Killing A Mosquito With A Bazooka [Corporate Transparency Act] thumbnail

Killing A Mosquito With A Bazooka [Corporate Transparency Act]

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By Bruce Bialosky

You have probably seen a cop show where there is a company owned by an entity that is owned by another entity to hide the real owners. A perfect example of someone using what can be referred to as “shell companies” is Hunter Biden having more than 20 of them. Congress wants to stop these activities which are believed to be sheltering illegal activities. Their solution? A proposal with such overkill it is akin to killing a mosquito with a bazooka.

The Corporate Transparency Act was passed in 2021 with bipartisan support. It put enforcement of this in the hands of a U.S. Treasury bureau named the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN). According to Director Andrea Gacki, their website states “This final rule is a significant step forward in our efforts to protect our financial system and curb illicit activities.” “BOI (Beneficial Ownership Information) can provide essential information to law enforcement, intelligence, and national security professionals as they work to protect the United States from bad actors who exploit anonymous shell companies to engage in money laundering, corruption, sanctions and tax evasion, drug trafficking, fraud, and a host of other criminal offenses with impunity, while legitimate businesses suffer from their misdeeds.”

That all sounds wonderful until you find out that an estimated 32.6 million companies will have to file reports on their website by the end of 2024. That includes all corporations, LLCs, partnerships, S corporations, and some trusts. This is not aimed at big businesses; it is aimed at small businesses. Your company is exempt from reporting if you have more than 20 full-time employees or you run a tax-exempt entity. One financial professional suggested a lot of shenanigans are done through non-profit entities wondering why they are exempt.

In addition, if you have more than $5,000,000 in gross receipts you do not have to file. There are 23 other categories of businesses that may be exempt. These businesses are licensed businesses like banks, insurance companies, investment brokerage companies, etc.

Once you determine you must file this report, what do you have to report? You must tell them every person who has 25% or more ownership. In simple terms, if you are the boss or one of the bosses you must be included in the report. When the company files they must report your full legal name, home address, and social security number. Most importantly, you have to provide a PDF of each person’s driver’s license or passport.

If anything changes after filing, you must also report the change within 30 days. That is an ill-defined requirement. For example, if you renew your driver’s license and the issue date and expiration date change, do you have to file a change?

As with any government mandate today there are penalties – lots of penalties – for non-compliance. You are subject to civil penalties of $500 per day if you don’t comply. Or you could be subject to criminal penalties of up to $10,000 and imprisonment for up to two years.

You can try to file this yourself, but most likely you need a professional. The American Bar Association has said it is questionable that attorneys should do it. The insurance companies for CPAs say they are not insuring for this act because they believe it to be legal work, not CPA work. A high-powered attorney who has been giving seminars on compliance with this new law stated he believes attorneys will include this in their process while creating a new entity for someone. He also stated that he believes CPAs are best suited to file for existing companies because they have the current information on the owners of companies, including who is in charge. Then some utilized a website to form their own company and don’t have an attorney or a CPA. Remember these are small businesses.

I spoke to attorneys who are going to charge at least $500 to comply with this law for new entities. That fee might increase for existing companies because of the law’s complexity. Remember, these are small companies by the law’s own definition. It is another barrier to people trying to start a business and free themselves from working for the gigantic corporations about which many of the elected officials who voted for this complain.

FINCEN has promised the protection of everyone’s personal information. Yeah, right. First, their own website lists a multitude of agencies that will gain access to this information. Second, this comes on the heels of IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn stealing up to 7,500 individuals’ tax information and distributing it to the New York Times and ProPublica. He was charged with just one felony and received only five years in prison. Not much of a deterrent for the disclosure of 7,500 tax returns. How trusting should we be?

A federal judge has in just the last couple of days put a hold on the program saying it is duplicative overkill as the states register all these businesses. It is yet unclear whether the Biden Administration will appeal.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to delay implementation of this law for existing businesses until 2025. The Senate has not yet addressed it. What they both should do is put a spike in the core of this overly invasive and costly mandate. It is just like the government to kill a mosquito with a bazooka.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

Liz Cheney Covered Up Trump’s Push For National Guard On J6 In Political Memoir thumbnail

Liz Cheney Covered Up Trump’s Push For National Guard On J6 In Political Memoir

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By Tristan Justice

As The Federalist reported, former Rep. Liz Cheney suppressed evidence that Trump requested National Guard troops for Jan. 6, 2021.

In her memoir, former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., falsely framed former President Donald Trump as the mastermind of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, with claims that the commander-in-chief resisted calls to deploy the National Guard. The Federalist exclusively reported on Friday that the vice chair of the since-disbanded Select Committee on Jan. 6 even suppressed evidence showing Trump actually pushed for more troops.

In her December book, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, Cheney outlined how the select committee discovered the White House was warned about the potential for violence in the run-up to Jan. 6, 2021. The chapter titled “They Knew” said the committee learned of warnings through records obtained by the Secret Service.

“To be clear, the issue was not that the Secret Service failed to brief those up the chain at the White House about the threat,” Cheney wrote. “It appeared to the Committee that this information was being conveyed up the chain, including directly to Mark Meadows and President Trump.”

Cheney wrote as if Trump was negligent about the need for security in Washington on the day of the electoral count.

“With the weight of the intelligence we received via Homeland Security, it is exceptionally difficult to believe that anyone in the White House with access to this information could have failed to recognize this obvious menace,” Cheney wrote.

But the Trump administration did recognize the risk of mayhem and actively sought to deploy 10,000 National Guard troops to reinforce D.C. police. Cheney just covered it up.

Last week, Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway reported that Cheney’s committee concealed testimony from former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato. In Ornato’s first interview with House investigators on Jan. 28, 2022, Ornato told lawmakers he overheard Meadows urge D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to mobilize as many National Guard troops as needed.

“He also testified President Trump had suggested 10,000 would be needed to keep the peace at the public rallies and protests scheduled for January 6, 2021,” Hemingway reported. “Ornato also described White House frustration with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s slow deployment of assistance on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.”

Lawmakers on the partisan probe kept the transcript from the public and went on a press campaign to discredit Ornato as a witness. In her book, however, Cheney cited Ornato’s testimony as evidence of White House dismissiveness surrounding the security situation in Washington on Jan. 6.

“It is also extremely difficult to believe that Mark Meadows, Donald Trump, and others were not briefed,” Cheney wrote, adding:

I would invite anyone who still harbors doubts to read the Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and in particular to download and read the November 29, 2022, recorded examination by Chief Investigative Counsel Tim Heaphy of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato. They knew.

But Cheney made no reference to Ornato’s Jan. 28 interview when he told lawmakers that Trump actually sought 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the Capitol.

“The former J6 Select Committee apparently withheld Mr. Ornato’s critical witness testimony from the American people because it contradicted their pre-determined narrative,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., who is investigating the Jan. 6 committee, said on Friday. “Mr. Ornato’s testimony proves what Mr. Meadows has said all along: President Trump did in fact offer 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the U.S. Capitol, which was turned down.”

Ornato told lawmakers that Mayor Bowser rejected the request for additional Guard troops in Washington, D.C. “Meadows,” he said, “wanted to know if she needed any more guardsmen.”

And I remember the number 10,000 coming up of, you know, ‘The president wants to make sure that you have enough.’ You know, ‘He is willing to ask for 10,000.’ I remember that number. Now that you said it, it reminded me of it. And that she was all set. She had, I think it was like 350 or so for intersection control, and those types of things not in the law enforcement capacity at the time.

Bowser ultimately requested a few hundred unarmed troops to offer District police rudimentary assistance.

“No DCNG personnel shall be armed during this mission, and at no time, will DCNG personnel or assets be engaged in domestic surveillance, searches, or seizures of US persons,” she wrote in a New Year’s Eve letter to the commanding general of the local National Guard. Bowser had previously been a critic of additional federal troops in D.C. when far-left demonstrators were tearing down the city in 2020.

The White House then turned to the Department of Defense to preemptively deploy more Guard troops.

“I remember Chief Meadows talking to DOD about that, I believe,” Ornato told the J6 committee. “I remember Chief Meadows letting me know that, ‘Hey, there was going to be National Guard that’s going to be at Joint Base Andrews in case they’re going to need some more, we’re going to — the Mayor would need any, we’re going to make sure they’re out there.’”

The select committee, with Cheney at the helm, refused to investigate then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s own opposition to additional Guard troops at the Capitol. Pelosi was reportedly concerned about the “optics” of reinforcements at the Capitol after Democrats condemned the use of federal troops in Washington amid the 2020 riots.

The House speaker was slow to give the green light for additional Guard troops on Jan. 6, while the White House became frustrated with Secretary Miller’s slow response to dispatch reinforcements once the Capitol was breached. Cheney herself reportedly discouraged the Pentagon from taking action with an op-ed she organized by former defense secretaries days before the riot to preemptively condemn troop mobilization.

Ornato described Meadows’ vexation with the Defense Department on the day of the riot:

“Every time [Meadows] would ask, ‘What’s taking so long?’ It would be, like, you know, ‘This isn’t just start the car and we’re there. We have to muster them up, we have to’ — so it was constant excuses coming of — not excuses, but what they were actually doing to get them there. So, you know, ‘We only have so many here right now. They’re given an hour to get ready.’ So there’s, like, all these timelines that was being explained to the chief. And he relayed that, like, you know — he’s like, ‘I don’t care, just get them here,’ you know, and ‘Get them to the Capitol, not to the White House.’”

Cheney, however, never let Ornato’s testimony come to light. Instead, her committee said in the final report that Trump “never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on January 6th or on any other day. Nor did he instruct any Federal law enforcement agency to assist.”

Hemingway reported Friday, “Ornato’s description of events also matched testimony offered by Kash Patel, the former chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, in the Colorado Supreme Court hearing about Democrat efforts to limit the ability of Americans to vote for the candidate of their choice.”

“The Colorado court, whose efforts to remove Trump from the ballot were so extreme they were overturned this week by a unanimous Supreme Court, claimed Patel’s ‘testimony regarding Trump authorizing’ at least 10,000 National Guardsmen was ‘illogical’ and ‘completely devoid of any evidence in the record,’” Hemingway wrote. “Because Ornato’s corroborating information had been suppressed from the public record by the January 6 committee, the Colorado Supreme Court improperly dismissed evidence.”

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Consequences of Good Intentions [Ukraine] thumbnail

The Consequences of Good Intentions [Ukraine]

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By Zack Yost

Between the ongoing war in Gaza and Houthi attacks on Western shipping in the Red Sea, the media has had plenty of gruesome foreign policy fodder for the content mill. However, this coverage has come at the expense of the ongoing grinding conflict in Ukraine, which has quickly gone from a euphoric cause célèbre to a now embarrassing catastrophe that is best shoved in the closet and forgotten like all the rest of America’s decades of costly foreign policy disasters.

In recent weeks and months, the tone of coverage around the ongoing war in Ukraine has changed. At one point, any Russian advance was treated as a fluke and any Ukrainian success was seen as the precursor to an inevitable victory. The tone has now decidedly shifted, however, toward a more pessimistic view of Ukraine’s prospects and the fulfillment of NATO/Western goals. We wrote in a previous piece that time was not on Ukraine’s side. Now it appears that the mainstream press is starting to come around to the same conclusion.

Whereas before any suggestion that Ukraine would achieve anything short of total victory against Russia was met with howls of protest and vitriolic accusations of being a Kremlin stooge, mainstream outlets have begun to openly acknowledge the writing that has been on the wall for quite some time.

Near the beginning of the war, the Russian troop columns had taken almost the whole of Novaya Rossiya and were putting pressure on Kiev. Amid this offensive, a delegation from Ukraine met with Russian counterparts in Turkey to discuss a possible end to the conflict. The US assumption seems to have hedged on the idea that the Russian government would not survive a sustained conflict against the might of NATO supplies and Ukrainian strength of arms. The question remains how likely it was that Russia would cave under the sanctions pressure it was under.

From the actions of the Russian government at the beginning of the war it has been convincingly argued that Russia did not intend to invade and conquer Ukraine for annexation, let alone continue on a rampage into the rest of Eastern Europe. Rather, the invasion’s goal was to have a show of strength and rapidly coerce Ukraine away from joining NATO and to secure the interests of Russian people living in Ukraine. It is arguable that when negotiations broke down in March of 2022 they moved forward with a more direct goal of annexing key regions of strategic interest that contain more Russian speakers and ethnics. For much of Ukraine’s history, these southern and eastern regions formed the backbone of pro-Russian sentiments in the Ukrainian government. However, the war has changed these attitudes in a myriad of ways. It was argued that in the leadup to the fighting the nearly 130,000 troops that Russia allocated in the first months of the war were not enough to pacify the whole country even if it was the goal.

However, as has now become unmistakably clear, the US and UK quashed these negotiations, and Ukraine, quite disastrously in hindsight, complied and declared nothing short of total victory, including the reclamation of Crimea, would be acceptable. In response, Russia realized that to win the war, Ukraine would have to be effectively neutralized by force and began to annex oblasts and incorporate them into Russia proper, effectively burning the ships behind them and ensuring that it was going to be invested in the conflict for the long haul.

At the beginning of the war, Ukraine was able to achieve success against overstretched Russian forces who were not prepared at the time to fight a drawn-out war of attrition. This in turn induced visions of further Ukrainian breakthroughs that would cause the Russian military to collapse and even potentially Putin’s government. However, these Ukrainian victories were never against well-prepared and fortified Russian positions. As the failed counter-offensive has demonstrated, Ukraine has thus far been unable to make gains against the Russian army when at parity.

In the year since that counter-offensive, the situation has turned against Ukraine in ways that were not difficult to foresee. The US and the West scraped the bottom of the barrel to outfit Ukrainian forces for the counter-offensive that in the end achieved nothing other than depleting manpower. To quote a former US official, “We built up this mountain of steel for the counteroffensive. We can’t do that again. It doesn’t exist.” Or in the words of NATO’s most senior military official, Admiral Rob Bauer, “The bottom of the barrel is now visible.” As the authors previously noted, the West is woefully unprepared to wage a modern war of attrition in Ukraine.

Western stocks were already facing shortages and production shortfalls, but thanks to the outbreak of the war in Gaza there is additional pressure that has seen ammunition earmarked for Ukraine rerouted to Israel instead. Furthermore, at the time of writing, Congress has not passed supplemental funding for Ukraine, even after returning from Christmas break. This means that not only is Ukraine not receiving what little American military aid it might hope to get, but it is also rapidly running out of funding to continue the functions of the rest of its state apparatus. Everything from firemen to pensions has been paid for by American aid that has now dried up.

The war in Gaza is hardly the only conflict competing for limited American resources. Numerous other potential crises loom on the horizon, ranging from further escalation in the Middle East due to attacks by Iranian proxy groups, pirate-style terrorist attacks on Red Sea shipping by the Yemeni Houthis, growing military escalation on the Korean Peninsula, and the potential Venezuelan invasion of Guyana in America’s backyard. Not to mention, America’s growing great power rivalry with China and the potentially devastating conflict over Taiwan that conflict entails. With so much chaos, Twitter activists are running out of room for flag emojis in their bios.

Commentators and scholars have long warned that the West would end up leaving Ukraine out to dry and were ignored for years, but increasingly such warnings appear prescient.

Internal Fractures

Meanwhile, European goodwill towards Ukraine has been collapsing. Perhaps even more notable than the stalled American aid package has been the collapse in relations between Poland and Ukraine, with the President of Poland comparing Ukraine to a drowning person who risks pulling its rescuer down with it. Polish truckers have even taken to protesting at the border to stop Ukrainian grain exports from undercutting their businesses. Additionally, recent European elections have seen a rise in support for parties and leaders that are on the record as opposing further aid to Ukraine, notably the election of Robert Fico as Prime Minister in Slovakia, and the unexpected electoral success of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.

Ukraine’s increasingly dire situation has not been lost on its leadership, which has now begun to openly feud amongst itself. According to Time Magazine, one of Zelensky’s closest aids stated that “he deludes himself” with talk of retaking the pre-2014 borders, and another states that corruption has continued unabated and that “people are stealing like there’s no tomorrow.”

At the beginning of December, former Ukrainian president, and Zelensky rival, Petro Poroshenko’s papers were canceled, and he was prevented from leaving the country to meet with foreign leaders. Another rival, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko, has accused Zelensky of turning into an authoritarian and of centralizing power in the country to such an extent that “at some point, we will no longer be any different from Russia, where everything depends on the whim of one man.”

Also concerning is the rumored rift that has now found its way into the public eye between Zelensky and the (now former) commander of the AFU General Zaluzhny. This has come about seemingly over their differing assessments of the state of the war. In an interview published by The Economist on November 1, 2023, Zaluzhny stated that the war had turned into a stalemate. Zelensky was quick to insist that this was not true, despite the abject failure of the summer counter-offensive to achieve anything.

Days later, on November 7, 2023, one of Zaluzhny’s aides was killed under unusual circumstances when he was opening birthday presents with his son and somehow set off a grenade. There are multiple accounts of what transpired, but as the BBC notes, “The official cause of the explosion has been questioned by Ukrainian commentators, some of whom have speculated whether it was an attack targeting Gen Zaluzhny himself, on the assumption that he might have attended his aide’s birthday celebrations.”

Speculation aside, Ukrainian media reports that Zelensky is suspicious of Zaluzhny’s potential political aspirations and that in addition to making political appointments to the military, he is also circumventing Zaluzhny in the chain of command to avoid his loyalists and instead deal with those loyal to Zelensky. This pessimism within the government also seems to have reached Zelensky himself who has been quoted by the critical Russian media agency, The Moscow Times, that he “no longer sees an end in sight” and is turning down requests from the army to mobilize as many as 500,000 men which will surely make his already precarious position even harder to maintain. At the time of writing, the long-standing feud between Zelensky and Zaluzhny has resulted in the firing of the latter. Time will tell how this will affect the Zelensky government as Zaluzhny ranks as one of Ukraine’s most trusted public officials.

No Foreseeable Future

On June 8, 2016, John Mearsheimer was on a panel at the Atlantic Council on the subject of NATO enlargement and Russia where he warned that “these policies [NATO expansion and integration] are leading the Ukrainians and the Georgians down the primrose path, because on one hand, we are provoking the Russians, causing all sorts of problems, giving them the incentive to do damage in Georgia and Ukraine and the idea the West is going to come to their rescue, you believe much too much in the United States.”

Negotiations that were scotched in early March of 2022 offered the possibility that Ukraine might have been able to survive with some semblance of sovereignty intact. Now Russia is likely unwilling to accept a Minsk III deal. With their annexation of the Novaya Rossiya region, they are signaling that this struggle will be one of total victory. Russian government ministers like Sergei Shoigu have stated that the war has been planned out at least until 2025. Furthermore, with the recent Russian victories around the Ukrainian stronghold of Avdiivka, there is growing doubt amongst observers that Ukraine can successfully resist Russian advances even at some of the most heavily fortified cities along the contact line.

Commentators and scholars like Mearsheimer have long warned that the West would end up leaving Ukraine out to dry and were ignored for years, but increasingly such warnings appear prescient. Some Ukrainians have woken up to this grim reality. As former Ukrainian presidential advisor, and now Zelensky rival, Oleksii Arestovych recently remarked, “In the conflict of globalists and realists, we made a bet on the wrong side. We shed blood to end up in the losing camp.” Hopefully, it is not too late to salvage an acceptable compromise and forge some semblance of peace, but that means accepting the reality of Ukraine’s untenable position.

*****

This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

WHO’s Guilty of Fake News, Now? thumbnail

WHO’s Guilty of Fake News, Now?

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By Molly Kingsley

“A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood,” poet William Shenstone once wrote. These words are likely to strike a chord with those who have been following the World Health Organisation’s ever-more desperate attempts to convince an increasingly skeptical public of its benign intentions in a bid to secure its plans for a new global pandemic prevention framework.

The latest missive came two weeks ago when Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the WHO, used the global stage of the World Governments Summit to reiterate the WHO party line: that ever more virulent, frequent pandemics pose an existential threat for which an underprepared world must urgently ready itself by adopting the WHO’s proposed pandemic management framework via a package of amendments to the existing International Health Regulations (IHR) and the new Pandemic Treaty. Each of these two accords is scheduled to be adopted by the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), in May 2024.

The world, according to Tedros, would be able to sleep easier at night were it not for “two major obstacles to meeting [the May] deadline.” The first is “a group of issues on which countries have not yet reached consensus” — those pesky Member States unhelpfully exercising their rights autonomously to disagree! And the second is “the litany of lies and conspiracy theories about the agreement” — presumably referencing those who, like UsForThem, have persistently dared to raise legally evidence-based concerns about the frightening scope and unprecedented implications of the proposals.

The first obstacle is telling in itself: far from this being isolated concerns of one or two recalcitrant Member States, it appears this disquiet is shared by an entire continent, and then some: the self-called “Equity Bloc” of nations includes many of the African states. The sticking point itself is also revealing: ‘equity’ is shorthand for equal access to health products and resources and relates to the fact that developing nations, almost entirely cut out from access to vaccines, etc, during the Covid pandemic, understandably are now seeking guarantees for more ‘equitable’ access to these therapeutics.

According to one insider blog post, “developed countries are making all efforts to undermine the equity-created amendment proposals,” before revealing that “the WHO Secretariat is also toeing the same line,” presumably on the grounds that this communist-style technology transfer from rich to poor would involve a transfer of wealth and know-how unpalatable to the pharmaceutical industry. Pharma benevolence has its limits, it would seem.

The second obstacle — the litany of lies and conspiracy theories — reflects an escalating controversy about the purported scope and intended impact of the WHO’s pandemic framework dating back to the original version of the proposals published back in February 2023.

One does not need a degree in international law (although as it happens the author holds one) to understand that the legal impact of the proposed IHR amendments would be to create a new command and control public health regime whereby Member States would submit to the binding authority of the WHO in relation to the management of actual or perceived international public health emergencies. Indeed, to understand the implications, one only has to be able to read.

In particular, the proposed IHR amendments contained new clauses that amended the definitions of previously non-binding ‘recommendations,’ and which provided that Member States will ‘undertake to follow’ a WHO-ordained public health response, which in turn covers powers to recommend lockdowns, quarantines, travel passes, mandatory testing, and mandatory medication including vaccination. The first draft of the new Pandemic Treaty contained a commitment that would have required Member States to commit a staggering 5% of national health budgets to international pandemic prevention and preparedness. (Following initial outrage, we know that this rather ambitious financial commitment subsequently was diluted into a more generic obligation to secure adequate funding.)

These proposals though seemed unambiguous in their intent and effect, and so a flurry of legally grounded commentators, jurists, and politicians raised flags about what seemed to be clear overreach by this unelected and largely unaccountable multilateral organisation, infringing on the autonomy and sovereignty of national governments and parliaments.

Tedros called foul, seething on social media back in March 2023 that “no country will cede any sovereignty to the WHO. We continue to see misinformation…about the pandemic accord…the claim that the accord will cede power to the WHO is quite simply false. It’s fake news.”

The debate has raged on since then, and as public concern has mounted — in no small part due to the failure of the WHO to release updated drafts particularly of the IHR amendments in accordance with its own timetables, a failure which is fueling the theory that there may be something to hide — so too has Tedros’ consternation grown, culminating in his ‘litany of lies and conspiracy theories’ speech in February in which he specifically denounced suggestions that the Pandemic Treaty “is a power grab by the WHO,” “that it will give the WHO power to impose lockdowns or vaccine mandates on countries,” “that it’s an attack on freedom,” as “dangerous lies,” “utterly, completely, categorically false.”

So who is right?

Having missed its own January 2024 deadline to publish revised drafts of the IHR amendments, it is impossible for the public to know whether its most offensive provisions, such as those mentioned above, will subsist into the final texts presented to the WHA in May. As the drafts currently stand, however, it is hard to see how Tedros is squaring the circle between texts into which are written in black and white binding obligations, and the notion that somehow this would not impinge on national decision-making autonomy.

Tedros’s bold denials have been couched specifically and exclusively in reference to the Pandemic Treaty, and for good reason: “The pandemic agreement will not give the WHO any power over any state or any individual,” he asserted most recently in February, “the draft agreement is available on the WHO website for anyone who wants to read it…and anyone who does will not find a single sentence or a single word giving the WHO any power over sovereign states.”

Tedros chose his words carefully because technically he is correct that the Pandemic Treaty does not contain these provisions, and an interim draft of it (from October 2023) is available on the WHO website. But as is well known by anyone familiar with the proposals, the offending provisions aren’t contained in the draft Treaty, but in the amendments to the IHRs about which Tedros has maintained a steadfast silence and of which no interim drafts are available on the WHO’s website.

Tedros’s allegations that those who suggest that the Treaty would impinge national sovereignty are either “uninformed or lying” look to be, well…uninformed or disingenuous at best when set against that broader context of which Tedros cannot credibly claim to be unaware. If Tedros or the WHO wish to dispute this charge they should do so with a clearly referenced legally-evidenced rebuttal against the IHR provisions listed above.

In further support of us uninformed, lying conspiracy theorists, the power-grabbing intentions of the WHO are rather helpfully laid bare in a paper authored by one of the key architects of the IHR amendments, Lawrence Gostin, who as director of the WHO Collaborating Centre describes himself as “actively involved in WHO processes for a pandemic agreement and IHR reform.”

Citing the fact that “there has been widespread noncompliance and exploitation of loopholes” under the existing IHR frameworks as a motivation to seek “potentially transformative legal reforms,” Gostin is refreshingly open about the fact that the aim of the IHR amendments would be to “fundamentally restructure the global health governance architecture.”

New “bold norms” would, he says, see the WHO’s temporary outbreak guidance transformed to “binding rules,” requiring states to “comply” and to be “held accountable.” Indeed, he notes that a number of States, the US included, have proposed “compliance” committees for the purpose of “boosting adherence to the new IHR norms.” He candidly addresses concerns about the potential for this new public health regime to impinge on personal autonomy, recognising the “complex trade-offs” involved and the reality that “much of public health law boils down to the balance between affirmative measures to protect community health with restrictions on personal autonomy.” In case the reader was in any doubt, he confirms that all of this “may require all states to forgo some level of sovereignty in exchange for enhanced safety and fairness,” words which should reassure precisely no one.

The matter of sovereignty is not the only area where the statements of the WHO and its senior officials appear to be evidentially unsupported. The legitimacy — such as there can said to be any — of the WHO’s proposals to bolster pandemic preparedness are predicated on a world plagued by ever more dangerous and frequent pandemics: “History teaches us that the next pandemic is a matter of when, not if,” says Tedros, a sentiment shared by the WHO’s director of health emergencies Mike Ryan who, in bemoaning delays in reaching agreement on the new texts, recently complained that whilst Member States had been negotiating “the elves have been in the basement processing 37,000 signals of potential epidemics…”

This thesis, however, is heavily disputed by experts based at Leeds University who in a paper pointedly titled “Rational Policy Over Panic” suggest that the evidential basis which forms the bedrock for the WHO’s pandemic response agenda has been grossly overinflated. “[T]he data and evidence is poorly supportive of current pandemic risk assumptions,” they note, explaining that, ”the data suggests that an increase in recorded natural outbreaks could be largely explained by technological advancements in diagnostic testing over the past 60 years…Covid-19, if indeed of natural origin, appears as an outlier rather than part of an underlying trend.”

This matters not only for legal and philosophical reasons, but also for economic ones. The WHO’s pandemic prevention aspirations involve a huge divestment of resources from other health policy areas into pandemic prevention; estimates used by the WHO and the World Bank propose c. $31.5 billion in total annual funding for pandemic prevention, as compared to c. $3.8 billion in current annual funding of the WHO, and $3 billion in total estimated funding globally for malaria, which kills over 600,000 people annually, close to 500,000 of whom are children.

This matters in itself, but also because there is a suspicion that the WHO’s direction and purpose is being driven too much by those who hold its purse strings. Less than 20% of the WHO’s financing originates from core contributions by Member States, the majority of its funding being for specified purposes, much of it from private donors. Of that, the lion’s share is provided by the Gates Foundation; indeed that organisation is the second-largest overall donor to the WHO. That organisation has strong financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, which stands to profit so significantly from the vaccine-based solutions at the centre of the WHO’s ever increasing focus on pandemic prevention.

In 2022 the WHO set up the WHO Foundation with the aim of attracting further philanthropic donations from the commercial sector. Leaving aside the overarching question of the suitability of a private funding model for an organisation seeking far-reaching powers over global public health, even on its own terms the model appears problematic: set up explicitly to ‘insulate’ the WHO from potential conflicts of interest and reputational risk the Foundation in its short life has been accused of a lack of transparency and behaviours which undermine good governance.

To borrow another famous author’s words, “The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool,” and so it has proved.

Whilst the funding model of the WHO is no secret, the reality is that the reach of the pharmaceutical industry and its vast financial resources is such to mean that there has been frighteningly little candid commentary about the WHO’s financial relations in global mainstream media. With few among the general public understanding that the same people who fund the WHO also fund millions of pounds into global media (in the UK alone, the Gates Foundation grantee list includes the Guardian, the BBC, the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times), it is all too easy for Tedros and Co’s denouncement of those of us raising concerns as dangerous conspiracists to remain unchallenged: take for example this recent Guardian piece, which in uncritically parroting Tedros’s “torrent of fake news, lies, and conspiracy theories” mantra conspicuously failed to mention that, according to the publicly available list of Gates Foundation donations, the Guardian appears to have taken USD 3.5 million in 2020 alone from that organisation.

With media shying away from publishing views critical of the WHO and its pharma sponsors, our politicians remain naively blind to the web of ulterior, vested motivations driving the restructuring of global public health. But with one set of actors coming to the table with clean hands — no undisclosed financial incentives nor purse strings pulled by profit-driven corporations — and the other with hands stained by pharmaceutical profits and dancing to the tune of undisclosed funders, who would the public trust were they only to be fed the facts?

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

Conservatives Fed Up With Democrats’ Get-Out-The-Vote Machine Build Their Own In Battleground States thumbnail

Conservatives Fed Up With Democrats’ Get-Out-The-Vote Machine Build Their Own In Battleground States

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By M.D. Kittle

The commitment to GOTV efforts has to be year-round, and conservative ground game leaders are finally waking up to that fact.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more energetic group of go-getters than the army of vote wranglers in the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition. SLSV, which bills itself as the “national hub & largest nonpartisan network in the country dedicated to increasing student voter participation,” is definitely dedicated.

But the coalition, which is at best “nonpartisan” in name only, is just one of a litany of leftist groups tirelessly and cooperatively working around the nation, particularly in the election-deciding battleground states, to elect Democrats.

The mission-focused group is but one working example of why the left is a well-oiled machine in turning out votes, especially among younger voters. But conservatives are waking up and pushing back, using some of the same get-out-the-vote (GOTV) strategies and tactics that Democrats have so effectively employed to win.

SLSV’s monthly meeting in February featured Amanda Fuchs Miller, deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Postsecondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). The bureaucrat gave the clubhouse gang a rundown of DOE’s legally suspect plan to use federal work-study program funds to pay college students to register their peers and work at the polls. It’s all part of the Bidenbucks plan, the Biden administration’s sweeping get-out-the-vote campaign using federal agencies and liberal groups to target Democrat-leaning voters ahead of November’s presidential election.

Yet there was so much more to the coalition’s February Zoom call: a presentation on the output of SLSV’s bee-busy working groups, an update on upcoming Action Plan Workshops, and a detailed discussion of the group’s goals this election year and beyond.

The meeting opened with a partner spotlight of Tevon Blair, co-founder of Xceleader. Blair is a “strategic communicator and social equity advocate in the nonprofit and political sector,” according to his company website bio.

Groups like SLSV and Xceleader are in it to win it all year round.

“Students enjoy that they know that every time a presidential election or governor’s race comes around, they know there’s going to be somebody on that campus trying to get them activated,” Blair told his leftist allies on the Zoom call.

While SLSV’s foot soldiers may be mainly made up of fresh-faced, wide-eyed left-wing college students, the organization and partner groups such as Xceleader are directed by seasoned former Democrat operatives tapped into a vast network of far-left money and resources.  

Blair worked on Democrat Stacey Abrams’ failed Georgia gubernatorial campaign. That fact might suggest how he and his organization get young voters “activated.” SLSV’s co-founder and Executive Director Clarissa Unger is a proud alumna of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

“Being a part of the Obama 2008 campaign was an honor and a transformative experience. 15 years later, I love that I still get to spend every day working to help students across the country have a voice in our elections. #ObamaAlumni #Obama08 #YesWeCan,” Unger wrote last November in response to Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s former senior adviser and CEO of the Obama Foundation.

‘We Had to Do Something’

While it may seem the left is light years ahead of the right in driving voters to the polls (by hook or crook), conservative groups across the country have been working overtime to catch up. 

In battleground Michigan, where Biden won in 2020 amid myriad election administration “irregularities,” Michigan Fair Elections and Pure Integrity Michigan Elections (PIME) are more than election integrity watchdogs. As election security lioness Cleta Mitchell said on her podcast, Patrice Johnson, chairwoman of the nonprofit organizations, is doing all she can to ensure her state doesn’t “fall prey to the things that happened in 2020.” 

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Johnson and some of her fellow citizens “decided to take action to help restore election integrity in Michigan,” as PIME’s website states.

“There were just several of us sitting around a kitchen table after the elections, and we were grousing and doubtful and skeptical and very upset. And we decided this wasn’t going to do anything. We had to do something,” Johnson told Mitchell last year on the latter’s podcast, “Who’s Counting?“

These frustrated Michiganders concluded, “If we’re going to focus on something, it had better be election integrity because without that we don’t have anything,” Johnson said.

Among its long list of initiatives, PIME launched the Underserved Voter Outreach Team (UVOTE), charged with identifying segments of the voting population the left wants little to nothing to do with. They include people of faith, gun owners, veterans, and others — constitutional patriots, a significant portion of whom have for various reasons sat out elections. Johnson said that often these would-be voters simply haven’t been approached.

“I think it’s very important to show them why, now more than ever, that it’s important to stand up for the Constitution and their constitutional rights and the quality of our elections,” Johnson said. “They’re good people, they’ve just been overlooked.”

The GOTV effort is a natural offshoot of the organization’s “Soles to the Rolls” program, which encourages its growing army of volunteers to use the Check My Vote website to track potential problems in Michigan’s voter rolls. As my Federalist colleague Shawn Fleetwood reported, the free voting history database was created in the wake of Michigan’s leading Democrat election official’s refusal to clean up the Great Lakes State’s rolls.

Soles to the Rolls has been so galvanizing that it’s earned the expected disdain of The New York Times. The Democrat Party’s mouthpiece suspects the election integrity initiative is “an apparent play on Souls to the Polls,” the far-left-funded get-out-the-liberal-vote campaign in Wisconsin. It’s all just more “election-denial movement” stuff, according to the election integrity deniers at the Times.

Getting into the Harvest

In deep-blue California, Republicans are getting wise to one of the left’s more effective vote-capturing tools: ballot harvesting. 

Conservatives have rightly complained about the practice and the election integrity holes in such ballot-collection initiatives by third-party groups. But as CalMatters notes, the California Republican Party is “going big” on ballot harvesting in 2024. Reporter Sameea Kamal wrote in October:

In part, it’s a reflection of political reality: With a few exceptions, the Republican Party has been struggling. On top of Democratic majorities in the Legislature since 1996, no Republican has been elected statewide office since 2006. And since the COVID-19 pandemic, California has sent mail ballots to every registered voter, making it easier for people to cast their ballots earlier and not just at polling places on Election Day.

California is one of 33 states that allow voters to authorize someone else to return their absentee ballot for them, with varying limitations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. California legalized the practice in 2016 but has since prohibited compensation based on the number of vote-by-mail ballots returned. Flat-rate payment is allowed. The left-wing Golden State has also barred ballot dumps at places of employment.

Jessica Millan Patterson, chairwoman of the California GOP, did not return The Federalist’s requests for comment. But she did tell CalMatters that the party is playing by the rules they’ve been given.

“It doesn’t make any sense to only be Election Day voters. That is like only playing three quarters of a football game,” she said, countering conservative purists who don’t want anything to do with ballot harvesting.

‘That Can’t Happen Again’

Conservatives in the critical swing state of Arizona are finding other ways to beat Democrats at their own GOTV game, said Scot Mussi, president of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. Mussi said right-of-center Arizonans are assembling a “whole coalition of different organizations so we have a ground game and a get-out-the-vote operation that beats the intensity of the left.” 

The effort begins with the Arizona Liberty Network, dedicated to helping citizens “effectively engage on political, social, cultural and economic issues affecting” the state. Mussi said the ground game initiative includes consistent and sustained Hispanic outreach. 

Hispanics are projected to account for nearly 1 in 5 voters in Arizona in November’s elections, Cronkite News reported. Hispanic voters in the last midterm election continued to back Democrats over Republicans, but a higher rate of Hispanic voters cast ballots for GOP candidates compared to the previous midterms, according to Pew Research. The gap dropped from 72 percent of Hispanics voting Democrat compared to 25 percent supporting Republicans in 2018 to 60 percent and 39 percent, respectively, in 2022.

“Our belief is that Hispanic voters are traditionally conservative on issues like crime, culture, schools for their kids, the economy, even on immigration,” Mussi said, adding that these are the issues that conservative groups are talking about with Hispanic voters.

The data bear out the fact that Hispanics are not some monolithic voting bloc, and their votes cannot be taken for granted. That’s particularly true among younger Hispanics.

Arizona Corporation Commissioner Lea Márquez Peterson told Cronkite News that she started Hispanic Leadership PAC, a political action committee that supports Hispanic Republicans who run for office.

“My parents are Democrats, my brother and I are Republican. I mean, so we’ve seen a lot of shifting and changing and it really depends on the perspective people are looking towards,” Márquez Peterson told the publication.

But Mussi said the commitment to GOTV efforts has to be year-round, and conservative ground-game leaders are finally waking up to that fact. He said failing to get conservative voters engaged and effectively communicate what’s at stake will keep Joe Biden and his disastrous regime in power for another four years, with a majority in Congress to do the far-left’s will.

“When we reviewed 2022, we found we experienced a drop off in Republican voting performance. That can’t happen again,” the conservative leader said. “We need to make sure conservatives and independent voters believe that Biden has led us in a wrong direction and make sure they are showing up.”

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

TRUTH REVEALED: Peter Schweizer Exposes CCP’s Role in Fentanyl Crisis in Explosive Best Seller thumbnail

TRUTH REVEALED: Peter Schweizer Exposes CCP’s Role in Fentanyl Crisis in Explosive Best Seller

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By Nick Baker

In a landscape in which the Left seeks to conceal the truth and its corruption behind its convoluted narratives and “social justice” initiatives, Young America’s Foundation alumnus and Director Peter Schweizer is once again standing up for accountability and transparency through the release of his latest book, Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans.

In his latest book, Schweizer boldly confronts the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agenda to proliferate the spread of fentanyl throughout the United States, implicating American “leaders,” including President Joe Biden, throughout the process.

It takes a monumental deal of unwavering courage to do what Schweizer is doing—exposing the nefarious figures who threaten the freedom of the American people. Nevertheless, through Blood Money, Schweizer eloquently reveals the indisputable partnership between the CCP’s dictators in Beijing and figures in our nation’s medical establishment.

Schweizer has earned a distinguished reputation as an investigative journalist and bestselling author. As an esteemed alumnus of YAF, the seven-time New York Times bestselling author attributes much of his confidence and success to his involvement with Young America’s Foundation as a student.

Schweizer first became involved with YAF as a high school student attending the National Conservative Student Conference (NCSC) in 1982. There, he heard and engaged with the conservative ideas that the Left so frequently attempts to stifle in academia–opportunities that YAF continues to offer to middle school, high school, and college students today.

In a recent interview with YAF’s Libertas magazine, Schweizer reminisced about opportunities for intellectual engagement and sense of belonging he found at YAF’s programs:

“YAF has always done a good job of presenting substantive knowledge to young people, and ultimately, it fueled my love for reading and led me to become an author,” Schweizer remarked.

He later served in a key role on the Foundation’s staff, serving as the director of academic affairs and an editor of the Foundation’s publications, and later gained invaluable experience as a William J. Casey Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and as a speechwriter during the George W. Bush administration. Today, Schweizer serves as founder and president of the Government Accountability Institute. He remains involved in the Foundation through his service on YAF’s Board of Directors and frequent speeches to YAF audiences nationwide.

“YAF meant the world to me when I was starting out, and it still does. No other organization reaches conservative students so effectively and so thoughtfully,” Schweizer emphasized, underscoring the enduring impact of YAF on his life and career.

Through Blood Money, Schweizer continues his track record of fearless investigative journalism, exposing the dark reality of CCP influence in America’s drug trade. His meticulous research and incisive analysis shed light on the complicity of powerful individuals and institutions in turning a blind eye to the fentanyl epidemic.

As Schweizer unveils the truth behind China’s role in fueling the fentanyl crisis, he calls upon Americans to confront the realities of foreign influence and corruption. His message resonates not only as a stark warning but also as a vital rallying cry for accountability and vigilance in safeguarding the principles of liberty and justice and the safety of the American people.

“If you are scared about the border and worried about the Chinese Communist Party, Peter Schweizer ties them together in his amazing new book,” Young America’s Foundation President Governor Scott Walker remarked on X.

Through his work with YAF and relentless pursuit of truth, Schweizer exemplifies the values of integrity, patriotism, and intellectual curiosity that YAF strives to instill in young people.

As Schweizer’s Blood Money takes its place on bookshelves throughout the nation, it stands not only as a testament to his investigative abilities but also as a testament to the legacy of Young America’s Foundation in shaping the minds and values of future leaders.

Schweizer’s other bestselling works include Red Handed: How America’s Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, Profiles in Corruption, Reagan’s War, Secret Empires, and Clinton Cash.

*****

This article was published by Young America’s Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot Fox News Mark Levin

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Great Ponzi Scheme thumbnail

The Great Ponzi Scheme

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By Daniel J. Mitchell and Leslie Rubin

The fiscal burden of the United States is getting seriously out of hand.

The United States is in fiscal trouble. The burden of government spending has increased by nearly $3 trillion over the past 10 years—nearly doubling in just one decade! And that means more resources are diverted from the economy’s productive sector, which is bad news whether the spending is financed by taxes, borrowing, or money printing.

To make matters worse, the burden of spending will get even heavier in the coming decades, mostly because politicians have saddled the nation with poorly designed entitlement programs that make no sense given our aging population. What’s more, Washington has dozens of ill-conceived programs ostensibly to help the needy, but they are riddled with perverse incentives that promote the opposite of what was intended.

If politicians continue to bury their heads in the sand, bad things will happen:

  • Radical, economy-sapping tax increases, including perhaps a value-added tax, which is a hidden form of national sales tax that has given European politicians an excuse to create enormous welfare states—leading to economic stagnation.
  • Reckless monetary policy as short-sighted politicians adopt the Venezuelan tactic of financing the government with the printing press—thereby compounding the damage of bad fiscal policy with bad monetary policy.
  • Massive increases in red ink. Our own Treasury Department says in its annual report that “the current fiscal path is unsustainable” because of numbers such as:
    • $34 trillion in interest-bearing debt as of December 2023 and rising rapidly.
    • $128 trillion in total obligations, including unfunded obligations to Social Security and Medicare as of September 2023 (the latest data available).
    • $18.2 trillion in additional interest-bearing debt is projected by the CBO over the next 10 years if we do not add any new programs.
    • $150+ trillion in interest-bearing debt in 30 years if we do not change our programs.

Our federal government continues to spend endlessly and has no way of making the numbers work. For all intents and purposes, Uncle Sam is running a Ponzi scheme as he has no way to pay back the debt other than borrow more money. Our Congressional leaders are paying no heed; they just keep on “spending like a drunken sailor,” referring to an old Navy cliché. Well, as President Reagan often quipped, that’s an insult to our sailors, because “at least a drunken sailor spends his own money.” Additionally, Modern Monetary Theory enthusiasts say that the country can borrow endlessly with no harmful effects. How? By printing money! Only an idiot would believe that—it is the furthest thing from true reality.

All this sounds horrible because it is horrible. To raise the alarm, we’ve written a book, The Greatest Ponzi Scheme on Earth, that explains America’s fiscal mess. It explains how we got in trouble and how we will suffer an economic crisis if we leave policy on autopilot.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that our book shows that there are reasonable solutions. All that is needed is for government spending to grow slower than the economy. In other words, put the government on a diet. Politicians could still increase spending, but only by modest amounts. Maybe 2 percent annual spending increases rather than the 7+ percent spending increases that we’ve seen over the past 10 years.

In our book, we show examples of countries that have long-run spending restraints (super-successful economies such as Switzerland and Singapore). But we also show examples of nations that dug themselves out of fiscal trouble merely by having multi-year periods of spending restraint. And if countries such as New Zealand, Canada, and Sweden can address their fiscal problems, surely we should demand the same from the crowd in Washington.

The Debt Bomb

The late Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) wrote a book in 2010 called The Debt Bomb. He was not a professional politician; he was a physician who was interested in the welfare of this country—a true statesman. He was totally frustrated by his inability to get fiscal sanity in DC, and wrote about what he saw coming. He predicted big problems if we did not move back to fiscal sanity. We strongly encourage you to read it to get an insider’s view of what Coburn tried to do.

His worst fears are coming true right before our eyes, today.

The “debt bomb” is ticking, and if left unchecked it will explode one day when we can no longer support our spending habit by borrowing more money from investors. When that day comes, we will be faced with several choices, all of them quite bad. The government could print more money, which would result in disastrous hyperinflation—think Venezuela. The United States could default on the debt, resulting in national and worldwide economic chaos. Lastly, Congress could try to balance the budget while maintaining the debt, an impossibility as the government would not even have enough income to meet its debt obligations, much less its operating expenses. That really results in default.

Kicking the can down the road solves nothing and makes the situation worse. It is a recipe for disaster.

There is a fire raging, and no one is paying attention. Does anyone care? Do you care?

Only an educated public will recognize the problem and demand that it be fixed. As Americans, it’s time for us to “get it.” Quit being the silent majority, and take an active role in fixing the problem. The citizens of this great country must make our voices heard. Do something. Speak up. Speak out.

The solution requires that Congress makes some politically difficult choices, and that will not happen without mass public support. Only with informed public support will our Congressional leaders take notice and fix the problem.

Abraham Lincoln said it best, “with public support anything is possible.”

To learn more, check out The Greatest Ponzi Scheme on Earth and visit mainstreeteconomics.org.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Real Purpose Behind Biden’s SOTU Speech thumbnail

The Real Purpose Behind Biden’s SOTU Speech

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By Marvin A. Treiger

“It was a word salad on speed.”
Dr. Carol Lieberman, forensic psychiatrist

Biden’s speech achieved the singular objective Jill and his other handlers had set for Joe’s speech in spades. Their objective was simple. Keep the Democratic hounds from bumping him from the ballot. The whole performance was designed to ward off the growing internal movement in Democratic circles to get rid of him.

To hell with anything else and everybody else. I think, given his innumerable weaknesses, one must conclude their strategy succeeded brilliantly. I, for one, was delighted to see things turn out as they did. We should not want to get rid of him.

He may even achieve a tiny and momentary bump in the polls. Also, fine. Then for sure, they can’t run him out of town. As the campaign progresses the fundamentals of his incapacity will grow and get ever more socked into the public consciousness than even now, which is really saying something.

No, to repeat, for the present it is far better for him (and for us) that he remains suspended in limbo rather than drop into the nether reaches of Hell.

Obama and His Minions

At the top of the list of those done with Biden is Obama. He despised Biden during his own Presidency and, if anything, has only deepened his disdain for the man or what’s left of him. Obama sends out subtle messages while he unleashes his main guy.

David Axelrod bluntly stated that Biden “should get out of the race,” and in another interview said he should “get going or get out”. There are other doubters in positions of power especially now that Trump is slowly expanding his lead over the incumbent to 5% (48% to 43%) in the most recent N.Y. Times/Siena poll.

Add to that the certain likelihood that Biden will decline further in the coming months and you can feel the panic growing within the radical constituencies.

So did Jill get what she wanted with her damn the torpedos strategy? I have to answer: Yes, I’m not complaining.

Jill, above all, and Joe’s other handlers stage managed, as best they could, Biden’s performance in the State of the Union message to serve that singular objective that he remains the Democratic candidate.

The Speech Itself

The speech was fascistic enough for the Radical Left with implicit cries for Civil War. This was done by way of analogy with internal “threats” to democracy being on a par with Lincoln’s situation on the eve of his election. Red meat for the revolutionary radicals.

The Leftists loved Biden attacking and insulting the Supreme Court over Roe accusing them of being partisan and political while they had to sit through it all stoney faced. The progressives loved his overturning of norms of civil discourse at every opportunity. All this was done with his mouth imitating a Gatling gun to the point of incomprehensibility – but they didn’t care.

At the same time, he led off with FDR and hit many of the traditional Democratic platitudes such as taxing the 1,000 billionaires (not mentioning that the vast majority of them are Democrats who rely on his growing corporatism). 

He also promised giveaways for the poor and compassion for the needy. Of course, with trillions in deficit and the interest on the debt approaching 1 trillion yearly, there is no money for these notions without continuing the march to impoverish the majority. What was the point?

The point was he wished to reassure the sleepy, moderate, traditional voters that, in fact, the Democratic Party was still their home and he was still their champion. These comforting allusions to old-time themes were there to hold the duped base of the Party in his camp and to remind them of him. Remember, good old Joe from Scranton.

Hyped up on drugs, he didn’t collapse. Instead of a meandering, lost, demented old man, he channeled an angry old man shouting all the while but, one must say, energetically. Just what his base wants to hear to counter the national narrative. Joe Scarborough said “it was the best Biden ever” using hyperbole to inoculate Biden from the reality of the going image of someone doddering on his last legs. Of course, Biden can’t keep that up and if his handlers push him to do so, they should be prosecuted for elder abuse. It won’t happen.

All this was designed to be just enough to ward off the detractors in his tent. And I think it worked. Now, his opposition, aside from a sudden health crisis or who knows what may have to use the Convention to get rid of him last minute. Great. Better then, than tomorrow. The Convention will be too late to turn the Trump tide.

But, for the rest of us, it consolidated all of what we already know and strengthened our fortitude without reversing the quiet doubts in the minds of the yet undecided.

Strangely, conservative columnists and pundits seemed to miss wholesale the fact and the importance of the power maneuvers represented by Jill and her cronies that were the decisive intent for the night. Nobody wrote about it even as they penned fine and discerning essays.

Nothing on this from P.J. Media’s Stephen Kruiser; nor from Daniel Greenfield (whom I love). Ace reporter Byron York missed this point as did Daniel Flynn of American Spectator. Matt Margolis of P.J. Media went in another direction and Kimberly Strassel bemoaned the choices before us while the WSJ editorial Board counseled Biden on the speech he should have given.

I’m far from recommending a “council of perfection” to anyone but this was right in front of our noses for anyone to see.

We’ll see what the polls show. It could be, absurd as it might sound, that Biden stays even or gains a point or two. No problem. It can’t last but it does assure he will not be ousted.

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

Arizona News: March 12, 2024

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By The Editors

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

A Lesson for America: Green Policies Crush German Economy thumbnail

A Lesson for America: Green Policies Crush German Economy

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By Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Alexander Frei

Germany’s gross domestic product has been falling since the third quarter of 2022, causing fears of the first 2-yearlong recession since the early 2000s. German farmers are openly protesting new climate regulations that would raise the price of diesel fuel, vital for tractors and farm machinery. This discontent is mirrored by the general public, which is opposed to higher energy costs that drag down the economy. Recent polls show a significant shift in public opinion that’s increasingly opposed to the coalition government.

Unlike the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate, where invariably one party secures a ruling majority, multiple German parties must form a coalition to reach the required 50%+1 majority threshold.

Currently, the Green Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Free Democratic Party comprise this coalition. The latest polls show all these parties polling far below their 2021 election results while the more right-leaning parties, such as the Christian Democratic Union and the Alternative for Germany, are surging in popularity.

The recent economic slowdown has resulted in widespread political discontent, and the core of the slowdown has been disastrous energy policy.

Instead of the government focusing on making energy affordable, it has continued its commitment to the “Energiewende”—the “Energy Transition”—a government project aimed at radically shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. One of the project’s stated goals is to increase the use of renewable energy sources to 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. The end goal is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2045.

Germany’s closure of its nuclear plants in April 2023 has made achieving net-zero targets significantly more challenging, given that nuclear power is capable of generating substantial amounts of carbon emissions-free electricity. The economic effect of these decisions is palpable for ordinary people, who feel it each month when paying their energy bills.

According to the most recent data published by the German Federal Statistical Office, consumers have been paying an average of 46 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. For comparison, the average price of electricity in the United States during December was just under 13 cents per kWh.

Cost disparities can also be seen in the price of gasoline. At the fuel pump, German consumers pay an average price of $7.23 per gallon, compared to $3.33 in America.

These high energy costs are slowing other aspects of the economy, leading to dramatic losses in purchasing power for consumers and threatening to make production unprofitable for many companies. In addition, small businesses and farmers, which rely on electricity and fertilizers to operate, respectively, have been hit extremely hard by these recent price increases.

In addition, the slowdown in global trade is profoundly affecting Germany’s export-centric economy, exacerbating the overall economic decline. Unfortunately for Germans, recent economic forecasts do not offer much hope either. Economists predict the economy to grow only by around 0.2% in 2024.

Large German companies have already taken notice and acted accordingly. Around 67% of German companies have moved at least some operations abroad, citing high energy prices and inflation as their main reasons for leaving. This wide-scale deindustrialization is especially prevalent for the mechanical engineering, industrial goods, and automotive sectors—the backbone of the German economy.

The tipping point came in February when the famous family-owned dishwasher manufacturer Miele announced that it would cut thousands of jobs and move production to Poland. Luxury car manufacturer Porsche initially planned on building a new car battery manufacturing plant domestically and then switched gears by announcing plans to open the proposed plant in America. Both the lack of future investment and deindustrialization create a snowball effect, worsening the situation.

Widespread dissatisfaction with Germany’s green policies should be a lesson for America. At the heart of the problem is Germany’s failure to allow for the energy industry to create affordable energy for its citizens. For years, the anti-business green energy agenda has decreased carbon emissions but increased the economic crisis. Germany’s experience shows that America needs a sound energy policy, not the arbitrary climate goals the current administration is pursuing.

*****

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

Image Credit: Shutterstock

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

What If A Market Roared And Nobody Heard It? thumbnail

What If A Market Roared And Nobody Heard It?

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By Neland Nobel

We all know about new highs in the Dow Jones Industrials, the NASDAQ, and the S&P 500. The market has been driven higher by a mere handful of very large tech companies. Some of the indices are already up 8% or so, just in the first two months of the year.  The equally weighted S&P is up slightly more than half that amount.

At least for ourselves, we continue to stay with the trend with reduced allocation to stocks because, while the market is expensive and distorted,  it has not violated any meaningful linear or moving average trend.  Although the market action has been distorted, it is still undeniably positive. 

Yes, we remain concerned about extreme levels of sentiment and valuation, and that is why we reduced risk. 

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell again reassured the market that interest rate cuts are forthcoming, as soon as inflation cools a bit more. However, services inflation is not cooperating and now fuel prices are rising as well.  The FED remains in a tough spot to deliver all the markets expect.

As Martin Zweig advised,  don’t fight the trend, and don’t fight the FED.

The reasons for the advance in equities now seem pretty obvious. The FED stated earlier that it would be cutting interest rates. Markets began the year wildly optimistic, projecting up to seven rate cuts. Those expectations have been scaled back but rate cuts are expected by summer as the FED normally will not cut within about 6 months of a Presidential election. And, the economy has made a rebound after the disastrous lockdown policies and continues to outshine Europe, Canada, and China. It has defied expectations of recession.

In addition, the hype about Artificial Intelligence keeps driving the tech companies upward. Even though Google had some extreme embarrassment with Gemini, investors rightly or wrongly, are putting great faith in the earnings potential of AI.

We are skeptical. Let’s hope the nexus between artificial intelligence and natural stupidity will eventually produce a better product than Gemini. It appears to have been programmed by the Communist Party, which would appeal to a rather small market.

Markets have also been supported by enormous fiscal stimulus. Fully one-third of GDP “growth” is the growth of government.

This fiscal stimulus rivals or exceeds previous periods. The website Game of Trades put together this interesting inflation-adjusted chart. 

The current budget deficit, in inflation-adjusted dollars, exceeds all the deficits needed to finance WWI, WWII, and 30 years of deficit spending, COMBINED. 

 

The size of this deficit spending may explain why one other market has gone to new highs, yet has gotten very little attention.

We are talking about the gold market.  Gold gets little attention compared to the soaring market and all the hype about AI.

But we know it is of interest to Conservatives if for no other reason, it seems most of the Conservative talk radio shows and podcasts have a gold advertiser. The Prickly Pear is no exception with our loyal advertiser, American Precious Metals. We hope you will call them at 602-840-5500 or 1-800-522-GOLD when you desire to buy or sell physical metals.  If you want to help independent citizen journalism, please support our sponsors.

Further, most Conservatives look with great anxiety at the wild government spending and soaring debt at all levels of society.  Gold is portfolio insurance even if presently it is not a hot investment.

Federal debt is now rising at a breath-taking clip of about a Trillion dollars every four months. One wonders how long this can continue before something breaks.  Between the rollover of existing debt and the funding of new debt, the bond market must swallow over $10 trillion in issuance in 2024.  With most of the traditional foreign buyers reducing US Treasury holdings, financing this debt with falling rates appears contradictory.  Interest costs on the debt now exceed $1 Trillion and likely will move even higher as low-interest rate bonds mature and must be refinanced.

If you look at the weekly chart for gold, you can see that from the fall of 2018 to the summer of 2020, it rose about 70%.  Since then, we have been a broad congestion, for almost four years, but recently gold broke a triple top, a bullish thing to happen from such a large consolidation.  That certainly is a positive development.

Some of the traditional stimulants for gold appear missing.  The dollar has not been particularly feeble, and usually, they move opposite each other.  The same can be said for equities.  Gold usually moves opposite the direction of stocks and that is why it has historically been a good portfolio diversifier.

Gold usually does well when “systemic risk” to financial stability is high.  While the potential of excessive debt certainly remains present, neither stock nor bond markets are acting concerned. Bank troubles are to be “believed” contained although Powell suggested in his recent speech before Congress to expect more bank failures.

Maybe equity markets should be more concerned,  but stocks as noted before, are pushing higher along a broad front.

Despite the wild spending and record debt build-up, public enthusiasm for gold remains subdued, if not negative. Western investors continue to liquidate ounces from the gold bullion ETFs and physical dealers we know say demand is weak with about as many liquidations as purchases. The chart below from the World Gold Council shows the oddity of the public leaving gold ETFs while bullion is firming.  Only in Asia is the flow positive into their respective ETFs and that has been the case for 12 months.

We do know that central bank demand continues to be robust, but that still can’t quite explain gold’s strength with such flaccid demand from investors.

One explanation is that the center of the gold market, which used to be London and New York, which is mostly a commodity futures market, has moved Eastward to China and there it is mostly a physical market. Prices for both gold and silver are at a premium in Shanghai right now, indicating strong demand. But why don’t investors buy in the cheaper Western markets and close the gap in prices through arbitrage? Likely because buyers don’t want futures (paper gold) but want the real stuff in hand.

Why do Asians want the real stuff and Americans don’t?  Perhaps because they have seen the collapse of huge real estate developments like Evergrande where a whopping 70% of Chinese household wealth is now stuck in these failing real estate institutions. They want to hold something that won’t go broke.

In addition, a growing number of countries (36) seem to be joining BRICS, which is an attempt to get away from US dollar hegemony. 

BRICS now represents about 50% of the global population and more than a third of global oil production.

The largest Arab state, Egypt just devalued its currency by 30%, hurt badly by a collapse in revenue from Suez Canal traffic, largely caused by Iran’s proxy the Houthis.

War in the Ukraine and Gaza continues.

Interestingly, gold has been below $2,000 per ounce for only two days this year, both days the Chinese markets were closed for their New Year.

Speaking of going broke, the reason central banks have been buying at the fastest pace in 50 years is outside of the US, investors are more worried about the rapid explosion of US debt, and prospects for more to come. We agree and think the US public should be a lot more concerned than it currently is.

The Kobeissi Letter recently summarized current contradictions in the markets rather succinctly:

“1. The S&P 500 is trading like we are in a new bull market.

2. Regional bank stocks are crashing like the crisis never ended.

3. Bonds are rising like the Fed is cutting interest rates.

4. Inflation data is rising like rate cuts are canceled.

5. Bitcoin is rising like there’s no recession coming.

6. Gold is rising like a recession is on the way.

Nothing adds up here.”

We agree it is confusing but we think new highs in gold are telling us something.  If we had to guess it is a combination of strong Chinese demand and central bank demand.  That central bank demand stems from the recognition that the US has entered a “doom loop”, that is, we are now borrowing money to pay interest on the debt.

What is the potential for gold?  Given that few investors are in, it would appear substantial.  Imagine if Western investors quit selling and joined the East and Central Banks in buying.

The same can be said for gold mining equities, which have been shunned for about a decade.  Only one other time in 2015 were gold mining shares this cheap relative to bullion.

At any rate, gold is at new highs and it seems few care.  Since gold tends to do best when there is systemic financial risk, its rise should not be ignored.

*****

Charts courtesy of Stockcharts.com and The World Gold Council, Game of Trades, and Holger Zschaepitz

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

The Illusion of a Palestinian ‘Demilitarized’ State thumbnail

The Illusion of a Palestinian ‘Demilitarized’ State

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By Bassam Tawil

As part of its effort to promote the idea of a “two-state solution,” the Biden administration has been talking about the need to establish a “demilitarized” Palestinian state next to Israel.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is reported to have asked the State Department for a “review of what a demilitarized Palestinian state would look like based on other models around the world.”

The purpose of such a review is to look at options for how a “two-state solution” can be implemented in a way that assures security for Israel, a US official told the American media outlet Axios.

The Biden administration is homing in on a new doctrine involving an unprecedented push to immediately advance the creation of a “demilitarized” but viable Palestinian state, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman reported in early February:

“[The plan] would involve some form of U.S. recognition of a demilitarized Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that would come into being only once Palestinians had developed a set of defined, credible institutions and security capabilities to ensure that this state was viable and that it could never threaten Israel.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi has also voiced support for the establishment of a “demilitarized” Palestinian state.

“There must be a Palestinian state on the June 4 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, side by side with Israel,” the Egyptian president said in November 2023.

“We are ready for this state to be demilitarized, and for there to be guarantees of the presence of forces, whether from NATO, the United Nations, or Arab or American forces, so that we can achieve security for both states, the nascent Palestinian state and the Israeli state.”

The talk about a “demilitarized” Palestinian state comes in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel and the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and burning alive of 1,200 Israelis, including women, children, and the elderly. Hamas also kidnapped more than 240 Israelis, more than half of whom are still being held hostage in the Gaza Strip.

The Hamas terrorists who attacked Israel used various types of weapons, including assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and motorized hang gliders. Thousands of terrorists infiltrated Israel from the Gaza Strip, which has been under the exclusive control of Hamas since 2007. The Iran-backed terror group Hamas soon launched a coup, overthrowing the Palestinian Authority (PA) and seizing control over the Gaza Strip.

The Hamas coup came two years after Israel withdrew from the entire Gaza Strip, after evacuating more than 9,000 Jews who were living there in more than 25 communities. Since 2005, there have been no Jewish civilians or soldiers in the Gaza Strip, which became a semi-independent Palestinian state.

After the Hamas takeover, Israel and Egypt tightened their respective border crossings and placed restrictions on shipping to prevent smuggling and the infiltration of terrorists and weapons. Since the Hamas takeover, Israel, a state the size of New Jersey, has been bombarded by tens of thousands of rockets and mortars — more than 11,000 just since October 7: 9,000 from Gaza, 2,000 from Lebanon.

The Israeli and Egyptian arms blockade did not prevent Hamas and other terror groups from smuggling large amounts of weapons into the Gaza Strip, mostly through the border with Egypt. The blockade also did not prevent the Palestinian terror groups from manufacturing and developing their own weapons, including various types of rockets and missiles. The idea that the Gaza Strip would become a “demilitarized” entity thanks to the Israeli and Egyptian security restrictions proved to be a pipe-dream.

The October 7 massacre of Israelis demonstrated that Israel’s enemies do not need tanks and warplanes to invade Israel murder 1,200 people and wound more than 5,000 others. The Palestinians have proven over the past few decades that when it comes to murdering Jews, they will use anything they can get their hands on as a weapon, including knives, cars, swords, screwdrivers, clubs, daggers, stones, Molotov cocktails, and explosive belts.

Four months after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, it has become clear how the Palestinian terror groups were successful in transforming the Gaza Strip into one of the most dangerous and militarized areas in the Middle East. The Israeli army has discovered and destroyed dozens of Hamas tunnels, many of which were equipped with electricity, ventilation, sewage systems, communication networks and rails, as well as weapons and food. The Gaza Strip is so full of weapons that, four months into the war, the Palestinian terrorists are still using rocket-propelled grenades and explosive devices to attack Israeli troops.

The situation in the West Bank areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority is equally worrying. In the past few years, Iran and its terror proxies had accelerated efforts to smuggle weapons into the West Bank through Jordan.

“Iran wants to turn Jordan into a transit area for weapons going into Israel,” said Amer Al-Sabaileh, founder of Security Languages, a counterterrorism think tank in the Jordanian capital of Amman. The bulk of Iranian weapons to Palestinians go into the West Bank, particularly to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, according to a senior Jordanian security official.

In November 2023, Israeli authorities foiled an attempt to smuggle 137 guns into Israel from Jordan, in what they said was the largest-ever seizure of weapons on the Jordanian border.

Four months earlier, Israeli authorities thwarted an unusual weapons smuggling attempt into Israel from Jordan, the details of which have not been cleared for publication. The smuggling was described as “irregular,” and not similar to previous, and frequent, smuggling attempts. Authorities investigating the incident believe the weapons were being spirited in for use by Palestinian terror groups in the West Bank.

In April 2023, a Jordanian parliament member was arrested by Israeli authorities for attempting to smuggle more than 200 firearms into the West Bank using his diplomatic passport.

The flow of weapons into the West Bank has facilitated the emergence of several armed groups responsible for countless terrorist attacks against Israelis. Most of these groups operate in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, which has several security forces consisting of tens of thousands of officers who are supposed to disarm the armed groups.

If the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip managed over the past few decades to accumulate so many weapons, one can only imagine what would happen if they were handed an independent and sovereign state with full control over the borders with Egypt and Jordan. The Palestinians would undoubtedly continue their efforts to obtain more weapons to be used in the Jihad (holy war) to kill Jews and eliminate Israel.

First, even if the Palestinians commit in advance to a “demilitarized” state, experience shown that their promises are worthless.

More importantly, according to Louis René Beres, professor emeritus at Purdue University and an expert in international law and political science, any commitment to a demilitarized state by the Palestinian leadership would be legally worthless:

“Any treaty is void if, at the time it was entered into, it conflicts with a ‘peremptory’ rule of general international law (jus cogens) – a rule accepted and recognized by the international community of states as one from which ‘no derogation is permitted.’ Because the right of sovereign States to maintain military forces essential to ‘self-defense’ is such a peremptory rule, Palestine, depending upon its particular form of authority, could be entirely within its right to abrogate any pre-independence agreement that had compelled its demilitarization.” [Italics in original.]

The Palestinian Authority committed, under the terms of the peace agreements signed with Israel, to combat terrorism and enforce law and order in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, the PA essentially did nothing to confiscate illegal weapons or crack down on the countless armed groups operating under its nose.

Even today, the PA is virtually doing nothing to foil terrorist attacks against Israelis from areas under its control in the West Bank. It is hard to find one Palestinian family in the West Bank that does not possess an assault rifle, pistol, or some other weapon.

After Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians had a chance to turn the coastal enclave into the “Singapore of the Middle East.” Instead, they turned it into one massive base for Jihad and terrorism. They also used the Gaza Strip as a launching pad to fire tens of thousands of rockets and mortars into Israel.

According to Beres:

“There are several substantive and foreseeable problems with Palestinian demilitarization. The first such problem has to do with conspicuously unchanging Palestinian commitments to an Arab state that would replace Israel. The second concerns certain critical expectations of international law-abiding expectations that could conceivably allow any Palestinian state to abrogate its pre-independence commitments to remain ‘demilitarized’…

“Therein lies the jurisprudential core of the Palestinian demilitarization problem: International law would not necessarily require Palestinian compliance with any pre-state agreements concerning the use of armed force. From the standpoint of such authoritative law, enforcing demilitarization upon a sovereign state of Palestine would be sorely problematic.” [Italics in original.]

Beres noted that both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas continue to agree on one central deal-breaking point: First, Israel’s existence is intolerable on purely religious grounds and, second, Israel, in its entirety, is nothing more than “Occupied Palestine”:

“Unhidden, both the Arab world and Iran still have only a ‘One-State Solution’ for the ‘Israel Problem.’ It is a ‘solution’ that eliminates Israel altogether, a physical solution, a ‘Final Solution.’ Even today, official Arab maps of ‘Palestine’ (PNA and Hamas) show the prospective Arab State comprising all of the West Bank (Judea/Samaria), all of Gaza and all of Israel. They knowingly exclude any references to a Jewish population and list ‘holy sites’ of Christians and Muslims only.”

Beres warned Israel not draw comfort from a purportedly legal promise of Palestinian demilitarization:

“Should the government of a new state of Palestine choose to invite foreign armies and/or terrorists onto its territory, it could do so without practical difficulties and without violating international law.”

As a fully sovereign state, Palestine might not be bound by pre-independence agreements, even if the compacts were to include the United Nations and/or United States reassurances to the contrary.

Beres added:

“Because authentic treaties can be binding only upon states, any agreement between a non-State Palestinian National Authority (presumably in tangible concert with Hamas) and a sovereign state of Israel would garner little respect…

“Following the Gaza war, any plan for accepting Palestinian demilitarization would be built upon sand. Neither the United States nor Israel should ever base its geostrategic assessments of Palestinian statehood upon such an illusory foundation. Following any implemented form of post-Gaza war independence, neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas would accept the idea of a ‘limited’ form of Palestinian statehood. By any Arab world definition, such an idea would be considered unreasonable and humiliating.”

No one can stop a future Palestinian state from becoming a lawless and militarized state. Such a state on Israel’s doorstep would pose a direct and grave threat to Israel’s existence and actually facilitate the mission of the Iranian regime and its terror proxies to murder more Jews.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

ROOKE: Leaked Docs Reveal The Trans Cult Is Going Even Further Than We Ever Knew thumbnail

ROOKE: Leaked Docs Reveal The Trans Cult Is Going Even Further Than We Ever Knew

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By Mary Rooke

An environmental group released leaked documents from the world’s top organization of doctors determining the correct course on youth and adult transgender healthcare late Monday.

The findings inside the WPATH Files published by Environmental Progress expose the sinister reality of this pseudoscience that has captured American children and goes far beyond anything we could have imagined.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) is the leading organization that most doctors, hospitals, and clinics look to for guidance on the proper treatment for children and adults who present to medical professionals with gender dysphoria.

Screenshot Environmental Progress WPATH Files

Even just three years ago, the understanding of the transgender craze was largely mistaken as affecting a small number of confused children and adults. However, the massive increase of people (and young girls in particular) identifying as “trans” has made it a household topic. It is the result of a social contagion that makes otherwise healthy children believe they were born in the wrong body and the only corrective action to fix the issue is to chemically and surgically alter their bodies.

Most families in America have not gone untouched by the trend of children expressing the desire to change their “gender identity.”

At the heart of the issue is whether parents can trust the medical information that is given to them by their doctor. The documents clearly show they cannot. (ROOKE: American Parents Stood Up To The Trans Cult And Won Big In Maine)

In a conversation over medical recommendations for permanent surgical procedures, professionals in the field lamented that some surgeons required two authorization letters to proceed with surgically removing the breasts of a minor girl, according to the report. The doctors called the requirement to make sure the girl suffered from gender dysphoria “gatekeeping,” a term progressive activists use when someone of sound mind is concerned about the drastic actions being taken.

Screenshot Environmental Progress WPATH Files

One doctor promised to help write the second letter if a different signature was needed to get the surgery approved, even though it’s clear they have never treated the patient in question.

Screenshot Environmental Progress WPATH Files

In multiple instances throughout the report and transcript of the videos meetings, the world’s top minds in transgender medicine agree that there is simply no way minors can give informed consent to be placed on hormone blockers, cross-sex hormones, or even surgeries that remove healthy sex organs such as breasts, penises and uteruses.

This seems like an obvious conclusion to anyone who has been around children for extended periods, but what has not been admitted before is that most parents responsible for determining the healthcare decisions for their confused children are also not capable of making an informed decision because they lack the biological knowledge to do so.

“But what really disturbs me is when the parents can’t tell me what they need to know about a medical intervention that apparently they signed off for,” Dianne Berg admitted, according to the transcript.

A conversation between medical professionals concerned about informed consent encapsulates the worry that parents are making permanent decisions for their children based on unproven science that is getting people maimed, sterilized and killed.

Unequivocally, parents have a divine right to determine their children’s healthcare needs. This was never questioned until recently when progressive activists started a political revolution by fighting to tear down these protections.

Part of this attack stems from forcing parents into a corner. More and more states are enacting policies that rip children from their protective parents if they refuse to go along with the “affirmation” model. Adhering to this thought requires acceptance of their child’s false gender identity, even if that means hormone blockers, cross-sex hormones, and permanent surgeries.

Screenshot Environmental Progress WPATH Files

Most parents understand their children require therapies that don’t accept the delusions that a child is born in the wrong body and needs medical intervention to “fix it.” Still, if these parents search for other options (thanks to Transgender activists), the state will consider them abusers.

Another leg of the revolution against parental protections has been the attack on American children through the radicalization of the U.S. education system. Many schools adopt policies that allow children to socially and sometimes medically transition to their preferred gender without their parent’s knowledge or consent. These guidelines cause real-life harm and force parents out of the discussion about serious and life-altering topics. (ROOKE: I’d Like To Thank Joy Reid. Her Open Endorsement Of Porn For Kids Makes My Job Easier)

For a long time, the medical community painted hormone blockers and other hormonal treatments as reversible or non-permanent fixes for children to “try out” being part of the opposite sex.

The report shows that these procedures are neither of those and, in fact, cause lifelong medical complications such as infertility, lack of orgasm and a newly discovered increase in developing possible cancerous masses.

WPATH President Marci Bowers admitted that the effects of puberty blockers on fertility and sexual satisfaction when these children get into adulthood have not been adequately studied, according to the report.

“We do not fully understand the onset of orgasmic response, and blockers make this a major question. Fertility and more problematic surgical outcomes at adulthood are also concerns,” Bowers said in the WPATH forum.

“The fertility question has no research that I’m aware of as puberty onset allows for fertility options while blockers preclude those opportunities,” she added. “The orgasmic response question is thornier and observational based largely upon the growing cohort of puberty blocked individuals seeking gender affirming surgical care years later (le. now, with our office providing that care to a large number). To date, I’m unaware of an individual claiming [the] ability to orgasm when they were blocked at Tanner 2.”

As adults, we understand the reality of not being able to have children or experience a full sexual relationship with a spouse. Still, there is no way to fully grasp the gravity of this loss at 13 years old or if the medical field is telling parents that these blockers are simply buying their child time to work out their confusion.

Screenshot Environmental Progress WPATH Files

Even worse, it seems cross-sex hormones are known to cause more problems than just a change in voice and added breast tissue. The risk for prolonged usage for women is pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), cardiovascular health, and even death.

Many medical professionals documented in the WPATH Files noted having cases with several of these issues.

“For example, in the discussion thread dated March 24, 2022, a nurse practitioner asked about a ‘young patient’ who developed pelvic inflammatory disease after three years of testosterone. The natal female ‘has atrophy with the persistent yellow discharge we often see as a result,’ the nurse wrote. Vaginal atrophy is the thinning, drying, and inflammation of the vaginal walls that occurs when a woman has less estrogen, typically after menopause. For many women, vaginal atrophy not only makes intercourse painful but also leads to distressing urinary symptoms,” according to the report.

Screenshot Environmental Progress WPATH Files

“In December 2021, a doctor described a 16-year-old patient who had developed large liver tumors after being on norethindrone acetate to suppress menstruation for several years and testosterone for one year. ‘Pt found to have two liver masses (hepatic adenomas) – 11x11cm and 7x7cm – and the oncologist and surgeon both have indicated that the likely offending agent(s) are the hormones,’ the doctor wrote,” the WPATH Files reported.

“Another doctor replied to this with an anecdote about a female colleague who, after about 8-10 years of taking testosterone, developed hepatocarcinomas. ‘To the best of my knowledge, it was linked to his hormone treatment,’ said the doctor, who had no more details because the cancer was so advanced that her colleague died a couple of months later,” according to the report.

This is medieval torture in a modern medical setting using American children as the subjects. These doctors admit the procedures are theories with insufficient medical data to prove the outcome is beneficial. The obligation our medical field has to “do no harm” is completely ignored when it comes to gender healthcare. The only logical move forward is for the U.S. government to launch investigations into the mistreatment of these patients to ensure this deadly ideology doesn’t capture more children.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Hobbs Vetoes Arizona Border Invasion Act

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By Daniel Stefanski

Arizona’s Democrat Governor has vetoed her first bill of the legislative session – and it happened to be one of the solutions for the southern border crisis.

On Monday, Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed SB 1231, the Arizona Border Invasion Act, which was sponsored by Senator Janae Shamp. The bill would have “ma[de] it unlawful for a person who is an alien (unlawful immigrant) to enter Arizona from a foreign nation at any location other than a lawful port of entry and outline[d] penalties for violations of illegally entering Arizona and provide[d] immunity from civil liability and indemnification for state and local government officials, employees and contractors who enforce this prohibition” – according to the purpose from the state Senate.

In her veto letter to Senate President Warren Petersen, Hobbs said, “This bill does not secure our border, will be harmful for communities and businesses in our state, and burdensome for law enforcement personnel and the state judicial system. Further, this bill presents significant constitutional concerns and would be certain to mire the State in costly and protracted litigation.”

Senator Shamp, a second-year lawmaker, expressed her outrage in a statement that followed the Governor’s action. She wrote, “The heart-wrenching February 22 murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley happened at the hands of a criminal who entered our country illegally. Arizona families are being torn apart by similar devastation. The Legislature did its job to protect our citizens, but Governor Hobbs failed to do hers. Vetoing the Arizona Border Invasion Act is a prime example of the chaos Hobbs is unleashing in our state while perpetuating this open border crisis as Biden’s accomplice. Arizonans want and deserve safe communities. Our local, county, and state law enforcement officers are pleading for help, and they support this legislation to protect our citizens. Their blood, sweat, and tears shed while trying to keep our communities safe from the staggering number of border-related crimes hitting our state will not be in vain.”

Shamp vowed that members of her party would continue to push forward solutions to combat the border crisis, saying, “The Republican-controlled Legislature will continue to prioritize closing our border and providing law enforcement with the tools they need. This veto is a slap in the face to them, Arizona’s victims of border-related crimes, and other citizens who will inevitably feel the wrath of this border invasion in one way, shape, or form at the hands of Hobbs and Biden.”

Democrat Senator Catherine Miranda gave Hobbs kudos after the veto, stating, “We were forced to go through this process so our colleagues across the aisle can use it as an opportunity to campaign. But we knew you had our backs with that veto pen.”

The governor’s veto of the border-related proposal comes almost two months after her State of the State address, where she took significant time to address the crisis, blaming both “Democratic and Republican administrations” for “the failure to secure our southern border.” Hobbs railed against “the same old political games that created this crisis and that have continually hurt communities, families and our state.” Also in the speech, she boasted about delivering on multiple fronts to help mitigate the crisis, including the launch of Operation SECURE and the creation of a Border Coordination Office within the Arizona Department of Homeland Security.

Both Senate President Warren Petersen and House Speaker Ben Toma wasted no time in reacting to the early January speech, releasing a joint statement after the conclusion of Hobbs’ remarks. Toma argued that despite Hobbs’ attempt to make Arizonans “believe she’s all about securing our border and ending the lawlessness caused by Joe Biden’s immigration system…her record is one of open borders…and she’s continued that approach as governor.” Petersen talked about “major mistakes” from Hobbs by vetoing three bills in particular “that would have kept families safe from drugs and crime” (during the 2023 legislative session).

Republicans are continuing to move more border-related pieces of legislation through the state House and Senate, despite the all-but-certain fate of those proposals.

*****

This article was published at AZ Free News and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

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The Takeover

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By Neetu Arnold

A massive increase in foreign money and students on American campuses is driving radicalization and subsidizing institutional failure

Something new and peculiar stands out about the wave of anti-Israel student activism that has rocked American university campuses since October: There is a visibly more radical element to these protests. Student activists almost seemed to take glee in Hamas’ massacre of innocent civilians—when they weren’t denying that it happened at all. The antisemitic rage struck a different tone than the typical anti-Israel fare that has become a central part of American student activism since Students for a Democratic Society formed in the 1960s.

So what changed? The answer is clear to anyone who watched the videos: these student protests are no longer composed solely of left-wing American students steeped in critical theory and post-colonial ideology. The protests are now havens for foreign students, especially those from Arab and Muslim countries, with their own set of nationalist and tribal grievances against Israel and the United States. In some cases, such foreign students appear to lead the protests in their pro-terrorism chants—some of which are in Arabic, or translations of Arabic slogans.

What we are witnessing is the latest consequence of a quiet revolution in higher education: the internationalization of the American university. Today, there are more than one million foreign students enrolled at American universities, making up more than 5% of the total student population. At elite universities, the situation is much more extreme: international students make up almost 25% of the student population.

The process of internationalization was slow at first, but it has rapidly accelerated in the past two decades. Since the Institute of International Education started to keep track of foreign student enrollment in 1948, it took over 50 years for enrollment to increase from 25,000 to more than 500,000 by 2000. But it only took 15 years after that for the number of international students to double to its current level of one million.

The motivations of universities to admit so many international students are two-fold. Foreign students, first and foremost, serve as cash cows. They disproportionately pay full price for tuition and housing, whether it comes from sponsorships by foreign governments or their own families’ largesse. The deal is even better for public universities—international students pay the out-of-state price, which is significantly higher than the tuition rate for in-state students.

Increasing international student enrollment also fits neatly into universities’ diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals. While this particular phenomenon is more recent, it is crucial for understanding the current shifts in international student recruitment. It also provides universities with a moral justification for their equivocating response to egregious—and perhaps even illegal—acts by international students in recent months…..

*****

Continue reading this article at Tablet Magazine.

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Nice Guy Garvey Could Win in California

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By Neland Nobel

Those of us old enough, remember when California, especially southern California, was a hotbed of Conservativism. Those days are long gone and even thinking of a Republican Senator from what was once “the Golden State” seems about as likely a pack rat learning to play the fiddle.

However, the candidacy of Steve Garvey in California and Larry Hogan in Maryland, seem promising.  Would they likely be strong Conservatives?  No, but they certainly would be better than the alternative, and if a second Trump term is a long shot, so would be Republican control of the Senate.  It would be vital just for judicial appointments let alone foreign policy issues.

I sort of grew up with Steve Garvey.  He entered the major leagues in 1969, about the time I graduated college. Like most young men, I followed sports, and since I had played baseball myself and loved it, baseball commanded most of my attention when I was not working or studying.

Long before Arizona had major league ball, most of us listened to either Dodger or Giant games on the radio.  Like many newcomers to Arizona, I could not follow my boyhood team, the Pirates. I mostly followed the Dodgers because I so enjoyed listening to Vin Scully.  In addition, the Dodgers during the 70s and 80s put on the field some terrific teams.  I listened to a lot of games during the summer evenings, the radio often crackling from gathering thunderstorms.

Scully was classy as an announcer and Garvey was classy as a player.  And both of them had incredibly durable careers.

There is something peaceful about listening to a game on the radio that seems lost on many today.  Despite all the trouble the country had during that period, you felt somehow all would be well if Vin was still on the radio.  What a loss that he is gone.

Garvey’s good guy image never seemed contrived, although at times it seemed over the top.   He seemed to realize that young boys would be following him and unlike many sports figures today, he understood that as a responsibility. At least in public, he conducted himself as one of the most fan-friendly players, even taking out a full-page newspaper ad thanking the fans for their support. He did have marital problems, and given his high profile, and that of his newscaster wife, his issues could hardly be kept private.  At the time, it was quite a scandal, even in swinging Southern California.  But Garvey just kept on performing at a high level.  Meantime he remarried as has been so for 35 years.

He got into a famous fight with pitcher Don Sutton, reportedly because Sutton did not like Garvey’s squeaky-clean image.  But Garvey just kept being Garvey, Mr. Consistency.

Unlike a lot of players, he did not unnecessarily showboat even though he was an astounding hitter and fielder, and he showed up to work.  Consistency was his hallmark and he played every day, year after year. He played one entire season without even committing an error.  In addition, I remember him being a clutch player.  With runners on base in a critical game, you wanted Steve Garvey at the plate.

You cannot play at that level,  that number of years, without having some kind of fire inside that mellow, not a hair out-of-place persona.   As you view the two videos provided, you likely will wonder during the interview if he could really been that nice and well-spoken.  I remember many post-game interviews when he was.

Even though he was quite young, he was always a very polite man.  That had to come from how he was raised. He seems the same today, well-dressed, thoughtful, and articulate. Therefore, although his chances are dim in union-dominated California, many remember that he and Vin sort of personified when California was great and exciting.  It was once clean and growing, and you didn’t have to step over human feces and needles to get to a restaurant.

It could be that California is hitting bottom and the policies of years of progressive one-party rule will create a yearning for once was a great place to live and work.  The recent vote for law and order in San Francisco was striking in that regard.

In addition to a possible swing back to normality, the country and California are ready for a little class.

Finally, Garvey deep down is the competitor with inner confidence.  You have to have that to put up the numbers he did over a long career. When it is the bottom of the ninth inning with runners on base, Republicans may have the ideal man at the plate in California.

*****

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Too Many Lawyers Leading to Too Much Mischief

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By Bruce Bialosky

The world has been directing negative comments against lawyers for at least five hundred years. Law schools push out too many people with degrees that go on to lay waste to our economy. Ambulance chasers have given way to the mass marketers arranging financial mayhem. Our government hires throngs of attorneys to attack our businesses and stifle our livelihoods. They end up engaging against legal counsel at other governmental entities in death-match battles financed by our taxes. This has accelerated into an egregious attack on our political system.

The visceral hatred of Donald Trump has redefined “political positioning.” Having lived through both RDS (Reagan Derangement Syndrome) and BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome), the TDS we are experiencing eclipses the previous ones in such a manner to resemble zombies on speed due to their vengefulness. They were willing to threaten our political system while he was President and have been working to destroy our court system ever since. If you don’t think these actions have a destructive effect permanently, you are probably experiencing TDS yourself where anything is justified to rid us of the menacing “Orange Man.”

This refers to the five ginned-up court cases against him. These include the defamation case held in one of the two locations (NYC and DC) that Republicans — and particularly Trump — have no chance of winning. The case only existed because a New York State law was created just so the case could move forward. Then a billionaire hater of Trump funded the legal fees to enable the lawsuit. The fact that a person can win a case based on an incident where she cannot even identify the place or date that it occurred is an affront to our legal system.

The other four cases are based on three people who engineered their political careers to get and convict a person without any specific knowledge of a crime. The fourth, Jack Smith, is such a rabid attack dog that he has spent hundreds of thousands of our dollars attempting to try and convict Trump, timed specifically to precede the 2024 election to ensure Trump loses.

The case just ruled on in New York is so disgusting it almost defies description. Leticia James, who has twice been elected Attorney General of the State of New York, defines how sick their political system has become. After persistent attempts, she finally found a 1956 statute – one that has never been applied (to anyone’s knowledge) because it is so absurd on its face. Let’s be clear here, despite anything James has charged, and Judge Arthur Engoron (handpicked by James) ruled, Trump did absolutely NOTHING wrong. If you believe he did then you have blanket ignorance of real estate loans in the modern world and most likely have a severe case of TDS. There were no criminal charges here. No one was harmed.

Engoron judged Trump owes $360 million not including interest. He has the chutzpah to say in his verbose ruling that if Trump had just been contrite Engoron would have ruled differently. If Trump had been, Engoron would have just stated, “See, he admitted he is wrong” and then puked out the same ruling in an attempt to break Trump. The fact that Trump must produce the funds in cash within 30 days and cannot use any banks doing business in New York (one of the world’s two banking capitals) demonstrates Engoron’s single-minded vengeance. Fortunately, an appeals court set aside some of the draconian requirements established by Engoron.

There is the special case of Kathy Hochul, New York’s clueless governor, who came out immediately and told the business world not to worry about doing business in New York as this ruling relates only to Trump. That statement alone validated the trial’s sole purpose: the destruction of Mr. Trump. Be assured the remainder of the business world saw what happened and will be reorienting their efforts away from New York thinking they could be next in line to have their assets confiscated by hollow rulings.

Jack Smith had a pitchfork thrown at his case to get Trump before our national election. Turns out President Biden had acted similarly, but even worse. He was not President at the time he kept top secret documents on open and careless display in his garage next to his prized Corvette. Robert Hur, the federal prosecutor in the Biden case, stated he did not recommend pursuing a case against Biden because he is too mentally feeble. Hur had to state his rationale, the absence of which would have clearly defined the separate and unequal justice for Democrats versus Republicans. Not levying charges against Biden makes Smith’s case a testament to inequality.

Suggesting “Trump acted differently” is simply hogwash. It is all about TDS.

There is a special case of DA Fani Willis. Ms. Willis had to concoct a RICO case that should have been handled by the Attorney General of the state if it had any validity. She is obviously a well-educated lady, but she should brush up on Confucius. He stated, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”

During a recent lunch with a litigator friend, he looked at me and said “What was she thinking? How did she think the relationship with (special prosecutor) Wade would not be discovered?” By immediately stating the cause of the claims against her was – you guessed it, racism – it was obvious she had no defense.

My friend and I spoke again after Willis testified that she had actually paid Wade back in cash. Please give me a break. In 45 years of working with the IRS, I have never and would never invoke the word “cash.” Where did the cash come from? She and her father then ginned up this story of black people paying for things in cash. Maybe 50 years ago. Every black person I know chases their credit card mileage points like the rest of us. Show us the withdrawals from your bank account, Ms. Willis, your W-2 employee. To answer my friend’s rhetorical question, she could only have been thinking no one would look into her. And when they did, she made up this grossly stupid story about cash. Has she never heard of Venmo?

Ms. Willis proceeds with this immense disservice to prosecutors everywhere. Wade did not think about this because he is not really a prosecutor, and he would not know unless he watched a cop show. When she made up the lie about when their relationship started, she never thought they might trace his cell phone activity. That is what cops do today — trace the cell phones of suspected criminals and pinpoint their locations. Do you think Willis would know it is provable that Wade was servicing her late at night way before invoking the phony date their relationship supposedly began? Wade never thought of tracing because he is not really a prosecutor, and/or doesn’t watch cop shows.

In this case, Confucius may be wrong. Hopefully, she will only have dug one grave – her own.

Alvin Bragg’s case is not worthy of discussion except to say he is another attorney using his power to destroy a disfavored person. His case has been judged to be inane, but you can never predict a New York jury vis-à-vis Mr. Trump.

It sounds like this column is about defending Trump. It is not. It is about defending our legal system against lawyers attempting to destroy it. How about lawyers destroying our legal system when they go after the licenses of attorneys general they disfavor? I rest my case. We must put a stop to this before we decline further to a second-rate country. It is not about Trump; it is about our government.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Congress Overspends, but the Fed Inflates

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By Alexander William Salter

Writing in The American Conservative, Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-OK) recently blamed inflation on irresponsible fiscal policy. He cites a barrage of statistics on the magnitude of the national debt, the looming insolvency of Social Security and Medicare, and the burdens high prices create for American households. Rep. Brecheen is partly right: perpetual deficits are bad for the economy, as well as for constitutional self-governance. But runaway deficits are not the primary cause of inflation. The Fed, not Congress, and the President is the chief culprit.

The connection between government spending and inflation seems obvious. Fiscal policy affects aggregate demand by changing total dollar-valued spending in the economy. If the government ratchets up spending, financed by borrowing, that should inject a new flow of funds into the national income stream. This is standard income-expenditure Keynesianism — and it’s wrong. We know this from history. Remember, the deficit increased significantly under Presidents Reagan and Obama. Inflation remained relatively static.

As Clark Warburton described it 80 years ago, deficit spending can increase dollar-valued national income only if it increases a) the rate of spending (velocity) for a given money supply or b) the money supply itself. Let’s consider each in turn.

Deficits and Velocity

Deficit spending influences the rate of money turnover, which economists call the velocity of money. But its effects are small. Interest rates are the most probable mechanism. All else being equal, if governments are borrowing more to finance deficits, then demand for capital increases. That should push up interest rates. Higher rates, in turn, increase the opportunity cost of holding money. Hence we should see faster spending; velocity goes up.

Empirically, the increase in velocity following an increase in deficit spending appears to be small. It certainly does not explain the high inflation from late 2021 to early 2023. Velocity declined sharply amid the uncertainty of the first two quarters of 2020. Although it picked up in 2022, it remains below its Q4-2019 level.

Deficits and the Money Supply

The extent to which deficits increase the money supply, if at all, depends on how the buyers of government bonds finance their purchases. If it’s spent out of existing cash balances (either by households or businesses), the money supply doesn’t change. But if the banking system expands its liabilities to purchase the bonds, the money supply grows. This effect is noteworthy. As Warburton showed, the government’s overall fiscal stance had little power to explain dollar-valued national income, and hence inflation. But the money supply could. Even traditional fiscal operations have a monetary mechanism.

Much has changed since Warburton’s day, of course. Financial innovation destabilized the velocity of several common measures of the money supply, leading the economics profession to sour on monetarism. (But as economists such as Peter Ireland and Joshua Hendrickson have shown, velocity for the Divisia monetary aggregates, which weight money-supply components based on liquidity, remain quite stable and predictive of aggregate demand.) Monetary economists pay much more attention to interest rates. They shouldn’t; the money supply still matters most, especially when we consider Fed policy.

Everybody knows Washington spent an incredible amount of money during the COVID-19 response years. Everybody also knows the Fed massively increased its holdings of government bonds during the same period. In 2019, the deficit was just under $1 trillion; it ballooned to more than $3 trillion the next year. Over the same period, Fed holdings of Treasury debt rose from just over $2 trillion to nearly $4.75 trillion and peaked at just shy of $5.75 trillion in Summer 2022. As a result, the M2 money supply exploded from $15 trillion to almost $20 trillion at the end of 2020, reaching a maximum of $21.7 trillion in March 2022. As noted above, velocity declined over this interval, but only by about 15 percent. The money supply increase was roughly 40 percent. Consequently, inflation was higher than it had been for a generation.

At most, large deficits impelled the Fed to support the market for government debt by purchasing more debt than it should have. The central bank, not the fiscal authorities, is the residual determiner of aggregate demand. We can quibble with certain details — for example, Warburton’s Fed adhered to a pseudo-gold standard whereas ours is pure fiat — but the basic relationship between money, dollar-valued national spending, and inflation remains the same as in Warburton’s days.

Deficits are bad for the economy because they transfer resources from the productive private sector to the unproductive public sector. Deficits are bad for self-governance because they transgress a basic small-r republican commitment: not to saddle future generations with crippling debt before they are even old enough to vote. Rep. Brecheen is absolutely right to rail against fiscal follies. But he has the wrong target in his crosshairs if he’s concerned about inflation. Rather than pile on the feckless Biden administration, whose economic incompetence voters already know, he should raise public awareness about the Fed’s monetary mischief and work hard to bring the rule of law to monetary policy.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Somersaulting Over Sonoran Hot Dogs

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By Craig J. Cantoni

The human capacity for inconsistency, contradiction, hypocrisy, double standards, and cognitive dissonance fascinates me—especially my own large capacity for such intellectual somersaults.

Somersaults were on display in a recent news story in the Arizona Daily Star. The story was about “Sonoran hot dog king” Daniel Contreras being in intensive care in a Tucson hospital. (“Family seeks prayers for Tucson’s El Guero Canelo Sonoran hot dog king,” Arizona Daily Star, March 2, 2024.)

Conteras is a local celebrity for winning a James Beard culinary award and being featured on the TV show “Man v. Food” for his Sonoran hot dog, which is served at his restaurant, El Guero Canelo. I applaud his success and join other Tucsonans in wishing him and his family well.

So, where is the intellectual somersault? Let me set the table.

Bacon and mayonnaise are among the toppings on a Sonoran hot dog. This makes it even more unhealthy than refried beans lathered with lard

The Sonoran hot dog has its origins in Mexico, where almost four of every ten people over the age of fifteen are obese, an obesity rate that almost equals the rate in the U.S. Mexico now has one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world, with a staggering 16.9% of the population afflicted with the disease, a disease that can become terribly debilitating. The diabetes rate in the U.S. is about five percentage points lower but still affects nearly 30 million Americans.

To continue setting the table, another recent story in the Arizona Daily Star was about the Tucson Unified School District receiving $7.2 million from a class-action lawsuit against tobacco companies JUUL Labs and Altria Group. The companies had been sued by TUSD and other districts around the country for the negative effects on schools from the marketing of vaping products (smokeless tobacco) to students. The money is being used by TUSD to hire health counselors.

To conclude with the setting of the table, the Arizona Daily Star had run a regular column until recently on the local marijuana industry. The column put a positive spotlight on selected retail marijuana stores and featured various pot products, including products in packaging and flavors that would appeal to kids. This in a city with a serious problem of pedestrians being fatally run over by cars, often due to the pedestrian or driver being impaired.

The inconsistencies are striking. One product, smokeless tobacco, is demonized, while two others are celebrated, although all three can have negative health effects.

The statistics on the health effects of vaping are squishy, but let’s assume that vaping is considerably unhealthier than smoking pot or eating hot dogs topped with bacon and mayo. That still doesn’t justify the double standard of saying nothing but negatives about vaping and nothing but positives about the others.

I have to stop here. It’s time for my snack of Peanut M&Ms.

*****

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

The American Stasi Controls What You Hear And See To Control What You Think And Do thumbnail

The American Stasi Controls What You Hear And See To Control What You Think And Do

/in , , , /by

By Sean Davis

Big Tech, federal agencies, and corporate media are working together to undermine the country and control your thoughts.

It’s tempting to look at Big Tech, corporate media, and federal agencies as distinct industries and entities with their own goals and organizational structures, but that’s not the right way to analyze them in 2024. In reality, they are just different systems within the same organism, similar to how eyes, ears, and legs are all part of a human body. They have different roles and functions, but all are subordinate to the same overarching goal: total power.

In 2024, these entities all function as part of a single system: the American Stasi. Recall that the Stasi was the oppressive spying and law enforcement regime deployed by the Soviet Union against the people of East Germany. The American regime today is every bit as corrupt and deceitful as the Soviet Stasi was during the Cold War. Big Tech and the federal surveillance system work hand in glove to manipulate what you see, hear, and think. The surveillance state spies on you constantly if you engage in activities it detests: going to church or speaking out at a school board meeting, for example. It develops and deploys complex technologies used to manipulate your perception of reality.

Big Tech is the deployment mechanism for much of this technology. Social media networks use government-funded technology to censor the news you read. Search engines use these technologies to prevent you from ever seeing information that’s inconvenient to the regime. Step out of line, and the surveillance state will demand that Big Tech shut down your account or prevent you from earning any revenue from your journalism. I personally know this happens because the regime did it to me and to The Federalist in 2020 and beyond.

Corporate media is used by both the surveillance state and Big Tech to bombard you and overwhelm you with messages it wants you to hear. If the government needs you to hate another country to justify the government’s desire to go to war with it, corporate media will gladly comply with story after story demanding war and slurring anyone who dissents as a domestic terrorist. The government will often spy on these dissenters and leak details of their private lives to corporate media to embarrass them, or they may even deliberately spread vicious lies about someone, knowing corporate media will happily broadcast them. Truth is no obstacle to the American Stasi.

If the government needs a war to replenish the coffers of its military-industrial complex backers and to justify the continued existence of its obscene security and surveillance services, it will use every appendage in the American Stasi to get its way. Corporate media will vilify the target foreign nation and any domestic dissenters. The FBI and its cronies will spy on, smear, and terrorize dissenters as national security threats. Defense research agencies will distribute technologies to their Big Tech friends, which will be used to throttle and deplatform citizens who object to the government’s actions.

And Big Tech will happily censor anyone the regime targets and then pat themselves on the back for being on the “right side of history.” At no point does the American Stasi engage in self-reflection and wonder if maybe it is the real villain. They all work in concert with each other in a constant feedback loop, effortlessly reinforcing each other in a manner requiring little overt direction.

Like with a human body, the eyes and ears and arms and legs don’t need step-by-step instructions for every menial task. They all know what’s required of them, or else they wouldn’t be part of the system. None of this is speculative, by the way. It’s all too real, and each one of you has witnessed multiple American Stasi operations rolled out over the last decade. Once you recognize what they’re doing and how the playbook never really changes, it’s difficult to unsee.

Russiagate? 100% American Stasi op from beginning to end. Ukraine impeachment? American Stasi op to defend its money-laundering playground in Ukraine, protect Biden, and hurt Trump. It was a psyop trifecta. The Kavanaugh rape hoax? Obvious American Stasi op. Covid? Oh, you better believe it. They brought out all the big guns on that one: it gave them the opportunity to take out Trump and deploy a biomedical surveillance state.

Hunter Biden’s laptop? Yep. The FBI fed lies to corporate media, and those lies were then used as censorship fodder by Big Tech. J6? Obviously. And, of course, the Ukraine war. And these are just the ones I can list off the top of my head. I promise you there are far more because the American Stasi never stops trying to manipulate the American people into giving the regime more power.

Power is all the American regime cares about, and it won’t stop until you don’t have any left.

*****

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

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

TAKE ACTION

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

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

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

Please click the following link to learn more.

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