiveness in sports and make Title IX advances an historical footnote. All women should be concerned about those issues. We should offer a reasonable compromise, similar to that offered by Governor Ducey, and make the other side look like the unyielding extremists that they are.

On April 9, the Arizona Supreme Court allowed an 1864 law to be enforced that effectively restricted abortion in all cases except when the life of the mother is in danger. The decision has supercharged the issue of abortion amid an already-contentious election year, forcing Republicans running in the battleground state to address not only the ruling, but the legal status of abortion itself.

Conversations with strategists and campaigns reveal that many Republicans are acutely aware of the impact the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling could have on races up and down the ballot. However, there is no consensus on how to approach the issue.

Meanwhile, with a constitutional amendment to establish a right to abortion likely to be on the ballot, Arizona has become a focal point for Democrats.

President Joe Biden’s campaign launched a seven-figure Arizona ad buy just two days after the decision, targeting young, female, and Hispanic voters; House Democrats’ campaign arm fired off attacks on incumbent Republican members of Congress; and Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Democratic Senate candidate, debuted a digital ad hitting Republican candidate Kari Lake for past abortion comments.

The ruling and abortion ballot measure are also expected to boost Democratic voter turnout; nonpartisan elections analyst Sabato’s Crystal Ball shifted key races in Arizona to more competitive categories, explaining that “we can’t imagine a major ballot fight over abortion rights would hurt Democratic turnout efforts in the state, and it very well could help.”

“I really think that the Supreme Court’s decision upends Arizona’s elections, and you have to almost re-evaluate every race up and down the ballot,” Barrett Marson, an Arizona-based Republican strategist, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Yet Republicans so far have been mixed in their responses.

The DCNF reached out to all major Republican campaigns in the state, as well as the House and Senate GOP campaign arms and major fundraising vehicles, to gauge Republicans’ strategy.

Some groups and campaigns have acknowledged that the ruling could potentially galvanize Democratic turnout and attract donor funding, stressing the need to spend funds accordingly.

“We are fighting back, and we will be running an aggressive, grassroots campaign to protect our state from the radical left,” a spokesperson for the Arizona Republican Party told the DCNF.

Others, meanwhile, are less concerned, arguing that the ruling does little to change the ballot’s dynamic.

“Democrats are already going to turn out; like, Donald Trump’s on the ballot,” one national Republican strategist told the DCNF.

Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, re-emphasized Trump’s recent abortion stance, in which the former president came out against a national ban and argued in favor of leaving the issues to the states, in a statement to the DCNF, but didn’t answer specific questions related to actions the campaign might take.

“President Trump could not have been more clear. These are decisions for people of each state to make,” Leavitt said.

Trump also came out against the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision for going “too far” in a Truth Social post on April 12, and called on the state legislature and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to quickly “remedy what has happened.”

Nevertheless, Biden’s ad blitz took aim at Trump’s abortion stance. “Because of Donald Trump, millions of women lost the fundamental freedom to control their own bodies,” Biden says in the video, referencing the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 with the help of Trump-appointed justices. “Women’s lives are in danger because of that.”

Gallego has also sought to bring attention to the abortion issue since the ruling, running an ad that calls Lake “wrong on abortion,” “wrong for the Senate” and “wrong for Arizona.”

For her part, Lake has come out against the state Supreme Court’s decision, calling for a “common sense solution.” She also announced her support for Trump’s abortion position on April 8, and subsequently released a policy video on the issue.

“I chose life, but I’m not every woman. I want to make sure that every woman who finds herself pregnant has more choices so that she can make that choice that I made,” Lake said in the video. “I never would ever assume that any woman had the same exact feelings I had or situation I had. We know that some women are economically in a horrible situation, they might be in an abusive relationship, they might be the victim of rape.”

“Republicans need to talk about what they believe on the abortion issue. Like, they have to. And I think Kari Lake’s doing a pretty good job of that,” the national Republican strategist said.

Lake’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Tate Mitchell, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), told the DCNF that “Arizona is one of our top pick-up opportunities this year, and we will continue working to elect Kari Lake and defeat open-borders, far-left radical Ruben Gallego.”

The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), a super PAC boosting Senate Republicans, emphasized to the DCNF that the only spending decisions they’ve made are in Montana and Ohio. SLF pointed the DCNF toward a June 2023 polling memo released by its affiliated nonprofit, One Nation, encouraging Republicans to make their position on abortion clear.

Another national GOP strategist told the DCNF that “national Republicans are still planning to invest heavily in television ads and ground game in Arizona.”

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee (RNC) referred the DCNF toward Trump’s Truth Social post criticizing the state Supreme Court’s decision, as well as an April 10 campaign press release calling Biden’s attacks on the former president over abortion “dishonest.” The RNC did not provide further details on its efforts to combat Democrats’ spending in the state.

On the House front, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is targeting the districts of Reps. David Schweikert and Juan Ciscomani.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball also moved Ciscomani’s seat from “Leans Republican” to “Toss-Up” on Wednesday.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm, did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment; neither did the campaigns for Schweikert and Ciscomani.

The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a super PAC boosting House Republicans, said it spent nearly $1 million for Schweikert’s race in the 2022 midterms, as well as over $3 million for Ciscomani.

“CLF was proud to support Schweikert and Ciscomani last cycle, and we are prepared to do what it takes to help these talented Members win again this fall,” Courtney Parella, communications director for CLF, told the DCNF in a statement.

‘Decided By Arizonans’

Arizona Republicans are similarly divided on what should be the legal status of abortion itself.

For instance, Republicans in the Arizona state legislature have twice blocked efforts to repeal the 1864 law after the state Supreme Court’s ruling.

“From a messaging standpoint, [the ruling] makes it a lot more difficult on Republicans, and I think in some of the swing congressional races and legislative races, it’s just gonna make this an issue for the foreseeable future unless the legislature can figure a way out,” Brian Murray, former Arizona Republican Party executive director, told the DCNF.

Lawmakers who blocked the law’s repeal, as well as the state Freedom Caucus, have expressed support for the decision, while Schweikert and Ciscomani, like Lake, have opposed it.

“This issue should be decided by Arizonans, not legislated from the bench,” Schweikert wrote on April 9. “I encourage the state legislature to address this issue immediately.”

“The territorial law is archaic,” Ciscomani said the same day. “We must do better for women and I call on our state policymakers to immediately address this in a bipartisan manner.”

The opposition from prominent Republicans to the Arizona Supreme Court’s abortion ruling could mitigate Democrats’ turnout boost, according to polling analyst Jon McHenry.

“Typically where there’s been something on the ballot, it has helped Democrats — there’s kind of no way around it. The Arizona situation is going to be an interesting case, because you have so many high profile Republicans saying that this really went too far,” said McHenry. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens with turnout when you have Republicans, essentially on the same side, saying, ‘we need to repeal this.’”

Nevertheless, the congressmen’s Democratic opponents have launched salvos against them over abortion, while the House Democratic campaign arm charged that Schweikert and Ciscomani are “backpedaling on their stance on abortion,” adding that “Arizona voters will remember that they remain hell-bent on controlling women and dragging this country backwards.”

The DCCC launched a mobile billboard in Schweikert’s district targeting the Republican over his voting record on in-vitro fertilization, The Copper Courier reported on April 11.

The Arizona GOP has yet to release a statement on the ruling, while the state Democratic Party has launched numerous attacks against Lake, Ciscomani and Schweikert over the issue.

‘Tough Year For Republicans’

Arizona’s importance in the presidential election between Trump and Biden, as well as the relatively narrow margins of victory in past Senate races, make correct handling of the abortion issue all the more important to the GOP. The state’s presidential, Senate and congressional races may be decided by just a few thousand votes this cycle, meaning that potentially increased Democratic turnout is particularly significant.

“This is going to be a tough year for Republicans in Arizona in a year that should be good. I mean, Joe Biden has a lot of headwinds here in Arizona,” Marson said. “[Before the ruling], I would have said that Arizona is a lean-Trump state … And today? I would say that Arizona is a lean-Biden state.” (RELATED: Elections Analysis Delivers Bad News For Arizona Republicans Following Landmark Abortion Ruling)

Trump narrowly won Arizona in 2016, but lost the state to Biden in 2020 by fewer than 11,000 votes.

Yet Trump has led Biden in the RealClearPolitics average for Arizona all cycle, and is currently up by 4.5 points, with Democrats hoping the abortion issue will help cut into Trump’s lead as election day approaches.

Abortion played a significant role in motivating Democratic voters during the 2022 midterms following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, according to a KFF/AP VoteCast analysis.

However, in a presidential election year, this effect may not be as strong.

“A presidential race is going to have literally armies of get-out-the-vote workers,” Murray told the DCNF. “If you don’t vote this time, or didn’t the last time, it’s because you really didn’t want to. So I don’t think you can get turnout much higher than it’s gonna be.”

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster for Biden’s 2020 campaign, told the DCNF that the state Supreme Court’s ruling “keeps the issue alive not just in Arizona, but everywhere.”

“It helps the Senate race, it helps the presidential, it helps with turnout, it helps with persuasion of suburban women in Phoenix and Tucson. So it’s very, very positive for winning the state, as well as the initiative in the state,” said Lake. “This is the big difference post-Dobbs — where the pro-abortion side is more energized than the anti-abortion side, and they’re bigger.”

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

“The Most Secure Election in American History”

By John Eastman

Editors’ Note:  Normally, we would not run an article of this length, but there are such rich veins of information to be mined here, that we think it is necessary. We have run the summary and the complete text. 2020 election interference has clearly been established, in our view. The collusion between intelligence agencies, the Democrat Party, and the media has been well established. Election fraud is less so, mostly because courts refuse to allow trials for technical reasons, and thus evidence under oath has been hard to obtain. We think Professor Eastman has done a great service by compiling data on many pivotal states that show illegality has occurred. Not surprisingly, that is why the powers that be want him destroyed.

I would like to discuss some of the illegalities that occurred in the 2020 election and the proposed constitutional remedies that we thought we could advance.

I would also like to discuss the lawfare that is sweeping across the country and destroying not just the people that were involved in those efforts, but the very notion of our adversarial system of justice.

This fight and the dangers from it are much bigger than what I am dealing with personally, or what the hundred or so Trump lawyers who have been targeted in this new lawfare effort are dealing with. It seems that there is something similar going on here, albeit to a much less lethal degree, than what we are seeing with the October 7th attack on Israel, as that, too, was an attack on the rule of law.

The international community that will condemn Israel’s just response to these unjust attacks demonstrates a bias in the application of the rule of law that is very similar to what we are dealing with here.

These are not isolated instances. They go to the root of the rejection of the rule of law. One of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, gave a speech, the Lyceum Address, in 1838 talking about the importance of the rule of law.

When there are unjust laws, you have to be careful about refusing to comply with them because what you may lose in the process – the rule of law itself — is of greater consequence. He was not categorical about that, however, because the example he gave was of our nation’s founders and their commitment to the rule of law.

But think about that for a minute. What did our founders do? They committed an act of treason by signing the Declaration of Independence. They recognized at some point you have to take on the established regime when it is not only unjust, but when there is no lawful way to get it back on track. These matters frame our own nation in our own time.

Let us start with the 2020 election. What do we see and how did I get involved in this?

When President Trump, then candidate Trump, walked down that famous escalator at Trump Tower, one of the planks in his campaign platform was that we need to fix this problem of birthright citizenship. People who are just visiting here or are here illegally ought not to be able to provide automatic citizenship to their children. People laughed at him for not understanding the Constitution.

In his next press conference, he waved a law review article, and said there is a very serious argument that our Constitution does not mandate birthright citizenship for people who are only here temporarily or who are here illegally. That happened to be my law review article on birthright citizenship.

Then, during the Mueller investigation, I appeared for an hour on Mark Levin’s television show and said the whole Russia collusion story (which Trump rightly called the Russia “hoax”) was illegitimate – completely made up. President Trump thought that my analysis was pretty good, and invited me to the White House for a visit.

When the major law firms were backing out of taking on any of the election challenges, President Trump called me and asked if I would be interested. Texas had just filed its original action in the Supreme Court against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan — four swing states whose election officers had clearly violated election law in those states and with an impact that put Biden over the top in all four.

Two days later, I filed the motion to intervene in the Supreme Court in that action. The Supreme Court rules require the lawyer on the brief to have their name, address, email address and phone number.

Nobody in the country at that point really knew who Trump’s legal team was, but all of a sudden people had a lawyer and an email address. I became the recipient of every claim, every allegation, crazy or not, that existed anywhere in the world about what had happened in the election. It was like drinking from a fire hose.

I received communications from some of the best statisticians in the world who were working with election data and who told me there was something very wrong with the reported election results, according to multiple statistical analyses.

One group decided to do a counter-statistical analysis. They said the statisticians had misapplied Stan Young’s path-breaking work. Unbeknownst to them, one of the statisticians I was relying on was Stan Young himself.

Did you ever see the movie Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School”? He has to write an essay for English class, the essay has to be on Kurt Vonnegut’s thinking, so he hires Kurt Vonnegut to write the essay for him.

The professor fails him. Not because it was not his own work – the professor hadn’t figured that out — but because, in the professor’s view, the work that Dangerfield turned in was not what Kurt Vonnegut would ever say. That is what I felt like with this supposed critique of the statistical work my experts were conducting.

Those were the kinds of things we were dealing with. I became something of a focal point for all this information. The allegations of illegality were particularly significant. I’ll just go through a couple of states and a couple of examples:

In Georgia, the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, signed a settlement agreement in March of 2020 in a suit that was filed by the Democratic Committee that essentially obliterated the signature verification process in Georgia. It made it virtually impossible to disqualify any ballots no matter how unlike the signature on the ballot was to the signature in the registration file.

The most troubling aspect of it, to me, was that the law required that the signature match the registration signature. Secretary Raffensperger’s settlement agreement required three people to unanimously agree that the signature did not match, and it had to be a Democrat, a Republican and somebody else, so you were never going to get the unanimous agreement. That means no signature was ever going to get disqualified – and in Fulton County, election officials did not even bother conducting signature verification

Even more important than the difficulty of disqualifying obviously falsified signatures was that, under the settlement agreement, the signature would be deemed valid if it matched either the registration signature or the signature on the ballot application itself. That means that if someone fraudulently signed and submitted an application for an absentee ballot and then voted that ballot after fraudulently directing it to a different address than the real voter’s address, the signature on the ballot would match the signature on the absentee ballot application and, voila, the fraudulent ballot would be deemed legal..

How do we know that went on? Well, we had anecdotal stories. A co-ed at Georgia Tech University, if I recall correctly, testified before Senator Ligon’s Committee in the Georgia Senate. She said she went to vote in person with her 18-year-old sister. They were going to make a big deal about going to vote in person because the 18-year-old sister was voting for the first time. They did not want to vote by mail. They wanted to make an event out of it, get a sticker, “I voted,” and all that stuff. They get down to the precinct and the 22-year-old is told that she has already voted. They said she had applied for an absentee ballot.

“No, I didn’t,” she said. “Oh, Deary,” they said, “you must have forgotten.” Very patronizing. “No, I didn’t forget.,” she said. “We have been looking forward to this for months. I know I did not apply for an absentee ballot.”

They subsequently found out that somebody had applied for an absentee ballot in her name, had it mailed to a third-party address, not an address she knew. She never recognized it, didn’t understand it, and then she testified that she later learned that the fraudulent ballot was voted.

We had that kind of anecdotal evidence to prove that this change in the signature rules that Secretary Brad Raffensperger signed on to had actually resulted in fraud. The disqualification rates statewide, because of this change in the law, went down by about 46%.

Why is the change in the rules through a settlement agreement a problem? Article II of our Constitution, the Federal Constitution, quite clearly gives the sole power to direct the manner for choosing presidential electors to the legislature of the State.

When Brad Raffensperger, who is not part of the legislature, unilaterally changed the rule from what the legislature had adopted by statute, that change was unconstitutional, not just illegal.

Another alteration of the rules set out by the legislature occurred in Fulton County. Election officials there ran portable voting machines in heavily Democrat areas of Atlanta, which was contrary to state law.

Pennsylvania. One of my favorite cases comes out of Pennsylvania. The League of Women Voters, which claims to be non-partisan but is clearly anything but, filed what I believe was a collusive lawsuit against the Democrat Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Kathy Boockvar, in August of 2020.

The premise of the suit was that the signature verification requirement that election officials had been applying in Pennsylvania for a century violated the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment because voters whose ballots were disqualified were not given notice of the disqualification and an opportunity to cure the problem.

The premise of the lawsuit was that there was a signature verification process but that it violated federal Due Process rights. The remedy the League of Women Voters sought was to have the court mandate a notice and opportunity to cure requirement.

The Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania decided to resolve the lawsuit by providing something the League had not even requested. She decided, on her own, that Pennsylvania did not really have a signature verification requirement at all, so the requested relief – notice and opportunity to cure – would not be necessary.

Unilaterally, she got rid of a statute that election officials in Pennsylvania had been applying for 100 years to require signature verification. She then asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to approve what she had done.

She filed what was called a Petition for a King’s Bench Warrant to ratify what she had done. If I ever bump into her, I’m going to say, “You know, you have not had a king in Pennsylvania since 1776, maybe you ought to change the name of that.”

The partisan elected Pennsylvania Supreme Court obliged. Not only is there no signature verification requirement in Pennsylvania, the Court held, but all those statutes that describe how election officials are supposed to do signature verification are just relics; they really do not have any meaning. So the Democrat majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, at the urging of the Democrat Secretary of the Commonwealth, just got rid of the whole signature verification process.

Then the court went on to say: And since there is no signature verification requirement, there is no basis on which anybody would be able to challenge ballots, so we are going to get rid of the challenge parts of the election statutes as well, and since there is no basis to challenge, the statute that requires people to be in the room while things are being counted, that really does not matter. It does not have to be meaningful observation. Being at the front door of the football field-sized Philadelphia Convention Center was sufficient even though it was impossible to actually observe the counting of ballots.

The statute actually requires that observers be “in the room,” but it was written at a time when canvassing of ballots would occur in small settings, like the common room of the local library, where being “in the room” meant meaningful observation of the ballot counting process. Obliterating the very purpose of the statute, the court held that being “in the room” at the entrance of the Philadelphia Convention Center was sufficient.

In other words, all of the statutory provisions that were designed to protect against fraud were obliterated in Pennsylvania. We ought not to be surprised if fraud walked through the door left open by the unconstitutional elimination of these statutes.

To this day, there are 120,000 more votes that were cast in Pennsylvania than their records show voters who have cast votes. Think about that: 120,000 more votes than voters who cast votes. The margin in Pennsylvania was 80,000.

Wisconsin. One of the people who has testified for me in my California bar proceedings was Justice Mike Gableman, former Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He was hired by the Wisconsin legislature to conduct an investigation.

His investigation efforts were thwarted at every turn, with the Secretary of State and others refusing to comply with subpoenas, etc. Nevertheless, he uncovered an amazing amount of illegality and fraud in the election. For example, the county clerks in Milwaukee and Madison had directed people that they could claim “indefinitely confined” status if they were merely afraid of COVID.

That is clearly not permitted under the statute, but voters who followed the county clerks’ directive and falsely claimed they were “indefinitely confined” did not have to submit an ID with their absentee ballot as the law required — again, opening the door for fraud.

Although the Wisconsin courts held that the advice was illegal and ordered it to be withdrawn, the number of people claiming they were indefinitely confined went from about 50,000 in 2016 to more than a quarter of million in 2020. The illegal advice provided by those two county clerks in heavily Democrat counties clearly had an impact.

Election officials in heavily Democrat counties also set up drop boxes. They even set up what they called “human drop boxes” in Madison, which is the home of the University of Wisconsin. For two or three consecutive Saturdays before the election, they basically ran a ballot harvesting scheme at taxpayer expense with volunteers – whom I suspect were actually supporters of the Biden campaign — working as “deputized” county clerks to go collect all these ballots, in violation of state law.

How do I know it is a violation of the state law? The Wisconsin Supreme Court after the fact agreed with us that it was a violation of state law.

One last piece. Wisconsin law is very clear. If you’re going to vote absentee, you have to have a witness sign a separate under-oath certification that the person who is voting that ballot is who they say they are.

The witness has to fill out their name and address and sign it, under penalty of perjury. A lot of these came in with the witness signatures, but the address not filled in. The county clerks were directed by the Secretary of State to fill the information in on their own. In other words, they were doctoring the evidence.

They were doing Google searches to get the name, to fill in an address to validate ballots that were clearly illegal under Wisconsin law. All told, those couple of things combined, more than 200,000 ballots were affected in a state where the margin victory was just over 20,000.

Then in Michigan, we had similar things going on. We probably all saw the video of election officials boarding up the canvassing center at TCF Center in Detroit so that people could not observe what was going on. There were hundreds of sworn affidavits about illegality in the conduct of that process in Detroit.

Then there was one affidavit on the other side submitted by an election official who was responsible for legally managing the election. He said, basically, that everything was fine, it was all perfect.

The judge, without holding a hearing on a motion to dismiss, at which the allegations of the complaint are supposed to be taken as true, rejected all the sworn affidavits from all the witnesses who actually observed the illegality, and instead credited the government affidavit – without the government witness evening being subject to questioning on cross-examination.

This is a manifestation of what I have described as the increasingly Orwellian tendency of our government. “We’re the government and when we’ve spoken, you’re just supposed to bend the knee and listen.”

That was just some of the evidence we had. In those four states, and in Arizona and Nevada as well, there is no question that the illegality that occurred affected way more ballots than the certified margin of Joe Biden’s victory in all of those states.

It only took three of those six states — any combination of three — for Trump to have won the election.

When I was coming out of the Georgia jailhouse after surrendering myself for the indictment down in Georgia, one of the reporters threw a question at me. He said, “Do you still believe the election was stolen?”

I said, “Absolutely. I have no doubt in my mind,” because of things like this and because of the Gableman report, because of Dinesh D’Souza’s book on 2000 Mules — that stuff is true.

People say, “Well, it’s not true. It’s been debunked.” No, it has not been debunked. In fact, there have been criminal convictions down in Pima County, Arizona, from the 2018 election, where people finally got caught doing the same thing that Dinesh D’Souza said they were doing.

Dinesh’s documentary was based on the investigative work conducted by Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote. Her team obtained, at great expense, commercially-available cell phone location data and identified hundreds of people who visited multiple ballot drop boxes, oftentimes in the wee hours of the morning, 10 or more different drop boxes. Then they got the video surveillance from those drop boxes (those that were actually working, that is), confirming that the people were dropping in 8, 10, 12 ballots at a time.

In Georgia, you are allowed to drop off ballots for immediate family members, but I think it is fairly clear that these folks – “mules” is what the documentary called them – were not family members. They were taking selfies of themselves in front of the ballot boxes because, as the whistleblower noted to Engelbrecht, they were getting paid for each ballot they delivered. In other words, this certainly looks like an illegal ballot harvesting scheme.

What has happened since then? Well, there is a group in DC, largely hard-liner partisan Democrats, Hillary and Bill Clinton crowd, but joined by a couple of hard-line never-Trump Republicans, or one, so they can claim they are bipartisan. The group is called The 65 Project, and it is named after the 65 cases brought by Trump’s team that supposedly all ruled against Trump.

Well, first of all, that mantra, how many have heard it?: “All the cases, all the courts ruled against Trump.” First of all, that is not true. Most of the cases were rejected on very technical jurisdictional grounds, like a case brought by a voter, rather than the candidate himself.

Individual voters do not have standing because they lack a particularized injury. Those were dismissed. There is no basis for claiming that there was anything wrong with the claims on the merits. It is just that the cases were not brought by the right people.

There was one case where one of these illegal guidances from the Secretary of State was challenged before the election. The judge ruled that it was just a guidance, and that until we get to election day to find out if the law was actually violated, the case was not ripe — and it got dismissed.

Then the day after the election, when election officials actually violated the law, the case gets filed again, and the court says, “You can’t wait until your guy loses and then bring the election challenge. It’s barred by a doctrine called laches. This is the kind of stuff that the Trump legal team was dealing with in those 65 cases.

Of the cases that actually reached the merits –there were fewer than a dozen of them, if I recall correctly — Trump won three-fourths of them. You have never heard that in the “New York Times.” And the Courts simply refused to hear some clearly meritorious cases, such as one filed in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The majority in that case simply noted that it did not see any need to hear the case, over a vigorous dissent that basically said, “Are you nuts? This was illegal, and we have a duty to hear the challenge.”

Two years later, that same Court took up the issues that had been presented to it in December 2020, and it held that what happened was illegal. But by then it was too late to do anything about it.

The 65 Project was formed — I think I’ve seen reported that they received a grant from a couple of George Soros-related organizations of $100 million — to bring disbarment actions against all of the lawyers who were involved in any of those cases.

The head of the organization gave an interview to Axios, kind of a left-leaning Internet news outlet, and he said in his interview to Axios that the group’s goal with respect to the Trump election lawyers is to “not only bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame them and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms” “in order to deter right-wing legal talent from signing on to any future GOP efforts” to challenge elections.

Think about that. Our system works, in part, because we have an adversarial system of justice that supports it. If groups like the 65 Project succeed in scaring off one side of these intense policy disputes or legal disputes, then we will not have an adversarial system of justice.

We will not have elections that we can have any faith in, because if you do not have that kind of judicial check on illegality in the election, then bad actors will just do the illegality whenever they want, and we won’t be able to do anything about it.

They are not the group that brought the bar charges against me in California, but they did file a complaint against me in the Supreme Court of the United States. A parallel group called the States United Democracy Center is the one that filed the bar complaint against me in California. Nearly every single paragraph of the complaint had false statements in it.

The bar lawyers publicly announced back in March of 2022 that they were taking on the investigation. Under California law, investigations before charges are filed publicly are supposed to be confidential. But there is an exception if the bar deems that the lawyer being investigated is a threat to the public.

So the head of the California Bar had a press conference announcing that I was a threat to the public, and therefore they could disclose that they were conducting an investigation. Now, what is the threat to the public that I pose? What is the old line? Telling truth in an era of universal deceit is a revolutionary act? I guess that is the threat to the public they’re asserting.

That is the threat to the public. Telling the truth about what went on in the 2020 election. They gave me the most extraordinary demand. They basically said we want to know every bit of information you had at your disposal for every statement you made on the radio, for every article you published, for every line in every brief you filed. It took us four months.

I said, “We’re going to respond to this very comprehensively.” They say I have no evidence of election illegality and fraud. We gave them roughly 100,000 pages of evidence. 100,000 pages we disclosed to them. They went ahead and filed the bar charges anyway against us in January of 2023.

My wife and I, since 2021, have been on quite a roller coaster.

We came to the realization that my whole career, my education in Claremont, my PhD, my teaching constitutional law for 20 years, my being a dean, my being a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, probably equipped me better than almost anybody else in the country to be able to confront, stand up against this lawfare that we’re dealing with.

This is our mission now. This is what we do. This is what I do around the clock, is deal with this.

I was teaching our summer seminar at the Claremont Institute. We do a series of summer seminars, one for recent college grads called the Publius Fellowship Program.

You may recognize some of the names of people that have gone through Publius. I was a Publius Fellow in 1984. Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, Tom Cotton, Kate Mizelle (the judge who blocked the vaccine mandates down in Florida). We’ve had some pretty good folks.

We also conduct a program for recent law school grads called the John Marshall Fellowship. We were conducting a seminar on the Constitution’s religion clauses when the news of the Georgia indictment naming me as an indicted co-conspirator came down. We kept going on with the seminar. At the end of the program, the fellows always roast each other and make fun of each other, missteps they’d made during the week and things like that.

Well, this year, they roasted me a bit. One of the students noted that as FBI agents were rappelling down from the rooftop, Eastman kept talking about the Constitution’s religion clauses.

He recounted that, prior to the program, the students didn’t know what to expect when they accepted the fellowship offer to study with me (among others), given all that was going on. Then he said that what they witnessed on that night, when the indictment came down, was a demonstration of courage they had not seen before, and that it was contagious. He then recited a line from our national anthem – the one asking whether the flag was still flying. And he noted, with great insight, that if you listen carefully to the words, the question is not so much whether the flag still flies, but what kind of land it flies over? Is it still the land of the free and the home of the brave, or the land of the coward and the home of the slave?

I find more and more, as more Americans are waking up to what is going on, that courage is indeed contagious. People are looking for ways to help fight back. When they see somebody standing up with that kind of courage, it gives them courage to join.

There are people in every county in the country, with eyes on the local clerk’s office and verifying that, “When it says 28 people are living and voting in an efficiency apartment, we know that is not true and we’re going to get that cleaned up.”

I remain optimistic as people are awakening to the threat to our way of life. This is one of the cornerstones of our Declaration of Independence. We are all created equal. There are certain corollaries that flow from that.

This means that nobody has the right to govern others without their consent. The consent of the governed is one of the cornerstones of our system of government. Our forefathers exercised it in 1776 by choosing to declare independence, and 10 years later by choosing to ratify a constitution, and we exercise that consent of the governed principle in an ongoing way by how we conduct our elections.

Ultimately, we are the sovereign authority that tells the government which direction we want it to go, not the other way around.

Regularly, we are instead being given the following message: “We’re the government. We have spoken. How dare you stand up and offer a different view.” That has turned us from being sovereign citizens in charge of the government to subjects being owned by or run by the government.

That is not the kind of country I intend to live in. It is not the kind of country I want my kids and now my grandchildren to grow up in. This is a fight worth everything you’ve got. That’s why we’re going to do as much as we can to win this fight. Thank you for your support and prayers.

* * *

Question: What happened after the 2020 election with Justices Thomas and Alito. They wanted the Supreme Court at least to hear the evidence, but were turned down. Why?

Dr. Eastman: One of the cases that was up there was one of the other illegalities that occurred in Pennsylvania. The Secretary of State unilaterally altered the statutory deadline for the return of ballots.

Pennsylvania, like most states, says, “If you’re going to mail in your ballot, it’s got to be received by the close of the poll so we’re not having this gamesmanship of being able to get ballots in after the fact.” She said, “Oh, we’re going to give an extra week.” The court said, “No, we’ll give an extra four days.”

That case was brought to the Supreme Court to block that clearly illegal action by the Secretary of the Commonwealth, agreed to by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. They asked for an emergency stay of that decision so the rule that had been in place would still be followed.

Ruth Ginsburg had died, there were eight people, and the court split four to four, which means the stay was denied. You had to have a majority. It was Thomas, it was Alito, it was Gorsuch, and it was Kavanaugh. John Roberts voted with the three liberals. Then when Amy Coney Barrett joined the court, I thought, “OK, we’ll get to five.”

When a motion to expedite in my case was filed in mid-December, we filed a cert petition from three of the erroneous Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases, we filed a motion to expedite, and that was denied. They didn’t even act on it.

Then February 12th of 2021, they denied the cert petition and the motion to expedite. The vote there was six to three on the ground that it had become moot. That meant Barrett and Roberts and Kavanaugh all voted to deny the cert petition. But it had not become moot.

The issue of whether non-legislative actors in the state can alter election law consistent with the Constitution remains an open issue. It should not be an open issue. The Constitution is quite clear, but there was a news account at one point reporting that John Roberts had yelled at Alito and Thomas, who had insisted they needed to take these cases. They were just like Bush versus Gore.

Roberts was reported to have said, “They’re not like Bush versus Gore. If we do anything, they will burn down our cities.” Which means the impact of what had gone on in the summer of 2020 in Portland and Kenosha and all these other places, had an impact on the Supreme Court declining to take these cases.

By the way, a little aside on that story to show you how distorted the January 6th committee, and particularly Liz Cheney was on the evidence.

At some point during the course of all this, the legislator in Pennsylvania who was conducting hearings on the election illegality in Pennsylvania wanted my advice on what the legislative authority was if they found that there was outcome determinative illegality or fraud in the election.

He sent an email to me at my email address at the University of Colorado, where my wife and I were teaching at the time.

I responded, “If there is clear evidence of illegality, that’s unconstitutional, and so you have the legal right, the legal constitutional authority to do something about it. If you think it altered the effect of the election, you should name your own electors.”

University of Colorado, contrary to their policy, disclosed that email publicly. Liz Cheney announced the email, said Eastman was pressuring the Pennsylvanian legislature to overturn the election, even though it was quite clear that my statement about legislative authority was specifically conditioned on a finding of illegality and fraud sufficient to have affected the outcome of the election.

The other gross distortion that came out of the J6 Committee involved an email exchange I had about whether to appeal the Wisconsin case to the Supreme Court. The campaign staff, money guys in the campaign said, “We’re trying to be good stewards of the funds we have. What are the chances that they’re going to take these cases? Is it worth filing these cert petitions?”

I wrote in the email, “The legal issues are rock solid. It therefore doesn’t turn on the merits of the case. It turns on whether the justices have the spine to take this on. Then I said, “And I understand that there is a heated fight underway and whether they should take these cases. We ought to give the good guys the ammunition they need to wage that fight.”

Liz Cheney or someone on the J6 Committee puts out a portion of this email. They ignore that I say the legal issues are rock solid. They say instead that Eastman, knowing his case had no merit, was pressuring the Supreme Court to take the case and obviously had inside information from Ginni Thomas, because three weeks earlier, Ginni had sent me a note saying, “I heard you on Larry O’Connor’s show giving an update on the election litigation. Can you give that same update to my Zoom call group? By the way, what’s your home address? I need it for the Christmas card.”

That was the email. All of a sudden, Liz Cheney and the J6 Committee puts those two things together as if there was something nefarious about it.

My understanding that there is an intense fight underway at the Court was based exclusively on the news accounts in The New York Times about Roberts yelling at Alito for insisting that the Court needed to take these cases. The dishonesty, the combination of the dishonesty, the whole thing, this narrative is out there and it is the government narrative.

No matter how false the narrative is, we are supposed to just accept it or bend our knees. “It’s like, the government says, ‘We’ve increased your funds this year from four to three,’” and we’re just all supposed to accept it. This is lawfare, but it is support of totalitarianism, of authoritarianism.

The government has spoken, and we are all supposed to accept it as true, no matter how obviously false it is. I’m sorry, free people should not and never have and never will if they continue to be a free people tolerate that kind of thing.

Q: I have two questions. One, when Raffensperger did that in Georgia, was it expressly to defeat Donald Trump? Do you think he knew what the ramification of that ruling was going to be? The second thing is, in this upcoming trial, is there an opportunity to lay out publicly for a jury?

Is this a jury situation, the talk you just gave us? Because there has to be a moment where people pay attention to this, and so far it has not happened.

Dr. Eastman: So far it has not come, I agree. I mean, it has come, but in ways that are immediately shut down. We are laying out the case now in my California bar trial, which next week enters its eighth week. My defense of my California bar license will have cost us a half million dollars before all is said and done.

Being a full trial team for eight weeks, it’s gone on. It is insane, but we are laying out the case to the extent the judge permits. She has already blocked about a dozen of my witnesses, but I’ll tell you some of the stories. We have a guy named Joseph Freed, retired CPA, professional auditor, auditing Fortune 500 companies his whole career.

He said something doesn’t smell right here, and so he applied his tools of the trade to look at the elections and wrote a book called “Debunked.” It’s a brilliant book. I told my wife, “This is the book I would have written if I hadn’t been on my heels playing defense the last year.”

The book was written and published in January of 2023, so the judge ruled it was not relevant because even though it discusses all the evidence I had before me, the analysis he did was after the fact and I could not have relied on it, therefore it was not relevant.

Two days later, the government offers a witness to introduce into evidence government reports that were done in September 2022. My lawyer objected, “It’s not relevant on your prior ruling.” The lawyer for the bar actually said, “Well, these are government reports. They are different.” So the judge let them in.

Part of the problem is, trying to prevent the story from getting out, even in a trial where the rules of evidence are supposed to come to play. I don’t think they’ll be able to get away with that in the Georgia criminal litigation.

This full story probably will come out more clearly there and it will have a bigger viewership there than my California bar trial has had because Trump is one of the defendants. The California bar trial is exposing a lot of this.

A reporter for the “Arizona Sun,” Rachel Alexander, is doing a terrific job covering the case in daily articles in Arizona Sun, but she also she has a Twitter account.

What I’ve seen this far from the state trial judge down in Georgia is that he is going to hold the line on what the law is and what the law requires. That is a very good thing and we’ll be able to see it. Fingers crossed.

About Raffensperger, look, I don’t know what his motives are, all I can see is the consequences of them. There are the consequences of that, which should have been obvious on its face. More importantly, there is the continued falsity claims in his public statements, and I’ll give you one example.

One of the expert reports on the election challenge that was filed — which never got a judge appointed, by the way, for nearly a month, and by then it was too late.

One of the allegations based on an expert analysis was that 66,247 people had voted who were underage when they registered to vote.

Now, he goes out and does a press conference and says, “We checked, nobody voted when they were underage,” but that was not the allegation made by the expert. The allegation was that they registered to vote when they were 16. You have to be 17 and a half before you can register.

If they had not re-registered, that meant they were not legally registered and not legally allowed to vote. He routinely mischaracterizes the actual allegation in the case, deliberately lying. Whatever his motives were with whether he’s anti-Trump or not, he is clearly lying, and we ought not to give him any credence whatsoever.

Q: You had said before that President Trump had won three quarters of the real cases. I’m wondering what that means to win, what are the implications of that and what is correct, if anything. What, then, then is the way forward?

Dr. Eastman: The way forward is a legal system. Now, the Trump cases that were won only involved small components like the statutory right in Pennsylvania to be there to observe the counting. They were blocking even minimum observation. The court ordered, “Yeah, you’ve got to let them into the room and observe.”

That was not one that was the grand enchilada on the outcome determinative issues, but he won the case. We won ultimately on the indefinitely confined ruling up in Wisconsin. They said that, “Just being fearful of COVID does not mean you’re indefinitely confined under the statute.”

It’s not as if the Wisconsin legislature didn’t have an opportunity to alter that. If they wanted, they determined, they considered alterations in the law as a result of COVID, made some, but this was not one of them.

What I have seen, and it pains me to say this, is that the level of corruption in our institutions, including our judicial institutions, is so pervasive now that it is troubling. Because many of these cases end up in the DC courts, I cannot imagine a stronger case for change of venue than those January 6th criminal defendants.

Yet their motions for change of venue were uniformly denied because they wanted this in the DC jury pool, which is like 95% hostile to Trump. This is not a jury of peers. This is not a jury that is likely to lead to a just and true result. This is a partisan political act, a loaded dice system in DC.

The same thing I think they were gambling on being true in Georgia, in Fulton County. But I don’t think the dice is as loaded there as it is in DC.

It will cost a million, a million and a half to defend against those charges. The poor guy who entered a plea agreement and pleaded guilty last week, one of the 19 defendants in Georgia, he is a bail bondsman for a living.

If he gets a felony, he is not only in jail for a while, but he cannot do his trade, so they offer him a misdemeanor conviction and no jail time. He took it in a heartbeat. Otherwise, he is looking at a million to two million dollars in legal fees tied up in this internationally televised drama for nothing, and he was not in the position to undertake that.

We have raised over a half million on my legal defense fund site. It’s probably going to end up being three million total that we need, but he did not have the ability to do a hundredth of that.

In international news: “Oh, one of Trump’s co-defendants is turning the tables on Trump. This is bad news for Trump.” No, it’s not. The guy made the most sensible decision he could.

My lawyer got a call from ABC, they said, “Have they reached out to you to offer a plea agreement?” I told him to say “No, I suspect they’re not going to, but I’ll tell you what. I’ll make a suggestion to them. I will agree to a plea agreement that says they drop all the charges, and I will agree to testify truthfully on their behalf. In exchange, I agree not to file a lawsuit for malicious prosecution against them.”

I thought that was a pretty good offer.

Q: You’re paying with your money. They’re paying with the…

Dr. Eastman: Yeah, they’re paying with my money too, taxpayer money.

Q: What about the ability to manipulate electronic voting machines? It was on every single broadcast for weeks.

Dr. Eastman: I quickly became a triage nurse. Once I filed that brief on behalf of Trump and everything started coming in. I had to try and make the best judgment I could about what kind of allegations were credible and what allegations were not credible. What things that would appear credible that we could prove versus the one that seem credible, but we cannot prove them. I’ll give you one example.

Early in January, Mike Lindell from MyPillow said he had a list of the Chinese intrusions. He has got 50 pages of spreadsheets purporting to show IP addresses in Beijing connecting with IP addresses in county election offices all over the country, and then altering Trump down 45 votes in this precinct or altering the totals as they are getting transmitted to the secretaries of state that then become part of the reported vote totals.

I had the first 10 lines of that spreadsheet on January 2nd, and I had some of the best security experts in the world that I was working with, and I said, “Can we verify this?” — because they commonly describe how many Trump votes were lost, but obviously just typed in. I said, “I need to see the data, I need to see the packet that you say is sending instructions to make these alterations.”

They wanted me to go to the president with this stuff and I said, “If in fact this is true this is an act of war by the number one other superpower in the world against the United States.” Taking that information into the president without confirming it would be an imprudent thing to do.

I wanted to confirm it and my experts, who had access to IP address registries, said none of the IP addresses were valid. This is made-up stuff. So, I was not able to confirm it. Now, maybe this occurred, but the data I was looking at was not the silver bullet of evidence that we needed to be able to take it.

Other stuff, do you know…how many saw the vote spike charts? Some entrepreneur started making T-shirts out of them. Those big vote spikes, you saw that chart over the Internet.

Well, think about that for a moment. Atlanta, which is about 90% Democrat, if they are not reporting partial returns all night long the way the rest of the state is, and then they report all of their returns all at once, you are going to see a vote spike for the Democrat.

If they are reporting partial returns all night long, the way the rest of the state is, and then you see that kind of vote spike, that is pretty good evidence of fraud. I asked, “The data we are looking at that gives us that vote spike chart, that famous Internet graph that everybody saw is based on state-wide aggregate time-series data. I need to know whether Atlanta is reporting what we would expect or whether it’s fraud.” How do I get that information? I need the county level time series. Let’s see what was going on in Fulton County alone.”

I’m told that Georgia officials locked access to the county level time-series data that would have helped me determine whether it was evidence of fraud or evidence of something that we should have expected. To this day, I do not know, but those are the things I was trying to do to get to the bottom of this information.

About electronic voting machines? There have been three audits. Antrim County, Michigan, and one of the leading critics of voting machines and their software is a guy named J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan.

He testified as the expert in litigation down in Georgia in 2018 saying these machines are not secure. They sealed his testimony and it was only released in June. It just says, “These things are susceptible to fraud by all sorts of bad actors.”

He was the government witness in Antrim County, and he demonstrated that, in his opinion, what really happened in Antrim County was that some of the local clerks had done an update. One of the cities in the county had omitted one of the school board races, and so they had to redo the ballot.

Unbeknownst to the county clerks, every line in the machine code was consecutively ordered throughout the whole county. If you add one line in Bailey Township, it doesn’t affect the cities in the county that began with A, but it affected everything else.

All the votes for Jorgensen were cast for Trump, all the votes for Trump were cast for Biden. All the votes for Biden were cast for the line marked “President” and didn’t count. When they unraveled that error and counted the actual ballots, it looked like this was an update in the software error and it was explainable.

Halderman goes out of his way, however, not to distance himself from his prior concerns about the vulnerability of election.

One of the things we discover in that Antrim audits is that in fact, the vote logs that are supposed to be there had been deleted for 2020, not 2016, not 2012, they’re still there, but 2020 had been deleted.

We also found that the password for access to the machine, that give you, the administrator, rights that would allow you to delete logs, was the same password that everybody had access to anywhere — from county clerk to anybody — they had the same password. 123456 or something simple like that was the password. It had been that way since 2008.

The audit uncovered huge vulnerabilities, but because the logs had been deleted, no proof. A second audit was done in Mesa County, Colorado. A woman by the name of Tina Peters was the county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado.

The Secretary of State in Colorado, a radical advocate named Jena Griswold, had ordered an update to all the machines in the county shortly after the election. The update destroys all the election evidence, and that is a violation of federal law.

All election information is supposed to be kept for 22 months, and the people that are on the hook for the violation of that federal law –and it is a felony — are the county clerks. Tina Peters said, “I’m not going to allow them to put me in way of a felony indictment of letting this information be destroyed.”

She made a mirror-image copy of all the data so that when they did the upgrade, she could say, “I haven’t violated federal law. I’ve got it.” She had the mirror image, and she hired forensic analysts to look at.

They are now charging her with nine felonies for illegally accessing the information, but what they discovered in that audit, they actually identified computer code that was changing votes. Now, Jeff O’Donnell was the guy that did it. He published three reports, the three Mesa County reports. I called Jeff O’Donnell as one of the witnesses of my California bar trial. The judge has barred him from testimony. We had not identified him up-front because this was going to be rebuttal to their claims that everything was fine. The third audit has occurred down in Georgia. There’s one case still pending from all of these things from three years ago. The case is called Favorito vs. Raffensperger.

Garland Favorito runs an organization called Voter GA, which has been doing election integrity oversight stuff in Georgia for 20 years. He is neither Democrat nor Republican. He is a Constitution Party guy, sorry.

There was a judge down there. Apparently this judge did not get the memo that we are not supposed to look at any of this stuff, and he authorized Garland and his team of forensic experts to access one of the machines in Fulton County, and he gave them forensic audit access.

They had it for about a week before somebody came down on the judge and said, “Oh, we’re not supposed to do that,” and the judge revoked the order. In that week, they discovered something very stunning. Think about how this works:

At first in our history, it used to be that you would go to both of your local precincts, and maybe the local library, and absentee ballots would get mailed in and delivered to that precinct, so that the absentee people who had voted from the same neighborhood were counted with the in-person votes.

This year in all the big cities, they had big central balloting and counting facilities: State Farm Arena in Atlanta, the Philadelphia Convention Center, or the TCS Center in Detroit.

This meant that absentee ballots are in from all 490 precincts in Atlanta, in Fulton County. They are randomly put through, they do not come all “in batches,” such as, these are all the ballots from precinct number one, or whatever. They are random.

They get put in, they get opened, and they get stacked into piles of a hundred, and then they get scanned. Now think about that. That means you have 490 different ballots being scanned. Every ballot, every precinct, has different races on it, different school board races, different things.

The ballot has a code to tell the machine which key to look to in order to know how to count those dots on the ballot box. Every 100 with that randomized listing of precincts creates a unique digital signature for that hundred. For mathematicians, that is 100 to the 490th power, because there are 490 precincts.

The odds that you have a duplicate batch of a hundred are zero. 0.0000001. Infinitely small chance that they would have anything. In their one week on one machine, they discovered 5,000 ballots with identical digital signatures in batches of a hundred.

The margin in Georgia was 11,779. They did this on just one machine, looking at it only a partial bit of time for one week. These are the three audits we had. We know the machines either have been hacked or are open to bad actors with access to the machines, either put in a thumb chip. Halderman’s the guy.

They had a convention in Las Vegas, hired a bunch of geeks, computer geeks from around the country, to come to this convention and see who could hack into the machines and alter the vote codes quickest. It took people about 15 minutes.

Halderman is also the guy. What is one of the big rivalries in the country, Michigan versus Ohio State? He had his Michigan students vote on who had the better football program, Michigan or Ohio State.

Now, anybody that knows anything about football knows there’s no way anybody in Michigan is ever going to vote for Ohio State, but he programmed it so that Ohio State won by 80 percent. It took him five minutes.

Michigan students voting on one of his Dominion machines, when this was the issue, the ballot initiative, voted for Ohio State. The notion that these things cannot be hacked is laughable. They have to be able to be opened if they need to be repaired. [I heard that from an MIT graduate at the time.]

The question is, how to prove that they were hacked in this particular instance when they are destroying the evidence, and that is where we are.

Q: Do the Republicans do this too?

Dr. Eastman: I don’t know. There was a story that was floated that the former Secretary of State in Arizona and former governor, who was running a distant fifth in the primary election for governor before he signed the $100 million contract with an electronic voting machine company, and all of a sudden he won the election, or the same thing that happened with Kemp in Georgia.

Those speculations have been floating out there that their bribery was not cash into their bank account but votes in their upcoming primary elections. I do not know whether that is true or not. Those allegations have been floated. It would not surprise me .

Stacey Abrams certainly thought Kemp stole the election. There was a whole litigation on it. That is why Halderman was doing his expert reports in that case.

More troubling, though, are the people that knew that there was something amiss and refused to do anything about it because they did not like Trump, or they do not like the Trump populist uprising movement that Trump is leading.

Remember, Trump did not create this movement. We need to date it back to the Tea Party movement in 2010 after Obamacare comes down. The Republicans in charge in Congress thought that was a bigger threat to them than the Democrats were.

They wanted to do everything they could to shut down that movement. The movement just took on a new guise when a new leader stepped up to get ahead of it, and it is the MAGA movement now.

Either they do not like those people in flyover country — that may be part of it from our release in DC — or they do not like anybody questioning the utter corruption that is making them all multimillionaires with having government jobs or some combination of both.

What was most discouraging was finding people saying, “Oh, I wish we could do something about this election illegality,” and then, on the back side, doing everything they could to stop it.

Former Attorney General William Barr is the primary example of this. Barr goes out on December 1st, and said, “We’ve been investigating, and we found no evidence of significant enough fraud to affect the outcome of the election.”

One of the charges against me in California is, “You continue to insist there was illegality even after Bill Barr made that statement. Why didn’t you bow to him?” Well, we subsequently learned that despite Barr’s public statement that US attorneys could investigate election illegality, anytime somebody did, he called him on the phone and order them not to.

In Pennsylvania, the US attorney in Pennsylvania, McSwain, was looking at the truck driver incident. Barr told him, “You hand all that over to the attorney general of the state” — a Democrat who was part of the problem.

One of the FBI investigators who was actually getting to the bottom of this got a call that said, “Stand down.”

The investigation of the ballots coming out from under the table and being counted after everybody was sent home down in Atlanta, the FBI did investigate that. Guess what the purpose of their investigation was. To determine that the statement that there were suitcases of ballots rather than bins of ballots was false. They did not do any other investigation about whether in fact people had been sent home.

You have people out there saying, “Oh, we’re investigating. Everything’s fine,” while behind the scenes ordering people not to do the investigation that would actually get to the bottom of it.

I call it the uniparty. You can call it the deep state. You can call it the administrative state. You can call it the corrupt state, but it sees the MAGA movement as the biggest threat to its syndicators. It is going to do everything it can to destroy the people who are going to try and publicize what is going on.

That is what we are dealing with, and we are $2 million in. One of the lawsuits that was filed against me by this guy down in North Carolina, I don’t know why he picked me as the lead defendant, but other defendants are all billionaire oligarchs who are using their own wealth. That is the kind of nonsense I’m dealing with.

This article is based on a briefing from John Eastman to Gatestone Institute.

*****

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

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Why Small Businesses Hate Bidenomics thumbnail

Why Small Businesses Hate Bidenomics

By Stephen Moore

If the economy is so good, why do small business leaders feel so bad?

The latest Small Business Optimism Index from the National Federation of Independent Business could hardly be more depressing.

The survey finds that the men and women who run our 33 million small businesses and hire more than half of American workers are in a somber mood. It also finds that small-business confidence has reached its lowest point in 12 years.

Amazingly, CEOs of small companies are even more fearful of the future today than during the COVID-19 pandemic, when most businesses were shuttered.

The confidence numbers have decreased every year President Joe Biden has been in office. Here are the numbers, according to the National Federation of Independent Business:

March 2020—102.0

March 2021—98.2

March 2022—93.2

March 2023—90.1

March 2024—88.5

Why are small-business owners feeling so dour at a time when the gross domestic product is growing? I asked that question of David Malpass, the former World Bank president who was Treasury Department undersecretary in the Trump administration. Malpass has observed, all over the world, what factors make small businesses successful and put their owners in a frame of mind to expand.

Smaller businesses are being crowded out by complex regulations and direct competition from the $35 trillion national debt,” Malpass concludes. “The Treasury borrowed $23 trillion in 2023 alone, much of it in the expensive short maturities needed by smaller businesses for working capital.”

The NFIB data is merely a survey, and sometimes business owners and investors act differently than they say they will. But there is more real data on how small companies are expanding.

The latest Federal Reserve data through March shows that commercial and industrial loans, a key resource for small business dynamism, fell over 5% in the last year in nominal terms, down over 8% after adjusting for inflation.

Yikes. Without investment, it’s hard for businesses to grow.

I asked Alfredo Ortiz, president and CEO of the Job Creators Network, which represents tens of thousands of small-business owners, what he sees in the business climate.

“Our members feel as though Biden has declared war on small businesses,” Ortiz said.

He also mentioned that his members are worried that a second Biden term would mean higher taxes, more regulations, and a continuation of high prices.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration seems frustrated and even indignant that more businesses aren’t supporting the White House program. But remember: Neither Biden nor nearly any of his top officials ever have started or even worked for a small or medium-sized business. They don’t have any feel for how their own policies impact the nation’s employers.

As an example, the Biden administration wants to put in serious jeopardy the franchise model where thousands of small entrepreneurs can start their own McDonald’s or Arby’s, or a retail store representing well-known and trusted brands. It wants the parent companies to be on alert that they can be sued for violations of labor laws, Environmental Protection Agency edicts, or federal “diversity” requirements, or can be on the hook for lawsuits against their franchises.

This could be the death of thousands of small, independent-owned franchises. The Labor Department wants small businesses to allow unions to run their stores.

What is so sinister here is that the franchise model for opening new businesses is an almost entirely unique American model of business growth. Entrepreneurial immigrants can come into the country, pool money as a family, then own and operate a Popeyes restaurant or a clothing store.

Biden also wants to nearly double the capital gains tax, which would scare away angel investors in small startup companies. If owners of a small or medium-sized business put the profits back into the company so it could expand, Biden would tax the “unrealized capital gains” on that investment.

Meanwhile, Biden is happy to give a big head start in the form of billions of dollars in grants and low-interest loans for large corporations such as General Motors and chipmaker Intel so they can expand operations on the taxpayers’ dime. These corporate welfare programs tilt the playing field in favor of the sharks, not the small-business minnows.

It’s no wonder that men and women who put their life savings on the line to build their businesses from scratch feel like they’re under assault. They are being taxed and regulated to death while too often inflation eats away their modest profits.

No one in Washington is going to be “forgiving” their loans when the business conditions get rough and high interest rates make it tough to get emergency loans. There is no safety net—and no “too big to fail” aid package—for the heroes of our economy, who have become the punching bag of big government.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

Climate Change Is Normal and Natural, and Can’t Be Controlled thumbnail

Climate Change Is Normal and Natural, and Can’t Be Controlled

By Frits Byron Soepyanfbs

Editors’ Note: The global warming crowd would like nothing better than to convince you that we are in a climate crisis and that they need to grab COVID-like emergency powers to dictate how you live your life. If it were not for the sinister nature of the movement, which wishes to control everything from the way we cook, drive, eat, our power sources, and the like, it would be amusing that they think their efforts to curtail C02, amidst all the other independent variables that are completely out of their control, can create what they imagine as the perfect climate.  They will fail to meaningfully change the climate but they may well succeed in taking our freedom, destroying all economic prosperity and impoverishing Americans.

NASA claimed that “Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate” and “human activity is the principal cause.” Others proposed spending trillions of dollars to control the climate. But are we humans responsible for climate change? And what can we do about it?

“The climate of planet Earth has never stopped changing since the Earth’s genesis, sometimes relatively rapidly, sometimes very slowly, but always surely,” says Patrick Moore in Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. “Hoping for a ‘perfect stable climate’ is as futile as hoping the weather will be the same and pleasant, every day of the year, forever.”

In other words, climate change is normal and natural, and you can forget about controlling it.

For instance, a major influence of weather and climate is solar cycles driven by the Sun’s magnetic field over periods of eight to 14 years. They release varying amounts of energy and produce dark sunspots on the Sun’s surface. The effects of solar cycles on Earth vary, with some regions warming more than 1°C and others cooling.

Climatic changes occur as a result of variations in the interaction of solar energy with Earth’s ozone layer, which influences ozone levels and stratospheric temperatures. These, in turn, affect the speed of west-to-east wind flows and the stability of the polar vortex. Whether the polar vortex remains stable and close to the Arctic or dips southward determines whether winters in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere are severe or mild.

In addition to solar cycles, there are three Milankovitch cycles that range in length from 26,000 to 100,000 years. They include the eccentricity, or shape, of Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. Small fluctuations in the orbit’s shape influence the length of seasons. For example, when the orbit is more like an oval than a circle, Northern Hemisphere summers are longer than winters and springs are longer than autumns.

The Milankovitch cycles also involve obliquity, or the angle that Earth’s axis is tilted. The tilt is why there are seasons, and the greater the Earth’s tilt, the more extreme the seasons. Larger tilt angles can cause the melting and retreat of glaciers and ice sheets, as each hemisphere receives more solar radiation during summer and less during winter.

Finally, the rotating Earth, like a toy top, wobbles slightly on its axis. Known as precession, this third Milankovitch cycle causes seasonal contrasts to be more extreme in one hemisphere and less extreme in the other.

Moving from outer space to Earth, ocean and wind currents also affect the climate.

For instance, during normal conditions in the Pacific Ocean, trade winds blow from east to west along the Equator, pushing warm surface waters from South America towards Asia. During El Niño, the trade winds weaken and the warm water reverses direction, moving eastward to the American West Coast. Other times, during La Niña, the trade winds become stronger than usual, and more warm water is blown towards Asia. In the United States and Canada, these phenomena cause some regions to become warmer, colder, wetter, or drier than usual.

In addition to El Niño and La Niña, there is also the North Atlantic Oscillation, which is driven by low air pressure in the North Atlantic Ocean, near Greenland and Iceland (known as the sub-polar low or Icelandic low), and high air pressure in the central North Atlantic Ocean (known as the subtropical high or Azores High). The relative strength of these regions of low and high atmospheric pressures affects the climate in the Eastern United States and Canada and in Europe, affecting both temperatures and precipitation.

Similarly, Hadley cells are the reason Earth has equatorial rainforests that are bounded by deserts to the north and south. Because the Sun warms Earth the most at the Equator, air on either side of the Equator is cooler and denser. As a result, cool air blows towards the Equator as the warm, less dense equatorial air rises and cools, releasing moisture as rain and creating lush vegetation. The rising, drier air reaches the stratosphere blowing north and south to settle in regions made arid by lack of atmospheric moisture.

These and other phenomena influencing our climate are well beyond the control of humans.

*****

This article was published by The C02 Coalition and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

As the University of Arizona Goes, so Goes Tucson thumbnail

As the University of Arizona Goes, so Goes Tucson

By Craig J. Cantoni

As the University of Arizona goes, so goes Tucson, the city where the university is located.

As Tucson goes, so goes the University of Arizona (UA).

Things haven’t been going very well for either of them. Both have been operating well below their potential for a long time, and both are suffering from problems that are largely self-inflicted.

UA is having a financial crisis, a leadership crisis, and a morale crisis among faculty and administrative staff. And, as will be discussed momentarily, it has been surpassed reputationally by other state universities, including land-grant colleges like itself.

The City of Tucson has high poverty and what comes with poverty: crime, human misery, blight, and low K-12 test scores. The surrounding county isn’t much better.

The Tucson metro area of nearly 1.1 million people is an economic backwater compared to many other Sunbelt metropolises, including compared to Phoenix, the megapolis a two-hour drive north on Interstate 10. This is in spite of Tucson having a milder climate and a prettier natural setting than Phoenix.

It hasn’t helped Tucson that UA has been a laggard in commercializing innovations and spinning off startups that have grown into high-paying enterprises.

An aside: In the spirit of leveling with the reader, I have connections to the University of Arizona. My son has done well from earning a bachelor’s and master’s in engineering from the university, and a former provost at the university was a client of my management consultancy while she was at UA and then while she was at another university.

I have lived and worked in big cities, small cities, corrupt cities, rich cities, impoverished cities, declining cities, and rising cities. Tucson tops all of them in provincialism, insularity, hubris, denial, and an aversion to prosperity.

Tucsonans take pride in their kindness, humanism, and concern for the disadvantaged. At the same time, paradoxically, they have embraced a governing ideology, a controlling political monopoly, and corresponding public policies that have hurt people by keeping the metropolis poorer than it would otherwise be.

The University of Arizona has similar traits.

Consider UA’s search for a new provost. Of the three finalists, one has taken a post elsewhere, and another was lambasted by faculty.

Curiously—or maybe it isn’t so curious—the rejected candidate had a track record of cutting costs, which would seem to be a top requirement given UA’s financial woes. But when he gave a presentation to faculty members, he apparently didn’t recite the correct platitudes and banalities about the disadvantaged, especially about so-called Hispanics.

According to a story in the Arizona Daily Star, over 100 faculty signed a letter bashing the candidate for his “very odd and concerning response” about being a provost at a “Hispanic serving institution.”

(Source: “U of A faculty members endorse 1 provost candidate, bash another,” by Ellie Wolfe, Arizona Daily Star, April 17, 2024.)

The above story further quoted the faculty letter as follows: “Our sense is that he has neither an understanding of nor a commitment to the values that define us as a land grant, and that constitute important areas of strategic opportunity and competitive advantage.”

The newspaper story went on to explain:

Hispanic serving institution is a federal designation by the U.S. Department of Education of universities with 25% or more total undergraduate Hispanic student enrollment.

Land grant universities, established by law in 1862, were initially created to teach agriculture, science, and engineering. Now, the universities provide education, research, and outreach meant to benefit their communities and address societal needs. The UA is one of 57 land grant universities in the country.

That’s almost laughable, considering that the politics and policies at the university and in the city have done little to reduce poverty and make metro Tucson more prosperous.

An aside: To level again with the reader, I earned two degrees long ago at a university that had a large Mexican student body. (They referred to themselves as Mexican back then, not Hispanic, just as I referred to myself as Italian, not White.) My Mexican buddies and I were in ROTC together and went through officer basic training and artillery training together. I also lived in the barrio of San Antonio, where I had my car stolen, my rims stolen another time, and got caught in the middle of a gun battle.

Contrast my experience with the provost candidate preferred by the UA faculty. She is a dean at Pennsylvania State University, located in State College, Penn., where Hispanics comprise four percent of the population. Yet the aforementioned letter from UA faculty said that they were impressed with her “commitment to the values of diversity and engagement of community that are central to our identity as a Hispanic serving institution and a land-grant university.”

If it sounds like blather, looks like blather, and smells like blather, it might be blather.

Speaking of blather, it’s particularly “blatherous” when university faculty talk about their commitment to community. It’s difficult to find a work environment more cutthroat, backstabbing, petty, and status-conscious than universities.

In addition to the search for a provost, another search has begun at UA to replace President Bob Robbins, who has announced his retirement date. It is critical for the future of UA (and Tucson) that the right person be found, but it’s difficult to be optimistic in view of past leadership.

The reputation of UA has suffered under its leaders while the reputations of other universities have shined under their leaders.

A case in point is Purdue University, the land-grant college in tiny West Lafayette, Indiana. News coverage abounds about how the recently retired president of Purdue, Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana, had frozen tuition, improved the school’s already stellar reputation, established collaborative relationships with large corporations, and built a research park that has just attracted SK Hynix to construct a $4 billion advanced semiconductor fab and packaging plant.

Imagine what such a facility would do for the reputation of UA and for poverty in Tucson. It would do a lot more than the current blather is doing.

Daniels also had groomed his replacement. He has been replaced by Dr. Mung Chiang, the former dean of engineering and executive vice president for strategic initiatives.

Purdue receives special recognition in the New York Times bestseller, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, by Frank Bruni. The book decries the obsession of parents to get their kids into one of the Ivy League colleges and makes the case that there are plenty of excellent schools outside of the Ivy League. In addition to Purdue, another land-grant university, Texas A&M, is recognized in the book.

Only one university gets an entire chapter in the book: Arizona State University, which is located in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe. ASU President Michael Crow is lauded for changing the reputation of the university from a party school to a school of excellent academics. Corporations have ranked it as one of the top five sources of qualified graduates.

By contrast, the University of Arizona receives two brief references in the book. One reference is about a student who passed through UA and then went on to earn a degree at a more prestigious university. Another is about a student who attended UA’s School of Architecture but then applied her architectural knowledge to her true love of the theater, where she got her start by designing stage sets in New York.

In closing, perhaps Tucson and the University of Arizona deserve each other. But Tucson residents and UA students don’t deserve their provincialism, insularity, hubris, denial, and blather.

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

A Coup Without Firing a Shot thumbnail

A Coup Without Firing a Shot

By Jeffrey Tucker

The last few years can be tracked at two levels: the physical reality around us and the realm of the intellectual, mental, and psychological.

The first level has presented a chaotic narrative of the previously unthinkable. A killer virus that turned out to be what many people said it was in February 2020: a bad flu with a known demographic risk best treated with known therapeutics. But that template and the ensuing campaign of fear and emergency rule gave rise to astonishing changes in our lives. 

Social functioning was wholly upended as schools, businesses, churches, and travel were ended by force. The entire population of the world was told to mask up, despite vast evidence that doing so achieved nothing in terms of stopping a respiratory virus.

That was followed by a breathtaking propaganda campaign for a shot that failed to live up to its promise. The cure for the disease itself caused tremendous damage to health including death, a subject about which everyone cared intensely before the shot and then strangely forgot about after.

Protests against the goings-on were met with media smears, shutdowns, and even the cancellation of bank accounts. However, and simultaneously, other forms of protest were encouraged, insofar as they were motivated by a more proper political agenda against structural injustices in the old system of law and order. That was a strange confluence of events, to say the least.

In the midst of this, which was wild enough, came new forms of surveillance, censorship, corporate consolidation, an explosion of government spending and power, rampant and global inflation, and hot wars from long-running border conflicts in two crucial regions. 

The old Declarations of rules on the Internet put free speech as a first principle. Today, the hosting website of the most famous one, signed by Amnesty International and the ACLU, is gone, almost as if it never existed. In 2022, it came to be replaced by a White House Declaration on the Future of the Internet, that extols stakeholder control as the central principle.

All the while, once-trusted sources of information – media, academia, think tanks – have steadfastly refused to report and respond in truthful ways, leading to a further loss of public trust not just in government and politics but also in everything else, including corporate tech and all the higher order sectors of the culture.

Also part of this has been a political crisis in many nations, including the use of sketchy election strategies justified by epidemiologic emergency: the only safe way to vote (said the CDC) is absentee via the mails. Here we find one of many overlapping parallels to a scenario hardly ever imagined: infectious disease deployed as a cover for political manipulation.

Crucially and ominously, all of these mind-blowing developments took place in roughly similar ways the world over, and with the same language and model. Everywhere people were told “We are all in this together,” and that social distancing, masking, and vaxxing was the correct way out. Media was also censored everywhere, while anti-lockdown protestors (or even those who simply wanted to worship together in peace) were treated not as dissidents to be tolerated but irresponsible spreaders of disease. 

Can we really pretend that all of this is normal, much less justified? The exhortation we receive daily is that we can and must.

Really? At what point did you realize that you had to start thinking for yourself?

We all have a different starting place and journey but each of us has the following in common. We’ve realized that official sources, the ones we’ve trusted in the past, are not going to make any sense of the above for us. We have to seek out alternatives and put the story together ourselves. And this we must do because the only other choice is to accept that all of the above consists of a random series of disconnected and pointless events, which is surely not true.

That leads to the second layer of comprehension; the intellectual, mental, and psychological. Here is where we find the real drama and incalculable difficulties.

At the dawn of lockdowns, what appeared to be a primitive public health error seemed to be taking place. It seemed like some scientists at the top, who gained an implausible amount of influence over government policy, had forgotten about natural immunity and were under the impression that it was good for health to stay home, be personally isolated, avoid exercise, and eat only takeout food. Surely such preposterous advice would be revealed soon as the nonsense it was.

How in the world could they be so stupid? How did they gain so much influence, not just nationally but all over the world? Did the whole of humanity suddenly forget about all known science in every field from virology to economics to psychology?

As time went on, more and more anomalies appeared that made that judgment seem naive. As it turns out, what was actually taking place had something to do with a move on the part of security and intelligence services. It was they who were given rule-making authority on March 13, 2020, and that’s why so much of what we needed to know was and is considered classified.

There were early initial reports that the virus itself might have been leaked from a US-backed lab in Wuhan, which introduces the entire subject of the US bioweapons program. This is a very deep rabbit hole itself, thoroughly exposed in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s The Wuhan Cover-Up. There was a reason that topic was censored: it was all true. And as it turns out, the vaccine itself was able to bypass the normal approval process by slipping through under the cover of emergency. In effect, it came pre-approved by the military

As the evidence continues to roll in, more and more rabbit holes appear, thousands of them. Each has a name: Pharma, CCP, WHO, Big Tech, Big Media, CBDCs, WEF, Deep State, Great Reset, Censorship, FTX, CISA, EVs, Climate Change, DEI, BlackRock, and many more besides. Each of these subject areas has threads or thousands of them, each connecting to more and to each other. At this point, it is simply not possible for a single person to follow it all. 

To those of us who have been steeped in following the revelations day by day, and trying to keep up with putting them together into a coherent model of what happened to us, and what is still going on, the ominous reality is that the traditional understanding of rights, liberties, law, business, media, and science were dramatically overthrown in the course of just a few months and years.

Nothing operates today as it did in 2019. It’s not just that functioning broke. It was broken and then replaced. And the surreptitious coup d’etat with no shots fired is still ongoing, even if that is not the headline. 

Of this fact, many of us today are certain. But how common is this knowledge? Is it a vague intuition held by many members of the public or is it known in more detail? There are no reliable polls. We are left to guess. If any of us in 2019 believed we had our finger on the pulse of the national mood or public opinion generally, we certainly do not anymore.

Nor do we have access to the inner workings of government at the highest levels, much less the conversations going on among the winners of our age, the well-connected ruling elites who seemed to have gamed the entire system for their own benefit. 

It’s so much easier to regard the whole thing as a giant confusion or accident on grounds that only cranks and crazies believe in conspiracy theories. The trouble with that outlook is that it posits something even more implausible; that something this gigantic, far-reaching, and dramatic could have happened with no real intentionality or purpose or that it all fell together as a huge accident.

Brownstone Institute has published more than 2,000 articles and 10 books exploring all over the above topics. Other venues and friends are out there helping us with this research and discovery, issue by issue. Even so, a great deal of responsibility falls on this one institution, the main work of which is providing support for dissident and displaced voices, which is implausible since it was only founded three years ago. We are deeply grateful for our supporters and would welcome you to join them.

As for the intellectuals we once revered for their curiosity and wisdom, most seem to have gone into hiding, either unable to adapt to the new realities or just unwilling to risk their careers by exploring hard topics. It’s understandable but still tragic. Most are happy to pretend like nothing happened or celebrate the change as nothing but progress. As for journalists, the New York Times publishes daily commentaries dismissing the Constitution as a dated anachronism that has to go and no one thinks much about it.

There is a lot to sort out. So much has changed so quickly. No sooner than the dust seems to be settling from one upheaval, there is another and then another. Keeping up with it all causes a level of psychological brain scramble on a scale we’ve never previously experienced.

It’s easier to wait for the historians to tell the next generation what happened. But maybe, just maybe, by stepping up and telling the story as we see it in real time, we can make a difference in stopping this madness and restoring some sane and normal freedom back to the world.

*****

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

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

The FED’s Dilemmas thumbnail

The FED’s Dilemmas

By Neland Nobel

The Federal Reserve is an unelected board of bureaucratic experts that holds great sway over the US economy, the world economy, and the standard of living of the people of the United States.

Because of the arcane nature of its work, its responsibilities are not something we would want under the sway of political operatives.  The FED likes to say it is “independent” but history shows it often bends the political knee.  That is dilemma number one.  The FED is often not truly independent. Historians generally think FED Chair William Martin comes off fairly well versus Lyndon Johnson but Arthur Burns looks like he caved to Richard Nixon.  How Jerome Powell will turn out remains to be seen. Remember the President appoints people to the Federal Reserve Board and to head the FED. Is it likely they will appoint potential political adversaries or those more likely to be compliant?

Like all powerful bureaucracies, it must not only protect its institutional power (and by the nature of bureaucracy expand its powers), but it must also deal often with contradictory directives.  For example, Congress says the FED should  seek “full employment”, at the same time maintain “price stability.” Often, the two objectives come into conflict with each other.

The second dilemma is the FED is often wrong.  Not only has it made foolish statements and decisions quite recently such as “inflation is too low below 2%”, “inflation is too high at 9%”, “inflation is transitory”, “there will be multiple rate reductions”, and now today “maybe no rate reductions until next year”, but the FED has also presided over a catastrophic decline in the value of money.  Our current dollar is worth a tad more than 3 cents on the dollar of 1913, the year of the FED’s founding. As a maintainer of price stability, they are an abject failure. Meanwhile, financial panics and market crashes have become more frequent, and certainly more severe, since it and the political authorities have decided to interfere to  “fine tune” the business cycle.

This problem of being wrong gets deep into economic theory that we have little space to elucidate.  However, the FED has the challenge of any price-fixing scheme. Absent market forces that truly represent what supply and demand are in reality, a bureaucrat must pick a price he thinks the market will clear or sadly, a price that will elicit political support.  Either way, if the guess is too high, it creates a surplus of X because profits are excessive for those that produce X, and prices the buyers of X out of the market because the price is too high, thus crimping demand.  If the guess for X is too low, it creates a shortage of X because producers lose money and consumers binge because X is too cheap.

The FED is the chief price fixer of the most important signal in the economy, interest rates. Interest rates are the traffic signal for the deployment of capital. Quite recently, the FED had interest rates at nearly zero, off and on for almost 20 years.  This has never happened before in economic history. This has created a huge asset bubble and the worst inflation in 50 years.

The FED is also nominally in charge of the exchange rate of the dollar, which can influence world trade and commodity prices.

In this complex process, the current FED, staffed by university experts, has managed to lose about $160 billion dollars with a capital base of around $40 billion.  This is largely because the FED bought so many bonds to keep interest rates low. When they raised interest rates to fight inflation, it caused their bond portfolio to lose value. For an agency that supposedly wisely controls money, to owe so much more than you are worth is a remarkable accomplishment.

Of course, private holders of bonds have also lost corresponding billions, due to the FED action.

All that begs the question. How does the FED know what the exact money supply should be?  How does it know the right interest rate for any given time in history?  How does it know the right inflation rate? What is the “correct” level of employment? What is the correct dollar exchange rate? It can’t know all these critical economic determinants. It has all the problems of any price-fixing board that substitutes bureaucratic fiat for a genuine free market of supply and demand. And if they get any of it wrong, we are all screwed.

The institution was founded in 1913, in part because of the Panic of 1907, and the theory derived from that event and past panics that argued for a flexible or “elastic currency”.  The theory was the FED was to lend to good creditors when money was desperately needed, to avoid banking panics.  Later, the FED got integrated into the general body of Keynesian thought that the government and its agencies should act as a counterbalance to the business cycle.  When the economy is contracting, add money to relieve the severity of the downswing in economic activity, and reduce or remove money when the economy is overheating and creating inflation.  The levers are monetary policy with the FED and fiscal policy with Congress and the President.

That theory, while elegant in concept, has not operated very well because the FED cannot control the budget (fiscal policy as opposed to monetary policy).  Congress has decided to run deficits both large and small, regardless of the business cycle.  The Biden Administration as we have pointed out in the past has spent more money in inflation-adjusted terms, than that needed to fund World War I, World War II, and 30 years of deficit spending.  It did so with the economy recovering and not in recession.  As a result, the economy has overheated and gone into a debt binge at the national all the way down to the household level. Hence, where is the sense that the government is acting to counterbalance the swings in the business cycle?  Keynes’s idea falls flat as a pancake when it comes to actual implementation within a democratic political process. Who can you find in Congress who does not want to raid the public treasury to gain votes?

This creates third dilemma: the FED either faces down a wild spending Congress, or it becomes the facilitator of a wild spending, monetary alcoholic. It has become the latter.  It would be fair to say if the FED historically had kept its original charter for sound money and price stability, the Federal government could not have grown into the freedom-killing intrusive monster that it has become. It would not have had the money to do so.

It is through lavish Federal spending that we get situations like the Biden Administration forcing local schools to embrace the idiocies of the transgender lobby.  If schools don’t toe the line to this bureaucratic edict, the Federal government will cut off the funds local school districts have become addicted to. Or, to paraphrase the Supreme Court, that which the Federal government subsidizes, it should control.

One can’t blame the FED directly for such an abuse of democratic processes by centralizing it in the Federal administrative state, but the FED kept the heat off Congress for the consequences of its actions.  If Congress had to raise every dollar through taxes, or borrowing,  rather than having huge inflationary deficits to play with, the democratic feedback mechanism of voters howling to their Congressmen about taxes and high-interest rates, would have worked its magic. The FED, by printing money, and buying government bonds, has facilitated Congressional and Presidential spending excesses and the subsequent concentration of power in the Federal government.

This creates the fourth dilemma number for the FED. The politicians want inflation, and so does the public, sort of wants inflation.  We must credit James Grant, the financial columnist for this insight. Inflation can make its appearance in two forms.  One is asset price inflation, which rarely gets computed in the government CPI numbers.  For example, easy money and ultra-low interest rates create a flow of money that eventually finds assets.  This may “feel good” both to the public and politicians.  Who does not want their stock portfolio and 401k to go up sharply in price?  After you buy a home,  don’t you want the price to go up? It makes you feel smart and richer and now you have a rising asset you can borrow against (HELOCS and second mortgages) and deduct interest charges. You feel smarter and wealthier when your house and portfolio are rising sharply.

But then there is the other form of inflation that comes usually a little later after the asset boom.  That is consumer price inflation or what we have called “in-your-face inflation” where the cost of fuel, electricity, food, car payments, house payments, car insurance, and interest on credit cards; all start rising more sharply than wages.  The squeeze lowers the standard of living of people and this kind of inflation is anything but “feel good” inflation. Desperate households start to borrow heavily to stay afloat, setting the economy up for a deflationary crash.  This creates the kind of economic instability the FED was originally designed to moderate, but instead, the FED itself becomes the instrument of this excess.

How does the FED quell “feel good inflation” and “feel bad inflation” at the same time?  End one and you end the other. That is where the FED is right now. The steps necessary to stop the painful inflation will clobber the feel-good inflation because assets are highly leveraged with a lot of borrowed money.  This may explain why the severity of business cycle swings and financial panics have gotten worse and more frequent over the past decades.  The FED has hardly tamed the business cycle. Rather it has made them more ferocious.

Moreover, the FED has conveyed to markets it will rush to the rescue even during fairly modest contractions in the economy or bear markets in equities. By doing so repeatedly over the past 30 years or so,  it has created what insurance people call a moral hazard.  The prospect of having not to pay for reckless behavior makes the insured more reckless than before.  Why not, you will get a bailout.

A further complication is that when economic distortions are not corrected, they compound on top of each other. It is a little like the Forest Service rushing to put out every small fire that burns down old timber and underbrush. Soon the dry brush and old timber grow to such an extent the next lightning strike causes a fire so large it can’t be controlled.

Since Congress will not quit spending, the main tool the FED has is to raise interest rates. But that adds more pain on top of the inflation and runs the real risk of deflating the highly leveraged asset bubble that it has blown. This increases the risk of a serious recession, which will trigger, once again, another spending spree and rescue effort from Congress.

In short, the way the FED has morphed in its role over the years has brought it a long way from the argument that originally brought it into existence.

More tragically, its many dilemmas are now ours.

Photo by Paul Morigi

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

Arizona News: April 24, 2024

By The Editors

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

“Bidenbucks” Make “Zuckbucks” Look Like Chump Change thumbnail

“Bidenbucks” Make “Zuckbucks” Look Like Chump Change

By M.D. Kittle

Election integrity watchdogs say private funds in elections pale in comparison to what Biden has wrought through the power of his pen.

Think “Zuckbucks” are bad? The leftists who crafted “Bidenbucks” say, “Hold my beer.”

Earlier this month, Wisconsin became the 28th state to tell Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the private-money-in-elections mob to go Zuck themselves — and for good reason. The Badger State knows as well as any what millions of dollars of leftist-led activist cash in the administration of elections can do to election integrity and voter confidence.

Zuckbucks — the nickname for the $400 million-plus that Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, dumped into the 2020 elections — predominately flowed to Democrat-centric cities in battleground states such as Wisconsin. Contracts devised by the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life, which has deep ties to the Democrat Party, and signed by city mayors required that election officials work with Democrat activists under the auspices of making voting “safe” during Covid.

Emails show activists, including a longtime Democrat operative, embedded in local election offices, offering to “correct” ballots and engaging in other suspicious conduct.

But as bad as Zuckbucks are, election integrity watchdogs say such private funds in elections pale in comparison to what President Joe Biden has wrought through the power of his pen. As wealthy as Zuckerberg is, his grant initiative was chump change compared to the resources of a politically weaponized federal government.

Cabal at the Core

On Aug. 9, 2021, just five months after Biden signed the executive order that would command the federal government to serve as a get-out-the-vote arm of the Democrat Party, Adam Lioz emailed “Team USDA.” Lioz, who at the time served as senior counsel for left-wing policy activist group Demos, wanted to circle back with Department of Agriculture staff and thank them for “a productive conversation,” according to records obtained by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.

“As we noted, we’ll have our ‘best practices’ slides ready in the next 1-2 weeks and in the meantime, y’all had asked for data on voter registration at the state level, which I’ve pasted below,” Lioz, who these days serves as senior policy counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wrote in the email with the subject line, “Demos Meeting on Voting Rights EO.”

“We’re eager to schedule follow up conversations to dig into specific programs and help with integration in any way we can. Just let us know when you are available for that,” he added.

Not surprisingly, Biden’s USDA did just that. New York-based Demos reportedly helped draft Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which directs each federal agency head to develop a plan to “promote voter registration and voter participation.” As the Foundation for Government Accountability notes, Biden’s fiat “follows the same strategy” contained in a Demos policy paper.

If you’re filling your leftist bingo card, Demos is closely tied to the far-left Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wing of the Democrat Party, according to activist tracker InfluenceWatch.

“The organization emphasizes three areas of commitment: voting rights expansion, a hybrid environmentalist-left agenda it calls ‘pathways to ensure a diverse, expanded middle class in a new, sustainable economy,’ and advocacy for communitarianism and a liberal interpretation of racial equality,” InfluenceWatch reports.

Biden tapped former Demos executive K. Sabeel Rahman to serve as Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs senior counselor and Chiraag Bains, the group’s former director of legal strategies, as the president’s deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council for Racial Justice and Equity at the White House. They were responsible for reviewing the actions taken to fulfill Bidenbucks, according to the Foundation for Government Accountability. The GOTV effort is being carried out by Susan Rice, Biden’s domestic policy adviser who served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations.

“This is a coordinated effort from left-leaning third parties and the Biden administration to use executive power and taxpayer resources for the purpose of federalizing elections and taking power away from the states,” said Chase Martin, legal affairs director at FGA.

‘Leftist Voter-Turnout Operation’

There are definitely some similarities between Zuckbucks and Bidenbucks. Much like private corporate funds in elections and their contract demands of involving activist groups, Biden’s order mandates federal agencies work with the White House’s “approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations.” These are NINOs, nonpartisan in name only.

Despite repeated requests for information on the implementation of the executive order, including the criteria for the third-party groups, the Biden administration has either slow-walked or altogether stonewalled the release of documents.

“Federal executive agencies, which have no business engaging in voter registration or mobilization efforts, as the EO directs, will surely exceed the scope of their authority under federal law,” House Republicans wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. “Moreover, in carrying out this EO, employees of these agencies will likely violate other laws such as the Hatch Act, designed to keep federal agencies, led by political appointees, from engaging in political activities to benefit one political party over another.”

The October 2022 letter goes on to note that any expenditure by the DOJ for this “could violate the Antideficiency Act, which prohibited executive agencies from spending funds Congress has not authorized or accepting volunteer services from ‘approved’ third-party organizations as EO 14019 directs.”

It’s clear the administration doesn’t care about any such constitutional entanglements, as Biden’s lawless record over the past three years suggests. Congressional Republicans have checked Democrats’ sweeping assaults on election integrity such as the ill-named “For the People Act,” so Biden is doing their work for them through executive order.

“Biden has turned the entire federal government into a leftist voter-turnout operation,” Tom Fitton, president of the government watchdog group Judicial Watch, wrote on his X account.

Now federal agencies are working overtime to realize the left’s plan.

Zuckbucks on Steroids

The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service is working with state agencies that administer school breakfast and lunch programs to “provide local program operators with promotional materials, including voter registration and non-partisan, non-campaign election information, to disseminate among voting-age program participants and their families.” That includes promoting voter registration in school cafeterias to high school students turning 18 by Election Day and working with leftist groups in Democrat-rich cities.

As The Federalist has reported, Milwaukee Public Schools has joined forces with the California-based VoteRiders and the League of Women Voters to do so. A faculty member at each school is tapped to serve as “Voter Champion” to assist those 18 or approaching 18 who don’t have a photo ID. On the taxpayer’s dime, the school employee connects the student with a representative from the leftist VoteRiders. MPS and the Biden administration have refused to turn over records to The Federalist and the Foundation for Government Accountability.

Meanwhile, the Democrat-led Michigan Department of State recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the U.S. Small Business Administration “to promote civic engagement and voter registration in Michigan.” The first-of-its-kind collaboration is expected to run through Jan. 1, 2036.

And the Department of Education recently announced a “clarification” to its rules allowing the taxpayer-funded work-study program to be used to hire college students to register their peers to vote — one of the more reliable Democrat voting blocs. My Federalist colleague Shawn Fleetwood has reported on several other ways the federal government is using Bidenbucks “to rig the 2024 election.”

In her book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway wrote about how a cabal of Democrat activists and business titans used Covid “as a pretext to maximize absentee and early voting.”

“Here, one billionaire in particular took a leading role: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg,” Hemingway wrote.

The left doesn’t have Covid to lean on this time around. So it’s using the full force of the federal government in its attempt to keep and consolidate its power.

The president is acting unconstitutionally, the agencies are acting unlawfully, and they’re doing so with taxpayer money with next to zero transparency for the taxpayer,” David Craig, senior legal fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told me. “That’s something that has to be fixed.”

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

Biden’s Title IX Rewrite Strips Away Protections For Women, Denies Women Equal Opportunity thumbnail

Biden’s Title IX Rewrite Strips Away Protections For Women, Denies Women Equal Opportunity

By Editors of The Independent Women’s Forum

Editors’ Note: Democrats cast themselves as the party of “women’s rights”, while they actually are the party of unrestricted abortion to be paid for with public money.  We hope the knowledge of this most recent decision will change the minds of not only Arizona women, but women across the nation. By using school lunch money for extortion, they impose by bureaucratic non-democratic means the whole of the transgender agenda. No elected representative accountable to the people even got to vote on this. This is pure bureaucratic fiat, showing the grotesque nature of the Administrative State in action. They would rather take the food out of children’s mouths than listen to the public will, which overwhelmingly rejects this action. It defines women as nonexistent. And they will be doing this from the college level down to kindergarten. Wherever schools use Federal money, they will by the nature of the incentives adopt the program of the radical transgenders. This action by the Biden Administration will do great damage to the cause of female advancement, will harm and confuse our children, curtail the rights and prerogatives of parents, and severely damage the public school system. It needs to be fought aggressively and tenaciously. 

”Taking opportunities from women and giving them to men doesn’t enforce Title IX, it violates it. That was true before the Administration dropped this rule, and it is still true today.” – Jennifer C. Braceras

Today, the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), the nation’s most impactful policy organization for women, condemned the Biden administration’s unlawful Title IX regulation, which unilaterally rewrites the landmark sex equality law and undermines women’s rights, and free speech, and due process. This new Omnibus Rule, which governs all aspects of the educational experience, turns Title IX on its head through extra-statutory regulations that require schools to allow males to self-identify into women’s spaces, opportunities, and athletics.

Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Law Center (IWLC) are preparing to sue the Biden administration to enjoin this unlawful action.

Announcing IWF’s lawsuits against the administration, May Mailman, director of Independent Women’s Law Center said, “Title IX was designed to give women equal opportunities in academic settings. It forbids discrimination on the basis of “sex,” which it affirms throughout the statute is binary and biological. The unlawful Omnibus Regulation re-imagines Title IX to permit the invasion of women’s spaces and the reduction of women’s rights in the name of elevating protections for “gender identity,” which is contrary to the text and purpose of Title IX. This is illegal, and we plan to sue.”

”Taking opportunities from women and giving them to men doesn’t enforce Title IX, it violates it. That was true before the Administration dropped this rule, and it is still true today,” added Jennifer C. Braceras, vice president for legal affairs at IWF and founder of IWLC. “The Department of Education can’t just rewrite the statute by administrative fiat. We are confident the courts will remind the Department of this basic principle and strike down this unlawful rule.”

By claiming that Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of “gender identity,” a term never mentioned in the original statute, the Biden administration’s rewrite forces schools to let male who identify as women take women’s scholarships and invade women’s private spaces — including women’s athletic teams.

Polling reflects that 69% of Americans believe athletes should play on teams that correspond with their biological sex.

In an election year, the Biden administration’s lie that this Title IX rewrite does not impact women’s sports is a dishonest attempt to hide their woke agenda from to the American people.

In addition to its impact on sports, the Title IX Omnibus Rule also redefines “sexual harassment” to encompass a single instance of speech, which will, in effect:

1. force students and teachers to use “preferred pronouns” or face discipline;
2. require schools to eliminate all sexual misconduct, even such conduct of which they are unaware, pressuring schools to create woke bureaucracies to police speech; and
3. dissolve protections for accused students (again, whose action may be failure to use the “correct” pronouns), including the right to see evidence against them.

The administration’s draft rules, released on June 23, 2022, “in celebration” of the 50th anniversary of Title IX, generated overwhelming public opposition, with citizens filing a record number of comments with the Department of Education.

Independent Women’s Voice, IWF’s 501(c)(4) sister organization, drove more than 20,000 public comments to the Department of Education opposing the Biden administration’s plan to gut Title IX. The legal and policy objections filed by IWF and Independent Women’s Law Center can be read below:

Female athletes and IWF ambassadors react to the Biden administration’s Title IX Omnibus Rule:

Coach Kim Russell, former Head Women’s Lacrosse Coach at Oberlin College and Independent Women’s Forum ambassador, said: “Make no mistake, this rule will be used by schools as justification for unlawfully punishing anyone who dares to dissent from the orthodoxy of gender ideology. I experienced first hand the desire of woke bureaucrats to punish people who speak out on behalf of women. For now, the Biden administration has provided those bureaucrats cover. But I am confident that this rule will not stand and will be struck down as a flagrant violation of the First Amendment.”

Paula Scanlan, former University of Pennsylvania swimmer and Independent Women’s Forum ambassador said: “If allowed to stand, the Biden administration’s new rule will set women back decades, eroding the impressive gains that Title IX ushered in.”

Riley Gaines, former 12-time All-American swimmer at the University of Kentucky and Independent Women’s Forum ambassador, said: “With its new Title IX rewrite, the Biden administration is unilaterally erasing fifty years of equal opportunity law for women. The president and his administration can’t act like they care about women or our opportunities and then go and wipe out women’s protections under the country’s landmark sex equality law.”

Independent Women’s Forum has been leading the fight to Take Back Title IX and save women’s sports. Learn more below:

Independent Women’s Forum ambassadors recently joined the “Take Back Title IX” roundtable, hosted by U.S. Senators on Capitol Hill, to advocate fairness in women’s sports. Read their written testimonies here.

IWF and IWLC have produced a first-of-its-kind report entitled, “Competition Report: Title IX, Male-Bodied Athletes, and the Threat To Women’s Sports,” to help athletic associations, policymakers, and courts understand the growing threat to female athletes.

IWF’s Female Athlete Storytelling drive featuring real stories from real women athletes can be found here.

IWF organized the first Our Bodies, Our Sports Rally in Washington DC on June 23, 2022 to take back Title IX. The rally, held across the street from the White House, featured female athletes, coaches, parents, and advocates and 17 organizations across the political spectrum to celebrate 50 years of Title IX and urge policymakers to help keep women’s sports female.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

Medical Groups Silent After Review Finds ‘Weak Evidence’ for Recommending Puberty Blockers to Kids thumbnail

Medical Groups Silent After Review Finds ‘Weak Evidence’ for Recommending Puberty Blockers to Kids

By Katelynn Richardson

Editors’ Note: It is appalling that American medical organizations either remain opposed or silent on this latest study. Already Scotland is looking at banning puberty blockers and several other European countries now severely restrict their use. Among these are Norway, U.K. Sweden, Denmark, France, and Finland. In addition, 22 American states have banned the use of puberty blockers. Between the abuses of COVID-19 vaccines and jumping on the transgender bandwagon, the American medical establishment looks less scientific and less medical every day. Maybe they should drop the pretense and just become left-wing political lobbyists. 

Major medical associations remain silent after the results of a four-year review commissioned by the National Health Service England undermined their recommendations for giving puberty blockers to children with gender dysphoria.

The Cass Report, conducted by Dr. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician and former president of the U.K.’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, found only “weak evidence” for offering puberty blockers to children.

Cass concluded that her findings, released April 10, “raise questions about the quality of currently available guidelines” offered by associations such as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the Endocrine Society, yet neither organization has committed to reviewing their guidelines.

The review recommends against treating children with puberty blockers outside of a research setting. It also urged “extreme caution” for providing cross-sex hormones to minors under 18 and stressed the need for a “clear clinical rationale.”

The review further suggested a “full programme of research be established” to “look at the characteristics, interventions, and outcomes of every young person presenting to the NHS [National Health Service] gender services.”

“Although a diagnosis of gender dysphoria has been seen as necessary for initiating medical treatment, it is not reliably predictive of whether that young person will have longstanding gender incongruence in the future, or whether medical intervention will be the best option for them,” The Cass Report noted.

The American Medical Association, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Endocrine Society did not respond to multiple inquiries over the past week from the Daily Caller News Foundation asking whether they had concerns with the report’s findings or intended to conduct their own review.

Aside from WPATH, these organizations largely have failed to address the report publicly. In a written statement, the transgender health organization said it “supports policies that increase access to high-quality ethical care for transgender youth” and claimed that the report is rooted in a “false premise.”

The organization’s standards of care, eighth version, states that waiting several years to start a young adolescent on puberty blockers “is not always practical nor necessary given the premise of the treatment as a means to buy time while avoiding distress from irreversible pubertal changes.” However, it acknowledges that establishing a “sustained experience of gender incongruence” can be important before starting.

“The foundation of The Cass Report is rooted in the false premise that non-medical alternatives to care will result in less adolescent distress for most adolescents and is based on a lack of knowledge of and experience working with this patient population,” the World Professional Association for Transgender Health said in a press release. “It is harmful to perpetuate this notion and does not acknowledge the very real fact that medical pathways are an important treatment option for many young people.”

The Endocrine Society characterizes puberty blockers as a “reversible pause to puberty” and “a first step in treatment to allow the adolescent to explore their gender identity and/or to provide relief from distress.” WPATH’s guidelines likewise recommend putting adolescents on “puberty-suppressing hormones” to “alleviate gender dysphoria.”

Physicians at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health acknowledged puberty blockers can cause irreversible consequences in minors such as infertility, bone loss, and disrupted brain development in educational sessions from September 2022 previously obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Both the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry recommend WPATH’s guidance for handling gender dysphoria in children. The AMA often opposes red state laws that ban sex-change procedures for minors, including puberty blockers.

The Cass Report notes that “there is no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think, and some concern that they may change the trajectory of psychosexual and gender identity development.”

The report also questions WPATH and the Endocrine Society on the “circularity” of their citations, which make support for their positions appear stronger than they are.

Early versions of the two organizations’ guidelines influenced “nearly all” guidelines set by other organizations, the report notes. Their guidelines are also “closely interlinked” because WPATH provided input on the Endocrine Society’s recommendations, it says.

“The circularity of this approach may explain why there has been an apparent consensus on key areas of practice despite the evidence being poor,” the report states.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Perfidious Nature of Lawfare – Democrats “Saving Democracy” thumbnail

The Perfidious Nature of Lawfare – Democrats “Saving Democracy”

By Neland Nobel

On April 17th, we attended the symposium put on by Dave Wanetick and “Davos In The Desert” in Ahwatukee.  It was mostly a somber evening with a few flickers of hope.

The subject was “lawfare”, a relatively new term to connote the use and abuse of the legal system to damage a political opponent or a political movement.  This may include lawsuits, prosecution, and the abuse of regulatory power to distract, bankrupt, and exhaust a political opponent.  Almost always this attack is coordinated with the dominant left-wing media to amplify the effect of the effort.

It has been around in various forms before, but not to the extent we see today.  However, the use of the IRS to harass political opponents and the Watergate Case, are early examples of the use of lawfare.  More recently we have seen it used against Supreme Court nominees, against a sitting President, and now a former President.

Especially when conducted by government prosecutors, political victims face the onerous task of defending themselves against the immense resources of government.  In short, lawfare is often conducted with money confiscated from the very political opponents being subjected to the attack, one the greatest feats of political ju-jitsu ever designed.

The intent is to use the legal system to arrange a political outcome that one might not be able to obtain in “fair” political competition or to severely damage the opposition with the intent to render them ineffective.

The two speakers have been personally subject to lawfare and were therefore close observers of the process.

Rachel Alexander is a lawyer specializing in election law and is the Editor of the Intellectual Conservative and a columnist for The Arizona Sun-Times.

John Eastman was Dean of the Dale E. Fowler School of Law at Chapman University, Director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, and has served as a lawyer for President Donald Trump.  He also used to debate at least weekly, Irwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley Law School on the Huge Hewitt radio show. As a lawyer for President Trump, he has run into great controversy because of advice given to challenge the results of the 2020 Presidential Election.  For that effort, he is facing both criminal prosecution and professional disbarment.

If you would like to assist Dr. Eastman with his legal expenses, click here.

It was pretty clear from the presentations that Democrats are willing to not only engage in election interference but will attack and destroy any attempt by Republican lawyers to represent their clients. The goal is to make any Republican lawyer professionally “radioactive” and by intimidation, send a clear signal not to oppose them.

For those unable to attend the event, we offer below videos of the respective presentations made by the speakers.

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Colorblind Counterattack thumbnail

The Colorblind Counterattack

By GianCarlo​​​​ Canaparo

We prefer the term “righteous indignation” to “hatred” because we know that it is very hard to pour hatred on sin without splashing any on the sinner. Yet hatred is the right response to evil. Righteous indignation can deliver only a pulled punch; hatred, a death blow.

That blow must be carefully aimed, but if it is, we will find in delivering it a kind of joy: the joy of “finding at last what hatred was made for.” Few good men, CS Lewis tells us, ever encounter this joy. They pull their punches, fearing that their hatred is aimed, at least in part, not at evil, but at another soul.

Two men writing two books, however, have found that rare and furious joy. In their very different assaults upon the same evil idea, Andre Archie (The Virtue of Color-Blindness) and Coleman Hughes (The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America) have found “congruity between [their] emotion and its object,” and they rain blows on it.

Their object is the racialism that has poisoned America. It goes by different names: critical race theory, antiracism, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Whatever it’s called, it holds that color, not character, is the locus of moral merit; that differences in material outcomes among color groups are the prime evil; that these differences come from oppression; and that to cure this oppression, society must discriminate against oppressors. In short, it holds that individuals of certain colors ought to be sacrificed to benefit groups of another color.

Hughes calls this ideology “neoracism,” and Archie, “corrosive barbarism.”

Each frames his book as a defense of color-blindness — the principle, in Hughes’s words, that “we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives.” Yet both authors are frustrated that their books are even necessary. How on earth, Archie seems to wonder, could the “noble racial tradition of color-blindness” retreat in the face of race hucksters peddling “intellectual nonsense” to “useful idiots” who go along with it to get along? How on earth, Hughes seems to wonder, could the ideas of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., find themselves labeled “white supremacist”?

Hughes and Archie have shaken off the shellshock, and now stand ready to fight back. Their books are therefore better characterized as counterattacks than as defenses.

The authors pour fire and scorn on the “sophistry,” “absurdity,” “bigotry,” “defeatism,” and “nihilism,” of the “depressing and debilitating belief” that every American is defined by his race label. Both books explore the origins of this evil idea, paying special attention to the prominent race hucksters who popularized it. After that, however, the authors’ avenues of attack diverge.

Hughes attacks on logical and empirical grounds. He argues that the defining features of the racialist worldview are arbitrariness and fact-blindness. The hucksters are wrong, he reasons , because they cannot produce the quantitative outcomes that they say they want. Worse, they will harm the very people they claim to want to help, to say nothing of everyone else.

Consider the racial categories with which we’re all so familiar. They may work in casual conversation, but try to use them as the basis of policy, and you will immediately realize that they are spectacularly arbitrary. To give slavery reparations to black people, for example, you run into a host of unfixable problems. One-in-five black Americans are recent immigrants, only four-in-ten black Americans say their ancestors were enslaved in the United States, and many, like former president Barack Obama, are descendants of both slaves and slaveholders. Most vexing yet is the problem of deciding who is black. One-half? One-eighthOne drop?

And then there are the neoracists’ empirical claims about the causes and cures of racial disparities. Here, Hughes channels Thomas Sowell and launches a fusillade of data at his opponents’ myths and absurdities. If we discriminate on the basis of race, as the neoracists do, the results will be arbitrary, and arbitrary policies can’t help anyone. Instead, Hughes argues, they will “create an enormous amount of justified resentment,” and breed the “racial tribalism” that has “marred and disfigured human societies throughout history.”

The core of the problem, says Hughes, is that the race hucksters are trapped in cognitive dissonance. They say race is a social construct but enforce “the rules of race” with a zeal matched only by “old-school racists.” They decry stereotypes but use stereotypes. They demand justice but mete out injustice to punish “racial-historical bloodguilt.”

Hughes’s argument is thorough, his logic relentless, and his use of data rigorous. These strengths, however, are also weaknesses. His opponents’ arguments are neither logical nor empirical. They speak in the language of morality warped by emotion, and Hughes has responded to them in a different language.

Still, there are many people who are not in thrall to the misbegotten morality of the neoracists. They speak Hughes’s language, and his message is powerful.

This brings us to Andre Archie.

Unlike Hughes, Archie attacks the racialist worldview on ethical grounds. It is no coincidence that a professor of Greek philosophy called his book the Virtue of Color-blindness. The hucksters are wrong, he argues, because they promote ascriptive qualities over character. They assign moral worth to the body, not to the soul. In so doing, they tear at the creed and culture that sustain America and, if left to it, will “destroy completely the ordered liberty that has defined our way of life for nearly three hundred years.”

Archie’s book is aimed at conservatives. In his telling, the race hucksters successfully beat back and bottled up the color-blind principle mainly because conservatives failed to fight. Conservatives didn’t want to fight when the race hucksters falsely claimed the moral high ground. Conservatives didn’t want to be called racist.

Left unsaid by Archie, but true, is that many conservatives failed to defend color-blindness not only out of fear of being called racist, but also because they forgot how to make any arguments but utilitarian ones. And those are hard arguments to make; who has the time to read everything by Thomas Sowell?

But Archie’s point — and this is his profound contribution to a genre over-saturated with data analysis — is that data don’t matter. Even if the hucksters were right that “antiracist discrimination” would usher in a utopia of material equality, Archie would still oppose them because material ends cannot justify immoral means. There are souls within these arbitrary racial groups, and when souls are at stake, “quantitative judgments don’t apply.”

At this point, we find a potential weakness in Archie’s book: its highest authority is the ancient Greeks. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were three of the greatest minds in history. Their philosophical tradition served as a cornerstone of America. But what those great Greek minds said about human nature, character, and choice — about the soul — is not worth believing simply because those great minds said it, but because it was first written on their hearts by a higher authority that Archie only hints at, leaving his reader wondering whether the Greeks’ greatness alone is enough to rally wavering conservatives.

In Archie’s defense, however, because the truths that the Greeks found are written on our hearts, people will respond to them no matter what they believe about their source. Truth moves us. We can’t help it.

At any rate, it is very good luck, if luck it is, that these books came out at the same time. Like hammer and anvil, both are needed to smash what lies between them. Hughes’s book is needed because Americans have forgotten how to make moral arguments. We are utilitarians now, so empirical books remain essential. If, however, empirical books were enough to defeat racialism, then Semple, Sowell, Steele, Loury and countless other data wizards would have dispelled it ages ago. Unfortunately, empirical analysis is not enough: “The race problem is a moral one,” wrote Alexander Crummel in 1889, “its solution will come especially from the domain of principles.” Thus, a rebirth of moral reasoning is needed. Thank heaven for Archie.

Maybe, if we storm racialism from both sides, then color-blindness can retake the offensive and beat back and bottle up its foe. We might not kill racialism outright on this side of eternity, but we might just manage to make color-blindness our “North Star,” as Hughes said in a recent interview. If we do, we will have done ourselves and our country a lot of good.

But only, as Archie reminds us, if we are willing to stand up and fight. So up, and over your barricades. There is joy to be found in this fight.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Illegals Are Truly a Benefit thumbnail

The Illegals Are Truly a Benefit

By Bruce Bialosky

Of course, they are not really “illegals” as they should properly be referred to as “undocumented immigrants,” “unauthorized immigrants,” “non-citizens,” “without status,” and/or “unlawfully present.” As the Left stumbles over the correct characterization of people who have entered this country with no compliance to our national laws and remain here despite their continuing non-compliance, the Left is now telling us they are actually enhancing our economy.

Our national press and elected leaders have finally woken up to the fact that Democrats have been conflating “illegal” immigrants with “legal” immigrants and combining them in one big punch bowl. This has been something the Left has been touting for years (and has been pointed out in this column for years) to validate the illegals and taint their political opponents as “anti-immigrant.” We are now being told that the Illegals are actually a huge benefit to the economy.

The timing for this claim is odd, to say the least. Mayors across the country (nearly all Democrats) have been pounding President Biden to provide funds from that money tree just outside the Oval Office to pay the staggering costs of housing, feeding, and caring for the mass illegal immigration that finally has slapped them on their sanctuary derrieres. As the mayors call for cuts in essential services to provide support for their cities’ interlopers, it is quite startling that the residents of these cities don’t demand a change of course as they drive over their unfilled potholes and by their uncollected trash.

A perfect example of the new way of thinking about our illegal immigrants is illustrated in the Washington Post’s column by Catherine Rampell who writes on economic issues. Ms. Rampell has the same qualifications on economics as Jared Bernstein, Mr. Biden’s chair of United States Council of Economic Advisors – meaning none. Her biography states that her mother is an accountant, arguably the closest Ms. Rampell comes to having a background in the area. Yet she keeps writing things like: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/13/immigration-economy-jobs-cbo-report/. She cites in her column, “As CBO Director Phill Swagel wrote in a note accompanying the forecasts: As a result of these immigration-driven revisions to the size of the labor force, ‘we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues (taxes) will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.’”

People can make an effective argument that we need to have some immigrants because of our declining birthrate. The most recent figures show a birthrate of 1.6 children while the replacement rate for a population is considered 2.1 children. The rate ticked up slightly in 2022, but only a smidgeon.

The most fascinating statement in her column: “The CBO has now factored in a previously unexpected surge in immigration that began in 2022.” Unexpected by whom? Biden’s open border policy had illegal immigrants flooding into the country for over a year by that time.

The facts say that the average of legal immigrants over the past 20 years has been a little over 1,000,000 per year. Given that our country had a Republican administration during 12 of those years (you know, the “anti-immigrant party”), that certainly seems like a significant number. The numbers show that the total of legal immigrants actually plummeted in 2020 and 2021 to an average of close to 725,000 per year. That should not surprise anyone since we are experiencing a worldwide pandemic. It is actually a little surprising the numbers were that high because the legal immigration process was largely shut down prior to a reopening.

So how was the CBO factoring in this unexpected surge? It shows you that not only did Ms. Rampell and the Washington Post willy nilly conflate illegal and legal immigrants, but the Congressional Budget Office does the same.

One must wonder how they create their figures when the illegal immigrants are missing two things that legal immigrants have – defined skills and green cards giving them the right to work here. Despite the touted new jobs numbers each month, there are still 8.9 million job openings in the United States. That number is down some but has been consistently between nine and ten million for a while.

There are two challenges to filling these jobs. First, getting native born Americans off their butts to get to work. The employment rate for American men ages 25-54 has been and remains dismal. The other challenge to filling these jobs is matching applicants’ skills to the available positions. Even if we provided all the illegals with green cards that doesn’t mean they come here with job skills unlike legal immigrants. One might argue you can train them, but the ones crossing the border these days are from all over the world and come with significant language barriers to being trained.

Some of the people coming here illegally may have serviceable skills. Most are qualified to be schleppers at construction sites or housekeeping help at hotels. We only have so many of those positions while we feed and clothe their children. Then there is medical care.

The CBO and Ms. Rampell have been smoking a lot of hooch here. There is no question legal immigrants add a lot economically to our country and we are letting in a huge number each year. There is no way that these Biden illegal immigrants are going to be anything other than a drain on our economy for years to come. Dispelling the CBO and Ms. Rampell’s myths is imperative.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

A Pulitzer Awaits the Arizona Daily Star thumbnail

A Pulitzer Awaits the Arizona Daily Star

By Craig J. Cantoni

A recent Wall Street Journal column on the scam of the federal student-loan program brought to mind the financial, governance, and ethical mess at the University of Arizona (UA).

The Arizona Daily Star’s coverage of the UA mess has been commendable, thanks to reporter Ellie Wolfe.  A Pulitzer Prize awaits her if she ties UA’s travails to the moral hazards created by the federal student-loan program, a program that has been implicitly endorsed, if not explicitly endorsed, by UA’s faculty and administrative staff.

The Wall Street Journal column in question was written by the superb columnist Allysia Finley.  (“The Big Bank Elizabeth Warren Loves,” April 14, 2024). Finley drew two conclusions about the federal student-loan program that seem hyperbolic but aren’t:

Never has there been a bigger taxpayer scam than the federal student-loan program.

The student-loan office is the biggest government monopoly and predatory lender in U.S. history.

How is this related to the UA?  Because it stands to reason that student loans have distorted UA’s finances, economics, academic standards, admission numbers, and graduation rates. It stands to reason because empirical studies have documented the distortive effects on higher education in general of billions in federal loans sloshing about.

Certainly, the billions have not resulted in the UA and other universities being more efficient, productive and cost-conscious.

Nor has the money transformed the bastions of social justice into paragons of justice.  To the opposite, colleges have become grifters by taking money from students who would be better off in trade school instead of college, who have little chance of graduating, who are in degree programs with little financial payoff, who can’t pay off their student loans, and who, thanks to the munificence of President Biden, can now expect taxpayers instead of the college grifters to eat the loans.

This is justice?  This is ethical?

Research leading to a Pulitzer could delve into such important questions as the following:

The Global Campus

Would UA have made the questionable acquisition of the on-line “university” known as Global Campus if it were not for student loans?  Related questions:  How many Global Campus students have outstanding loans and in what amount, how many of these students can expect to graduate, what is their loan balance upon graduation or dropping out, and what are their expected earnings, by degree, if they do graduate?

The Brick-and-Mortar Campus

Similar questions as above could be asked and answered about loan balances, graduation rates, and expected earnings of students on the main campus.

University Costs Before and After the Tuition-Loan Bonanza

What were the key metrics and financials at the UA before and after the federal student-loan program became entrenched and caused a skyrocketing of student debt?  What was the amount of administrative overhead before and after, the amount of capital spending on country-club amenities for students before and after, the amount of money spent on athletics before and after, graduation rates before and after, tuition fees before and after, and the cost of room and board before and after?

Political and Ideological Effects

How has the loan money and other government monies affected the political and ideological leanings of students, faculty, and administrators?  Have they become more or less in favor of redistribution, collectivism, and bigger government?

In addition to the above, parallels could be drawn between the rising cost of college and the rising cost of mortgages and housing.  The tuition-loan program played a role in the former, and government housing programs and policies played a role in the latter—along with the Federal Reserve’s years of quantitative easing and zero interest rates, which drove up asset prices to the benefit of owners of assets.  Now, to counter the inevitable economic distortions resulting from the government’s economic distortions, the Fed has raised interest rates, thus making mortgages more expensive and reducing the supply of houses.

Distortions beget distortions beget distortions.

If Arizona Daily Star reporter Ellie Wolfe were to use her talents in exposing the truth about student loans, she might win a Pulitzer.  Even if she didn’t, her work could become a template for other newspapers and could put Tucson in the limelight as a center of excellent journalism free of political bias.

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Sex Education of Our Nation’s Children: Since the Sexual Revolution thumbnail

The Sex Education of Our Nation’s Children: Since the Sexual Revolution

By Kali Fontanilla

Since the Sexual Revolution

Then came the 1960s and the Sexual Revolution. Many attribute the Sexual Revolution to the birth control pill approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1960. Some states banned the pill entirely or made it illegal for single women to purchase, but by 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to unmarried women was unconstitutional. At the same time, attitudes about sex changed. Sex was no longer culturally tied to marriage and children.

With this change, a new organization was formed to tackle sexual health and education in America.Mary S. Calderone, the medical director of Planned Parenthood of America, co-founded the Sex Information and Education Council (SEICUS) in 1964. SEICUS had a mission of moving America away from the Family Life focus of sex education of the past. They asserted that “sex is not just something you do in marriage, in a bed, in the dark, in one position. Sex is what it means to be a man or woman.” This was the first time the nation had been introduced to comprehensive sex education programs in our public high schools. The type of sex education promoted by SEICUS included content on gays, lesbians, and masturbation.

Another proponent of comprehensive sex education during the time was Lester A Kendell, who wanted the nation’s sex education programs to move away from the idea that premarital sex was harmful to society or individuals. He explained, “The purpose of sex education is not primarily to control and suppress sex expression, as in the past, but to indicate the immense possibilities for human fulfillment that human sexuality offers.” You can see how this mindset would lead to a focus on pleasure-based sex education, perhaps something fine for classes given to adults but wholly inappropriate for instruction to children.

SEICUS produced study guides on sex education, masturbation, and homosexuality with funding from the Office of Education at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. With the wide distribution of its guides, SIECUS received requests from schools to help with their sex education programs. The Family Life Education programs, as proclaimed by the sexual progressives, were deemed insufficient to meet the educational needs of the rapidly changing sex lives of the American people. Or were the times really changing as quickly as we have been told?

If you look at the statistics from the time of the Sexual Revolution, the mindset of Americans was still pretty tame. It turns out not everyone was a free-love hippie. Of married women, 21 percent had no premarital sex, and 43 percent of women had only one premarital sex partner—their future husband. Even as late as the 1980s, over half of women had only one partner before walking down the aisle. Compare this to 2010, where only 5 percent of new brides are virgins. It’s all relative. At the time, the Sexual Revolution seemed wild, but in comparison, today, it was PG. Regardless, sex education organizations like SEICUS found their angle to get into the schools and promote their loose view of sex to those under 18.

Source: Nicholas H. Wolfinger, “Counterintuitive Trends in the Link Between Premarital Sex and Marital Stability,” Institute for Family Studies, June 6, 2016, https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-link-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability.

By the 1980s, around half the states in America adopted comprehensive sex education curricula, while the rest continued to teach Family Life Education classes emphasizing abstinence before marriage. But in the mid-1980s, the deadly AIDS epidemic fundamentally changed how America viewed sex. With an almost 100 percent fatal rate at the time, both sides of the sex education debates blamed each other. Those in favor of more abstinence-centered programs believed that the AIDS epidemic was caused by the overall moral decline of society and the sanctioning of permissive attitudes toward sex by those favoring comprehensive sex education programs. Organizations like SEICUS used the AIDS epidemic to justify the need for more information on homosexual relationships to be taught in our schools. In 1986, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop pushed for comprehensive sex education in our nation’s public schools. “There is no doubt that we need sex education in our schools, and it includes information on heterosexual and homosexual relationships,” Koop wrote in his report. “The need is critical, and the price of neglect is high.”

But was the need critical? Yes, the AIDS epidemic was scary and certainly made the headlines, but the realistic chance for an American to contract and then die from AIDS in the 1980s was around 0.0002 percent. Nevertheless, AIDS deaths were the tragic excuse needed to get more instruction in our sex education programs about homosexual sex and a general push toward comprehensive sex ed.

Fast forwarding to today, some organizations are pushing for more pleasure-based sex education, completely obliterating the lines of what most sane people would consider appropriate to talk about with children. Consider that the National Education Association’s LGBTQ caucus recommends the Queering Sex Education Teen Guide. The guide asserts:

We recognize the need for an alternative sex education resource. It’s not okay that gaps are being left and our sexual experiences are being ignored: there’s so much opportunity in the queer world, and that includes queer sex. Penis and vagina is one kind of sex, but it’s not the only kind of sex! This information should not only be available but celebrated. We want to re-frame the sex that we have and the sex that we want to have as something positive. We want to see the kind of sex we have and want to have reflected in the curriculum. It’s needed.

The guide recommends that students be taught about fisting, rimming, bondage, and sadomasochism. They also have a resource video produced by Planned Parenthood of Toronto to teach students about all those acts. This is just one example of the push for pleasure-based sex education in our schools. The point is that putting a condom on a banana was PG-13, but now they want sex education to be NC-17. America, this is not a joke. This is really happening.

*****

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

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

Flyers Urging Illegals To Vote For Biden Found In Left-Wing Group’s Office In Mexico thumbnail

Flyers Urging Illegals To Vote For Biden Found In Left-Wing Group’s Office In Mexico

By Brianna Lyman

Flyers reportedly posted around a Resource Center Matamoros facility in Mexico encouraged illegal immigrants — who are not eligible to vote in the United States — to vote for President Joe Biden in November, according to The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. One of the organizations operating out of the Resource Center Matamoros (RCM) has ties to Biden’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose articles of impeachment the U.S. House of Representatives delivered to the Senate [this past] Tuesday afternoon.

The flyers, which the Oversight Project posted photos of on X, read “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.” The Heritage Foundation said the flyers were first discovered by Muckraker but also confirmed to The Federalist that their own team had obtained a copy of one of the flyers “inside the RCM office.”

“The flyer in the X thread is a direct scan of the one our folks obtained on-site inside the RCM office,” a Heritage Foundation representative said. “The flyers were also posted all over the camp in the port-a-potties.”

Nevertheless, others have raised questions about the flyer, including Fox News’ Bill Melugin.

“I am extremely skeptical of this. The flier appears to be a word for word Google Translate copy & paste of a portion of the NGO’s English website, with ‘vote for Biden’ randomly added in at the end, when it does not appear on the site,” Melugin posted on X. “The translation is bad, then you have ‘bienvenidos’ spelled wrong and ‘todos con Biden’ added onto the flier with a Biden logo.”

Another social media user associated with a left-wing immigration group claimed to have spoken with the executive director of RCM and said the posters were “Totally fake” and “Made up by two posers.”

It is unclear whether RCM authorized the posting of the flyers, but the Heritage Foundation told The Federalist that because they found flyers in the RCM office, they have “every reason to believe” the flyer is from the organization. The Federalist reached out to RCM for more information but did not receive a response.

The flyers “appear to be handed out when illegal aliens use the RCM for assistance in coming to the USA,” according to the Oversight Project.

RCM says it is “a humanitarian organization that provides a safe space where refugees at the southern Texas-Mexico border can access legal and social support services.” Its “6-unit office complex” hosts the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which provides “legal assistance and assistance with obtaining formal documents for job search and integration into the city of Matamoros as [migrants] wait to access the asylum process in the US.”

RCM founder and executive director Gaby Zavala previously worked with La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE)– a left-wing organization that is partnered with the Open Society Institute, as pointed out by the Oversight Project. The Open Society Institute is funded by left-wing billionaire and mega-donor George Soros.

RCM also worked alongside Team Brownsville, a left-wing organization, and Angry Tias and Abeulas, which aims to help illegal immigrants cross the border, according to the Oversight Project.

Mayorkas — whose disastrous handling of the invasion at the southern border earned him impeachment by the House — was formerly on the board of HIAS and in his current role with the Biden administration has met with members of both Angry Tias and Abuelas as well as LUPE, according to Judicial Watch.

[READ NEXT: Not A Single Democrat Witness In Congress Agreed Only Citizens Should Vote In Federal Elections]

While illegal immigrants and other noncitizens are prohibited from voting in federal elections, federal voter registration forms simply require each individual to check a box affirming he is a U.S. citizen. The lack of any requirement that new voters show documentary proof of citizenship prompted former President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday to announce Republican legislation that would demand such documentation from new registrants.

The federal government currently prohibits states from requiring potential voters to provide such proof to register to vote in federal elections. States may require proof of citizenship to register for statewide elections, as Arizona does. But even in Arizona, a voter who attempts to register to vote with the state form but fails to provide proof of citizenship must then be registered to vote on a federal-only form.

During the 2020 presidential election, 11,600 voters voted using a federal-only ballot, AZ Free News reported. President Joe Biden won the state by 10,457 votes.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

Arizona Republican Party Joins Two Other State GOPs Filing an Amicus Curiae Brief in Kari Lake’s and Mark Finchem’s Voting Machine Tabulator Lawsuit thumbnail

Arizona Republican Party Joins Two Other State GOPs Filing an Amicus Curiae Brief in Kari Lake’s and Mark Finchem’s Voting Machine Tabulator Lawsuit

By Rachel Alexander

The Arizona Republican Party (AZGOP) submitted a joint Amicus Curiae brief on Thursday with the Georgia Republican Party and the Republican State Committee of Delaware supporting Kari Lake’s and Mark Finchem’s Petition for Certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court. The pair are appealing the lower courts’ decisions against their lawsuit challenging the use of electronic voting machine tabulators in elections. Under the new leadership of AZGOP Chair Gina Swoboda, who has a lengthy history in election integrity work including heading the Voter Reference Foundation, the AZGOP is heavily focused on election integrity.

Authored by attorney William J. Olson the brief argues that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals erred by dismissing the case claiming Lake and Finchem lacked standing. The court affirmed the trial court’s granting of the defendant’s motion to dismiss, asserting that the pair lacked standing because “speculative allegations that voting machines may be hackable are insufficient to establish an injury in fact under Article III.” The complaint emphasized that the lower courts “conflated standing with merits, twisting the standing rules to require much more — that the complaint prove facts sufficient to grant relief.”

Lake and Finchem filed the lawsuit prior to the 2022 election. They are again candidates; Lake is running for the U.S. Senate and Finchem is running for the Arizona Senate. The brief noted that the two “filed a motion to expedite, as the serious election problems that occurred in 2022 are being repeated, with the 2024 general election now only seven months away.”

The amicus brief pointed out a new trend since the 2020 election of courts refusing to grant standing in election cases. “In the short time since the 2020 election cycle, many of this nation’s federal and state courts have implemented a major modification in this Court’s standing jurisprudence which severely limits the election challenges they are willing to consider on the merits,” the brief said. “These recent decisions, requiring plaintiffs in election challenges to meet unreasonable standards to demonstrate standing, violate a basic duty of the federal courts.”…..

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Continue reading this article at the Arizona Sun-Times.

Rachel Alexander specializes in election law. Find her at The Intellectual Conservative.

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

Thinking About Abortion and Arizona Elections thumbnail

Thinking About Abortion and Arizona Elections

By Neland Nobel

There seems to be no issue that stirs up people as the issue of abortion. It likely is because the thinking and narrative around the subject have been so distorted over the past 40 years or so. It would appear that the issue will be critical in multiple elections this cycle, including the state of Arizona. If that is so, we need to be clear-headed about what is going on.

In part, the controversy is because abortion is both a moral and a political issue. One can take a moral point of view, and also a political point of view that may differ or may coincide. Is that hypocrisy or just because some things are in the moral realm and some in the political realm?  There has always been tension between complying with the civil government and Biblical law as in Mark 12:17. “Render unto  Ceasar…”

The fundamental purpose of government is to protect life and property, and clearly, a life is not only affected, but terminated in the abortion decision. So, the state and the law do have a role to play, do they not?

The standard thinking of the left has been that it is all about a woman being able to control “her body.” A “right” conjured out of a penumbra of the Constitution relating to privacy. More recent Supreme Court decisions have found otherwise. However, a baby is not part of her body. She is carrying the baby to be sure, she helped create the baby, but the baby is not part of her body.

As an aside, it was striking how easily the left disposed of the “right to control our bodies” when it came to COVID-19 vaccinations.

Now your spleen is part of your body and if it has to be removed, that is a choice a person of either sex should be able to make in consultation with medical experts.

However, a spleen does not have a heart and brain, and it will not grow into an independent human, depart from your body, and then lead a totally separate existence. So, we can dispense with the “it is a woman’s right to control her body argument.” It is not logical and never has been.

Abortion should not be part of the women’s rights movement but has been conflated as such. It is not about being able to vote, own property, or pursue a career. The baby is not part of her body although it obviously can affect her body for about nine months and beyond.

What are “reproductive rights” we hear so much about?  It would seem that would entail the right to not have sex, the right to have sex with whom you choose when you choose, and whether that is within a lasting relationship or not. It would include the right to choose any appropriate device, procedure, or medication to either avoid or enhance pregnancy. You can see there is a lot of freedom there to make decisions about sex and childbearing.

When you think about it, it is odd that such angst is vented on this subject when today women have more choices to determine when and if they will become pregnant than they ever had in history.  And for the most part, they are legal, available, easy to use, and inexpensive.

Planned Parenthood was founded as a birth control movement to reduce the number of those believed inferior before most contraceptives. Margaret Sanger was an outspoken racist and bigot who was part of the broader Progressive goal of eugenics. But technology makes birth control possible without killing babies, regardless of the motivations.

In this sense, abortion is not “birth control” but rather the product of the failure of “birth control”.

But for the period women are fertile, do “reproductive rights” allow for the killing of another being, a human baby for reasons of family planning or convenience? As previously noted, this killing would seem less “necessary” today given technological and pharmacological advances.

It would also appear that once conception has occurred, and a baby is growing, something fundamental has changed. The rights of the baby should have some consideration in the matter. Indeed, the rights of the father, which are often completely ignored, should also be considered.

Today, the argument is made that only the “rights” of the mother should be considered. Generally speaking, outside of war, most advanced societies believe the right to kill another human is moral only in defense of the assaulted person or another innocent human being. The baby is not “assaulting” anyone with the intent to cause harm or injury and is entirely innocent.

Many try to circumvent this obvious truth by contending that abortion is not killing a baby.  Clearly, whether by pharmaceutical means or being dismembered inside the mother by devices, the baby is being killed. The counter argument then is made that is it “not a baby” but rather a “clump of cells.”

What is a “clump of cells”?  Well, a clump of cells could be asparagus growing or toe fungus.  If that were the case, then there is no question that you can destroy this clump of cells.  However, the “clump of cells” in question is quite particular.  It contains the DNA of at least two people, but actually many more people that had created their own clump of cells.  This clump of cells will become only one thing, a new human being. 

To avoid the reality of this logic, the next typical step is to suggest as long as this clump of cells is not developed enough “to be human”, the baby has no rights whatsoever and thus it is OK to kill the clump.

But then there is the tricky issue of determining when precisely is that?  When the baby is “viable” or when the baby can “feel pain”?  How do we know when a baby feels pain?  Modern science seems to be constantly proving that viability is possible at remarkably early ages.  Neither the viability nor the feeling of pain can be precisely calculated.

It is extremely difficult to know exactly at what point a zygote becomes a baby and hence the argument that it is at the point of conception that it becomes human makes logical sense. As noted before, regardless of age or development, the zygote will only become a human baby and not asparagus.

The stage of human development does not obviate your rights.  A two-year-old has few rights, but with growth, he or she will obtain them.  But we would not kill the child even though they have not obtained all legal rights.  The baby in or out of the womb has a right to live, once created.

The right to live is the most fundamental of all rights. Without life, other rights make no sense.  It is rare to hear anyone suggest non-living objects have rights.

Either a woman has an absolute right to kill her baby or she does not.That is the question and your thought exercise for the day. And if it is not an absolute right, when and under what circumstances does she have a limited right? This recent exchange with liberal Bill Maher is revealing.

The compromise that has been sought for years has been if the pregnancy is a physical danger ( as opposed to mental anguish) to the mother’s life, or if the baby is old enough to feel pain (a slippery concept to be sure), there should be some limitations on “abortion rights.”

We never liked the term “reproductive rights” because those rights were exercised before conception while the goal of abortion itself is NOT to be reproductive.  The exercise of “reproductive rights” was exercised prior to the baby coming into existence.  Most reproductive “rights” are exercised without the intention of becoming pregnant. 

Some people suggest that as a man, I have no right to speak on these matters. That’s baloney. It is a contentious political issue and a matter of law and morality.  As such, all citizens have a right to voice an opinion. Don’t be made to cower by this argument.

The abortion movement was born as part of the eugenics movement.  Much like the argument over the stage of development when a baby becomes “human”, this argument can be extended to adults who function at a very low level and do not appear fully aware or competent to enjoy life.  That is a dangerous slope to try to walk.  Not surprisingly, the internal logic of judging the worthiness of life has led to the killing of those with retardation and mental illness in NAZI Germany and the wholesale extermination of those regarded as inferior people. It has also led to a movement in Western countries towards very liberal policies regarding euthanasia.  A general disregard and respect for life is spreading.

Further, we are warning you that your emotions are about to be manipulated cynically for political reasons.  Democrats want to paint all Republicans as unfeeling retrogrades who don’t appreciate the gains women have made in our society. They believe they have found a wedge issue to exploit. They want to push initiatives and legislation that are extreme and only consider the mother’s wishes. Further, beyond abortion, they want to redefine the family unit and the idea of sex itself.

Our moral sense is to protect a woman’s choice up to the point of pregnancy, and then recognize the rights of the baby are now involved. If the mother does not wish to keep the baby, many couples are looking to adopt.

That might cause the mother emotional trauma. Yes, it might, but that is preferred to killing the baby who suffers damage that can never be reversed.  The exercise of all rights involves corresponding responsibilities.

Former President Trump is catching lots of flak because he has taken a position that irritates the purists on both sides of the debate.

As a political question, he has made the correct decision.  This is a question for states to decide. That is what appointing originalists for the bench was all about. Alabama may decide differently from California.  That is the wonder of federalism, which is our system of government.

So, the battle for public opinion will have to be conducted on a state-by-state basis.

As for Arizona, a reasonable compromise would be to limit abortion to very early in the term of pregnancy, before the baby is “viable” and “likely to feel pain.”  We don’t know the exact time that would be and we humans at this juncture can’t really know.  However, it is the best that can be done at this time to try to resolve a contentious issue. It will not be acceptable completely to either side.  That is the very nature of compromise.

There is no unlimited right to abortion and it is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. Women have the right to determine their destiny, but not by killing others to achieve it.

On the other hand, our right-to-life friends have not succeeded in convincing a large majority of their position.  Some key states have already passed very expansive abortion legislation. That is the political reality we must contend with.

Politically speaking, it would be unwise to sacrifice all other important issues, just to this single issue.  Our country is going bankrupt, our elections are rigged, the government is imprisoning right to life demonstrators, the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Amendments of the Bill of Rights are under assault, we are being invaded by illegal immigrants, Democrats favor criminals over the innocent, and we are abandoning the rule of law to a giant administrative state.  The next President will likely appoint several more Supreme Court Justices.

If Democrats win big and take the White House and House and Senate, the right-to-life movement will be in even worse shape than it is now.  It is far better for conservatives to win, not just for this issue, but for many of those aforementioned.

Therefore, it would be best to push a moderate line of compromise that avoids Democrat victory.  Make the other side sound extremist and radical while we should sound sensible.

Morally, I can’t support abortion, but politically it is clear the Democrats are going to use this in Arizona and other key states and exploit this difficult moral and personal issue for their own ends.

A reasonable political compromise, and we admit it is an uncomfortable compromise, is to allow abortion under certain limited circumstances that involve the safety of the mother and require that the procedure occur very early in the term of pregnancy.

For our right-to-life friends, compromise may be insufficient.  We appreciate why. If it is human life, killing is not justified at any stage of development, except to save the mother.  Why would the murder of babies be OK in one state and not another? That is logically and morally consistent. But a worse outcome would be an unlimited “right” to taxpayer-funded abortion enshrined, including late-term abortions, in our Constitution or law; plus a Democrat victory that allows them to overturn every aspect of our society and economy.

Politics isn’t bean bag and we must try to advance what we can and get the vote in Arizona of a large contingent of independent voters. This may be the best we can get even if it is not all that we may want.

Compromise in the political realm does not substitute for the need to continue the moral conversation. Abortion is a poor substitute for self-control or contraception.

Ultimately we have to convince suburban women, and many men,  that killing babies should not be part of the “women’s rights movement.”

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

Is Arizona Turning Blue? The Latest Voter Registration Numbers Tell a Different Story. thumbnail

Is Arizona Turning Blue? The Latest Voter Registration Numbers Tell a Different Story.

By Arizona Free Enterprise Club

Editors’ Note: The news and the numbers below are encouraging for the GOP and the 2024 election. But, the most important news and numbers are how many GOP ballots are correctly cast in the approaching November election. Given that the leftist, radical Democrat Party holds the Arizona offices of Governor, Secretary of State and Attorney General, their past election rigging and suspected election malfeasance, the Democrat manipulations of election laws, and the Democrat push for their voters to overwhelm the mail-in voting system with early mailing of their ballots, it is essential for Republican and Independent voters to alter their habits and vote in the most efficient and effective way. The Prickly Pear strongly urges every reader to vote by mail (as most Arizonans do) but vote immediately after receiving your ballot. The guidelines for competitive voting in this year’s critical election are presented in our TAKE ACTION link. Please read and study our articles about this year’s voting to avoid being disenfranchised as a voting citizen and not achieving a strong victory on November 5th for all of  the national and state offices – How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona: Part 1 and Part 2

Everyone knows that political pundits, social media influencers, and the corporate media love a good narrative. And one of their favorites for years has been the claim that Arizona is trending blue—that a demographic shift toward Democrats is inevitable.

This ‘conventional wisdom’ is repeated so often that much of the Republican political class in the state has accepted it as fact. Some are even advising candidates that the only path forward for Republicans is to abandon their conservative principles, embrace center-left policy solutions, and settle for a future of divided government.

But a funny thing about narratives and conventional wisdom: numbers don’t lie, especially those showing party preference when people are registering to vote.

Last month, the Secretary of State updated the statewide voter registration data prior to the Presidential Preference Election. The latest figures show that Republicans are once again the largest voting bloc in Arizona, surpassing Independents by nearly 40,000. This is certainly an important development—especially given all the attention it received on social media when Independent registrations surpassed Republicans last year.

But that’s not the most significant voter registration trend. It’s the one that could spell doom for the Democratic party in our state’s upcoming election.

The Data Shows a Widening Gap Between Registered Republicans and Democrats

According to the Secretary of State’s recent report, the voter registration advantage for Republicans over Democrats is now 5.77%, with approximately 236,000 more people registered as Republican than Democrat.

How significant is this?

On Election Day in 2022, the gap between Republicans and Democrats was 4.03%—or about 166,000 more Republicans than Democrats. And on Election Day in 2020, the gap was only 3.04%—or about 130,000 more Republicans than Democrats.

This means that in less than four years, the percentage gap between Democrats and Republicans has nearly doubled, and in raw numbers went from 130,000 to 236,000 more Republicans than Democrats in the state!

At first glance, this already looks impressive, but the registration numbers from the last decade show an even greater long-term trend. Based on the data from the Secretary of State, the gap between registered Republicans and registered Democrats is stronger today than at any point in the last 10 years! (See graph above and chart below)

So, despite the ‘conventional wisdom’ of the political class, there is no evidence that Arizona is trending blue. In fact, the registration numbers suggest the opposite. Now, Republicans look to be positioning themselves in 2024 to look a lot more like the 2014 and 2016 elections that featured a massive red wave and the election of President Donald Trump.

And while the last three elections may have been razor thin close, a combination of ridiculous Democrat policies—along with critical Republican successes—are setting up the opportunity for Republicans to have a big year.

Democrats Are Hemorrhaging Support Due to Absurd Policy Positions

One thing these voter registration numbers tell us is that people are seeing just how crazy Democrats are on the issues. We can start with the current border crisis where the Biden administration has abandoned its constitutional duty, and Democrat Governor Katie Hobbs has done everything she can to pretend it doesn’t exist. In the meantime, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in the number of “gotaways,” a surge of illegal immigrants in the Tucson Border Sector, and an increase in cartel violence—to name just a few of the problems.

Then, there’s our schools where Critical Race Theory and radical gender theory have been spreading like wildfire—especially over the past four years. In the Scottsdale Unified School District, we’ve seen administrators encourage students to replace their “deadname”—the name that individuals reject upon transitioning genders—with their preferred name on their school ID. In Phoenix, a sixth grade teacher was recorded teaching her students about gender identity and not trusting their parents on the subject. And a Tucson High School held its first annual drag show in May 2022, weeks before one of the counselors who organized the event was arrested for having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl.

But we also can’t forget about how the Left handled COVID. Democrat-run states had some of the most restrictive stay-at-home orders in the country. Just ask the people of Michigan. And many of them also pushed “vaccine passports” to allow citizens to use their freedoms. Then, of course the Biden administration rolled out a dangerous vaccine mandate with Democrat-run cities like Phoenix quick to get on board.

On top of all this, the Left continues to push preposterous bans on gas stoves and gas cars while now trying to adopt taxes on our vehicle miles traveled as inflation eats away at the average citizen. Meanwhile, the only thing Katie Hobbs seems to be able to accomplish is breaking the record for most vetoes in a legislative session and massively growing the size of the state government.

Republican Successes Have Created Great Momentum

People want to live in a state that’s free. That’s why Arizona’s Republican leadership has made it a top priority—especially in the last four years—to ensure that our freedoms are both protected and expanded.

During COVID, our state’s response put it ahead of most other states in the country. While we certainly weren’t immune from restrictions, Arizona remained open as blue states like California, New York, and the aforementioned Michigan continued with extreme lockdowns and other measures that crushed their state’s economies.

Then, in July 2021, Republicans delivered historic tax cuts for all Arizona taxpayers, giving them some much-needed relief from rising inflation. But they didn’t stop there. With gas, grocery, housing, and energy prices climbing under the Biden administration, Republicans also included tax relief for Arizona’s families in last year’s state budget.

Along with this, conservatives got to work on passing a law that both saves taxpayers money and provides universal school choice for every single child in the state. Upon the launch of the expanded Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA), the program was so popular that the ESA website became overwhelmed by the large number of families looking to escape the woke agenda in our union-backed public schools.

Now, the latest voter registration numbers are demonstrating that these policies have resonated with the electorate in Arizona while attracting even more conservatives to our state. That’s probably why Democrats have been so frantic trying to repeal school choice and falsely blame our historic tax cuts for the budget shortfall. They are worried that it will be game over for them if these structure reforms stand.

It’s also important to note that none of this guarantees electoral success for Republicans. A registration advantage is like a head start in a race. Great to have but means nothing if the GOP doesn’t work hard to unify around a conservative platform, conduct a robust GOTV program, and support their general election candidates. Poor voter turnout and infighting within the party cost Republicans several races throughout the state in 2022.

But the overall political trend lines are clear. Arizona’s freedom-focused policies have laid a foundation for us to be a red state. Now, we need to use this momentum, build on it, and ensure that we become an even more red state for years to come.

Help Protect Freedom in Arizona by Joining Our Grassroots Network

Arizona needs to have a unified voice promoting economic freedom and prosperity, and the Free Enterprise Club is committed to making that happen. But we can’t do it alone. We need YOU!

Join our FREE Grassroots Action List to stay up to date on the latest battles against big government and how YOU can help influence crucial bills at the Arizona State Legislature.

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This article was published by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.