Whistleblower Transcripts Show Deep-State Election Rigging For Biden Was Way Bigger Than A Laptop thumbnail

Whistleblower Transcripts Show Deep-State Election Rigging For Biden Was Way Bigger Than A Laptop

/in , , , , /by

By Kylee Griswold

If you thought censorship of a laptop was the extent of the deep state’s 2020 election rigging on behalf of the Biden family, think again.

All roads lead to Hunter Biden.

That is, all roads paved with (alleged) extortion, bribery, money laundering, tax evasion, prostitution, drug abuse, and, most importantly, election rigging. The roads traversed by Internal Revenue Service agents-turned-whistleblowers — whose disclosures to the House Ways and Means Committee were released as transcripts on Thursday — are no exception.

The troubled Biden son has always been at the center of concerns about the 2020 election, in the form of the infamous “Hunter Biden laptop.” When reports surfaced in October 2020 of an abandoned laptop showing the dirty details of not only Hunter’s shady business enterprises and potentially criminal conduct but also then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s knowledge of and involvement in it, the corrupt Department of Justice joined hands with Big Tech censors and media propagandists to hide the story.

This was hugely significant, not only because it exposed the depravity of federal law enforcement and America’s information gatekeepers, but also because polling showed that if voters had known the depths of Biden family filth at the time, a potentially scale-tipping number of them would have voted differently in the 2020 election.

The IRS whistleblower transcripts released on Thursday, however, add new layers to the election rigging. According to the IRS agents who came forward, federal agencies abandoned standard procedures to slow-walk investigations into Hunter Biden, ignored agents who pushed for the investigation to move forward properly, retaliated against those agents, and — crucially — interfered even further in the 2020 election by making sure not to go public with details of their investigation until Donald Trump was on his way out the door and Joe Biden was safely elected.

How It All Went Down

The second IRS whistleblower, who remained anonymous, recalled what he remembered from May 2019 to Dec. 8, 2020, the day agents went “overt” with the Hunter Biden case, immediately following the contested presidential election.

He explained that in criminal tax investigations, IRS policy dictates the “need to interview the subject within 30 days of elevating the investigation.” Though sometimes undercover investigations or ongoing criminal activity might delay interviewing a source, that just isn’t how tax crimes work, he said, because “the evidence is typically historical.” The whistleblower said he especially wanted to go overt to put the Biden son “on notice,” since Hunter apparently had unpaid taxes from 2015 and unfiled tax returns from 2016 and 2017. One can infer from the transcripts that if the IRS’s standard timeline had been followed, Hunter Biden would have been interviewed by the early summer of 2019. But he wasn’t.

According to the whistleblower, he repeatedly raised the issue of going overt but was always shot down. “I was continually being told that we had to stay covert to preserve potential evidence from the FBI side of the investigation,” he said. Assistant U.S. attorneys and the DOJ’s tax attorneys, however, told the IRS agents that prosecutors would eventually be able to move forward with hard-hitting “Spies evasion” charges, felony charges for willful tax evasion. Based on the sweetheart Hunter Biden plea deal revealed this week, those felony charges were never pursued. Instead, assuming the deal is accepted, the Biden son’s tax charges will be mere misdemeanors with probation, no jail time.

So the investigation dragged on, covertly, with electronic search warrants and time-consuming reviews. Here’s what happened, in the whistleblower’s words:

Throughout all this time we’re having biweekly meetings. At these biweekly meetings, I am continually bringing up that we need to go overt. There came a point in time to where there were some bank reports out there that were going to get released, and they were going to include potentially the names of the investigators from the IRS and the FBI who received those bank reports. So with that being released in the public, we’re like it’s going to out our investigation, so we need to come out and go overt with the tax case. And I remember there were always times to where we were always on an impending election cycle. It was always the election being brought up.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Any time there was reason to make the case public, “the election” was always “being brought up.”

“In early 2020, it was the [primaries],” the whistleblower continued. “I think that Iowa was the very first one where we weren’t sure what we were allowed to do or we weren’t — it was always wait and see.”

Then while his team was preparing to issue search warrants — for scouring physical residences to look for evidence of a subject’s attempt to file tax returns — before going overt, the higher-ups shut them down, the whistleblower said. In early September 2020, the DOJ Tax Division and the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office halted “overt activities or any activities that could be overt whatsoever.”

Then on Oct. 20, 2020, just days after the New York Post broke the first bombshell laptop story and only two weeks before the election, the whistleblower’s team was prepping to do a covert walk-by to confirm the address of Hunter Biden’s residence for a search. But no. A DOJ tax attorney — it appears to be Mark Daly (who has no problem prosecuting tax evasion of non-Bidens), but the transcript is a bit ambiguous — said, in the whistleblower’s telling: “Tax does not approve. This will be on hold until further notice.”

“I have never in my career have had Tax Division, let alone approve us doing a walk-by or anything like this,” the whistleblower said. “…[U]ltimately, we never were able to do the walk by the residence until after the election. And that’s ultimately when we went overt and were able to do the activities that day on December 8th.”

The other IRS whistleblower, Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley, shared similar concerns with the House Ways and Means Committee, alleging the DOJ “slow-walked the investigation” and denied search warrants of Hunter Biden’s quarters because of “optics.”

So What?

You might not care about the chronology or seemingly mundane details of an IRS investigation. Heck, most Americans would rather not think about the IRS ever, for any reason. But this is more than a bureaucratic timeline. It’s an account — under penalty of perjury, from two respected IRS agents who were present for these hangups — that exposes the next layer of the deep state’s proven record of interference in the 2020 election.

That matters not only because the interference has shattered Americans’ confidence in our electoral process, but because conservatives who were decried as conspiracy theorists and “election deniers” for calling foul in 2020 were right all along.

The Democrat regime interfered in the election, plain and simple. Local officials did so by unlawfully changing rules at the last minute. Big Tech did so by hiding damaging information on their preferred candidates and censoring conservatives. Billionaire activists did so by pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into government offices in the blue areas of swing states to run get-out-the-vote operations. The media did it by lying to voters, day in and day out.

But the regime’s deep-state footsoldiers are perhaps the most egregious offenders. Their censorship and legal malpractice to shield the Biden family were in-kind campaign contributions to the now-president — who likely wouldn’t hold that title without their help.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist 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.

Politized Science Can Be Hazardous To Your Health thumbnail

Politized Science Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

/in , , , , , /by

By Dr. Thomas Patterson

The Lancet was once a leading British medical journal. It was sober and medically exacting. It was so respected that it was often cited to settle controversial issues in the field of medicine.

Today, it is a shell of its former self, shot through with leftist political ideology. A recent editorial called out the UK Home Secretary for her “appalling and shocking“ comments.

Was it about a drop in research funding or disputed medical opinions or something else of direct relevance to medicine? No, the Secretary opined that new migrants to the UK possessed “values which are at odds with our country“ and brought “heightened levels of criminality“.

Some might dispute such statements and some not, but how is this discussion pertinent for a medical journal? Richard Horton, the editor, went on to call for “war“ on the other side of the ideological divide.

Horton and The Lancet are hardly alone in degrading medicine by politicizing it. Science and scientists are in reputational decline because, well, they deserve to be.

Physicians were once respected for their integrity. They could be stodgy and paternalistic sometimes, but they couldn’t be influenced or bought.

Now medical doctors have morphed from being dedicated stewards of their patient’s health to “medical providers”, as government payers describe them. Most owe their professional loyalty to a hospital-based system that operates pretty much like any other business, with the bottom line always in view.

Meanwhile, on issues ranging from Covid to climate science to transgenderism, we are urged to follow “the Science” as if Science were the collective pronouncements of the big shots rather than a process for rolling back the limits of knowledge. “The Science” is often determined by hacks who are especially successful at scoring research grants because they supply the answers our grant-making elites want to hear.

Politicized science can lead to bizarre and harmful conclusions. There is now a movement against randomized controlled trials (RCTs) because they didn’t produce the approved answer to the question of whether face masks prevent infection.

Scientific American stated “decades of engineering and occupational science” show they worked. So there. No silly trials are needed to confirm what everyone knows anyway.

But RCTs are the only way to determine whether a premise is factual. They are the basis of the scientific method, which lifted us out of millennia of ignorance and produced the marvels of modern medicine. Exposing well-regarded but ineffective practices is precisely why they are needed.

While real scientists encourage debate and discovery, pseudoscientists silence those who dissent from the status quo. For example, scientific journals demanded the retraction of research producing evidence that transgenderism can be a social contagion.

Dr. Lisa Littman of Brown University coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria“ after her research revealed that although sufferers from the malady are customarily entered into transitioning protocols including hormones and surgery, they often present for treatment in clusters of young women who together discovered their supposedly mistaken gender identity. Dr. Littman’s research was retracted by Brown soon after it was published, due to the outrage of the medical mob.

Yet other researchers like Abigail Shrier and institutions like the UK’s Tavistockstock Center noted the same phenomenon. Springer Nature, a journal noted for its scientific soundness, was set to publish a review of 1655 possible cases of rapid onset gender dysphoria but reversed course, deciding to retract it due to the suspiciously flimsy objection that “written informed consent” was possibly lacking in the study. Intellectual tyranny defeated open debate again.

We need a respected, honest scientific community more than ever. We need them to make more scientific advances, to train future scientists, and to protect us from the befouling influence of politics on science.  The antics of Dr. Fauci and others, bending the truth to seek political favor, did lasting damage to the reputation of the scientific community.

Climate science too has been hopelessly compromised by politics and the biased grant-making process. One of the results is an epidemic of existential depression among young Americans who believe their lives will end in devastation because of excessive carbon emissions (still wrong, no matter how many times it’s been predicted). It’s a shame.

TAKE ACTION

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

Arizona State University Sees Scrutiny Over Conservative Event Backlash thumbnail

Arizona State University Sees Scrutiny Over Conservative Event Backlash

/in , , , /by

By Carly Moran

An Arizona lawmaker wants the state’s collegiate governing body to investigate why an Arizona State University employee lost her job shortly after organizing an event featuring conservative speakers.

Rep. Austin Smith, R-Surprise, wrote to the Arizona Board of Regents on June 21 following the decision by ASU to terminate the employment of administrator Ann Atkinson.

Atkinson worked as the executive director of the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development at ASU’s Barrett Honors College, where she hosted an event in Feb. 2023 titled “Health, Wealth and Happiness,” with conservative speakers Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk. By June 30, she will be terminated from ASU.

“ASU claims to value freedom of expression,” Atkinson said in a Wall St. Journal op-ed. “But in the end, the faculty mob always wins against institutional protections for free speech.”

Atkinson argued that the move was politically motivated, but ASU argued differently, saying it was due to the Lewis Center’s loss of funding.

“Arizona State University is committed to, in practice, not just rhetoric, all things that support free speech and all of its components,” the university’s news release reads. “ASU employee Ann Atkinson has lost the distinction between feelings and fact in her recent comments about what prompted her loss of employment at the T.W. Lewis Center at Arizona State University.”

The T.W. Lewis Foundation, led by prominent home developer Tom Lewis, did cancel its funding of the development center. However, Lewis’ revokement of funds may be a response to Atkinson’s treatment, and not the cause. Lewis is known for funding conservative groups, including Prager University and Turning Point USA. He even issued a statement to the Arizona Republic in response to Atkinson’s job loss.

“The long story short is that conservative viewpoints are not welcome at ASU, or at most public universities in America,” Lewis said.

Atkinson detailed ways she believes the administration sought to censor the event without outright banning it. Nevertheless, the event was successful, with a total turnout of 1,500 attending in person, and 24,000 online.

“The university administration’s position on the event was no secret,” Atkinson said. “All advertising about ‘Health, Wealth, and Happiness’ was scrubbed from campus walls and digital flyers. Behind closed doors, deans pressured me to postpone the event indefinitely.”

The clearest form of opposition was a letter signed by 36 honors college faculty members. Though the letter condemned the event, it did not explicitly call for its cancelation.

“Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk are purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, as well as the institutions of our democracy, including our public institutions of higher education,” the letter read. “By platforming and legitimating their extreme anti-intellectual and antidemocratic views, Barrett will not be furthering the cause of democratic exchange at ASU, but undermining it in ways that could further marginalize the most vulnerable members of our community.”

The letter cited examples of Prager and Kirk’s positions in which they disagreed.

According to some, Atkinson is not the only to suffer repercussions for expressing conservative beliefs at ASU. In the letter to the Arizona Board of Regents, Smith cites the previous arrest of student Tim Tizon for handing out pocket constitutions, as well as the firing of ASU Gammage Theater employee Kin Blake for hosting Atkinson’s event that “did not align with Gammage’s values.”

“Free speech is paramount to the future of our Republic,” Smith said, “Higher education taxpayer-funded universities must be held to a higher standard regarding the First Amendment. I am disturbed that this trend continues to happen at Arizona State University. I have asked the Regents to do their job and seek answers immediately from Arizona State administrators.”

In addition to Smith’s investigation, ASU is currently being watched by the campus free speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

“FIRE sees no #1A problem with such a closure, provided there are genuine funding concerns,” FIRE tweeted. “But, because schools often point to viewpoint-neutral reasons to justify viewpoint-based censorship, we’ll continue to monitor closely.”

FIRE had previously given ASU their “green” rating regarding the freedom of expression and speech on campus.

*****

This 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.

9 Allegations About Bidens, DOJ in IRS Whistleblowers’ Testimonies thumbnail

9 Allegations About Bidens, DOJ in IRS Whistleblowers’ Testimonies

/in , , , /by

By Fred Lucas

The White House won’t respond and Attorney General Merrick Garland is playing defense after the release of sworn testimony from two IRS whistleblowers alleging special treatment in the agency’s investigation of the president’s son, Hunter Biden.

The House Ways and Means Committee voted Thursday to make public the transcripts of the IRS agents’ testimonies—two days after the Justice Department announced a plea agreement with Hunter Biden that would result in no prison time for failing to file income taxes and lying on a background check for a gun purchase.

Here’s nine things to know about what the IRS whistleblowers said.

1. ‘WH/DOJ Weren’t Alerted?’

Gary Shapley, a 14-year veteran of the IRS, gave his testimony May 26 to investigators for the House Ways and Means Committee.

Less than a week later, on June 1, a second and anonymous IRS agent also testified under oath.

After the Justice Department announced its plea deal with Hunter Biden on Tuesday, the Ways and Means Committee, in a party-line vote Thursday, decided to release the transcripts.

In a tweet Friday, The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project raised the involvement of the White House and Department of Justice by asking: “Are we to believe that the WH/DOJ weren’t alerted to the explosive whistleblower testimony before [the transcripts were] released?” (The Heritage Foundation is the parent organization of The Daily Signal.)

If someone shared or leaked the IRS whistleblowers’ testimonies before the House committee authorized their release, it could be a violation of federal law (under 26 U.S. Code § 6103) regarding the confidentiality and disclosure of tax returns and information on such returns.

The law states that “no officer or employee of the United States, … shall disclose any return or return information obtained by him in any manner in connection with his service as such an officer or an employee or otherwise or under the provisions of this section.”

According to whistleblowers, IRS officials recommended that Hunter Biden be criminally charged with attempting to evade taxes, committing fraud, making false statements, willfully failing to file returns, and failing to provide information on over $8.3 million in income.

“Whistleblowers describe how the Biden Justice Department intervened and overstepped in a campaign to protect the son of Joe Biden by delaying, divulging, and denying an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes,” Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., said in a public statement.

The Daily Signal sought comment from spokespersons at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office on their awareness of the testimony before announcement of the plea deal. Neither responded.

The Daily Signal also sought comment from the office of Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, to ask whether any Democrats on the committee shared information with the White House or Justice Department.

Neal’s office did not respond to multiple phone and email inquiries.

2. ‘Sitting Here With My Father’

The Justice Department delayed authentication of messages between Hunter Biden and a Chinese business partner, the IRS’ Shapley, a supervisory agent, testified to House investigators.

“For example, in August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant. Unlike the laptop [abandoned by Hunter Biden at a Delaware repair shop], these came to the investigative team from a third-party record keeper and included a set of messages,” Shapley said.

The IRS supervisory agent went on to give an example:

We obtained a July 30th, 2017, WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to Henry Zhao, where Hunter Biden wrote: ‘I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.’

Shapley also testified that at a September 2020 meeting, Assistant U.S. Attorney for Delaware Lesley Wolf said there was “more than enough probable cause for the physical search warrant there, but the question was whether the juice was worth the squeeze.”

The prosecutor also said that “optics were a driving factor in the decision on whether to execute a search warrant,” the IRS agent testified.

3. White House Won’t Comment

During a White House press briefing Friday, a reporter asked National Security Council spokesman Adm. John Kirby about the whistleblower allegations concerning the text message from Hunter Biden to his Chinese business associate.

“I’m not going to comment further on this,” Kirby said. “I am not going to address this issue from this podium.”

He soon departed quickly, wishing reporters a good weekend.

Later in the same briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refused to  respond to reporters’ questions about the IRS whistleblowers’ testimonies. She instead referred reporters to the White House Counsel’s Office—which she said already has addressed the matter.

“I believe my colleague at the White House Counsel’s Office has answered this question, has dealt with this, has made it very clear,” Jean-Pierre told reporters. “I just don’t have anything to share outside of what my colleagues have shared. So I would refer you to him and the DOJ. I’m not going to comment from here.”

On Tuesday, when the Justice Department announced its plea deal with Hunter Biden, Ian Sams, a senior adviser to the counsel’s office, issued a written statement for the senior Biden.

In it, Sams said: “The President and First Lady love their son and support him as he continues to rebuild his life. We will have no further comment.”

Sams didn’t respond to an inquiry Friday from The Daily Signal after the White House press briefing. The Daily Signal asked whether either the White House or the Justice Department was made aware of what the two IRS agents said pending announcement of the plea deal with the president’s son.

However, it doesn’t appear that the White House Counsel’s Office has spoken to reporters about the IRS whistleblowers’ allegations.

Asked whether she stood by her earlier statement that Biden knew nothing about his son’s various business dealings, Jean-Pierre said, “Nothing has changed.”

Another reporter asked, referring to Hunter Biden’s text to the Chinese business associate saying his father was right there: “Have you spoken to the president about this? Have you asked him whether he was there with his son on July 30, 2017?”

Jean-Pierre answered: “This is not a conversation that I’ve had with the president. Again, I would refer you to the White House counsel.”

Biden’s press secretary also was asked whether the president would talk to the attorney general, Garland, about the matter.

“I cannot say if the president had a conversation with the attorney general about this,” she said.

4. ‘Weiss Requesting Special Counsel Authority’

U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss, a holdover from the Trump administration who is in charge of the Hunter Biden case, wanted to bring charges in the District of Columbia in March 2022, but was denied permission, according to testimony.

Weiss also sought special counsel status from the Justice Department in the spring of 2022, in order to conduct an independent inquiry. However, superiors also denied that request.

In the fall of 2022, Weiss requested to bring charges against the younger Biden in the Central District of California. The Justice Department denied that request in January.

“From March 2022 through Oct. 7, 2022, I was under the impression that, based on AG Garland’s testimony before Congress and statements by U.S. Attorney Weiss and prosecutors, that they were still deciding whether to charge 2014 and 2015 tax violations,” Shapley testified to House investigators.

“However, I would later be told by United States Attorney Weiss that the D.C. U.S. Attorney would not allow U.S. Attorney Weiss to charge those years in his district. This resulted in United States Attorney Weiss requesting special counsel authority from Main DOJ to charge in the District of Columbia,” the IRS supervisory agent testified.

“I don’t know if he asked before or after the attorney general’s April 26, 2022, statement, but Weiss said his request for that authority was denied and that he was told to follow DOJ’s process,” Shapley said.

5. Garland: Weiss Had Complete Discretion

During a press conference Friday, Garland responded to the whistleblowers’ allegations. As Biden’s attorney general, he previously had testified under oath before the Senate that the Weiss’ Delaware-based investigation would be completely independent…..

*****

Continue reading this article at The Daily Signal.

TAKE ACTION

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

Arizona News: June 26, 2023 thumbnail

Arizona News: June 26, 2023

/in , /by

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.

Arizona State University sees scrutiny over conservative event backlash

Is Katie Hobbs the Darth Vader of Arizona Politics?

Hobbs Vetoes Prop 400 Bill Leaving Voters With Fewer Choices

Hobbs Racks Up Vetoes Against Voter Confidence Bills

Kerr Outraged Over Hobbs Veto Of Public Safety Bills

Hobbs vetoes ban on ESG investments in Arizona

Corporation headquarters are moving to Florida, Texas and Arizona

Immigration Displacing U.S. Workers at Record Pace

Phoenix Considers Creation Of New Court To Handle Crimes Committed By Homeless

SCR 1015 Would Ensure That Our State’s Initiative Process Is For All Arizonans

Mohave Judge Assigned To Hamadeh Election Case Was Censured And Reprimanded In Past For Overdue Rulings

Former Arizona governor announced new CEO of free market PAC

State of emergency limit on 2024 Arizona ballot

Study: Federal biopharma policies could cost Arizona 11,000 jobs

TAKE ACTION

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

Anti-Pharma Dem Ruben Gallego Took Thousands In Campaign Cash From Drug Companies thumbnail

Anti-Pharma Dem Ruben Gallego Took Thousands In Campaign Cash From Drug Companies

/in , , /by

By Michael Ginsberg

Democratic Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego has accepted thousands of dollars in donations from individuals and political action committees (PACs) associated with major pharmaceutical companies and the healthcare industry despite frequently criticizing both, a Daily Caller review found.

Gallego, who is running for Senate against Independent Kyrsten Sinema, frequently blasts the former Democrat for her opposition to single-payer healthcare and perceived closeness with the pharmaceutical industry. However, Gallego’s campaign has accepted more than $30,000 from pharmaceutical company PACs since his first run for Congress, with the health sector providing the fourth-largest source of funds for his 2022 reelection bid.

Since his initial 2014 run for the House, Gallego has accepted $31,500 from political action committees associated with pharmaceutical companies. Notably, he took cash from Bristol Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly, two firms that congressional Democrats have accused of price-gouging. At the same time, however, Gallego blasted Sinema for initially opposing a price-fixing scheme that Democrats fought to include in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

“Kyrsten Sinema blocked key provisions for negotiating the cost of prescription drugs in the Inflation Reduction Act. Sinema’s support for Big Pharma over seniors on a fixed income makes her unfit to lead Arizona,” Gallego tweeted in April.

“Senator Sinema is calling herself an ‘independent’ now. Well, she’s not independent from Wall St, Big Pharma, or their pricey lobbyists,” he claimed after she left the Democratic Party. (RELATED: Dem Senate Candidate Obtained Special Mortgage For D.C. Home Despite Claiming Arizona As His Primary Residence)

The Gallego campaign did not respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment on whether or not he would return any campaign donations from pharmaceutical companies or employees. He also accepted more than $85,000 from individuals employed in the health sector during the 2022 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.

Despite running as a left-wing populist alternative to the centrist Sinema, Gallego’s Senate campaign has accepted cash from industries that he often criticizes. During the first quarter of 2023, he accepted more than $106,000 from employees of big banks and other major corporations. Gallego raised more money from lawyers than any other profession during Q1 of 2023.

Overall, Gallego raised more than $3.7 million in Q1 of 2023, and has more than $2.7 million on hand. Sinema raised $2.1 million in Q1 of 2023, and has more than $9.9 million on hand.

A series of surveys conducted by Public Policy Polling in April found Gallego leading a series of contests with Sinema and potential Republican candidates. In a matchup with former Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Gallego would garner 42%, Lake 35%, and Sinema 14%. Against Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb or businessman Jim Lamon, Gallego would similarly hold 43% support, while Sinema would gather 15% and 16% respectively.

*****

This article was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation 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.

OPINION: January 1 or December 6, Not June 19, Should Be the National Holiday thumbnail

OPINION: January 1 or December 6, Not June 19, Should Be the National Holiday

/in , , , /by

By Catherine Salgado

Today has been declared a national holiday—Juneteenth. But if we really want to celebrate a day that was a landmark in America’s journey toward a freer, less racist society, we should not be celebrating Juneteenth—we should be celebrating January 1, the day in 1863 when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, or December 6, the day the 13th Amendment was ratified. Or even February 3, the day the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870. And I believe the only reason the Democrats wanted this holiday is because it marks the date of a rare instance of a Democrat politician (Andrew Johnson, who was otherwise very racist) allowing an anti-slavery action. Indeed, the president in office when Juneteenth happened, Johnson, infamously wrote, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”

To be more clear. . .The Emancipation Proclamation was written and issued by Republican President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, and it freed all the slaves in Confederate territory and welcomed black soldiers into the US Army and Navy. Below is an excerpt from the Proclamation:

“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. . .

And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”

A magnificent document! In modern times, however, it is necessary to make a few clarifications. Firstly, Lincoln is often criticized for not freeing all slaves unconditionally. The answer is that he did not have the power to do so. While the words “slave” or “slavery” are never mentioned in the US Constitution, the slaves owned by those not in rebellion against the United States were legally considered property at the time, and Lincoln did not have the power as president to confiscate “property” from non-rebels. This is a not a mark of Lincoln’s racism, since we know that Lincoln later fought with extreme intensity for the passage of the official constitutional amendment which ended slavery once for all. Lincoln also called at least one former slave, Frederick Douglass, his “friend.”

Secondly, note that Lincoln specifically mentions that the Proclamation is in accord with the Constitution. Anti-slavery advocates such as Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and George Washington who had been disappointed to achieve no slavery ban in the Constitution had taken comfort in the fact—as noted above, per Madison—that “slave” and “slavery” are not mentioned at all in the Constitution. There is also no mentioned barrier of any sort according to race (in fact, Washington’s revolutionary army was fully racially integrated and black men could vote in most states in the early days after the Constitution was passed).

Lincoln had long before argued for rights for black Americans on the basis of precedent, and he clearly believed his Emancipation Proclamation was only continuing the work of freedom which the Constitution had begun, in full accord with the ultimate intentions of the Constitution’s most influential writers, like Madison.

Therefore, the Emancipation Proclamation was a history-changing document, a landmark achievement. A white man born and partly raised in the South declared that all slaves in Confederate territory were free, and that black men had the right to serve their country in the military. This same man sent forth an army mostly composed of white men (though the Proclamation ensured it was a multi-racial army) who were willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice—their lives—to prove that black men ought to be free.

Nearly half a century later, one of the slaves who had been freed by the Proclamation, Booker T. Washington, was invited to give a speech on Lincoln to a group of Republicans. Booker T. Washington’s opening words capture beautifully what the Emancipation Proclamation meant to the former slaves of America: “You ask that which he found a piece of property and turned into a free American citizen to speak to you tonight on Abraham Lincoln.”

So why not celebrate January 1? Well, New Year’s Day is already a national holiday, so that makes it a little impractical; though we could well celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation on that same day. Or we could celebrate December 6, since that was the day in 1865 that the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified—the Amendment that was uniquely Lincoln’s, though he did not live to see it officially ratified. After all, December 6 is therefore the day when slavery was officially and finally ended, without exceptions, in the United States (with 100% Republican support and only 23% Democrat support). Let December 6 be the holiday celebrating the end of American slavery. So why celebrate Juneteenth? What exactly happened today that is so important?

The answer is, not much. June 19 saw no pivotal point in the history of race relations in America. It “marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed.” I am very happy that the federal troops were ensuring that the last territory not continue to hold people in bondage.

But the reality is that this day was merely the end point of a work that was started by other men, years before. We celebrate July 4, 1776, not the day that the siege at Yorktown ended or the day Cornwallis’s army officially surrendered. In the same way, Constitution Day is September 17, the day the Constitution was signed by the Constitutional Convention delegates, not the day the last state accepted it. Why? Because the starting point—the first brave step, the first history-rocking move, is what qualifies for a national holiday. We celebrate the start, not the finish. Obviously everything that came after in both cases was important, very important, but that does not mean any of those other days automatically qualifies as a holiday.

So why is June 19 a holiday now? My answer is that the Democrats are trying to clean up their history. It is not that this day has never been celebrated before—of course it has. But it was made a federal holiday because the president under whom the federal troops were sent into Galveston was a Democrat, Andrew Johnson. Also, this holiday allows for Democrats to put in any significance they desire, because the major significance is not already obvious to everyone.

The president who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and pushed the 13th Amendment through Congress was a Republican, and the party that ultimately ensured the ratification of the 13th Amendment was the Republican party. Likewise, the 15th Amendment that gave black men the right to vote (as originally they had when the Constitution was ratified) was the special project of Republican President U.S. Grant, and it was passed by Republicans with not a single Democrat’s vote in favor. Democrats are erasing the true history of anti-slavery achievements to make themselves look good.

And Andrew Johnson, the Democrat president in office when “Juneteenth” happened? Johnson had owned slaves before the Civil War (only Democrats owned slaves by the time of the Civil War, by the way). He was a highly racist man, and he did not want justice for former slaves. Lincoln’s plan to give every former slave or his family “forty acres and a mule” was ruined deliberately by Johnson, who pardoned former Confederate Democrats so they could have their land back. “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men,” Johnson wrote.

Johnson “vetoed the Freedman’s Bureau Bill, designed to allocate land for the freedmen, provide schools for their children, and increase the Bureau’s legal power by setting up military courts in the southern states to protect the freedmen’s rights.” He furthermore “vetoed The Civil Rights Bill, which was designed to protect blacks against black codes and terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.” Unsurprising, considering the Ku Klux Klan was an entirely Democrat organization, founded by a former Confederate leader and war criminal, Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Johnson did not allow troops to go into Texas because he wanted to hasten the end of slavery or increase the rights of black Americans. Johnson was a disgusting racist, as the majority of his fellow Democrats have always been. If there is one president whose actions we should celebrate, it is not Andrew Johnson. I am all for having a national holiday to celebrate an important event in American history furthering the end of racism—but let it celebrate Lincoln, the president who called a black man his friend, not the president who believed blacks incapable of engaging in anything but “barbarism.”

*****

This article was published at Pro Deo et Libertate 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.

The U.S. Is Ruled by Heinerscheids thumbnail

The U.S. Is Ruled by Heinerscheids

/in , , , /by

By Craig J. Cantoni

They won’t rest until they get their fellow Heinerscheid, Donald Trump.

Heinerscheids on the left and right dominate the top of government, industry and media.

What is a Heinerscheid (high-nur-shide)?

A Heinerscheid is an upper-caste American from the Ivy League who has been hoodwinked to believe that a degree from a top-ranked school brings wisdom, common sense, and self-awareness.

In truth, the primary value of the degree is that it serves as an entrée into a network of other Heinerscheids.

Heinerscheids are experts at using their connections to acquire social, economic, and political power to advance themselves.  As a result, they hold influential positions in the echo chamber of a big corporation or big government, or big media, where they make multiples of what the average bloke makes, an amount that far exceeds what they contribute to the commonweal.

We’ll begin with Heinerscheids on the left and turn later to ones on the right.

Heinerscheids on the left have been steeped in crackpot race theory, marinated in social justice sophistry, and pickled in guilt over their gilded station in life.  They try to compensate for their silver spoon through hollow virtue signaling and communing with the so-called disadvantaged, believing that they are intellectually and morally superior to the middlebrows and lowbrows in Middle America.

The term Heinerscheid is eponymously derived from the name of a real person:  Alissa Heinerscheid.

Alissa Heinerscheid is the former Anheuser-Busch marketing executive and brand manager for Bud Light who thought it would be a swell idea to partner with the trans social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney in selling beer, or swill if you will.

Mulvaney supposedly has ten million followers on social media, a statistic that baffles me, because if I were on social media, I wouldn’t be interested in following even myself.  Mulvaney also was an actor in the stage production of the musical “The Book of Mormon.” Evidently, it’s okay to lampoon Mormons but not transsexuals and transgenders.   

Alissa Heinerscheid attended the Groton School, where the annual tuition is purported to be $60,000.  She went on to get degrees in English and literature from Harvard, and from there got an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the alma mater of Donald Trump.

No wonder she used the word “fratty” to describe Bud Lite drinkers.  She would know fratty.

It would be inaccurate to say that Alissa was born on third base.  Actually, she and others of her caste started the game of life with a five-run advantage and umpires who had been bribed to throw the game in their favor.

It’s possible for someone to be born and raised in a lower caste and still be a Heinerscheid, as long as the individual later went to the right college and now lives in the right neighborhood and parrots the right clichés and platitudes about diversity, social justice, and giving back to the community.  There are also a lot of Heinerscheid wannabes who don’t quite make the grade but strive to be accepted into the caste.  Joe Biden is one of them.

Heinerscheids on the right are from the same caste as those on the left, went to the same schools, and live in the same neighborhoods.  However, they differ from their counterparts on the left in not feeling guilty about their station in life, in not being woke, and in not demeaning the white working class, not that they really care about the working class or want to live among them.

If you believe as I do that the U.S. is in decline, then the fault lies with the Heinerscheids who have been running the country for the last half-century. It’s certainly not the fault of the proles, hoi polloi, and deplorables.

The lower castes weren’t responsible for the overthrow of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, the folly of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the bloody debacle of the Vietnam War, or the closing of the gold window in 1971, or the Arab Oil Embargo and its subsequent economic downturn, or the arming of the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, or the offshoring of their jobs, or the imbecility of the Iraq War, or the further imbecility of the Afghanistan War, or the rise of ISIS, or the decades of unsustainable deficit spending, or the tuition loan scam and the related greed of universities, or the never-ending propagation of government red tape and bureaucrats, or the economic fallout from the Federal Reserve’s easy money and zero interest rates.

On the last point, it should be noted that the Fed employs an estimated 300 Ph.D. economists.  It’s a safe bet that many of them are Heinerscheids.    

The partisan divide in Congress and the divide between the current and former administrations masks how alike the two sides are in pedigree.  There are a lot of Heinerscheids on both sides of the divide who are in the same good-ole-boy or good-ole-girl network, where, to repeat, they learned how to pull the levers of government, industry, and media in accumulating power, prestige, and wealth.

Yale is one of the breeding grounds.  Not only was the CIA born at Yale, but notable members of the university’s secret society of the Skull and Bones included JFK advisor McGeorge Bundy, President Herbert Walker Bush, President George W. Bush, Senator John Kerry, and Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee.

A small sample of the many other notable Yale graduates includes Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, William Buckley, Time Magazine Editor Fareed Zakaria, FedEx founder Frederick Smith, and Ron DeSantis, who also has a Harvard degree.

Georgetown is another breeding ground.  Some of its notable graduates include Lyndon Johnson, Antonin Scalia, Bill Clinton, Robert Gates, Steve Bannon, Jerome Powell, Paul Pelosi (husband of Nancy Pelosi), Hunter Biden, Tiffany Trump, and Eric Trump.

Harvard graduates have permeated government, industry, and media even more.   A list of the 100 most notable Harvard graduates is at this link:

100 Notable alumni of Harvard University

It’s telling that eight of the nine Supreme Court justices are from the Ivy League.  Are we to believe that other law schools don’t produce expert constitutional jurists?

What about Donald Trump?  Is he a Heinerscheid?  He certainly is by pedigree.

Until the seventh grade, Trump attended the private Kew-Forest School in Queens, where his wealthy father was a member of the school’s governing board, and where the current tuition is about $40,000 per year.  Due to unruly behavior, he was then sent to the New York Military Academy (NYMA) in Cornwall-On-Hudson in upstate New York, where the current annual tuition and fees for boarding students total $53,000.

Trump went on to get a degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

He certainly knew how to operate the levers of power in New York City, a city awash in Heinerscheids.  Leveraging his inherited wealth and connections, he built a real estate empire, and, knowing how to play the Heinerscheids in the media, he got his own TV show and nearly constant media coverage locally and nationally.  In a very real sense, he is a product of Heinerscheids.

Now they hate him, not for being narcissistic and obnoxious, but for being a traitor to his caste. Instead of playing the Heinerscheid game, whether on the side of the right or left, he violated the rules of the game and exposed the Heinerscheids for the hypocrites and phonies they are.

There’s nothing like a scorned Heinerscheid.  They won’t rest until they get him.

TAKE ACTION

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

Voting Machine Printer Company Says Maricopa Election Day Report ‘Inaccurate,’ Seeks Correction thumbnail

Voting Machine Printer Company Says Maricopa Election Day Report ‘Inaccurate,’ Seeks Correction

/in , , /by

By Natalia Mittelstadt

The printer company said Maricopa County did not contact them during the investigation into Election Day printer issues.

A printer company says a report by Arizona’s Maricopa County on errors at voting centers on Election Day 2022 is “factually inaccurate” and is seeking a correction from the county attorney’s office.

Ballot printer issues at more than 70 vote centers in the county on Election Day last year resulted in long lines because tabulator machines could not read some of the voters’ ballots.

The county commissioned former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor to investigate the matter and write a report, which directed some of the blame on Japan-based printer company Oki Electric Industry Co.

The report, which was released in April, found that between the August primaries and the November general contest last year, the county expanded the length of ballots from 19 to 20 inches to include all of the required information for the races.

The increased ballot size in combination with the use of 100-pound ballot paper, the report concludes, was too great a strain on the printers.

“We concluded that the combined effect of using 100-pound ballot paper and a 20-inch ballot during the 2022 general election was to require that the Oki B432 printers perform at the extreme edge of their capability, a level that could not be reliably sustained by a substantial number of printers,” the report reads.

OKI responded late last month to the report by saying it was never contacted by county officials and investigation teams working on their behalf. Furthermore, the company said, neither election services providers nor “any other parties associated with the investigation” contacted OKI….

*****

Continue reading this article at Just the News.

TAKE ACTION

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

Weekend Read: What Good Comes from Gain-of-Function? thumbnail

Weekend Read: What Good Comes from Gain-of-Function?

/in , , , , , /by

By Thomas Buckley

Prior to the pandemic, the term “gain of-function [GOF] research” was rarely heard outside the confines of a laboratory or a government bureaucrat’s office.

COVID changed all that and the term, its GOF abbreviation, and the debate over its implications took center stage in the international pandemic discussion.

Researchers, members of the public health nomenklatura, elected officials, and just regular folks whose lives were upended and freedoms stripped by the overwhelming, overreaching, and over-the-top response to the pandemic all grappled with the idea of GOF as they tried to defend, downplay, question, or just get even the vaguest handle on the cause and meaning of the pandemic.

What is GOF? Is GOF dangerous? Who is paying for GOF research? Why is GOF research being done? Is GOF responsible for the pandemic or did GOF help fight the pandemic – or both?

One question – oddly enough – was not often asked: Has gain-of-function research ever worked?

And even more oddly – more ominously, as well – the answer is no, it has never worked as advertised to the public.

And if something that has never worked, something knowingly pointless, as it were, turns out to be the actual cause of the pandemic – that GOF did indeed lead to the creation of COVID – that adds a level of incompetence, intentionality, and infuriating futility to the misery of the past three years that is truly numbing.

The risk/reward calculation under those circumstances is very clear – zero chance of reward for performing an infinitely risky act. Performing any activity – from crossing the street to breeding superbugs in a lab – with those odds is unconscionable.

So what exactly is GOF? That in and of itself is difficult to specify as the term has been used to describe a number of different concepts, possibly in order to mystify the public and obfuscate the significant risks inherent in the process as it relates to virus enhancement.

The general definition offered to the public by officials during the pandemic was essentially this: GOF takes a virus and enhances its lethality to, or transmissibility amongst, humans in order to be able to study the resulting bug to speed the search for a potential treatment if and when the virus evolves in nature to the same danger point.

In other words, if scientists can work with the possible superbugs, now they can get a “head start” and be better prepared to fight them in the future if they should appear naturally (zoonotically) and threaten humans.

By that definition – a common, descriptive, and precise definition – gain-of-function has never worked.

Admittedly, it may have “worked” if a different goal was in mind. First, if a more plausible reason for engaging in the practice – the creation of bioweapons – has resulted in a “success” it will obviously never be made known to the public.

Second, it can be said to have worked if the actual point of GOF is to sell vaccines, etc. in response to a new bug; in fact, in that (admittedly hyper-cynical but far from impossible) scenario, GOF has worked in spades (the recent Senate report that claims China was working on a COVID vaccine even before the rest of the world had heard of the virus may bolster this awful explanation.)

“Enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (research) has no civilian applications,” said Dr. Richard Ebright, a Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology. “In particular, it is not needed for, and has not contributed to, developing any vaccine or drug, preventing any outbreak, or controlling any outbreak.”

Then why do it?

Here is where the slippery definition issue raises its ugly head.

Dr. Ralph Baric is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and has been a self-described “reluctant spokesman” for GOF for nearly a decade.

He has a very different opinion on the matter.

When contacted and asked if GOF has ever worked, Baric, before quickly ending the telephone call, said “Yeah, I don’t think I want to participate in this discussion, but there are examples – look harder.”

“Looking harder” found, amongst other things, a Technology Review article in which Baric did expand upon the process. First and foremost, he said:

“Human beings have practiced gain-of-function for the last 2,000 years, mostly in plants, where farmers would always save the largest seeds from the healthiest plants to replant the following year. The reason we can manage to have 7 billion people here on the planet is basically through direct or indirect genetic engineering through gain-of-function research. The simple definition of gain-of-function research is the introduction of a mutation that enhances a gene’s function or property—a process used commonly in genetic, biologic, and microbiologic research.”

By that definition, breeding dogs for specific traits (lungs and height for sighthounds like Irish wolfhounds, roly-poly skin and coat for guard dogs like Shar-Peis, etc.) is an example of GOF, as is cross-breeding roses to get different colors.

In the current context, that is disingenuous at best, purposefully obtuse at worst – by that logic, the Earth and Jupiter are the same thing because they are both planets.

Baric does admit that the “classic” definition of GOF changed somewhat about a dozen years ago when the H5N1 avian flu virus was intentionally modified. H5N1 was already known to be particularly nasty to humans but, thankfully, it had a very tough time making the jump to humans. The virus was modified to make it more easily transmittable in order, it was claimed, to be able to better study and develop defenses against it if and when it did make the jump.

Citing that as GOF successes, Baric said in the article that two drugs – including remdesivir of COVID fame – emerged from the process.

Other experts in the field do not see the H5N1 work as qualifying as a “success” for GOF.

“H5N1’s lethality was already known and it was so close already,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine and a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration that called for an entirely different, far more targeted approach to dealing with the pandemic. “Proponents of GOF cannot take credit for that.”

Bhattacharya also finds it odd that said proponents of GOF must point to such wobbly “evidence” as the H5N1 episode to support their claims.

“Given the amount of investment and the attention GOF has gotten, you would think the supporters would be more forceful in telling the world of their success,” Bhattacharya said. “Given that it is so potentially consequential, the public deserves more transparency.”

Kevin Esvelt, a biology professor at MIT, agrees with Bhattacharya. “The public has never heard about it (working) because virus enhancement has, to my knowledge, never directly contributed to any real-world treatment or intervention,” Esvelt said.

Esvelt also sees different definitions applying to different concepts and processes. For example, he notes that all bioengineering involves a type of “gain-of-function” but that it is only concerning, or problematic, when the function gained is the transmissibility or virulence of a pathogen. Instead, he defines the specific process that Baric and Wuhan Institute of Virology engage in as “virus enhancement.”

Even so, the entire raison d’etre of the “make viruses nastier in the lab so we can better fight them in the future” concept is inherently, irrevocably, and dangerously flawed.

“The notion that you’d get the same outcome in the lab as will occur in nature is implausible. Evolution isn’t that reproducible even under controlled conditions, and of course nature applies different conditions. So the ‘learn which mutations are dangerous’ argument doesn’t hold much water,” Esvelt said.

In other words, GOF researchers are basically trying to hit the evolutionary lotto – “Hey, look at that – it evolved EXACTLY how we predicted.” Since that has not occurred, that leads to other questions regarding its necessity, including that its usefulness may not at all lay in its publicly-stated purpose.

The fact that – by default – super viruses have inherent bioweapon possibilities and the military-style response to the pandemic have led many to wonder about its real purpose.

Remember – Ebright used the word “civilian.”

As to COVID itself, in 2015, Baric worked with Dr. Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in China, which created a so-called chimera by combining the “spike” gene from a new bat virus with the backbone of a second virus. (A spike gene determines how well a virus attaches to human cells.)

In that article, Baric stressed that his lab did not cooperate too closely with the WIV – “Let me make it clear that we never sent any of our molecular clones or any chimeric viruses to China,” Baric said.

Baric said he believes COVID to have emerged zoonotically but does admit the possibility of sloppy lab work and has steadfastly called for hyper-vigilant lab security protocols globally. He did, however, add that “(A)s the pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 is so complex, the thought that anybody could engineer it is almost ludicrous.”

As to the definition of exactly what GOF is, it seems Baric believes it is in the eye-of-the-beholder – or at least the befunder – “Ultimately, a committee at the NIH is the final arbiter and makes the decision about what is or is not a gain-of-function experiment,” Baric said.

Which brings us back to exactly what the NIH thinks qualifies as GOF.

According to this 2021 paper by a trio of Johns Hopkins researchers titled “COVID‐19 and the gain of function debates,” that imprecision makes any discussion of the true impact of GOF exceedingly difficult.

“(T)he fuzzy and imprecise nature of the term GOF has led to misunderstandings and has hampered discussions on how to properly assess the benefit of such experiments and biosafety measures,” the paper states.

While the National Institutes of Health did not reply to repeated emails and telephone messages asking for their current definition or even a comment on the subject, it seems the NIH itself looks at it this way, with GOF acting as a possible means to enhance a pathogen (nasty microbe, virus, etc.). From a 2017 report (on the proper future oversight of GOF projects after they had been paused in the United States out of safety concerns for four years):

“A potential pandemic pathogen (PPP) is one that satisfies both of the following:

2.2.1. It is likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations, and

2.2.2. It is likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.

2.3. An enhanced PPP is a PPP resulting from the enhancement of a pathogen’s transmissibility and/or virulence. Wild-type pathogens that are circulating in or have been recovered from nature are not enhanced PPPs, regardless of their pandemic potential. “

It is the enhancing of pathogens that the NIH now considers a type of GOF research, though this was not always the definition it used, a fact highlighted by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul in a tense exchange with the inexplicably powerful bureaucrat Dr. Anthony Fauci. Paul noted that shortly before that November 2021 hearing the definition on the NIH website had been changed; Fauci side-stepped the question of why that was done but did admit the term itself is “nebulous.”

Here is the original definition the senator was referring to:

“The term gain-of-function (GOF) research describes a type of research that modifies a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent. Some scientists use the term broadly to refer to any such modification. However, not all research described as GOF entails the same level of risk. For example, research that involves the modification of bacteria to allow production of human insulin, or the altering of the genetic program of immune cells in CAR-T cell therapy to treat cancer generally would be considered low risk. The subset of GOF research that is anticipated to enhance the transmissibility and/or virulence of potential pandemic pathogens, which are likely to make them more dangerous to humans, has been the subject of substantial scrutiny and deliberation. Such GOF approaches can sometimes be justified in laboratories with appropriate biosafety and biosecurity controls to help us understand the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, assess the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and preparedness efforts, including surveillance and the development of vaccines and medical countermeasures. This research poses biosafety and biosecurity risks, and these risks must be carefully managed.”

Here is what it was changed to:

“This research can help us understand the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, assess the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents such as viruses and inform public health and preparedness efforts, including surveillance and the development of vaccines and medical countermeasures. While such research is inherently risky and requires strict oversight, the risk of not doing this type of research and not being prepared for the next pandemic is also high. While ePPP (enhanced potential pandemic pathogen) research is a type of so called “gain-of-function” (GOF) research, the vast majority of GOF research does not involve ePPP and falls outside the scope of oversight required for research involving ePPPs.”

Even with the devastation that was likely caused by GOF, the NIH still appears to be playing fast and loose with the process, the definitions, and the safety regulations.

Ebright said that “(A)t least approximately two dozen current NIH-funded projects appear to include enhanced potential pandemic pathogens research as defined in the P3CO Framework (approximately a dozen involving enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens other than SARS-CoV-2, and at least approximately another dozen involving enhancement of SARS-CoV-2,)” Ebright said. “None have received the risk-benefit review mandated under the P3CO Framework.”

For a complete look at the current oversight – i.e. risk reduction – framework, see here:

Take monkeypox, for example. Science Magazine reports that “In a U.S. government lab in Bethesda, Maryland, virologists plan to equip the strain of the monkeypox virus that spread globally this year, causing mostly rash and flu-like symptoms, with genes from a second monkeypox strain that causes more serious illness. Then they’ll see whether any of the changes make the virus more lethal to mice. The researchers hope that unraveling how specific genes make monkeypox more deadly will lead to better drugs and vaccines.”

Esvelt also questioned the benefits of the GOF process even if it worked:

“And even if GOF was predictive, what intervention is going to change as a result? Are we going to develop a vaccine because it might accumulate the remaining mutations and spill over into humans? How are we going to test its efficacy against a presumably lethal, pandemic-capable virus that hasn’t yet infected any human and might never do so?” asked Esvelt.

GOF could be an example of scientific “white whaleism,” the maniacal search for something that carries only personal meaning – Ahab’s Moby Dick – just for the sake of the search, the chance to prove something to others that needs not proving, the doing of something out of a tunnel vision obsession that will bring no tangible benefit and only the very real risk of catastrophe to others.

“There are no cost-benefit analyses and no vaccine manufacturers clamoring for the data. It seems to be entirely driven by the all-knowledge-is-worth-having assumption” said Esvelt.

As with any complicated, insecure, obscure, purposefully obtuse system, a fog-filled gray area exists around GOF and it must never be forgotten that gray areas are very convenient, very deniable places in which to hide questionable conduct.

Did COVID spring from gain-of-function research in a Chinese lab? At this point, it seems somewhere between likely and probable that it did, protestations of the Chinese government and those reliant on government – doesn’t matter which government – funding aside.

Why is GOF being performed? As it has never worked as advertised in the past, a logical possibility is that it could be useful for certain military applications and, of course, it may remain theoretically possible that some remote, ephemeral upside may someday occur…if the researchers get very very very lucky.

Did the United States help pay for the research? Despite Fauci’s claims – which showed him to be either a liar or an incompetent or both – the answer is yes and the NIH is still funding GOF research, seemingly with questionable oversight (see above.) Overall, hundreds of millions of dollars (a precise figure is unavailable for obvious reasons) have gone into GOF research globally.

Is GOF dangerous? Though almost all lab-based scientific research and advancements carry at least a tiny element of risk, nothing like the level of terminal, global, and trans-generational risk of GOF has – to the public’s knowledge – been undertaken since the Manhattan Project and the study of radiation. And even that had very specific, very probable, and very real and tangible benefits (useful for “pure” or basic science, ending World War II, power generation, nuclear medicine, etc.) that GOF cannot begin to claim.

Did GOF create and either/or help end the pandemic? Those are million-dollar questions.

Speaking of a million dollars, the effort to contact Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – which took its cut of the money it funneled from the NIH to the WIV for gain-of-function research for comment for this article was unsuccessful.

But the effort did lead to one of the saddest moments of irony possible, though. When you call the EcoHealth office, this is the message – to this day – you hear: “Our office is currently closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

*****
This article was published by Brownstone Institute 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.

Gov. Hobbs Vetoes Homeless Crackdown Bill, Six Others in One Day thumbnail

Gov. Hobbs Vetoes Homeless Crackdown Bill, Six Others in One Day

/in , , , /by

By Carly Moran

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed Senate Bill 1413, a bill that would have made homeless encampments on private property trespassing.

The bill would have also allowed cities to remove homeless encampments’ property if after a warning they are not claimed within 24 hours. If not claimed within 14 days, the property would be destroyed. Counties and municipalities would be required to clean the area.

In Hobbs’ June 5 veto letter to Senate President Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, she stated there are more constitutional solutions to the state’s homeless issue.

“People become and remain unsheltered for a variety of reasons,” Hobbs said. “This legislation addresses none of those root causes, offers no pathways to assistance, and effectively criminalizes experiencing homelessness. I invite you to join me in pursuing more productive solutions that respect human and constitutional rights.”

Sen. Justine Wadsack, R-Tucson, offered a veto response regarding her legislation.

“This bill was to serve as a tool for municipalities to use in an effort to get these individuals off the streets and into services connecting them to shelter, sanitation facilities, health care and meals,” Wadsack said. “Various outreach groups, like Gospel Rescue Mission, have availability right now to serve these individuals and get them back on their feet. If Governor Hobbs’ goal is to turn Arizona into California, her veto of this bill will surely contribute to our state’s demise.”

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2022 Point-in-Time Estimates of Homelessness Report, Arizona has more than 13,000 homeless people. While there was only a 1% national increase in homelessness, Arizona experienced a 23% jump in its homeless population between 2020 and 2022.

SB 1413 was one of seven bills vetoed by Hobbs that day. Others include a bill that would have amended certain election laws and a bill that would have made showing sexually explicit imagery to students a felony.

*****

This 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.

21 Federal Agencies Promote Pride Month With Taxpayer Dollars thumbnail

21 Federal Agencies Promote Pride Month With Taxpayer Dollars

/in , , , , /by

By Gigi De La Torre

While a number of companies have faced public criticism for promoting LGBTQ Pride Month in June, federal organizations promoting “pride” activities have mostly flown under the radar.

One of the few times a federal entity came close to being scrutinized occurred when the Navy deleted a pride post on its Instagram account.

Even after that incident, the Navy continued to promote Pride Month with the publication of an official memorandum on Twitter announcing the Navy’s 2023 pride theme: “Peace, Love, Resolution.”

The nautical military branch was simply following its commander in chief’s directive. The White House has made several announcements promoting and encouraging others to celebrate Pride Month, including by publishing a press release, posting on Twitter, and changing the official White House’s Twitter header to a pride logo. 

Other military branches and federal organizations such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the United States Postal Service, and the Department of Veterans Affairs followed the White House’s example and are promoting Pride Month.

Though this list is not exhaustive, here are 21 federal and federally funded organizations that promote Pride Month with taxpayer dollars:

  1. The Smithsonian Museums: The taxpayer-funded museums offer a lineup of LGBTQ events for the month of June, including sexuality talks and “drag story hours” featuring “drag queens” reading books to children.
  2. CIA: The Central Intelligence Agency announced its support for Pride Month with a puzzling theme: “WELCO-ME.” The acronym stands for “Wellness Equity LGBTQ+ Community Openness ME,” according to the Twitter post.
  3. FBI: The bureau announced its support of Pride Month on Twitter by thanking its LGBTQ employees for their service, dedication, and “perspectives.” While the bureau accepts LGBTQ perspectives, it has actively targeted Catholic perspectives.
  4. Department of Labor: This Pride Month, the Department of Labor says that it will “joyfully celebrate” LGBTQ employees by offering “guidance to workforce development on gender identity, gender expression, and sex stereotyping.”
  5. Department of State: On Twitter, the State Department encouraged individuals to view their “LGBTQI+ travel safety page.” It said in a press statement, “We strongly oppose the ‘otherization’ of LGBTQI+ persons to justify authoritarian power grabs and attacks on institutions of democracy globally.”
  6. Department of Education: Rather than focus on increasing the overall math, science, or literary scores of American children, the Department of Education decided it was more important to create this pride post on Twitter: “Our message to LGBTQI+ students, teachers, and staff as we begin #PrideMonth: ED has got your back.”
  7. Department of Agriculture: The Department of Agriculture connected pride to farming in a Twitter post that showed a poster with the words “2023 Pride Month: Changing the Landscape.”
  8. U.S. Agency for International Development: This federally funded world development organization claims that its “efforts are both from and for the American people.” It released its “first-ever LGBTQI+ Inclusive Development Policy” and is giving money through the organization’s “Rainbow Fund” to missions that “integrate LGBTQI+ considerations into their programming.”
  9. NASA: Johnson Space Center celebrates Pride Month by participating in Houston’s parade and events and by permitting employees to wear LGBTQ attire on Wednesdays during June. It also has various employee LGBTQ-themed socials planned.
  10. USPS: The Postal Service continues to promote Pride Month through LGBTQ-themed stamps. The USPS announced these pride stamps via a post on Twitter: “We’re proud to continue honoring influential groundbreakers like Harvey Milk, Sally Ride, Isadora Duncan, Ellsworth Kelly, and Emilio Sanchez on our stamps and your envelopes.” The Postal Service also posted on June 8 that it offers special scholarships for LGBTQ individuals.
  11. Veterans Affairs: Under the theme “We All Have a Seat at the Table,” the United States Department of Veterans Affairs is holding its third annual “virtual Pride Month.” This monthlong event features online seminars on topics that include “A Legal Guide to LGBTQ Couples,” “Healthcare and Fertility Preservation for Transgender Patients,” and “A Clinical Guide to Gender-Affirming Prosthetics,” to name a few.
  12. Army: Instead of producing its own Twitter post, the Army retweeted Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s press release honoring “LGBTQ Service Members.”
  13. Marines: Out of all the military branches, the Marines came the closest to not endorsing Pride Month. The only public support we found was a retweet of the Navy’s Twitter post on participating in the Department of Defense’s 12th annual Pride Month celebration and a public announcement on its website recognizing the service of LGBTQ service members.
  14. Navy: The military branch promoted Pride Month with the publication of an official memorandum on Twitter announcing the Navy’s 2023 pride theme: “Peace, Love, Resolution.” The Navy also participated in the Department of Defense’s 12th annual Pride Month celebration.
  15. Air Force: The Air Force saluted Pride Month in its Twitter pride post. So far, it has hosted two pride events on air bases, one of which included a presentation by LGBTQ officer Lt. Col. Bree Fram during a Pride Month luncheon at Altus Air Force Base.
  16. Space Force: Like most of the other military branches, the Space Force recognized its LGBTQ service members through a pride post on its Twitter account.
  17. Department of Justice: In a news release from “Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in Honor of Pride Month,” the DOJ posted a fact sheet on its work to defend LGBTQ individuals.
  18. Department of Transportation: On Twitter, the Department of Transportation published a poster that contained a pride-themed, Black Lives Matter fist logo with the word “pride” on the poster.
  19. Department of Energy: How energy relates to Pride Month is still unknown; nonetheless, the department felt a need to endorse the LGBTQ community by creating a pride-themed logo and posting, “When everyone has a seat at the table, America is at its strongest.”
  20. Department of Homeland Security: Like other organizations, the Department of Homeland Security announced its endorsement of Pride Month by posting a video of the department raising the LGBTQ flag at its headquarters.
  21. Library of Congress: The nation’s library sponsored Pride Month by encouraging readers to check out its LGBTQ books. The library is set to host a number of pride events this June; however, The Daily Signal was unable to view them as the webpage was down.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal 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.

ASU Advocates For Pornographic LGBTQ+ Books In K-12 thumbnail

ASU Advocates For Pornographic LGBTQ+ Books In K-12

/in , , /by

By Corinne Murdock

Arizona State University (ASU) advocated for keeping pornographic LGBTQ+ books in K-12 classrooms.

The university featured commentary from professors on the subject as part of a feature story dedicated to Pride Month issued last week.

“In June, Pride Month is a time to promote inclusivity, raise awareness and celebrate the contributions the LGBTQ+ community has made to society,” read the article.

ASU classified an explicit graphic novel, “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” as an example of a banned book that qualified as a source of knowledge. The book details a wide variety of gay sexual acts and fantasies carried out by minors and adults.

English professor Gabriel Acevedo, who focuses some of his teaching on expanding students’ knowledge of LGBTQ+ literature, said that banning these kinds of books would limit students’ intellectual growth.

“By limiting that knowledge or not providing access to it, we are underestimating the student’s abilities to make choices that fit their lives,” said Acevedo. “We learn by reading. We learn by engaging these topics. If we don’t know these topics (because) we don’t engage with these materials, are we learning?”

School of Social Transformation Justice and Social Inquiry professor Madelaine Adelman said that LGBTQ+ content in K-12 schools is important for fostering acceptance.

“Why would they want to be in a place where they don’t feel accepted? Why would they want to continue their education in that space?” said Adelman.

Adelman co-founded the Phoenix chapter of the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in 2002 and served as its co-chair until 2013. Adelman was also a founding member of GLSEN’s National Advisory Council in 2004, departing the council in 2013. Adelman joined GLSEN’s Board of Directors in 2010.

The GLSEN Phoenix chapter appears wherever controversy over sexualizing children occurs. Recurring issues arise with GLSEN’s network of Gay-Straight Alliance or Gender-Sexuality Alliance (GSA) clubs in schools. GLSEN Phoenix also conducts LGBTQ+ affirmation training that schools have required teachers to attend, such as Cocopah Middle School.

In December 2021, GLSEN Phoenix urged teachers to create secret libraries to hide controversial or banned content.

Over the last few years, GLSEN has spoken out against bills to protect minors, such as last year’s ban on gender transition surgeries.

The Arizona Department of Education (ADE) had a working relationship with GLSEN under former Superintendent Kathy Hoffman.

ASU and GLSEN have numerous other ties, including the program manager for the Transgender Education Program (TEP), Cammy Bellis. Her work at ASU over the past decade concerned establishing greater awareness and normalization of LGBTQ+ lifestyles in K-12 environments.

One of the GLSEN Phoenix board members who encouraged the creation of secret libraries in schools, Andi Young, recently received her master’s degree in social work from ASU. Young is currently the co-chair of the board, and serves as a therapist/licensed master social worker with Beckstein Behavioral Health. Young describes herself as an “LGBTQ-affirming therapist” that assists teenagers and adults in living their “full, true, authentic selves.”

*****

This article was published by AZ Free News 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.

Climate Ideology in America’s Classrooms thumbnail

Climate Ideology in America’s Classrooms

/in , , , /by

By Peter Murphy

America’s K-12 classrooms are increasingly becoming indoctrination centers for a one-sided view of climate change, aka, global warming and the supposed existential threat to humankind. The Biden administration, universities, left-of-center think tanks and state governments are developing and spreading climate change curriculum that also contains an explicit activist bent to turn the nation’s children into climate crusaders.

While climate and weather issues are not a recent curriculum topic in America’s elementary and secondary school classrooms, the teaching and content has accelerated in recent years.

By 2013 the Next Generation Science Standards were developed by the National Research Council and other non-profit groups, along with two dozen states. These standards recommended that “man-made climate change” be taught beginning in the fifth grade and incorporated into all science classes.

The degree to which states comply with these or other climate standards remains voluntary. In 2020, the National Center for Science Education and the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund—organizations that fanatically embrace global warming—assigned “grades” on the extent states adopted climate change curriculum and indoctrination. Twenty-seven states received a grade of “B+” or higher on their respective climate curriculum, while 20 states got a “C+” or lower, among which ten received “D” and six states received an “F” grade.

As with two sides of the same ideological coin, the embrace of human causation as the “predominant” factor in a changing climate coincides with activism in climate curriculum, including assignments and projects for students to undertake to save the planet.

According to Radhika Iyengar, director of education at the Columbia University Climate School, which promotes one-sided climate education, the teaching of climate change should include “caring for each other and caring for the planet,” he said. “If you’re not emotionally connected with your environment, it’s very difficult to save it.”

Climate writer Renee Cho further described climate education this way: “What helps students deal with their feelings are solutions, so teachers need to offer opportunities for collective action and problem solving…promoting understanding of environmental justice issues …also introducing a spiritual connection with nature.”

Man-made climate indoctrination is what is sought for children, and it is spreading in America’s K-12 public schools.

In 2020, New Jersey became the first state to mandate climate curriculum across all subjects beginning in kindergarten, including science, social studies, physical education, computer science, and the arts — both visual and performing arts.

Last year, Connecticut followed suit by adopting a law to require science classes to include lessons on man-made climate change, its impact, and potential solutions. State assessments for grades 5, 8, and 11 include questions about students’ understanding of climate change.

In Massachusetts, in the current 2023 school year, more than a dozen high schools have adopted a pilot climate education program developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Climate Action Through Education (CATE) program. The program developers are looking to spread the curriculum nationwide that will include lessons for subject areas beyond science and “opportunities for students to explore climate solutions.”

MIT professor Christopher Knittel, the leader of the CATE program, said, “we will be honest about the threats posed by climate change but also give students a sense of agency that they can do something about this.”

Still, other one-sided climate change education programs are listed here, which invariably go back to manipulating children’s emotions and turning them into political activists.

The Nature Conservancy is about preparing students “for the world ahead and empowering them to advocate for change.” Its climate educator, Jaime Gonzalez said, “I would literally start with footage of people being rescued from Hurricane Harvey,” then explain how climate change “made the storm more destructive.” Historical storm activity is ignored since it refutes such drivel.

The Biden administration also is infusing one-sided climate education. The U.S. Department of Education’s “climate action” plan is about “support[ing] states, districts, schools, and institutions of higher education by disseminating resources related to school facilities and climate education.” Multiple federal agencies also have established curriculum content, including the EPA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation.

A report released in April 2023 by Teachers College at Columbia University claims that 80 percent of parents surveyed support climate change being taught in elementary and secondary schools, although the level of support varies by ideology, according to the authors.

However, parental support for climate curriculum as part of their child’s education does not necessarily translate to embracing the ideological one-sided nature of climate curriculum.

Two separate polls conducted in the last year by OnMessage, Inc. and the Senate Opportunity Fund found overwhelming support across party and ideological lines that: Schools should be focused on teaching the basics and stop focusing on pushing a political philosophy. Parents should be able to move their children to a different school if they believe their school has become too political.

The evidence that most parents and teachers support climate change education should be part of K-12 curriculum, combined with their opposition to political agendas and ideology in the classroom, provides an opportunity to fill the void in America’s classrooms. Children deserve climate facts and realities by using scientifically sound, agenda-free climate components to K-12 curriculum.

*****

This article was published by CFACT, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow 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.

No One Voted for Administrative Rule Constraining Every Aspect of Our Lives thumbnail

No One Voted for Administrative Rule Constraining Every Aspect of Our Lives

/in , , , , /by

By GianCarlo Canapro

The federal government has threatened to withhold Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program funds from a Catholic hospital in Oklahoma because the staff keeps one small candle burning in its chapel. It’s tiny, encased in glass, and kept far away from medical equipment, but the feds insist it’s a safety risk.

It’s absurd, but not surprising. Absurdities are a feature of administrative rule.

What is administrative rule? It’s a system of government where nearly every aspect of Americans’ lives is regulated by obnoxious laws that nobody voted on, enforced by pedantic bureaucrats who nobody voted for.

The candle is just one example. There are many.

Federal water regulators are fighting a 16-year-long battle to prevent the owners of a dry plot of land from building a home, under the theory that the land contains “navigable waters” because it is connected by a road to a marsh, by marsh to a ditch, by ditch to a creek, and by creek to a river.

And state governments have ticketed and fined children for running lemonade stands without the proper food and beverage licenses.

Administrative rule is America’s system of government. We were a republic once, but our representatives didn’t like the pressure of governing, so they foisted the responsibility onto a massive bureaucracy.

How massive? Nobody knows exactly how many agencies there are. And nobody has a clue how many rules and regulations they administer.

We know that there are hundreds of thousands of pages of laws and regulations. We know that our administrative agencies publish thousands more every year. But nobody knows how many rules they contain. Neither the smartest lawyer, nor the most learned judge has the slightest clue what the law, in total, is.

And that’s just the federal law. State legislatures have followed Congress’ bad example and foisted their jobs onto state agencies.

This is a problem. None of us voted for, or has any ability to vote against, any of these laws. And nobody, short of our buck-passing congressmen, can fire the bureaucrats who make them. Self-government is more faded memory than reality.

What’s more, nobody can possibly comply with the law because nobody can know it. And where, as in America, the law regulates nearly everything an American does, one’s life is full of invisible legal traps. Losing federal funding is the risk posed by some of these traps. But others will strip one of his business, his job or his freedom.

Even the most lawful and conscientious American can fall into jail by tripping over some arcane regulation about recycling bottles or packaging lobsters.

It’s bad enough that bureaucrats fuss over the little details of our lives. But where things go from bad to worse is when bias creeps in.

Some bureaucrats are doubtless well-intentioned, albeit in the overbearing way that nannies supervising unruly children are. But some are not. Some of them are power-trippers. Others are discriminators. Some are both and enjoy using their power to harm people they don’t like.

In the case of the candle in the hospital chapel, it could be that the hospital’s regulator just loves rules for rules’ sake. The finger-wagging type: “Well, technically the law does say all flames must be supervised at all times.”

Or perhaps the regulator hates religious organizations and people.

It would be easy to rummage through the hundreds of thousands of laws to find one or two to throw at religious people or any other group of people a regulator dislikes.

There are too many rules for people to know, so they cannot conform their behavior to them. And there are too many rules for bureaucrats to enforce equally, so bureaucrats are free to pick and choose their targets.

This is the greatest problem of a system of administrative laws: it tends to become a system of no laws at all. It replaces the rule of laws—general, equal and knowable—with the rule of men who enforce unknowable decrees unequally and with absolute discretion. And so, 10,000 little rules become 10,000 little tyrannies.

If there is to be any hope for self-government and for the rule of law, America must abolish administrative rule.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal 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.

US National Debt Hits $32 Trillion, Up $572 Billion Since Debt Ceiling Suspended. TGA Starts Refilling, Drains Liquidity From Markets thumbnail

US National Debt Hits $32 Trillion, Up $572 Billion Since Debt Ceiling Suspended. TGA Starts Refilling, Drains Liquidity From Markets

/in , , /by

By Wolf Richter

Debt doesn’t matter. Until it does. And now it does.

The U.S. national debt spiked by $572 billion since the debt ceiling was suspended two weeks ago after the sarcastically named “Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023” was signed into law, the Treasury Department reported Friday evening. The total government debt now exceeds $32.0 trillion – hallelujah, we made it!

Debt doesn’t matter. Until it does. And now it does — in several ways, including interest on the debt, and fuel for inflation. Interest rates have come up because inflation started to rage in early 2021, and all this fiscal stimulus from deficit-spending is throwing fuel on the inflation fire, and so “core” inflation – inflation minus food, whose prices have ticked down, and energy whose prices have plunged – has been stubbornly stuck in the 5% range annualized for seven months, driven by inflation in services:

The US national debt comes in two types of Treasury securities, “nonmarketable” (cannot be traded in the bond market) and marketable (can be traded in the bond market).

“Nonmarketable” Treasury securities include the “I bonds” that Americans can buy – they pay a base rate plus a rate based on CPI. The Treasuries securities held by government pension funds, the Social Security Trust Fund, etc. are nonmarketable. These nonmarketable Treasury securities jumped by $96 billion since the debt ceiling was suspended, to $6.86 trillion.

“Marketable” Treasury securities spiked by $476 billion since the debt ceiling was suspended, to $25.2 trillion. These are the securities that the government sells via auctions to the public.

The Treasury Department is now selling a flood of Treasury securities to replenish its checking account that had been drawn down to near-nothing during the debt-ceiling standoff. These securities include a large amount of Treasury bills (with a maturity date of one year or less), short-term Cash Management bills (at the last CMB auction on June 13, it sold $45 billion in 42-day CMBs), and longer-term notes and bonds, including TIPS.

The Treasury General Account at the New York Fed, which is the government’s checking account, had fallen to a closing balance of $23 billion just before the debt ceiling was suspended – a hair-thin cushion, given the huge amounts that flow daily through this account. The default day would have been sometime in early June. In this respect, this 2023 debt ceiling farce mirrored prior debt ceiling farces.

What flows into the TGA are tax receipts and the proceeds from selling Treasury securities. June 15 was also the deadline for quarter estimated taxes that corporations and self-employed have to pay. So there was a surge in the balance of the TGA.

Since the debt ceiling was suspended, the TGA has jumped by $227 billion – including the June 15 tax receipts – to a balance of $250 billion. But the tax receipts are going to get spent promptly, as they do every quarter.

Last year, the June 15 tax payments caused the TGA balance to jump by $140 billion. And a month later, the balance was down by $200 billion. Deficit spending will see to it that tax receipts are outspent at a very fast clip.

Massive bond issuance will be required in the near future, along with tax receipts, to:

  • Replenish the TGA
  • Pay off maturing securities
  • Fund the ongoing blistering budget deficit…..

*****

Continue reading this article at Wolf Street.

TAKE ACTION

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

To Work or Not to Work, That is The Question thumbnail

To Work or Not to Work, That is The Question

/in , , , /by

By Bruce Bialosky

A large portion of the national debt limit bill negotiations involved reestablishing work requirements to receive payments from the various government handout programs. President Biden objected to what was in the House bill and a compromise was struck. Why are we discussing this now?

There is definitely a difference of opinion even though a bipartisan bill was passed in 1996 and signed by President Clinton. That bill ended the aspect of welfare programs encouraging people to sit on the sidelines while others worked and produced the resources off which they would be living.

The attitude is exemplified by Zack Beauchamp of Vox describing the successes of Joe Biden. He stated,” The May jobs report found that the US economy produced 339,000 jobs, a blistering pace of growth.” That would be true if someone were totally unaware that 10 million American jobs remain open and have for many months. That means only 3.4% of the jobs open were filled. It would truly be a “blistering pace of growth” if all those people sitting on the sidelines took say 1.5 million jobs in a month.

And why are these people sitting on the sidelines? Because they can. It used to be that people worked so they would not starve or end up homeless. So, they could take care of their families. Now the government has encouraged people to take benefits and litter themselves on the streets of our once glorious cities.

An example of how things got better when we altered the process of handouts was outlined in a Wall Street Journal interview with Robert Doar, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Doar cited that in 1996 in New York City, a mess at the time, 1.1 million people were on welfare in a city of less than eight million. The city was encouraging this behavior. That changed. Over a period of years that number reduced to 360,000 welfare recipients while the population grew.

We all know that there are people who are physically or mentally restricted from working. Many of those disabilities are self-induced (drug use, refusal of help, etc.). I was told a story by someone recently of a man who was let go in a cutback from his company. He had not found a single job in six years. If he were not being provided support by his wife and the government, he might have lowered his sights and taken a job working in a different industry.

SNAP (food stamps) was the government program revised in the debt ceiling bill. The program currently requires 20 hours of work per week for adults without kids at home. The states hand out SNAP and they ignore the rules because it does not affect their budgets as the federal government pays for the program. Many states hunt down people to hand out these benefits. In a recent AEI study, they found only 25% of people are able-bodied adults between 18 and 49 without children at home working despite receiving SNAP. It is clear that very few state governments are enforcing the rules.

To get a take on the Left’s position that is fostering these continuing handouts to able-bodied people who are not filling the many open positions we can look to a recent column in the New York Times by one of their lead columnists, Jamelle Bouie. Mr. Bouie thinks work requirements are hokum. He flat out says “work requirements for federal assistance programs do not, well, work.”

Bouie stated, “Work requirements don’t work, but Republicans still want them, so much they threatened to crash the global economy to get them.” One cannot totally blame him for making this comment as our irresponsible president stated he saved us from “economic collapse.” No, he did not; we were never anywhere near that. Remember when presidents were a calming influence? Biden talks as though he is the head hysteric.

Bouie re-ups a new reason from the Left as to why we should not establish rules to limit who can receive free money from the government. The argument goes like this — the cost to enforce the rules is just too costly. Maybe our nominee for labor secretary, Julie Su, should try that as her defense for the $20 billion in fraud from unemployment paid to people under her watch.

Bouie states, “It costs states tens of millions of dollars to institute work requirements. The administration of Arkansas’s work requirement for Medicaid costs close to $26 million. After the Iowa legislature passed its bill to impose work requirements on SNAP recipients, the nonpartisan Iowa Legislative Services Agency put the cost of administering the new rules at $17 million over the next three years. Beyond the cost to the government, there’s the fact that reducing benefits harms the overall economy; what people don’t have, they can’t spend.”

There you have it folks. Just hand out more government money and don’t set up any rules about who qualifies because the cost to administer the rules is wasted and it harms the economy. These are the same people who say stopping shoplifting in stores costs too much and is dangerous for the employees. Why set age requirements for Social Security and Medicaid?

How about this concept: We will establish programs to aid those in need. Anyone who illegally takes advantage of these programs will suffer swift and sure punishment for violating the rules. When was the last time you saw anyone indicted for defrauding the government?

Economists used to say this is the way things work: People get jobs, they stop getting government handouts, and they start paying taxes thus the revenues of the government go up and the expenditures go down thus decreasing the budget deficit. That certainly would help because Mr. Biden has engineered a $2.1 billion deficit for this year despite it being post-pandemic.

With the attitudes displayed by people on the Left about government handouts, it is no wonder our governments are drowning in debt and many people think our country is going to hell in a handbasket.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

CRICKETS: Biden White House Silent When Asked if it Conspired With Leftist Group to Target Parents Again thumbnail

CRICKETS: Biden White House Silent When Asked if it Conspired With Leftist Group to Target Parents Again

/in , , , , /by

By Tyler O’Neil

The Justice Department backtracked on its 2021 memo urging the investigation of concerned parents, but the Left and the Biden administration seem to be gearing up for another round.

President Joe Biden’s White House did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about the ties between the administration and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which last week added parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education to its “hate map,” listing them alongside KKK chapters.

Two days after the SPLC released its “hate map” and list of “hate groups” for 2022, the White House on June 8 released a strategy “to Protect LGBTQI+ Communities.” That strategy cites “federal threat monitoring” showing that LGBT individuals face threats “increasingly tied to hate groups and domestic violent extremists.” The Biden administration’s strategy also announced that the DOJ will take “an all-of-Department approach to protecting LGBTQI+ rights,” touting the DOJ’s United Against Hate initiative.

The strategy also aims to “shield LGBTQI+ Americans from book bans,” announcing that the Department of Education would seek to counter efforts by parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty to protect children from sexually explicit books in school.

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups.” It tars religious freedom organizations such as Alliance Defending Freedom as “anti-LGBTQ hate groups,” and this smear inspired a gunman to target the Family Research Council for a terrorist attack in 2012.

The White House appeared to use the SPLC’s terminology in its new strategy only two days after the SPLC released its updated list of “hate groups.”

The strategy also links to a Department of Homeland Security webpage that includes resources on “digital and media literacy.” Those resources include a document drafted by the SPLC alongside American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab.

Furthermore, an SPLC chief policy officer took part in the White House’s United We Stand Summit last September. White House records reviewed by The Washington Free Beacon reveal that Susan Corke, head of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project (which is behind the “hate map”), met Jan. 6 with the National Security Council’s counterterrorism director, John Picarelli. Corke led the effort to add Moms for Liberty to the “hate map.”

SPLC staff spoke, as did Picarelli, at the “Eradicate Hate Global Summit,” also held in September.

The White House has not been secretive about working with the SPLC. Biden’s office celebrated the SPLC’s support for its antisemitism effort last month, and Biden twice nominated an SPLC attorney to a top federal judgeship.

This Biden-SPLC collaboration, amid renewed government attacks on concerned parents, seems reminiscent of the letter that inspired the DOJ memo investigating parents. The DOJ memo followed a letter from the National School Boards Association comparing parents who protest school district policies to domestic terrorists and encouraging Biden to use the Patriot Act against those parents. Later documents revealed that the White House had worked with the school board association to draft the letter.

The DOJ ultimately rescinded the memo and the National School Boards Association apologized for the letter. But recent developments suggest the SPLC may be fulfilling the association’s role in another round of attacks on parents.

The White House didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s questions about whether Biden officials had coordinated with Corke or the Southern Poverty Law Center in drafting or creating the administration’s LGBT strategy.

The White House also didn’t respond to questions about whether it encouraged the SPLC to brand concerned parents such as Moms for Liberty“antigovernment extremist groups” and place them on the “hate map” with the KKK. The White House also declined to identify which groups it considers “hate groups.”

The SPLC’s 2022 report names numerous parental rights organizations, including 230 chapters of Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education (based in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania), 12 chapters of Parental Rights in Education, and many state-based chapters of Parents Involved in Education.

The SPLC had hinted that it might attack such groups in April, when the organization’s Maya Henson Carey compared parental rights advocates to the “Uptown Klans” of white Southerners who tried to maintain segregation after the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

The SPLC has faced numerous scandals and hits to its credibility. In 2019, it fired co-founder Morris Dees amid accusations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment going back decades. Amid that scandal, a former employee came forward as having been “part of the con.” He wrote that the SPLC’s hate accusations are a “highly profitable scam.” In 2018, the SPLC paid $3.38 million to a Muslim reformer whom it had branded an “anti-Islamic extremist.”

The Dustin Inman Society, which the SPLC brands an “anti-immigrant hate group,” filed a defamation lawsuit against the organization. That lawsuit cleared a major hurdle earlier this year.

The Southern Poverty Law Center didn’t respond to a request for comment.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal 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.

Some Unpleasant Federal Reserve Arithmetic thumbnail

Some Unpleasant Federal Reserve Arithmetic

/in , , /by

By Paul Mueller

Editors’ Note:  The accounting mechanics are complicated. The bottom line, however, is the FED is pursuing a contradictory policy. If the FED has any function, it was supposed to back up the banking system in the event of a liquidity crisis and maintain a stable currency. Yet, banking failure has been quite prevalent in recent business cycles, including the present one. It also has created a regime of chronic currency inflation. Having failed in its primary role, it has ventured into attempting to “fine-tune” the economy with constant manipulative intervention. It is a dangerous development that an unelected board of experts has been given this power to make or break the economy. The risk of both political abuse and the risk of concentrated error is a hallmark of central planning.  Central planning is incompatible with a market system and a republican form of government where power is exercised, either by voluntary choice in the marketplace or by elected representatives of the people, not selected bureaucrats representing a banking cartel.

The Nobel Laureate Thomas Sargent wrote a famous paper called “Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic” about how national debt could grow in an unsustainable fashion (from a purely hypothetical standpoint, of course). The Federal Reserve System has its own kind of “unpleasant arithmetic” to consider.

The unpleasant arithmetic stems from the fact that the higher the Fed raises interest rates to combat inflation, the more money it must inject into the economy. To maintain its target interest rate, the Fed must pay that interest rate to banks that have deposits at the Fed and to counterparties that have Repo (repurchase agreement) arrangements with the Fed. Repo acts much like a decentralized deposit system – just one that is highly collateralized by the exchange of a debt instrument like a bond for the cash deposit until the bond is repurchased. They pay banks the top end of their interest rate target range and pay repo counterparties the low end of their target range.

Practically speaking, the Federal Reserve “sells” a billion (or perhaps a trillion?) dollars worth of Treasury bonds to various counterparties for a few days or a week or two at a time, and then buys them back at a slightly higher price. The difference between the price they sell the bonds for and the price they buy the bonds for represents the rate of return or interest earned by the counterparties. The Fed maintains its target interest rate by paying that rate to its repo counterparties.

On March 30, 2022, the Fed had $3.773 trillion in bank deposits and $2.041 trillion in repo agreements. That means in order for it to maintain an interest rate of .33 percent at the time, the Fed had to pay that amount of interest on $5.814 trillion dollars; which is about $19,186,200,000 ($19 billion annually) or about $1.6 billion per month.

By March 29, 2023, the Fed had $3.402 trillion in bank deposits and $2.633 trillion in repo arrangements for a total of $6.035 trillion. Their targeted interest rate was then about 4.6 percent, meaning the Fed had to pay $277,610,000,000 ($277 billion annually) or about $23 billion per month.

The Fed’s target interest rate is now over 5 percent.

While $23 billion may not seem like much compared to the Fed balance sheet, or the federal debt, or the budget of the federal government, it is still a pretty significant amount of money. And that is how much money the Fed adds to the economy each month.

That money is not a loan. Nor is it “reversible” the way the traditional monetary policy of buying and selling bonds is. Now we can see why the arithmetic is “unpleasant” for the Fed. It can’t sell its bond securities to pull money out of the economy without realizing massive losses. By one of its internal estimates (footnote 2), the market value of the Fed’s bond holdings had fallen $1.1 trillion dollars by September 2022. The Fed can let its securities mature and not roll them over, but that means it no longer earns interest on those securities to help finance its massive payments to banks and other counterparties.

And if the Fed wants to raise interest rates further, it will have to make even larger payments into the financial system – every 100 basis points of increase in interest rates means payments of an additional $60 billion per year or $5 billion per month to the financial system.

Hypothetically, the Fed could roll over its bond portfolio into higher-yield bonds, which could partially offset its higher costs. But this will take quite a bit of time since most bonds held by the Fed have at least a year (and some many years) before they mature.

In the interim, the Federal Reserve System has been running massive operating losses. In February, it had accumulated losses of $36 billion. I estimate that their accumulated losses are now between $76 billion and $116 billion, and climbing. This chart illustrates the trend of striking operating losses at the Fed.

As Thomas Hogan pointed out in April, the Federal Reserve will not resume remittances of their profits to the US Treasury when they are back in the black. They plan on waiting until they offset their current operating losses before sending money back to the Treasury – something that will likely take years.

Besides the contradiction of raising interest rates to reduce inflation by means of putting new liquidity into the market, the Fed will likely extend a lifeline to distressed industries, as it recently did in the case of Silicon Valley Bank.

While the Fed is trying to remove the punch bowl with its left hand by raising interest rates, it is trying to put the punch bowl back with its right hand by adding $20+ billion each month in new money to the financial system and periodic “assistance” programs adding even more liquidity to the market. The higher rates go, the harder both hands will be working in opposite directions.

That’s some unpleasant arithmetic.

*****

This article was published by AIER, American Institute for Economic Research, 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.

Illegal Border Crossers So Far This Year Outnumber The Population of 8 States thumbnail

Illegal Border Crossers So Far This Year Outnumber The Population of 8 States

/in , , , /by

By Bethany Blankley

At least 1.2 million people have been apprehended or reported evading capture at the southern border in the first five months of this year, according to data obtained and analyzed by The Center Square.

The estimate is based on official apprehension data reported by U.S. Customs and Border Protection as well as gotaway data. A Border Patrol agent provides this data exclusively to The Center Square on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Gotaways are those who illegally enter the U.S. and intentionally seek to evade capture. Border Patrol agents report those who have illegally entered and evaded capture based on several factors. CBP doesn’t publicly report gotaway data.

Gotaways are averaging roughly 60,000 per month, according to data analyzed by The Center Square. However, these numbers are believed to be higher for several reasons, including the fact that far fewer agents are out in the field and aren’t able to identify the tracks of those who’ve gotten away. Federal, state, and local law enforcement officers have no idea who or where they are, or how many of them are known, suspected terrorists or violent gang members and criminals, those in law enforcement tell The Center Square.

Combined, the monthly totals are greater than the individual populations of eight U.S. states, two states more than last month when illegal border crossers in 2023 totaled more than the populations of six states.

At least 240,256 foreign nationals were apprehended or reported evading capture after illegally entering the southwest border in May, according to preliminary data obtained by The Center Square. The preliminary data excludes Office of Field Operations data and only includes Border Patrol data. The total increases after CBP publishes its official data because it includes OFO data.

In April, those apprehended or reported evading capture totaled at least 285,000. In March, they totaled nearly 270,000; in February, they totaled roughly 205,000; in January, nearly 216,000, according to data analyzed by The Center Square.

In the first five months of this year, illegal border crossers combined totaled at least 1,216,256. That’s greater than the populations of Montana (1,139,507), Rhode Island (1,090,483), Delaware (1,031,985), South Dakota (923,484), North Dakota (780,588), Alaska (732,294), Vermont (647,156) and Wyoming (583,279).

Officials have told The Center Square that people who’ve been apprehended are arriving from over 170 countries. The majority are arriving and being apprehended in Texas.

The Biden administration maintains the border is secure and closed. At least 25 Republican governors disagree. Among them are nearly a dozen who’ve so far sent their state’s National Guard troops or state law enforcement officers to Texas to assist with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security efforts, Operation Lone Star.

“While the federal government has abdicated its duties, Republican governors stand ready to protect the U.S.-Mexico border and keep families safe,” a group of 24 governors said last month in support of Abbott.

Over the past nearly two and a half years, Republican governors have provided a range of solutions for the president to consider to secure the border and haven’t received a response.

*****

This 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.

STAY INFORMED

Receive regular news, commentary, and analysis straight to your inbox.

POWERED BY

DrRichSwier.com | ThePricklyPear.org

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.