The Partisan Rigging of the 2022 Election thumbnail

The Partisan Rigging of the 2022 Election

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By Edward Ring

Election reform candidates are not the threat. The threat to democracy is to leave things the way they are.

In a society that retains trust in its institutions, the most authoritative source for news and information would probably be the publicly funded media property that is supposed to adhere to the highest standards of journalistic objectivity. Here in America, that would have been PBS. Except it isn’t. The American media, by and large, along with Silicon Valley’s social media communications oligopolies, are doing everything they can to deny American voters the opportunity to politically realign their nation.

It’s always useful for conservatives to watch the legacy networks, starting with PBS, to fully appreciate the level of bias that pervades their “news” organizations. While watching them all the time might quickly become intolerable, return periodically to be reminded: The political content on these networks serve the interests of the Democratic Party.

These days, and for at least the past year, PBS anchor Judy Woodruff, along with every PBS reporter, repeats the term “election denier” dozens of times during every daily news broadcast. They repeat it without irony, without hesitation or qualification. It doesn’t matter what level of skepticism someone may have about the 2020 election. Skepticism in and of itself makes one a “denier.” One can have well founded, incrementalist concerns about election integrity, or one can believe every allegation ever made about systemic election fraud, but there’s no room for such a continuum. According to PBS, all these folks are “election deniers.”

Characterizing anyone concerned about election integrity as an “election denier” is manipulative and deceptive, and with rare exceptions, every major news network is doing it. The pervasive deception practiced by the national media throughout the Trump presidency and ever since, in addition to being deliberately manipulative, is designed to cause profound election consequences. We know it was coordinated; we know it was effective. It still is. And all of it designed to elect Democrats and defeat Republicans. Does that constitute “rigging” an election, and if not, why not?

The media’s role in rigging elections to favor Democrats cannot easily be overstated, but it’s far from the only way in which elections in America are rigged. We’re all familiar with the way laws were ignored in swing states by partisan election officials. Depending on which state these violations occurred, they included ballot drop boxes, ballot harvesting, mailed ballots, changes in procedures governing ballot custody and ballot verification, same day registration, waiving voter ID requirements, and more. We all remember how one activist multi-billionaire sent over $400 million dollars to public agencies tasked with administering elections, and restricted his donations to Democrat-heavy precincts in these same swing states in order to “get out the vote.”

To reduce this to the obvious: Ignoring laws is against the law. And public entities accepting private donations that are made with explicitly partisan objectives, at the very least, violates the supposed impartiality and political neutrality of the election bureaucracy. Does any of that constitute rigging an election? Why not?

These allegations are beyond serious debate. Nearly all media is partisan, favors Democrats, and manipulates their audiences. Election officials broke state election laws to help Democratic candidates. Partisan private-sector billionaires made donations to public entities with the goal of increasing Democratic turnout.

But there’s so much more. Consider the manipulated search results on Google, and the suppressed content on the major social media platforms. The partisan participation of America’s social media and search giants in manipulating public opinion, all by itself, has decisive election consequences. These communications platforms deliberately shape political sentiments in open defiance of their legal obligation to refrain from censorship in exchange for their Section 230 exemption from publisher liability. If nothing else were stacking the deck in favor of Democrats, the activities of Google, Facebook, and Twitter would be sufficient reason to allege the 2020 election was rigged.

And then there were the statistically improbable results, the dubious integrity of the ballot counting process and the questionable security of the voting machines. We can go down that speculative path a very long way. But we don’t have to. It is enough to say that legacy media, online platforms, partisan election bureaucrats, and billionaire donors made sure the election went their way. Because they rigged what they reported, what content we saw, the rules they violated, and every donation they made to a public entity. In my book, that’s a rigged election.

Small wonder there are new laws being passed in multiple states requiring (gasp) voter ID, signature verification, a secure chain of custody for ballots, cleaned up voter rolls, paper ballots that can be saved for audits, restrictions on partisan donations by private citizens to public election bureaucracies, and other reasonable measures to reduce the probability of another rigged election. And for their trouble, Judy Woodruff & Co. calls the people supporting these measures “election deniers” engaged in “voter suppression.”

The Partisan Corruption of Election Bureaucracies

At the time of publication, the polls will have just closed on the West Coast. But for any close race, we won’t know the results for several weeks. In California, election results don’t have to be certified and publicly disclosed until December 16.

This is preposterous on its face. No major nation except America requires such a protracted period to count votes, and this never happened in America until very recently. The reason for it has little to do with the COVID pandemic, because just one reform would have solved that problem (and still would): Restrict mail-in ballots to absentee voters who complete a rigorous application process.

What the partisan media won’t share with their audience is the degree of corruption that has infected the administration of elections in urban, Democratic Party-controlled counties for decades, or how the new laws enabling same day registration, early voting, ballot drop boxes, mailed ballots, ballot harvesting, and similar measures have enabled even worse corruption. In California, where the supposedly enlightened fight against “voter suppression” is the most evolved, it is uncanny how every race initially reported as too close to call ends up, several weeks later, a victory for Democrats. The voter file in California, according to expert Democrats and Republicans alike, is a mess. And as voter sentiments realign and races tighten even in this blue bastion, voter integrity matters.

Deep blue Los Angeles offers a good illustration of just how broken the system can get. Consider this excerpt from a report in City Journal that describes the voting process: “This year, every registered voter was mailed a ballot, and 84 percent of ballots were cast by mail. The city now permits ballot harvesting and unguarded drop boxes, and it doesn’t check signatures.”

The City Journal story describes how Democratic Socialists are on the verge of complete control over the Los Angeles City Council, where they have, among other things, committed to “no new cops,” the “abolition of police and jails,” “a universal public and unionized education system,” and “new housing that is permanently affordable and not operated for profit.”

These fanatics get a pass from the media, they get funding from feckless, virtue signaling, delusional billionaires, and, more to the point, they operate in an election system that is rife with defects. In 2019, to settle a lawsuitbrought by Judicial Watch, the State of California agreed to purge over 1.5 million names of inactive voters. At the time, in violation of federal law, which requires the removal of inactive registrations that remain after two general elections, Los Angeles County had more registered voters than citizens old enough to register. The voter registration rate was 112 percent of the adult citizen population.

One year later, in the 2020 primary election, Los Angeles County officials rolled out new and unproven voting machines, or “ballot marking devices,” which would “be accessible for everyone, including the disabled and visually impaired.” The result—jamming ballots, confusing procedures, election gridlock, and incomplete screens so voters had to push “next” merely to see all the candidates competing for each office, were so disastrous that even the very left-wing American Prospect called it a debacle.

There isn’t much reason to expect that problems with the voter rolls or the voting machines have been completely fixed. Much more likely, what happens in Los Angeles elections is the opposite of “voter integrity.”

A prime example of this can be found in the recent attempt to recall Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, someone who is either a certifiable idiot or a cunning revolutionary bent on destroying civilization. On the surface, the story of how the Gascón recall failed is merely questionable. The petitioners failed, by an eyelash, to produce enough valid signatures, and that’s all there is to it. One might raise eyebrows at a 27 percent rate of invalid petitions, but it happens.

Since 2008, however, the man in charge of ensuring Angelenos are given secure elections is Dean Logan. This excerpt from UpintheValley.org, one of the best political blogs in America that nobody’s ever heard of, describes Logan’s history, and how he oversaw verification of Gascón recall petitions:

In secret, courtesy of Dean Logan, Registrar of Voters, who managed to disqualify 195,000, or 27%, of the signatures away from the eyes of Recall Committee observers, who were banned from the building on the grounds it was not an election but a signature verification process. Dean Logan has a history. In 2004 he was the Director of Elections in Seattle during the Dino Rossi-Christine Gregoire gubernatorial race, in which Rossi prevailed by 261 votes, then 46 votes in the recount, and then in a second manual recount Logan ‘found’ 573 votes for Gregoire, previously disqualified due to -wait for it- signature matching issues. The blowback was so intense Logan was forced to resign. Because one can only fail upward in the administrative state, Los Angeles hired him soon after.

Partisan election functionaries such as Logan, concentrated in corrupt urban strongholds where Democratic Party machines exercise absolute political power, are never the ones under the media microscope. Yet they always seem to select the right combination of ballot irregularities and technicalities to decide close races in favor of Democrats, taking full advantage of the extended period allowed for vote certification and the gaping loopholes in election security enacted by partisan legislatures.

Reserved instead for microscopic scrutiny and withering stigmatization are those “election deniers” whose candidacies for the influential secretary of state offices in states across the nation are a mortal “threat to democracy.” But these reform candidates are not the threat. The threat to democracy is to leave things the way they are. Rigged.

Americans, by the millions and irrespective of their background or ideology, are increasingly appalled by the psychotic absurdity of what are now mainstream Democratic talking points. Murdering a full-term fetus is a woman’s inalienable right. Mutilating a child who “chooses” a new gender can be done without parents’ consent. Burning down cities in pursuit of social justice is not a crime. Smothering city streets in feces and discarded syringes is necessary to protect the rights of homeless drug addicts. Criminals are victims. Productive, hard-working citizens who struggle to maintain financial independence are privileged oppressors. White people, men, heterosexuals, and Christians: Bad. BIPOC, LBGTQ+, women (if they’re liberal or trans), and non-Christians: Good. Shutting down the energy industry so an entire nation can freeze to death is necessary to counter “climate change.”

And if you vote against the political party that spews this dishonest, nihilistic, manipulative, misanthropic insanity, you are “endangering Democracy.”

Democratic Party power will diminish as a result of this election. But if not for a rigged system that is rotten to the core, they would be handed a ticket to well-deserved oblivion.

*****

This article was published at American Greatness, and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

Richer Throws Maricopa County Supervisors Under The Bus, Asks For Contributions To Campaign thumbnail

Richer Throws Maricopa County Supervisors Under The Bus, Asks For Contributions To Campaign

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By ADI Staff Reporter

On Tuesday, in the middle of Election Day, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer threw the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors under the bus for the myriad of problems with election day voting. His message, from his campaign email account, came complete with a “Contribute” button at the bottom.

With one in five voting centers experiencing problems with printers and tabulators, causing county-wide chaos, Richer took the time away from his work to send out the email to supporters, pointing his finger at the Board:


November 8, 2022

I am very sorry for any voter who has been frustrated or inconvenienced today in Maricopa County.

Every legal vote will be tabulated. I promise.

State statute has long governed the division of labor in Arizona election administration. Broadly speaking, the County Recorder is responsible for voter registration and early voting. The Board of Supervisors is responsible for Emergency Voting, Election Day operations, and tabulation.

Since becoming Recorder in 2021, I have worked hard to improve voter registration and Early Voting, while also supporting the Board’s administration of Election Day operations and tabulation, as well as bolstering communications about elections holistically.

I will continue to do that today, and through the conclusion of this election. And I will continue to assist voters in any way I can.

The Board of Supervisors has now identified the problem and has begun fixing affected voting locations.

The Board of Supervisor is also advising all affected voters to do one of the following:

  • Place the ballot in “drawer 3.”  This secure ballot box is retrieved by bipartisan workers at the end of the evening and brought to our central tabulators.  This is the same methodology used for early voting, and it is the same methodology used on Election Day by most counties (including Pima County and Yavapai County)
  • Go to a different voting location. There are 223 voting locations, and the significant majority of them are unaffected. If you have already checked in, but want to cast your ballot at another site, you must first check out with a poll worker at the SiteBook to return the issued ballot. Then you will be able to vote at any of our locations. All locations can be found at Maricopa.Vote.

As has always been the case, every valid vote will be counted.

And has always been the case, I remain committed to helping in any way I can.

Stephen Richer

Maricopa County Recorder

P.S. We have received and verified over 900,000 early ballots, and those will be ready for release at 8:00 PM tonight when results first become available.

Richer has attacked many of his own supporters when they expressed concerns about the unprofessional handling of the 2020 Primary and General elections, despite the fact that Richer’s own 2020 campaign focused on those same complaints.

In fact, Richer was hired by the Republican Party to issue a report following complaints about former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes’ handling of the 2018 election cycle. Fontes is now the Democrat’s candidate for Secretary of State.

In a January 2019 preliminary report to then Party Chair Jonathan Lines, Richer noted several areas of concern with Fontes’ conduct in 2018, including Fontes’ decision to open emergency voting centers located in Democratic-controlled precincts, his decision to rehabilitate ballots after Election Day, and allegations of partisan behavior by Fontes.

Since that time, Richer has changed his tune to fit one that serves the “establishment Liz Cheney/John McCain wing” of the Republican Party, say his former supporters, who received the email….

*****

Continue reading this article by Arizona Daily Independent.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

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SCOTUS Should End Racial Categories

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By Craig J. Cantoni

For justification, the Supreme Court of the United States should look at the discriminatory consequences of a 1922 Supreme Court ruling that attempted to define “white.”   

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on the constitutionality of racial preferences in college admissions. The case was brought on behalf of Asians but applies to all “races.”

The following related questions also should be addressed by the court.

First, does the categorizing of Americans into the six racial/ethnic categories of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American lead to more or less discrimination and divisiveness?

Second, of the hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups in the US and world, which ones belong in which category?

Third, how do colleges and other institutions identify who belongs in which official category?

Those aren’t glib questions. They are critical questions in view of the fact that the six categories are used for more than college admissions. They also are used in hiring decisions, promotion decisions, and diversity and inclusion decisions.

Some say that race is obvious from physical appearance and is captured very well by the six official categories.  For example, it’s obvious that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is white and Justice Clarence Thomas is black. Besides, the argument goes, it’s the reality of human nature to see race in people’s physical appearance.

The essence of this argument is, “We know one when we see one.”

But do we? Should we?

Take Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Based solely on appearance, she’d be seen as a white justice because she looks white—or at least as white as my Italian ancestors. But she is categorized as Hispanic, due to her ethnicity. Left without their own category are scores of other ethnic groups, many of which are mired in poverty and smaller in numbers than Hispanics.

Then there is the science. Physical appearance as an indicator of race is problematic in light of DNA. Of the twenty thousand or so genes in the Human Genome, only a tiny fraction determines skin color, hair texture, facial shape, and other superficial indicators of race. Also, about three percent of the genes of many people, including probably this writer, can be traced to Neanderthals. Moreover, there is the complicating factor of intermarriage, which is like putting genes in a blender and seeing what physical appearance is the result.

The intellectual somersaults of attempting to define race would be hilarious if it were not for the injustices that such attempts have produced throughout history. Woke Americans who believe that whites were immune from such injustices are embarrassingly ignorant of history.

A history lesson:

In the early decades of the twentieth century, “white” was defined very carefully, very narrowly, and very exclusionary in America. It was defined by the Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment to mean anyone who was Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Excluded from the definition were Jews, Poles, Italians, and other peoples from Eastern and Southern Europe.

Not only were these other people seen as non-white, but they were described in the vilest language possible as being genetically, cognitively, and culturally inferior to WASPs.

The definitional issue came to a head after the First World War, when a question arose about whether all non-citizen soldiers who served in the US military had a right of return to America and ultimately citizenship.  It arose because an act called the Emergency Act was being considered in Congress to stop immigration for two years.

The case was brought on behalf of an East Indian who was denied a right of return and citizenship.

In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that of the non-native-born, citizenship was open only to whites and “persons of African descent.”  (The latter were included because of legislation that had been passed during Reconstruction.)  People of “Asiatic descent,” as the court referred to as the East Indians, were not white and thus ineligible for a right of return.   

An aside:  Ironically, East Indians now rank first in income in the US.  Perhaps this is due to them not being treated paternalistically and not becoming dependent on the welfare state.

The WASP establishment quickly found ways of getting around the decision, in order to continue treating non-WASP Europeans as non-white. One way was to use the pseudo-science of Race Science—which was very popular at the time and endorsed by leading universities—to establish that Italians and others were of Asiatic descent. Another was to subsequently pass the Immigration Act of 1924 to restrict the emigration of people from non-WASP countries.

In the meantime, the State Department did what it could to classify non-WASPs as non-white. After a visit to Europe, State Department officials wrote the following about prospective European immigrants who were not WASPs: Sicilians were “small in stature and of a low order of intelligence”; Polish and Russian Jews were “filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits”; and the people of Warsaw were “decidedly inferior . . . physically, mentally and morally.” (Source:  The Guarded Gate, by Daniel Okrent.)

Similar views formed the basis of the horrific Eugenics movement, a decades-long movement that was led by leading progressives.  

The views were shared by leading newspapers, magazines, universities, and other establishment institutions. One of them was the New York Times, which warned that American institutions were being menaced by swarms of aliens who were bringing “diseases of ignorance and Bolshevism,” as well as “loathsome diseases of the flesh.”

Another was the Saturday Evening Post. Its purported expert on immigration was interviewed in Kennebunkport, Maine, by the Boston Herald. A few days later, the Herald ran the headline, DANGER THAT WORLD SCUM WILL DEMORALIZE AMERICA.

Many of those institutions still exist today but now see themselves as woke. As a result, they support racial preferences in colleges and in diversity and inclusion initiatives in government, industry, and elsewhere—preferences that exclude whites (and Asians).  They don’t define “white,” but what they mean by the word can be inferred from the ethnocultural groups that they exclude from the preferences.

WASPs are one of the excluded white groups, ironically. So are Americans of Jewish descent and of Eastern and Southern European descent. The same for scores of other whitish-looking minority groups, such as Armenians, Turks, Syrians, Greeks, and Iranians.

One hundred years ago, whites were categorized in a way that furthered discrimination.  Today, they are categorized in a way that furthers discrimination. Likewise for Asians. 

This is progress? This is social justice?

It’s time for the Supreme Court to stop the intellectual acrobatics.

*****

Craig J. Cantoni is an author and former business executive who spent a career at the vanguard of equal rights and equal opportunity.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

The Election Results So Far: Not a Great Outcome thumbnail

The Election Results So Far: Not a Great Outcome

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By Neland Nobel

As we write this, there are many races just too close to call. Especially in Arizona, most of the major state races are still up in the air. In part, this is because of the gross incompetence of Maricopa county officials, who have once again embarrassed the state on the national stage.

And in part, it is caused by Arizona turning purple. The land of Goldwater is no more. The voting is just so close in almost every race it suggests the state is roughly evenly divided. The GOP needs to study carefully what has been done successfully in Florida, another state that gets a huge influx of people from other states, that haul their politics with them. If Florida can overcome the import of millions of eastern liberals, so can Arizona. But, it is apparent, that we in this state have a lot of work to do.

However, at the national level, the GOP has suffered major disappointments in Pennsylvania, where a cognitively impaired stroke victim has beaten a popular TV personality. Similar disappointments can be seen in Michigan. However, the true standout for the GOP was the blowout victory in Florida, once a state like Arizona, that teetered back and forth between both parties.

The mid-terms have not turned out to be the Red Wave many had hoped for. Right now, it looks like narrow control of the House is the best we will get. Yes, that is enough to stop most of the Biden agenda, so it is better than before. But that alone is not enough to roll it back or repeal its worst elements and protect the Supreme Court.

The debate will no doubt now turn to the performance of the Trump-endorsed candidates and what appears to be a poor performance.

Some would argue, that if those candidates had won, it was only because of the favorable circumstances of this cycle. Kitchen table issues of crime and inflation favored Republicans they would say. Add to that, the extraordinarily low approval rating of the sitting President, mumbling Joe Biden. So, the Trump candidate would win only because of these favorable conditions.

Now that they appear to be losing, it will be argued that they were so bad, even under these favorable conditions, they could not win thus demonstrating their inferiority.

Perhaps the distinction between Trump-endorsed and MAGA-supporting Republicans should be made. Certainly, those that have argued for a strong border policy, moderate Covid response, and anti-woke legislation (DeSantis, Rubio, and Abbott in Texas), did very well. So it appears that MAGA-supporting candidates can do well, even if not endorsed by Trump. In fact, DeSantis did extraordinarily well, in spite of getting some insults hurled at him by Trump in just the last week or so.

DeSantis appears to us, as the clear winner in this election.

However, The Prickly Pear took the position rather early opposing Trump’s endorsements.  We thought it short-circuited the primary election process.

In the primaries, candidates must build coalitions, raise money, develop platforms, and compete. This process usually results in picking the best via the Darwinian nature of politics.

Endorsements give a quick leg up and advantage to a candidate before they have demonstrated they can succeed at the basics. In the case of Trump, so many voters thought that he had been badly mistreated and almost automatically swung their support to his favored pick, without giving it the consideration they might otherwise have.

Indeed, it appears the results of these endorsements did not result in election victory in a climate that should have strongly favored their success.

Thus the separation of MAGA policies versus the personality traits of Trump himself, will likely continue.  Some like National Review are saying it is the failure of MAGA positions themselves, but victories in Florida and Texas argue against that.

Our own sense comes from a poll The Prickly Pear has been conducting for weeks among our own readers. In this poll, readers were also able to leave comments.

For the most part, our readers are conservative with libertarian leanings.

They have steadily favored DeSantis over Trump by about a 2:1 margin. There was a slight tilt bank to Trump after the former President’s residence was invaded by the FBI, which could have been a natural “outrage” shift in the survey data. But afterward, it continued to strongly favor DeSantis.

It should be emphasized our survey was a sample of strongly conservative opinions, not necessarily that of the public at large. But it clearly has shown to us that Trump, while admired for his courage and stamina, is regarded by many as a negative. His ego, temperament, and personality, create a negative response among many who support his policies, but simply don’t like the man all that much.

Many seem to admire the man and support his policies, but feel his personality gets in his own way.  Clearly, a strong ego is necessary to survive the attacks he has been forced to endure.  But with that ego comes tone deafness to some of his failures, especially the poor administrative picks he made while President.  For example, he complained bitterly and with justification about the Department of Justice, but he appointed his own Attorney Generals.  And, who can forget Anthony Scaramucci, the White House Communications Director that lasted about two days in office but took up permanent residence as a Trump critic on cable television?

Much of Trump’s administration of his office was chaotic and ineffectual. 

Many races are yet to be called and we can expect a forensic examination of how this race played out among racial and ethnic groups, the role of the abortion issue and other hot societal questions, and the money and dominant media advantage the Democrats enjoyed. The role of Mitch McConnell and his devious use of Senatorial Election money will also likely draw scrutiny.

But in many national races, and in Arizona in particular, Trump-endorsed candidates have not produced the Red Wave many of us desired. Regardless of the granular details, that seems to be one conclusion we can draw from the election results.

Can MAGA policies prevail without the personality of Trump? We think DeSantis and Greg Abbott have proven they can.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

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Affirmative Action: Does Diversity Offer a Sporting Chance?

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By Paul Schwennesen

I received a letter yesterday from Harvard’s outgoing president Drew Gilpin Faust, asking me to close ranks against an oncoming political attack from a student-rights group that is demanding—brace yourself—that college acceptance standards be tied to scholarly excellence instead of accidents of birth. This “divisive” attack (the president’s word, not mine) from Students for Fair Admissions is attempting to advance a meritocratic agenda that will, it is feared, destroy the sacred idol of big-D Diversity.

Divisiveness and Diversity

I looked up this shadowy, reactionary group of agitators. Their mission is to “… support and participate in litigation that will restore the original principles of our nation’s civil rights movement: A student’s race and ethnicity should not be factors that either harm or help that student to gain admission to a competitive university.” The group has ties to the Republican right, which is the kiss of death in today’s toxic stew of identity politics. This is odd, because frankly Republicans have a much better track record of real commitment to egalitarian principles than the Democratic Party (which, for instance, voted overwhelmingly against the Civil Rights Act). In today’s Orwellian world, however, treating people differently based on the color of their skin is the hallmark of woke progressive thinking. Meanwhile, placing the content of someone’s character before the color of his or her skin is, well, racist.

Harvard says it will “react swiftly and thoughtfully to defend diversity as the source of our strength and our excellence … [a] diverse student body enables us to enrich, to educate, and to challenge one another.” In the abstract sense, I couldn’t agree more. Diversity is a good thing. But diversity of what, exactly? While Harvard is attempting (somewhat credibly, and probably with the best of intentions) to cobble together a variegated group of students with all the appropriate hues and gender affiliations, it is less clear they are doing an adequate job of welcoming students with a diversity of the most important trait: thought. As if student bodies were some kind of exotic menagerie, Harvard has done a fine job carefully selecting crops of students who look diverse based on superficialities, but have been notoriously poor at selecting groups of students with a diversity of intellectual persuasion.

Sporting Odds

A process that selects academic winners and losers on the basis of “background” is considered not only acceptable, but eminently desirable today. I discussed this with a friend who vigorously defended the sensibility of affirmative action programs for giving students from a less privileged background a “fighting chance” in the great race that is life.

By that logic, I asked this friend (a former college athlete), if it wouldn’t make sense to require that sports, which have remained largely clear of such social manipulations (Title IX notwithstanding) to toe the same line? Would it not be just to establish a protocol for sporting awards that manages for a diverse winner’s group that accounts for the vagaries of upbringing and relative advantages of the contestants? After all, admission to a coveted university is an “award” every bit as much as admission to an elite sporting team or gold medal. My friend found the suggestion ridiculous, even bordering on offensive.

Perhaps. As I watch Russia pummel Saudi Arabia in the World Cup, oughtn’t the Saudis who have, shall we say, a mixed history of sport, be given a sanctioned handicap against the clearly better-prepared Russians? Shouldn’t the results of the Olympic 100-meter dash account for “life experience” in ways that ensure a representative sampling?

Shouldn’t college athletic teams (let alone the NBA and NFL) hew to the same standards of ethnic diversity that drive college entrance protocols? On closer thought, my friend is right—it is indeed ridiculous and offensive.

The problem, of course, is that “commitment to diversity” is not a meaningful goal. No person, committee, or policy is wise enough to be able to judiciously micromanage the complicated set of characteristics that define “diversity.” Inevitably, in pursuit of one form of diversity, another is lost because the pursuit of diversity involves choosing winners and losers for the coveted slots in each freshman class. And next thing you know, you have Asian Americans bitterly and righteously complaining of unjustly being discriminated against at Harvard.

Commitment to excellence, and a commensurate pledge to helping others achieve it is far much more credible. If there are systematic issues with underrepresented groups (such as poor or conservative kids) effectively being locked out of the halls of wealth and privilege, then we must apply efforts toward diligently aiding those kids in the communities where they are from. Help them to write better essays, learn calculus, or play the violin, not to guess (and hope) that the accidents of their birth may happen to favor them this particular year. Help them meet and exceed entrance exam standards, rather than by playing schoolmarm wicket-keeper.  In short, make academic excellence as pure as sporting excellence.

Harvard’s president tells me that,

…as a university community, we are bound across differences by a shared commitment to learning, to pursuing truth, and to embracing the rigor and respect of argument and evidence. We never give up on the promise of a world made better by an assumption revisited, an understanding expanded, or a truth questioned—again and again and again.

Agreed. And to that end, I’d like to question the truth of Diversity as an end unto itself, to revisit the assumption that discrimination, when done by the “right people” and for the “right reasons” is okay.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

After Destroying Your Kids’ Education, Teachers Unions Think We Should All Just Hug It Out thumbnail

After Destroying Your Kids’ Education, Teachers Unions Think We Should All Just Hug It Out

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By Christopher Jacobs

One couldn’t help but notice the ironic timing. One week after the release of results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed a historically large decline in student test scores during Covid-induced lockdowns, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten tweeted out approval of an article in The Atlantic calling for “a pandemic amnesty.”

Apart from the obvious quip of whether there’s an amnesty the left will not support, Weingarten represents perhaps the last person who has the right to advance this message. School lockdowns went on for far longer than they needed to, thanks to Weingarten and her union cronies — and America’s children paid the price. Parents across the country can and should take offense at Weingarten’s dismissive attempt at self-absolution.

Public Schools’ Prolonged Shutdowns

Weingarten’s intervention aside, The Atlantic article has more than a nugget of truth in it. At the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t know a lot about Covid — exactly how and where it was transmitted, how to treat it, and so much else. In such an environment, people obviously would make statements they thought were true, and promote policies they thought beneficial, only to discover that later evidence proved them wrong.

To that end, writer and professor Emily Oster makes a fair point:

There is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people — people who cared about children and teachers — advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

Notice the key qualifier here: “In spring and summer 2020,” people had little information about how Covid spread, and therefore (in Oster’s view) school lockdowns seemed reasonable.

But lockdowns didn’t last only through spring and summer 2020. In many cases, they lasted through the spring of 2021. A tracker of schools’ opening status found that a majority of public schools did not go back to fully in-person learning until the week of April 19, 2021. That’s more than one year after the pandemic began, and well after the period in which Oster argues incomplete and imperfect information should excuse public officials’ poor policy choices. Well into January 2021, at least 1 in 6 public schools remained fully remote, with the schoolhouse doors shut to all would-be learners.

By contrast, an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, released on the heels of the dismal NAEP scores nationwide, notes that Catholic schools took a different approach. Most Catholic schools had reopened their doors by the fall of 2020. And whereas public school students’ test scores dropped dramatically from pre-pandemic levels, scores in Catholic schools actually rose — particularly for African American and Hispanic students.

In other words, by the fall of 2020, school closures, and the drop in test scores that appear to have been caused by the same, represented a policy choice, one that Weingarten and the AFT embraced.

Pro-Lockdown Unions

To her credit, Oster notes that she advocated for school reopenings, and (wrongly, in my view) received harsh criticism at the time for doing so. Weingarten and the organization she heads, on the other hand, didn’t just support prolonged shutdowns — they worked behind the scenes to keep schools closed.

Documents released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act requests revealed how, within weeks of the Biden administration taking office, the American Federation of Teachers received a draft copy of Centers for Disease Control guidance on reopening schools. Several AFT-suggested passages raising doubts about school reopenings were adopted almost verbatim by the CDC, leading one public health expert to ask why “this political group [i.e., the AFT] gets to help formulate scientific guidance for our major [federal] public health organization. … This is not how science-based guidelines should work or be put together.”

Having found herself on the wrong side of history for promoting prolonged lockdowns, Weingarten has spent the past several months trying to rewrite it. However, her claims that AFT supported prompt school reopenings sparked so much pushback that she apparently now wishes to move beyond the entire matter.

America’s Children Suffered

Oster’s article argues that, in the interests of moving forward, “we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go.” Certainly, perpetual gloating and/or insults won’t advance anyone’s long-term interests, even if they may make people temporarily feel self-satisfied.

But between the two extremes of forgetting history entirely or, to take a more cynical view, putting it in the proverbial memory hole and holding a perpetual grudge stands the appropriate middle ground, where people 1) admit fault and 2) take steps to make amends.

In the case of school lockdowns and their devastating effects, the solutions seem obvious. Even if she won’t offer her resignation as AFT president, will Weingarten admit that she and her organization got things wrong by casting doubt on reopening in AFT’s clandestine communications with the CDC? Will the public school teachers who spent months and months out of the classroom during the 2020-21 academic year commit to doing more in terms of after-school tutoring, to make up for the poor policies their union adhered to for far too long?

The American people should not try to exact vengeance on political leaders who made erroneous policy choices — but they have every reason to demand accountability, including from “leaders” such as Weingarten who fail to admit their mistakes. The children who could suffer the effects of pandemic-era learning loss for years, or even decades, to come should expect no less.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

If Republicans Win On Tuesday, Thank The Election Integrity Movement thumbnail

If Republicans Win On Tuesday, Thank The Election Integrity Movement

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By Mollie Hemingway

If Republican candidates do as well as expected on Tuesday, they can credit the new, widespread, and coordinated effort to begin securing U.S. elections, helping give candidates the best opportunity possible to win a fair fight in the new voting environment of mail-in balloting.

The Republican National Committee, other party entities, and dozens of public interest election nonprofit groups built over the last two years a multimillion-dollar election integrity infrastructure that passed laws improving voter ID and other election security measures, defended those laws from legal attacks by Democrats, and sued states and localities that failed to follow the law. They also recruited, educated, trained, and placed tens of thousands of new election observers and other workers throughout the long midterm voting season.

And they did it all in one of the most hostile propaganda environments on record.

2020’s Wake-Up Call

The 2020 election was a massive wake-up call for many Americans on the right. In the months leading up to it, Democrats forced through changes to hundreds of laws and processes governing how elections are conducted.

The rule-change scheme was run by Marc Elias, a Democrat election attorney who also ran his party’s Russia collusion hoax, which falsely claimed Donald Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia. Sometimes Democrats’ 2020 changes were instituted legally. Frequently, though, they were effected by other means, such as getting a friendly state or local official to change the rules unilaterally.

The 2020 election plan, some of which was admitted to in a flattering Time magazine story, sought to flood the zone with tens of millions of unsupervised mail-in ballots, historically understood to be riper for fraud and other election irregularities than supervised, in-person voting. The plan also involved the private takeover of government election offices to run Democrat-focused get-out-the-vote operations. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, financed the project, doling out $419 million to two left-wing groups that focused grants and assistance to government offices in the Democrat areas of swing states.

This radical change — “practically a revolution in how people vote,” as Time put it — included the widespread practice of placing ballot drop boxes predominantly in Democrat areas of the country, mailing out unsolicited mail-in ballots or applications for mail-in ballots, using well-funded teams of ballot harvesters both inside and outside of government, lowering and changing the standards for mail-in ballot acceptance, and fixing or “curing” ballots that were improperly filled out.

Corporate media and other Democrats claimed the election was the best-run in history. In reality, it was a mess. Big Tech and the media ran coordinated disinformation campaigns to benefit Democrats by suppressing news that hurt the party. Big Tech also deplatformed effective conservative voices and media outlets, suppressed fundraising emails from Republicans, and elevated certain information to help Democrats.

There were other problems. Candidate debates occurred long after mail-in and early balloting began. Poll observers were sidelined under the guise of a Covid “emergency.” The counting of ballots cast via unsupervised, mail-in voting resulted in curious and confusing results. It took days and sometimes weeks to find out how many ballots were cast, much less for whom. In the end, Americans learned that Joseph Biden, who had spent most of his campaign at home, had become the most popular American president in history, collecting an astounding 81 million votes.

Many Republican voters wondered how things were allowed to get so bad with elections.

Republicans Spent 40 Years on the Sidelines

Part of the reason Republicans hadn’t more effectively fought the election integrity battle before now is somewhat shocking. The 2020 contest was the first presidential election since Ronald Reagan’s first successful run in 1980 in which the Republican National Committee could play any role whatsoever in Election Day operations. For nearly 40 years, the Democratic National Committee had a massive systematic advantage over its Republican counterpart: The RNC had been prohibited by law from helping with poll watcher efforts or nearly any voting-related litigation.

Democrats had accused Republicans of voter intimidation in a 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race. The case was settled, and the two parties entered into a court-ordered consent decree limiting Republican involvement in any poll-watching operation. But Dickinson Debevoise, the Jimmy Carter-appointed judge who oversaw the agreement, never let them out of it, repeatedly modifying and strengthening it at Democrats’ request.

Debevoise was a judge for only 15 years, but he stayed 21 years in senior status, a form of semi-retirement that enables judges to keep serving in a limited capacity. It literally took Debevoise’s dying in 2015 for Republicans to get out of the consent decree. Upon his passing, a new judge, appointed by President Obama, was assigned the case and let the agreement expire at the end of 2018.

The effect of this four-decade hindrance on GOP poll-watching cannot be overstated. Poll watchers serve many functions. They deter voter fraud, but they also help with getting out the vote. Poll watchers can see who has voted, meaning campaigns and political parties can figure out which areas and voters to call and encourage to vote. They also can observe who was forced to vote provisionally or who was turned away at the polls.

“Without poll watchers, the RNC would have no good way to follow up with its voters to help ensure a provisional ballot is later counted, direct confused voters to their correct polling place and document irregularities, such as voting equipment malfunctions and other incidents that are important flash points in a close election or recount,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has explained.

For decades, Democrats built up expansive coordination efforts that the Republicans were prohibited from developing. Republican candidates and state parties could do things on their own, but not with help from the national party. In 2012, the Obama-Biden campaign bragged about recruiting 18,000 lawyers to be poll watchers, providing more than 300 trainings to ensure the observers understood election law. The volunteers would collect more than 19,000 problematic incidents at polling locations that were resolved with or without legal intervention.

The consent decree also meant the RNC was kept out of almost any litigation related to Election Day. In fact, one main part of the RNC’s legal efforts was training staff to stay away from Election Day operations, including recounts, and fending off litigation that arose from the consent decree.

It paralyzed the RNC’s political operations, as the slightest misstep would result in getting sued by Democrats. For example, when former Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer said in an interview with GQ magazine that he’d watched 2016 returns in an oversized utility room on the fifth floor of Trump Tower, Democrats deposed him to show he’d violated the order by being on the wrong floor, one tied to Election Day outreach.

The Democrats used that trivial fact to try, unsuccessfully, to get the new judge to extend the limitation on their political rivals for another decade. Even though the decree was finally lifted after nearly 40 years, it didn’t mean Republicans were on even footing with Democrats in 2020. Democrats had spent decades perfecting their Election Day operations and litigation strategy while everyone at the RNC walked on eggshells, knowing that if they so much as looked in the direction of a polling site, there could be another crackdown.

Thus there was no muscle memory about how to watch polls or communicate with a campaign. They had spent decades not being able to organize or talk to presidential campaigns, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or the National Republican Congressional Committee about any of these efforts.

What a change, then, when McDaniel announced in early 2020 her “intention to be the most litigious chair in history.”

But First, Election Reforms

Before mounting successful lawsuits, however, better laws had to be passed — a difficult task in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, when Democrats claimed any criticism of how that election had been run was unacceptable and possibly criminal. That campaign, designed to suppress efforts to bolster election security, continues to this day. Nevertheless, Republican lawmakers in dozens of states began pushing for election reforms.

For example, bans on so-called Zuckbucks, the private takeover of government election offices, were passed and signed into law in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Six Democrat governors vetoed attempted bans, understanding how key Zuckerberg’s funding was to Democrat success in 2020. The governors of Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all vetoed the bans. Wisconsin’s governor, currently in a tight election, vetoed twice. The Kansas legislature overrode the veto.

The resulting contrast between election integrity in some of these battleground states could not be clearer. Take Pennsylvania, for instance, a pivotal swing state where the Democrat governor vetoed the legislature’s attempted reforms. Its partisan Supreme Court meanwhile issues conflicting guidance, resulting in disparate treatment of ballots depending on the county they’re cast in. Elections here are high in irregularities and low in voter trust.

Not so in Georgia. Recall that despite tremendous pressure from Democrats who alleged massive GOP-led voter suppression, including Biden who smeared election integrity efforts as “Jim Crow 2.0,” Georgia passed much-needed reforms related to voter ID, mail-in voting, and drop boxes, in addition to the Zuckbucks ban. The result has been record-breaking early, in-person voter turnout, across demographics, surpassing 2 million voters this week.

Meanwhile, the Foundation for Government Accountability worked with states to make policy changes to clean voter rolls, ban ballot trafficking, secure ballot custody, roll back Covid waivers, enact penalties for election lawbreakers, require chains of custody, secure drop boxes, pre-process absentee ballots, improve absentee voter ID, and dozens of other types of reforms.

Florida has been working steadily to improve its election system since the disastrous 2000 election. Last year, that meant banning Zuckbucks. This year, those changes included “requiring voter rolls to be annually reviewed and updated, strengthening ID requirements, establishing the Office of Election Crimes and Security to investigate election law violations, and increasing penalties for violations of election laws.”

Incidentally, the Center for Renewing America filed a complaint with the IRS over the tax break that Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan received for their 2020 election meddling.

Litigate, Litigate, Litigate

While the RNC and the Trump campaign did achieve some legal successes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, it was nowhere near sufficient against the well-funded and coordinated Democrat effort. Republican donors and grassroots demanded more.

The RNC got involved in 73 election integrity cases in 20 states for the midterms, with plans to expand. They won a lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for restricting the rights of poll challengers; got Maricopa County, Arizona, to share key data about its partisan breakdown of poll workers; won an open records lawsuit against Mercer County, New Jersey, for refusing to share election administration data; won a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections for restricting the rights of poll watchers; and reached a favorable settlement against Clark County, Nevada, in which the county agreed to share information about its partisan breakdown of poll workers on a rolling basis.

“I’m so grateful the RNC is back in the system after 40 years. They’re so needed,” said Minnesota State Senator and former Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer.

Ken Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general and acting deputy DHS secretary who now runs the Election Transparency Initiative, agreed. “They’ve been a game changer in the litigation arena to keep elections clean.”

The RNC wasn’t the only big change in the litigation battle. Hotelier Steve Wynn, strategist Karl Rove, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and top Republican election lawyers launched an election litigation group, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), in July 2022, and within three months chalked up several major victories.

For instance, RITE sued over controversial Wisconsin Elections Commission guidance that conflicted with state law, telling election clerks to accept ballots that had been spoiled, and won the case. It was also part of the group that successfully sued Pennsylvania over whether ballots that failed to be dated, as required by state law, could be counted.

“It goes to show what responsible and tireless lawyering can do for election integrity,” said Derek Lyons, the president and CEO of RITE.

Groups with lengthier histories of battling for election integrity, such as the Public Interest Legal Foundation, also had successes. A Delaware court ruled that the state’s newly passed mail-in balloting scheme violated its constitution.

Monitoring Polls

U.S. elections used to occur on one day, requiring just one day of poll observations. Now that elections can spread out over days, weeks, or even months, many more workers are needed to monitor the casting of ballots.

The RNC hired 17 in-state election integrity directors and 37 state-based election integrity counsels in key states. They conducted more than 5,000 election integrity trainings, recruited more than 70,000 poll watchers and workers, and worked with more than 110,000 unique volunteers nationwide. They set up an issue reporting system and distributed copies of Poll Watcher Principles for states. If voters encounter election issues, they can file a report, and attorneys will be dispatched to resolve the issues. Sites were set up in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Congressional Republicans also got in on the action. Rep. Rodney Davis, the top Republican on the House Administration Committee, notified all 50 states that he would be deploying dozens of specially trained election observers to protect the integrity of the ballot box.

The move occurred after Democrats nearly seized a seat won by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa in 2020. She won her election by just six votes, leading Democrats to attempt to unseat her using parliamentary shenanigans. The Republicans of the House Administration Committee just released a mini-doc about Democrats’ attempt at literal election denialism.

With tens of millions of voters newly concerned about election integrity, other groups also took part in massive training operations. The Election Integrity Network, which started with a podcast on election integrity issues hosted by longtime election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, grew into state summits, which then built out into coalitions in states, attracting people to weekly meetings. The network has trained 76,000 poll workers.

The network’s North Carolina Election Integrity Team covers 95 percent of that state’s priority areas with poll observers. It has more than 30 local task forces, with representatives in 75 of 100 counties. More than 2,000 North Carolinians were individually trained. The group has established a strong working relationship with the state General Assembly to overhaul legislation and built relationships with local election officials. Similar groups are operating in Georgia, Virginia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and other states.

The Vulnerable Voters Working Group meets to develop and implement ideas to protect nursing homes from left-wing ballot harvesting. The American Constitutional Rights Union is one coalition partner working to protect seniors from illicit activities.

Part of the benefit of an aggressive legal strategy is that it incentivizes election bureaucrats and officials to follow the law, which helps restore trust in elections, Election Integrity Network Director Marshall Yates says. “What these people do is provide transparency and accountability to the system that was previously just run by unaccountable bureaucrats. They may or may not see something but just their presence is a check on making sure there is some accountability to the system, and it should restore confidence in seeing how elections were administered.”

What Remains

While reforms were passed in more than two dozen states, key lawsuits were filed and won, and poll workers are being deployed nationwide, many problems remain. Even with the recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court victory, that state remains essentially lawless when it comes to election integrity. North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, and other battleground states retain problematic election processes and guidance. And inflated voter rolls, combined with unsolicited mail-in ballots, are a recipe for disaster.

The new election integrity groups have much work to do in the years ahead. But many Americans, from establishment Republicans to grassroots conservatives, have poured themselves into restoring integrity to elections nationwide. They have begun to achieve major successes in lobbying for election security, litigating against a well-funded activist opposition, and training poll watchers. And they did it all in the face of a hostile propaganda press that maliciously disparaged them as election deniers.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

Google Skewing Search Results For Arizona’s Gubernatorial, Secretary of State Races thumbnail

Google Skewing Search Results For Arizona’s Gubernatorial, Secretary of State Races

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By Corinne Murdock

Editor’s Note [AZ Free News]: Since our story published, search results for Kari Lake now show her campaign website on Google’s first page.

Google appears to be skewing search results of Arizona’s gubernatorial candidates to favor the Democratic candidates over the Republicans. AZ Free News monitored search results over the past week and discovered indications of a consistent bias for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs and secretary of state candidate Adrian Fontes, over their respective Republican opponents Kari Lake and Mark Finchem.

It’s likely the latest in Google’s history of attempting to sway election outcomes. The Big Tech giant historically referred to their technique of manipulating search results as “ephemeral experiences.” Google has admitted to manufacturing this information in order to change people’s attitudes and behavior concerning politics.

A search of “Katie Hobbs” brings up Hobbs’ website as the first result, followed by top news portraying Hobbs favorably. A sample of articles featured over the weekend: an MSNBC interview that she’s the sane candidate, a Fox News report that she has “Republicans” campaigning for her, a KTAR report that former President Barack Obama will stump for her and Senator Mark Kelly, and an Insider report on Fox News mistakenly screening mock election results of a Hobbs victory.

After those articles, it’s Hobbs’ secretary of state website, her Twitter feed, her Wikipedia page, an endorsement by pro-abortion group Emily’s List, her Ballotpedia, her Facebook, and various coverage of the burglary of her campaign office.

Then there’s the results of a search on “Kari Lake.” Her campaign website doesn’t appear on any of the first 11 search result pages, and doesn’t appear even when omitted results are included. Lake’s website appears sporadically via ads, alongside which there are usually ads asking voters to donate to Hobbs.

Search results for Lake yield a Wikipedia page first, followed by top news portraying Lake unfavorably. Here were some of the articles featured over the weekend: multiple outlets’ coverage of “Saturday Night Live” mocking Lake and other Trump-backed candidates, multiple outlets’ reports on former congresswoman Liz Cheney’s millions and latest ad to defeat Lake, an Arizona Republic report detailing Attorney General Mark Brnovich accusing Lake of running a “giant grift,” and a Politico report on Lake using “MAGA star power.” After those articles, it’s Lake’s Ballotpedia, her Twitter feed, several YouTube videos, a Washington Post article, her Instagram feed, and her Facebook page.

Something similar occurs when voters look up the secretary of state candidates. A search for “Mark Finchem” yields his state legislator profile first, not his website, followed by his Wikipedia page and a collection of “top stories” characterizing Finchem as an “election denier” and target of Cheney’s PAC. Whereas a search for “Adrian Fontes” yields his campaign website first, followed by his Ballotpedia profile, endorsements, social media profiles, and two individual links to news coverage detailing Fontes’ campaign platform. Absent from the first page of results are “top stories” portraying Fontes in any negative light.

The same can’t be said for other races. Google search results for attorney general candidates Abraham Hamadeh (R) and Kris Mayes (D) yield their websites first, followed by Ballotpedia and social media accounts — no top news stories aggregated near the top.

The same is true for the search results for Maricopa County attorney, superintendent, treasurer, and state legislative candidates. U.S. House and Senate races don’t reflect that bias, either.

Google has a history of political favoritism of the left. Evidence of their role in elections became evident following the 2016 presidential election.

In last Thursday’s episode of Fox News “Tucker Carlson Today,” acclaimed psychologist and researcher Robert Epstein said that Google modifies its search results to influence voters. That’s in addition to the fact that Google is one of the top surveillance entities in the world.

Epstein, a Biden voter, said that his research confirmed whistleblower testimonies of Google’s election influence. Throughout the 2016 election, Epstein monitored Google activity using 1,735 voters across four swing states. In all, Epstein gleaned around 1.5 million ephemeral experiences across not only Google, but Bing, YouTube, and Facebook.

Epstein asserted that the biggest issue in elections wasn’t fraud but the Big Tech companies’ unchecked influence.

“I was nauseated that our data were [sic] telling us that this election was in the hands of private companies, Google in particular. Literally, that there is no more democracy, there is no more free and fair election, it’s just an illusion,” stated Epstein.

Epstein said that Google and YouTube influenced search results to favor far-left ideology. He estimated that Google’s influence in search results affected around 6 million votes in 2020.

“What we found was extreme liberal bias on Google — which is the only real search engine that counts — and hardly any bias on Bing and Yahoo,” said Epstein.

Arizona doesn’t appear to be the top priority for the Big Tech giant this year, despite evidence of their handiwork in the gubernatorial and secretary of state races. According to Epstein’s research, Google’s current primary focus is Wisconsin.

Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee (RNC) sued Google over claims of censorship. The RNC provided research indicating that the Big Tech giant sends its campaign emails to spam folders automatically to suppress its fundraising and get-out-the-vote messages.

****

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

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

Unexplained Excess Deaths Are on the Rise thumbnail

Unexplained Excess Deaths Are on the Rise

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By Edward Ring

By a significant margin, and according to data reported weekly by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the death rate in America

remains elevated. If nothing else is certain as Americans continue to cope with the most disruptive event in the last half-century, one fact is indisputable: As the number of cases of COVID-19 decreased over the past few months, they now account for less than half of this persistently elevated death rate.

In the six years before the COVID era, deaths in the United States averaged between 2.6 million and 2.8 million people per year. These averages are adjusted for population growth, and with a population as large as that of the United States, the numbers should be, and are, remarkably stable. During the three years immediately preceding 2020, for example, the population growth-adjusted death rate from all causes varied by only 1.5 percent.

None of that is true today. The increase in total deaths—deaths from all causes, not just COVID deaths—is up significantly. In the nine months in 2020 from April to December, a normal death count would have been 2.04 million. Instead, during that period, 2.57 million people died, 26 percent above normal.

Deaths in the United States from all causes in 2021 were also well above normal—3.46 million versus only 2.8 million if it had been a normal year, 24 percent over normal. So far in 2022, with complete data available through August, total deaths were 1.91 million, against a projected 2.21 million if it were a normal year, which is still up 16 percent. These numbers are shown graphically on the chart below.

To put these overages in perspective, in recent decades before COVID came along, a very bad flu season would mean an increase in total deaths, but typically not much more than the usual increases every flu season. This can be seen above, where the normal multi-year average (blue line) rises to a peak of around 60,000 total deaths per week during the worst month of flu season in January, then descends to around 50,000 per week in mid-summer. Even the H1N1 virus didn’t have a significant overall impact. Between 2009 and 2010, the CDC estimates around 12,500 Americans died from H1N1. That represents not quite a 0.5 percent increase in total deaths.

While it is encouraging that total excess deaths in the United States during 2022 so far are only up 16 percent compared to 24 percent in 2021 and 26 percent in the last nine months of 2020, they are still well above anything we have seen in the United States in the last 100 years. But more troubling is the fact that according to the CDC’s own data, most of these excess deaths cannot be attributed to COVID. In the chart below, the blue line plots the number of excess deaths over the past two-and-a-half years, and the gray line plots how many of those excess deaths are attributable to COVID. The gray line is consistently below the blue line.

To put these overages in perspective, in recent decades before COVID came along, a very bad flu season would mean an increase in total deaths, but typically not much more than the usual increases every flu season. This can be seen above, where the normal multi-year average (blue line) rises to a peak of around 60,000 total deaths per week during the worst month of flu season in January, then descends to around 50,000 per week in mid-summer. Even the H1N1 virus didn’t have a significant overall impact. Between 2009 and 2010, the CDC estimates around 12,500 Americans died from H1N1. That represents not quite a 0.5 percent increase in total deaths.

While it is encouraging that total excess deaths in the United States during 2022 so far are only up 16 percent compared to 24 percent in 2021 and 26 percent in the last nine months of 2020, they are still well above anything we have seen in the United States in the last 100 years. But more troubling is the fact that according to the CDC’s own data, most of these excess deaths cannot be attributed to COVID…..

*****

Continue reading this article at American Greatness.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

In Final Arizona Push, Blake Masters Blasts The Washington Establishment thumbnail

In Final Arizona Push, Blake Masters Blasts The Washington Establishment

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By Tristan Justice

‘My job is to win with or without Mitch McConnell’s money, and I think we’re on track to win without,’ Masters told The Federalist.

PHOENIX — Arizona Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters, a political novice who has never run for elected office, is in a statistical tie with Democrat incumbent Mark Kelly heading into Election Day, and he’s done it without much help from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“My job is to win with or without Mitch McConnell’s money, and I think we’re on track to win without,” Masters told The Federalist in an exclusive interview on the first day of his finalé bus tour this past weekend.

Two months ago, McConnell’s super PAC to reclaim the majority in the upper chamber opened September with an axe to the rest of its planned spending against Kelly. With Masters down 6 points in the polls against a Democrat who narrowly captured the seat just two years ago, the Senate Leadership Fund gutted $18 million from the race. Kelly won by fewer than 80,000 votes in 2020 and tied himself to an unpopular president over his two years as a senator, voting 95 percent of the time with the Biden White House agenda. Instead, McConnell bankrolled the defense of GOP Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, spending more than $5 million in a race between two Republicans.

“I try not to feel entitled to other people’s money,” Masters told The Federalist on Saturday. “That’s a left-wing value. I’d be like [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] if I felt entitled to other people’s money. So when Mitch McConnell cut funding for Arizona, I could have gotten mad, I could have just started throwing bombs at him in the media, but I didn’t.”

Masters didn’t need to. Where McConnell has chosen to spend money this cycle speaks for itself. Instead of throwing support and funding behind Masters to flip a seat to the GOP, he has bent over backward to protect old-guard Republicans from insurgent GOP candidates who have pledged not to support the octogenarian lawmaker for another term in leadership, even if it means sacrificing chances to reclaim a Senate majority.

If Masters prevails on Tuesday without McConnell’s aid, it will be yet another sign of the new era of Republican politics, in which young, populist outsiders forge a new GOP without asking the establishment for permission.

Masters, who announced during the crowded state primary that he would cast his vote for a more conservative alternative for leader should one arise, never bowed to McConnell in order to garner the Republican Senate chief’s approval and the money that comes with it. McConnell made clear this fall that his money comes with strings attached, and Masters was willing to cut them.

“I’ve said I’m going to vote for the most conservative person running,” Masters told The Federalist, maintaining a posture of defiance to the party establishment that has come to define his campaign.

A New Generation of Republican Leadership

As far as McConnell is concerned, the threat Masters poses is about more than a vote for Senate leadership. It’s also about the generational change Masters represents: a new brand of bold, conservative populism that the candidate pledges to bring to the upper chamber, undermining old-guard Republicanism altogether.

In many ways, Masters is a traitor to his class. A privileged elite from Silicon Valley with degrees from Stanford and Stanford Law, Masters left the fortune of California’s lucrative tech industry to run as a conservative populist for the Arizona Senate seat held by Kelly, an astronaut. Like Ohio’s J.D. Vance, who is also running as a first-time candidate this cycle, Masters is a protégé of billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a rare conservative operating in the belly of left-wing America. Thiel pumped $15 million into each campaign through the primaries. If Vance, 38, and Masters, 36 — both of whom rail against Big Tech as a menace to democracy — prevail on Tuesday, they will represent ex-Silicon Valley insiders working to reshape conservatism and the Republican Party itself.

Their message has clearly picked up steam among a Republican base energized to turn out for their respective candidates in the midterms, which are historically hostile to the president’s party. During the final days of the primary campaign in Arizona, Masters maintained the momentum he built over the contest with a double-digit lead in the polls: He beat the runner-up by 12 points for the nomination.

Activists Energized by Masters’ Appeal

Vincent La is a 27-year-old software engineer from California who moved to Arizona in May of last year, alienated by the far-left takeover of the Golden State. As the sun set over the Arizona desert Friday night, La was preparing to canvass for the Republican slate of candidates in the Phoenix suburbs with local congressional candidate Kelly Cooper and several activists. None looked older than 30.

La said this year is the most involved he’s ever been in an election. He pointed to Masters as his favorite candidate, even during the primary.

“I thought he knew what time it was,” La told The Federalist, saying Masters’ antagonism of Big Tech’s empire motivated his vote. “I thought he knew what Republicans needed to do.” Others cited the candidate’s contagious energy.

Ariane Buse also recently fled California for Arizona, disillusioned by the former’s downward spiral under left-wing leaders. Asked in the packed auditorium of Scottsdale’s Dream City Church, the last leg of Masters’ bus tour on Saturday, if she trusted Masters considering his background as a first-time candidate coming from California, Buse was unconcerned and complimented his intensity.

“I think he’s young, he’s excited to do something, he’s from Tuscon, he knows what this state needs. I think he’s got great energy,” Buse told The Federalist.

If Masters was tired on the sixth and final stop of just day one of a three-day bus tour, it was hardly noticeable. On stage, he attacked inflation, the media, and the border crisis, particularly highlighting the fentanyl flooding the country as “poison.”

“I’m refusing the term ‘overdosing,’” Masters said, describing victims of the crisis as being “poisoned,” while he blasted “limousine liberals” and “champagne socialists” as apathetic to the problems their policies create.

It’s the kind of forceful rhetoric Republican voters have come to expect of their leaders, and it’s why Masters has resonated with grassroots conservatives in Arizona.

Ashley Earle is a mother of three children who lives in Scottsdale with her husband. She grew up in Arizona, married her high school sweetheart, and moved their family to the Virginia Appalachians before recently returning home. She homeschools the kids while her husband runs a small business, coping with inflation as they cling to the American dream they’ve found in the Grand Canyon state. Americans everywhere are struggling with rising prices, but Central Arizona is suffering the highest rate of inflation in the entire country.

Earle didn’t hesitate when asked outside the Dream City Church auditorium the first thing that comes to mind when she hears the name “Blake Masters.”

“I love his passion,” she said with a smile, comparing their families, which both have three young children. “He understands what it’s like to be a parent in our age group.”

When asked her thoughts about Republican leadership, Earle’s smile dissipated.

“I feel like they’re afraid of Blake,” she said.

When pressed backstage on what his success thus far, without support from the top elected Republican in the country, means for the party, Masters said it shows what voters are looking for.

“I think it kind of shows I’m more in touch with what people want right now,” Masters said. “I’m running on this very bold but very commonsense America First agenda. It’s not complicated.”

It also shows that the America First agenda, which was put forth by President Donald Trump six years ago and dubbed “Trumpsim,” has begun to transcend that label and become a larger movement beyond the man himself. Kari Lake, a local charismatic news anchor who left her nearly 30-year television career to run for governor, was greeted at the final stop as a rock star after campaigning on a Trump-inspired “Arizona First” agenda.

The state’s Republican Senate and gubernatorial candidates are running as a ticket, encouraging Arizonans to vote “Lake and Blake.”

The Tide Is Already Turning in Washington

Masters has been able to capitalize on the few D.C. institutions and individuals who are responsive to the grassroots activists who make up the Republican base, betting that the way to win elections moving forward is to cater to the people and not the pundits.

Kelli Ward, the chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, explained over lunch in south Phoenix that this year’s slate of candidates aligned against the coastal establishment was a directive for Washington to heed the shift in mood.

“The politicians have to remember who they work for, and I think that in Arizona we sent that message,” said Ward.

After McConnell pulled $18 million from Masters’ competitive contest only to dump $5 million into Alaska, other groups such as Heritage Action for America began jumping in to fill the gap. The Sentinel Action Fund, a project of Heritage Action to support candidates with widespread support among the grassroots, has put more than $8 million behind Masters and against his well-funded opponent, who is battling for re-election with nearly $80 million. The group did the same for Gen. Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, pumping more than $2.15 million into the GOP bid to unseat incumbent Democrat Sen. Maggie Hassan after McConnell axed $5.6 million for the Granite State. Last month, Bolduc joined Masters in maintaining opposition to McConnell for another term as Senate leader.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman, has spent more on Masters’ race than on any other candidate this cycle. Scott, who publicly admonished McConnell in September when the minority leader trashed the quality of this year’s candidates, has put nearly $10 million from the NRSC behind the Arizona effort to bring down Kelly.

After months of campaigning tied the polls against the odds, local GOP leaders worry that Masters still might lose over low turnout brought by complacency and that a revolution in the Republican Party might fail. If Republicans want to win — and they want to win with generational change in Washington — they will need to show up to the voting booth.

*****

This article is published at The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

Biden’s Family Got “Interest-Free,” “Forgivable” Loan From China, New Evidence Reveals thumbnail

Biden’s Family Got “Interest-Free,” “Forgivable” Loan From China, New Evidence Reveals

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By The Editors

President Joe Biden has made waves this fall with his plan to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans, shifting the burden to taxpayers. Five years earlier, his family cashed in on a zero-interest, forgivable loan of its own from an energy company in communist China, according to evidence in the possession of the FBI.

The loan arrangement, confirmed in documents obtained by Just the News and also new information released by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), shows the Chinese energy firm CEFC Beijing International Energy Company Limited understood the transaction would benefit Joe Biden’s family (referred to as “BD family” in the emails), but it also was creating heartburn with its own compliance/risk management officers.

The Chinese company’s leaders “fully support the framework of establishing the JV (joint venture), based on their trust on BD family,” stated a July 26, 2017 email from a CEFC official to Tony Bobulinski, a Hunter Biden business partner at the time. The email was written in part to explain why there had been a delay in getting the money to a firm called SinoHawk associated with the future president’s son and brother, Hunter Biden and James Biden, respectively.

“The delay of wire is caused by the details on the JV building, as follows: 1) the positioning and strategy of the JV are not made fully clear to CEFC 2) 5 million is lent to BD family in the 10 million charter capital. How will this 5 million be used (or the 10 million as a whole)? This 5 million loan to BD family is interest-free,” the email stated…..

*****

Continue reading  this article at Just the News.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

We Must Have Accountability thumbnail

We Must Have Accountability

/in , , , , , /by

By Editorial Staff

By Justin Hart / Brownstone Institute

The failures and harms from our pandemic public policies are legion!

Fauci-endorsed lockdowns were ineffective (and damaging!); risks from COVID-19 are not uniform for the entire population but directly aligned to your age; the mortality impact on children is almost immeasurable but we burdened them with mandates and school closures; mask mandates have shown zero impact on quelling the spread of the virus; denied by Fauci and Co., natural immunity offers strong protection; and vaccines (designed for a 2-year-old variant) have proven ineffectual at stopping the current crop of feared COVID variants.

Dr. Fauci and his cadre of unelected health officials were on the wrong side of every one of these outcomes. They were made aware of every data point above but their one-size-fits-all policies have not changed in the face of the evidence. In their minds, there is only the panic.

Recently, Professor Emily Oster of Brown University, admits in a recent article that interventions like social distancing “were totally misguided” but begs for amnesty for the serious damage wrought by health overlords like Dr. Fauci.

*****

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

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

‘Why Not Debate Your Opponent?’: Don Lemon Calls Out Katie Hobbs For Ducking Debates thumbnail

‘Why Not Debate Your Opponent?’: Don Lemon Calls Out Katie Hobbs For Ducking Debates

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By Harold Hutchison

CNN host Don Lemon questioned Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is running for governor, Wednesday morning about her refusal to debate Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake.

“Why not debate your opponent? If you believe your opponent … has issues in spreading conspiracy theories about a stolen election and so on and is not being truthful with the people of Arizona, why, then, not get on the debate stage?” Don Lemon asked Hobbs.

“You know, not only is Kari Lake — has she centered her entire platform around this election denialism, I didn’t want to give her a bigger stage to do that,” Hobbs responded. “But additionally, she has shown that she’s not interested in having any kind of substantive conversation. She’s only interested in creating a spectacle.”

Lake took a lead in polls released in recent weeks, including an 11% lead in a Fox10/InsiderAdvantage poll released Oct. 26, an OH Predictive Insights poll released Monday showed Lake with a 2% lead. Pollster Matt Towery told Fox10 that Hobbs’ refusal to debate Lake could be a reason the former television anchor surged ahead.

“Our campaign strategy is our campaign strategy,” Hobbs told Lemon.

Lake’s website features lengthy discussions of her positions on the border, homelessness, the economy and education. The website also had shorter discussions on water issues, the Second Amendment, rural Arizona and election integrity.

“Secretary Hobbs remains willing and eager to participate in a town hall style event, such as the forum she participated in last week in which Arizonans were able to hear directly from Sec. Hobbs about her in-depth policy plans and how she would approach governing this state,” Nicole DeMont, campaign manager for Hobbs, said in a Sept. 11 statement. “Unfortunately, debating a conspiracy theorist like Kari Lake – whose entire campaign platform is to cause enormous chaos and make Arizona the subject of national ridicule – would only lead to constant interruptions, pointless distractions, and childish name-calling.”

Lake, who received former President Donald Trump’s endorsement, narrowly won the Republican primary in August. She labeled the 2020 election “corrupt” and said President Joe Biden “shouldn’t be in the White House” during a June Republican debate.

“It’s rich to hear Katie Hobbs claim on CNN that Kari Lake only talks to fake news outlets, given that Kari Lake has talked to CNN (is Hobbs calling CNN fake news?) as well as CBS, ABC, Fox News, multiple broadcast networks in Arizona, and in fact takes questions from dozens of reporters from dozens of outlets almost on a daily basis,” a Lake campaign spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement. “Kari Lake has run one of the most press accessible campaigns in history while Katie Hobbs refuses to debate, runs from reporters, and hides in her basement.”

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is this coming Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots).

If you have not submitted you mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

Biden’s Diesel Fuel Shortage: Cold Comfort thumbnail

Biden’s Diesel Fuel Shortage: Cold Comfort

/in , , , , , /by

By Lawrence Kadish

During World War II, the Allies’ aerial assault on the Nazis did not begin to have the strategic means to bring the enemy to its knees until Germany’s oil reserves were destroyed and it was unable to refuel its tanks. Then, as now, destroying the energy infrastructure of an adversary can bring about the destruction of a nation. America’s current enemies have not forgotten that historic lesson.

Which is why Americans should view with alarm the unconscionable news reported by industry analysts that we are facing a severe shortage of diesel fuel this winter.

Understandably, we have been focused on the price of gasoline, but it is diesel that actually runs America. It is diesel that powers America’s freight trains, trucks, freighters, barges and buses. It is the fuel that runs our farming and construction equipment. And for many, diesel is the fuel that heats their homes.

How is it that diesel reserves have dropped to frightening levels while the energy-demanding cold weather has not even arrived in most of the country yet? How is it that the Biden Administration continues to buckle to a Progressive agenda that has prevented us from accessing the energy that resides within our borders?

While current refining capacity is one of the reasons why there is a pending energy crunch, we need to recognize that the White House has aggressively sought to fulfill their political pledge to curtail new oil and gas drilling. If successful, that policy would prevent us from returning to energy independence. If the Biden Administration is allowed to proceed, our enemies, and their enablers, would find a seriously damaged America, the victim of a self-inflicted wound threatening our future.

It remains deeply troubling to see those corporate billionaires who hold American citizenship consider how their Chinese multimillion dollar markets will react to American foreign policy — and then offer domestic political donations with an eye on placating places like Beijing.

Having been questioned about his half a billion dollars’ worth of Democratic political donations designed to further their agenda, Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg says he will not pursue a second round of contributions.

Private funding of government election offices has since been made illegal, at least in 24 states. In all 50 states, however, federal public funding of government election offices appears still to be legal.

In an era when we may be thirty days from a severe diesel shortage that can further rob our nation of its global leadership, the president’s actions may be literally cold comfort for many Americans and our economy.

*****

This article was published by Gatestone Institute International Policy Council and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is this coming Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots).

If you have not submitted you mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

COLD COMFORT: Biden’s Diesel Fuel Shortage thumbnail

COLD COMFORT: Biden’s Diesel Fuel Shortage

/in , , , , , /by

By Lawrence Kadish

During World War II, the Allies’ aerial assault on the Nazis did not begin to have the strategic means to bring the enemy to its knees until Germany’s oil reserves were destroyed and it was unable to refuel its tanks. Then, as now, destroying the energy infrastructure of an adversary can bring about the destruction of a nation. America’s current enemies have not forgotten that historic lesson.

Which is why Americans should view with alarm the unconscionable news reported by industry analysts that we are facing a severe shortage of diesel fuel this winter.

Understandably, we have been focused on the price of gasoline, but it is diesel that actually runs America. It is diesel that powers America’s freight trains, trucks, freighters, barges and buses. It is the fuel that runs our farming and construction equipment. And for many, diesel is the fuel that heats their homes.

How is it that diesel reserves have dropped to frightening levels while the energy-demanding cold weather has not even arrived in most of the country yet? How is it that the Biden Administration continues to buckle to a Progressive agenda that has prevented us from accessing the energy that resides within our borders?

While current refining capacity is one of the reasons why there is a pending energy crunch, we need to recognize that the White House has aggressively sought to fulfill their political pledge to curtail new oil and gas drilling. If successful, that policy would prevent us from returning to energy independence. If the Biden Administration is allowed to proceed, our enemies, and their enablers, would find a seriously damaged America, the victim of a self-inflicted wound threatening our future.

It remains deeply troubling to see those corporate billionaires who hold American citizenship consider how their Chinese multimillion dollar markets will react to American foreign policy — and then offer domestic political donations with an eye on placating places like Beijing.

Having been questioned about his half a billion dollars’ worth of Democratic political donations designed to further their agenda, Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg says he will not pursue a second round of contributions.

Private funding of government election offices has since been made illegal, at least in 24 states. In all 50 states, however, federal public funding of government election offices appears still to be legal.

In an era when we may be thirty days from a severe diesel shortage that can further rob our nation of its global leadership, the president’s actions may be literally cold comfort for many Americans and our economy.

*****

This article was published by Gatestone Institute International Policy Council and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is this coming Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots).

If you have not submitted you mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

Victor’s Endorsement of Masters Shows GOP is the Best Chance for Liberty thumbnail

Victor’s Endorsement of Masters Shows GOP is the Best Chance for Liberty

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By Ryne Bolick

On the first day of November, Libertarian candidate Marc Victor announced his withdrawal from the race for U.S. Senate in Arizona. This was not all that he announced. Victor also announced his endorsement of Republican candidate Blake Masters. This shows that the Republican Party is the best vehicle for liberty-minded individuals to enact change.

Prior to the announcement, Blake Masters and Marc Victor had an open discussion and exchange of ideas that was recorded and included in Victor’s endorsement video. Victor opens the discussion with Masters by saying he was impressed with the Republican candidate’s recent appearance on Ron Paul’s podcast.

The discussion touched on a variety of issues, including foreign policy, the non-aggression principle, economic issues, taxes, COVID shutdowns, education, the federal reserve, energy, guns, immigration, social security, abortion, the separation of church and state, medical freedom, drug policy, and marriage.

Foreign policy

The libertarian view on foreign policy has traditionally found more common ground with the left. However, in recent years, prominent figures in the Republican Party have challenged the GOP’s pro-intervention reputation. The Democrat and Republican parties are even showing signs of trading platforms on foreign policy, and this grows more apparent with Biden’s criticism of some Republicans’ reluctance to send aid to Ukraine.

The shift of the Democrat Party toward a pro-intervention platform is also apparent in former Congresswoman and 2020 presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s withdrawal from the Democratic Party. She was one of Congress’ most vocal critics of interventionist foreign policy. Tulsi Gabbard has since endorsed Kari Lake and Blake Masters, further showing that liberty lovers on both sides of the aisle can find sanctuary in the GOP.

In Victor’s video with Masters, the two agreed on foreign policy.

“I have been a long critic of U.S. interventionism and some of these formerly forever wars”, said Masters. He went on to criticize current lawmakers saying, “The foreign policy block in D.C., they’re always itching to intervene.”

Masters acknowledged their common ground saying, “You and I agree about having a strong military, but the goal is defense.”

COVID shutdowns and mandates

Libertarians are always skeptical of government intervention in private business; but during the COVID-19 pandemic, Republicans were the strongest critics of COVID shutdowns and mandates. Meanwhile, Democrats did little to speak out against authoritarian government overreach.

Little discussion was needed for Victor and Masters to know they were on the same page regarding mandates. They both agreed the shutdown of private businesses was unconstitutional.

Education

Libertarians reject nearly all federal funding, and that includes education.

Victor asked Masters if they were on the same page regarding the separation of school and state; and Blake Masters confirmed their common vision and went on to say we need to further separate government and schools, “starting with getting rid of the federal Department of Education.”

Both additionally rejected the federal funding of student loans.

Immigration

Immigration is the one issue mentioned during this discussion in which the respective stances from the Republican and Libertarian party platforms are most distant. Some more extreme libertarians advocate for open borders; whereas border security is a hot topic within the Republican party.

Nevertheless, the two again found much common ground.

The two mostly agreed on a need to reduce the welfare state associated with our current immigration system and to have a secure border, but still allow good people into our country. Masters said, “[we should] attract the world’s best and the brightest; and stop the Mexican drug cartels from selling people into slavery in our own country.”

Abortion

The libertarian philosophy regarding abortion is complex, but boils down to little government intervention.

While government intervention characterized by libertarians may include Republican legislation that hinders abortion access; libertarians can agree with Republicans that abortions should not be funded by taxpayers. Victor and Masters agreed that there should be no taxpayer-funded abortions.

Both Victor and Masters agreed overturning Roe v. Wade was the right thing since it returned decision-making on abortion back to the states.

Masters’ stance reflects a broader notion that when the federal government does not need to step in, it should not step in. Issues such as these should be kicked out to state governments to make decisions more reflective of local beliefs supporting the federalist system of governance intended by our founding fathers.

Liberty’s place in the GOP

Victor and Masters wrapped up their discussion by discussing libertarian philosophy. Masters said he largely agrees with the theory of libertarianism, but he disagrees with libertarianism on the grounds that he believes we need to fight back against left-wing (or right-wing) authoritarianism.

The key takeaway of Masters’ discussion with Victor is that Masters will be an advocate for liberty in the U.S. Senate. It is apparent that the two share a liberty-oriented philosophy on a variety of issues where they share common ground. Without Victor in the Senate race, there is still an advocate for liberty, and for this reason, Victor was comfortable withdrawing from the race.

As Ronald Reagan said, “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally – not a 20 percent traitor.”

Masters represents at least 80 percent of the views of those passionate about liberty, such as Victor or myself; so we can count on Masters to be an ally for liberty.

While the party is not without fault, the GOP continues to be the best vehicle for liberty.

*****

This article was published by Western Tribune and is reproduced with permission.

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How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). On October 12th, he ballots were mailed to all voters registered for mail-in voting in the 2022 midterm elections. ‘Election day’ is next Tuesday November 8.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

Mark Kelly Says He’s a Criminal Justice Moderate. His Campaign Took $350K From a Soros-Backed Defund Group. thumbnail

Mark Kelly Says He’s a Criminal Justice Moderate. His Campaign Took $350K From a Soros-Backed Defund Group.

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By Chuck Ross

A dark money group that wants to defund police and abolish federal immigration agencies has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Arizona Senate race, providing a last-minute boost for Democratic senator Mark Kelly, whose once-sizable lead has evaporated ahead of Election Day.

Living United for Change in Arizona has spent nearly $350,000 since Oct. 21 to help the Kelly campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records. The expenditures have gone to pay wages for canvassers to knock on doors in the Grand Canyon State to turn out the vote for Kelly.

The donations create an uneasy alliance for Kelly, who fashions himself a moderate criminal justice reformer. Living United, which has received funding from left-wing billionaire George Soros, has called for defunding the Phoenix Police Department, saying, “The police do not protect or serve us.” The group, which has held protests outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, made national headlines in October 2021 after its members filmed Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) in a bathroom on the campus of Arizona State University and grilled her over her opposition to ending the filibuster to pass a voting bill.

The group’s support comes at a pivotal moment for Kelly, whose double-digit lead over Republican Blake Masters has disappeared amid growing concerns about crime and the economy. A recent poll from the progressive Data for Progress found Kelly tied with Masters. The poll also found that Latino voters favored Kelly by a 58-37 margin, down considerably from Kelly’s support among the group in the 2020 special election…..

*****

Continue reading at The Washington Free Beacon.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). On October 12th, he ballots were mailed to all voters registered for mail-in voting in the 2022 midterm elections. ‘Election day’ is next Tuesday November 8.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

Big Tech + Big Government = Censorship thumbnail

Big Tech + Big Government = Censorship

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By Erica Mitchell

Above, that’s Vijaya Gadde, who until she was fired by Elon Musk, was Twitter’s lead censor — and, as it turns out, a government suck-up. You have probably seen by now The Intercept’s jaw-dropping report about how the US Government has been collaborating with Big Tech to monitor and shape what Americans are allowed to talk about. I won’t quote the report at length here, but here’s the gist:

Note this part especially, from the report:

Got that? If you have a dissenting opinion on the lab-leak theory, on vaccines, on Critical Race Theory, on Afghanistan, or on Ukraine, then the Feds may be interested in you.

Check out this Twitter thread by Bill Roggio, editor of Long War Journal.

Same deal with Covid, and with racialist anti-Asian and anti-white policies implemented by elites, supposedly for our own good. What “inaccurate information” about “racial justice” does the US Government believes is a threat to the security of the homeland? Diversity is our strength, and if you doubt it, the Eye of Sauron notes your lack of faith and commitment to fighting racism. I’m reminded of this C.S. Lewis quote Paul Kingsnorth cites in his latest newsletter:


Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

You will notice if you read The Intercept’s report — and note well that The Intercept is a left-wing website — is how eager these tech companies were for the government to intrude:

Elon Musk fired Vijaya Gadde as one of his first acts after buying Twitter. Why do you think that these people were eager for the government to increase its monitoring of the media? Because they trust these state actors to enforce a progressive-friendly narrative. This is what it means when the Deep State has been captured by the Left.

I cannot say it often enough: this is what the people who came to America to escape Communism are warning us about in Live Not By Lies! Excerpt from the book:

What unnerves those who lived under Soviet communism is this similarity: Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as a matter of power dynamics among the groups. A utopian vision drives these progressives, one that compels them to seek to rewrite history and reinvent language to reflect their ideals of social justice.

Further, these utopian progressives are constantly changing the standards of thought, speech, and behavior. You can never be sure when those in power will come after you as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before. And the consequences for violating the new taboos are extreme, including losing your livelihood and having your reputation ruined forever.

People are becoming instant pariahs for having expressed a politically incorrect opinion, or in some other way provoking a progressive mob, which amplifies its scapegoating through social and conventional media. Under the guise of “diversity,” “inclusivity,” “equity,” and other egalitarian jargon, the Left creates powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse and marginalizes dissenters as evil.

It is very hard for Americans who have never lived through this kind of ideological fog to recognize what is happening. To be sure, whatever this is, it is not a carbon copy of life in the Soviet Bloc nations, with their secret police, their gulags, their strict censorship, and their material deprivation. That is precisely the problem, these people warn. The fact that relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty. That, and the way those who take away freedom couch it in the language of liberating victims from oppression.

Or, protecting the homeland from badthinkers among its people. And for the record, I would find this every bit as repulsive and frightening if the Deep State were right-wing. Wouldn’t you?

The right-wing government of George W. Bush misled us all into the Iraq quagmire — and, as Bill Roggio says, lied to us to keep us in Afghanistan. The left-wing Obama government did the same thing about Afghanistan. Do you really trust Washington — left or right — to tell it straight to the American people about Ukraine? Whatever you think about US involvement in the Ukraine war, it ought to scare you that the US Government believes that it’s in the interest of “homeland security” to monitor and correct “disinformation” about US policy there.

Look, it’s very hard to know what’s true and what’s not anymore. Peter Savodnik had a good piece recently about how the mainstream media runs interference for John Fetterman, the disabled Democratic candidate for US Senate. Most of us are well aware how the mainstream media police the boundaries of discourse constantly to protect its sacred cows. Jonathan Chait, the liberal columnist for New York magazine, admitted in his latest piece that the Left hurts itself with this. Excerpt:

The motive for many progressives to follow these stifling conventions was sympathetic. If you believe systemic racism and inequality are the greatest crisis in America, which I do, and you also believe the racism of the Republican Party is far more dangerous than any excesses on the left, which I also do, then you might hesitate to admit to anything that might be used by Republicans to discredit the cause of racial justice. Yet that hesitation allows the most unreasonable people on the left to rope the whole progressive movement into indefensible and self-discrediting positions.

The George Floyd protests are hardly the only subject for which this dynamic has prevailed. Progressives decided that the hypothesis that COVID-19 may have originated in a laboratory rather than zoonotically was “racist” — even though this was a purely scientific question, the evidence was and is murky, and it was easier to imagine racist behavior resulting from a theory blaming COVID on Chinese cultural practices than a theory blaming China’s government. Journalists at mainstream organs followed this convention, essentially turning a scientific question into a political one. When institutions adopt illiberal norms of debate that make it impossible to challenge an accusation of racism or sexism, they open themselves inevitably to abuse.

I believe the cultural pressures that produced these errors are in remission. But they haven’t disappeared. As evidenced by the likes of Scocca and Katz, there remains a deep-seated impulse on the left to defend or deny illiberal norms. They insist the wave of hysterical accusations, overpolicing of language, and empowered outrage mobs were a figment of the critics’ imaginations, or that these things happened but were actually good, or perhaps, somehow, both. As people in these institutions begin to lose their fear of speaking truthfully, we need to honestly confront what happened.

It’s bad enough that progressive journalists do this. But to have those who control social media platforms engage in it, and to encourage involvement of the State in policing discourse? And to have a domestic security arm of the State spreading its bureaucracy into controlling the narrative behind the scenes?

Tyranny. That’s what this is: tyranny.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). On October 12th, he ballots were mailed to all voters registered for mail-in voting in the 2022 midterm elections. ‘Election day’ is next Tuesday November 8.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

White and Woke Supremacy thumbnail

White and Woke Supremacy

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By Craig J. Cantoni

The forgotten white supremacists whose descendants pretend to be woke and virtuous.   

Below are vile, racist comments spoken by white supremacists about minorities. The supremacists and minorities will be identified after the comments.

These races have “crooked faces, coarse mouths, bad noses, heavy jaws, and low foreheads.”

They “lack the conveniences for thinking” and are “a degenerate class.”

They are “uncleanly, intemperate, quarrelsome, ignorant, and hard on women and children.”

The distinctive shape of their nose arises from “the habitual use of the quadratus muscle, the muscle of disgust, contempt, and disdain, which lead to scorn, acknowledging guilt.”

They are “vast masses of filth.”

We are imperiled by “multitudes of men of the lowest class, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy, nor any initiative of quick intelligence.”

The “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of low mentality clearly belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age.”

Note: The source of the above and much of what follows is the outstanding book, The Guarded Gate, by Daniel Okrent.

Clearly, the foregoing disgusting comments were said by Southern rednecks and right-wing extremists. Just as clearly, they were said about African Americans, Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans, and other minorities of color. And they were spoken in the dark recesses of the internet.

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

The comments were uttered in the early twentieth century and beyond by New England intellectuals, academics, politicians, and other members of high society—all of whom were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, most of whom were progressives, and many of whom claimed that their lineage went back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The comments were about Jews, Catholics, eastern Europeans, and southern Europeans, especially Italians—all of whom were seen as non-white and genetically inferior.

Such comments were published and/or praised by leading publications and universities. The publications included the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, the Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and the American Economic Review. The universities included Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon. Even the American Museum of Natural History joined the bandwagon.

Leading politicians and influencers also agreed with the sentiments, including Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Cabot Lodge, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, Charles Scribner of publishing fame, and J.H. Kellogg of cereal fame. Others included Walter Lippmann, the famous journalist and founder of the New Republic; and Mary Harriman, the wealthiest woman in America, who had inherited her wealth from her father, E.H. Harriman, the baron of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads.

Supremacist thinking was especially rife in the early decades of the twentieth century but also extended into later decades. For example, Look Magazine, which was a popular and widely circulated periodical, wrote that baseball great Joe DiMaggio was not a typical Italian, in that he didn’t reek of garlic and put bear grease on his hair. Another baseball great, Yogi Berra, was compared to an ape in appearance.

Incidentally, my dad and uncle grew up with Yogi in the Italian section of St. Louis, which was known as Dago Hill when I was a kid.

Return to the early twentieth century, the Breeders Association was an influential organization at the time. Its mission was not to breed better dogs but to breed better people—namely, people who were like WASPs and not people who were like Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Greeks, and so on. The organization dovetailed with the eugenics movement.

This was white supremacy for sure, or more accurately, WASP supremacy.

Another WASP supremacist was Madison Grant, the author of a popular book, The Passing of the Great Race. The book’s theme was that Americans of Nordic blood were being overrun by the “barbaric blood” of non-Nordics.

The San Francisco Chronicle said that Grant was “a thoroughly qualified ethnologist.” The Nation editorialized that his book gave “a historical concept of truths of racial evolution which as a whole is unanswerable.” The New York Times featured the book over two pages of its Sunday magazine. The National Research Council honored Grant with an appointment to its Anthropology Committee, and he was lauded by the Association for the Advancement of Science.

Another book of the same genre was Applied Eugenics, which became a leading textbook that went through four printings in six years. Its authors, diehard progressives, wrote that suitable eugenic material couldn’t be found in the “fecund stocks” of people marked by “illiteracy, squalor and tuberculosis, their high death rates, their economic straits.”

The epitome of white supremacy was William Earl Dodge, a Manhattanite, heir to three large fortunes, and breeder of horses. He authored the book, The Right to Be Well Born, which, among other supremacist themes, contended that the lower classes should have their own registry, like Clydesdales, so that potential mates could see where each other ranked on a eugenics scale.

Today, many of the descendants of the foregoing white supremacists are no doubt privileged, progressive, and well-off, having used their inherited advantages to become leaders in business, academia, the arts, and government. They are also probably woke, due to knowing their ancestral history and feeling guilty about it. As such, they embrace critical race theory, diversity and inclusion initiatives for non-whites, as well as reeducation workshops in which white students and white corporate employees are forced to confront their privilege and subconscious racism—inanities that don’t affect the privileged progeny of white supremacists, because, from their lofty heights, they are above the fray.

It’s a double travesty that the progeny are projecting their guilt and penance on the descendants of those who suffered at the hands of the progeny’s forebears. And to make it worse, today’s media, academia, and industry let them get by with it.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). On October 12th, he ballots were mailed to all voters registered for mail-in voting in the 2022 midterm elections. ‘Election day’ is next Tuesday November 8.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

How The Surveillance State And Big Tech Colluded To Make Twitter ‘Disinformation’ The New Terrorism thumbnail

How The Surveillance State And Big Tech Colluded To Make Twitter ‘Disinformation’ The New Terrorism

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By John Daniel Davidson

The late, great Angelo Codevilla maintained that America’s response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed because it adopted a law enforcement approach to what is essentially a foreign policy problem. He argued that the law enforcement approach — the idea that we could detect and disrupt terrorist plots before they come to fruition, and arrest those responsible — required the construction of a vast state security and surveillance apparatus that would eventually, when the terrorist threat subsided, be turned on American citizens.

As in so much else, Codevilla was prophetic.

Earlier this week, a deeply reported piece by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang of The Intercept revealed an “expansive effort” by the Department of Homeland Security to curb speech it considers dangerous by pressuring tech platforms to engage in online censorship. Although DHS’s widely ridiculed “Disinformation Governance Board” was scaled back and then shut down earlier this year amid well-deserved criticism, “other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.”

The security apparatus that was erected to keep us safe from al-Qaida, it seems, is looking for something else to do now, so it has decided to become the arbiter of what constitutes false and dangerous information, and therefore what political opinions Americans are allowed to express online.

Citing a trove of documents connected to an ongoing lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, Klippenstein and Fang reveal a quiet pressure campaign by DHS “to try and shape online discourse” that involves frequent meetings and coordination with top tech and finance executives, and even “a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use.” At the time of this writing, the portal is still live.

What might DHS consider “inaccurate information” worthy of suppression? A whole host of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

Because “disinformation” isn’t clearly defined, it can be whatever DHS and the federal agencies under its purview say it is. And wouldn’t you know it, disinformation turns out to be whatever ideas and opinions contradict the official narrative of the Biden administration and Democratic Party leadership on major political issues.

No surprise, then, that Big Tech appears to be OK with this. Klippenstein and Fang quote a February text from Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official, to a DHS director, saying: “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.”

But not, perhaps, as hesitant as Masterson thinks. Emails and documents connected to the Missouri lawsuit show a close collaboration between DHS and top executives of social media firms such as Twitter. In 2018, Congress passed and President Trump signed a bill creating an office inside DHS called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. It was a response to some high-profile hacking of U.S. firms such as SolarWinds and Equifax, and the idea was for CISA to protect critical national infrastructure.

But it didn’t take long for CISA to expand its definition of critical national infrastructure to include “misinformation and disinformation,” taking its cues from an advisory committee that includes Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s erstwhile head of legal affairs and policy, whom Elon Musk fired last week. Gadde was the co-author of a report in June urging CISA to take on an expansive role in policing online speech, calling on the agency to monitor “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources.”

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has questioned the official government narrative on Twitter or Facebook over the last two years. Did you dare to speculate online that Covid might have come from a lab leak in China? If so, then as late as December of 2020 you were promoting what NPR (among many other outlets) called a “baseless conspiracy theory” for which there is “zero evidence.”

Problem is, things move fast in the world of real-time disinformation policing, and yesterday’s baseless conspiracy theory is today’s respectable viewpoint. A newly released Senate interim report reflects what most people’s common sense suggested to them a long time ago: that the pandemic was “more likely than not” the result of a “research-related incident.”

Same with the Hunter Biden laptop story that broke ahead of the 2020 election. The story was dismissed by dozens of former top intelligence officials who claimed it was “Russian disinformation,” but we now know what anyone who bothered to look into the story knew in October 2020 — that it was all true. The laptop was real.

We also know, by Mark Zuckerberg’s own admission to Joe Rogan in August, that the FBI reached out to Facebook ahead of the 2020 election to tell them to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation. And now we know a little bit more about the FBI’s involvement. According to Klippenstein and Fang, the FBI was involved in high-level communications that allegedly led to Facebook’s suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on the laptop.

It should all outrage Americans who think the First Amendment should actually mean something, that people should be banned from the public square for expressing opinions the ruling regime dislikes. Indeed it’s hard to think of anything more un-American, and it’s not too much to say that this censorship represents a real threat to the survival of the republic.

One need not even engage the facile libertarian line that Twitter and Facebook are private companies and can do whatever they want. It’s enough to see the many ways powerful government agencies are now working hand-in-hand with private Big Tech firms to suppress online speech and censor political ideas the regime deems to be a threat.

Codevilla was exactly right. A security and surveillance apparatus originally constructed to keep us safe from terrorists has been transformed into an instrument of domestic surveillance, and is now being used against us.

*****

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

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). On October 12th, he ballots were mailed to all voters registered for mail-in voting in the 2022 midterm elections. ‘Election day’ is next Tuesday November 8.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

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