Where Leftism Crashed in 2022

Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Amid many economic failures in 2022, two of the biggest were Democrat-dominated Hollywood and the marijuana industry. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Americans voted with their feet by fleeing Democrat-controlled areas to states with Republican governance.

Americans moved out of all four of the biggest liberal states: California, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Their population declines were the greatest in the country, while conservative states such Texas and Florida boomed by attracting Americans to move there.

So many people left California, New York, and Illinois since Joe Biden took office that each state would have lost yet another seat in the House of Representatives (and another Electoral College vote) in addition to the seat that each state lost in the 2020 Census. Democrat-controlled Minnesota would also lose a seat, while the states picking up those four seats would be Arizona, Florida, Idaho, and Texas.

The liberal media lost $540 billion in market value in 2022. The Dow Jones Media Titans index, which includes 30 of the world’s largest media companies including Disney, crashed by 40% in value, far more than other industries.

Hollywood’s end-of-year extravaganza, the big-budget “Babylon” movie about itself, was a sickening display of depravity that bombed at the box office. Even liberal critics expressed dismay at how low this movie sank.

Streaming services, which were supposed to be the next wonderful thing, likewise posted losses this past year. As Netflix turned to promoting perversity, millions of Americans turned it off.

The Wall Street Journal estimates that more than 100 million Netflix viewers are freeloading off of someone else’s password, totaling nearly half of its worldwide subscriber base. Reed Hastings, the billionaire Netflix CEO who showers liberal causes with his largesse, saw the value of Netflix stock decline by more than 50% in the past year.

An even bigger drop in value has occurred in the marijuana industry, which is euphemistically called cannabis to avoid negative connotations with the harmful weed. After voters were fooled into legalizing pot in many states, the black market has overwhelmed law enforcement and illegal drug sales are rampant now.

Legalizing the drug did not curtail the illegal traffic as pot promoters promised. Just the opposite: after making cannabis legal in nearly half the states, unlawful drug activity has only increased.

Oklahoma, where a 2018 ballot initiative legalized only medical marijuana, has become the largest exporter of pot and other drugs to other states, which is prohibited by federal law. With an estimated 7,000 marijuana growers dotting the rural landscape, the putrid smells, chemicals, bright lights, and excessive water use have transformed the Sooner State into a dystopia.

A gangland-style murder at a 10-acre marijuana farm shocked the state in November, with many questions unanswered about how six Chinese nationals got into that business. Court documents filed earlier this month allege that the Chinese-born suspect demanded the return of $300,000 he had invested in the pot operation before he started shooting.

Despite such rampant criminality, the cannabis industry is undeterred as it promotes a March ballot initiative there to legalize recreational use of the harmful drug. The once-conservative state, which features one of the highest concentrations of churches in the country, is being transformed by this destructive experiment.

Illegal sales of marijuana have caused the bottom to drop out of prices on lawful sales, resulting in billions of dollars in losses to investors. The price of marijuana in Michigan has dropped by 75%, and similar declines in its value have occurred in California as illegal pot-growing continues to dominate the market.

California and Oregon are unlawfully exporting their excess marijuana to other states, including Michigan and New York. More than two-thirds of cannabis sales are estimated to be illegal in California and elsewhere.

Three out of four midwestern states rejected legalizing marijuana there in November, and pot-producers’ hopes for federal legislation to end the banking ban on the pot industry went up in smoke when it was not included in the recent omnibus bill. Federal legislation in favor of cannabis seems less likely in the new Congress, where Republicans hold a slim majority in the House.

Legalizing pot has been disastrous to the desert southwest, where it has accelerated a dire water shortage that will soon result in deep cuts in what can be taken from the Colorado River. California and Colorado opened the door to rampant marijuana grows that steal immense amounts from the only source of water for 40 million Americans.

This month a drought emergency was declared for Southern California, as the Biden Administration failed to broker a new deal for how the Colorado River’s unprecedented low water level will be shared across the region. Now the feds threaten to impose rationing on water use by the southwestern United States.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Deceitful Deep State Targets Trump

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

After throwing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden by suppressing the damaging truth about him on social media, the deceitful Deep State is going all-out to prevent Donald Trump from winning in 2024. On Monday the Trump-hating House Select Committee on January 6th announced a so-called “referral” of criminal charges against Trump relating to a day that most Americans have long since forgotten.

The driving force behind the “referral” was the sanctimonious Jamie Raskin (D-MD), whose own teacher, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, called him out for conducting an unconstitutional witch-hunt. Congress’s job is to legislate, Dershowitz pointed out, and the House has no authority to recommend criminal charges against anyone.

Another law professor, Jonathan Turley, quipped that this tiresome House committee is like “a group of actors that refuse to leave the stage.” Turley patiently explained that the absurd accusation that Trump “incited insurrection” on January 6th was firmly rejected by the Supreme Court 53 years ago in a unanimous decision that has never been questioned.

Trump was unfazed by the two-bit political actors who linger on their anti-Trump stage before being dispersed by the incoming House GOP majority in two weeks. “These folks don’t get it that when they come after me, people who love freedom rally around me. It strengthens me,” Trump responded Monday on Truth Social.

“Unfit for any office,” blustered the Wyoming-rejected Liz Cheney, using invective that should be applied to herself rather than Trump. She was humiliated by her own constituents in her landslide primary defeat last August, and embarrassed herself further by supporting these meaningless criminal referrals.

The committee’s referrals would go to Jack Smith, the special counsel named to take charge of the politicized investigations into Trump but who has never appeared in public since his appointment. He reminds movie buffs of the “George Kaplan” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Cold War thriller North by Northwest, in which a U.S. intelligence agency created a non-existent decoy to divert attention from its real double agent.

The phenomenal Julie Kelly of the American Greatness website exposed how the Attorney General pretended to turn over the Trump investigation to a special counsel to shift attention from the Democratic hacks who are really running it. More than a month later, Jack Smith has never reported here for duty, as far as we know, and may still be in Europe recovering from a bicycle accident and knee surgery.

Merrick Garland’s announcement that Jack Smith was taking over the investigation was a public relations stunt, designed to pretend that there would be independent oversight of the investigation of the leading Republican candidate for president. In the absence of meaningful supervision, the DOJ recently served subpoenas on officials in all seven battleground states where Trump supporters properly questioned the election results.

CNN reports that 20 prosecutors within the DOJ have been assigned to investigate January 6. That’s a larger team of prosecutors than is used for real crimes, and if the mysterious Jack Smith is really in charge, then he is not reining them in.

Democrats on Capitol Hill are using the DOJ as their club to intimidate Republicans. More victims of the out-of-control J6 Committee are expected to be announced in its final written report to be issued on Wednesday, and already Trump’s attorney John Eastman has been targeted by it.

Meanwhile, the Deep State has once again prevented the release of evidence documenting the CIA’s complicity in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy almost 60 years ago. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., recently stated that the “CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.”

None of the JFK-related files were to be withheld from the public after October 2021. But Biden, who protects the Deep State while it covers up for him, released only a few innocuous records while concealing the most important documents.

Only 95% of the JFK documents have been entirely released to the public, as the Deep State hides its own misconduct by withholding the final 5%. In 1992, Congress required that all withheld documents about the JFK assassination be released to the public by October 26, 2017, except as ordered by the president.

Trump’s instincts were right when he promised to release all the JFK documents while he was president, but was reportedly talked out of it by his former CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Now Pompeo, backed by a web of dark money funding, is assembling the resources to challenge Trump’s reelection.

The next presidential election will be about reining in the Deep State, and Donald Trump is the only Republican willing and able to lead on that crucial issue. The first actions by the incoming GOP majority in the House in January should rescind everything the J6 Committee did.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Who Will Close the Border?

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

More than 1,000 illegal migrants openly walked across the Rio Grande into El Paso, Texas Sunday night, capping a record-breaking 3-day weekend in which 2,460 illegal migrants were “processed” there by federal agents. El Paso is just one of nine sectors defined by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) along the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico.

About 500 miles downriver from El Paso, two large groups totalling 1,000 migrants crossed into Eagle Pass, Texas, in the Del Rio Sector, last Friday, after 700 migrants had crossed the day before. On Saturday, Fox News reporter Bill Melugin tweeted that “CBP sources tell us more than 4,800 migrants have crossed illegally in just these two sectors in the last 24 hours.”

From his first day in office, Joe Biden has signaled his administration’s policy and promise not to enforce our nation’s immigration laws. The predictable result is that a relentless human tide of uninvited people from around the world have been entering our country from the south, after first passing through the lawless narco-state of Mexico.

The roughly 5,000 people who surrender every day to be “processed” by Border Patrol agents in CBP do not even include the thousands of known “got-aways.” That’s the official term for migrants who evade arrest when they sneak across the border, because they have prior criminal records for drug trafficking or sex crimes.

The number of got-aways has exploded under Biden because no Border Patrol agents are available to stop and arrest them. That’s because Biden’s anti-American DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has reassigned CBP and Border Patrol agents to “processing” the unprecedented hordes of illegal migrants who voluntarily turn themselves in every day.

Nor do the numbers include the thousands of people who enter legally through airports or other ports of entry, but then violate the terms of their admission by staying too long, working illegally, or committing deportable crimes. These people are just as illegal as the migrants who waded across the Rio Grande, but we can’t find them without implementing the entry-exit system that Congress mandated over 20 years ago,

The sheer numbers of these unwanted people are so gargantuan that we struggle for words to express how rapidly our country has changed for the worse since Joe Biden took power 23 months ago. The best estimates are that the number of illegal aliens has increased by at least 5,000,000 since Biden became president less than two years ago.

Five million is greater than the population of half of the 50 states. It’s greater than all but one of our cities and all but two of our counties.

The number of invaders is projected to increase substantially when the Title 42 expulsion policy goes away on December 21 as ordered by Judge Emmet Sullivan. That’s the same federal judge who persecuted General Mike Flynn on trumped-up charges, even refusing to recognize the Justice Department’s dismissal of all charges against Flynn.

More than half of the five million new migrants have been wrongly classified as asylum seekers, despite the principle that requires refugees to seek asylum in the first safe country they come to. All of the migrants crossing our southern border passed through at least one safe country on their way to the United States, so their bogus asylum claims should have been tossed without further ado.

Even the newly elected Republican majority in the House of Representatives has not shown the appetite or the will to reverse the flow of people across the border. Many Republicans speak only of the crisis “at” the border, as if the problem is just the 5,000 people who crossed yesterday, rather than the 5,000,000 who crossed in the last two years.

“One of the highest priorities, when the Republicans take back Congress,” Donald Trump declared at a rally in Florence, Arizona on January 15, “will be to . . . find and detain and deport every one of the illegal aliens that Joe Biden has released into our country.”

Trump’s commonsense promise was cheered by his thousands of supporters, but it has gained no traction in the halls of Congress, where Democrats and even some Republicans are trotting out discredited ideas to extend amnesty to illegal migrants. A week after the midterm elections, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer was bold enough to say the quiet part out loud.

“We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to,” Schumer declared. “The only way we’re going to have a great future is if we welcome immigrants.”

Schumer’s avowed goal of replacing the American population with immigrants is an open declaration of war on the family-friendly, hard-working, middle-class Americans who form the base of the Republican party. Will Republican leaders rise to meet the challenge?

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

New Evidence of Tainted Elections

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The unjustified suppression of free speech on social media and the exploitation of rampant early voting ballots, have severely tainted the last two elections. The sooner both problems can be rectified, the sooner election integrity will be restored.

Donald Trump’s tweetstorm, not on Twitter but on his platform Truth Social, hit a nerve. Trump pointed out that “steps must be immediately taken to RIGHT THE WRONG. Only FOOLS would disagree with that and accept STOLEN ELECTIONS. MAGA!”

Elon Musk has just done our country, and indeed the entire world, a massive favor by exposing how Twitter “interfered with” the 2020 presidential election. The FBI and the Democratic National Committee spun deceitful tales about Russian interference in order to suppress truthful information about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The New York Post, the oldest newspaper in America, had broken the story about the treasure trove of incriminating information about the Biden family found on that laptop. Government and Democrats sprang into action and got Twitter to censor tweets about it.

The Deep State is suddenly quiet about all this, becoming the “Dark State” of wrongdoing proven by Musk’s data dumps from Twitter’s files. In Brazil, it appears the socialist candidate only narrowly defeated the Trump-like conservative Jair Bolsonaro with a boost from Twitter censorship.

At the same time, Musk is tweeting about the money that crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried poured into electing Democrats this year. $40 million is “just the publicly disclosed number,” Musk tweeted, adding that SBF’s “actual support of Dem elections is probably over $1B. The money went somewhere, so where did it go?”

Musk’s enlightening tweets would have been removed by prior management, but now Musk is the boss. He was tweeting in response to “SBF donating $40m to not go to jail for stealing $10b+ is one of the highest ROI (return on investment) trades of all time.”

Some of that money undoubtedly went into exploiting early voting, which Democrats use to subvert election day by stuffing ballot drop-boxes and herding uninformed voters to early voting precincts like cattle.

In all-important Arizona, Twitter censorship boosted the Democrat candidate against the Trump-endorsed Kari Lake. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) tweeted on Sunday against how “the SOS of AZ and Gov candidate, Katie Hobbs, used the power of the AZ SOS to collude w/ Twitter to unconstitutionally violate 1st Amendment rights of Americans for her own political gain.”

In a story broken by The Gateway Pundit, Twitter censored tweets critical of Democrat gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs at her request.

These requests from Katie Hobbs, the AZ secretary of state who refused to recuse herself from supervising her own election, were released in a federal lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, which has exposed how social media giants censor conservative speech at the request of the Biden administration officials.

Before Democrats start hurling the epithet of “election denier” at anyone who wants election integrity, Democrats need look no further than their own newly elected House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries. Two years into Trump’s first term, Jeffries tweeted: “The more we learn about 2016 election the more ILLEGITIMATE it becomes.”

The following year, at a Congressional hearing about the disgraced Robert Mueller investigation, Jeffries absurdly claimed that Americans still needed “to try to figure out what the heck happened” in the 2016 election.

“We want people who ‘legitimately’ won the election to lead our country, not people who had to cheat in order to win!!!” Trump pointed out.

Merely a decade ago, the top political issue for the Left was the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, which allowed a nonprofit group to make an anti-Hillary Clinton documentary without violating campaign spending limits. Now that the Left has gotten control of the big money, we do not hear that complaint anymore.

A record number of early ballots were cast in Georgia this year, more than during the pandemic in 2020, plus another 2 million early votes in the runoff. Some conservatives mistakenly think that the record early turnout in Georgia is the way of the future, when the real future for our nation is returning to one Election Day.

No wonder Republicans are losing Georgia. Republicans cannot win an election that has “record early voter turnout.” As The Western Journal’s Floyd Brown told Steve Bannon on The War Room, there is no path for Republicans to win statewide elections in Arizona, Georgia, and other must-win states without a return to in-person voting on Election Day.

Joe Biden derided the 2021 Georgia election law as Jim Crow 2.0, but state judges poked major holes in the law the legislature passed. One judge extended early voting beyond what the legislature authorized while another judge ordered officials to accept absentee ballots that arrive up to three days after election day.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.