BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Maricopa County GOP To Formally Censure County Recorder RINO Stephen Richer TONIGHT After Tuesday Primary Election Debacle – MARICOPA STILL COUNTING thumbnail

BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Maricopa County GOP To Formally Censure County Recorder RINO Stephen Richer TONIGHT After Tuesday Primary Election Debacle – MARICOPA STILL COUNTING

By Jordan Conradson

Editors’ Note: The following article is published to report the frustration and disappointment with the conduct of the August 2nd primary election in Maricopa County under the leadership of Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer. The Prickly Pear interviewed Mr. Richer in 2020 as a candidate for the Recorder’s office when he ran against and defeated Adrian Fontes, a Democrat partisan with clear violations of his role as a nonpartisan Recorder conducting honest elections. Stephen promised to make the Recorder’s office “boring again” and stated publicly that Fontes was incompetent and had criminally violated the office. The 2022 primary election in Maricopa County speaks very poorly of Mr. Richer’s competence and we question his ability to manage the November general election and, critically, the 2024 election. We are not yet calling for his removal as stated in the following article but are watching closely his performance and behavior going forward.

Separately, we observed voter after voter (too numerous to count) arriving at our polling stations this past Tuesday, August 2nd, depositing their ‘mail-in ballots’ in the ‘mail-in ballot’ box located where we traditionally actually cast our vote in the voting booth with the result available for tabulation by the evening for announced election results. With 80-85% of Arizonans voting by mail-in ballot and ballots arriving in their mailboxes almost 30 days before election day, dropping these green envelopes off at polling stations the actual day of the election prevents a full counting for days to weeks, if ever, with significant opportunity for election fraud. Signature verification and actual recording of mail-in ballots are labor intensive and delay the final vote tallies for every office throughout the state. A future article at The Prickly Pear will examine this major issue of the voting mechanisms in our state with recommendations for voter education and reform of our broken electoral system.

Tonight, The Maricopa County Republican Committee will move to formally censure RINO Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who ran on a platform of rooting out corruption in elections and cracking down on election fraud, but has done the exact opposite.

This resolution calls on Richer to resign or be permanently expelled from office by the voters through a recall.

Maricopa County had another corrupt election on Tuesday. The Gateway Pundit reported on the major fraud concerns and issues in Maricopa and statewide. We also reported that Maricopa County stopped the counting in the middle of the night on election night, just after Trump-Endorsed MAGA Queen Kari Lake took the lead.

Now, they’re still counting the ballots! The whole world is watching and wondering, what the hell is going on?

TAKE ACTION

The $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 being pushed through the U.S. Senate to be passed by reconciliation (50 votes plus the Vice President) before the upcoming August recess is a threat to America’s economy and the well-being of all Americans. The article above makes clear that Senator Kyrsten Sinema is the one Democrat vote that America is looking at. She alone can stop this legislation. Please contact her at her office locations in Washington, D.C. and in Arizona by phone and letter. Click the red TAKE ACTION link below for Senator Sinema’s contact information.

Although Senator Mark Kelly is a do-as -Chuck Schumer- tells-you-to-do partisan shill, contacting him may be helpful given his significant vulnerability in the November general election. His contact information is also found at the TAKE ACTION link below. We suggest that copying him on your letter to Senator Sinema may possibly have some impact on his voting behavior. Calling his office is also important – the staffs do score the relative positions of constituents and this too may influence the voting behavior.

Democratic Activists Are Dishing Out Millions To Keep CRT, Gender Theory In Schools thumbnail

Democratic Activists Are Dishing Out Millions To Keep CRT, Gender Theory In Schools

By Reagan Reese

An education nonprofit that labels itself as non-partisan is pouring millions of dollars into political groups ahead of school board elections, according to Politico.

The Campaign for Our Shared Future, which works for “equitable, anti-racist programs, practices and policies” in K-12 education, is targeting school board elections in red states including Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, and Michigan, with a plan to reach at least 15 states, according to Politico. Executive Director Dr. Heather Harding said the group has raised at least $9 million for voter education efforts and plans to raise more. (RELATED: ‘We Are Being Censored’: Co-Founder Of Conservative Moms Group Blasts Twitter)

The campaign branches for Campaign For Our Shared Future were registered by two groups run by Arabella Advisors, a group known for pushing “Democratic dark money nonprofit groups,” Politico reported. New Venture Fund, which centers its work in “race, equity, diversity and inclusion” and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a group that works for “economic equity and racial justice,” are backing Campaign For Our Shared Future.

“After two years of being accused of a fake ‘astroturf’ movement, imagine the surprise of first-time activists and average parents from across the country to see that Arabella Advisors – a massive, dark money-funded network – has poured eight figures into jumping on the education bandwagon,” Parents Defending Education President Nicole Neily told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s unsurprising that democratic donors are panicked about how their allies have mismanaged this issue – but no amount of money can make up for the fact that at the end of the day, they truly believe that they know better than we do how to raise our children… and that is a losing message, period.”

Harding’s work history includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Teach For America, which values a “shared commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness.”

Campaign For Our Shared Future currently works with Our Turn, a youth activism group that focuses on social justice issues like immigration reform, Politico reported.

The education group provides a “voting guide” for school board elections in several red states and provides information on what makes a “good school board candidate” including someone who is fairly involved in the school, according to the website. “Extremists are causing chaos” in school board meetings, the group says, providing an example of a Florida man who challenged the school’s equity statement and deemed it “indoctrination.”

The group also called parents who opposed mask mandates in a Virginia school “conspiracy theorists,” the website shows.

Next, the group plans to target Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin but has not revealed in what ways, and will work with Florida Student Power, a group of students focused on LGBTQ, racial, and women reproductive injustices, Politico reported.

“It’s clear to me that the battle continues to grow,” Harding told the outlet. “We think that presidential politics will continue to keep schools sort of in their crosshairs. We don’t find that productive to the actual work of learning, so we do hope that as more donors join us we can be broader, and go deeper so that public schools continue to be a backbone of democracy.”

Campaign For Our Shared Future did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

The $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 being pushed through the U.S. Senate to be passed by reconciliation (50 votes plus the Vice President) before the upcoming August recess is a threat to America’s economy and the well-being of all Americans. The article above makes clear that Senator Kyrsten Sinema is the one Democrat vote that America is looking at. She alone can stop this legislation. Please contact her at her office locations in Washington, D.C. and in Arizona by phone and letter. Click the red TAKE ACTION link below for Senator Sinema’s contact information.

Although Senator Mark Kelly is a do-as -Chuck Schumer- tells-you-to-do partisan shill, contacting him may be helpful given his significant vulnerability in the November general election. His contact information is also found at the TAKE ACTION link below. We suggest that copying him on your letter to Senator Sinema may possibly have some impact on his voting behavior. Calling his office is also important – the staffs do score the relative positions of constituents and this too may influence the voting behavior.

The Inflation ‘Reduction’ Act – Really?? Are You Kidding?? Calling Senator Sinema thumbnail

The Inflation ‘Reduction’ Act – Really?? Are You Kidding?? Calling Senator Sinema

By John R. Ammon

The $739 billion Inflation ‘Reduction’ Act of 2022 – really?? Are you kidding?? Joe Manchin, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden are attempting to rapidly hoist this Senate bill on America before the coming recess to reduce inflation!

Does any sane American (sane = common sense, attached to reality) actually believe this totally partisan and desperate legislation arriving months before the November 8th reckoning will reduce the Biden inflation caused by uncontrolled federal spending and the attack on energy in America?

After appearing as a rare, sane and pro-American Democrat, Manchin now claims his elevation to the world’s oldest profession from the political profession, a close second.

This legislation, to be passed by reconciliation (50 votes plus the Vice-President), will be economically devastating to Americans and make the economic crisis in America much worse as recession deepens and severe inflation goes higher.

The bill includes a higher tax burden on all classes of taxpayers and small businesses (where American jobs are created), hundreds of billions for the Green New Deal, over $250 billion taken from Medicare and a host of other hostile provisions hurting the working folks and producers in the nation. The enviro-left-Democrat base is cheering the Democrat Senators on to ‘save the planet’.

Who is left among the Senate Democrats to stop this assault on economic and energy policy, in effect a crushing of the middle and lower classes? There is one person – the one who previously stood with Joe Manchin against eliminating the Senate filibuster, against packing the Supreme Court, against spending 5 trillion dollars on Build Back Better, etc., etc.

It is Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Contact her now and be loud and clear – her political future is at stake and she may be the only Senator who can actually stop this craziness and threat to America’s future.

She is on the ballot in 2024 and has billed herself as an independent, maverick styled politician. Remind her that Arizonans reject this damaging, partisan election year legislative stunt and will reject her if her name is on it.

Let Senator Sinema know that her name is now the only important name – she is the one Senator who can kill this bill at a time of recession and galloping inflation. The state she represents is polling decidedly against the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and a vote for it by her will not be forgotten or forgiven.

See the TAKE ACTION link below to contact Senator Sinema and inform her of the consequences of caving to Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden.

Although Senator Mark Kelly is a predictable and loyal shill for Chuck Schumer and does what he is told, he is on the ballot this November and is very vulnerable. Delivering the same message to Kelly is appropriate and might be helpful even if his vote is quite predictable.

TAKE ACTION

The $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 being pushed through the U.S. Senate to be passed by reconciliation (50 votes plus the Vice President) before the upcoming August recess is a threat to America’s economy and the well-being of all Americans. The article above makes clear that Senator Kyrsten Sinema is the one Democrat vote that America is looking at. She alone can stop this legislation. Please contact her at her office locations in Washington, D.C. and in Arizona by phone and letter. Click the red TAKE ACTION link below for Senator Sinema’s contact information.

Although Senator Mark Kelly is a do-as -Chuck Schumer- tells-you-to-do partisan shill, contacting him may be helpful given his significant vulnerability in the November general election. His contact information is also found at the TAKE ACTION link below. We suggest that copying him on your letter to Senator Sinema may possibly have some impact on his voting behavior. Calling his office is also important – the staffs do score the relative positions of constituents and this too may influence the voting behavior.

The Biden Administration Says US Not in a Recession, but Federal Statutes Say Otherwise. Who is Right? thumbnail

The Biden Administration Says US Not in a Recession, but Federal Statutes Say Otherwise. Who is Right?

By Jon Miltimore

Is the US economy in recession? The answer is, paradoxically, both easier and more complicated than you might think.

As expected the United States posted negative growth for the second consecutive quarter, according to government data released on Thursday.

“Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 0.9 percent in the second quarter of 2022, following a decrease of 1.6 percent in the first quarter,” the US Bureau of Economic Analysis announced.

The news prompted many outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, to use the R word—recession, which historically has been commonly defined as “economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.”

The White House does not agree, however, and following the release of the data, President Biden said the US economy is “on the right path.” 

The comments come as little surprise. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had recently hinted that the White House would contend the economy wasn’t actually in a recession even if Q2 data indicated the economy had contracted for a second consecutive quarter.

“There is an organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research that looks at a broad range of data in deciding whether or not there is a recession,” Yellen said. “And most of the data that they look at right now continues to be strong. I would be amazed if they would declare this period to be a recession, even if it happens to have two-quarters of negative growth.”

“We have a very strong labor market,” she continued. “When you are creating almost 400,000 jobs a month, that is not a recession.”

Yellen is not wrong that NBER, a private nonprofit economic research organization, looks at a much broader swath of data to determine if the economy is in a recession, or that many view NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee as the “official recession scorekeeper.”

So White House officials have a point when they say “two negative quarters of GDP growth is not the technical definition of recession,” even though it is a commonly used definition.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that federal statutes, the Congressional Budget Office, and other governing bodies use the two consecutive quarters of negative growth as an official indication of economic recession.

Phil Magness, an author, and economic historian points out that several “trigger” provisions exist in US laws (and Canadian law) that are designed to go into effect when the economy posts negative growth in consecutive quarters.

“For reference, here is the definition used in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act of 1985,” Magness wrote on Twitter, referencing a clause in the Act. “This particular clause has been subsequently retained and replicated in several trigger clauses for recessionary measures in US federal statutes.”

It’s worth noting that Magness doesn’t contend the two consecutive quarters definition is the best method of determining whether an economy is in a recession, but simply points out that claims that it’s an “informal” definition of recession are untrue.

“It may not be a perfect metric, but it has a very long history of being used to determine policy during recessions,” Magness writes.

Some readers may find it strange that so much heat, ink, and energy is being spent on something as intangible as a word, which is a mere abstraction that has no value. And some policy experts agree.

“Whether [we’re] in a technical recession is less interesting to me than the following 3 questions,” Brian Riedl, an economist at the Manhattan Institute, recently said. “1) Are jobs plentiful? (Yes – good) 2) Are real wages rising? (Falling fast – bad) 3) Is inflation hitting fixed-income fams? (Yes – bad.)”

Others contend that definitions matter, and that by ignoring the legal definition of recession, the Biden White House can continue to argue that the US economy is “historically strong” even as economic growth is negative, inflation is surging, and real wages are crashing.

As Charles Lane recently pointed out in the Washington Post, words have power. He shares a colorful anecdote involving Alfred E. “Fred” Kahn, an economist who served in the Carter Administration who was instructed to never use the words “recession” or “depression” again.

In 1978, Kahn — a Cornell University economist in charge of President Jimmy Carter’s inflation-fighting efforts — said that failure to get soaring prices under control could lead to a “deep, deep depression.” Carter’s aides, perturbed at the possible political fallout, instructed him never to say that word, or “recession,” again.

We don’t know whether this instruction stirred the wrath of Kahn, a verbal stickler notoriously disdainful of cant and euphemism; in a previous government job, he had sent around a memo telling staff not to use words like “herein.”

It did trigger his wit, though: In his next meeting with reporters, Kahn puckishly said the nation was in “danger of having the worst banana in 45 years.”

Lane’s anecdote about Kahn is instructive because it reveals something important about these debates. While they may have a certain amount of importance as far as political spin goes, they are meaningless as far as economic reality is concerned. Substituting the word “banana” for recession did not change economic conditions or the economic outlook one bit, which no doubt was precisely Lane’s point.

My colleague Peter Jacobsen made this point effectively earlier this week.

“[You] don’t need a thermometer to feel if it’s hot outside,” he wrote. “Economic issues, especially inflation, top the list of concerns for voters going into the 2022 midterms, and it isn’t particularly close. So officially defined recession or not, it doesn’t really matter.”

Moreover, Jacobsen explains, macroeconomic data like GDP have historically been the tool of politicians and bureaucrats, who use them to justify economic interventions.

“When GDP numbers fall below a certain level, politicians can use that data to try to push income back up. Or perhaps when the economy is ‘running too hot’ politicians can use fiscal and monetary policy to slow down the economy.

All of these metaphors about economies running hot or stalling are based on a central planning view of the economy. In this view, the economy is like a machine which we can adjust to bring about the proper results. Without macroeconomic statistics, central planners have fewer means by which to justify particular interventions. We can’t claim we need stimulus if we can’t point to some data indicating it’s necessary.”

The takeaway here is an important one. We don’t need “bureaucratic weathermen” telling us when the economy is good or bad any more than we need them “managing” the economy with the money supply, which is precisely how we got here in the first place.

So while the debates over the R word are likely to continue, it’s important to remember it doesn’t really matter if you call this economy a recession or a banana. The fundamentals speak for themselves.

*****

This article was published by FEE, Foundation for Economic Education and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 being pushed through the U.S. Senate to be passed by reconciliation (50 votes plus the Vice President) before the upcoming August recess is a threat to America’s economy and the well-being of all Americans. The article above makes clear that Senator Kyrsten Sinema is the one Democrat vote that America is looking at. She alone can stop this legislation. Please contact her at her office locations in Washington, D.C. and in Arizona by phone and letter. Click the red TAKE ACTION link below for Senator Sinema’s contact information.

Although Senator Mark Kelly is a do-as -Chuck Schumer- tells-you-to-do partisan shill, contacting him may be helpful given his significant vulnerability in the November general election. His contact information is also found at the TAKE ACTION link below. We suggest that copying him on your letter to Senator Sinema may possibly have some impact on his voting behavior. Calling his office is also important – the staffs do score the relative positions of constituents and this too may influence the voting behavior.

Biden Administration Begins Closing Arizona Border Wall Gaps After Pledging To Not Build ‘another foot’ thumbnail

Biden Administration Begins Closing Arizona Border Wall Gaps After Pledging To Not Build ‘another foot’

By Bethany Blankley

The Department of Homeland Security has begun to close gaps in a border wall in Arizona after President Joe Biden pledged in January 2021 to not build “another foot.”

DHS says it plans to complete the Yuma Morelos Dam Project and close four wide gaps in the border wall near Yuma, Arizona, to “address operational impacts, as well as the immediate life and safety risks.”

The gaps are located in the former Yuma 6 project area, in the Yuma Border Patrol Sector. The project was previously funded by the Department of Defense’s (DOD) military construction appropriations and is now being funded through DHS’s FY21 appropriations.

“Due to the proximity to the Morelos Dam and the swift moving Colorado River, this area presents safety and life hazard risks for migrants attempting to cross into the United States where there is a risk of drownings and injuries from falls,” DHS said. “This area also poses a life and safety risk to first responders and agents responding to incidents in this area.”

Prior to construction, DHS will engage in standard environmental planning and “move as expeditiously as possible, while still maintaining environmental stewardship” once construction begins, it said.

The project was operational under the Trump administration but halted shortly after Biden came into office. On his first day in office, Biden issued 17 executive orders, including one pausing all border wall construction within a week. The order left billions of dollars worth of work unfinished. Because the government was still under contract, not completing construction initially cost taxpayers $6 million a day. After construction crews were let go, the cost dropped to $3 million a day.

The president also returned $2.2 billion in border wall funds to the Department of Defense, which was reallocated to fund 66 projects in 16 countries, three U.S. territories, and 11 states. According to a DOD memo, the majority of the funds, $1.26 billion, was allocated to secure the borders of other countries like Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, and others.

The Yuma Sector encompasses the southwest corner of Arizona, including 181,670 square miles of primarily desert terrain, and 126 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border from the Imperial Sand Dunes in California to the Yuma-Pima County line.

It’s traditionally been the third-busiest sector behind two sectors in Texas. In June, more than 23,700 people were apprehended entering the U.S. illegally. Another 2,000 were recorded as gotaways – those who intentionally evade law enforcement after entering illegally without making immigration claims. From January to June 2022, 160,482 people were apprehended in the sector, nearly four times more than the number apprehended in January-June 2021, according to CBP data.

The majority of the illegal foot traffic in the sector comes through the Morelos Dam. Since Biden’s been in office, hundreds of thousands of people from over 150 countries have flown to Mexicali, Mexico, then taken a bus or taxi ride to Algodones, Mexico. They then walk across a concrete ledge on the dam to illegally enter the U.S.

Under new Biden administration policies, once they surrender to Border Patrol agents and are processed, many are released into Arizona instead of being deported or returned to Mexico to begin their immigration claim process.

When asked about the fact that walls work as a deterrent at a news briefing on Friday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jeane-Pierre said, “We are not finishing a wall. We are cleaning up the mess that the prior administration made. We are trying to save lives. This is what the prior administration left behind that we are now cleaning up.”

After overcoming legal challenges, the Trump administration built more than 450 miles of border wall in a short period of time. The Morelos Dam project had yet to be completed.

On July 1, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a $564 million border security bill into law allocating $335 million in state sales tax revenue to build and maintain a wall along the Arizona-Mexico border. When signing it, he said Biden’s policies created “the worst border crisis in over 20 years” and Arizona was “standing up for the rule of law.”

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

The $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 being pushed through the U.S. Senate to be passed by reconciliation (50 votes plus the Vice President) before the upcoming August recess is a threat to America’s economy and the well-being of all Americans. The article above makes clear that Senator Kyrsten Sinema is the one Democrat vote that America is looking at. She alone can stop this legislation. Please contact her at her office locations in Washington, D.C. and in Arizona by phone and letter. Click the red TAKE ACTION link below for Senator Sinema’s contact information.

Although Senator Mark Kelly is a do-as -Chuck Schumer- tells-you-to-do partisan shill, contacting him may be helpful given his significant vulnerability in the November general election. His contact information is also found at the TAKE ACTION link below. We suggest that copying him on your letter to Senator Sinema may possibly have some impact on his voting behavior. Calling his office is also important – the staffs do score the relative positions of constituents and this too may influence the voting behavior.

A Political Victory for the Joes Is a Loss for the Country thumbnail

A Political Victory for the Joes Is a Loss for the Country

By William Anderson

Editors’ Note: If Manchin thinks this will end the war on fossil fuels, he of course is wrong. The legislation through taxation and subsidies still directs energy choices through a top-down, central planning model, rather than allowing free competition among choices. It also does nothing to challenge the dubious science of global warming, rather it embraces it. Nor does it stop wrecking our existing energy infrastructure while new plans fail to deliver. You would think with the example of Germany right before us, our leaders would have more sense.This defection could have been predicted as he is, after all, a Democrat. With such a narrow margin in the Senate, this capitulation by Manchin is of serious consequence to the nation. Senator Sinema of Arizona remains, but we doubt she has either the nerve or philosophical gumption to resist caving as well.

After months of being portrayed as a villain or worse in the mainstream media, Joe Manchin suddenly has become a Democratic Party hero—all because he has declared he will support legislation that he and President Joe Biden claim will “reduce inflation” and give us better weather. Not surprisingly, the New York Times is leading the way in effusively praising the legislation, claiming the bill “would be the most ambitious action ever taken by the United States to try to stop the planet from catastrophically overheating.”

The “newspaper of record” continues:

The bill aims to tackle global warming by using billions of dollars in tax incentives to ramp up wind, solar, geothermal, battery and other clean energy industries over the next decade. Companies would receive financial incentives to keep open nuclear plants that might have closed, or to capture emissions from industrial facilities and bury them underground before they can warm the planet. Car buyers with incomes below a certain level would receive a $7,500 tax credit to purchase a new electric vehicle and $4,000 for a used one. Americans would receive rebates to install heat pumps and make their homes more energy-efficient.

Biden declared: “This is the action the American people have been waiting for,” adding that the proposed bill provides “investments in our energy security for the future.”

Progressives claim this combination of new taxes, tax credits, and political favoritism will promote wind and solar energy, vastly curb carbon dioxide emissions, save the US government billions of dollars via cheaper drug prices, and curtail inflation (it is currently titled The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022). And—to ensure Manchin’s endorsement—it supports a natural gas pipeline in Manchin’s home state of West Virginia.

If anything can embody the current disconnect between progressive elites in politics, academe, and the media with how things operate in that sphere we call reality, it is the response to this legislation. We are told that increasing taxes on individuals and businesses, putting in a regime of price controls for drugs (which have artificially high prices in the first place because of government favoritism toward that industry), installing a system of tax credits for vehicles that are mostly a plaything of wealthy people, along with creating credits and subsidies for wind and solar power is going to reduce inflation and improve most Americans’ lives.

While each portion of this hodgepodge of wish lists needs scrutiny, one can sum up the entire ordeal by pointing out that the gap between what supporters of something like this claim it will do and what it actually does is enormous. Not surprisingly, the media concentrates upon the political aspects of passing the legislation, the “big story” being Manchin’s willingness to go along with it after having opposed similar legislation before.

Rarely, if ever, are the results of legislation—and especially the kind of legislation progressives tout—scrutinized after passage. Instead, progressives assume that the legislation in question will do everything its supporters claim. One should not expect to see an assessment of the results of this latest “historic” bill on the NYT op-ed page a year from now.

For example, any bill with the goals and actions presented in this “inflation reduction” legislation needs to be examined based on real costs and benefits. Tax credits and subsidies for “renewable” energy (which many unrenewable components go into producing) will mask the prices people must pay for these goods, but what are the real costs? What is the value that people will receive in return?

The first thing to remember is that while one can argue over whether a tax credit is a government subsidy or a real benefit, the fact that often is lost in the argument is that without the possible tax reduction, many people would not purchase the subsidized good in the first place. The tax credit incentivizes car buyers to make choices they would not have made otherwise, and it further distorts structures of production.

For all the happy talk about electric cars and the slick advertisements that herald a new age of electricity, the so-called transition is not about political goals and NYT editorials that claim otherwise. When we go past the rhetoric, we are dealing with government central planning, an energy-focused form of the Gosplan, which made the USSR’s economy nonfunctioning. Central planning can call for reallocation of resources and lay out the plans, but without market prices and profits and losses, resource allocation will become an economic train wreck.

While progressives give lip service to profits and losses, even trying to tilt the economic landscape with tax credits, bans on certain goods, and other coercive means, resources still will move in the direction of consumer choice. Economies depend upon real information, real goods, real prices, and real resources. If we do not have these things, along with free consumer choice, then there inevitably will be resource dislocations as production is pulled onto an unsustainable path.

Take the automobile industry, for example. Although some companies have announced their intention to go all-electric in the next decade, one doubts that anyone in those industries believes that operating vehicles purely with batteries is going to have the outcomes that progressives are promising. While battery costs have declined in recent years, they are decreasing at a decreasing rate. The gasoline-electric hybrids have more potential both in terms of unit cost declines and lowering emissions (when one takes in the entire scope of emissions per mile), but the political climate is pointing everything toward the exclusive use of batteries.

When politics and reality collide, reality always must win, no matter the rhetoric progressives give us. Joe Manchin can claim this newest version of “Build Back Better” is going to reduce inflation and improve life for most Americans, but the reality is that it is going to result in more inflation and shortages. The government can create new tax credits for electric cars, but that will not change the technological reality of building those cars. Consumers still are going to have to wait weeks and even months for their new electric cars, and after they get them, they will have to deal with the limitations those cars place upon them.

As for the progressives in the Democratic Party, the propaganda machines will move in reverse. Manchin now is a hero instead of a villain, and Gail Collins may even write something nice about him for a change.

The hard reality, however, is that central economic planning will create unnecessary hardships for many Americans—and this legislation attempts to do just that. In the end, the rhetoric accompanying this bill cannot overcome the reality that when politicians direct economic resources, bad things happen.

*****

This article was published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 being pushed through the U.S. Senate to be passed by reconciliation (50 votes plus the Vice President) before the upcoming August recess is a threat to America’s economy and the well-being of all Americans. The article above makes clear that Senator Kyrsten Sinema is the one Democrat vote that America is looking at. She alone can stop this legislation. Please contact her at her office locations in Washington, D.C. and in Arizona by phone and letter. Click the red TAKE ACTION link below for Senator Sinema’s contact information.

Although Senator Mark Kelly is a do-as -Chuck Schumer- tells-you-to-do partisan shill, contacting him may be helpful given his significant vulnerability in the November general election. His contact information is also found at the TAKE ACTION link below. We suggest that copying him on your letter to Senator Sinema may possibly have some impact on his voting behavior. Calling his office is also important – the staffs do score the relative positions of constituents and this too may influence the voting behavior.

Ballot Initiative to Reform Arizona Election Laws Allegedly Gathered Signatures Illegally

By Tom Joyce

A ballot initiative that would significantly change how the state’s electoral campaigns are funded and conducted is facing allegations of illegal signature gathering.

The Arizona Free Enterprise Club filed a lawsuit challenging an initiative that it calls “radical” and argues will weaken the state’s election integrity laws. 

The AFEC complaint alleges that many of the signatures turned in to support the initiative were invalid for various reasons and should not have counted. 

The organization argues that some signatures were gathered by paid circulators who failed to register with the Secretary of the State’s office and that others included incorrect information.

In all, the club estimates that over half of the signatures on the election initiative were illegally gathered.

“After analyzing over 45,000 petition sheets and 420,000 signatures, it’s clear that well over half of the signatures on this election initiative were collected in violation of state law,” President Scot Mussi said in a statement. “That should be more than enough to invalidate this initiative.”

The club also expressed these concerns with the initiative, if it were to pass, in a press release:

  • Upend Arizona’s election administration and voter registration laws.
  • Sharply reduce candidate contribution limits while channeling more taxpayer subsidies to so-called “Clean Elections” candidates.
  • Curtail safeguards governing the initiative and referendum process.
  • Impose new taxes.

The defendants in the case are Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and the political committee Arizonans for Free and Fair Elections.

The initiative in question is called the Arizona Fair Elections Act.

Among other provisions, the initiative would mandate automatic voter registration for everyone who obtains a state-issued ID, allow for same-day voter registration, and expand early voting.

Hobbs’ office and Arizonans for Free and Fair Elections could not be immediately reached for comment.

*****

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

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Davos Man, Master Of The Poors

By Rod Dreher

What globalists did to Sri Lanka, they are doing to us all, in many ways.

Slowly but surely, I’m getting used to this new posting system. I am receiving your comments about the problems with the new commenting system, and am passing them on to the Mothership. Sounds like we are quickly going to have a fix for the lack of anonymity. Please share your feedback with me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com; I’m forwarding everything on to the bosses. And hey, Jonah R., whatever your real name is, would you mind reaching out to me at that email address? Thanks.

I think I’m even more focused on decline-and-fall than usual because I’m sitting here in Central Europe reading the media and hearing people talking about how frightened they are of what’s coming in the autumn and winter, should Russian gas supplies be cut off. Very few people in this part of the world support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but nobody asked them if they were prepared to sacrifice their economies to tweak Putin’s nose. In Germany, business leaders and others are talking about the possibility of German industry collapsing from lack of gas to power its factories. This is not an empty threat. The German economy is the engine that powers Europe. If Germany falls into depression, so will the rest of Europe — and that means political unrest, perhaps even violence. If you see what’s happening in the Netherlands right now, with angry farmers fighting back violently against the state’s plan to take away their land, you see what is possible for all of Europe in the near future. Then what will NATO do?

Earlier today I mentioned the Uvalde cops as a metaphor for our leadership class. Here’s another metaphor: the World Economic Forum in Davos. You might have seen that the government of Sri Lanka collapsed this week in the face of national bankruptcy and rioting by people who can’t feed themselves. What happened? Sri Lanka followed the advice of the WEF, and shifted to all-organic farming a few years back. Its agricultural economy collapsed. A nation that used to be able to feed itself with rice is now reduced to importing it.

Funnily enough, the WEF scrubbed its “we’re going to make Sri Lanka rich” article from its website in the wake of the disaster there.

Ah, but the Wayback Machine remembers all! Here’s a link to a 2018 article by the Sri Lanka PM, written on the World Economic Forum website, promising to make his country “rich by 2025”.

The Sri Lankan people own, so to speak, a lot less now than they did back in 2018, when they were not rich, but could at least feed themselves. They took the advice of Western experts, and are now broke and hungry. Michael Shellenberger analyzes the causes of the crisis. Excerpt:

But the biggest and main problem causing Sri Lanka’s fall was its ban on chemical fertilizers in April 2021. Many other developing nations had to deal with similar challenges, including covid and high foreign debt, but have not collapsed. Indonesia has suffered terrorist bombings, which harmed tourism, but managed to rebound, and tourism rebounded in Sri Lanka starting last year. And while economic growth declined after 2012 but from astronomical peaks of 8% and 9% and remained above 3% and 4% until 2020.

The numbers are shocking. One-third of Sri Lanka’s farm lands were dormant in 2021 due to the fertilizer ban. Over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85% experienced crop losses. The numbers are shocking. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold. While there are just 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 15 million of the country’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming.

Things were worse for smaller farmers. In the Rajanganaya region, where the majority farmers operate just a hectare (2.5 acres), families reported 50% to 60% reductions in crop harvest. “Before the ban, this was one of the biggest markets in the country, with tonnes and tonnes of rice and vegetables,” said one farmer earlier this year. “But after the ban, it became almost zero. If you talk to the rice mills, they don’t have any stock because people’s harvest dropped so much. The income of this whole community has dropped to an extremely low level.”

But the damage to tea was the key to Sri Lanka’s financial failure. Tea production had generated $1.3 billion in exports annually. Tea exports paid for 71% of the nation’s food imports before 2021. Then, tea production and exports crashed 18% between November 2021 and February 2022, reaching their lowest level in 23 years. The government’s devastating ban on fertilizer thus destroyed the ability of Sri Lanka to pay for food, fuel, and service its debt.

This is precisely why, despite having a soft spot for organic farming, I have not been able to believe that organic farming is a solution for feeding all the people of the world.

Brendan O’Neill from Spiked connects the dots. Excerpts:

As with the global lockdown’s dire impact on Sri Lanka, these deranged and damaging green policies will feel to many Sri Lankans like an external imposition, something pushed on their nation by global institutions and global decisions. Yes, Sri Lanka’s own political elite feverishly embraced the organic lunacy. But as Michael Shellenberger points out, the World Economic Forum promoted organic in Sri Lanka. Many elite campaigners in the West advocated for Sri Lanka to move to full organic, some of them supported by funds from ostentatiously eco-friendly corporations like Google, Disney and JPMorgan.

If I were a Sri Lankan farmer, watching my yield deplete, seeing prices sky-rocket, seeing fuel and food running out, I would be angry primarily with my government, yes. But I would save some of my fury for the world’s influential eco-elites, who seem to view the developing world as a site for environmental experimentation rather than as a part of the world that needs more industrialisation and growth in order that it might enjoy economic equality with us in the West.

Sri Lanka shows us what happens when policy is shaped according to the desires and prejudices of the new elites rather than the needs of ordinary people. Lockdown may have been a boon for the laptop elites and for some billionaires, but it was incredibly harmful for many working-class people in the West and for millions of hard-up people in the global South. The green ideology may provide the new elites with a sense of purpose, flattering their narcissistic delusion that they are saving the planet from a man-made heat death, but it hits the pockets of workers in the West who will end up paying for the Net Zero madness, and it inflames hunger and destitution in those parts of the world not yet as developed as the West.

In Sri Lanka, we see an extreme and unsettling case study of what happens when global policy is built on the fear and narcissism of disconnected elites, rather than being informed by the question of what people need in order to flourish and become wealthier. Also in Sri Lanka we see exactly the kind of pushback we need against all this. The people have had enough. And they are not alone.

Note well these words: when the global policy is built on the fear and narcissism of disconnected elites, rather than being informed by the question of what people need in order to flourish and become wealthier.

Does gender ideology, and the queering of a generation of children, give them what they need in order to flourish and become wealthier? It does according to Joe “Transgender Rights Is The Civil Rights Issue Of Our Time” Biden, and every other member of the globalist leadership class. Does training up children to think of themselves wholly in terms of racial group identity, and to despise themselves or others based on group identity, give them what they need to flourish and become wealthier? Does teaching them phony ideological theories instead of science and facts, and teaching them to be so fragile that they scream bloody murder when confronted with questions that make the anxious — does contribute to their flourishing, learning the habits of intellectual conformity? Does turning criminals loose on the streets to prey on innocents, based on a ridiculous theory that criminals aren’t really responsible for their criminality, “systemic racism” is, give kids of any race what they need to flourish?

Why are ordinary people consenting to be colonized by these woke brahmins? What they did to the people of Sri Lanka, they would do to all of us. And are doing, in many ways. In traveling through Central Europe these past three years, I’ve encountered people — Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians — who believe that the efforts to destroy the family, and the gender binary, are a form of cultural imperialism, coming mostly from Woke Capitalists of the US and Western Europe. Of course, they are right! It will be a great day when we have governments in the US and Western Europe who agree with the ordinary folks of the former communist bloc European nations, and who are willing to use political power to fight this vampiric madness of Davos Man, and restore the conditions of health and flourishing.

*****

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

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The Pentagon Owns Its Recruiting Crisis

By P. Michael Phillips

Editors’ Note: We think it likely that the emphasis on transgender issues, race, feminism, and betrayal of the troops in Afghanistan ( the long indecisive conduct of the War itself and multiple deployments) are all issues. As to the double down of the military on forced vaccines, we have this observation: the Commander-in-Chief has been vaccinated twice, boosted twice, lives in a mask-controlled bubble with an attending physician at hand, and he got Covid. If the vaccines really worked, this could not happen. The insistence that we all take the risk of serious side effects (particularly myocarditis in young men) for something that is patently ineffective, rubs people the wrong way. It is like, you can’t join unless you believe our lie about the vaccines and the equally offensive lie about the special campaign to root out white supremacy. Many people from the rural South who make up 40% of the military simply say that is BS, which it assuredly is. The military has lost sight of its mission: maximum combat readiness. Instead, it has let itself become a petri dish for progressive social experimentation. Who would want to become part of that and risk your life in the process?

Replenishing the military ranks with qualified personnel is a perennial challenge. It’s no secret, though, that this year our armed forces are fighting uphill to recruit and retain talent.

Most of the services are well behind their quotas. But the Army, our largest service, is having the hardest time enticing young Americans. That service will fall short, nearly 20,000 troops from its original target end strength of 485,000 for FY ’22, and next year could be worse.

To manage, Army officials have slashed end strength and enlistment goals, while recruiters are offering fat stacks of cash and generous service terms as inducements.

So far, nothing is working.

The Army’s Chief of Staff, General James McConville, blames the shortfall on the competition with the private sector. Others blame upwardly mobile families who would rather their children attend college than wear a uniform.

Both are old saws. And this year, they ring hollow.

Some civilian jobs do pay more. But for an 18-year-old with only a high school diploma, military compensation is nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, recruits most often cite generous pay and benefits as the reason for signing papers.

Meanwhile, undergraduate enrollments are down over 600,000 from last year. So, it appears our missing recruits aren’t trading rifles for books, either.

Instead of blaming their competition, the Pentagon brass might dwell on their tarnished image as the reason fewer young Americans want to join up. 

Public trust in the military institution has plunged steeply since 2018, according to one poll. Respondents cite politicized leaders, scandals, and the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan for their loss in confidence. 

We might add to that list suicides, sexual assaults, social justice indoctrination, and Covid vaccination policies as dulling the shine of military service.

Of the lot, the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate may prove its deepest self-inflicted wound. 

While the service chiefs are begging Congress to fund more generous recruiting incentives, they have forcibly discharged thousands of vaccine dissenters – including most of those objecting on religious grounds. A similar fate awaits tens of thousands more of the unjabbed in the National Guard and Reserve. Never mind that our military increasingly relies on these part-time troops for routine mission support.

And the Pentagon has doubled down. Submission to the vaccine is now a condition of enlistment, despite evidence the therapy is at best ineffective, and at worst dangerous for younger, healthier people.

It’s a policy gravely alienating to the families of Middle America whose children disproportionately serve in our all-volunteer force.

Before going further, consider that fewer than one quarter of Americans in the prime recruitment age of 17-24 years can meet our military’s physical, moral, or educational entry requirements, and that figure continues to decline. 

Of those, only about 9% of young Americans have any desire to serve. Perhaps only 1% ever do.

High standards have produced something of an embarrassment of riches. Our service members are amongst the healthiest, most disciplined, and best educated of their cohort nationally. But to maintain this quality, recruiters have come to count on solidly middle-class families inhabiting our Mid-American towns, suburbs, and rural counties to fill their quotas. 

Recruiters bank on small-town America because for a variety of reasons our populous cities produce few qualified volunteers. Even the New Yorkers and Californians in the ranks are more likely to hail from upstate or inland counties. In fact, a once-reliable third of all new recruits enter from just five southern states: Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.

The prepossessed term for these rich recruiting grounds is ‘flyover country.’

Instead, we might think of them as communities celebrating life on a smaller and more intimate scale, where patriotism, faith, family, and public service remain in fashion.

And yet their young people are not signing up like they used to.

The belief by some that vaccine mandates are meant to purge conservative Christians from the armed forces may be one reason recruiting offices are empty. After all, young people living in these prime recruitment areas are somewhat more religious and tend to be more conservative in outlook than many Americans.

They also are less likely to be vaccinated against Covid.

A more charitable account, though, is that the brass authored their own Catch-22 in the rush to prove their obedience to President Biden. As such, they have taken a position purported to improve readiness that has done quite the opposite. And now that they’ve become so thoroughly entrenched, they cannot easily retreat.

No matter. It should trouble the Pentagon more that their reluctant recruits are most likely military legacies.

Like many professions, the military is a family business. Roughly 80% of recruits either grew up in a military family or have a close relative who served. General McConville’s own clan is actually something of a poster family in career following, with three children and a son-in-law in uniform. Even the general’s wife once served.

Career following in military families is nothing new. It’s been going on since our country’s founding. The children of veterans, like those of bankers or physicians, often emulate their parents’ professional ethos early on. For soldiers, this includes respect for duty and honorable, selfless service. The generational transmission of such virtues has played a critical role not only in reproducing our service cultures but by extension our national values.

But it’s also a fragile chain.

While research indicates that military children are 5 times more likely to follow a parent into the service, only 1 in 4 do. And their desire to serve drops sharply every year over the age of 18. 

In short, the Pentagon’s stubborn adherence to its Covid protocol is breaking faith with its once loyal base. And the longer they dig in, the smaller that base will become.

It’s a high price our nation may pay for unimaginative leadership.

P. Michael Phillips is a retired senior military leader with significant political-military experience in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and a researcher in the social and cultural reproductive aspects of Civil-Military Relations.

*****

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

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The New Age of Orwellianism

By Josh Hammer

Community organizer and left-wing social activist Saul Alinsky wrote, in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals,” that “he who controls the language controls the masses.”

Alinsky, whose work profoundly influenced at least one notable fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama, was in that quip channeling George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel “1984.”

“Newspeak,” the language of Orwell’s fictional single-political party superstate, was a tool devised for monitoring the people’s communications, prosecuting “thoughtcrimes,” and ultimately controlling and dictating the people’s very beliefs.

Conservatives have taken pleasure in poking fun at the modern left’s “Orwellian” tendencies—perhaps too much, actually, as overuse of the accusation has had the effect of limiting its potency.

But as the woke ideology metastasizes within the American left like cancer it is, and as censors increasingly clamp down on anything sniffing of dissent to the regime’s orthodoxy, it is now clear that we are in a new age of Orwellianism.

In this new age, the regime and its enforcers pursue the suffusion of its orthodoxy at any cost, gaslighting dissenters into not believing their own lying eyes.

This week, new governmental data revealed that the American economy, measured by gross domestic product, contracted for the second straight quarter. That was, up until perhaps a week ago, the universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “recession.”

This was not a partisan issue; indeed, well-known liberal, Democratic Party economists have frequently defined recession in precisely these terms.

Back in 2008, President Joe Biden’s current National Economic Council director, Brian Deese, stated: “Of course economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”

And in 2019, top Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein said that a “recession” is “defined as two consecutive quarters of declining growth.”

Democrats are now singing a different tune. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has stubbornly refused to concede that America is now in an economic recession.

Deese apparently also disagrees with his old self of 2008: Following the release of the data evincing the second straight quarter of economic contraction, Deese stipulated that we are “certainly in a transition,” but also added that “virtually nothing signals that this period … is recessionary.”

The ruse is transparent and obvious to the point of comedy. As famed investor David Sacks tweeted: “A lot of people are wondering about the definition of recession. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth if a Republican is president. The definition is far more complicated and unknowable if a Democrat is president.”

Democrats similarly seem interested in changing the definition of “inflation,” which currently sits at four-decade highs and is disproportionately responsible for Biden’s dismal job approval ratings and Democrats’ unfavorable political outlook this fall.

The widely accepted economic definition of inflation is when there is too much money chasing too few goods. The way to tamp down inflation is thus to limit the money supply and/or increase the production of goods.

Just this week, around the same time as when the U.S. formally entered a recession, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., finally reached an agreement on a version of the White House’s long-sought-after Build Back Better domestic initiative. But Democrats renamed the bill: It is now not called Build Back Better but the Inflation Reduction Act.

And the revised bill includes new government expenditures to the tune of nearly $400 billion in energy- and climate-related spending. Authorizing such a fiscal boondoggle is the precise opposite of limiting the money supply. It is the logical equivalent of trying to put out a fire with a blowtorch.

Remarkably, it is the same ideologues who are eager to change the well-accepted definitions of “recession” and “inflation” who remain perplexed as to what exactly a “woman” is.

In March, then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, pointedly refused to define what a “woman” is. Her excuse was that she is “not a biologist.”

Related, in Matt Walsh’s excellent new documentary “What Is a Woman?” the myriad “gender studies” professors and gender ideology-bewitched “doctors” interviewed by Walsh invariably define a “woman,” in a circular fashion, as being “someone who identifies as a woman.”

Whether it is a Supreme Court justice herself or the vogue flatulence that now constitutes “gender studies” in the American academy, then, the left is incapable of defining what a “woman” is.

That confusion appears to be ubiquitous: Lia Thomas, the biological man who has been wreaking havoc in women’s collegiate swimming, was even nominated for the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.

Alinsky would be proud of such imperious enforcement of regime-approved orthodoxy; “he who controls the language controls the masses,” after all.

The left’s fundamental problem is that its haughtiness, fervor, and zeal for gaslighting us sane Americans is belied by its unpopularity. It is curious that the left can talk and act this way when its most notable avatar, Biden, is as severely unpopular as he currently is.

Perhaps the left will be chastened by its impending November defeats at the ballot box. But don’t bet on it.

*****

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

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Ms. Pelosi, You Must Go to Taiwan

By Bruce Bialosky

Shockingly, Nancy Pelosi emitted something with which I agree. She was not doing her usual thing of lying to us like telling us she never speaks to her husband about public policy and their investments. Ms. Pelosi is planning a trip with a Congressional member delegation to Taiwan. Way to go, Madam Speaker, you finally got something right.

Ms. Pelosi had stated she was planning to go in April, but the plan was canceled because she contracted COVID. Back then, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi stated the trip would be “a malicious provocation.” Really? A visit to an independent country by the United States elected representative must be approved by Chinese Communist dictators. Maybe Ms. Pelosi should be boarded up in her San Francisco home by the Chinese until she acquiesces and admits the error of her thinking.

Now that she has announced the August trip, matters have risen to even a higher level of Chinese nonsense. Then we have our president – someone who creates problems nearly every time he opens his mouth without reading from the teleprompter (and these people were worried about what came out of Trump’s mouth). This time he said about the Pelosi trip “The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now.” Once that spilled from his lips, the media started speculation about a military conflict between China and the U.S. over a visit by an American elected official.

The Chinese are the people who meet with such esteemed countries as Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and North Korea.

This time around the Chinese have been even more overwrought in their reaction. Wang Yi went even further and stated “This is a blatant double standard. If the US House Speaker, a political leader of the United States, deliberately visits Taiwan, it would be a malicious provocation against China’s sovereignty and gross interference in China’s internal affairs and would send an extremely dangerous political signal to the outside world. If the U.S. side insists on having its own way, China will surely make a firm response and all the consequences will be borne by the U.S. side.”

The Chinese dictators have determined they not only control the people in their own country but likewise control us. It has been stated the timing of the trip is sensitive for the Chinese because it comes in the same month as the August 1st anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. Folks, check your summer plans and make sure you have them approved by the Chinese Central Committee because you do not want to mess with their annual celebration of creating the greatest mass murdering machine in history. Maybe when we take down our flags from the Fourth of July celebration, we should put up the People’s Republic flag in anticipation of the big celebration? These are the kinds of things that get into your head when you listen to murderous dictators.

Obviously, there is no way in the world Pelosi can cancel this trip. If she cancels the trip, the Chinese mass murders would be determining our foreign policy. We would look even weaker than we do from Biden’s horrendous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Here is what Pelosi should do. She should go there and endorse the One China policy. She should say there is one China and there is one Taiwan. We should put an end to this horrendous idea that Formosa is or was a part of China. Even if you buy into that garbage, Taiwan has been an independent nation since 1948. There might be two people on the island who want to be part of China and handing Taiwan over to China would only enslave the Taiwanese. There would be indoctrination camps to eliminate the free thinkers and the others will be put in prison.

The British made the mistake of handing over Hong Kong to the Chinese. We are seeing the evil fruits of that decision which is destroying one of the true bastions of capitalism and freedom. The British should have declared Hong Kong a free and separate country. They should have never trusted the thugs of Peking.

We have a long history of telling others they will not dictate our foreign policy. We should not allow anyone to do that now. Certainly not a group of mass murdering thugs like the Chinese.

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No Farmers, No Food, No Life thumbnail

No Farmers, No Food, No Life

By Carla Peeters

The world is now facing a man-made food catastrophe. It is reaching crisis levels.

Current policies in many parts of the world place a priority on climate change for realizing a green new deal. Meanwhile, such policies will contribute to children dying from severe malnutrition due to broken food systems, with shortages of food and water, stress, anxiety, fear, and dangerous chemical exposure.

More negative pressure on farmers and the food system is asking for a catastrophe. The immune system of many people, especially children, has lost its resilience and has weakened too far with high risks for intoxication, infections, non-communicable and infectious diseases, deaths and infertility.

Dutch farmers, of whom many will face a cost of living crisis after 2030, have drawn the line. They are supported by an increasing number of farmers and citizens worldwide.

It’s not the farmers who are the most heavy polluters of the environment, but industries who make the products needed for a technocracy revolution to green energy, data mining, and Artificial Intelligence. As more of the WEF plans are rolled out by politicians, inequalities grow, and conflicts are rising all over the world. 

The strong farmers’ revolt in the Netherlands is a call for an urgent transition to a people-oriented, free and healthy world with nutritious food cultivated and harvested in respect to natural processes. The cooperation of ordinary people worldwide is on the rise to prevent a mass famine catastrophe caused by the plan of scientism and technocracy to rule and control the world by unelected scientists and elites.

Enough food, access to food is the problem

Farmers around the world normally grow enough calories (2,800) per person (while 2,100 calories/day would be sufficient) to support a population of nine to ten billion people worldwide. But still over 828 million people have too little to eat each day. The problem is not always food; it is access. The UN which wrote in 2015 in the Sustainable Development Goals goal 2: No hunger and malnutrition for all in 2030 will not be reached.

Throughout history many times natural or manmade disasters led to food insecurities for longer periods of time, resulting in hunger, malnutrition (undernourishment) and mortality. The Covid-19 pandemic has worsened the situation. Since the global pandemic began, access to food estimates show that food insecurity has likely doubled, if not tripled  in some places around the world.

Moreover, during the pandemic, global hunger rose to 150 million and is now affecting 828 million people, with 46 million at the brink of starvation facing emergency levels of hunger or worse. In the hardest hit places, this means famine or famine-like conditions. At least 45 million children are suffering from wasting, which is the most visible and severe form of malnutrition, and potentially life-threatening.

With global prices of food and fertilizers already reaching worrying highs, the continuing impacts of the pandemic, the political forces to realize climate change goals and the Russia-Ukraine war raise serious concerns for food security both in the short and the long term.

The world is facing a further spike in food shortages, pushing more families worldwide at risk for severe malnutrition. Those communities which survived former crises are left more vulnerable to a new shock than before and will accumulate the effects, diving into famine (acute starvation and a sharp increase in mortality).

Furthermore, the growth of economies and the development of nations are currently slowing down due to a lack of workforce a sharp decrease in well-being, and higher mortality rates.

In the wake of new nitrogen limits that require farmers to radically curb their nitrogen emissions by up to 70 percent in the next eight years, tens of thousands of Dutch farmers have risen in protest against the government.

Farmers will be forced to use less fertilizer and even to reduce the number of their livestock, in some cases up to 95%. For smaller family-owned farms it will be impossible to reach these goals. Many will be forced to shutter, including people whose families have been farming for up to eight generations.

Moreover, a significant decrease and limitations of Dutch farmers will have huge repercussions for the global food supply chain. The Netherlands is the world’s second largest agricultural exporter after the United States. Still, the Dutch government pursues their agenda on Climate Change while there is currently no law to support the implementation, while they will not change much in the planet’s major air pollution. Models used to arrive at the decision of the Dutch government are debated by acknowledged scientists.

In no communication have Dutch politicians considered the effects of their decision on breaking a most important goal in the UN agreement: ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all in 2030.

Unfortunately, Sri Lanka, a country whose political leader introduced zero Nitrogen and CO2 emissions policy, is now facing economic problems, severe hunger, and difficulties to access food upon a political decision that farmers were not allowed to use fertilizers and pesticides. Still, politicians responsible for Nitrogen emissions/climate change in other countries pursue the same green policy. 

Furthermore, experts are warning that heat, flooding, drought, wildfires, and other disasters have been wreaking economic havoc, with worse to come. Food and water shortages have been in the media.

On top of that, Australian experts announce a risk for an outbreak of a viral disease in cattle. This could cause an A$80 billion hit to the Australian economy and even more real supply chain issues. Countless businesses and producers go bankrupt. The emotional toll they are facing to euthanize their healthy herds is immense and hardly bearable. It is pushing more farmers to end their life.

Hopefully, the need for the Danish government to apologize, as an investigative report on the cull of more than 15 million minks in November 2020 criticized the action that led to the misleading of mink breeders and the public and the clearly illegal instructions to authorities, will help politicians to reconsider such drastic measures on farmers.

Worldwide, farmers’ protests are rising, supported by more and more citizens who stand up against the expensive mandates for changes to “green policies” that already brought massive miseries and instability.

At a ministerial conference for food security on June 29 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that worsening food shortages could lead to a global “catastrophe”.

Malnutrition responsible for more ill health than any other cause

The increased risk of food and water shortages the world is facing now will bring humanity to the edge. Hunger is a many-headed monster. For decades conquering world hunger has become a political issuein a way that it could not have been in the past. The use of authoritarian political power led to disastrous government policies, making it impossible for millions of people to earn a living. Chronic hunger and the recurrence of virulent famines must be seen as being morally outrageous and politically unacceptable, says Dreze and Sen in Hunger and Public Action, published in 1991.

“For those at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger in the world would be a disaster. For those who need availability of cheap labor, hunger is the foundation of their wealth, it is an asset,” wrote Dr. George Kent in 2008 in the essay “The Benefits of World Hunger.”

Malnutrition is not only influenced by food and water shortage, but also to exposures of extreme stress, fear, insecurity of safety and food, social factors, chemicals, microplastics, toxins, and over-medicalization. No country in the world can afford to overlook this disaster in all its forms, which affects mostly children and women in reproductive age. Globally more than 3 billion people cannot afford healthy diets. And this is in contradiction to what many people think is just a low-income country problem.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic began, about 8% of the population in North America and Europe lacked regular access to nutritious and sufficient food. A third of reproductive-age women are anemic, while 39% of the world’s adults are overweight or obese. Each year around 20 million babies are born underweight. In 2016 9.6% of the women were underweight. Globally in 2017, 22.2% of the children under the age of five were stunting, while undernutrition explains around 45% of deaths among children under five.

As stated by Lawrence Haddad, the co-chair of the Global Nutrition Report independent Expert Group, “We now live in a world where being malnourished is the new normal. It is a world we must all claim as totally unacceptable.” While malnutrition is the leading driver of disease with nearly 50% of deaths caused by nutrition related non-communicable diseases in 2014, only $50 million of donor funding was given.

Malnutrition in all its forms imposes unacceptably high costs – direct and indirect – on individuals, families and nations. The estimated impact on the global economy of the chronic undernourishment of 800 million people could be as high as $3,5 trillion per year, as was stated in a Global Nutrition Report in 2018. While child deaths, premature adult mortality and malnutrition-related infectious and non-communicable diseases are preventable with the right nutrition.

This will be much more at this precious moment, as the population sharply increases in excess mortality and non-communicable diseases among the working age people as recently shown by insurance companies.

Famines cause transgenerational effects

Famine is a widespread condition in which a large percentage of people in a country or region have little or no access to adequate food supplies. Europe and other developed parts of the world have mostly eliminated famine, though widespread famines that killed thousands and millions of people are known from history, like the Dutch Potato famine from 1846-1847, The Dutch Hunger winter 1944-1945 and a Chinese famine of 1959-1961.

The latter was the most severe famine both in terms of duration and number of people affected (600 million and around 30 million deaths) and led to widespread undernutrition of the Chinese population in the period from 1959-1961. Currently, Sub-Saharan Africa and Yemen are countries with recognized famine.

Unfortunately, global destabilization, starvation and mass migration are increasing fast with more famines to be expected if we do not act today.

Epidemiological studies of Barker and later of Hales showed a relation between the availability of nutrition in various stages of pregnancy and the first years of life and diseases later in life. Their studies demonstrated that people with metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular diseases were often small at birth. More and more research proves the role of nutrition-related mechanisms influencing gene expression. Even the period prior to pregnancy might influence a later risk for insulin resistance or other complications of the fetus.

As demonstrated in a study with 3,000 participants in Northern China, prenatal exposure to famine significantly increased hyperglycemia in adulthood in two consecutive generations. Severity of famine during prenatal development is related to the risk for Type 2 diabetes. These findings are consistent with animal models that have shown the impact of prenatal nutritional status on neuro-endocrine changes that affect metabolism and can be programmed to transmit physiologically across multiple generations through both male and female generations. Early life Health shock conditions can cause epigenetic changes in humans that persist throughout life, affect old age mortality and have multigenerational effects. Depending on which trimester the fetus is exposed to food deprivation or even stress alone a related disease later in life may vary from schizophrenia, ADHD to renal failure and hypertension among others. Other studies of famine exposure in people have produced evidence of changes in the endocrine system and to prenatal gene expression in reproductive systems.

The effects of periods of famine or undernutrition have predominantly been seen in people with low social economic income. However, 1 in 3 persons in the world suffered from some form of malnutrition in 2016. Women and children are 70% of the hungry. There is no doubt that undernutrition increased further during the past six years. Stunting and wasting increased in the most vulnerable. Two out of three children are not fed the minimum diverse diet they need to grow and develop to their full potential.

The hungry people in countries like Sri Lanka, Haiti, Armenia, and Panama are the tip of the iceberg, opening the eyes of many citizens worldwide to a fast-growing problem as a result of the lockdowns, mandates and coercive policies in climate change, drought and the Ukraine war.

Citizens of the world have been facing for years: excess mortality, a fast decline in infertility and childbirth with a threat to human rights for women and more diseases.

Shocking reports of the UN and WHO acknowledged the health of people and environment is declining. The world is moving backwards on eliminating hunger and malnutrition. The real danger is that these numbers will climb even higher in the months ahead.

The truth is that food innovation hubs, food flats (vertical farming), artificial meats and gene and mind manipulations will not be able to tackle the depressing state humanity is facing.

Zero-Covid policy has brought humanity at risk in its existence. Covid-19 vaccines with a risk for harmhave been rolled out even for children under five years, hardly at risk for a severe disease, but undernourishment that greatly increases susceptibility to major human infectious diseases has not been taken care of.

Conflicts are growing worldwide, increasing instability. Citizens will no longer accept policies without a clear harm-cost benefit analysis.

We need to act now to decrease food and fuel prices immediately by supporting farmers and effective food systems for nutritious food to heal the most malnourished (children and females of childbearing age) in the population.

Let us hope for a return of Hippocrates’ principle: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”

*****

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

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Most Arizonans’ Monthly Costs Inflated By At Least $200 This Year

By Tom Joyce

Inflation is a big problem for Arizona residents, an Arizona Public Opinion Pulse (AZPOP) Survey conducted by OH Predictive Insights shows.

Released Thursday, the poll concluded that 62% of Arizonans had seen a monthly spending increase of $200 due to inflation.

The Phoenix metropolitan area is one of the nation’s hardest hit in terms of inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released data on July 13 showing costs have increased 12% in 2022.

Reacting to the poll, Chuck Warren, Managing Director of the September Group, LLC. said that inflation amounts to a significant tax increase on the American people.

“Americans are basically experiencing the biggest tax increase in four decades,” Warren said in a press release. “Due to a myriad of factors including bad public policy, everyone is experiencing a massive tax increase that is impacting their household budgets and family’s lifestyle.”

Inflation has hit certain groups of people especially hard. The poll found that 84% of students and 79% of homemakers say inflation has negatively impacted them.

That said, OH Predictive Insights chief of research Mike Noble thinks inflation will be a top issue for Arizona voters this November.

“As wages struggle to keep pace with the rising prices of everyday items like fuel and food, the effects of inflation are burning in Arizonans’ wallets, and those concerns will almost certainly be voiced in the ballot box,” Noble said in a press release.

Older residents were the least likely to say that they had felt the effects of inflation (55%). However, it is impacting a majority of them as well.

The poll was conducted between July 5 to July 14 and had a 3.2% margin of error.

*****

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

Big Tech’s Blueprint to Stop a Red Wave in 2022 thumbnail

Big Tech’s Blueprint to Stop a Red Wave in 2022

By Allum Bokhari

Editors’ Note: Those libertarian friends we have should be made aware that The Prickly Pear was recently suspended by YouTube and we were put out of commission in our video section for about a week. Our infraction was never specified but related to running an interview of an individual who made remarks questioning election integrity and the outcome of the 2020 election. Discussing election integrity is not permitted by censors on YouTube. To avoid being shut down, we can’t run interviews on the subject. That is clearly censorship. Moreover, their software is ubiquitous and the only platform that meshes with dominant software in the industry that allows us to build our magazine on the back end. In short, they have a virtual monopoly position in the industry. Such monopoly power allows Big Tech to effectively censor ideas in the marketplace. Jabber about finding “competition” is made by those ignorant of how dominant these platforms really are. In reality, there is no competition. We have never been great fans of anti-trust laws but conservatives and libertarians need to rethink that position.

Republicans think a “red wave” is inevitable in November. But the Democrats still have one big advantage: the ever-tightening grip of Big Tech censorship, which will be used to prevent undecided voters from encountering even the most mainstream conservative news in the runup to the next election. Republicans will have a strong message — but what if voters are prevented from hearing it?

In the runup to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Google completely suppressed Breitbart News from its search results. Compared to 2016, Breibart News went into the 2020 election with a 99.7 percent reduction in visibility for its links on Google search. The censorship was so severe, no-name blogs with plagiarized headlines and content would appear in search results before the original Breitbart News articles. On searches for the term “Joe Biden,” Google cut visibility on Breitbart News links to zero.

Then, a few weeks before the election, Big Tech teamed up to suppress one of the biggest stories of the cycle: the Hunter Biden laptop story. A post-election poll found that 17 percent of Biden voters would have reconsidered their decision had they been aware of the laptop story alone, not counting the hundreds of Breitbart News stories voters didn’t have access to due to Google censorship.

Biden’s margin of victory in three swing states was less than a percentage point, making tech censorship a pivotal factor in the outcome. There is no law preventing Silicon Valley from not only repeating this plan in 2022, but scaling it up to a massive level – and that’s exactly what they are doing. The groundwork is already being prepared, in a number of ways:

#1 “Independent” Watchdogs Downgrading Conservative Media — NewsGuard Discredits The Right 

No matter how mainstream you are, you aren’t safe. NewsGuard, the establishment “misinformation” watchdog that received funding from the Pentagon and whose software is being rolled out by millions of schoolteachers across the country, recently downgraded Fox News in its rankings of trustworthy and untrustworthy news sources.

NewsGuard users will now see a red warning label next to Fox News links all around the internet, signaling to users that the source is considered untrustworthy by the organization, which was set up by former establishment media figures Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz in 2018, in the early years of the media-concocted “misinformation” panic.

Fox News and Breitbart News have now both received the negative “red” rating from NewsGuard. This means that, going into the 2022 midterm elections, NewsGuard is warning its users not to read the two leading conservative-leaning sources of online news.

Naturally, the sources that pushed the Russiagate hoax and said the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinfo” — a claim repeated by NewsGuard’s co-founder — receive no such warning label.

#2 Facebook Suppressing The News — If The Wrong Side Is Winning, Call Off The Game 

Silicon Valley has also found a way to censor all conservative media at the same time. For years, the left has been wailing and screaming about the success of conservative media on Facebook. Despite algorithm changes that suppressed traffic to conservative websites — by a whopping 20 percent in the case of Breitbart News — conservative media has continued to crush the competition.

Facebook has an answer: if conservative media is winning the news war on its platform, it will simply suppress all news at the same time. This month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the platform is shifting resources away from its News Tab and news distribution, and towards a “creator economy.” This means that news will be featured less frequently to users, whether they ask for it or not. This is a way of preventing unwanted narratives from reaching the public, at the very moment when news coverage of the failures of Democrat rule in D.C. will be ramping up.

This is a repeat of what Facebook did after the 2016 election when it reduced the visibility of political posts — a change that resulted in engagement on Donald Trump’s page dropping by almost half.

******

Continue reading  this article at Breitbart.

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Jim Jordan Demands Answers From FBI For Allegedly ‘Pressuring’ Agents To Bolster ‘Domestic Violent Extremism’ Cases thumbnail

Jim Jordan Demands Answers From FBI For Allegedly ‘Pressuring’ Agents To Bolster ‘Domestic Violent Extremism’ Cases

By Gabe Kaminsky

FBI officials are “pressuring” bureau employees to reclassify cases to involve Domestic Violent Extremism (DVE) in order to satisfy “performance metrics” created by data-hungry superiors, a top Republican alleged in a letter Wednesday, demanding answers on the matter.

“We continue to hear from brave whistleblowers about disturbing conduct at the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote in the letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray. “From recent protected disclosures, we have learned that FBI officials are pressuring agents to reclassify cases as ‘domestic violent extremism’ even if the cases do not meet the criteria for such a classification.”

Jordan is demanding the FBI provide the number of DVE investigations from January 2020 to the present and the number of “Confidential Human Sources” that have contributed to DVE reports since that same time, among other documents. He has set an August 10 deadline for the bureau to respond.

DVE pertains to someone in the U.S. “without direction or inspiration from a foreign terrorist group or other foreign power who seeks to further political or social goals wholly or in part through unlawful acts of force or violence,” according to the FBI. Wray testified in June 2021 that the FBI has a “very, very active domestic terrorism investigation program” and that it has “doubled the number of domestic terrorism investigations,” according to the letter. (RELATED: Congressional Republicans Urge FBI And DHS To Designate Jane’s Revenge Attacks As Domestic Terrorism).

“Given the narrative pushed by the Biden Administration that domestic violent extremism is the ‘greatest threat’ facing our country the revelation that the FBI may be artificially padding domestic terrorism data is scandalous,” Jordan also said.

FBI employees are not finding enough DVE and are being pushed by superiors to use minor evidence to reclassify cases, according to a whistleblower who allegedly spoke to Jordan and other Republicans. The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division Director and another official “have pressured agents to move cases into the DVE category to hit self-created performance metrics,” said Jordan.

The metrics are used to dish out “awards and promotions,” said a whistleblower to Jordan and Republicans. The new allegations are relevant given how the FBI has become politicized, said the Republican, who wrote a letter to Wray in June outlining whistleblower claims that the FBI is “purging” conservative employees.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

*****

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

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Fighting to Reclaim Comic Books From Woke Left, New Comic Lands First Punch thumbnail

Fighting to Reclaim Comic Books From Woke Left, New Comic Lands First Punch

By Douglas Blair

As consumers of pop culture are increasingly aware, the world of comic books and superheroes has gone woke. Superman no longer fights for “the American Way,” and Captain America’s archnemesis, Red Skull, is now a Jordan Peterson analog.

For the fans who just want a good story free from the political moralizing the left foists on us daily, alternative options are far and few between.

Enter “Isom,” a new comic book series created by Eric July as an antidote to what he sees as a push by popular media to “beat people over the head with stuff like social justice.” 

The series focuses on a man named Avery Silman, a Texas rancher who briefly worked as a superhero codenamed Isom.

Notably, not only is July the creator of the “Isom” series, but he also founded the publishing company that produces it, Rippaverse Comics.

In an interview with Fox News, July said, “What I wanted to do was be a part of the solution instead of griping about the problem, so I had the idea, it made sense financially, and it was the perfect time to do it.”

Maddeningly to the radical left, July and his characters are black. But based on the vicious response to “Isom” by radical leftists, he’s not the type of black man they can tolerate.  

The popular comic book forum on social media site Reddit banned users from discussing “Isom,” citing the forum’s rules against “supporting comics from hate groups.” Reportedly, commenters also used racial slurs in describing their distaste for July’s work.

That type of racial gatekeeping—in addition to the ballooning anti-American sentiment at places like comic giants Marvel and DC—is clearly off-putting to many of those same ethnic groups the radical left tries to court.

In that same Fox interview, “Isom’s” artist, former DC Comics artist Gabe Abdul Eltaeb, said he specifically left the company in response to its decision to butcher the Man of Steel’s mantra.

“I made it to DC Comics and made it to Superman,” said Eltaeb. “My little-boy dream came true, [but] they made him woke.” 

So, he left the company.  

July and Eltaeb are putting into practice what conservatives talk about but are often too scared to do: They’re taking the fight to the left in their own arena and creating a competing product to fight against the leftists dominating the industry.

It’s been majorly successful, too. Within days of going on pre-sale, the comic raked in a whopping $2 million. There’s clearly a hunger for this type of non-woke content among consumers starved for media that doesn’t evangelize for the radical left.

Especially given that American superhero comics are hemorrhaging readers.

Industry analysts at NPD BookScan reported that Japanese comics, or manga, obliterated American comic sales in 2021.

Manga sales accounted for more than three of every four comics in the country last year. American superhero comics made up a pathetic 6.5%.

It seems Americans are voting with their wallets, and woke leftist garbage is losing out.  

This shift from woke content comes as conservatives experience a renaissance in the creative space. Conservative cartoonists like George Alexopoulos spread their work to burgeoning audiences online, while outlets like The Daily Wire are working on creating a conservative film empire on the backs of films like “Run, Hide, Fight” and “Terror on the Prairie.”

But until “Isom,” comics have been mostly ceded to the left. Which is a bit weird when you think about it.

Comics seem like a natural haven for pro-American and conservative values. Superman and Captain America exist as avatars for the best the country can be.  

Superman is hugely powerful and could destroy the planet if he wanted to. But as someone who stands for positive American values, he instead uses his powers for good.

Why have conservatives allowed the left to corrupt these stories and make superheroes yet another mouthpiece for their woke propaganda? Americans clearly enjoyed comics featuring pro-America superheroes in the past and are avoiding new leftist content like the plague.

The proper response to this resurgence in conservative, non-woke media is to cultivate it. Buy a comic made by someone who doesn’t toe the woke line. Support them financially because they won’t get any help from the radical leftists in charge of comic titans like Marvel or DC.

And if comics aren’t your thing, find something that is. There are conservative artists who need people to buy their art and conservative musicians trying to spread their music. They need help, too.  

“Isom #1” is set to come out in August, and hopefully, the pre-sale numbers will continue to explode as the property becomes better known.  

Conservatives can reclaim the comic book industry from the left. You don’t even have to be a superhero to do it.

*****

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

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China and the US: Whose Side Is the Administration On? thumbnail

China and the US: Whose Side Is the Administration On?

By Lawrence A. Franklin

China this weekend, according to reports, privately delivered a message to US national security officials reinforcing an earlier Chinese Foreign Ministry statement: if US Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi goes ahead with her planned August visit to Taiwan, it would be met with a “resolute and strong measures.”

China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Zhao Lijian stated on July 19 that the visit “would seriously undermine Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

While China’s threats contain unusually emphatic language, the visit comes as no surprise to China. Pelosi had scheduled a visit last April, which allegedly was postponed over COVID concerns. Her plan to go to Taiwan indicates that at least some in the US would like incrementally to depart from the “One China Policy,” which claims Taiwan as part of China.

Beijing is doubtless evaluating President Joe Biden’s statement made this May in Tokyo after a meeting of the Quad allies — India, Australia, Japan, and the US — that the US would militarily defend Taiwan were it attacked.

China’s threats regrettably appear to have achieved their purpose. They seem to have convinced at least a few high-level US officials to recommend that Pelosi cancel her trip. US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan went on record opposing her visit. National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communication John Kirby also acknowledged that Pelosi was briefed by a National Security Council team on “context, facts, and geographical relationships,” whatever that is supposed to mean. Biden blamed the Pentagon.

Pelosi, meanwhile, remains prepared at least to lead a delegation to Asian democratic allies of the US — including Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia — in addition to Taiwan.

Her visit seems intended, in part, to reassure our allies that the US will continue to maintain an active presence in the Pacific. One hopes that Pelosi’s Taiwan visit is also intended to reassure free Asia that America will militarily defend Pacific democracies, despite the failure of the US either to deter Russia from invading Ukraine or adequately to defend it after it was invaded.

US military leaders are making similar “reassurance visits.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, for instance, in Indonesia on July 24, was also scheduled to attend a defense conference in Australia with Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral John Aquilino on July 27.

Milley could easily, once again, ring up his Chinese counterpart, General Li Guocheng, and have what is called ” a frank conversation” about the catastrophic risks to Communist China of an open military clash, should China take any military action against Pelosi’s plane or whatever else.

Communist Chinese propagandist Hu Xijin suggested that to demonstrate China’s sovereignty over Taiwan, a warplane from the People’s Liberation Army Air Force could “accompany” Pelosi’s plane, and then fly over the island of Taiwan on its way back to the mainland.

Media reports claim that US Ambassador to China Nick Burns, who may be helping to prepare Biden for a video conference with Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping in the next few weeks, should cut short his visit to Washington if Pelosi’s trip leads to a crisis. Despite China’s harsh rhetoric over the Pelosi visit, communication between the Chinese and US leaders remains diplomatic: Xi recently dispatched a message wishing Biden a “speedy recovery” from his mild case of Covid.

At the same time, unnamed Chinese military contacts are threatening that China’s fighter jets could intercept Pelosi’s military aircraft as it nears Taiwan, or interfere with the plane’s landing at Taipei Airport. If Pelosi, as head of America’s legislative branch, decides to proceed with her trip to Taiwan, despite opposition from the Biden administration, the Pentagon might consider assigning military fighter escorts alongside her aircraft to discourage PLA aggression.

Above all, the US, must not submit to the Chinese Communist Party’s threats. Pelosi should proceed to Taiwan with as large a bipartisan Congressional delegation as possible. If she bows to demands to stay away, China will be incentivized to attack Taiwan effectively the next day. Backing down at this point would only establish a pattern that all Beijing has to do to intimidate America is bark.

After America’s humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and the “far too little, too late ” response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, any cancellation of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan would be seen the world over as yet another spineless US surrender.

US options could include delivering public and private warnings that force would be met with force. The US Navy could immediately deploy an aircraft carrier group near the Taiwan Strait; and a large bipartisan Congressional delegation could accompany Pelosi. The allies in the Quad could also stage a quickly-organized military exercise in the Indo-Pacific region.

If Pelosi proceeds, Biden will need to declare his support for the visit, to demonstrate US unity of command.

The only question is if this administration finally has the political will to stop appearing weak, scared and permitting China to dictate US policy. The administration’s record so far:

One has to ask, whose side is the administration on?

*****

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

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Biden Family Connections to U.S. & China Energy Deals thumbnail

Biden Family Connections to U.S. & China Energy Deals

By Larry Bell

Here’s a head-scratcher.

Weren’t we told by President Joe Biden that the release of a million barrels of oil a day from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) from April onward, “will help address supply disruptions caused by Putin’s further invasion of Ukraine and the Price Hike that Americans are facing at the pump?”

Why then in June—during an American energy shortage—did Biden’s Department of Energy headed by former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, agree to transfer between a fifth and a sixth of the reserve oil that he bragged about releasing to boost America’s supply offshore to Europe and Asia?

More disturbingly curious, of the 5 million barrels of crude already to be tapped from SPR for export abroad, why would Energy Secretary Granholm sign off on a sale of 950,000 of those barrels to China—much less to Unipec (the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation, better known as Sinopec), where former V.P. Biden’s son Hunter’s private equity firm, BHR Partners, bought a $1.7 billion stake in Sinopec seven years ago?

Unipec’s bid was selected by the Energy Department as one of 12 among 126 submitted to receive part of the SPR offering based upon the “price-competitive sale.”

Although Hunter’s lawyers told The New York Times that he “no longer holds any interest, directly or indirectly” in BHR Partners, a company he co-founded in 2013. The Washington Examiner reported that he remained listed as a part-time owner through another company, Skaneateles, an LLC he solely owned as recently as last March.

According to the Examiner: “Business records from China’s National Credit Information Publicity System accessed Tuesday continue to identify Skaneateles as a 10% owner in BHR, and Washington, D.C., business records continue to list Biden as the only beneficial owner of Skaneateles.”

Biden’s Energy Department has refused compliance with requests in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by a nonprofit government watchdog, the Functional Government Initiative, to compel records concerning administration officials’ decision to tap the oil reserves in the absence of a sudden disruption in supply such as a hurricane or cyber attack.

And of all places, why send our emergency oil to China, a country that is Russia’s main market to support its war against Ukraine that Biden blames for American pump pain?

Joe Biden and his history of curious family connections with the DOE (Department of Energy) and China readily trace back to his years in the Obama administration.

Remember back in 2009 when Fisker Automotive, a start-up company to be located in then V.P. Biden’s Newport, Delaware, backyard was gifted with an unsecured $529 million DOE loan guarantee to develop two lines of plug-in hybrid cars that would ”result in approximately 5,000 jobs created or saved for domestic parts suppliers and thousands more to manufacture a plug-in hybrid in the U.S.?”

Four years later, when Fisker filed for bankruptcy, not a single one of those thousands of efficient cars ever rolled off assembly lines, and those thousands of jobs “poofed” into thin air promises.

Sadly, at least for taxpayers—perhaps less so for the Biden family—there’s more to this story.

Whereas intricacies of the Fisker’s settlement deal are tangled, bankruptcy documents curiously listed Joe Biden’s son, [Robert] Hunter, along with a brother of Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden as creditors.

Also, curiously, Fisker was later purchased at auction by Wanxiang, a Chinese conglomerate, after reportedly being ”enticed” by Fisker creditors.

As I reported on this column in Jan. 2021, Wanxiang also reportedly has ties to Hunter Biden.

The foreign company had invested $1.25 billion into a different company that was a client of Seneca Advisors, Hunter’s private equity firm he co-founded in 2019 with Christopher Heinz, the stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry when Joe was vice president.

Other notable Fisker Chapter 11 creditors included former Clinton Vice President Al Gore and venture capitalist John Doerr, a ”big-ticket” Obama donor, and later a major contributor to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.

Perhaps it’s little wonder then that Joe Biden picked an experienced boondoggler, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, as his DOE secretary.

During her governorship from 2003 to 2011, Granholm handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to politically favored startups to create ”green jobs,” of which many failed.

One of those companies was A123 Systems, a fledgling electric-car battery manufacturer that received a $249 million DOE grant plus another $125 million in Michigan state tax credits.

As coincidences never seem to cease, A123 went bust in 2012 about the same time its customer—none other than Fisker Automotive also did —and also, like Fisker, its assets were purchased by Hunter’s Seneca Partners reported client, China’s Wanxiang group.

Then-Gov. Granholm also offered battery manufacturer LG Chem $125 million on top of the $150 million in DOE stimulus dollars it received. LG Chem apparently ran out of clean energy when its employees were caught watching movies and playing games around the clock because they ostensibly had little productive to do.

Mascoma, a biofuels startup, got $20 million from Granholm and up to $100 million from DOE for a plant that was never built to convert biomass into cellulosic ethanol.

Granholm also approved $100 million for a renewable energy park that was scrapped.

Other dim projects included some shady solar energy bets including United Solar Ovonic, Evergreen and GlobalWatt.

According to the Mackinac Center, a Michigan think tank, only 2.3% of Granholm’s investments in the state’s main incentives program met their job creation promises.

Speaking of dim projects, the shadiest of all may be Joe Biden’s choice of Jennifer Granholm to head his transition to a green energy future, one that relies on Beijing’s control of 90% of those solar panels we import and 80% of the rare earth minerals needed for the millions of electric vehicles we’re supposed to buy to plug in to our already overtaxed energy grids.

Whether prompted by colossal incompetence, concerning conflicts of interest, or resulting from confounding coincidences, such policies compromise any confidence that we dare trust those in charge.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

A Cooler Assessment of Heatwave Deaths thumbnail

A Cooler Assessment of Heatwave Deaths

By Vincent Geloso

“Lawn watering banned: mercury 101.3” read one Toronto newspaper. “Heat kills 100 Twin Citizens” titled a St-Paul newspaper. These titles are not from the current heavily discussed heatwave. They are from the 1936 heat wave – one of the most extreme waves of the twentieth century according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Heat Wave Index. No other year since 1895 gets even close to that year in terms of intensity, and the next closest is 1934.

Highlighting this earlier historical episode is not something I do in order to push sideways the claim that heat waves have increased (and will increase further) because of climate change. I highlight this because it allows us to gain a perspective on the linkage between human wellbeing and climate that catastrophic media treatments fail to convey.

During the 1936 heatwave, an estimated 5,000 individuals died as a result of heat-related causes – a death rate of 39 per million in 1936. That number is probably too conservative given the quality of vital records in the past relative to today. Notoriously poor vital statistics regarding mortality causes among African-Americans and the poverty-induced vulnerability to these mortality sources make the death toll too low. Moreover, the number also seems to exclude those who died as a result of complications caused by the heat wave.

Nevertheless, let’s take this number at face value and contrast it with the EPA’s estimates of heat-induced mortality produced from the heat in the five hottest years between 1979 and 2018: 1980, 1988, 2006, 2007, and 2012. In those years, the average death rates from heat waves stood at between 0.86 and 2.87 per million. Scaling the EPA’s heatwave index to the same level as in the disastrous 1936 heatwave and assuming that mortality increases by the same proportion allow us to imagine the death toll from the same event taking place today. The mortality rate would have been between 3.49 and 14.21 per million. This means that heatwaves are killing between 64 percent and 91 percent fewer people (relative to population) today than in 1936.

This is an undeniable sign of our resilience to climate shocks. It does not invalidate claims that the intensity, duration, and frequency have been increasing since the 1960s. Neither does it invalidate the claim that climate change is driving these trends.

What it does, however, is tell us that there are two winds pushing the boat to fewer heat deaths. The headwind is climate change which explains roughly 37 percent (with a confidence interval going between 20 percent and 76 percent of the number of heat deaths between 1991 and 2018, according to an article in Nature Climate Change concerned with a large international sample of countries. The tailwind is technological progress and economic growth which offer households the ability to protect themselves from extreme climatic events.

This tailwind, which can be observed through high ownership rates of air conditioning, higher quality housing, better health care, access to clean and fresh water, and the like, explains the lion’s share of the decline in heat-related mortality. Indeed, even if you take the upper bound of the aforementioned Nature Climate Change paper of 76 percent of deaths explained by climate change, climate change would need to increase the heat wave index by a factor of ten to force the death rate to exceed 10 deaths per million. No climate model seems to suggest such a possibility.

Moreover, the death count from heat waves is just slightly lower than the number of cold-related deaths. As such, climate change may increase the former but decrease the latter – creating an ambiguous net effect on mortality rates from climate extremes. Some studies suggest that the net effect will be fewer deaths in total. Others suggest more deaths in total. Which set of studies is correct is, however, irrelevant. Indeed, the tailwinds that reduced heat-related deaths also reduced cold-related deaths.

Chasing after sensational headlines predicting doom and gloom do us a disservice. It hides the progress we have made historically and prevents us from using this history to guide public discussions. Journalists and pundits should keep this in mind before they try to use a current event to get attention.

*****

This article was published by AIER, and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

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

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

NeverTrump’s Latest Attempt To Dismiss Election Concerns Is Particularly Dishonest thumbnail

NeverTrump’s Latest Attempt To Dismiss Election Concerns Is Particularly Dishonest

By Mollie Hemingway

If they want to convince voters outside their bubble, they should try far harder than they did with this report.

A group of establishment Republicans released a report last week claiming to make “The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election.”

It is not news that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The report’s strawman-slaying title is intended to suggest that concerns about the integrity of that election are without merit. But the report itself simply goes through court decisions and recounts, listing how they turned out. It focuses on questions about “fraud,” rather than the significant and extremely well-substantiated concerns Republican voters have about the election.

“Their methodology obscures the vast majority of actual material to consider if one were honestly engaging the problems,” said Capital Research Center President Scott Walter. His group has documented the significant role played by Mark Zuckerberg’s private funding of government election offices, a massive issue that the report almost completely elided.

Other major issues were also downplayed or ignored, even as court cases and investigative reports vindicate some of those concerns. In just the last few weeks, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, for example, ruled that unsupervised ballot drop boxes and third-party ballot trafficking both violate state law.

In its report, the group claimed its conservative Republican bona fides were beyond question, asserting that no members “have shifted loyalties to the Democratic Party, and none bear any ill will toward Trump and especially not toward his sincere supporters.”

In fact, the group is a combination of NeverTrumpers and people who thought the Republican Party had gone off the deep end long before Trump’s arrival. The report uses misdirection and red herrings regarding “voter fraud” to avoid talking about genuine and substantiated concerns regarding illegal voting and election integrity. And it is sourced to left-wing corporate media outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, hardly places to go to make any case, much less a credible or conservative one, about the 2020 election.

From the Voter-Rejected Wing of the GOP

Report co-author Thomas Griffith, a former federal judge whose enthusiastic support of Ketanji Brown Jackson was singled out by President Biden in his speech when he nominated her to the Supreme Court, told NeverTrump publication The Dispatch: “The idea is that it’s written by conservatives, for conservatives. We recognize the people who are watching [Morning Joe and CNN] are probably not the people we’re primarily interested in.”

Paul Ryan’s former chief of staff David Hoppe, another co-author, admitted the group got much support for its project from volunteers at high-powered, inside-the-Beltway law firms. Still, corporate media accepted the group’s framing of itself as “conservative.” Even a cursory look at the list revealed that to be overly generous if not completely misleading.

Ted Olson served as former President George W. Bush’s solicitor general, but he is most well known for being the brains and muscle behind the legal campaign to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. When President Trump sought to have his help to fight against the Russia collusion hoax that so undermined the country, Olson declined to help. He did go on television to publicly disparage the president after declining his request. Olson even tried to get Mitch McConnell to backtrack on his policy of not holding hearings for Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement until after the 2016 election. Olson is routinely derided by critics as a “conservative attorney for sale,” and someone who has “always been a hired gun.”

Former federal judge Michael McConnell argued on PBS in support of the second impeachment trial for President Trump.

Former federal judge Michael Luttig is already well known for helping out the Democrats’ Ja 6 Committee. He rather famously left the federal bench for Boeing — “taking his toys and going home,” as some put it at the time — after President George W. Bush didn’t put him on the Supreme Court. The Wall Street Journal noted that his resignation letterpointedly didn’t mention the younger Bush.

Luttig also serves on the advisory board of “The Safeguarding Democracy Project,” led by Richard Hasen, an election law professor who criticizes voter ID laws. Its mission statement claims Republicans who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election were acting in bad faith, and that election integrity laws passed after the 2020 election “threaten the cornerstone of American democracy.”

Gordon Smith, one of the report’s co-authors, wasn’t even considered a conservative in the old Republican Party back when he served as a senator from Oregon from 1997-2009. Before he became a high-paid lobbyist for the National Association of Broadcasters, he was assessed the fourth most liberal GOP senator after Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine, and Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, who officially joined Democrats in 2009. By 2008, when he was defeated, Smith scored only a 33 out of 100 by the American Conservative Union. Just this year, he declined to endorse a Republican for Oregon’s gubernatorial race.

Former Sen. John Danforth of Missouri, another co-author, thought the Republican Party was too conservative by 2005, arguing in The New York Times that it had become a party overtaken by conservative Christians. Danforth, an Episcopal priest, was a public supporter of efforts to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. He has said the worst mistake he ever made was supporting Sen. Josh Hawley’s political aspirations.

All of the report’s authors are or were Republican, including Hoppe, but they tend to inhabit parts of the old Republican Party that voters are increasingly rejecting, not just for their weak policy proposals but for their habit of cooperating with left-wing media in its unceasing attempts to undermine the new Republican Party’s political strengths.

The Man Who Lost the Decades-Long Battle for Election Integrity

Two days before the razor-thin 2020 presidential election, report co-author Ben Ginsberg, the long-time dean of establishment Republican election lawyers and former counsel to Bush’s presidential campaigns and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns, did one of the most hostile things imaginable to Trump and his voters. He went to The Washington Post to beg Americans to vote for Democrat nominee Joe Biden (“My party is destroying itself on the altar of Trump.”) He and other NeverTrumpers represent exceedingly little of the Republican Party outside of the Beltway, but in an election that came down to 43,000 votes across three states, they should get at least some credit — or if you’re a Republican voter, blame — for pushing Biden and other Democrats over the finish line and bringing the country to where it is today.

Ginsberg, it turns out, bears more responsibility for how the election turned out than most, and his op-ed explains why.

It wasn’t just that Ginsberg used his Republican pedigree in order to elevate his hatred of Trump when Republican campaigns desperately needed unity and strength. By November 2020, such tantrums were common among the Republicans who used to control the party. No, it was that he went on an absolute tirade against election integrity itself, adopting every Democrat Party talking point against Republican efforts to secure the ballot box.

Two days before the 2020 election had even occurred — and long before this report came out last week — his mind was made up. Proof of systemic fraud simply “doesn’t exist.” He compared concerns about election integrity to a hunt for the “Loch Ness monster.”

He praised practices enabling widespread unsupervised voting, including unattended ballot drop boxes, drive-through voting operations, and third-party ballot trafficking. He belittled concerns about even weak and insufficient verification systems, such as signature matches. He said Republican lawyers fighting against such practices were engaging in “voter suppression,” a common Democrat talking point.

Months after Ginsberg’s 2020 op-ed mocking election concerns, Time magazine itself confirmed what many Republicans suspected: the existence of a “conspiracy” by powerful Democrats to push through these unsupervised voting practices, creating an election system to ensure the outcome they desired. As Time wrote, it was “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

The successful effort to change hundreds of laws and processes across the country to enable tens of millions of unsupervised ballots to flood the system was led by Marc Elias, the same Democrat attorney who had been behind the creation of the Russia collusion hoax, the lie that Trump didn’t win in 2016 but stole the election by colluding with Russia.

Democrats had been working for decades to accomplish these changes. For nearly four decades, it was Ginsberg’s job to fight them. As the Republican Party’s top election lawyer, Ginsberg was supposed to be the person responsible for pushing back against coordinated and well-funded Democrat efforts to expand unsupervised voting and to make it difficult to scrutinize the resulting ballots that were far more susceptible to fraud.

It’s not surprising that Republicans fared so poorly against the coordinated Democrat campaign to water down election integrity over the last 20 years given that Ginsberg was the guy supposedly leading their fight.

Early on in my reporting for my best-selling book on the 2020 election, I spoke with dozens of Republican attorneys at the state and federal levels who had found themselves battling this widespread and coordinated takeover of the 2020 election. I asked some of them about Ginsberg’s op-ed and work, and how he compared to Elias.

They told me that Elias doesn’t have much going on in his life other than his election work, and he wakes up each morning with big plans on how to manipulate elections. (A look at his active social media presence supports the characterization.) They explained to me that Elias isn’t as good of an attorney as he promotes himself to be, but he’s the type who will argue whatever he needs to for a client. If that means arguing that voting machines aren’t secure — as his group did in 2020 when trying to overturn the results of Rep. Claudia Tenney’s election in New York, he’ll do it. If it means mocking the idea that voting machines aren’t secure — as his group did in 2020 when battling Trump election challenges that same year, he’ll do that too. He takes whatever side of an issue he needs to in order to secure a favorable outcome for his clients.

These sources noted that Ginsberg, by contrast, usually managed to help Elias and other Democrats in their efforts. They said he was a decent and well-connected Beltway attorney, but he didn’t seem to care much about election integrity, relative to his Democrat counterpart’s efforts. He was a fine lawyer who tended to do a mediocre job, they said. In fact, as soon as he retired, Ginsberg’s written and spoken statements sounded like they could have come from Elias.

Ginsberg even recently co-founded a group to fight election integrity efforts, claiming that such efforts to ensure transparency and accountability put election officials at risk. His co-founder David Becker, formerly with radical left-wing group People for the American Way, now runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, one of the two groups Zuckerberg funded during the 2020 election with $419 million. Those funds enabled the private takeover of government election offices in the blue areas of swing states. With Luttig, Ginsberg serves on the advisory board of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, the group opposed to election integrity efforts.

So What About the Report’s Substance?

The report was presented as an exhaustive look at what happened in the 2020 election. In fact, it only really looked in a cursory fashion at a limited set of lawsuits officially raised by Trump attorneys in the days and weeks after the election.

The report’s co-authors admitted to The Dispatch that the information in the report wasn’t new. Indeed, it’s seemed mostly to be a summation of what law associates might find in Lexis-Nexis — a recitation of legal cases and brief mentions of a few reports and audits in six battleground states. It did not dig deep into any of them, merely restating the circumstances by which cases were dismissed or resolved. And it doesn’t even do a good job with that.

For instance, it characterizes a report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty as finding, “no evidence of widespread voter fraud and no evidence of significant problems with voting machines — in fact, they found that Democratic candidates performed worse than expected in areas with Dominion machines.” Of course, “widespread voter fraud” and “voting machines” are red herrings, intended to divert people from dealing with what actually happened to control the election outcome in Wisconsin.

Contrast the report’s summation of the issue in Wisconsin with the actual first statement from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on its website for election integrity, which says, “It is almost certain that in Wisconsin’s 2020 election the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.” The Supreme Court of Wisconsin has shown that claim isn’t even up for debate, and while that is not “voter fraud,” per se, many Americans would describe the efforts to enable illegal voting methods as “widespread election fraud.”

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s report was a particularly modest account. Other independent analysts and econometricians analyzing Wisconsin have found that Zuckerberg’s meddling had a far greater impact than they realized. Here’s what a team of academics wrote about the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s takeover of government election offices in Wisconsin’s biggest cities:

Without CTCL involvement in Wisconsin in 2020, Wisconsin would be a solidly red state. We estimate that CTCL’s investment in seven Wisconsin counties resulted in 65,222 votes for Biden that would not have occurred in CTCL’s absence. That’s more than three times as big as the final 20,800-vote margin between Biden and Trump in 2020.

Private funding of elections overwhelmingly went to Democrat areas of swing states, produced skewed results, and violated legal requirements prohibiting partisan effects to nonprofit work. The situation in Wisconsin was so bad that leftist activists funded by the Zuckerberg operation led to multiple resignations of local officials in protest.

The report barely mentions, and therefore fails to adequately deal with, Zuckerberg’s funding and what it paid for, merely mentioning that some legal challenges had cited it. This is despite its central role in the outcomes for multiple swing states, including Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia.

The report does a poor job dealing with Georgia as well. In its opening paragraph on Georgia, the report’s authors write, “Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a conservative Republican, conducted a full manual recount of the five million ballots cast, confirming Biden’s victory. At Trump’s request, election officials then conducted a post-certification recount, which also confirmed Biden’s victory. Secretary Raffensperger, with the assistance of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, evaluated and rejected numerous claims of fraud.”

There are multiple major problems with this characterization of Georgia. The report authors didn’t seem to understand, or failed to accurately convey, the situation with the Trump lawsuit filed there. To take just one example from that lawsuit, it alleged a serious problem with illegal voting. Shortly after the election, voting data expert Mark Davis noticed a problem of 40,000 votes cast by people who had registered to vote in a county different from the one they had claimed to move to. It was one of the dozens of categories mentioned in the Trump lawsuit, and in the intervening months, it has been confirmed that more illegal votes were cast in this manner than comprises the margin of victory for the race.

One could perform a recount a thousand times and not detect, much less deal with, that problem. A recount would simply recount the ballots, whether they were legal or not legal. As for the suggestion that Raffensperger took seriously, much less rejected, claims of illegal voting, the evidence does not support the claim. He fiercely fought the campaign’s efforts to determine the precise number of illegal votes during the time they needed the information for their lawsuit. After The Federalist reported on this issue last year, and a television station confirmed the existence of the problem, his office was cagey about whether they were going to investigate, much less do anything about it. His office also made excuses for the illegal voting, suggesting it was not a major concern for his office.

The issue isn’t even addressed in the report, and discussions of the lawsuit and how it was handled are completely inadequate and erroneous. The problem with the lawsuit — which did not allege fraud and which had many substantiated claims — was that it could not get a hearing before Jan. 6. The problems the campaign’s legal team had getting a hearing were Kafka-esque, and the report doesn’t seem to understand what the issues were, much less how they were handled.

Other major issues are neglected in the report. Because of the limited scope and lack of depth to the report, it doesn’t even acknowledge, much less give credit, to a 2022 Pennsylvania court decision ruling that all no-excuse mail-in voting in the commonwealth is unconstitutional. In its discussion of the Arizona audit, which found large and systematic problems in election administration, it quotes the response from the hostile Maricopa County Board of Supervisors as definitive. Likewise, it quotes news articles from the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, and other left-wing media outlets as definitive responses to election concerns. This is laughably unserious.

Reports Like This Harm the Republic

When Luttig went to the one-sided Jan. 6 star chamber, he concluded his remarks by saying that Trump and his supporters were “a clear and present danger to American democracy” because of their ongoing concerns about election security.

The report repeatedly asserts that the reason why there is a lack of trust in elections is because of Trump and his supporters. In fact, one of the most important reasons to fight the coordinated campaign to weaken election integrity is that the lack of controls that make fraud easier to commit and more difficult to detect is responsible for the lack of trust in elections.

Following the contentious 2000 election, former President Jimmy Carter and Republican James Baker co-chaired the bipartisan Commission on Election Reform. Its 100-plus-page report was called “Building Confidence in U.S. Elections,” and it treated election integrity as vitally important to that goal.

Rather than mocking or dismissing concerns about election integrity as unimportant, the Carter Commission stressed the problems caused by bloated and inaccurate voter rolls, nonexistent or faulty voter-identification procedures, and unsupervised voting. It said these practices threaten elections and democracy, as do misconduct by partisan election officials, the use of inconsistent procedures in different precincts, and an overall lack of transparency. The report noted that mail-in balloting is associated with higher risk of fraud and could also undermine faith in elections.

Making sure that voting is fair is one of the most important issues in the country. That’s why it remains a top concern to Republican voters, even as Washington, D.C., rolls out every member of the establishment to try to force them to fall in line with weak and insecure voting provisions.

If they want to convince voters outside their bubble, they should try far harder than they did with this report.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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