People Are Questioning? It’s About Time thumbnail

People Are Questioning? It’s About Time

By Mark Oshinskie

During the luncheon following a recent family funeral, people reminisced about my Uncle Bob, whom I never met. Bob, trained to translate Russian, was shot out of the sky while flying at 20,000 feet in a 17-person Air Force plane over Soviet Armenia on September 2, 1958. He was not yet 23.

For over a decade after the shootdown, Bob was classified as MIA. There were unconfirmed rumors that Armenians on the ground had seen a few of his plane’s crew parachuting from the burning, nosediving C-130. Six bodies were promptly sent home. Neither Bob’s nor the ten others’ were.

My family made many efforts to learn of Bob’s status after he was shot down. My grandmother—Bob’s mother—was given an audience with JFK during the 1960 Presidential campaign. A photo of that meeting was prominently displayed in her small, steep hillside rowhouse in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town. But The Cold War precluded any serious diplomatic pressure or disclosure.

When Boris Yeltsin became Soviet President in 1991, he declassified and shared records of the incident in which my uncle was killed, as well as records for 16 other spy plane shootdowns over Soviet airspace spanning from 1953-1971. I have an envelope with 8 x 10 inch black and white photos of the impact of the MiG-launched missile hitting Bob’s crew’s plane at 3:07 in the afternoon, as well as translated transcripts of the MiG pilots’ dialogue. I also received photos of his shattered aircraft smoldering on the barren, rocky ground and of dismembered, uniformed limbs there. Eventually, a book was published about Bob’s flight and others like it. In 1994, US News and World Report ran a cover story on these flights. So did ABC’s 20/20.

In 2011, an Air Force official showed up at my father’s New Jersey door and handed him his brother’s high school ring. A resident of the village where the plane crashed found the ring, presumably on Bob’s hand, and kept it for over fifty years before handing it over to authorities who, in turn, passed it to my father.

During the repast, family elders said they had, when Bob was in the Air Force, suspected that he’d been flying spy missions. Of course, the military didn’t admit this, either before or after the shootdown. The official line was that his plane had inadvertently flown off course, “perhaps lured by some Soviet beacon.”

But during a 1997 memorial service for my uncle’s crew at NSA Headquarters, I met former airmen who had done missions like, and during the same period, as my uncle. Some had even flown with him; the crews were, to some extent, interchangeable. They laughed off the mistake/beacon excuse. They said they knew exactly where they were at all times. They were ordered to deliberately enter Soviet airspace to see how alert the Russians were, to photograph Soviet facilities and to eavesdrop on Russian radio communications.

The Soviets were alert enough to shoot down seventeen planes. And sleepy enough not to shoot down multiple planes that crossed borders during other missions, such that the guys on those flights could come home, live to advanced ages and tell me that my uncle was good to have on your side in bar fights.

At the end of the discussion about the family’s uncertainty about the dangerous nature of Bob’s work, one of my cousins said, “Well, people didn’t question things back then. Now everyone questions everything.”

I’ve actively disagreed with many people at many times regarding pandemic policies. But on this occasion, I opted not to. The luncheon was winding down and, out of respect for the immediate family of the person just buried, and because I would have been seen as bringing up a new topic, I uncharacteristically laid down my arms and didn’t call out that false premise as it pertained to the Scamdemic.

Given the past 40 months, the notion that people today question everything couldn’t be more wrong. Americans not only failed to question the government and media regarding “Covid “mitigation,” but they angrily demanded that others also obey edicts that made no sense. There was so much that didn’t withstand even the most basic scrutiny. 

Many Americans have spent much of the past three years in a state of full-on Coronavirus groupthink and compliance. Instead, those who feared SARS-CoV-2 should have asked themselves such simple questions as:

What’s “novel” about this virus?

When in human history have healthy people been quarantined?

How will locking down and closing schools, parks, and gyms make a virus vanish?

How many hospitals are being overrun by Covid patients?

Don’t the videos of those Chinese guys dying in the streets seem fake?

If masks work, why do mask wearers insist that others use them?

If masks work, why lock down anything?

Who do I know who’s been killed by this virus?

Weren’t they already very old and/or sick?

How many people die on any given day?

What percentage of those infected with “the virus” survive?

If many people test positive but show no symptoms, how reliable are the Covid tests?

Won’t lockdowns and school closures cause tremendous harm?

Isn’t it odd that this crisis is happening during an election year?

And later:

Why has the two-week “Shelter in Place” order turned into many months of closures?

Why don’t reporters ask Fauci or other bureaucrats any hard questions?

Why doesn’t the media interview those who oppose lockdowns, masks, and “vaxxes?”

Why do the most locked down, masked-up states have the highest Covid death rates?

Why did American public schools stay closed for 18 months when kids were at no risk?

Why should those with a 99.9 percent infection survival rate inject experimental substances?

How do we know that the scarcely-tested Covid vaxxes won’t cause long-term harm?

If the shots work, why do injectees care if other people don’t inject?

Why are so many vaxxed people getting sick and dying?

These questions, and others, should have occurred to anyone who could tie his own shoes. Although latter-day Americans see themselves as much more sophisticated than their 1950s counterparts, most 2020-22 Americans weren’t insightful enough to ask questions that even malt shop-going bobbysoxers and Wally Cleaver would have asked. Gee, Beave…

By buying into Coronamania, those who thought of themselves as astute and worldly-wise exhibited severe deficits of judgment and of self-awareness.

*****

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

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Weekend Read: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order thumbnail

Weekend Read: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order

By Christopher F. Rufo

Critical race theory was never designed to reveal truth—it was designed to achieve power.

The American Mind is pleased to present this excerpt from the new book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything by Christopher F. Rufo. Copyright © 2023 by Christopher F. Rufo. Reprinted by permission of Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

The ambition of the critical race theorists and their confederates in “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is not simply to achieve cultural hegemony over the bureaucracy, but to use this power to reshape the structures of American society. But in the miasma of mystical reasoning and therapeutic language, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the critical question: What specifically do they want?

The answer is to be found in the original literature of critical race theory which, before its transformation into the euphemisms of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” was remarkably candid about the discipline’s political objectives. They had abandoned the Marxist-Leninist vocabulary of their precursors, such as Angela Davis and the Black Panther Party, but the critical race theorists imagined a revolution that struck just as deeply. They cobbled together a strategy of revolt against the Constitution, using the mechanisms of institutional power to change the words, meanings, and interpretations that provide the foundation of the existing order.

“The Constitution is merely a piece of paper in the face of the monopoly on violence and capital possessed by those who intend to keep things just the way they are,” said legal theorist Mari Matsuda. Tearing it down was not a transgression; it was a moral obligation. When necessary, Matsuda argued, the critical race theorists could appeal to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution to advance their interests, but ultimately, they believed, “rights are whatever people in power say they are.” The point was not to uphold the principles of the Constitution, but to wield them as a weapon for securing authority.

In place of the existing interpretation, the critical race theorists proposed a three-part overhaul of the American system of governance: abandoning the “colorblind” notion of equality, redistributing wealth along racial lines, and restricting speech that is deemed “hateful.”

To begin, the critical race theorists made the case that “color-blind constitutionalism” functions as a “racial ideology” that “fosters white racial domination” and advances an implicit form of “cultural genocide.” The system of individual rights and equal protection, they argued, provided an illusion of equality that failed to address the history of racial injustice. The way stations of “multiculturalism,” “tolerance,” and “diversity” were inadequate substitutions for “legitimate governmental efforts to address white racial privilege.” To rectify this deficiency, the critical race theorists proposed a new interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that moves from a system of negative rights—or, protection against state intrusion—to a system of positive rights, or an entitlement to state action.

As Derrick Bell explained, the remedy for the limitations of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had failed to achieve substantive racial equality, was to “broaden the Constitution’s protections to include economic rights” and an “entitlement to basic needs—jobs, housing, food, health care, education, and security—as essential property rights of all individuals.” In practice, the implementation of this view would require a system of affirmative action, racial quotas, reparations, and group-based rights. The Constitution would thus become “color-conscious” and the state would treat individuals differently according to race, deliberately reducing privileges for whites and securing privileges for minorities. “The only substantive meaning of the equal protection clause,” explained Mari Matsuda, “mandates the disestablishment of the ideology of racism.”

There is no bottom to this line of thinking. For critical race theorists, the word “racism” included everything from explicit discrimination to unconscious bias to unequal outcomes of any kind. And, as Bell insisted, it had an eternal, indestructible power over American society. As a consequence, the critical race theorists abandoned the hope of racial integration and equality under the law, which was deemed naïve, and would replace it with a permanent machine of racial reasoning and reapportionment.

At the abstract level, this would mean foreclosing the promise of the Declaration, the Emancipation, and the Fourteenth Amendment. At the practical level, it would mean permanently categorizing, ranking, sorting, rewarding, and punishing individuals on the basis of identity, rather than character, merit, or individual accomplishment. For the critical race theorists, the question was how, not if, racism has occurred, and any alternate explanations for disparities, such as family, culture, and behavior, were dismissed as rationalizations for white supremacy.

How could this system of white supremacy be corrected? First and foremost, through the equalization of material wealth through racial redistribution.

The key justification for this policy came from UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris, who wrote an influential Harvard Law Review paper called “Whiteness as Property,” which was celebrated by Derrick Bell and republished as one of the founding texts in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. In the essay, Harris argued that property rights, enshrined in the Constitution, were in actuality a form of white supremacy and must be subverted in order to achieve racial equality.

“The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination. Even in the early years of the country, it was not the concept of race alone that operated to oppress blacks and Indians; rather, it was the interaction between conceptions of race and property that played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination,” Harris wrote. “Only white possession and occupation of land was validated and therefore privileged as a basis for property rights. These distinct forms of exploitation each contributed in varying ways to the construction of whiteness as property.”

Harris thus established the emotionally loaded premise—whiteness and property are inseparable from slavery—that she then projected onto modern society. “Whiteness, initially constructed as a form of racial identity, evolved into a form of property, historically and presently acknowledged and protected in American law,” she wrote. But this had been mystified by the racial ideology of the Constitution. “Although the existing state of inequitable distribution is the product of institutionalized white supremacy and economic exploitation, it is seen by whites as part of the natural order of things that cannot legitimately be disturbed. Through legal doctrine, the expectation of continued privilege based on white domination was reified; whiteness as property was reaffirmed.”

Harris, however, believed that this system was not inevitable and, through the process of demystification, could be overthrown. She argued that the basic conceptual vocabulary of the constitutional system—“‘rights,’ ‘equality,’ ‘property,’ ‘neutrality,’ and ‘power’”—are mere illusions used to maintain the white-dominated racial hierarchy. In reality, Harris contended, “rights mean shields from interference; equality means formal equality; property means the settled expectations that are to be protected; neutrality means the existing distribution, which is natural; and, power is the mechanism for guarding all of this.”

The solution for Harris was to replace the system of property rights and equal protection, which she described as “mere non-discrimination,” with a system of positive discrimination tasked with “redistributing power and resources in order to rectify inequities and to achieve real equality.” To achieve this goal, she advocated large-scale land and wealth redistribution, inspired in part by the African decolonial model. Harris envisioned a temporary suspension of existing property rights, followed by a governmental campaign to “address directly the distribution of property and power” through property confiscation and race-based reapportionment.

“Property rights will then be respected,” Harris noted, “but they will not be absolute and will be considered against a societal requirement of affirmative action.”

In Harris’s formulation, if rights were a mechanism of white supremacy, they must be curtailed; if property was “racialized property,” it was the legitimate subject for racialist reconquest. And the state is justified in pursuing a regime of “affirmative action,” which Harris defined broadly as “equalizing treatment,” including South Africa–style wealth seizures, which, she said, were “required on both moral and legal grounds to de- legitimate the property interest in whiteness—to dismantle the actual and expected privilege that has attended ‘white’ skin since the founding of the country.”

The next question facing the critical race theorists was more practical: How would this proposed system of group-based rights and racialist redistribution be enforced? The answer was clear: through the regulation of “harmful” speech.

In a book titled Words That Wound, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Crenshaw laid out the case for dramatically restricting the First Amendment in order to suppress individuals and institutions that represent the forces that would “advance the structure and ideology of white supremacy.”

The foundation of their argument was that speech can be a form of violence and, as such, must be restricted by the state in a similar manner. “This is a book about assaultive speech, about words that are used as weapons to ambush, terrorize, wound, humiliate, and degrade,” they write in the book’s opening paragraph. As with private property and colorblind equality, critical race theorists proposed that the First Amendment was not designed to protect individual speech but to cynically enable “racist hate speech” and protect the system of white supremacy.

Freedom of expression, they argued, does not serve citizens equally; in fact, it is both a means and a mask for the subordination of minorities. When the state permits harmful speech, which ranges from subconscious racial messaging to explicit racist polemics, it threatens the physical and psychological safety of racial minorities. “We are not safe when these violent words are among us,” Matsuda wrote. “Victims of vicious hate propaganda experience physiological symptoms and emotional distress ranging from fear in the gut to rapid pulse rate and difficulty in breathing, nightmares, post-traumatic stress disorder, hypertension, psychosis, and suicide. Patricia Williams has called the blow of racist messages ‘spirit murder’ in recognition of the psychic destruction victims experience.”

In order to adjudicate guilt, critical race theorists argued that the concept of “harmful speech” must be interpreted through the lens of intersectionality, with the victim-perpetrator distinction offering a rubric for culpability. The writers of Words That Wound was explicit in their argument that whites, and whites only, had the capability of committing speech violence.

The racist language used by minorities against whites, such as Malcolm X’s famous tirades against the “white devil,” would be exempted from restrictions. “Some would find this troublesome, arguing that any attack on any person’s ethnicity is harmful,” Matsuda argued. “In the case of the white devil, there is harm and hurt, but it is of a different degree. Because the attack is not tied to the perpetuation of racist vertical relationships, it is not the paradigm’s worst example of hate propaganda. The dominant-group member hurt by conflict with the angry nationalist is more likely to have access to a safe harbor of exclusive dominant-group interactions. Retreat and reaffirmation of personhood are more easily attained for members of groups not historically subjugated.”

In addition to racial speech, critical race theorists would also regulate political speech. Under their ideal regime, Marxist speech would be protected by the First Amendment; “racist,” “fascist,” and “harmful” speech would not.

In practice, the critical race theorists would institute a system of speech codes, behavior regulation, bias detection, and reshaping of the subconscious in order to produce a predetermined outcome of “anti-racist” speech, behavior, and culture. The justification, following the example of Cheryl Harris’s treatment of private property, was that speech power must be redistributed in order to dismantle the institutions and ideologies that prop up the racist system. Speech that embodies “whiteness” must be suppressed; speech that embodies “blackness” must be supported. The content of speech, beginning with “unconscious racism” and ending with the “fighting words” of racial threats, must be reordered and redirected toward the substantive goal of overturning the existing system.

Taken together, the three pillars of the critical race theorists’ ideal system of governance—the replacement of individual rights with group rights, the race-based redistribution of wealth, the suppression of speech based on a racial and political calculus—constitute a change in political regime.

Under the ideology of the critical race theory, the meaning of the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the protection of private property would be demolished. The result would be a form of tyranny: the state would not only control the distribution of material resources, as in a collectivist economic regime, but would also extend its domain over individual psychology, speech, expression, and behavior. These twin goals— material and nonmaterial reapportionment—would be achieved through the heavy hand of the state, which would be granted unprecedented intrusion into public and private life.

As the ideologists and bureaucrats of critical race theory entrenched themselves in the institutions, they worked to turn these concepts into policy. They believed their ideas were ready to see the light of day.

The rise of the DEI regime is no longer an academic exercise.

In recent years, left-wing bureaucracies have proposed and enacted a range of policies predicated on the logic of critical race theory. For example, during the coronavirus pandemic, some states created a race-conscious formula for distributing vaccinations that would deny treatment to whites in order to achieve “racial equity.” On the West Coast, some cities have created income transfer programs exclusively for racial and sexual minorities. In government, some agencies have started to mandate separate employee training programs for “whites” and “people of color” so that whites can “accept responsibility for their own racism” and minorities can insulate themselves from “any potential harming [that] might arise from a cross-racial conversation.” Some public schools have followed suit, segregating students by race for field trips and extracurricular activities, which are, according to school officials, designed to “create a space of belonging,” which, they say, without a hint of irony, is “about uniting us, not dividing us.”

At the federal level, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced an “Anti-Racism in Public Health Act” that seeks to use the theory of “intersectionality” to direct resources to favored racial-political factions and to embed the monocausal “racial disparities” doctrine into every appendage of the federal government. Likewise, on his first day in office, President Joseph Biden issued an executive order seeking to nationalize the approach of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “embed equity principles, policies, and approaches across the Federal Government.” In business, every Fortune 100 corporation in America has submitted to the ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

This is only the beginning. This movement seeks to establish itself in every layer of the public and private administration, which will be refitted to advance the substitute morality of critical race theory and replace governance by the Constitution with governance by the bureaucracy. The strategy is not to amend the Constitution through the democratic process— which, the critical race theorists concede, would be an impossibility—but to subvert it through a thousand administrative cuts. Their gambit is to normalize the regime of group-based rights, active discrimination, speech suppression, and racialist redistribution of resources through small administrative decisions, which can, over time, legitimize broader policies.

The critical race theorists’ ultimate ambition is to establish these principles as state orthodoxy from the top down. In an essay for Politico Magazine, Boston University professor and bestselling popularizer of critical race theory Ibram Kendi unveiled his proposal for an “anti-racist amendment” to the Constitution. “The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials,” Kendi explained. “It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Antiracism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for clearing all local, state, and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigating private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitoring public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

In other words, the scope and power of the new “Department of Antiracism” would be nearly unlimited. In effect, it would become a fourth branch of government, unaccountable to voters, that would have the authority to veto, nullify, or suspend any law in any jurisdiction in the United States. It would mean an end to the system of federalism and to the lawmaking authority of Congress. Furthermore, under the power to “investigate private racist policies” and wield authority over “racist ideas,” the new agency would have unprecedented control over the work of lawmakers, as well as auxiliary policymaking institutions such as think tanks, research centers, universities, and political parties.

Although Kendi’s proposal is framed as an amendment to the American constitutional order, it is better described as an end to the constitutional order. In the name of racial justice, the critical race theorists and their fellow travelers would limit, curtail, or abolish the rights to property, equal protection, due process, federalism, speech, and the separation of powers. They would also replace the system of checks and balances with an “anti-racist” bureaucracy with nearly unlimited state power—and every other institution would be forced to fall in line.

If critical race theory should succeed as a system of government, it is easy to imagine the future: an omnipotent bureaucracy that manages transfer payments between racial castes, enforces always-shifting speech and behavior codes through bureaucratic rule, and replaces the slogan of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” with the deadening euphemism of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

This is not yet the regime in America, but unless there is a reversal within the institutions, the slow, hulking machine of critical race ideology will continue to accumulate power and marginalize democratic opposition. Once the public has been sufficiently alienated from the Constitution of 1789— when its heroes have been destroyed and its memories severed from their origins—the Constitution will finally become “merely a piece of paper,” a palimpsest to be written over in pursuit of the “total rupture” with the past. It will become, in the words of Derrick Bell, nothing but “roach powder” used to suffocate and destroy American liberty.

The triumph of the new ideological regime would mean the end of a society oriented, however imperfectly, toward the eternal principles, and the installation of the society of racial score-settling and bureaucratic leveling, abandoning the individual to his fate.

*****

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

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Arizona News: July 29, 2023 thumbnail

Arizona News: July 29, 2023

By The Editors

The Prickly Pear will provide current, linked articles about Arizona consistent with our Mission Statement to ‘inform, educate and advocate’. We are an Arizona based website and believe this information should be available to all of our statewide readers.

Poll finds Hobbs Has Second Lowest Approval Rating In US

Hobbs Finds Way To Stem Exodus Of Californians To Arizona

Mayes Accused Of Spreading ESA “Propaganda,” Scaring Parents Again

Horne Challenges Mayes’ Chilling ESA Message To Parents

Justice Bolick Swears-In Senator Bolick

Arizona’s Plan to Become Semiconductor Leader Stalls Due to Lack of Skilled Workers

Majority of Heat Deaths in Maricopa County Due to Meth

Phoenix Wants To Eliminate Parking Spaces In Another Ridiculous Push To Become A 15-Minute City

Water Conservation Has Taxpayers Paying More For Less In Cities Across The State

How Arizona’s Veteran Population Compares to Other States

Arizona-California stateline tops nation for biggest gas price difference

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‘We Have Goals’: West Point Head Dodges Question About Race-Based Goals For Academy Student Makeup thumbnail

‘We Have Goals’: West Point Head Dodges Question About Race-Based Goals For Academy Student Makeup

By Micaela Burrow

The superintendent for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point defended racial admissions goals while denying that the academy has quotas for race or gender at a hearing Wednesday.

Indiana Rep. Jim Banks pressed Lt. Gen. Steven Gilland on the difference between a “quota” and a “preference” in admissions at a hearing on diversity, standards and freedom of thought at military academies, but the Army service academy superintendent did not answer the question. Instead, he defended the academy’s diversity goals after Banks revealed a West Point report describing “race-based composition goals” that Republicans have described as divisive and distracting from warfighting priorities.

“What’s the difference between a preference and a quota?” Banks asked. (RELATED: DeSantis Reveals Plan Aimed At Gutting Diversity Efforts And Promoting Accountability In The Military)

“We don’t have quotas,” Gilland said. “We have goals to meet as I stated with regards to leader goals, categories of young men and women as regards to background,” as well as goals for the composition of scholars, leaders and athletes, he said.

The House Armed Services Committee organized the hearing on the heels of a Supreme Court decision overturning race-based admissions at universities that did not address military service academies.

Leaders at West Point, the Naval Academy and Air Force Academy said they were still assessing the legal implications of the ruling. They declined to explain how, if at all, policies would change if the court expressly applied the decision to military service academies.

Banks presented a chart from a 2017 report to the academy’s Board of Visitors describing in detail the composition goals for classes up to the class of 2020, including goals related to racial categories black, Hispanic and Asian.

We have class composition goals. If we don’t meet them, we don’t meet them,” Gilland told Banks. He confirmed that West Point has not abandoned the practice, setting composition goals for the most recent incoming class graduating in 2027.

“Those goals are established on the basis of the composition of our officer corps. We would like our graduating classes to look similar to the officer corps,” he said.

Charles Q. Brown, Biden’s nominee for Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, told Congress this month he set demographic accessions goals based on the general population of the United States.

However, this may not always have been the case, according to a copy of the document obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The percentage goals of African-American accessions increased over time. In 2015, USMA targeted a class comprising of 12% to 15% African-American and achieved a class that was 10.7% African-American. By 2019, the proportion of admitted African-Americans hit a high of 15.1% but slumped again to 13.8% in 2020, despite a stated goal of greater than 14% African-Americans for each year.

Goals for Asian and Hispanic students were set at or below their respective share of the U.S. population for each year, and the percentage goals did not match the proportion of Hispanic officers, the document showed.

We have goals. We have composition goals,” Gilland reiterated.

Vice Adm. Sean Buck, in contrast to Gilland, said that the Naval Academy’s recruiting efforts have supported increased diversity. “We do not have race-based composition goals at the Naval Academy,” he said

*****

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

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The Impact Of The Asylum Rule Reversal thumbnail

The Impact Of The Asylum Rule Reversal

By Michael Infanzon

Impact of Asylum Rule Reversal on Arizona’s Southern Border and Influx of Illegal Immigrants

The recent ruling by a federal judge striking down the Biden administration’s temporary restrictions on migrants seeking asylum has significant implications for immigration policy and the influx of illegal immigrants at the Arizona southern border. The judge’s decision, while celebrated by advocates of immigrant rights, has sparked a debate over the balance between humanitarian concerns and national security interests. How does this ruling impact the situation at the Arizona southern border and the challenges posed by illegal immigration?

The ruling’s immediate impact on the Arizona southern border is likely to be a surge in the number of migrants attempting to cross into the United States. The decision to lift the restrictions on asylum claims for those who crossed the border illegally and penalize migrants who scheduled appointments could create incentives for increased illegal immigration. Arizona, being a major entry point for unauthorized border crossings, is likely to witness a higher influx of migrants seeking asylum, further straining resources and services at the border.

The state’s border enforcement agencies may face challenges in managing and processing the increased number of migrants. Additionally, the ruling might lead to a surge in border apprehensions, as migrants may perceive a higher chance of gaining entry into the United States through the asylum process. This, in turn, could escalate tensions between border communities and federal agencies and heighten security concerns.

The Influx of Illegal Immigrants

With the lifting of restrictions, the influx of illegal immigrants into Arizona and other border states could exacerbate existing immigration-related challenges. The increased volume of asylum seekers may overwhelm the existing immigration infrastructure, including detention centers and asylum processing facilities. Consequently, the processing of asylum claims could be significantly delayed, leading to a backlog of cases and prolonged stays for migrants in detention.

The surge in illegal immigration may also create economic pressures on local communities and public resources. Local governments and social service providers may struggle to accommodate the sudden increase in demand for housing, healthcare, education, and other essential services. This could potentially strain relationships between migrants and host communities and may even result in social tensions.

Legal and Ethical Considerations

While advocates of immigrant rights celebrate the ruling as a victory for humanitarian values, critics argue that it interferes with the executive branch’s ability to enforce immigration policy and uphold national security interests. The ruling raises questions about the separation of powers and the extent to which the judiciary should be involved in immigration matters. The judicial intervention in this policy area may be seen by some as an overreach of power, as decisions regarding immigration are often considered to be within the domain of the executive and legislative branches.

Furthermore, the ruling’s implications go beyond domestic considerations. The United States is part of international agreements and conventions related to refugee protection and asylum rights. The decision to lift restrictions on asylum claims for those who crossed the border illegally could be interpreted as a departure from the principles outlined in these agreements. This may have broader implications for how the U.S. is perceived on the global stage and could impact diplomatic relations with other countries that are also grappling with refugee crises.

The situation at the Arizona southern border will require careful monitoring and thoughtful responses from policymakers to strike a balance between protecting vulnerable populations seeking refuge and upholding national security interests.

*****

Michael Infanzon is a political and government policy contributor at The Prickly Pear.

 Michael writes about government policies that affect millions of Americans, from their introduction in the legislature to their implementation, and how this all impacts our everyday freedoms.

 Michael is the Managing Partner for EPIC Policy Group, located in Phoenix, AZ. EPIC has clients ranging from motorcycle rights organizations, firearms organizations, 2A rights organizations, veterans advocacy, and chambers of commerce to agricultural products and personal freedoms among other policy issues.

You can follow Michael on Twitter (@infanzon) and email him at infanzon@epicpolicygroup.com

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Navajo Nation Leader Says Biden, AOC Energy Policies Cripple Tribe’s Economy

By J.J. Brannock

Members of the Navajo Nation in the southwestern U.S. say the federal government is leaving their people behind with its energy policies, crippling their economy and leaving more people in poverty.

Republicans on the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources are attempting to overturn such Biden administration policies, including the Department of Interior’s land withdrawal and ban on oil and gas leasing outside of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, where members of the Navajo tribe reside.

The DOI issued a Public Land Order in June imposing a 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park for the next 20 years. The prevention of oil and natural gas leasing within the zone would cause Navajo mineral owners to lose an estimated $194.3 million in revenue over the next 20 years.

More than 5,000 Navajo mineral owners rely on income from energy development. The individuals are called Navajo allottees, as the minerals they own were allotted to their ancestors many years ago.

Delora Hesuse, a Nageezi Chapter Navajo who lives within the 10-mile buffer, said in a hearing last week that “this is hugely important because our area is very poor and families still do not have electricity or running water. Our elderly rely on this money to feed their children and livestock.”

Committee Republicans said the land order also would further harm domestic energy efforts.

“The Department of Interior’s decision […] represents Mr. Biden’s latest effort to impose his radical agenda by locking up our nation’s land and water while further crippling domestic energy production and pushing the United States into greater dependence on foreign sources for energy,” Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chairman Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., said in the hearing.

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said that the Navajo were placed in an “economic hostage situation,” with the tribe believing that continuing to mine oil and gas is the only source of possible income.

“The answer to that, in my view, is not to revert back to that [oil and gas mining],” Ocasio-Cortez said, “but to invest and reinvest in these communities, particularly where there is harm being done.”

She asked if there were other steps the federal government could take to better support the Navajo people through an energy transition.

Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, responded that such a discussion should have happened before the decision to restrict oil and gas leasing within the buffer zone was made.

“I did not even know about the announcement or anything from the secretary,” Nygren said, “but my hope was that we were going to have these discussions to come up with a collective solution.”

Western Energy Alliance, a group that represents 200 companies centered on exploration and production of oil and natural gas in the West, said the Biden administration’s policies, with no plan to address the obvious fallout, will lead to more poverty among the Navajo tribe.

Aaron Johnson, vice president of Public and Legislative Affairs for the alliance, said, “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez assumes an energy transition for the Navajo Nation that doesn’t exist. As President Buu Nygren said, such a transition isn’t happening now nor will it in the foreseeable future. The Interior Secretary’s ten-mile buffer around Chaco Canyon will lead to more poverty in a disadvantaged community by denying nearly $200 million in oil and natural gas revenue for Navajo members. Meanwhile, tribal wind and solar royalties are nonexistent.”

“According to Interior’s own data, under the Biden Administration tribal oil production is down 21% and natural gas is down 11%,” Johnson continued. “They’re working to reduce sustained energy income to tribes into the future by choking new permits back 60%. Congress should reverse Interior’s withdrawal and allow Navajos to earn an income and support their families by developing their energy resources.”

Nygren also spoke on one of the tribe’s biggest and cleanest coal plants, the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona, being decommissioned in December 2019.

“The promise was solar fields down the road,” Nygren said, “but now nothing exists. People are out of jobs. There’s no royalties, no taxes, so I truly agree with having a transition plan that’s equitable, and that plan was never presented to me, it was just a decision that was made.”

Nygren said the lack of compromise and communication from the federal government led to the opposition to the DOI’s land order.

“The withdrawal was done without meaningful consultation and fails to honor the Navajo Nation sovereignty,” he said. “Respect for tribal sovereignty must be consistent, even when it is not convenient. The nation offered a compromise that honored Navajo sovereignty and the rights of our allottees, but that was rejected with inadequate explanation from the administration.”

The tribe had previously offered a five-mile buffer zone compromise that helped protect the park and enable Navajo mineral owners to develop most of their resources but revoked it after DOI Secretary Deb Haaland failed to conduct “sufficient tribal consultation.”

“I feel like as the Navajo Nation president I’m the one that has to figure out that solution,” Nygren said about the recent federal actions. “I feel like I’ve inherited the issue and the only way to get it done is through Congress or the secretary, but in the meantime, it’s a problem of the Navajo Nation president and the Navajo Nation council.”

In response to the DOI’s order, the Congressional Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources discharged the Energy Opportunities for All Act last week, which would nullify the Interior Department’s decision. The discharge essentially means that the bill is now ready to begin floor proceedings.

“The House Committee on Natural Resources is keeping our commitment to the American people by working to lower energy costs and support tribal rights by promoting access to our nation’s natural resources,” Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., said in a statement.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., has not yet announced an official floor time for consideration of the bill.

*****

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

FedNow Isn’t a CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency], But It Is Dangerous

By David Brady,Jr.

Starting in July, the Federal Reserve will be rolling out a new payment service dubbed “FedNow.” Among many on the dissident side of politics, there is a growing worry that this new service may be a trojan horse for a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

The concern is a valid one. A CBDC, depending on how it is implemented, could eliminate the privacy allowed by a cash system, allow the freezing of accounts with greater ease, and open the door to social credit scores for individuals. One asks, is the fear of FedNow truly justified? Or is it a risk for another reason?

To analyze whether FedNow is a trojan horse for a CBDC, one must first understand what a CBDC would be in function. A CBDC, as defined by the Federal Reserve itself, would be “money that is a liability of the central bank.” In essence, a CBDC would be a digital dollar with accounts held at the Federal Reserve itself, similar to what the Federal Reserve offers to banks today. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, has dubbed this a “wholesale” CBDC and stated on numerous occasions that such a currency could only be made so by an act of Congress. Legally, individuals cannot have accounts at the Federal Reserve. Changes to this must be made by Congress, to which Powell has not offered an opinion.

Powell is not the only policy maker at the Federal Reserve to express concern or show dismissal toward possible benefits of a CBDC. Federal Reserve governor Michelle Bowman did as much during a speech to Georgetown University in April 2023. Bowman discussed the listed benefits of a CBDC, including possible speeding up of the financial system and the inclusion of more Americans in the banking system. She, however, dismissed all of these. She touted the benefits of FedNow in speeding up interbank transactions but expressed the fears many hold as to the politicization of a possible CBDC. Powell has also dismissed a CBDC on similar lines, stating to the House Financial Services Committee, “We’ll have real-time payments in this country very, very soon” (this being a reference to CBDC’s being proposed as a solution to transaction speeds).

On the possible smoothing of the payment system, Bowman touted FedNow as a solution that would make a CBDC unnecessary. On the subject of including more Americans in the banking system, she noted the skepticism that many hold toward banks. She posited that a CBDC would solve that issue in no way, shape, or form. Among key players on the Federal Reserve Board there is clear opposition to CBDCs.

But to address the elephant: FedNow. Is FedNow a central bank digital currency trojan horse? Short answer: no. Long answer: FedNow is a new settlement system for member banks of the Federal Reserve System. Historically accounts have been settled physically by vehicles moving money between banks at the end of business days. Today it is primarily done by the system known as Fedwire. Very similar name, but it is not the same entity.

Many Americans use different banks to provide money warehousing services, thus resulting in transfers of money between different banks as billions of transactions occur each day. This constant stream of transfers results in a figurative spaghetti monster of assets and liabilities changing hands second after second. No bank can possibly process these transactions all at once. Fedwire accumulates payments between various banks, allowing individual account balances to be managed by banks themselves, and at the end of the business day processes payments between them in gross amounts.

The result is massive end-of-day transfers of money between various financial institutions. This service, however, is only possible during banking hours and not at all on weekends or during bank closures. FedNow, in contrast, settles payments instantaneously between banks and continues to do so even past banking hours. This new system is, to put it plainly, an upgrade over the old settlement systems in place at the Federal Reserve. It isn’t a CBDC, but it does pose a new risk.

The recently failed Silicon Valley Bank almost saw 81 percent of its deposits, worth $142 billion, withdrawn in two days. What would have taken longer in the era of physical cash was accelerated by online banking. Apps like Cash App, Zelle, and PayPal, and even those of other banks, have made the old market mechanism of bank runs far more efficient and deadly for banks. Silicon Valley Bank, thus, nearly collapsed and was seized by regulators.

FedNow, as a system, would worsen this risk. As Austrians have long noted, fractional reserve banking is a confidence game. By issuing more liabilities than assets, a fractional reserve bank relies on the hope of having enough cash on hand if depositors come knocking. The market correction comes in the form of bank runs, where depositors rush to their bank and withdraw all their deposits. The bank, being unable to meet all redemption requests, goes insolvent and must liquidate other assets to meet the demands.

The gamble of a fractional reserve bank is anticipating the depositors’ demand for their physical deposits. So long as it is only a minority of depositors who choose to redeem their claims, the bank may continue to operate. Thus, it is a confidence game. The system works so long as nobody looks under the table.

FedNow heightens the risk of bank failures. While libertarians acknowledge the market at work in bank runs, every bank in the United States operates on a model of fractional reserve banking.

Operating alongside online banking, this new system will increase bank runs and systemic bank failures. While this is certainly a market solution, the effects may be catastrophic. Depositors last in line, deceived by the fraud, may lose everything as a result. Businesses placing their funds in an ordinary bank might lose it all. There will be victims of fraud who may not be able to get restitution.

So, while FedNow is not a CBDC, it does pose a different kind of threat to the economy. Rather than create a risk of government overreach through the Federal Reserve, it opens a massive door to the collapse of the system itself. FedNow, while made to allow better settlement on the market, will be a near-fatal reform to the system that created it.

*****

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

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Hunter Biden Plea Deal Derailed By Federal Judge

By Tristan Justice

Hunter Biden pled not guilty to federal tax crimes Wednesday after an agreement with the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s office fell apart.

In June, the president’s son struck a plea deal with federal prosecutors limited to two misdemeanor tax crimes and a felony firearm charge. The latter count of illegal firearm possession would have been forgiven after 24 months of sobriety. The agreement was reportedly derailed when the federal judge overseeing the case pressed attorneys with questions that revealed divisions between both sides.

Hunter Biden was expected to plead guilty to a trio of federal charges despite the fact that whistleblowers from the investigation with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) claimed significant felonies were left off the table.

Veteran IRS agents Joseph Ziegler and Gary Shapley testified before House lawmakers last week that the Department of Justice (DOJ) sought to thwart their federal tax investigation that originated as a probe into a foreign pornography ring. According to Shapley, U.S. Delaware Attorney David Weiss allowed the statute of limitations to pass to avoid filing additional charges. Whistleblowers also said they were left in the dark about record evidence from the FBI that was corroborated by the bureau implicating President Joe Biden in a criminal bribery scheme with Hunter’s Ukrainian business partners.

Federal prosecutors revealed in the courtroom Wednesday that the Justice Department is still weighing charges under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

The department sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday, offering Weiss to testify after the August recess.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy opened the door to impeachment proceedings against the president related to the Biden family business ventures this week. On Tuesday, McCarthy told Fox News an inquiry will commence once information begins being withheld from GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

*****

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

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Revelations About Biden’s $10 Million Ukraine Bribery Scheme Warrant Impeachment thumbnail

Revelations About Biden’s $10 Million Ukraine Bribery Scheme Warrant Impeachment

By John Daniel Davidson

At no time since the 1868 impeachment of President Andrew Johnson has an impeachment been more warranted than it is now.

Now we know there was good reason for Trump to be asking about it. We also know there’s far more evidence Biden engaged in impeachable (and possibly criminal) offenses than there ever was against Trump. When Democrats first impeached Trump at the end of 2019, they claimed he had solicited foreign interference in the 2020 election by asking Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky about the Biden bribery scheme. His questions now appear to be well-founded. They’re questions the FBI and Justice Department should have been asking back in 2017 when the informant first told the FBI what he knew.

What we’ve now learned from the four-page document — an unclassified FD-1023 form, which is used by the FBI to record credible reports and information from trusted confidential sources — is that Burisma allegedly paid $10 million in bribes to the Biden family so that Joe Biden, who at the time was vice president, would make the company’s legal problems in Ukraine disappear. Biden later bragged about how he pressured Ukrainian authorities to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, by threatening to withhold aid to the country. At the time, Biden claimed Shokin was “corrupt.”

But if what the FBI informant says is even partially true, it’s Biden who is corrupt — and on a grand scale. According to the document, a top Burisma executive said the only reason the firm hired Hunter Biden (for a mind-boggling $83,000 a month) was “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” and that even though Hunter “was stupid,” they needed him “so everything will be okay.” What’s more, the firm was apparently told by both Hunter and Joe Biden that it needed to hire Hunter for this “protection.”

Keep in mind this isn’t some third-hand reporting, or some obviously fake dossier cooked up by the RNC and passed off to credulous journalists to smear Biden. This is what a trusted FBI informant says he was told directly by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder and CEO of Burisma.

After Trump won the 2016 election, the FBI informant asked Zlochevsky on a phone call if he was happy about the outcome. He was not. Asked if he was worried about the bribes he’d paid to the Bidens, Zlochevsky said he was “pushed to pay” them, and that he had many text messages and recordings, including two with Joe Biden himself, that show he was coerced into making the bribery payments. And anyway, Zlochevsky added, because then-VP Biden had personally gotten Shokin fired, “nobody would find out about his financial dealings with the Bidens.”

All of this and more is detailed in the FD-1023 form, which the FBI hid from Congress and investigators for years, and which Democrats lied about as recently as June, falsely claiming that Trump’s own Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr had closed down the investigation into the Biden bribery scheme. (Barr refuted that claim directly, telling The Federalist the FBI informant’s allegation “was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”)

But instead of following up on this credible informant’s claims and seeing where the investigation led, the FBI and DOJ buried the document and later defied a congressional subpoena demanding its release. They also barred investigators from questioning Biden family members, tipped off the Biden family about the investigation, and then offered Hunter Biden a ridiculous plea deal for minor tax offenses designed to shield him from future prosecution.

All that obstruction might not be enough to stop the truth from getting out. We’re probably going to learn much more in the days and weeks to come about the alleged Biden bribery scheme in Ukraine. As Margot Cleveland wrote in these pages yesterday, IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler testified before lawmakers Wednesday that they hadn’t yet seen the FD-1023 document but that it “could further corroborate other information that we might be having an issue corroborating because it could be regarding a foreign official. So if we have information regarding that in a document or a witness, we can further corroborate later evidence.”

“This testimony suggests that the IRS’s investigation likely uncovered evidence the FD-1023 corroborated,” writes Cleveland. “With that form now public, both Ziegler and Shapley can study it and assess what documentary material, such as wire transfer reports, they uncovered that is now corroborated.”

The corporate media will no doubt treat this as a non-story, but that doesn’t mean the rest of America should ignore it. As my colleague Sean Davis noted yesterday on Twitter, “This is the biggest corruption scandal in American history, and it’s not even close.”

If this is the biggest corruption scandal in American history (and it looks like it is), then it deserves a full and exhaustive investigation. And since we know a corrupt and compromised FBI and DOJ can’t be trusted to conduct an investigation into a bribery scheme they actively tried to cover up, Republicans in Congress will have to do it themselves.

At no time since the 1868 impeachment of President Andrew Johnson has an impeachment been more warranted, and never has it been as necessary as it is now.

*****

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

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No Place to Lay Your Head: How Economic Policy Makes Housing Unaffordable for Young Working Families thumbnail

No Place to Lay Your Head: How Economic Policy Makes Housing Unaffordable for Young Working Families

By H. Shelton Weeks and Victor V. Claar

When it comes to the decision whether to rent or own, most of our parents gave us counsel that went something like this: (1) move out (!), (2) rent something inexpensive while you save until you can afford a downpayment on a home, and then (3) finance a home because you are investing in real estate – rather than “throwing away” rent money every month.

Yet in today’s real estate market – whether in Southwest Florida, Alabama, or Western Massachusetts – all three of those pieces of advice are nearly impossible for young working families to follow. And whether it’s the rental market or the market for single-family homes, wrong-headed economic policy – federal, state, and local – is to blame.

And it’s bad. While most Americans believe that moving out of your parent’s home is an important rite of passage, recent Pew data indicate that a stunning 37 percent of men aged 25-29 now share a residence with an older relative. And in many cases, both males and females are moving back in with their parents for financial reasons. They just can’t find a way to make the money work.

Now a skeptic might suggest that young people are moving back home because they don’t work hard, can’t stick to a budget, or don’t possess the fortitude necessary to face the world head-on. But rental price data suggests otherwise.

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) refers to households as being “housing-cost-burdenedwhen they spend more than 30 percent of their monthly household income on rent or a mortgage, plus other housing needs like utilities. Such cost-burdened families frequently have difficulty paying for other essentials like food, clothing, transportation, or medical care. And renters are much more likely to be housing-cost burdened than mortgage holders.

The latest national data (May 2023) from the Waller-Weeks-Johnson Rental Index highlight the financial hardship faced by young households who either rent or want to. In May 2023, the average national rent was $2,048.36. This represents an 8.11 percent premium above the rent one would expect based on historical growth rate trends, and also represents a 4.79 percent increase in the past year alone. The index also estimates the annual income required for an average household to avoid being “rent burdened” according to the HUD definition, and in May 2023 that number for the US was a whopping $81,934. Yet the most recent Census Bureau estimate of US annual household income (though with a two-year lag) was roughly just $70,000. Clearly, conditions throughout many of the nation’s rental markets make it very challenging for young households to find housing at a price that aligns with their budget constraints.

In addition, because the cost of utilities can vary so much from city to city, the Waller-Weeks-Johnson index omits utility costs completely from its estimated monthly cost of housing. This means that rental markets are even more burdened than the index indicates and that an average household needs even more annual income to avoid being rent-burdened than the May 2023 estimate of $81,934.

But why? Why is all housing so unaffordable for many? And why isn’t it limited to either rent prices or home prices?

A fundamental reason that prices of all housing – apartments, condos, townhouses, and single-family dwellings – move up and down together is because buying a home and renting are the two alternatives most of us face. Economists refer to these as “substitute goods.” Examples abound. In one recent instance, pandemic-driven microchip supply-chain issues reduced the supply of new cars – resulting in a surge in prices of not only new cars but also their closest substitute: used cars. So when it comes to housing, high prices – or high mortgage rates – in residential real estate will drive families into the rental market, driving up rents. Conversely, high rents can drive families into the homebuying market, driving up home prices. In short, housing costs move up and down together – regardless of which market changes first.

But none of this resolves the fundamental question of why all housing costs seem so high. Nor why price drops are ephemeral, while increases quickly become the new normal.

The answer is two-fold. First, much housing policy – often born of good intentions – results in what we like to refer to as “artificial scarcity.” Now we all encounter artificial scarcity most often when we deal with monopolies. In fact, that’s the entire point of being a monopolist. Because you face no competition, you can get away with producing less of a good or service than we’d see in a more competitive market. That’s artificial scarcity. And when you produce less, you can charge more.

This is why incumbent monopolists and wannabe monopolists alike work so hard to pursue economic regulations that guarantee their firms reap the profits of artificial scarcity for as long as possible. The best guarantee of ongoing monopoly power is to get politicians to make it illegal to compete with you. Economists refer to the costly efforts firms incur to lobby politicians in this way as “rent-seeking” behavior.

There’s also artificial scarcity in housing markets, but in that case, it’s the planners themselves who put housing in such short supply – and at consequent high prices.

For starters, most municipalities around the country use residential zoning, a process that restricts land use in one “zone” to a few limited uses. For example, if a neighborhood is “zoned” for only single-family residential dwellings, then it’s unlawful to build an apartment building or an auto repair shop in that zone. You can see already that such zoning ordinances create an artificial shortage of apartment buildings where there doesn’t need to be a shortage. And when there is artificial scarcity, higher prices follow.

Defenders of residential zoning generally proceed along two lines. First, we ourselves have heard residents defend such restrictive policies because they have been arrived at via the democratic process. That is, if current residents living in single-family neighborhoods wish to vote to keep it that way, then it’s their democratic right to do so. After all, who could object to policies decided by democracy?

But just because the policy is arrived at by voting doesn’t mean it will be a good policy. It’s an extreme example, but we used to tolerate slavery in the United States – a product, at the time, of representative democracy. But that policy was wrongheaded for all kinds of reasons. Or to take a ridiculous example, I am pretty sure there are sufficient votes to ban bowties, via popular vote, from men’s fashion if we cared to. But that would be a silly policy to enact because it would interfere with the ability of individuals to freely choose their neckwear.

The other argument that defenders of residential zoning will make is that it keeps neighborhoods “nice.” We have personally heard people say things like, “nobody wants a church near a school near a restaurant near an auto body shop.” But this argument overlooks significant challenges. First, throughout most of human history, including much of US history, we all worked and played and worshiped, and shopped within the same neighborhood. The strip mall, the subdivision, and the industrial park are twentieth-century inventions, and we now drive to all of the places we used to walk to within our neighborhoods. And in most cases, the reason we do everything in different zones now is because of zoning ordinances that made it so – not because the subdivision and the industrial park spontaneously emerged as the product of a free society.

Any restriction of any use of any productive resource – whether it be land, labor, capital, or entrepreneurship – will necessarily limit and frustrate its productive potential.

This brings us back to artificial scarcity. If young working families need more housing, the market should be free to deliver what they want and need. Instead, we limit the places where new apartments can be constructed. If you ever wonder why the new apartment building goes up behind your local Walmart and not someplace more convenient for its residents, blame zoning.

Even where single-family dwellings are concerned, we create artificial scarcity. Most municipalities dictate minimum lot sizes, minimum distances from the street, and minimum distances from neighbors’ homes. Such policies artificially restrict the number of residents to something smaller than it needs to be. It’s all democratic, but it restricts the options for working families looking for a place they can afford that is also convenient to their workplace as well as the schools they want their kids to be able to attend.

But what about the other reason for a lack of affordable housing? We mentioned, “artificial scarcity” through zoning, minimum lot sizes, and “setbacks” (minimum distances from your neighbors or the street). But what else gets in the way of affordable housing for young working families?

The other answer lies in the Fed’s activist management of interest rates. Interest rates — all of them — are arguably the most important prices in a market economy. They should help households figure out how much to save and over what time horizons, and they should facilitate sensible borrowing and investing by firms. But rather than allowing interest rates to coordinate such plans, the Fed commandeers interest rates in an effort to deliver on its only two responsibilities: “maximum employment” and “price stability.” As a consequence, interest rates cannot convey accurately to developers how much to borrow and when, and they cannot do the same for potential homebuyers either.

In recent months, home prices have softened slightly since the worst of the pandemic, which sounds like good news. But at the same time, home mortgage interest rates have more than doubled. And the real monthly cost of your house is your mortgage payment – calculated using both the sale price of the house and the interest rate you locked in. While sale prices for single-family homes have softened, it’s difficult to claim that housing costs overall have moderated in any serious way.

It’s often said that less is more. And, in this case, less housing regulation and less intervention by the Fed could lead to more of what we claim to want: affordable housing for all, located in the most socially beneficial places possible.

*****

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

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The Multiple Indictments of Donald Trump and the Rising Tyranny of the Far Left thumbnail

The Multiple Indictments of Donald Trump and the Rising Tyranny of the Far Left

By Mark Wallace

Until less than six months ago, no United States president or former president had ever been indicted for any serious crime.  The closest any president had ever come to criminal prosecution for a serious crime was Richard M. Nixon, who was named as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Watergate affair in the mid-1970s.  Ulysses S. Grant was arrested for speeding in his horse-drawn carriage, but a speeding ticket is hardly a serious crime.

The history of the United States of America’s integrity in respecting its current and past presidents and not levying false and contrived serious crime allegations against them came to a screeching halt on April 4, 2023 when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr. announced an indictment of President Trump for 34 counts of “falsifying business records.” This was soon followed up with a federal indictment of President Trump in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida for allegedly mishandling classified documents.  That indictment was filed June 8, 2023.  The lead government attorney is Jack Smith.

Remaining in the hopper are additional likely criminal indictments for matters relating to the January 6 trespasses in the U.S. Capitol and purported election interference in the State of Georgia.  

Although these savage actual and intended prosecutions directed at a U.S. president are without even the tiniest scrap of precedent in the history of the United States of America, there is plenty of precedent for them in the history of the communist Soviet Union and the fascist Nazi Germany.  Indeed, the prosecution of political opponents through political show trials is usually on page one of the playbook of history’s biggest and most evil monsters such as mass murderers Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

Josef Stalin cemented his iron control over the Soviet Union by arranging political show trials in the mid-1930s for Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, two of the “Old Bosheviks” who had helped Comrade Lenin overthrow the Tsar in 1917.  Kamenev and Zinoviev were two of Stalin’s main political opponents.  The prosecutor hand-picked by Stalin was Andrey Vyshinsky.  Vyshinsky accused Kamenev and Zinoviev of (variously) treason, espionage, poisoning and sabotage in a kangaroo court political show trial in 1936.  Each of them was found guilty — no surprise there — and promptly executed.

It is Andrey Vyshinsky who is sometimes attributed with the origin of the phrase “Show Me the Man and I Will Find You a Crime.”

After the failed July 20, 1944 conspiracy to kill Adolf Hitler, Hitler took his inspiration from Stalin in subjecting the conspirators to political show trials after which they were promptly executed.  Hitler set up a “People’s Court” — another kangaroo court —presided over by fanatical Nazi Roland Freisler.  Hitler reportedly boasted to others that “Freisler is our Vyshinsky.”  Freisler was what today might be termed an “activist judge.”  He made no show of being a neutral judge and instead often acted as the prosecutor, denouncing the defendants himself and then pronouncing a guilty verdict without even a murmur of opposition from defense counsel (who kept their mouths shut if they knew what was good for them, unless perhaps they spoke up to denounce their own clients).  After the guilty verdict, defendants were hung from piano wire nooses suspended from meathooks — a grisly and torturous death to be sure.  Freisler’s tenure came to an end when he was killed in court during an American air raid in February 1945.

Bringing history up to date in our present time, we now find President Trump’s fanatical Far Left opponents taking a page from Josef Stalin’s and Adolf Hitler’s playbook and attempting to corruptly use our justice system to destroy him and prevent his re-election as president in 2024.  If Biden had more of his wits about him, we can imagine him boasting to confidants, like Adolf Hitler, that “Jack Smith is our Vyshinsky.”  Is Alvin Bragg the modern-day equivalent of Hitler’s Roland Freisler ?  The jury is still literally and figuratively still out on that one.

Make no mistake about it, the real purpose of these prosecutions of President Trump is not to enforce the law but rather to illegally and feloniously interfere with the 2024 election.  The goal is to imprison or otherwise greatly hinder Donald Trump so that he cannot run an effective  campaign for president.

Attorney Generals in Red States like Missouri, Tennessee, Texas and Louisiana need not sit idly by while corrupt federal and state prosecutors feloniously interfere with free and fair 2024 presidential elections in those States.  And if indeed a corrupt prosecutor is indicted for election interference and extradited to stand trial in, say, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas or Louisiana (or in all of them), he may find that he or she cannot just run to a friendly federal court and get an injunction to stop the state criminal prosecution.  There is an old U.S. Supreme Court case by the name of Younger v. Harris that generally bars federal courts from enjoining state criminal prosecutions.

On the subject of whether these prosecutions of Donald Trump constitute election interference, consider this.  What would be greater election interference, a group of armed thugs barring members one political party or the other from entering voting booths at a single voting precinct, or so tying up the time of the leading candidate of the Republican Party for president that he cannot effectively campaign throughout the nation?  The first of these affects one voting precinct.  The second affects virtually every voting precinct in the entire nation.  Indeed, the Democrats sent armed thugs to 100 voting precincts to stop Republicans from voting and it would not be as serious an election interference as what they are doing to Donald Trump at the present time. 

If indeed a prosecutor’s goal is to imprison Donald Trump so that he cannot run an effective presidential campaign, it would seem poetic justice to see that prosecutor hoist by his own petard and to spend that campaign sitting in a jail cell in, say, Missouri.  Of course, if that prosecutor is indicted by Attorney Generals in six or seven Red States and convicted in all of them, the States might need to draw straws to see which State gets to put its prison facilities to good and just use.  

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Judge Halts Arizona Transgender Sports Ban, Horne Promises Appeal thumbnail

Judge Halts Arizona Transgender Sports Ban, Horne Promises Appeal

By Cameron Arcand

A federal judge ruled against Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne in a lawsuit over banning transgender girls from participating on girls’ sports teams in schools.

Arizona District Court Judge Jennifer Zipps, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, ordered a preliminary injunction that will allow girls who identify as transgender to play for their school’s girl’s sports teams.

“Plaintiffs will also suffer severe and irreparable mental, physical, and emotional harm if the Act applies to them because they cannot play on boys’ sports teams. Playing on a boys’ team would directly contradict Plaintiffs’ medical treatment for gender dysphoria and would be painful and humiliating,” the court document states. “Plaintiffs’ mental health is dependent on living as girls in all aspects of their lives.”

However, Horne insists that the final decision maker will be the U.S. Supreme Court, which leans conservative.

“We will appeal this ruling. This will ultimately be decided by the United States Supreme Court, and they will rule in our favor,” Horne said in a statement Thursday. “The Plaintiffs in this case claimed that this only involves pre-pubescent boys, but we presented peer-reviewed studies that show pre-pubescent boys have an advantage over girls in sports. The only expert presented by the Plaintiffs was a medical doctor who makes his money doing sex transition treatments on children and who has exactly zero peer-reviewed studies to support his opinion.”

The law, known as the “Save Women’s Sports Act” was passed by the Republican-led Legislature and later signed by former Gov. Doug Ducey in March 2022. Other Republican-led states, such as Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Alabama, have similar laws on the books. According to 13 News, two transgender girls sued Horne in order to get the opportunity to play for the girls’ teams at their schools. 

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College Towns Across America See Massive Democratic Shift thumbnail

College Towns Across America See Massive Democratic Shift

By Arjun Singh

College towns across the United States have come to overwhelmingly support Democrats, which is damaging the Republican Party’s ability to win elections in key swing states, according to a new report.

The American Communities Project (ACP), which has sought to develop a demographic profile of every county in the United States, has cataloged the voting patterns of 171 “college towns,” where major colleges or universities are situated and account for much of their economic activity, according to a report released by the project this year. The towns have seen a dramatic increase in Democratic support since the 2000 presidential election, with over two-thirds now being expressly Democratic, per the report and analysis by Politico. (RELATED: Here’s How Colleges Could Get Around The Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Ruling)

Of the 171 college towns, 38 towns flipped from being predominantly Republican to Democratic, while 79 Democratic-leaning college towns became even more so by large margins, in terms of average vote shares during elections, per the analysis. By contrast, just 47 Republican-leaning towns became more Republican, while just six college towns flipped from being pro-Democratic to pro-Republican.

In the 2000 election, 48% of all college towns in the United States voted for Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee that year who lost the election, the report reads. In 2020, that number had increased to 54% for Joe Biden, who won.

Additionally, the report revealed that among the college towns and counties where support had shifted, several were in prominent “swing states” where presidential elections are often decided. These included Dane County, where the University of Wisconsin—Madison is located, and where the Democratic margin of victory in the state’s recent Supreme Court election was higher than any other county.

In Washtenaw County, where the University of Michigan is located, voters chose Joe Biden over then-President Donald Trump in the 2020 election by a margin of over 50%, approximately 101,000 votes, per the analysis. Had Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton obtained such a margin of victory in 2016, she would have won the state of Michigan, which Trump won in an upset and was among the states key to his Electoral College victory.

In Larimer County, Colorado, which includes Fort Collins and the campus of Colorado State University, the Democratic margin of victory in 2020 increased by 169,000 votes over the 2000 election, while the Republican margin increased by just 21,000 votes.

“This is a really big deal,” said Mark Graul, a former campaign manager for President George W. Bush in Wisconsin in 2004, to Politico. The shift is “truly making it impossible for Republicans to win a statewide race,” he added.

Most of the new residents in college towns, particularly in Dane and Larimer Counties, were from outside the state and from states that favored Republicans.

Overall, the nationwide gap between both parties among college-educated voters in 2020 was over 1 million votes, in favor of Democrats, per the report.

The Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

*****

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

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The (Almost) Complete List of Biden’s Lies

By Charles M. Strauss

I say “almost” complete because (1) Biden has told so many lies that surely there are some that I have missed, and (2) by the time this article is published, likely he will have added new ones.

In this list, I include as “lies” only those things that are not only false, but which Biden knows to be false. I exclude, for example, the preposterous assertion that “Assault rifle bullets travel five times faster than other bullets,” which is akin to saying that cars with automatic transmissions travel five times faster than cars with standard transmissions. Such untrue statements are not “lies,” just astonishing foolishness, and Biden is every bit as foolish as he is dishonest. He is the Cliff Klaven president — often wrong, but never in doubt.

But why is Biden such a prolific — even compulsive — liar? I am not an expert, but sometimes common sense beats expertise. As the saying goes, “I can tell a good egg from a bad egg, even though I am not a chicken and I cannot lay either kind.” I don’t know why Biden lies, but I have a suspicion. Psychologists recognize something called “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”  According to Mayo Clinic:

“Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. They need and seek too much attention and want people to admire them. People with this disorder may lack the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others. But behind this mask of extreme confidence, they are not sure of their self-worth and are easily upset by the slightest criticism.”

Hmm. “Easily upset by the slightest criticism.” Like, for example, when Biden told a person who dared to question him at a town hall meeting, “You’re full of s__t” and “I’ll slap your face”? (And Trump was accused of not acting presidential!)

Here are some more characteristics of people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

– Make achievements and talents seem bigger than they are.

– Behave in an arrogant way, brag a lot and come across as conceited. (“I think I have a much higher IQ than you.”)

– React with rage or contempt and try to belittle other people to make themselves appear superior. (“You’re a dog-faced pony soldier.”)

Any listing of Biden’s lies must begin with his first appearance on the national stage, in 1987, when he first decided this country needed him to be president. Certainly he had been lying long before that — most likely since he could talk. But that episode was the first time we saw him on national TV, when he replied to a person who asked a fairly innocuous question: “What law school did you attend, and how did you do?” Biden flew off the handle:

 “I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do, I suspect.” Then, in less than a minute, he told these lies:

– “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship   the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship.”

– “I graduated in the top half of my class.” (Top 90%. 76th out of 85.)

– “I won the International Moot Court Competition.”

– “I was named the Outstanding Student in the Political Science department.”

– “I graduated with three degrees.”

The pundits at the time (including Democrats) predicted that that would be the end of Biden’s political career — nobody would ever take him seriously again. How did his image get “rehabilitated”? Lying. In the movie, “Wag the Dog,” the president’s PR team finds a dangerous psychopathic soldier, William Schumann, and sells him to the American public as a war hero (“Good Old Shoe.”) In Biden’s case, his long career as a liar and plagiarist were simply shoveled into the memory hole.

Since then, he has claimed that:

– He used to drive an 18-wheeler. (He got a ride in one.  Once.  Fifty years ago.)

– He spoke to the “inventor” of insulin. (Multiple scientists are credited with discovering insulin; two died before Biden was born and there is no evidence Biden met any of the others.)

– He “had a house burn down with my wife in it” and said “they almost lost a couple firefighters.” (In 2005, Biden’s house had a small fire in the kitchen. Controlled quickly. No injuries. No big risk to firefighters.) 

– He was raised in the Puerto Rican community of Delaware.  (Eyeroll. In Delaware in 1970, only 2,154 people   0.39% of the state population   were of Puerto Rican descent.)

– He spent time at and went to the Tree of Life synagogue after the 2018 shooting. (The folks at the synagogue say it never happened.)

– He served as a liaison to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during the Six-Day War. (Biden was struggling through law school during the war, and Meir wasn’t prime minister then.)

– His first job offer came from Boise Cascade, an Idaho lumber company. (The company said they have no record of President Biden’s application, or of him having worked for the company.)

– The first time he got arrested was at a civil rights protest. (There is no evidence he has ever been arrested — not a first, second, or any other time.)

– He was actively involved in the civil rights movement, including marches and sit-ins. (In 1987, Biden was forced to admit that no, he was never active in the civil rights movement. Nevertheless, he still repeats that lie now and then.)

– He “got started out of an HBCU, Delaware State.” (He never attended Delaware State or any historically black college or university.)

– He was arrested while trying to see Nelson Mandela in Soweto, Africa, with Ambassador Andrew Young. (Ambassador Young said it never happened, and besides, Mandela was not in Soweto at the time; he was over 700 miles away.)

– “I got raised in the black church. We would go sit in Rev. Herring’s church…sit there before we’d go out, and try to change things when I was a kid in college and in high school.” Reverend Herring died long before this lie, but longtime elders in the church say they have no memory of Biden going to that church when he was young.

– “I probably went to shul more than many of you did,” he told a Jewish group. “That’s where I received my education. I’m a practicing Catholic, but I’d go to services on Saturday and on Sunday.  You all think I’m kidding.” (No, we don’t think he’s kidding; we think he’s lying. Or else Biden is America’s first Puerto Rican Jewish Black president.)

– He had a conversation with an Amtrak conductor in 2012 or 2013 about traveling over one million miles on Air Force Two. (That conductor retired in 1993, died in 2014, and Biden didn’t reach one million miles on AF2 until 2015.)

– He was appointed to the Naval Academy in 1965, by the late Sen. J. Caleb Boggs (R-DE). (There is nothing in Boggs’ records, or any other records, about Biden being appointed to the Naval Academy. Biden graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965, so he could not possibly have been appointed to be a freshman, after he had already graduated.)

– Oil refinery pollution is “the reason I and so damn many other people I grew up with have cancer.” (Riiight… he has “oil cancer.” Suuure.)

– He was a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania after his term as Vice President. (Never happened.)

– His “great-grandpop” was a coal miner. No he wasn’t. Biden must be thinking of Neal Kinnock’s great-grandpop.)

– After he was elected vice president, his first act was to award a long-delayed (WW2) Purple Heart to his Uncle Frank. (Uncle Frank was not eligible to receive a Purple Heart. Also, he died in 1999, and Biden wasn’t elected vice president until 2008.)

– He hit a ball 368 feet off the wall in a Congressional baseball game in 1973. (Funny, nobody else remembers it, and no contemporary newspaper reports said anything about it.)

– His grandfather was an All-American football player at Santa Clara University. (Not according to the records of Santa Clara University and the NCAA.)

– He himself “could have been an All-American” football player. (Biden played on the freshman football team (repeat, the freshman team) for part (repeat, part) of one semester in college. He also said he considered walking on to an NFL team and thought he could make it in the pros.  Mmhmm.)

– When he was a member of the New Castle County Council, a woman asked him to remove a dead dog from her lawn, but instead of removing it, he left it on her doorstep. But on another occasion, he changed the story and said he removed the dog. (No word on whether that woman was related to Corn Pop.)

– Corn Pop.

– He had visited Afghanistan and Iraq twice after becoming president. (No he didn’t.)

– His son Beau died in Iraq. (Beau Biden died in a Maryland hospital.)

– Beau died “as a result of” the war in Iraq. (Beau Biden was not shot at or injured in Iraq; he had a desk job. Biden has suggested his son’s cancer was caused by inhaling toxic gases from “burn pits” in Iraq.  There is no evidence of that being true; it is just another of Biden’s lies to make a story, and himself, more interesting.)

– His first wife and infant daughter were killed by a drunk driver. (His first wife and infant daughter were killed in an accident, but Biden embellished the story; i.e., he lied.  There was never any evidence or suspicion that the truck driver who hit them was drunk, nor was he ever charged or cited with recklessness or anything else. She had a stop sign; he did not. She pulled into the path of a truck, and he was unable to stop in time.)

– He never discussed business deals with Hunter. (But he left Hunter a voicemail a year before that assertion, referencing a business deal with Chinese energy giant CEFC.)

– He signed a law cancelling student loans, which “passed by a vote or two.” (Congress passed nothing; Biden signed an Executive Order, which is why the Supreme Court shot it down. Congress is supposed to make laws, not the President.)

– The price of gas is “down from over $5 when I took office.” (The day before former President Donald Trump left office, the national average price of gas was $2.38.)

– He traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese President Xi Jinping. (Nope.)

– The withdrawal from Afghanistan was an “extraordinary success.”

– When he was elected, there was no national plan for vaccinations; he had to start from scratch.  (By the time he took office, nearly a million Americans had been vaccinated. Never heard of Operation Warp Speed?)

– If you get vaccinated, you won’t need to wear a mask.

– If you get vaccinated, you won’t get the Wuhan virus.

– He has been to the border.

– The border is secure.

Bidens apologists and enablers call these “gaffes.” A gaffe is a mistake. A lie is intentional.

People make a big deal about Biden’s age-related dementia. But his continuous lies are not age-related. He has been a psychopathic liar his whole life. Now he is a psychopathic liar with senile dementia.

Too harsh?

Psychopath:

Noun

1. A person who engages repeatedly in criminal and antisocial behavior without remorse or empathy for those victimized.

2. A morally irresponsible person.

3. A person with a personality disorder indicated by a pattern of lying, cunning, manipulating, glibness, exploiting, heedlessness, arrogance, delusions of grandeur, sexual promiscuity, low self-control, disregard for morality, lack of acceptance of responsibility, callousness, and lack of empathy and remorse. Such an individual may be especially prone to violent and criminal offenses.

When it comes to misinformation, Biden is full of it.

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If We Live by Lies, We Will Demand Deceitful Politicians

By Barry Brownstein

Recently, the AIER’s Senior Editor James Harrigan asked rhetorically, “When was the last time a politician of any description used the phrase ‘sacred honor’ with a straight face?” Jefferson, Harrigan pointed out, wasn’t “inventing the Declaration from whole cloth,” but instead, he was capturing “the American mind.” In his evocative Fourth of July essay “The Harmonizing Sentiments of the Day,” Harrigan concluded, “So we are left with one important question in our own time: What are the harmonizing sentiments of our day?”

Once foreign to the “American mind,” dishonor and deceit are essential “harmonizing sentiments” in totalitarian societies. In a society controlled by force, lying is a way of life for the government and its citizens, who harmonize to survive.

The day before he was exiled from the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn released the text of his famous essay, “Live Not By Lies.” The Marxist doctrine that the state can determine our being will never be true, Solzhenitsyn explained, but its fallaciousness can be maintained by the lies of citizens. We live by lies, Solzhenitsyn spelled out, when,

We have internalized well the lessons drummed into us by the state; we are forever content and comfortable with its premise: we cannot escape the environment, the social conditions; they shape us, “being determines consciousness.” What have we to do with this? We can do nothing.

“We can do nothing” is a lie. The actual truth Solzhenitsyn wrote is, “we can do—everything!—even if we comfort and lie to ourselves that this is not so. It is not ‘they’ who are guilty of everything, but we ourselves, only we!”

What we can do, Solzhenitsyn argued, is “Never knowingly support lies! He explained the cure to overcoming the totalitarian harmonizing sentiment of deceit:

When people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they [lies] can only survive when attached to a person.

We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!

Václav Havel was a dissident, playwright, and the first president of Czechoslovakia after communism. Havel echoed Solzhenitsyn when he wrote,

Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim. For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better.

“Consciousness precedes Being” means we get the government we deserve. We can no longer pretend to be victims of the world we see.

When we choose to live in an inner world governed by our self-deception, we get a government ruling by deceit and vigorously stifling alternative views. In the American mind today, is the prevailing harmonizing sentiment inching dangerously close to normalizing totalitarian deceit?

During COVID, particularly in the early days of the pandemic, the public was frightened. Many preferred to get with the program and eschew responsibility for their often difficult health decisions. They wanted no interruptions to their fantasy that their preferred choice was an easy decision. Yet life is messy; there are few one-size-fits-all answers. Unwilling to tolerate the inherent ambiguity in life, they willingly forfeited their freedom. They demanded a government that lied and deceived them.

Streams of orchestrated, hateful propaganda were directed against those who made different medical choices. These relentless attacks were designed to stir up an agitated population easily gulled into supporting attacks on constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. The result was predictable. As Aldous Huxley wrote, “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” Righteous indignation may be another prevailing sentiment in the American mind of our time.

We saw during COVID that many didn’t want to decide for themselves what was true. Misinformation came to mean even truths that disagree with the current official orthodoxy. Only 30 percent of Americans agreed “misinformation” about COVID vaccines is constitutionally protected speech. Why were 70 percent of American minds unconcerned about the government violating basic constitutional rights? Were they victims of a deceiving government, or did their self-deception create a lying and bullying government? 

In July, Federal Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction barring the Biden Administration from bullying social media companies into censoring posts or deplatforming people. He ruled, “Each United States citizen has the right to decide for himself or herself what is true and what is false. The Government… does not have the right to determine the truth.”

Doughty wrote: “One of the purposes of free speech is to allow discussion about various topics so the public may make informed decisions… Without a free debate about these issues [vaccines, masks, closures etc.], each person is unable to decide for himself or herself the proper decision regarding their health.” (See also, “How AIER Helped to Hobble Fauci’s ‘Ministry of Truth”)

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is one plaintiff that Judge Doughty ruled for. Kheriaty observed, “The common feature of all totalitarian systems is the prohibition of questions: every totalitarian regime first monopolizes what counts as rationality and determines what questions you are allowed to ask.”

Kheriaty has it half-right. We were not allowed to ask questions because many didn’t want to hear unsettling answers.

Of course, living with lies is not just about vaccines. Questions about the wisdom of transitioning children, via medical interventions, to another gender identity are not to be asked. In some circles, people prefer to be assured these surgical and hormonal medical procedures unambiguously save lives.

The wisdom of the subsidized green economy can’t be questioned either. “They” must do something about the climate is a common refrain. Denied is the truth that problems are solved not by social planners but by individuals free to cooperate with others in the course of an emergent social process.

We can go on with other examples. But like a snow globe that settles if you stop shaking it, sanity returns to a mind that takes steps to reduce its agitation. Deceitful people demand a government that whips up constant agitation via “emergencies” and “crises, “ensuring their minds never settle down to reflect and come to terms with their self-deception.

Imagine a world with 100 percent censorship. We don’t have to imagine, we have only to study history. In his memoirs, Hitler’s armaments minister, Albert Speer, observed, “In normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them.”  In totalitarian societies, there is no such correcting device. Instead, Speer continued, “every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world.”

If we have turned our backs on reality, no one and no event is coming to save us. We can temporarily renounce our freedom by our own lies, but as Solzhenitsyn warned, “if we shrink away” from renouncing our “daily participation in deceit,” we should “cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath—we do it to ourselves!” 

In 2024, when deceitful liars are among our political choices, it is because we the people have not learned that we forfeit our freedom when we lie and demand lies. Truth may make us uncomfortable, but it will preserve freedom.

*****

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

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Arizona News: July 25, 2023

By The Editors

The Prickly Pear will provide current, linked articles about Arizona consistent with our Mission Statement to ‘inform, educate and advocate’. We are an Arizona based website and believe this information should be available to all of our statewide readers.

Independent Voters Now The Largest Voting Group In Arizona

AG Mayes Plans To Ignore SCOTUS Free Speech Ruling

Federal Judge Blocks Arizona Save Women’s Sports Act

Group Warns Legislature About “Data Mining Of Children”

Arizona One Of The Top Economic States In Nation

EVs Aren’t The Solution To Anything

Judge halts Arizona transgender sports ban, Horne promises appeal

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How Democrats and Their Media Allies Cooked Up a Phony Supreme Court ‘Legitimacy Crisis’ thumbnail

How Democrats and Their Media Allies Cooked Up a Phony Supreme Court ‘Legitimacy Crisis’

By Jarrett Stepman

The legacy media has signaled that it’s all in on the Left’s cooked-up Supreme Court “legitimacy crisis.”

This week, Senate Democrats plan to vote on Supreme Court ethics rules that are clearly meant to give them the ability to hector and harass the court to get the decisions they want. The vote coincides with an increasingly aggressive media campaign to create the appearance that the Supreme Court is mired in scandal.

There’s no question the Left has launched this scheme because it is infuriated by the Supreme Court’s recent decisions.

A Supreme Court leaker struck the first big blow in 2022, releasing the upcoming draft opinion that would ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade. The opinion did not mark an aggressive change—it merely overturned the badly reasoned Roe decision, which had effectively outlawed abortion restrictions across America. That leak inspired death threats against justices, alongside political threats from Democrats in Congress.

More defeats this year, on affirmative action and the student loan bailout, have sent the left-wing media machine into overdrive.

The loss on affirmative action was particularly stinging given how unpopular racial preferences in admissions are. Without elite institutional backing, the issue is a dead letter with the American people.

The Left had become so accustomed to every institution doing its bidding that its only strategy in the face of defeat revolves around putting a metaphorical stick of dynamite under the Supreme Court and setting it off.

Every scheme Democrats have drawn up to deal with this challenge like court packing — has come off as obviously partisan and downright reckless.

They need the media to step in and make this all seem serious and noble. As you would expect, their friends in the media have been happy to oblige.

Politico basically acknowledged that the legacy media en masse is all too eager to carry water for the Democrats’ crusade to pulverize a Supreme Court they no longer control. This was from Monday’s Politico Playbook—a widely read media newsletter:

Fourteen months ago, our colleagues Josh Gerstein and Alex Ward’s revelation of the Supreme Court’s draft Dobbs opinion didn’t just upend American politics and abortion policy — it also ushered in a new era for the media’s coverage of the court.

No longer do SCOTUS reporters principally cover only the cases before the high court. Now they’re focused more regularly and aggressively on ‘the justices’ business dealings, relationships, and ethical issues,’ as well as the broader politics around the high court, Vanity Fair’s Charlotte Klein reports in a new story that interviews Josh about the shift.

The “new era” that they are referring to is one in which those on the Left must endure Supreme Court decisions they don’t like. Therefore, they will now do anything to smear the court and delegitimize it until they get decisions they like again.

Politico noted that media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post are suddenly pouring resources into “asking explosive ethics questions” about Supreme Court justices.

After not caring to ask questions for generations our noble, objective media has suddenly become highly interested in ethics reform on the Supreme Court. What incredible and surely coincidental timing for the Democrat Party messaging effort.

They are here to convince Americans that the Supreme Court’s “crisis of legitimacy” is something other than the cooked-up Democrat campaign to bring the high court to heel.

Where was this legitimacy crisis when the Supreme Court sided in favor of Obamacare by reclassifying it as a tax? When that decision came down, the legacy media celebrated it as a wonderful affirmation of the Supreme Court’s institutional integrity.

That phase is over. The Bat Signal has gone up. The Left’s media pawns are in full delegitimizing mode now.

As columnist Dan McLaughlin wrote in National Review, some of the media’s “explosive” revelations about Supreme Court justices have been hilariously shallow non-stories. Apparently, some of Justice Clarence Thomas’ former clerks used Venmo—a commonly used money transfer app—to receive money for a Christmas party. A lawyer who worked on the latest affirmative action cases also happened to attend that party.

All the party attendees had clerked for Thomas at some point. The bill was $20. So, it was roughly equivalent to a fast-food lunch in a big city these days if you splurge on dessert. I guess we’re supposed to believe this sum swayed Thomas’ opinion on affirmative action, even though Thomas surely had no long public record of statements on the issue.

Get ready for a series of stories about how Thomas or Justice Samuel Alito, or any one of the other justices on the Supreme Court not controlled by the Left, once bought a hot dog at a baseball game that pro-life advocates also attended—a scandal of the highest proportions, implying that we need to restore Roe v. Wade or something.

As I’ve noted time and again, those on the Left will seek to destroy any institution they don’t control. They don’t care about constitutional limits, they don’t care about the structure of government, checks and balances, or anything like that. They only care about amassing power and enforcing their agenda.

If that means bulldozing the court, so be it. If that means empowering an activist court to overstep its bounds and act as a kind of super-legislative body as it did during the Warren Court era of the mid-20th century, again, so be it.

This latest campaign to intimidate and smash the court has been obvious and cynical to anyone paying attention.

In the end, this moment reveals a lot more about leftists than it does the integrity of the justices they seek to impugn.

*****

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

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You Are the Population They Want to Control thumbnail

You Are the Population They Want to Control

By Robert Malone

Worldwide birthrate per 1,000 people follows a very predictable trend. In “developed” and/or wealthy nations, the birthrate is low and in nations at the lower end of the economic development scale, the birthrate is high. Nothing new there.

Many countries, including the US, have birthrates that either are too low to sustain current population levels or are stable. Since 1970, the population of people born in the US has been stable at below 300 million. In fact, some estimates show a decline in population. All of the population growth in the US during this time period has been due to immigration. That is why the USA has grown to 336 million people in 50 years. This trend has only increased in recent years.

There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the US in 2018, making up 13.7 percent of the nation’s population. This represents a more than fourfold increase since 1960, when 9.7 million immigrants lived in the US, accounting for 5.4 percent of the total US population

For Jill and I growing up in a blue state, we were indoctrinated at an early age by the public school system that having two children was the responsible thing to do to save the planet from overpopulation. That careers were more important than having a large family. That women would find more fulfillment in a education and career, as opposed to staying at home. That women should defer motherhood until college and a career were firmed established. That this was the responsible path to take. Today, young women receive the same messaging from our government, our schools systems, and mainstream corporate media.

This messaging by the US government is still as strident as when I was in my youth 50 to 60 years ago.

The truth is that UN’s Agenda 2030 asserts that migration is a human right. What this means in practicality is that persons born in countries with high birthrates have a right to migrate into wealthy countries with low birth rates.

To begin – migration is not a “human right.” Property laws and nation states exist for a reason. To assert otherwise is to assert that there is a one-world government which is in control of migration. Another usurpation of authority by the UN and the WEF.

This nation’s rules and regulations, our very Constitution do not apply to non-citizens. This is by design. Let’s abide by our Constitution and Bill or Rights, not UN agreements, such as Agenda 2030, which was signed by a US president and never ratified by the Senate.

Our country has done a fine job of convincing the American populace that large family size hurts families and individuals in aggregate. We were told that the reward of that, for better or worse, would be a stabilized population over time and preservation of the American way of life, environment, cultural heritage and associated economic opportunities for US citizens. And yet still they persist. This week, Kamala Harris specifically stated that a reduced population was key to children being able to breath and drink clean water. This is not the first time she has asserted this false narrative.

When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breath clean air and drink clean water.” – Kamala Harri

Yet, the Biden border crisis grows ever more urgent and the rate of illegal immigration continues to surge. It is a no brainer to think that an option to reduce population might be as simple as reducing immigration, if that was their true intent.

The truth is that the US has a vibrant and amazing culture. A heritage built on independence, free speech, shared values, and strong work ethic. This heritage can easily be diluted by too much immigration. Just look what is happening France right now. Open migration policies have worked to cause a vast instability within the nation. France literally can no longer integrate so many people, with such different sets of cultural norms into their core national culture. This is not progress.

Under globalism, the heterogeneous cultures throughout the world are being weaponized as a way to destroy diversity; a path towards enabling a single, globalized government controlled by the UN and the WEF. Which is precisely what open borders, the immigration policies of the UN and even Kamala Harris’ statements seem to be working towards. It is time to end this nonsense and get back to a closed and orderly immigration system.

There are over 8 billion people in the world. The US can not take all those that wish to immigrate. To think otherwise is foolish.

America has to be an independent and free nation. We need to rely on Americans for our goods and services. A strong economy is one that meets its own needs internally. Whereby goods, services, medical care, and energy are produced domestically. A strong nation doesn’t need to import low-wage earners to do its dirty work. The bizarre directive of reducing the naturally born population while importing new immigrants serves no functional purpose except to further globalize the USA.

By accepting large numbers of immigrants while reducing our own American population, we further regress as a nation, and we will continue to accelerate economic devastation of both middle class and urban poor citizens. A new world order where migration is a right, borders are open and the UN controls the ebb and flow of populations is ceding American nationalism and will destroy the American experiment in self-governance.

Our government needs to stay out of the business of enforcing population measures.

Which brings me to the mRNA genetic shots. People worry that the mRNA jabs have some sequence or component, such as the lipid nano-particle or genetic code, which are causing sterility. And that these were intentionally designed to cause a decrease in fertility worldwide. This is not a completely unrealistic fear.

For years, there have been rumors of abortion vaccines and anti-fertility vaccines being developed in India and Africa. With evidence being presented for and against these rumors. But we do know for sure that China used forced sterilizations and forced abortions on its own citizens. Now, China worries that their population levels are crumbling rapidly. Government controls on family choices are immoral. The idea of a vaccine to control population is repugnant.

Which brings me to a newly published Nature paper that shows that using adeno-associated viral vectored techniques, cats can be permanently sterilized. In this essay, I don’t want to get into the science behind this (let’s defer that to a later essay) but I do want to discuss the ethics of developing “gene therapy” techniques that rely on viral vectors for sterilization.

To begin with, such a fertility gene therapy technique using adeno-associated virus (AAV) “gene therapy” vectors could be accidentally or purposefully modified to be infectious. This requires a recombination event (rescue) of another related adenovirus, which could be a wild type. Once that happens, the viral vector could be replication competent: ergo infectious. Although AAV “gene therapy” vectors are not a full replicating virus; the truth is that in a research setting, using the full virus to create infectious products is relatively simple. It could be as simple as missing a purification step or a recombination event. If such a product were to escape or be released into the general cat population, it would be a disaster. If such a vector had a rescue event in an injected animal, it could literally create a new virus. What happens if it were to infect on other feline species, such as cheetahs, big cats, cougars or bobcats? There is a scenario whereby it could decimate the population of an endangered species or all the cats . Furthermore, there is a possibility that such a virus could jump species – even into humans. Adeno-associated viruses are respiratory viruses, so can spread easily. What happens then?

Not to mention, we already know that NGOs and governments are willing to consider reducing population via vaccination or forced sterilization. Who is to say whether an organization, perhaps even one with the “best of intentions” in mind (or believing that “the ends justify the means”), would be willing to go there. After what we have experienced over the past three years, I would consider it in the realm of possibility. Kamala Harris, Bill Gates and the WEF and UN all have made their positions crystal clear. Population reduction is imperative.

There must be more regulatory controls on biological research for both animals and humans.

But in the meantime, we have to consider that the government doesn’t really care about population control. You can know them by their actions, not their words. Their words endorse low birthrate as a pathway to population stabilization, but their actions enable rampant population growth due to immigration. The DATA indicate that what they really are striving for is a New World Order, whereby the UN becomes the dominant force of the world, with nation states nestled under their organizational structure. One in which out-migration combined with regional population control via government-enabled birth control (via both pharmaceuticals and deployed propaganda) is designed to augment that process of enabling populations born in economically disadvantaged regions to gain control of more economically advanced nations and infrastructure while destroying the cultures and politico/economic structures which have historically enabled the economic development of these more advanced regions.

*****

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

Author -Robert W. Malone is a physician and biochemist. His work focuses on mRNA technology, pharmaceuticals, and drug repurposing research. You can find him at Substack and Gettr

TAKE ACTION

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

Tale Tale Of Two States’ Policies: Comparing Arizona and Colorado Economies thumbnail

Tale Tale Of Two States’ Policies: Comparing Arizona and Colorado Economies

By Lauren Scott

Arizona and Colorado had similar policy decisions in recent years but diverged on a number of them. A new report says the Copper State’s pro-growth moves have resulted in outsized economic growth compared to its northern neighbor.

Partnered with the Arizona Chamber, the Common Sense Institute of Arizona used research from partners in Colorado to estimate the potential impacts on Arizona’s economic prospects of enacting some of the policy ideas within the “job killer” bills, according to the CSI Arizona report.

CSI’s report analyzed 67 bills and found that if enacted, they would create an additional $25 billion in costs for businesses, resulting in a $9.5 billion decrease in Arizona’s economy.

“Bills like those studied here are being shopped at state legislatures across the country, and many of them have been introduced annually at the Arizona Legislature,” according to the report. “Though they have not moved in the past, the lesson of Colorado’s anti-business policy transformation over the past half decade shows that climates can change quickly.”

Five years ago, Arizona and Colorado were on similar growth trajectories. In 1990, Arizona had 3.7 million residents and Colorado was 10% smaller. By 2015, Arizona’s population had increased 86% and Colorado’s by a comparable 65%.

One difference in the past few years between Arizona and Colorado is the policies.

“Arizona has aggressively invested in policy initiatives post-Great Recession intended to both diversify and make more competitive its business economy (and in particular its manufacturing economy),” according to the report. “The beginnings of this can be traced to the state’s passage in 2011 of its ‘Jobs Bill,’ which established the Commerce Authority and lowered business property and income tax rates.”

But Colorado went in a different direction. 

“While the state conformed to the federal tax law changes in 2017, beginning in 2019, it has been enacting various statutory and regulatory schemes intended to promote social welfare ahead of economic growth,” according to the report.

Colorado’s manufacturing sector is now running at an average annual job growth rate of just 0.7%/year.

According to the report, if Arizona had grown more like Colorado since 2019, there would be 113,500 fewer workers, 3.5% of the state’s workforce.

“Policy matters as seen in Arizona’s success compared to Colorado’s shortcomings. In the Grand Canyon State, our leaders have trusted people over government,” Rep. Matt Gress, a Phoenix Republican who previously served as former Gov. Doug Ducey’s budget director, told The Center Square. “The report released today by the Common Sense Institute Arizona reveals that some Arizona politicians think they know better than Arizonans by proposing terrible ideas like tax hikes of all sorts, higher energy costs to cover environmental regulations, and greater compliance with an administrative state that knows no bounds.”

In Colorado and since 2019, at least 13 bills similar to “job killer” bills identified this year by the Arizona Chamber have been enacted. More are under active consideration and each year similar bills are re-introduced.

“Arizona has seen extraordinary economic growth over the last ten years,” Executive Director of CSI Arizona Katie Ratlief said in a tweet. “Our economy has diversified and matured, and we’ve been one of the fastest growing states in the country.”

CSI estimates that some of the bills introduced would have a total tax increase of more than $15 billion.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

Tale Of Two States’ Policies: Comparing Arizona and Colorado Economies thumbnail

Tale Of Two States’ Policies: Comparing Arizona and Colorado Economies

By Lauren Scott

Arizona and Colorado had similar policy decisions in recent years but diverged on a number of them. A new report says the Copper State’s pro-growth moves have resulted in outsized economic growth compared to its northern neighbor.

Partnered with the Arizona Chamber, the Common Sense Institute of Arizona used research from partners in Colorado to estimate the potential impacts on Arizona’s economic prospects of enacting some of the policy ideas within the “job killer” bills, according to the CSI Arizona report.

CSI’s report analyzed 67 bills and found that if enacted, they would create an additional $25 billion in costs for businesses, resulting in a $9.5 billion decrease in Arizona’s economy.

“Bills like those studied here are being shopped at state legislatures across the country, and many of them have been introduced annually at the Arizona Legislature,” according to the report. “Though they have not moved in the past, the lesson of Colorado’s anti-business policy transformation over the past half decade shows that climates can change quickly.”

Five years ago, Arizona and Colorado were on similar growth trajectories. In 1990, Arizona had 3.7 million residents and Colorado was 10% smaller. By 2015, Arizona’s population had increased 86% and Colorado’s by a comparable 65%.

One difference in the past few years between Arizona and Colorado is the policies.

“Arizona has aggressively invested in policy initiatives post-Great Recession intended to both diversify and make more competitive its business economy (and in particular its manufacturing economy),” according to the report. “The beginnings of this can be traced to the state’s passage in 2011 of its ‘Jobs Bill,’ which established the Commerce Authority and lowered business property and income tax rates.”

But Colorado went in a different direction. 

“While the state conformed to the federal tax law changes in 2017, beginning in 2019, it has been enacting various statutory and regulatory schemes intended to promote social welfare ahead of economic growth,” according to the report.

Colorado’s manufacturing sector is now running at an average annual job growth rate of just 0.7%/year.

According to the report, if Arizona had grown more like Colorado since 2019, there would be 113,500 fewer workers, 3.5% of the state’s workforce.

“Policy matters as seen in Arizona’s success compared to Colorado’s shortcomings. In the Grand Canyon State, our leaders have trusted people over government,” Rep. Matt Gress, a Phoenix Republican who previously served as former Gov. Doug Ducey’s budget director, told The Center Square. “The report released today by the Common Sense Institute Arizona reveals that some Arizona politicians think they know better than Arizonans by proposing terrible ideas like tax hikes of all sorts, higher energy costs to cover environmental regulations, and greater compliance with an administrative state that knows no bounds.”

In Colorado and since 2019, at least 13 bills similar to “job killer” bills identified this year by the Arizona Chamber have been enacted. More are under active consideration and each year similar bills are re-introduced.

“Arizona has seen extraordinary economic growth over the last ten years,” Executive Director of CSI Arizona Katie Ratlief said in a tweet. “Our economy has diversified and matured, and we’ve been one of the fastest growing states in the country.”

CSI estimates that some of the bills introduced would have a total tax increase of more than $15 billion.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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