Is America’s greatest existential enemy, the genocidal Chinese Communist Party (CCP), exploiting Biden’s open borders to send agents or soldiers into the U.S.?
Numbers of illegal aliens pouring into America to receive taxpayer-funded freebies continue to climb, but one nationality is particularly showing a stunning leap in migrant numbers. Fox News’ Bill Melugin tweeted on April 2:
“Border Patrol arrests of Chinese nationals who crossed the U.S. border illegally over recent years.
Fiscal Year 2021: 342
Fiscal Year 2022: 1,987
Fiscal Year 2023: 24,125
Fiscal Year 2024: 22,233 (so far)
6,300% + increase since FY’21.”
Why should you be worried? As I have reported before, experts warned that the CCP is almost certainly sending in plants among the illegal alien horde. But with numbers as high as they are, and the fact that so many of these Chinese illegals have been military-age men, one has to wonder if a whole army of CCP soldiers is invading America.
It is extremely and increasingly difficult to escape from China and get all the way to America as a Chinese dissident, and it is very unlikely that tens of thousands of dissidents are simultaneously escaping and making their way to Latin America and thence to the U.S. without CCP hindrance. Some, no doubt, are dissidents, but that does not explain over 45,000 Chinese migrants suddenly appearing at our border just over the last year and a half. The CCP has certainly been growing increasingly aggressive and disdainful toward the U.S. under weak, China-pandering Joe Biden.
We know the CCP has multiple illicit police stations in America and has infiltrated our institutions and government, even paying off Biden and family. Unknown numbers of criminals, terrorists, and gang members are pouring into America as illegal migrants too. Most significant of all, the Biden administration deliberately reduced the vetting on Chinese migrants to a laughable level of irrelevance. Is it such a stretch of the imagination to think the CCP would be taking advantage of the open southern U.S. border and non-existent migrant vetting to send in a lot of soldiers or agents?
And if they are, we had better watch out—we might wake up one morning to find World War III happening right on our doorsteps.
*****
Catherine Salgado is an accomplished writer and investigative reporter who publishes daily in her Substack column,Pro Deo et Libertate(For God and Liberty). This superb column provides news and opinion pieces from an honest, common-sense perspective in the spheres of culture, politics, liberal arts, and religion. The Prickly Pear is grateful for her permission to reproduce her public writings and recommends that our readers subscribe toCatherine’s superb Substack column. Please consider a paid subscription for full access to all of her excellent and informative writings.
Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot
TAKE ACTION
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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His choice for running mate answers many a question.
In the full year since he first emerged onto the national stage as the biggest political wildcard since Ross Perot, it was first assumed that Robert F Kennedy Jr. was likely to draw votes away from Joe Biden in the Democratic primary and weaken the incumbent for the fall campaign. But after RFK Jr. switched from Democrat to independent, the contours of the race changed, based on the notion that he might draw votes from both major party candidates in November, perhaps in equal measure. Then came the late March announcement of Kennedy’s running mate – and suddenly, everything changed again.
Kennedy had an open, unlimited field of known and unknowns from which to select his vice presidential choice. As an independent candidate without a party structure to involve itself in the selection, he was free to head in any number of possible directions. For example, he could have chosen another relatively centrist – and attractive – Democratic defector in Tulsi Gabbard. He could have gone the route of the No Labels party and picked someone identified with the middle, in the image of a Joe Manchin. Or he could have decided on celebrity for celebrity’s sake and chosen New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, whose name was floated likely for the sole purpose of its shock value. Any of those choices would undoubtedly be somewhat attractive to skeptical, non-ideological voters seeking an alternative to Trump and Biden.
Instead, the 70-year-old son of the martyred senator and scion of the nation’s most famed political family did something few had expected. He tacked heavily left and selected a woman who not only is virtually unknown but has unambiguously identified herself as a committed leftist. One could hardly be more clear than calling yourself, as Nicole Shanahan has, a “progressive through and through.” Shanahan was familiar to those in the jet-set world of Silicon Valley, to be sure – but not to anyone else. All you need know is that she donated $700,000 to support Measure J, a post-George Floyd Los Angeles County criminal justice initiative that defunded law enforcement and diverted local revenue to “alternatives to incarceration,” as per the New York Post. She also gave $150,000 to support the infamous George Gascón’s 2020 bid for Los Angeles district attorney and contributed $25,000 to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory fund.
But the most revealing contribution by Ms. Shanahan was $4 million to the RFK Jr. SuperPac. Is her selection all about money? Is the VP slot a reward for the millions she has already donated, or more about the promise of much more to come from Shanahan, ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, whose net worth is an estimated $95 billion? And if this decision is only about the Benjamins, what does it say to voters about Kennedy’s priorities and financial capacity to run a competitive campaign? He knows he is not going to win the presidency – his support has crested at roughly 15% in recent polls – so the vice presidential choice is about as big a statement as an independent candidate can make. And this one was, if not big, certainly clarifying.
Consequently, Democrats are freaking out now that, in the opinion of most though not all professional Democrats, RFK Jr. will almost certainly draw more votes from Biden than from Trump. In 2016 and 2020, less than 50,000 votes in three states swung the election, so Kennedy pulling even five percent of the vote – assuming he gets on enough states’ ballots – could well be decisive one way or another. Even as his name has been synonymous with Democratic politics over decades, talk of Kennedy being a plant or stalking horse for Trump has risen to just beneath the surface in leftist circles. Seriously.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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Top executives behind a Chinese chemical manufacturer planning to build two U.S. factories belong to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and affiliated influence outfits, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has found.
The DCNF’s investigation is based, in part, on information provided by the Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action. The DCNF previously reported that Capchem, which makes chemicals used for batteries in electric vehicles, has received tens of millions of dollars in subsidies from Chinese government agencies, including a blacklisted Chinese government entity that plays an instrumental role in the CCP’s “Military-Civil Fusion” efforts.
“Communist Chinese companies have no place on American soil,” New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, told the DCNF. “The Communist Chinese-owned company has a concerning history of advancing CCP military technology, presenting a clear and pressing national security threat.”
A Capchem spokesperson acknowledged that “some” of its employees are CCP members, but that “the company doesn’t have exact statistics about the number of them.”
However, a DCNF review of Capchem’s Chinese social media account found that the firm reported employing 44 CCP members as of June 2020. A separate social media post from 2023 identifies Capchem President Zhou Dawen as Party Secretary of the company’s CCP branch.
A “Party branch” is the smallest “grass-roots” CCP organization, and is required in Chinese institutions containing three or more Party members, according to the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, which is China’s state organ for legal supervision.
“As a privately controlled company, Party member identity does not influence company management or operations,” the spokesperson told the DCNF.
Yet, the CCP Central Committee’s Organization Department says party committees are meant to “guide and oversee enterprises in obeying state laws and regulations, unite their employees, safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of all parties and promote the sound development of their enterprises, with a focus on carrying out the [CCP]’s principles and policies.”
In July 2019, Capchem’s own social media account shows the CCP Committee in the Pingshan District of Shenzhen recognized Zhou as an “Outstanding Party Secretary” during an event celebrating the CCP’s 98th anniversary.
“This honor doesn’t belong to me personally, it belongs to all of Capchem’s Party branch comrades,” Zhou said during the 2019 event, according to the post. “As an old CCP member, I have a responsibility and duty to do my best for the Party’s cause.”
“My experience tells me, as long as we work according to the instructions assigned by our superior Party unit, work conscientiously, obey the law and what may come, the enterprise will most certainly overcome obstacles and usher in a better future,” Zhou said.
Capchem’s spokesperson admitted Zhou is “a member, but he is at retirement age,” adding that Capchem USA “does not employ any member of the Chinese Communist Party.”
[Screenshot of Capchem’s president and CCP Party Secretary Zhou Dawen from the firm’s social media account]
But Capchem USA executives have been affiliated with groups identified by U.S. government entities as serving CCP’s “United Front” strategy. “United Front” groups engage in “influence activities and intelligence operations,” according to the House Select Committee on the CCP.
The “United Front” system is led by the United Front Work Department (UFWD), a “Chinese intelligence service” responsible for coordinating domestic and foreign “influence operations,” according to the U.S. government-funded U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
Capchem Chairman Qin Jiusan is identified in a Louisiana business filing as a director of Capchem USA.
Qin’s company bio previously disclosed his membership in the Pingshan branch of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission identified the CPPCC as one of several “important actors within the United Front system” in a 2023 report.
The CPPCC’s English-language charter states that delegates must “uphold the leadership” of the CCP, “take advantage of the CPPCC as a United Front organization,” and “keep state secrets.”
Qin is also a member of the Pingshan branch of the All-China Federation Of Industry And Commerce (ACFIC), according to the Shenzhen municipal government and CPPCC websites.
The UFWD lists ACFIC as a “subordinate,” and ACFIC describes itself as CCP “led” and tasked with linking the CCP “with people in non-public economic activities.”
A Capchem spokesperson confirmed Qin is a “local member” of the CPPCC and ACFIC. Capchem itself is also a corporate member of ACFIC, the spokesperson added.
However, Qin’s CPPCC affiliation disappeared from his company profile after the DCNF reached out for comment.
[Image created by the DCNF using screenshots from Capchem’s website.]
Capchem previously scrubbed references to its products being used in “high-end military equipment” and within the “military and aerospace industries” from its website after being contacted for comment by the DCNF.
“When these companies start scrubbing their websites, it’s clear that we’re on the right track,” Mike Howell, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, told the DCNF.
‘Follow Closely In The Party’s Steps’
In May 2023, Capchem announced that a “top advisor” to ACFIC’s Shenzhen branch, who was also a former China Ministry of Aerospace official, inspected the firm’s headquarters and met with company chairman Qin Jiusan.
The Shenzhen UFWD’s social media account also contains posts indicating that United Front officials have inspected Capchem facilities several times, including in February 2020 and April 2022. Photos from the 2020 and 2022 inspections show Qin leading UFWD minister Li Guangming on a tour of Capchem’s headquarters.
In August 2022, Qin spoke at a UFWD event in Shenzhen, according to the Shenzhen UFWD’s social media account. In his remarks, Qin described a speech given roughly two weeks earlier by President Xi Jinping as “profound,” telling the audience it “clarified a series of major theoretical and practical questions concerning United Front work in a new era.”
“As the vice chairman of Pingshan District’s ACFIC, I will take the lead in strengthening my personal study [of Xi’s teachings],” Qin said, adding that he would also “follow closely in the party’s steps.”
“Exacerbating our reliance on companies like Capchem for the domestic manufacture of energy products would be a self-defeating mistake,” Bryan Burack, senior policy advisor for China and the Indo-Pacific at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center, told the DCNF.
Capchem USA CEO Charlie Yao also previously belonged to an organization that the Chinese government has identified as serving the United Front, a Capchem spokesperson said.
Yao “was a member of the All-China Youth Federation from 1995-2000,” the spokesperson told the DCNF.
The All-China Youth Federation (ACYF) is a “patriotic United Front organization” that operates “under the leadership” of the CCP, according to the Chinese government.
John Dotson, deputy director of Global Taiwan Institute, called ACYF a “CCP-operated agency” and “United Front” organization.
“Any of ACYF’s officials would be subject to Party orders, Party discipline, etc.,” Dotson told the DCNF.
Capchem’s spokesperson, however, claimed that “neither Shenzhen Capchem nor Capchem USA has a relationship with individuals or entities involved in the CCP’s United Front.”
Burack told the DCNF that, given all Capchem’s CCP and United Front ties, he views the company as “part of the CCP’s influence apparatus.”
‘No Such Thing As A Private Company In China’
Capchem USA currently has plans to build chemical manufacturing facilities for electric vehicles in Lawrence County, Ohio and Ascension Parish, Louisiana.
Capchem USA also stands to benefit from U.S. government largess. Ohio’s Lawrence County recently granted Capchem USA a 50% tax break and Louisiana offered the firm a “$2 million performance-based grant for infrastructure expenses,” among other state incentives. Likewise, Capchem could also benefit from the web of subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022.
The company’s plans, however, have come under scrutiny from lawmakers who believe the firm’s Chinese government ties present a national security threat.
“Examples like Capchem are all the more reason we need to ensure Chinese companies are not eligible to receive U.S. taxpayer funding to further entrench our reliance on CCP-dominated supply chains in strategic industries,” Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP, told the DCNF. “There is no such thing as a private company in China.”
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-04-05 02:28:002024-04-05 02:28:00Chinese-Owned Chemical Giant Expanding Into US Heartland Led By Members Of Communist Party, Influence Orgs
American males are turning off, and tuning and dropping out.
Many boys and men are struggling to flourish in their roles as sons, students, employees, and fathers, and to achieve the sense of purpose that comes from being rooted within marriages, communities, churches, and country.
Much of the literature on the boy crisis contains impressive, even essential social science work that clearly demonstrates that boys and men are falling behind. My recent essay, “Men Without Meaning: The Harmful Effects of Expressive Individualism,” is an attempt to distill this literature and explore how expressive individualism—the notion that the inner self is the true self and is radically autonomous—plays a central role in the boy crisis.
The ascendance of expressive individualism, which can be traced to the Sexual Revolution, is partially responsible for the breakdown of marriage and has gained a foothold in religious institutions. Among others, it combines the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, who divorced sex from gender; psychologist Sigmund Freud, who elevated human sexuality as central to identity; and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that man is innocent and corrupted by society.
Political scientist Warren Farrell and counselor John Gray’sThe Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It is the go-to text for understanding the dad deprivation that is the primary cause of the boy crisis. It lays out how a dad’s presence can positively impact a child’s scholastic achievement, verbal intelligence and quantitative abilities, and development of trust and empathy. Likewise, it shows that the absence of a father’s presence increases the likelihood that a child will drop out of school, commit suicide, use drugs, become homeless, end up in poverty, develop hypertension, and be exposed to or commit bullying and violent crime, including rape.
Fathers, like mothers, contribute in unique and indispensable ways to the raising of children. One example is through play, which helps children develop, learn the limits of their bodies, and properly channel aggression. According to, “Theorizing the Father-Child Relationship: Mechanisms and Developmental Outcomes”: “Children seem to need to be stimulated and motivated as much as they need to be calmed and secured, and they receive such stimulation primarily from men, primarily through physical play.”
Dad deprivation is especially disastrous for boys. As mimetic creatures, theoretical arguments about masculinity and virtue fall short of a father’s lived witness of their mastery. Boys learn how to become good men by imitating a good man, and the mentors of their lives are their fathers.
Thanks to expressive individualism’s effect on our moral imagination, however, today many people dismiss the benefits of embodied play and assume that fathers and mothers are interchangeable. We have accepted the premises that the mind and body are disconnected and the body is unimportant.
Expressive individualism has also changed the way we think about marriage, making it more fragile. Marriage is no longer geared towards the character formation of each spouse and to providing a loving environment for the raising of children, but rather is now primarily viewed as a means to achieving emotional satisfaction and personal improvement. Rather than both husband and wife sacrificing for the good of the marriage, each spouse aims separately to achieve his and her personal subjective idea of “self-actualization.”
As Andrew Cherlin, a sociology and public policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, articulates in The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, marriages based on expressive individualism involve:
Growing and changing as a person, paying attention to your feelings, and expressing your needs…[M]arriages are harder to keep together, because what matters is not merely the things they jointly produce—well-adjusted children, nice homes—but also each person’s own happiness.
Over twenty years ago, in The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men, philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers drew attention to the fact that boys were falling behind in school. Some of the precipitating causes were newer, such as zero-tolerance policies, the decline of free play and recess, and the rise of a self-esteem centered safety culture. Others reach back much further. Our education system, in many ways, is not designed for boys. Simultaneous shifts in our economy have lengthened the time spent in school and raised the stakes of getting an education.
On average, the energy level of boys makes it difficult for them to sit still for long periods. They can be unorganized and frustrate their teachers, who factor behavior into grading. Perhaps some teachers, mired in expressive individualism, expect girls and boys to behave the same, as “boys on average receive harsher exclusionary discipline than girls for the same behaviors.” In truth, as senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institute Richard Reeves writes: “The parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, future orientation, sometimes labeled the ‘CEO of the brain,’ are mostly in the prefrontal cortex, which matures about 2 years later in boys than in girls.”
The progressive style of education, relying on Rousseau’s romantic vision and promulgated by reformers like John Dewey and others, contends that theoretically children should direct their own educational trajectory. This has been particularly harmful to boys. Approximately since the 1970s, as Sommers writes, children have been treated as their “own best guides in life. This turn to the autonomous subject as the ultimate moral authority is a notable consequence of the triumph of the progressive style over traditional directive methods of education.”
Changes in education were greeted with changes in the economy itself. Precipitated by free trade and automation, America is now a global knowledge economy. Overall, those most negatively impacted have been men without much education. According to “The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men”: “Between 1973 and 2015, real hourly earnings for the typical 25-54 year-old man with only a high school degree declined by 18.2 percent, while real hourly earnings for college-educated men increased substantially.” American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis details how over seven million men ages 25-55 have checked out of the workforce. Such men often receive disability payments or are living with a relative who serves as a source of income.
These disengaged men are spending a great deal of time in front of screens that promote disembodied expressive individualism. This includes an average of 5.5 hours of movies and TV per day, not to mention the rise of exceedingly popular online pornography. Some estimate that Gen Z boys are being exposed to porn at the average age of nine. Studies indicate that pornography rewires the brain, causing boys and men to desire more and more novel content rather than a relationship with a real woman. Male employment is often tied to family structure, and marriage rates for low-income men have declined, demonstrating the unique causes and reinforcing mechanisms of the boy crisis.
The devastating impact of the opioid epidemic is another factor. Some estimate that it could account for 43 percent of the decline in male labor force participation from 1999 to 2015. During that time, the number of overdoses quadrupled, and men made up almost 70 percent of such deaths. The incarceration rate has also risen, and years behind bars reduce the likelihood of finding employment.
These phenomena are not equally distributed across the country, and some have hypothesized that increased deaths of despair (deaths from suicide, overdose, etc.) “among less-educated middle-age Americans might be rooted in ‘a long-term process of decline, or of cumulative deprivation, rooted in the steady deterioration in job opportunities for people with low education.’” The second leading cause of death for American men under 45 is suicide.
All this has left many men without purpose and hope. The boy crisis both reflects and contributes to the broader crisis of America and the West, in no small measure driven by the expressive individualism that has left men and women disconnected from relationships, human nature, and objective truth. America and the West are running on the fumes of our heritage, no longer able to articulate our principles or the gratitude we owe the past.
For much of history, human beings have been most willing to give the last measure of their devotion for what truly provides identity: God, family, and country. Each of these encompasses the individual, pulling him out of himself and toward a life of sacrifice, responsibility, and devotion. Expressive individualism is a stark deviation from the traditional understanding that freedom and virtue are intertwined. As articulated in the classic work Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life: influenced by modern psychological ideals, to be free is not simply to be left alone by others; it is also somehow to be your own person in the sense that you have defined who you are, decided for yourself what you want out of life, free as much as possible from the demands of conformity to family, friends, or community.
Solutions to the boy crisis must counteract such messaging and ideas, putting forth a substantive view of marriage, revitalizing religious institutions, and honoring fatherhood and male mentorship as fundamental sources of meaning. They will reestablish a proper understanding of the human person and the ties between happiness and virtue. Sadly, there are no silver bullet solutions to these issues. The devastation is far-reaching and multitudinous, and the work we have to do matches the price we have paid.
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Democrats have long touted Social Security and Medicare as the crown jewels of both the New Deal and The Great Society. While both parties have voted for these programs, their design and implementation have, for better or worse, largely been a project of the Democrat Left in this country.
If they can take the credit for these programs, then it is fair for them to take the blame for the financial instability and mammoth costs of these programs. Several fixes have been required along the way, in the 1970s and early 1980s, and now the program again faces insolvency in a little more than a decade.
Both Medicare and Social Security were designed poorly and have had their design problems compounded by Congress extending benefits without a requisite increase in revenue. Politicians have played politics with our retirement security.
With Social Security, unlike private pensions, the benefits have little to do with contributions. The assets are not invested for a rate of return, rather they are “invested” in nonmarketable treasury securities, that historically have had a poor rate of return. But with Social Security buying these bonds, it helped hide the true size of the fiscal deficit. This, in turn, helped Democrats add additional expensive programs to the budget during the era when deficits were a political negative. Now that Social Security is liquidating the “trust fund”, it will add supply to a treasury market already struggling to absorb the huge spending of Bidenomics.
Today it seems, neither party seems to care much about deficits. There are complaints to be sure, but nothing is done about it, and in fact, deficits have expanded greatly as Democrats signed on to what they like to call Modern Monetary Theory.
Private pensions are funded by the people who receive the benefit. In the case of Social Security, it is a “pay as you go system”i.e., you paid for your parent’s benefit, and your children are paying for yours. Since younger generations pay for the retirement of older generations, this sets up an actuarial risk at the heart of the program. What happens when the number of young people shrinks and the number of elderly expands? We are finding out.
For most of the history of Social Security, the population was growing so it was not an issue, but now the population is dropping fast and hard. People are not forming families, those that are formed are much older and have fewer children.
Compounding the problems, Democrats have ruthlessly attacked anyone suggesting reforms of these programs were necessary. It is common knowledge that even suggesting changes constitutes the “third rail” of American politics. We all remember the Paul Ryan look-alike “throwing grandma off a cliff”, as shown in Democrat television ads. As political theatre, the Democrats get an A+. For statesmanship, then get an F-.
Democrats, having done such a good job of demagoguing the subject, timorous Republicans have not seriously brought up the subject since. It has now been 20 years.
The problem is that neither party is willing to discuss problems in Social Security, and if they are not addressed, in about 13 years, there will have to be about a 23% cut in benefits. Most of us have learned the hard way in life, that ignoring a problem, will not fix it.
But because of the political toxicity of the politics, we are rolling towards a cliff and no one wants to either admit there is a problem or do anything about it.
While much of the problem is political, in basic terms, it is a math problem. More money is going out of the system than is coming in. In a sense, it was designed as a giant Ponzi mechanism and hence it has all the inherent weaknesses of such a pyramid scheme. For Ponzi investors to get paid, there must be an increased flow of new investors. But for Social Security, the number of new participants is shrinking.
Unrestricted immigration is not the answer either although we wonder if that is not one of the secret motivations of its advocates. The costs are huge because welfare state benefits are now being given to people who have not paid a dime into the system.New illegal immigrants can get a substantially better deal than citizens.
Let’s look at some charts to simplify and explain the basic problems Social Security faces.
In the early 1950s, about 14 people were working supporting every Social Security beneficiary. By 1960, it was five workers per beneficiary. Now it is well below 3 and headed to 2. Imagine the payroll taxes on young workers if just slightly more than two workers have to support a retiree, plus have money left over to support their own families and retirement.
This is because of two demographic trends: declining birth rates and older people living longer than expected. It’s math, not politics.
The expense of children is often cited as the issue. But religious people live in the same expensive society as those who are not, yet they have more children. It is more a question of life priorities. Women are largely in control of this decision, and with various forms of birth control, they have a lot of options.
Meanwhile, people are living longer because of better healthcare, diet, and knowledge.
Many people want the good life it seems, they just don’t want new humans to have that. Or, they think of people largely as a mouth to feed rather than a brain that can produce. As a generation, we produced more than we ate. Young people can do it too. But the fear among many is that having children will harm “the earth.”
Whatever the complex reasons are, there is little evidence these trends will change any time soon and certainly not fast enough to shore up the programs in question. Therefore, our leaders must act prudently and decisively. Sadly, that doesn’t look like it will happen.
Income flowing into the program is not keeping pace with the outflow. Cash flow has turned negative. Current projections show that Social Security will exhaust its “trust fund” in about 13 years. When that point is reached, wrenching change will be necessary. It will mean either a huge cut in benefits, a large increase in taxes, the use of currency debasement to plug the holes (inflation), means testing of benefits, or likely a combination of all the above.
To continue benefits, shortfalls in Social Security will have to be supported out of the general budget, creating an even greater budget crisis.
Unfortunately, Democrats, by sending deficits out of control for other things, are putting key trust funds in jeopardy. Their actions have removed what limited flexibility we had to deal with the crisis.
That means we soon will have to deal with multiple crises. With all this new spending, where is the revenue going to come from to shore up these “trust funds.”? As mentioned previously, huge Federal borrowing is already disturbing the bond market.
The Highway Trust fund will run out in 2028, Medicare by 2031, and Social Security by 2033. Over the next decade, these three programs face funding deficits of over $3 Trillion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
This is not a small problem. Millions of Americans, especially the vulnerable elderly who can’t return to work, depend on these programs for both income and health care. Citizens were promised a benefit and our government knows they are in jeopardy. Yet, nothing is being done to fix them, and politically, nothing apparently can get done.
Without change, a 23% drop or more in benefits will be necessary. Such a drop in spending by the huge number of retirees would seriously impact consumer spending and the economy as a whole. Additionally, to break a promise of this magnitude and duration, would cause social upheaval and political anger on a scale rarely seen.
Inflation would impact all of us negatively and the young are in a no-win situation. They will have a lower standard of living than previous generations, something quite new in America.
Besides, there is also something deeply immoral about passing on a staggering burden to our grandchildren, without either their knowledge or consent. We no longer put children in debtor’s prison for the sins of their fathers, or do we?
This is what happens when politicians design a program vital to all and then ignore the routine maintenance necessary to keep the machine dependable. Irresponsible does not seem like a strong enough term to describe the venal exploitation of voters.
At the end of the day, it is our fault for letting them get away with such a massive con job. As voters, we reward those who spend and punish those who have had the temerity to point out we are headed for fiscal catastrophe. You get the kind of leaders you vote for.
Now we are borrowing money just to pay interest on our debt and face the tremendous challenge of funding the trust funds in danger.
Thanks, Democrats. Yet these “entitlements” are now eating most of what remains of the Federal Budget. Between this so-called “mandatory” spending, interest due on the debt, and defense; only about 15% of the budget is up even for Congressional debate. Not only is the fiscal car rolling towards the cliff, but it is largely doing so on automatic pilot.
At least Thelma and Louise decided their fate.
One of the few exceptions to this cruel ruse being pulled on both the retired and the young is Arizona Congressman David Schweikert, who had been ringing the alarm for years. Tragically, too few are listening. We hope you will listen to his recent remarks.
*****
Image Credit: YouTube Screen shot Thelma and Louise Fandango
TAKE ACTION
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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The regime has lost all perspective and decency in its war on its perceived enemies.
Dr. John Eastman is a patriot, a constitutional scholar, a lawyer, a husband, and a father. He is our friend, colleague, and fellow board member of the Claremont Institute, who has spent his life defending the principles upon which this great nation was founded. After a ten week travesty of a trial, a California Bar Court judge, seeking to criminalize disagreements in constitutional interpretation, recommended that John should lose his license to practice law in California.
The term “lawfare” has become part of the American vernacular in the past few years. It means the manipulation and corruption of the legal system to gain political advantage and attack and destroy one’s political opponents. The most famous example of lawfare is, of course, the shocking abuse of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Attorney General’s office in the state of New York, and the District Attorney’s office in Fulton County Georgia in an attempt to destroy the current Republican candidate for the presidency, Donald J. Trump. But the assault on Trump is just the most widely publicized example of this evil practice, which is destroying the rule of law in America.
Anyone who dares to oppose the reigning progressive regime, at any level and in any way, is a potential target of this lawfare. Especially targeted are those who dared to raise any question about the legality of the 2020 election. Prominent among these is John Eastman.
In his case, an activist group, States United Democracy Center, joined other activists in filing an ethics complaint with the California State Bar Association. As David Brock, one of the leaders in this lawfare, explains, the aim of these activists is “not only [to] bring the grievances in the bar complaints but shame [their targets] and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms.” Specifically, they aim not just to disbar, but to destroy, the 111 attorneys who were involved in legally challenging the 2020 election results.
The Bar Association, which is overwhelmingly progressive, then becomes complicit in the lawfare. The legal travesty John suffered during his judicial proceedings is vivid in the transcripts of the trial and has been described in detail by Rachel Alexander of the Arizona Sun Times, which provided comprehensive day-to-day coverage of the trial. The entire proceeding was a mockery of the impartial judging of professional conduct that should be expected in such a tribunal. It was partisan grandstanding with a judgment that seemed preordained from the first week.
John will appeal, of course, and we expect him to prevail. But his case is a warning to us all of the increasing criminalization of any challenge to the progressive orthodoxy, whether the subject is elections, climate, race, gender, the economy, public health, or the Constitution. Concerned citizens of all stripes, whatever their opinions on John’s representation of and advice to President Trump in 2020 and 2021, should regard this trend with alarm.
We stand by John, applaud his fortitude in standing up against these shameful and un-American attacks, and pray that his courage is contagious.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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Editors’ Note: The film reviewed by CFACT we have viewed and think is excellent. It is factual and scientific, but easily understood by a layperson. A link is provided in the third paragraph. View the movie. You will enjoy it and be better informed for doing so.
Our (mankind’s) ability to control the weather and change the planet’s climate is greatly exaggerated. More precisely, it is a fruitless and wastrel endeavor and unnecessary besides.
That is the main takeaway from the new filmClimate: The Movie (The Cold Hard Truth), written and directed by Martin Durkin and released last week.
Climate will always change, no matter how many square miles of solar panels and wind turbines desecrate the landscapeand oceans, regardless of how many strip-mined electric vehicles the government attempts to force-feed us, and no matter how many trillions of dollars are printed and spent by politicians and virtue-signaling multi-billionaires.
Climate change is a natural phenomenon primarily influenced by solar activity, including sunspots, solar winds, and cloud formation. That’s right: the sun impacts Earth’s climate, something I learned by drawing pictures in kindergarten science, yet is disregarded by the vast climate change mega-industry of governments, corporations, media, grant-receiving scientists and professors, and the entertainment world.
Instead, said the industry is obsessed with carbon dioxide, which is a trace atmospheric gas comprising four ten-thousandths of the atmosphere, or 0.04 percent, that is essential to human, animal, and plant life. Indeed, CO2 makes the world livable and thriving, yet is falsely labeled a “pollutant” that somehow threatens the existence of Earth itself and must be curtailed. In fact, carbon in the atmosphere has been much higher at temperatures cooler and hotter than today, at levels resulting from temperature changes, rather than the cause of them.
Climate: The Moviefeatures a series of interviews of prominent and credentialed scientists, including Steven Koonin, NYU professor and former Assistant Secretary of Energy in the Obama administration; Richard Lindzen, retired atmospheric physicist from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Roy Spencer, meteorologist at the University of Huntsville in Alabama and an award-winning veteran of NASA; Willie Soon, an astrophysicist and aerospace engineer at Harvard and the Smithsonian; and others, some of whom were blackballed for daring to challenge the prevailing climate change group-think narrative.
Another major feature of the film is data. How warm is the planet today compared to previous decades, centuries, and millions of years ago? Based on rock formations, temperature can be estimated going back as long as 500 million years. At the present day, it turns out Earth is in a colder period than the planetary norm. Measured over thousands of years, the climate has been quite stable, ranging within a few degrees, and now in an overall warming trend by about one degree since the late 1800s, during which average global temperature has varied modestly up and down.
Another key data point is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which was four and five times higher than the levels of today, at 2,000-plus parts per million, including during ice ages. Yet, such realities have eluded climate obsessives like John Kerry and countless others who assert that nameless scientists warn of exceeding 400 parts per million means the planet is headed to a proverbial danger zone.
In sum, the climate changes of recent decades and centuries have ebbed and flowed in an unremarkable, non-threatening fashion.
The film also discusses the importance of accurately measuring global temperature change by making apples-to-apples comparisons, which the climate alarmist industry routinely ignores to fulfill its political narrative. Temperature records of 100 or more years past were commonly taken from thermometers in sparse areas when the U.S. was a more rural nation. These readings do not properly compare to results taken in dense areas of today due to the “urban heat effect,” studied by Dr. Spencer. By contrast, temperature data measured by satellites, ocean or rural-based thermometers show smaller vicissitudes over time.
How did it get this way? How did climate change alarmists become a pervasive influence? Money. It always comes back to the money, primarily from government.
After a global cooling period in the 1970s, when actor Leonard Nimoy (“Mr. Spock”) and many others warned of the coming ice age (even as man-made carbon emissions were sharply increasing since World War II), temperature reverted slightly upward. This spawned a movement championed by then-U.S. Senator Al Gore, who became Vice President in the Clinton administration, which sharply increased funding to study global warming.
Government research funding typically chases problems to “study” and solve, the film asserts. The climate change issue, with its growing alarm bells, unscrupulously parroted in the media for decades, has since gone far beyond government research grants to subsidizing big corporate industries (e.g., solar, wind, EVs) to purportedly lower the temperature.
Politicians from President Biden on down who peddle climate exaggerations, dutifully echoed by most national media, will go on ignoring the science and reality presented in Climate: The Movie. To otherwise embrace the scientific evidence from this robust film would mean the end of the climate gravy train and the climate alarmist crusade to expand government power and control over society.
*****
This article was published by CFACT, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and is reproduced with permission.
TAKE ACTION
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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Self-defense is an ancient common law right under which necessary and reasonable force may be used to defend one’s person or property. As Sir Edward Coke expressed it in 1604: “The house of everyone is to him as his Castle and Fortress as well for defense against injury and violence . . . if thieves come to a man’s house to rob him, or murder, and the owner or his servants kill any of the thieves in defense of himself and his house, it is no felony, and he shall lose nothing.”
The meaning of reasonable force has always been heavily context-dependent, considering the facts of the case including the intentions of the parties. If a trial were to become necessary in the scenario described by Coke, the court would have to establish that the intruders were indeed thieves intent on robbery or murder, or at any rate that the homeowner reasonably believed this to be the case. The use of force to defend oneself from an attack inherently carries the risk of causing the attacker’s death, making it necessary to ascertain that this was not merely a homicide masquerading as self-defense. Otherwise, anyone could shoot another and argue that he thought it was an intruder, as happened in the Oscar Pistorius case.
If the attacker shoots first, it is not unreasonable to shoot back. Difficult cases arise where the attacker is unarmed or armed only with the natural weapons of his own fists. The old common law rule, as reported by the Michigan Law Review in 1904, was that
it was not necessary the assault should have been made with a deadly weapon, but that an assault with the fists alone, if there was apparent purpose and ability to inflict death or serious bodily injury, was sufficient to justify the killing in self-defense. . . . a mere battery by the fists alone, will not justify an homicide, even where there is a great disparity of physical power, without a plain manifestation of felonious intent.
The felonious intent of the attacker (intention to inflict death or serious bodily injury) has long been treated as key to justifying killing the attacker, and such intention could only be judged in all the circumstances of the case. Mere words would not suffice, as one might shout, “I’ll kill you!” with neither felonious intent nor ability, and conversely an intention and ability to kill may be exhibited clearly without any words being uttered.
In the context of comparative law, Uwe Steinhoff controversially goes further to argue that self-defense ought to be lawful even if the attacker did not use his fists: “An attack need not involve physical force; rather, an attack is every threat of violation or actual violation of an interest that is protected by law (that is, of a right) insofar as this threat stems from human action.” Steinhoff distinguishes between an “attack” and “harm” as in his view one is still entitled to defend oneself against an attack without waiting to see the degree of harm, if any, that might result from the attack.
Imagine a scenario where a weak and puny man launches himself at a weightlifting champion with intention to cause harm, only for the attacker’s fists to bounce ineffectually off his victim (as happened once to Arnold Schwarzenegger). In Steinhoff’s view, the victim in this case, bigger and stronger than his attacker though he may be, would nevertheless have a right to defend himself with a reasonable degree of force.
The aim of mentioning these examples is not to comment on the current law, which is too heavily circumscribed by legislation and case law to permit brief summary. The aim here is instead to highlight some of the difficulties in ascertaining the boundaries of self-defense. Legislative rules are typically detailed and encompass numerous conditions and exceptions.
For example, in New York, “deadly physical force” generally cannot be used unless
“the actor reasonably believes that such other person [the attacker] is using or about to use deadly physical force. Even in such case, however, the actor may not use deadly physical force if he or she knows that with complete personal safety, to oneself and others he or she may avoid the necessity of so doing by retreating.”
That is easy to state, but in reality, how would one “know that with complete personal safety” violence can be avoided by retreating? In many circumstances where deadly force is used or threatened, there are no guarantees of “complete personal safety.” In Steinhoff’s example, it is rarely clear that there is no other way to save Snow White other than by taking out the evil queen: “Yet one is certainly allowed to tackle the evil queen with physical force in order to prevent her from giving the apple to Snow White if there is no other way to save Snow White.”
It is in practice often difficult (though not impossible) to show that there was no other way to avert the threat other than by use of deadly force, primarily because decisions must often be made in split seconds. The point here is that on a test of reasonableness, it would not suffice simply to say “there was no other way”—it would be necessary to show this to be in fact the case. It is one thing to understand clearly the meaning of self-defense and another to ascertain whether defensive action is justified on the facts of specific cases.
Natural Law and Natural Rights
From a natural law perspective, the right to self-defense is an element of the right to self-ownership. Self-defense entails the right to wield force in defense against any forceful invasion. As Murray Rothbard explains:
If every man has the absolute right to his justly-held property, it then follows that he has the right to keep that property—to defend it by violence against violent invasion . . . for if a man owns property and yet is denied the right to defend it against attack, then it is clear that a very important aspect of that ownership is being denied to him.
That is no more than a starting point, as it is still necessary to ascertain the scope of the right to self-defense. Rothbard asks:
How extensive is a man’s right of self-defense of person and property? The basic answer must be: up to the point at which he begins to infringe on the property rights of someone else. . . . It follows that defensive violence may only be used against an actual or directly threatened invasion of a person’s property—and may not be used against any nonviolent “harm” that may befall a person’s income or property value. (emphasis added)
It is by no means straightforward to decide what “directly threatened invasion” means in specific cases. In Rothbard’s example, where “someone approaches you on the street, whips out a gun, and demands your wallet,” the threat is clear. However, he notes that an invasion or threat of invasion need not be “actual physical aggression” but may include intimidation or even fraud, which is “implicit theft” and thus a threat against one’s property. Rothbard insists however that the threat must be direct, overt, and clear; it must be “palpable, immediate and direct,” not “vague and future.”
Rothbard cautions that “in the inevitable case of fuzzy or unclear actions, we must bend over backwards to require the threat of invasion to be direct and immediate . . . the burden of proof that the aggression has really begun must be on the person who employs defensive violence.” Thus, violence can only be deployed in response to violence: “It would clearly be grotesque and criminally invasive to shoot a man across the street because his angry look seemed to you to portend an invasion,” and the response to a violent threat must be proportionate: “The criminal, or invader, loses his own right to the extent that he has deprived another man of his.” To shoot dead a shoplifter, for example, would be disproportionate: “In fact, the storekeeper has become a far greater criminal than the thief, for he has killed or wounded his victim—a far graver invasion of another’s rights than the original shoplifting.”
It would indeed be grotesque to summarily execute people for shoplifting, but that assumes a simple case where it is clear that the invader is intent only on shoplifting. The case would be different in circumstances where it is impossible to distinguish between a mere shoplifter and an intruder whose intention, as far as can be ascertained under the circumstances, seems reasonably to be to cause grave bodily harm. For example, in the case of Tony Martin, the outcome turned on the fact that the burglars were in the process of fleeing when he shot at them:
Fearon, 29, and 16-year-old Fred had travelled from Newark in Nottinghamshire on the evening of 20 August to raid Bleak House, the semi-derelict farm building in Emneth Hungate, Norfolk . . . Upon hearing them, Martin came down from an upstairs bedroom and opened fire with a pump-action shotgun. Martin claimed to have been acting in self-defence; prosecutors argued he had anticipated the pair and lay in wait for them.
The case would have been different if he had shot them on entry rather than exit. After all, it may not have been clear to him whether the burglars’ intention was merely to burgle or to cause him bodily harm. He could in theory have called out to the intruders, “Halt and state your intentions!” in the manner of a soldier on patrol, but most criminals intent on causing harm are unlikely to yield peacefully to such an inquiry.
In the common law context, these issues are all components of reasonable force. Deadly force used in response to a threat that is neither direct nor immediate but is merely speculative or remote would not count as reasonable.
Peaceful Adjudication of Disputes
To avoid these difficulties, common law jurisdictions have long upheld a strong policy preference for the peaceful settlement of disputes and have constrained as far as possible the deployment of force. In Jacque v. Steenberg Homes, Inc. (1997), the supreme court of Wisconsin observed in a case of trespass that one reason why the state steps in to vindicate violations of property rights is to discourage people from resorting to “self-help” remedies. In this way, courts hope to discourage people from deploying force in defense of their own rights:
In McWilliams, the court recognized the importance of preventing the practice of dueling, by permitting juries to punish insult by exemplary damages. Although dueling is rarely a modern form of self-help, one can easily imagine a frustrated landowner taking the law into his or her own hands when faced with a brazen trespasser.
The policy goal is “the preservation of the peace” or “providing an incentive for plaintiffs to bring petty outrages into court” instead of resolving the dispute by rashly throwing down the gauntlet in a fit of temper. For example, the case in the Michigan Law Review cited earlier involved parents fighting over the aggravating behavior of their children:
On the morning of the murder, the defendants were passing Hallgarth’s premises when he hailed them and a heated conversation ensued over some difficulty about Gray’s children at school. Hallgarth leaping over the fence, but without weapons of any kind except his bare fists, advanced in a threatening manner upon Gray, who thereupon drew his pistol and warned him to desist.
The reasoning behind the legislative regulation of self-defense is to discourage people from leaping over fences and resorting to fisticuffs in disputes with their neighbors. Most jurisdictions also prohibit or strongly discourage self-help in property disputes, especially in the context of tenancies, in favor of calling the authorities to deal with any violation of the owner’s rights:
It would still be necessary to prohibit forms of self-help, such as padlocking, because of the foreseeable and, therefore, unnecessary one-on-one confrontation. . . . It does not take a mystic or a psychologist to see the possibilities for violence and conflict in these scenarios. A lockout attempt, whether done face to face or like a thief in the night when the occupant is away, can be a provocative act. “It is difficult to imagine a more volatile situation from which extreme violence could be reasonably anticipated than the surreptitious removal of a man’s home, whether it be a rented one or a mortgaged one.”
The question libertarians must nevertheless ask is whether the state is justified, in its attempt to keep the peace, in limiting the right to self-defense. Even if we stipulate that the state is a parasite and everything the state does is therefore inherently wrong, it would still be necessary to address the question of how peaceful interaction can be maintained in situations where human beings are wont to fly off the handle and take potshots at each other with or without weapons. Human nature being what it is, this problem would also arise for private defense agencies to which people in a libertarian society had voluntarily subscribed.
To avoid violent conflict in a dispute resolution, it is certainly a good idea to encourage peaceful adjudication. It is however important to reiterate that the right being vindicated through such adjudication is not the right to a fair trial but, according to Rothbard, the right to self-defense:
Presumably, a free market will tend to lead to most people choosing to defend themselves with those private institutions and protection agencies whose procedures will attract the most agreement from people in society. In short, people who will be willing to abide by their decisions as the most practical way of approximating the determination of who, in particular cases, are innocent and who are guilty. But these are matters of utilitarian discovery on the market as to the most efficient means of arriving at self-defense, and do not imply any such fallacious concepts as “procedural rights.”
Agreeing to resolve disputes through arbitration proceedings, for example, or any other institutional form of dispute resolution must therefore not be taken as a reason to undermine the right to self-defense. The right to self-defense rests in the person whose property right is violated and not in society or in the state. Thus, the individual also has a natural right to bear arms as an emanation of the right to self-ownership. As Rothbard explains: “Every man has the absolute right to bear arms—whether for self-defense or any other licit purpose.”
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Legacy media outlets and President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) neglected to mention that Sam Bankman-Fried was a top donor to Democrat-aligned causes in their releases on the disgraced cryptocurrency tycoon’s sentencing Thursday.
Bankman-Fried contributed more than $37 million overwhelmingly to support Democrat-aligned causes during the 2022 midterm election cycle, according to OpenSecrets. Yet the DOJ said he gave “millions of dollars of political contributions to candidates from both parties” while legacy media outlets largely did not provide details regarding the recipients of the donations. (RELATED: ‘He Directed Me To Commit These Crimes’: Alleged Fraudster’s Ex Blames Him At Trial)
CNBC and The Associated Press both published articles on the sentencing that cited the fact prosecutors said Bankman-Fried gave to both parties. The New York Times and The Washington Post each published articles mentioning the contributions without noting which party they went toward.
Bankman-Fried gave $27 million to Protect Our Future PAC and was its main backer in the 2022 midterm election cycle by far, according to OpenSecrets. The PAC spent $23 million to boost Democrats during the cycle.
The fraudster contributed $5 million to a Super PAC boosting Biden’s 2020 campaign called Future Forward USA, according to Federal Election Commission data. He also gave $50,000 to the Biden Victory Fund and $2,800 to the Biden campaign in October 2020.
Moreover, Bankman-Fried allegedly tasked FTX Director of Engineering Nishad Singh to make contributions to Democrats in his name for reasons relating to “optics,” the former executive testified, according to a trial transcript posted by Inner City Press.
A jury found Bankman-Fried guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy-related charges in November, with the New York probation department’s recommending a sentence of 100 years in prison, according to a February court filing requesting a more lenient sentence. Bankman-Fried’s lawyer had asked for a 60-78 month sentence, referencing his philanthropic ventures and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
Bankman-Fried “misappropriated and embezzled FTX customer deposits, and used billions of dollars in stolen funds for a variety of purposes, including … to help fund over a hundred million dollars in campaign contributions to Democrats and Republicans to seek to influence cryptocurrency regulation,” according to the DOJ’s August indictment against him.
The fraudster gave $10 million to a Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell-tied group called One Nation in August 2022, Puck News first reported and DOJ prosecutors confirmed. Former FTX executive Ryan Salame gave $23 million to mostly Republican candidates and groups during the midterm elections, according to OpenSecrets.
“SBF may serve as little as 12.5 years, if he gets all of the jailhouse credit available to him,” former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner told CNN Thursday.
The Post thanked the Daily Caller News Foundation for referencing its past reporting on Bankman-Fried’s political donations in an earlier article.
The DOJ, CNBC, the NYT, and the AP did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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Over the past 18 months, The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen and I have visited the border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. What we saw in all our travels was the same: President Joe Biden’sdeliberateabandonmentof every measure that has worked in the past to reduce incentives for illegal immigration, combined with diminished enforcement of immigration law in the interior, has attracted economic migrants from all over the globe.
People from over 180 countries who want to enter the U.S. but have no legal basis to do so know that the Biden administration will let them in and allow them to stay, so they come. It’s as simple as that.
Last week, we were in San Diego County, California. On the first day, we started about 60 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean at Jacumba Hot Springs, visiting spots along the border wall:
The next day, we went to a San Diego bus station to see busloads of illegal aliens being released after cursory processing by the Department of Homeland Security:
On our last day, we visited Otay Mesa and later walked a couple of miles down the sand from Imperial Beach to the spot where the border wall comes down alongside Tijuana, Mexico, into the ocean:
Nothing makes the value of physical barriers more obvious than the spot near Otay Mesa, where Biden stopped construction cold on the border wall when he took office, leaving a giant gap right across from the outskirts of Tijuana.
Pictured: Aerial view of the U.S.-Mexico border and Otay Mesa port of entry. (Photo: Local unnamed business)
The local landowners in Otay Mesa obligingly allowed the U.S. government under the Trump administration access to their land to build a wall, only to be left with a gap that creates a giant unlawful “pathway” into the United States that is used daily by illegal crossers under the Biden administration.
On a visit to the gap last week, we watched one man walk into America through it unimpeded. A small group had already crossed and was sitting in the shade of the wall, waiting for the Border Patrol to pick them up. Not only do they have zero fear of U.S. authority, but illegal crossers now are impatient to be apprehended so they can get released and head to their desired destination—usually a “sanctuary city” such as Boston, Denver, or New York.
Guessing several of this group were West African, I asked in French where they were from. “Mali,” a smiling man replied:
Although Mali has a number of active terrorist groups, chances are no one in this small group was a terrorist or had a serious criminal record. And if they had a criminal record in the U.S., they’d likely have evaded detection entirely as one of the 2 million or so “gotaways” who entered on Biden’s watch while Border Patrol was busy catching and releasing those who gave themselves up.
But we cannot know for sure. It’s a chance we’ll have to keep taking, because there is no way for DHS to verify the information given before it releases people by the thousands every day. Name, date of birth, country of origin, criminal history back home—that all is pretty much taken on trust, since few actually carry identification, and if they do, foreign documents can’t be quickly or easily verified by U.S. authorities.
Biden came to office promising to stop building the wall. That’s because Biden prioritizes illegal immigrant “rights” over U.S. national interests and enforcement of the law—and because border walls work and a completed wall could foil his priorities.
No barrier can keep out 100% of those attempting to enter illegally, but together with sensors and aerial surveillance, walls channel those attempting to enter illegally to spots where human agents can intercept them. With walls, measures to prevent asylum fraud, and meaningful efforts at law enforcement and deportation, a country can successfully defend its borders.
If walls didn’t work, then the Dominican Republic wouldn’t be building one along its 250-mile border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola.
The Dominicans are watching their feckless neighbor collapse for the umpteenth time and don’t think they should be forced to accept the fallout from a failed state. A wall with controlled entry points for legal workers and commerce will give the Dominicans control over their sovereignty and who they admit while Haiti turns “into another Somalia,” as Dominican President Luis Abinader told The Wall Street Journal recently.
In contrast, Biden has abandoned finishing the U.S. wall and allows basically free entry. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas wants “to be very clear: Our borders are not open.” Yet he admitted recently that over 85% of aliens caught entering illegally at the border are released. A door that opens 8.5 of every 10 times you push on it can hardly be called “closed.”
On our California visit, we saw small groups of people from multiple countries camped out near Jacumba Hot Springs, waiting for the Border Patrol to pick them up and process them for release. We drove back and forth across dirt roads looking for spots where the wall ended at rocks or hills and left gaps through which people had passed, leaving mounds of trash in their wake. Once, we came across Border Patrol vehicles and a group of a hundred or so illegal immigrants they had just “caught” crossing the border.
What happens to them and the thousands of other people the Border Patrol picks up every day?
Those released at the border usually get a “Notice to Appear” in immigration court—in a few months or sometimes much longer—to defend themselves in deportation proceedings. At that point, many have achieved everything they wanted already by being allowed into the U.S., so they don’t bother to show up for their court dates.
If they do show up and claim asylum to avoid being deported, many abandon the process when it gets inconvenient. For those who go all the way through the process, a majority are denied asylum, because they aren’t being persecuted back home and are simply here looking for work (which is not a valid reason for receiving asylum). But then, at the conclusion of a long and expensive process, they stand little chance of actually being deported by a demoralized, defanged, activist-led Department of Homeland Security.
The Biden administration says its “strategy [is] to combine expanded lawful pathways with stronger consequences to reduce irregular migration.” Mayorkas claims that “people who cross our border unlawfully and without a legal basis to remain will be promptly processed and removed.” No one believes this.
Certainly not the people we saw last week in San Diego from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who came here via several other safe countries. They were well aware they could bypass the legal U.S. immigration system, get into the country anyway, and stay.
As White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said after the State of the Union address, “Biden believes in treating everyone humanely” and in “not demonizing immigrants.” No one has a problem with that. The problem is that the Biden administration makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. To it, they are all welcome “migrants,” or “newcomers.”
In the San Diego border sector, we asked some Border Patrol agents how morale was. These are men and women who signed up to protect their country. They know what their job should be: deterring and arresting people who enter the U.S. without permission and intercepting drugs and the people who smuggle them. But since Biden and Mayorkas took over their agency, that’s not what they do anymore. They are relegated to working for a glorified social services agency at best, or the world’s most efficient alien-smuggling cartel at worst.
“I hate going to work every day,” one young Border Patrol officer told us. The view from the border is of a country that is losing self-respect. A country unwilling to enforce its own laws will descend gradually into anarchy, a state that will eventually attract few willing to defend it.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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It’s almost a certainty that he wasn’t asked penetrating questions when he spoke the party line about diversity.
Two news stories on March 27 exposed what is wrong at the University of Arizona (UA), and, by extension, the Tucson metropolis.
The first was a story in the Arizona Daily Star about a presentation by Fouad Abd-El-Khalick to 75 staffers of UA and to 300 others who watched via Zoom. Who’s he? He is a candidate being considered for the position of provost at the university.
The second was a story in the Wall Street Journal about a South Korean company announcing plans to build a $4 billion advanced microchip plant in the small town of West Lafayette, Indiana, which is the home of Purdue University. The chips are targeted for the burgeoning industry of artificial intelligence. Like UA, Purdue is a land grant university.
Abd-El-Khalick’s presentation was replete with de rigueur and pro forma platitudes, sophistries, and banalities about his commitment to diversity, the disadvantaged, and the larger Tucson community. He knew his audience.
No doubt, he didn’t get one question on why a $4 billion chip plant is going to be built in West Lafayette and not Tucson.
The reason is that Purdue has world-class and world-renown engineering programs in microelectronics and semiconductors. Purdue has also benefited tremendously from the outstanding leadership of recently retired university president Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana.
For sure, Abd-El-Khalick wasn’t asked the following question: What would help minorities, the disadvantaged, and the larger Tucson community more: a) hollow, unoriginal rhetoric about diversity; or b) a $4 billion chip plant?
Abd-El-Khalick seemed to suggest that he is the embodiment of diversity, although his skin shade is not any darker than mine. And with a PhD in science education, he certainly isn’t disadvantaged.
Given that I had a long career at the vanguard of equal rights and equal opportunity, I have additional questions for Abd-El-Khalick:
Dear Mr. Abd-Ell-Khalick:
The following questions are not intended to be glib or provocative. They’re being asked because it’s important for a candidate espousing diversity to be clear about the meaning of the word and to be explicit about the admissions criteria he would establish at the university.
You’re from Lebanon. Does that make you a White person or a racial minority for purposes of diversity, equity, and inclusion?
If that makes you a racial minority, why so?
Israel is to the south of Lebanon. Are Jews minorities for purposes of DEI? Why or why not?
How about Armenians?
At one time, Lebanon was an example of a successful multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial society. It no longer is. Why did diversity stop working well there?
Mexican Americans account for approximately 40 percent of the population of the City of Tucson. Italian Americans account for approximately five percent. Are both groups considered minorities?
If Mexicans are considered to be both minorities and disadvantaged for DEI purposes but Italians are not, why are they seen differently?
Is it because Italians as a group have more income and wealth than Mexicans as a group? How would you know that? Wouldn’t it be fairer (and legal) to consider an individual’s income and wealth instead of the income and wealth of the person’s assigned group identity?
By the way, are you aware that of the 38 million Americans in poverty, 16.7 million of them are non-Hispanic Whites?
You seem to be saying that the University of Arizona should give special consideration to certain identity groups. That implies that the university has been discriminating against qualified applicants from these groups and needs to take remedial actions. Has the university engaged in discrimination?
These questions show why I’m not qualified to be a university provost or professor.
TAKE ACTION
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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The Great Climate Change Revolution is headed for failure. You can tell that because it is already in big trouble before the ultimate heavy lifting has even started.
International accords, (i.e. Paris Agreement) passed with great fanfare to ensure cooperation on emissions reductions, are ignored by most of the signers, notably China. Consumers worldwide are balking at increased energy prices. Unsold EVs are piling up.
All this resistance is occurring well before the full rollout of the regulations and restrictions needed to achieve zero net carbon emissions by 2050, the agreed-upon goal of climate activists worldwide.
It may not seem at first glance like the climate change movement is struggling. After all, mainstream dogma still holds that man-made warming has us careening toward disaster, possibly an uninhabitable planet. The only solution is to “just stop oil” along with coal and gas.
As John Kerry explains, there is no alternative. Biden’s proposals have nothing to do with politics nor ideology. “It’s entirely a reaction to the science, to the mathematics and physics that explain what is happening”.
It was no surprise, then, when Biden officials recently rolled out new CO2 emissions requirements, maintaining the same endpoint by 2032. The only way for auto makers to comply would be for gas-powered cars to comprise only 30% of new car sales.
But there’s a telling detail. The 2030 requirements have been relaxed, which means that they’re still going to put the squeeze on to force more EV sales, just not right now. But what’s going to change to make regulations more palatable in 2032 then in 2030? There’s no evidence that the demand for EVs will be greater or that consumers will be more interested in purchasing them.
EVs were envisioned as the cutting edge of the “zero by fifty” campaign. If we could replace the outmoded, smoke-belching anachronisms on the roads with sleek new vehicles lacking tailpipe emissions, the new atmospheric standards would be a piece of cake.
But there are problems. Consumers aren’t wild about EVs. After years of the feds promoting them and subsidizing them in every way thinkable, they still account for just 8% of new car sales.
They are still too expensive, refueling can be difficult and they have poor resale value. Moreover, the giant batteries are a disposal nightmare. EVs increase soot pollution. Depending on the fuel source used to produce the electricity, they may produce no net carbon reduction anyway!
Auto makers for now are slashing prices on the mandated EVs and making up for it with profits from gas-powered cars. Ford alone lost $4.7 billion last year on EV production, a whopping $64,000 per EV sold.
Yet the Biden administration soldiers on, insisting EVs can capture 70% of all sales within eight years. Hint: they can’t. Look for other accommodations to reality to be made. Meanwhile they are doing a lot of economic damage, for no possible benefit.
Americans are less caught up in climate panic than ever. Surveys revealed that of all the issues in this year‘s election, voters rank climate change 10th in importance. “We’re number 10” may not make an inspiring campaign slogan, but the massive media, academic, and governmental infrastructure dedicated to its promotion means the climate change industry won’t disappear anytime soon.
As Swedish economist Björn Lomborg points out, climate change is a problem but only one of several mankind must grapple with. Meta-analysis of all scientific estimates shows climate change costs will likely average one percent of GDP across the century, a figure sure to be dwarfed by anticipated economic growth. Meanwhile, the proposed solutions insisted upon by the panic advocates will average $27 trillion annually, or seven times more than the problem itself.
Costs aside, we lead better lives because of fossil fuels. Abundant energy has more than doubled lifespans, dramatically reduced hunger and increased personal income tenfold. Climate-related deaths from droughts, storms, floods, and fires have declined an astonishing 97% over the last century.
The worst thing we could do is to drive ourselves into poverty by “following the (false) science“. We need to stay economically and technically strong to be able to accommodate change as needed. Human beings do that, you know.
*****
Thomas C. Patterson, MD is a retired Emergency Medicine physician, Arizona state Senator and Arizona Senate Majority Leader in the ’90s. He is a former Chairman, Goldwater Institute.
TAKE ACTION
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-04-01 02:28:002024-04-01 02:28:00The Panic Over Climate Change Is Not Catching On
Republicans are walking a tightrope heading into the 2024 election.
They must show their base that they are fighting hard on the issue of election integrity, which many conservatives believe cost former President Donald Trump his 2020 re-election bid.
Simultaneously, they must operate in the reality that they now live in the world of ballot harvesting and drop-boxes.
That dichotomy is why the Republican National Committee (RNC) told the Daily Caller they are committed to prioritizing election integrity efforts between now and November. They are waging lawsuits on issues ranging from ballot access to voting rules. Yet the party is also heavily pushing its “Bank Your Vote” initiative, encouraging Republicans to vote early.
Other elements of the party seem more resigned to playing by Democrats’ rules rather than trying to change them. The Caller also reached out to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), which the RNC said is helping bankroll the party’s legal fights.
After sending the Daily Caller a link to an Axios article about get out the vote efforts, and then ignoring multiple follow-up requests for an interview about election integrity, NRCC spokesperson Will Reinert sent the Caller the following: “We’ve complained about your coverage several times to editors, so to tell you the truth, we really don’t care to engage on pieces we don’t care about to help you guys out.”
A prominent conservative pundit read the Reinert email and told the Daily Caller, “‘pieces we don’t care about’ is the giveaway. They’re mailing it in on election prep, in other words.”
Election integrity is, however, an issue Republican voters care deeply about: coming out of the last presidential election, nearly two-thirds of Republicans and Trump voters said they had little faith votes were counted accurately, according to one poll.
In 2020, a number of election laws were changed, and others were straight up ignored, in key states due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona, voters had expanded access to methods of voting including ballot drop-boxes, mail-in voting and early voting thanks to Democratic Party legal efforts led by Marc Elias. (RELATED: Key Swing State Election Laws Under Fire Over Voter Integrity Provisions)
Elias is a high-powered attorney who has played a leading role in hundreds of lawsuits seeking to make it easier to vote and undo Republican efforts to make elections more secure.
A Daily Caller review of current election laws found that the situation on the ground remains dire for election integrity hawks. A number of key battleground states, including those that delivered Biden the presidency, are still slated to use many of the election procedures in 2024 that outraged Republicans in 2020.
At least seven are slated to deploy ballot drop-boxes. Nearly all are likely to have no-excuse absentee voting. Five are on track to have more than two weeks of early voting, and Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina will mail out absentee ballots more than six weeks before election day.
“As we’ve talked about, the damage done by Democrats to change laws during COVID was unprecedented. There’s still a lot of work to do, not everything is where we want to be right now. But that’s why we’re scaling up this massive program and filing all this litigation because we’re actively trying to fix it up,” an RNC official told the Daily Caller. “We understand that there are still issues, especially in swing states with key stuff we need to fix. That’s why this exists.”
There is still time for some of these laws to change before election day, but the clock is ticking for Republicans to make inroads toward changing them.
After media outlets began calling the election for President Joe Biden in 2020, Republicans across the spectrum of the party concluded that those changes to how America votes played at least some role in his loss. Certain conservatives will tell you it was the single biggest factor in President Joe Biden’s victory.
With eight months to go, Republicans are mobilizing operatives across the country and spending millions of dollars to avoid a lawfare wipeout akin to what they suffered in 2020 — but the climb is uphill, and progress has been marginal.
“I have no idea what the Republicans are doing. But I can tell you what we did in 2020 when we were watching the Republicans stay on the sidelines,” Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True The Vote, told the Daily Caller.
The Daily Caller began its investigation into Republicans’ election integrity efforts at the beginning of 2024, conducting an interview with members of the RNC’s election integrity staff in the beginning of February.
Since the interview, new leadership has taken over at the RNC and the Trump campaign has merged with the organization and made several staff shakeups.
National Review reported that the election integrity department had been a part of widespread layoffs that saw dozens of RNC staffers cast aside. However, an RNC official with direct knowledge told the Caller that reports the election integrity staff were asked to re-apply for their jobs was false. A source with the Trump campaign confirmed the same reality, stating that the staffers had not been let go.
Christina Bobb, a former Trump administration staffer who went on to be Trump’s attorney and a One America News Network anchor, has been appointed as the RNC’s election integrity senior counsel, a source told the Daily Caller. The Trump campaign source said the previous election integrity staff at the RNC would be sitting down with Bobb in the future.
When it comes to election integrity, the RNC and its partners are working, but they are playing catch up to Democrats’ nearly 40-year head start. The RNC was subjected to a consent decree in 1982 after a Democratic National Committee (DNC) lawsuit, neutering the party’s ability to engage in election integrity lawsuits until the decree was lifted in 2018.
The DNC sued the RNC in the 1980s, alleging that the party had sought to discourage African-Americans from voting through targeted mailings warning about penalties for violating election laws. The consent decree largely limited how the RNC could participate in election lawsuits.
“Early voting and GOTV effort is like the Space Race or the Arms Race of the Cold War. We defeated the Russians essentially by spending them into oblivion,” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, told the Daily Caller. “The Democrats are spending us into oblivion. They are miles ahead. They’ve already landed on the moon a few times and we haven’t even gotten the ship off the ground.”
The RNC told the Daily Caller that the party first dove into the election integrity sphere in 2022. It was the first time the RNC had the opportunity to work with other campaign committees, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the NRCC. The effort was “loose,” a member of the RNC’s election integrity department told the Daily Caller.
The party did not offer clarification on the timeline of its election integrity efforts prior to 2022 after the Daily Caller followed up.
Following the 2022 election, then-RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel moved to make the RNC’s election integrity efforts an actual department of the party. That allowed the operation to pull resources from all departments such as communications, politics and legal.
Now, in addition to its legal department, the RNC has three election integrity counsels based at its headquarters and 13 election integrity counsels in key states including Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia,Michigan, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“These counsels work around the clock to identify and act on opportunities for election integrity litigation, in addition to coordinating with local law firms and stakeholders in their respective states,” Josh Helton, an RNC election integrity official, told the Daily Caller.
By the end of February, the RNC told the Daily Caller that it planned to have deputy election integrity directors in each of the 13 states where it has an election integrity counsel. Regional directors will also join the election integrity effort to oversee a specific geographic territory and oversee how the party liaised with stakeholders in the area.
In addition to the legal counsels, the RNC has “boots on the ground” as a part of their “recruitment training and shifting of poll workers and poll watchers.”
“These are folks that are going to be in those in those polling locations and they’re going to be our eyes and ears on the ground. That will be reporting back to our our election day headquarters, which happens all during early voting and Election Day,” Helton told the Daily Caller.
“Where we have volunteer and paid attorneys they are going to be taking in those calls triaging the information that comes in and taking the appropriate action,” Helton continued.
With 79 election integrity lawsuits filed in 23 states ahead of the 2024 election, the RNC told the Daily Caller that it has plans to reach at least 100. The party is also in “constant contact” with all 56 Republican state and territory parties to collaborate on election integrity litigation — even transferring money to them as needed, the RNC told the Daily Caller.
“The RNC from what I’ve seen, is an intervener you know, it’s liberal groups that file these lawsuits. In some some of these cases, the RNC is intervening to try to help defend the state statute. That’s basically what’s going on all across the country,” Hans Von Spakovsky, the manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, told the Daily Caller. Von Spakovsky added that he thought the state of election integrity was in a better position than 2020, and does not expect a repeat of 2024.
Others disagreed.
“From what I have seen and what I haven’t, we definitely are,” conservative attorney and pundit Kurt Schlicter said about whether he thought the GOP would end up in a similar situation to 2020.
“And I would love to be wrong. I hear ‘we’ve filed 78 lawsuits’ that’s like saying if I’m a commander, ‘oh I’ve fired 78 shells,’” Schlicter added.
“They should be getting insurance. They should be filing lawsuits, and getting injunctions in place to make sure that all the state legislatures, election rules are being followed strictly. And that they’re not being waived because of COVID or Chinese flu or Chinese pneumonia or whatever the next bullshit pandemic is going to be,” Mike Davis, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and founder of the Article 3 Project, told the Daily Caller.
“You need to get injunctions early so the Democrats can’t change the rules at the last minute. If they change the rules, they’ll be in contempt of court,” Davis continued.
Count Marc Elias himself among those who are skeptical of Republican efforts. For years, dating back to 2009, Elias was the lawyer for the Democratic party. Elias is most prominently known for his work during the 2020 presidential election cycle, when he spearheaded the Democratic Party’s efforts to expand voting access and loosen election integrity provisions.
“It seems nearly certain that Republicans at all levels will continue to file frivolous post-election lawsuits and will suffer similar results in 2024,” Elias wrote in a recent report.
Ahead of the election, Elias has begun to track his own and other “pro-voting” suits. Over the last year, Elias and other “pro-voting” lawsuits saw 83 victories for voters across 26 states, according to his report.
According to Elias’ report, Republican and their election integrity forces prevailed a mere 20% of the time in 2022 and 27% of the time in 2023. The same report noted that there were 51 “pro-voting” lawsuits in 2023 to just 22 election integrity lawsuits.
Despite the improvement, Elias has predicted that Republicans will once again watch the rug be pulled out from underneath them and suffer the same fate as 2020.
For their part, the RNC dismissed Elias’ claims that 2024 will be a repeat of 2020.
The Daily Caller provided the RNC with the same report and cited specific stats from it, asking for a response to Elias’ data which portrays Republicans as behind in its legal fight. The RNC dismissed Elias’ report and concerns entirely.
“We don’t put much stock into how Elias tracks lawsuits,” an RNC spokesperson told the Daily Caller.
Results have been mixed so far for the RNC — the organization sent the Caller a list of 17 “selected litigation wins” from 2022 until now. Some were significant, such as protecting New Hampshire’s voter ID requirement or banning expanded ballot harvesting in Arizona. In Florida, the RNC strengthened Florida’s voter ID requirements.
But others were cases still in progress, or only resulted in marginal changes unlikely to significantly affect the election.
There are notable instances were Republican lawfare has failed. In 2020, ballot curing was a key issue in Pennsylvania. The state secretary of state’s office issued guidance right before election day telling counties they could inform voters of improperly filled out absentee ballots, allowing them to turn in a provisional ballot on election day to ensure they got counted.
But a number of Republican-leaning counties ignored this guidance, believing it to be a violation of state law. The Trump campaign sued after the election to discount the cured ballots from Democratic-leaning counties, but lost at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, 7-0.
Republicans, including the RNC, have since sued again to overturn the ballot curing rules. But those efforts culminated last year with a state judge dismissing the RNC’s lawsuit, leaving in place the patchwork set of ballot curing policies from county to county.
The RNC’s election integrity blitz has also seemingly left party allies, as well as most voters, in the dark.
“The first thing I look for is a chain of command. I’m just a military guy. Who is the person whose lapels I grab, look in the eye and say, what is going on? And there isn’t one, to my knowledge,” Schlicter said. “I don’t see the kind of coordinated planned operation that I would look for that would memorialize best practices.”
McDaniel sat down at the end of February with the head of the RNC’s election integrity project for her podcast “Real America.”
The RNC’s Election Integrity Twitter account tweeted out a clip of the podcast to its less than 2,000 followers. The pair talked about the GOP’s efforts to make elections “FAST – Fair, Accurate, Secure, and Transparent” ahead of November.
By the party’s own measures of success, the interview was a failure — because hardly anyone actually saw it. Just over 12,000 people viewed the video where McDaniel touted their efforts to recruit poll watchers, use volunteer lawyers and the building of a war room.
Just 37 social media users liked the tweet. The podcast currently has 1,200 views on YouTube. Comments are turned off on the video.
“When I go and speak to folks around the country, a lot of folks after I do my presentation, they said ‘we didn’t know the RNC was doing all that. We had no idea.’ If people don’t know, if the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, like if people don’t know how hard the RNC and the NRSC and NRCC are fighting to secure these elections, we’re not gonna accomplish one of our primary goals, which is to restore that faith and confidence in the electoral process,” Helton said. (RELATED: Daily Caller Columnist Mary Rooke Explains Why ‘Rigged’ Is Essential To Voters Understanding Elections)
The RNC isn’t working alone. It’s partnering with the NRCC and the NRSC to equally fund the election integrity operation.
After the NRCC ignored multiple interview requests from the Caller to talk about this issue, the Caller told Reinert his initial one-sentence response with an Axios link was some of the “laziest shit [I’d] ever seen,” prompting Reinert’s reply that the organization doesn’t care about this election integrity story.
Jack Pandol, NRCC communications director, followed up with the Daily Caller about the interaction with Reinert, telling the outlet that the parties were making a historic committee investment, funding the RNC’s election integrity program and “getting better at it than the Democrats.”
Pandol added that the NRCC’s legal teams are in regular communication with the RNC and NRSC as they work “jointly on the project.”
During the NRCC’s brief interaction with the Daily Caller, Pandol noted that the party’s legal team was in regular communication with the RNC. Despite the frequent conversation, however, the NRCC was unable to explain which election integrity organizations have been in communication with the RNC to work on litigation ahead of the election.
“I have no idea what local groups have or haven’t heard from the RNC, I’m not a spokesman for them so I’d suggest you talk to them about it,” Pandol told the Daily Caller.
The NRSC, the other arm of Republicans election integrity effort, painted a more candid picture about the party’s coordination with other election integrity focused groups.
“We’re getting our ass kicked in that realm. Excuse my language but like, the Dems have the Arabella, that whole network. They have so much more money than us. You haven’t seen an equivalent on our side,” a member of the NRSC election integrity effort told the Caller.
“RITE has been involved somewhat. You see a funding discrepancy across the board, not just with legal right-wing. They have more money than we do. That’s kind of the problem,” they added.
Outside of the official party apparatus, independent organizations focused on election integrity are bustling.
Some, such as Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), have had the opportunity to work hand-in-hand with the RNC in a battle for election integrity.
“The main thing that we see is, first of all, wherever Marc Elias has been active and running, everywhere he is, the ecosystem of the election integrity world is there to meet him and confront him,” Derek Lyons, the president of RITE, told the Daily Caller. Because of how the election integrity ecosystem has confronted Elias, Lyons told the Daily Caller that the democratic lawyer has not had much success.
It is evident from dozens of operatives working on election integrity within the Republican sphere that there is no Marc Elias of the right. The effort appears more balkanized than that of the Democrats, for better or worse.
RITE is currently involved in 17 states such as Colorado, Ohio, Montana, Kansas and Florida where the organization is working to protect drop box safe guards, mail-in ballot rules, signature matching, voter identification and ballot harvesting rules, the organization told the Daily Caller.
In New York, Georgia, Arizona and Vermont, the group is going “on offense” and trying to enact laws around citizenship requirements, no-excuse absentee voting, invalid signature matching and double voting.
Other election integrity organizations are non-partisan, which prohibits them from working with political organizations such as the RNC. But for the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), the group finds its non-partisan nature more beneficial than if it was to work with the GOP.
“When Republicans file cases, they run into a buzzsaw,” J. Christian Adams, the president of PILF, told the Daily Caller.
“To go on offense, you really needed to do it last year. And instead of suing on behalf of Republicans, we’re suing on behalf of a county election official who has to accept the ballots,” he continued.
“You see the difference? Because if you bring a case under the brand Republican versus I’m just this poor schlub, who has to make a decision, the courts are more likely to rule in favor of the poor schlub than they are in favor of a Republican Party,” Adams added.
But within what the RNC described as a “robust” ecosystem, some groups have felt abandoned. True the Vote, one of the many nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations working within the election integrity sphere, noted that they had no clue what the GOP was doing legally ahead of the election.
“We just won a huge legal victory in Georgia against Stacey Abrams. That’s a great example of a place that the RNC or NRCC or so many that claim that they’re supportive of election integrity, could have made some kind of an overture. We fought that alone for three years and I think speaks to the distance,” Engelbrecht told the Daily Caller. (RELATED: Stacey Abrams’ Nonprofit Implodes After Shelling Out Millions In Failed Election Fights)
“They’re going to do what they’re going to do. We’re here on the ground, seeing things fall apart and knowing that action needs to be taken and we just are assuming that we’ll do what we can and pray that others join in the fight,” she continued.
The RNC noted to the Daily Caller that the party never heard from True the Vote regarding any possible assistance in its legal battle.
“One thing you want to avoid is doing duplicative work. So if like there’s one group, that is you know, deep in the trenches on specific Georgia litigation, maybe that frees us up to get really into a court battle in Arizona, so on and so forth,” the RNC told the Daily Caller, adding that the party has to be very careful with how it works with and communicates with nonprofits.
True the Vote later told the Daily Caller that they cannot reach out to the RNC because of their nonpartisan nature, but expressed optimism that the party would engage in their litigation in the future.
“True the Vote is very happy to hear about the RNC’s election integrity efforts. Must be a stealth campaign,” Engelbrecht hit back.
The landscape could shift with former President Donald Trumpsecuring the GOP nomination for 2024 and integrating his campaign with the RNC.
“Securing our elections is a top priority,” Chris LaCivita, a Trump campaign senior adviser told the Daily Caller in a statement. “Across the country, we will be aggressive in addressing issues related to the way elections are conducted because we must restore the integrity of the election process and Republican voters’ trust in the system. Otherwise, we risk losing future elections and losing our country.
With the new leadership in place, some organizations previously snubbed out of partnership have already seen improvement. Turning Point Action, a 501(c)4 partner of Turning Point USA, is one of those groups that has felt an increase of optimism as it has begun its “Chase the Vote” effort.
“Before with the old leadership, we heard nothing. There was no willingness or coordination to work with us.” Kolvet told the Caller. “With the new leadership we are very hopeful. We are very optimistic, there is a new vibe.”
Still, no centralized agenda seems to exist. And in the meantime, some Republicans are focused not on overturning Democrats’ election rules, but simply beating them at their own game.
To some degree, that includes the RNC itself, which is putting major juice behind its “Bank Your Vote” initiative encouraging conservatives to vote early in 2024.
Turning Point Action’s “Chase the Vote” initiative focuses on getting in touch with voters who have received mail-in ballots and encouraging them to fill it out and cast their vote. The initiative currently focuses on Arizona and Wisconsin where the organization plans to hire hundreds of full-time staffers devoted to the effort, Kolvet told the Daily Caller.
“Our ultimate goal is, I don’t think that we’re looking to set a blanket regime of election laws across the country. I don’t think that that’s realistic. We as conservatives and Republicans have a very strong belief that elections are to be left to the states to make up their minds on how to run those,” Helton said.
Regardless, time remains, and the parties leading the effort are remaining optimistic about their chances.
“You asked the question, are we in this position where we’re going to be told it’s too late to challenge things, like again in 2020. Hopefully not,” Lyons told the Daily Caller.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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Winning requires first acknowledging past and existing problems.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is reportedly asking prospective employees what they think about the 2020 election — as they should.
Citing unnamed sources, The Washington Post reported that job applicants at the RNC have been asked about whether they believe the 2020 election was “stolen,” although the Post acknowledged the questions were “open-ended.”
The Post tried to spin the story as the RNC “demanding fealty” to former President Donald Trump, using the words of President Joe Biden’s rapid response director. But beating Democrats — who showed in 2020 that they are willing to ignore the rule of law in order to change how elections are fundamentally run, to their advantage — starts by acknowledging what happened in 2020.
“Potential staffers who worked on the front line in battleground states or are currently in states where fraud allegations have been prevalent were asked about their work experience,” RNC and Trump spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said in a statement to The Federalist. “We want experienced staff with meaningful views on how elections are won and lost and real experience-based opinions about what happens in the trenches.”
For one, unelected officials usurped the authority of the legislature to unilaterally change election laws and fundamentally alter the electoral process.
Then-Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar serves as a prime example, having bucked not only the legislature but guidance from the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court declined to expedite Pennsylvania Republicans’ challenge to a state supreme court order that permitted ballots that were postmarked by Election Day but received during the three days following Election Day — and also ballots lacking a postmark but received during the same period — to be counted, based on the understanding that Boockvar would segregate ballots received during the three day extension.
Republicans argued the state supreme court’s decision violated state law that stipulates ballots must arrive by Election Day. Any move to extend the deadline for accepting ballots, they contended, should belong to lawmakers.
Boockvar initially issued guidance on Oct. 28 ordering all ballots received after Election Day be kept separate in the event the high court ruled the ballot extension unconstitutional. Justice Samuel Alito noted that guidance the same day, in a statement on the court’s decision not to take the case. But just days before the election, Boockvar issued updated guidance ordering the segregated late ballots be counted “as soon as possible upon receipt of the ballots.”
Boockvar was later rebuked by a state court for additional guidance she put out that allowed voters missing proof of identification to “cure” their mail-in ballots until Nov. 12, nine days after the election. Trump’s campaign and the RNC argued Boockvar lacked the authority to change the law and only the legislature had power to legislate election changes.
“[T]he Court concludes that Respondent Kathy Boockvar, in her official capacity as Secretary of the Commonwealth, lacked statutory authority to issue the November 1, 2020, guidance to Respondents County Boards of Elections insofar as that guidance purported to change the deadline … for certain electors to verify proof of identification,” Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt wrote.
Other battleground states had issues that undoubtedly affected the election, such as Georgia, which saw Democrats sneak in a major change to mail-in voting months before Election Day. As part of an agreement with the Georgia Democratic Party, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, state election officials agreed to permit “ballot curing.”
Ballot curing allows voters whose ballots were rejected a chance to “cure” or correct the issue on their absentee ballot so that it can be counted. But as The Federalist’s John Davidson pointed out, there was a less-publicized provision of the agreement that had consequences for the election. Prior to the agreement, the signature on an absentee ballot had to match the signature in Georgia’s voter registration database. Ballots were rejected if the signatures did not match.
But the new agreement made sure that an absentee ballot signature simply had to match the signature on the absentee ballot application. This means if someone filled out an application fraudulently, that same person could then sign the ballot itself and both signatures would match.
Or take a state like Wisconsin, where two years after Trump lost by roughly 20,000 votes, the state Supreme Court ruled unelected officials did not have authority to usurp the legislature the way it did when it issued guidance permitting the use of ballot drop boxes in direct contradiction of state law. Milwaukee, like other left-leaning cities in the state, had more than a dozen of these illegal drop boxes. President Joe Biden beat Trump by more than 100,000 votes in the city.
Unlawful changes to election laws were only one of the ways the 2020 election was rigged — or “fortified,” as leftists would say. From Big Tech censorship of conservative speech and bombshell news (like the Hunter Biden laptop story), to media interference, to the infiltration of election offices by private donors via “Zuckbucks,” the 2020 election was rife with alarming issues that Republicans would be foolish not to learn from.
“Allowing just one of these attacks to infect our electoral system would be a crisis,” Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingwaytoldthe House Administration Committee last month. “Allowing all of them at the same time is an existential threat to our system of self-government.”
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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Since Donald Trump’s rise within Republican ranks, conservatives have divided into two competing foreign policy camps. One contends that Trump’s approach suits the world in which we live and supersedes previous GOP national security and foreign affairs outlooks. A smaller contingent contends that Ronald Reagan’s understanding of America and his conduct of diplomacy remain the gold standard for U.S. foreign policy.
Atlantic Council colleagues Matthew Kroenig (also a Georgetown professor of government and international relations) and Dan Negrea contend that considerably more agreement about foreign affairs prevails among conservatives than they themselves realize. When fleshed out, a Trump-Reagan fusion represents, they persuasively maintain in their new book, “the foreign policy synthesis around which the Republican Party can coalesce.”
Taking their title from Ronald Reagan’s succinct 1977 statement of his stance toward the Cold War, Kroenig and Negrea argue in “We Win, They Lose: Republican Foreign Policy and the New Cold War” (the acknowledgements thank me although I contributed at most encouragement), that the United States has been thrust into the New Cold War by the People’s Republic of China. Trump administration veterans – Kroenig in the Defense Department and Negrea in the State Department – the authors maintain that Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy rightly recognized that America had already entered an era of great-power competition with Russia as well as with China.
Notwithstanding “real divisions within the party,” argue Kroenig and Negrea, recognition of “[t]he existential threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” provides conservatives “a central, unifying theme.” By combining Reagan’s characteristic “commitment to individual liberty, free markets, and a strong national defense” with Trump’s emphasis “on the interests of all Americans and confronting countries, such as China, whose economic policies harm American interests,” Kroenig and Negrea contend, conservatives can fashion a strategy for winning the New Cold War.
The authors start from the basics. Foreign policy, they argue, stems from fundamental views about human beings, political life, and the world. Following the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, Kroenig and Negrea state that conservatives typically see the world as dangerous, respect tradition, recognize religion as an essential social bond, appreciate that political communities inevitably contain a hierarchical dimension, and grasp that peoples and nations tend to regard their shared values and beliefs as superior to those of others.
Progressives place the emphasis elsewhere. They focus on opportunities for collaboration across communities, nations, and civilizations. They often believe that science and reason should liberate individuals from backward tradition and benighted faith. They seek to level hierarchies at home and abroad while stressing the equal worth of all peoples’ and nations’ values (with the exception, among woke progressives, of America’s and the West’s characteristic principles, which they deem inferior to the rest).
These divergent ideas about individuals, society, and international relations produce different opinions about the goal and conduct of foreign affairs. For most conservatives – true of both Reagan and Trump – U.S. foreign policy’s primary purpose is to secure American freedom and prosperity. Conservatives see international conflict as rooted in competing interests and clashing goals. Accordingly, they believe that hard power plays an ineliminable role in world affairs. While appreciating that international institutions can serve the nation’s interests, conservatives prefer U.S. global leadership because they think that America’s dedication to individual freedom and equality under law distinguishes it from other peoples and nations.
In contrast, the progressive outlook organizes foreign policy around the betterment of humanity. Progressives typically see conflict among nations as springing from misunderstandings. Hence, they downplay the need for hard power, even as a last resort, and often suppose that all major differences among nations can be overcome through dialogue, diplomacy, transnational courts, and international organizations. Assuming that America is no better than any other country and worse than many, progressives frequently favor the transfer of authority from sovereign nation-states, including the United States, to multilateral institutions and the United Nations…..
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-29 02:30:002024-03-29 02:30:00Trump-Reagan Fusion Can Win the New Cold War
Not so long ago, commentators across the political spectrum were warning us that China’s economy was set to surpass America’s. The United States needed, one Senator claimed, “a 21st -century pro-American industrial policy,” to ward off this existential threat.
Such rhetoric was reminiscent of the late-1980s, when a slew of books appeared to warn Americans that, unless the United States adopted Japanese-like industrial policy (government intervention that shifts resources toward a particular sector or industry), it was doomed to be economically dwarfed by a country which America had militarily crushed four decades earlier.
Yet in 1990, Japan’s economy began entering its “Lost Decade” of stagnation. While that owed much to seriously flawed monetary policy, it also resulted from extensive government interventions into the Japanese economy via industrial policy: a point conceded by no less than Japan’s finance ministry in 2002.
Similar patterns may be manifesting themselves in China today. The shine is definitely off China’s economy, and many of Beijing’s economic dilemmas have resulted from the Communist regime’s dirigiste policies.
The biggest time-bomb confronting Beijing is its self-inflicted demographic disaster. Thanks to the one-child policy pursued between 1980 and 2016, China now faces all the complications associated with an upside-down demographic pyramid, in which an increasingly elderly population is supported by a shrinking pool of younger people.
That means ever-accelerating spending on pensions, welfare, and healthcare which will steadily crowd out investment in things like research and development, infrastructure, and defense. No wonder Beijing is now urging families to have three children. The trouble is that once demographic patterns are set in place, they are hard to shift. Consequently, as the foreign policy scholar Ryan Hass notes, China is now “at risk of growing old before it grows rich.”
Dismal demographics aren’t the only challenge with which China must grapple. The country is reaping the whirlwind of conscious decisions on Beijing’s part over the past 15 years to embrace more state-centric economic policies.
Take, for instance, China’s much-touted Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI). Since 2013, Beijing has sought to systematically promote and invest in infrastructure projects around the world, particularly in countries China considers geopolitically significant.
From its beginning, however, BRI has been characterized by runaway costs: so much so that, as early as 2015, state-run Chinese banks started reducing their exposure to BRI while Chinese commercial banks began trying to avoid it altogether. There is also evidence that BRI has long been marred by corruption on the part of those Chinese officials responsible for directing it.
Such problems, however, are to be expected when the government plays a heavy-handed role in directing investment — a process which steadily accelerated in China after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. This has produced widespread misallocations of capital across the economy as a result of state-controlled banks lending to inefficient and zombie state enterprises.
Chinese state officials have even acknowledged that Beijing wasted at least $6 trillion on unsuccessful investments between 2009 and 2014. That makes it unsurprising that the IMF’s 2021 Article IV Consultation report on China concluded that Chinese state-owned businesses were, on average, only eighty percent as productive as private companies. This, the IMF report stated, had played a significant part in China’s ongoing productivity decline since the late-2000s.
A related problem is China’s aggressive use of industrial policy, especially since the early-2010s, in the form of subsidies, direct state investments, and cheap loans. The goal has been to try to bolster growth in sectors like advanced manufacturing, technology, the service sector, infrastructure, and agriculture.
Naturally if you throw enough money at any given economic sector, you will get some results. But Scott Lincicome and Huan Zhu’s extensive analysis of industrial policy in China shows massive failures in areas like semiconductors, 3G mobile technologies, domestic aircraft, and automotive manufacturing. The same policies have also contributed to growing corruption in many economic sectors, including China’s highly subsidized R&D sector.
These and other trends are making foreign investors nervous. This brings us to yet another problem facing China’s economic policymakers.
Inbound foreign direct investment in China has been falling now for two straight years. It is now at its lowest level since 1993. This development reflects a complex relationship, from trade tensions to unease about Beijing’s intentions vis-à-vis Taiwan.
Decreasing confidence among foreign business leaders about China’s future economic prospects also underlies this foreign investment downturn. The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China’s 2023 Business Confidence Survey, for instance, reported “a significant deterioration of business sentiment.” More specifically, “64 percent of respondents reported that doing business in China became more difficult in the past year, the highest on record;” “11 percent of respondents have shifted existing investments out of China;” “8 percent have taken the decision to move future investments previously planned for China elsewhere;” and “one in ten report they have already shifted, or plan to shift, their Asia headquarters (HQ) or business unit HQ out of Mainland China.”
“Uncertainties in China’s policy environment,” according to the Survey, were central to this deteriorating confidence. Foreign businesses are anxious about growing ambiguity concerning what Beijing will allow foreign businesses to do in China. This uncertainty has surely been exacerbated by the fact that China’s National Bureau of Statistics is becoming progressively more selective about what economic data it releases, and regularly delays the release of other relevant data. In August 2023, China simply stopped releasing information about its youth unemployment rate.
Do these trends indicate that China is about to lapse into Japanese-style 1990s stagnation? It is far too early to tell. They do, however, indicate that American policymakers — whether their focus is national security or trade — should recalibrate their approach to Beijing and avoid getting locked into a narrative which assumes that China is an unstoppable economic colossus. Put simply, the evidence suggests that it is not.
*****
This article was published by AIER, and is reproduced with permission.
TAKE ACTION
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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Mark your calendar for April 17th for an important discussion of lawfare.
Davos in the Desert and David Wanetick have an amazing event on April 17. It is called “Lawfare: The Woke’s War Against Lawyers Representing Republicans” and the venue will be in Ahwatukee, AZ.
The two featured speakers will be John Eastman and Rachel Alexander.
The Left has been aggressively seeking to systematically strip Republicans of legal counsel. The threat of not being able to find counsel to represent them when subjected to lawfare results in the paralysis of Republican candidates. Thus, woke politicians, judges and lawyers are undermining democracy by removing Republican candidates from the landscape.
Lawyers brave enough to defend Republican plaintiffs face sanctions (heavy financial fines), reputational damage and disbarment. Judges are targets of intimidation by woke rioters. To wit, the US Marshals Service data reveals that serious threats against federal judges, which trigger investigations, rose to 457 in fiscal year 2023 from 224 in fiscal 2021. Further:
For more than 120 days during the summer of 2020, ANTIFA and other woke warriors targeted the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, triggering the arrest of more than 900 progressive activists.
Nine lawyers, some of whom may have had connections with Donald Trump, were ordered to pay Detroit and Michigan a total of $175,000 in sanctions for challenging the 2020 election results. The Arizona Supreme Court imposed sanctions on lawyers representing Republican Kari Lake for challenging defeat in the governor’s race. Separately, Republican leaders in Arizona, including the state’s GOP chair Kristina Karamo, and their attorneys were ordered to pay nearly $60,000 in sanctions over an election lawsuit.
Left-wing ideologue David Brock launched a “dark money” effort called 65 Project to disbar, publicly shame, and impoverish more than 100 lawyers who participated in filing post-election legal challenges to the 2020 presidential election results.
The 65 Project sought to disbar sitting United States Senator Ted Cruz for his views on the 2020 elections.
Rudy Giuliani’s law license was suspended in New York and Washington DC. A U.S. Bankruptcy judge declared that Mr. Guliani’s bankruptcy would not relieve him of paying an egregious $148 million verdict against him for defamation.
One of President Trump’s lawyers during his impeachment trials, Michael van der Veen, had his house attacked and received multiple death threats. Another one of Trump’s lawyers had to take his family into hiding because his home was vandalized. The windows were broken and he says that he received close to 100 death threats.
Don’t miss this unique opportunity to listen to leading authorities speak about Lawfare on April 17 in Ahwatukee.Register here.
TAKE ACTION
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
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Biggest Price Drops from 2022 Peak: San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Phoenix, Dallas, Las Vegas
20-City Index drops for 3rd month in a row, forming Double Top. Only Washington DC sets a new all-time high.
The home price index for the 20 metros that the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index covers declined by 0.1% from the prior month, the third month in a row of declines. Year-over-year, the index was up 6.6%.
Year-over-year, wait a minute… today’s “January” 2024 reading is three months off the October 2023 peak, while January 2023 was seven months off the June 2022 peak. Year-over-year comparisons are meaningful when the index is very seasonal, and comparisons match the high in the current year to the high in the prior year, and the low in the current year to the low in the prior year. But this is not the case here. The highs are in different seasons (June v. October), because they were caused by factors other than the slight (if any) seasonality of the Case-Shiller index.
So the year-over-year change (+6.6%) compares today’s “January” reading which is three months off the October peak to January 2023 which was seven months off the June peak and was the bottom of a non-seasonal trough. For that same reason, the year-over-year changes will diminish over the next few months.
Today’s S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index for “January” is a three-month moving average of home prices whose sales were entered into public records in November, December, and January. The fact that it is a three-month moving average irons out some of the seasonality.
The index uses the “sales-pairs method,” comparing the sales price of the same house over time, thereby eliminating the issues – including seasonality due to the seasonal change in mix – associated with median prices (see “Methodology” toward the end of the article).
The long view of the 20-Cities Index shows the mind-blowing surge over the past few years; and it shows a bizarre non-seasonal double top that has never occurred in the history of the index, with the first top in June 2022 and the second top in October 2023.
You can also see that there is little seasonality in the index going back over 20 years:
To qualify for the Most Splendid Housing Bubbles, the metro must have experienced home-price inflation since 2000 of at least 180%. The indices were set at 100 for the year 2000. Today’s index value for Miami, which we’ll get to in a moment, of 429 is up 329% since 2000, making Miami the most splendid housing bubble on this list.
Home-Price Inflation. By measuring how many dollars it takes to buy the same house over time via the “sales pairs” method, the Case-Shiller index is a measure of home-price inflation. So Miami had 329% home price inflation since 2000. By comparison, consumer price inflation, as measured by CPI, was 83% over the same period.
Prices were below their 2022 peaks in 9 metros of the 20 metros in the Case-Shiller index (% from their respective peak in 2022, month of peak):
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-28 02:30:002024-03-28 02:30:00The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America (March 2024 Update)
Rather than asking why NBC decided to hire McDaniel, we should ask why McDaniel wanted to join such an obviously corrupted institution.
The recent announcement that former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel will join NBC News as a contributor has brought much controversy, much of it misplaced. Rather than asking why NBC News decided to hire McDaniel — the question the corporate media hyperventilated about over the weekend and into Monday — people should instead ask why McDaniel wanted to join such an obviously corrupted institution.
The media outrage demonstrates that Romney will get no respect or plaudits from the mainstream elite. So why do she and others sign contracts at places like NBC, and allow themselves to get played by a media that just wants a few “token” conservatives on the air to disguise their cultural Marxism?
Racist Quotas and Woke Bias
Just over a year ago, I wrote that the RNC should decline to have the major networks participate in the party’s debates for presidential candidates, because of their woke, and likely unconstitutional, “diversity” metrics that categorize employees by gender and skin color. Among that group, NBC News seems particularly objectionable, given that Chairman Cesar Conde publicly called for a quota of making half of the division’s employees nonwhite and half female.
Of course, these same media executives looking to check every racial, ethnic, and gender box care little about their employees’ political bias, which NBC and othermediainstitutions somehow “forgot” to include in their diversity reports. Instead of making an effort to hire conservatives, or at minimum ideological centrists, at every level of the organization — reporters, editors, producers, directors, and the like — the networks just pick off a few prominent conservative personalities to put on camera, and trot them out to make their overwhelmingly leftist organizations appear more “balanced.”
It’s a trick that raises echoes of half a century ago, when some corporate boards made mere token attempts to hire women or African Americans. The question is why the commentators in question seem so desperate for cash, attention, or “mainstream” credibility that they continue to engage in this charade.
Selective Outrage
The level of amnesia on display by NBC anchor Chuck Todd in criticizing the hiring of McDaniel amazes and astounds.Todd, who himself started out interning for a Democrat, then-Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, somehow “forgot” all the former politcos who moved into broadcast media. (Politico’s media columnist helpfully compiled a list.) Several of them, including his late NBC colleague Tim Russert and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, migrated to the news side of television after having served for Democrats, as opposed to McDaniel, who will appear as a political commentator rather than in a journalism role.
Did Todd express outrage at any of these moves? For that matter, did he say a word when NBC News hired the sitting White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, to her current post as an MSNBC anchor?
Speaking of Psaki and her former gig, Todd on Sunday accused McDaniel of “gaslighting” the public during her tenure as RNC Chair. But as I noted two years ago, Psaki waved around a binder supposedly of Covid spending requests, claimed to the press that “we’ll make copies for you,” and then refused to make copies for the one reporter who asked for the information, instead giving the reporter a single hour to review nearly 400 pages of documents in a conference room.
Did Todd call out this gaslighting by Psaki — either then, or now? For that matter, has he criticized his colleague Kristen Welker, Todd’s successor as host of “Meet the Press,” and a White House correspondent at the time of Psaki’s remarks, for Welker’s own incompetence, as she failed to follow up and call out Psaki’s false claims?
And when it comes to “gaslighting,” has NBC News ever provided a public explanation as to why it retracted elements of a story about the attack on Paul Pelosi, other than the generic statement that “the piece should not have aired because it did not meet NBC News reporting standards?” If Todd wants to attack “gaslighting,” shouldn’t he demand that his own employer provide more accountability to their audience about what exactly caused the errors in this story?
Corrupt Corporate Press
I also don’t recall hearing Welker, Todd, or any of the other well-compensated NBC News hosts complaining about how the network recently terminated several journalists, or offering to give up some of their salaries so that NBC could hire and/or retain more reporters. Isn’t it funny how all these anchors’ supposed principles about “saving democracy” and the vital work of the press run hollow when it could jeopardize their own beaucoup bucks?
In that sense, perhaps Romney, who will reportedly make nearly $300,000 a year on her new contract, is made for an institution like NBC. She apparently is willing to play the media game to “make coin” and stay relevant, just like the self-righteousness of Todd and Welker dare not extend to criticizing anything that could jeopardize their cushy jobs. If not exactly a match made in heaven, these characters seem made for each other in a corrupt and craven town like Washington, D.C.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-03-28 02:28:002024-03-28 02:28:00The Real Ronna McDaniel Controversy: Why Does The Former RNC Chair Want To Join Corrupt Corporate Media?
