Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Kamala’s Inflation Is Causing the Strike Wave

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Early Tuesday 45,000 workers went on strike at our 36 major shipping ports from Maine to Texas, imposing estimated costs of $5 billion daily and causing a supply chain nightmare. This shuts down our enormous ports in Houston and near New York City, and is the first strike by the longshoremen’s union since 1977.

Inflation is the root cause of this devastating dockworkers’ strike, which is part of a new strike wave that includes the walkout at Boeing that has stretched into its third week and caused more than a billion dollars in harm. Inflation has sharply increased the cost of living and created uncertainty about the future value of the dollar, while wages have failed to keep up with rising costs.

Workers feel compelled to demand substantial salary increases merely to break even as the costs of daily necessities of life have soared. In negotiating long-term contracts, unions must factor in uncertainty about how bad inflation will become, which has pushed the annual increase in healthcare costs from 5% in 2021 to an estimated 8% by next year.

Look at Inflation destroying the World. NONE OF THIS HAPPENED WHILE I WAS PRESIDENT!” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday afternoon in dismay about multiple crises occurring under Kamala Harris, who cast the tie-breaking vote in enacting the Inflation Acceleration Act in 2022, misnamed the Inflation Reduction Act.

Reading from a teleprompter, Harris declared “I will work to pass the first-ever federal ban on price gauging on food.” Her gaffe in mispronouncing “price gouging” showed she had no understanding of what she was reciting, and her plan would result in shortages.

Meanwhile, Trump has been visiting the carnage wrought by Hurricane Helene in Georgia and North Carolina, where more than 140 have died from the storm and a reported 600 are missing. Biden was lounging at his vacation home refusing to do anything more than take a few phone calls, while Harris dined with liberal celebrities in Hollywood who hope to buy this election with lavish campaign contributions.

Oh, it’s good to be home!” gushed Kamala Harris Sunday afternoon to liberal billionaires in Los Angeles, while 1.7 million businesses and residents lost power in the Southeast from Hurricane Helene. Only after Trump shamed Biden did Sleepy Joe finally agree to visit the devastated regions.

A rebuilding effort will be needed in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene but that won’t be easy with all of our Eastern ports shut down by the recent strike. It won’t be cheap, either, with construction prices having risen sharply during the Biden Administration, and strikes causing more inflation.

Already surcharges have been slapped onto goods in anticipation of the closing of our Eastern and Southern shipping ports, and goods have been rerouted at additional expense to the West Coast. Shortages are expected.

Philadelphia, in battleground Pennsylvania that is expected to decide the upcoming presidential election, is a major port of entry being hit particularly hard by this shutdown. Produce is what comes through the Port of Philadelphia: vegetables and fruit, plus frozen meat, paper, and steel products.

Americans have already endured sticker shock on these goods, as Trump explained in detail during a press conference on August 15 at his summer home in Bedminster, New Jersey. Food prices have surged by 28% since 2019, with nearly all of those increases due to inflation under Kamala Harris and Biden.

Trump has gotten along well with unions his entire life while constructing high-rises in New York City, Chicago, and beyond. With union labor he built his magnificent hotel at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., completed it ahead of schedule, and subsequently sold it at a profit.

Trump is supported by an overwhelming majority of Teamsters union workers as confirmed by a recent poll that its leaders published in September. The Teamsters bosses declined for the first time in nearly 30 years to endorse the Democrat nominee, Kamala Harris.

The strike wave of 1945-1946 resulted in the Republican landslide of historic proportions in the midterm elections that year. Then the Taft-Hartley Act was enacted to deal with costly strikes by authorizing the president to order a cooling-off period for negotiations, but Biden refuses to invoke it now in fear of a backlash by union voters.

A similar strike wave occurred in the 1970s, and contributed to runaway inflation that culminated in Jimmy Carter’s landslide defeat for reelection in 1980. The incumbent president in 1976, Gerald Ford, was likewise defeated when he ran for reelection.

As roughly half of our nation’s ocean shipping grinds to a halt now, the lack of leadership in the White House harms our Nation. As war continues in Ukraine and expands in the Middle East, this strike wave at home weakens our national strength.

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.

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Globalists’ War Against Trump

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Only one man stands in the way of the globalist agenda: Donald Trump. Globalists are doing everything they can to prevent his return to the White House.

On Sunday, Ukraine’s Zelensky visited the large munitions plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was welcomed by Democrats Gov. Josh Shapiro and embattled Sen. Bob Casey Jr. Their implicit message is that sending more American-made arms to Ukraine, with permission to launch them deep inside Russia, would appeal to voters in this pivotal swing state.

In an interview published Sunday by The New Yorker magazine, Zelensky campaigned for the globalist-controlled Kamala Harris by improperly describing Trump’s VP as “too radical” for urging peace. JD Vance is the popular Senator from Ohio where many Ukrainian Americans reside, and Vance rightly speaks out against this senseless war as RFK Jr. and others have.

After sharply criticizing Trump and Vance – which should be considered an illegal foreign campaign contribution to Kamala Harris – Zelensky was flown at taxpayer expense to Scranton on a U.S. Air Force C-17A plane. Zelensky never mentions how many Ukrainians have really died in this futile war, which has inflicted over a million casualties and wanton destruction.

Globalists provided Zelensky with more security for his campaign stop in Pennsylvania than for Trump. The Deep State cares more about keeping Zelensky safely in power than about protecting Trump so that he can become president again.

Zelensky is not helping himself by picking sides in our presidential race, or by lashing out at Trump and Vance as early voting begins. Trump will be tougher now in forcing Zelensky to accept a peace deal that would include holding the free election that Zelensky canceled when he declared martial law.

Meanwhile Ryan Wesley Routh, the would-be assassin on Trump’s Florida golf course, sat undetected in nearby bushes all night and morning waiting for Trump to reach the adjacent hole. No one swept the course perimeter, which would have easily caught Routh without gunfire.

Routh considered himself to be a “global citizen” and even wrote a book about it. “ALL GLOBAL CITIZENS COME STAND WITH UKRAINIANS NOW!” his book shouted in an excerpt available on Amazon.com.

Who paid for this assassin’s travel from Hawaii to Ukraine and back, and then to South Florida? When the British newspaper Daily Mail interviewed Routh’s 35-year-old son, Oran Routh said his father told him he was at the beach, which the son assumed was in Hawaii, not Florida.

The DOJ released a handwritten letter addressed to “Dear World” in which Ryan Routh admits “This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump.” Though grateful for the work of local law enforcement and the alert action by the Secret Service agent who shot at the would-be assassin, Trump properly criticized the meager charges that were filed against the wannabe killer.

The charges brought against the maniac assassin are a slap on the wrist,” Trump stated on Monday. “Florida charges would be much more serious than the ones the FBI has announced.”

The Secret Service does not lack adequate funding, as the House pretended when it voted unanimously to send them hundreds of millions of additional dollars even before the agency accounts for its failure to prevent Trump from being shot in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. The real problem is that the Deep State hates and fears Trump, who should fire much of the D.C. elite upon returning to the White House.

The 741 self-described National Security Leaders who published a manifesto endorsing Kamala cited as one of their reasons that Trump would probably fire some of them if he takes office again. Biden and Harris have not fired a single person for more than 3.5 years, despite pervasive wrongdoing and gross incompetence as in their deadly pullout from Afghanistan.

At an overflow rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Trump explained how he kept peace in the world for four years as president. But war, not peace, is what the Deep State wants to justify its existence and engage in profiteering from arms sales and then construction projects afterward in the destroyed countries.

On Tuesday Biden delivered his final speech to the United Nations in promotion of the globalist ideology, mouthing words that were written for him to deliver. Biden pledged endless ongoing “support to help Ukraine win this war,” which is impossible.

In contrast, Trump explained to the crowd who packed the 6,000-seat arena in Indiana, Pennsylvania that the world is on fire because of Biden and Harris. They did nothing to prevent this war or the worsening one in the Middle East.

Globalists are pro-war because they enrich themselves from the weaponry sold and used, and from the rebuilding that follows. They picked Harris as their puppet to continue this agenda.

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.

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Election Integrity or Defund DC

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Speaker Mike Johnson met with Trump for hours late Sunday afternoon, but it was not to discuss the second assassination attempt on Trump earlier that day. Johnson was surely there to talk about how the federal government will run out of money at 12:00 a.m. on October 1st, unless the GOP-majority House passes a Democrat-favored continuing resolution to keep the money flowing.

Last week Johnson declared that “Congress has a lot of responsibilities, but two primary obligations: responsibly fund the government and make sure that our elections are free and fair and secure, and that’s what we’re working on.” The need to ensure fair and secure elections is clear after what happened in 2020, but it is baffling why a conservative thinks there is a duty to continue funding the morally bankrupt and fiscally irresponsible federal government.

Although Johnson referred to the feds as “the” government, the most valuable governmental services are actually performed by state and local governments. More funding of the federal government has meant throwing good money after bad, such as sending hundreds of billions of dollars to continue endless bloodshed in Ukraine.

Funding the federal government has fueled the weaponized prosecutions of Trump and thousands of his supporters, locking many of them up for years under inhumane conditions in the “DC Gulag.” Continued funding of the federal government has meant more enforcement of onerous regulations that have choked off job growth in our country.

Notably, Trump did not announce that Johnson’s visit was productive, presumably because Trump does not have an enamored view of the D.C. elite as many congressmen and their spouses have. Trump has emphasized that he’d prefer to shut it all down if there is no provision for election integrity in continued funding, and he’s right.

If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET,” Trump posted on Truth Social a few hours before his debate with Kalifornia Kamala Harris on September 10.

THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN – CLOSE IT DOWN!!!” Trump added.

Most Republican congressmen agree with Trump, although some have grown to like the luxurious trappings of their positions in D.C., and want to extend that gravy train forever. Some falsely claim that a shutdown would hurt only Republicans in the upcoming election, when the opposite may be true.

Elon Musk, many on his popular platform X, and thousands of influencers on the internet are against unlimited federal spending. Most enlisted service members would support Trump despite a temporary interruption in their pay, which Trump would fully restore.

If Trump promises to restore back pay to everyone except civilian federal workers, cheers would be heard nationwide. Farmers and manufacturing workers in pivotal swing states would likely rejoice if D.C. bureaucrats and regulators were laid off.

Johnson’s initial plan for continued funding of the government failed last week amid opposition by more than a dozen Republicans, such that he could pass it only if he dropped election integrity to obtain Democrat support. Trump properly insists that election integrity be part of any continued funding, so Johnson would lose Trump's support if Johnson tries to pass a “clean” funding bill without it.

Called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, the election integrity provision would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Reports abound of illegal aliens registering to vote in multiple states, because most states make no effort to verify the citizenship of registered voters.

Without proof of citizenship, there is no meaningful enforcement preventing hordes of illegals from casting ballots, and thereby tilting the election results. Studies show that the Biden-Harris administration has been relocating the hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants to predominantly Republican states, presumably in the hope of turning them to the Democrat side.

As a separate bill, the SAVE Act passed in the House in July. But Democrats in the Senate have refused to allow a vote on it.

Elon Musk repeatedly posts on X how this has been the Democrat strategy all along, to bring in millions of illegals so that they can eventually vote overwhelmingly for the Democrat Party. Now is the time to require election integrity as a part of any continuing resolution to keep the federal government funded.

Democrats were hopeful that Taylor Swift’s recent endorsement of her fellow “childless cat lady” would yield an enormous surge in voter registrations for the Democrats, but a new ABC/Ipsos poll suggests that her endorsement may have backfired. Meanwhile, a grassroots effort by @EarlyVoteAction continues to increase Republican voter registrations, and has sharply narrowed the gap that Democrats have long enjoyed in crucial Pennsylvania.

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.

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

Dems Dump 20,000 Haitians on a Small Ohio Town

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

D.C. Democrats have figured out a new way to punish Trump Country, which is small-town America favoring Donald Trump for President. Overwhelm a small town of 56,000 Americans with 20,000 Haitian migrants, as Biden-Harris has done to Springfield, Ohio, and watch conflict develop.

The liberal media deny news about this, but videos of outrage by longtime residents have gone viral on X and TikTok. Most Haitians do not know how to drive, so car accidents in this small town have caused car insurance rates to skyrocket for everyone who lives there.

There are videos of residents complaining about pets disappearing, presumably taken for food by these migrants, who reportedly also decapitate ducks in the local park. Grocery store items are being opened up and consumed right off the shelves.

A 95-pound elderly woman testified at a public hearing, which is available on video, that “it is so unsafe. I have men that cannot speak English in my front yard screaming at me, throwing mattresses in my front yard, throwing trash in my front yard.” She and her husband feel they are being forced out of their home of 45 years.

Independent journalist Tyler Oliveira has posted many video interviews of Springfield residents on X, including one viewed 1.7 million times of a black veteran explaining how he’s been unable to obtain Medicaid while social services are overwhelmed by Haitian migrants. In another video showing an hours-long waiting line for benefits, an officer estimated that the ratio during the morning is 9-to-1 Haitians compared with locals.

Biden-Harris has lavishly funded these migrants, such that landlords evict American tenants to obtain higher rent from federally subsidized Haitians. On television, Kamala Harris took credit for extending the stay of 100,000 Haitians after their temporary protected status (TPS) expired.

Democrats see future voters for their party by bringing in these large numbers of Haitians and other third-world migrants. Added to the millions crossing over our southern border, this open border policy is to replenish the many voters fleeing Harris to vote for Trump.

Kamala Harris has not relocated all these Haitian migrants to a swing state such as Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, where the backlash could cost her the upcoming election. She also did not drop large numbers on a city such as New York or San Francisco, where liberals praise illegal aliens everywhere except in their own backyard.

Trump is on track to win Ohio by double digits, and no longer holds rallies there because his lead is so large. With Trump picking Ohio U.S. Senator JD Vance as his running mate, Harris has given up on the state and Democrats may feel this is a politically safe place for them to dump migrants.

At the videoed city commission meeting on August 27, a local black YouTube influencer Anthony Harris passionately decried that “these Haitians are running into trash cans. They’re running into buildings. They’re… flipping cars in the middle of the street.”

One car accident caused by a Haitian migrant in Springfield had particularly tragic consequences. On the first day of school last year, a 35-year-old Haitian national named Hermanio Joseph drove a minivan into oncoming traffic, forcing a school bus carrying 52 students off the road which killed one of its eleven-year-old passengers.

Twenty-three additional children were also injured, one severely. Joseph was subsequently convicted of involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide, and sentenced to 9 to 13-and-a-half years in prison.

The Haitian migrant did not have a driver’s license, but had been given a state ID. It was an accident that resulted not from any intoxication, but from out-of-control immigration.

I have a 20-year-old granddaughter who works two jobs, pays city tax,” Lisa Hayes said at the Springfield public meeting. “She works two jobs, she’s pregnant; it took us four months to get Medicaid for that young lady.”

Meanwhile, Biden-Harris has resumed travel authorizations for migrant parolees under their mass parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV). This began 3 years ago when 12,000 Haitians appeared at Del Rio, Texas and camped under the international bridge, where horseback-riding U.S. Border Patrol agents were falsely condemned by Biden and Harris for brandishing whips on migrants.

Biden-Harris exploited this fake news to grant parole (amnesty) to 30,000 migrants every month from 4 countries – flying them wherever they like. Monday night on Fox, Bill Melugin said 205,000 Haitians have entered our country under the CHNV program, while Venezuelans admitted under this same program have recently terrorized the residents of an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado.

Months ago JD Vance publicly raised this issue of Biden-Harris harming Springfield residents by overwhelming them with migrants. Yet Kamala Harris continues to insist on her open border policy.

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.

Tuesday, September 3, 2024

San Francisco Shooting Highlights Kamala’s Policies

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

In broad daylight, the first-round draft pick of the San Francisco 49ers was shot in the chest Saturday afternoon by a teenage thief, and the star’s first words were “Am I gonna die?” Wide receiver Ricky Pearsall had been walking alone on a sidewalk near Union Square when a 17-year-old with a gun tried to steal his Rolex watch.

Once a fashionable shopping area like Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Union Square has become seedy as Macy's, Nordstrom, and many other stores, boutiques, and restaurants have closed there. Pearsall was shopping after an autograph signing at the Cow Palace.

Video showed blood covering his upper body while he was helped into an ambulance. His mother subsequently posted on Facebook that the bullet miraculously missed vital organs and exited his body, declaring that “God shielded him.”

San Francisco authorities were immediately lenient to the shooter, concealing his identity and declaring that he would be charged merely in juvenile court. But it has been posted on X that he is a gang member who was caught with an illegal gun merely days earlier, and then released by California authorities.

Teenagers who commit even murders in California are typically back on the streets within a few years of becoming adults. By charging them only as juveniles, as this assailant will be, officials make them eligible for release in the near future.

Welcome to San Francisco, the once-golden city that has been ruined by the liberal policies of Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and other Democrats. Rampant street crime, homelessness, and people defecating on public sidewalks have repelled so many tourists and conventions that the largest hotels in the city have been abandoned by their owners.

America has never elected a San Francisco liberal as president, and should not start now with Kamala Harris. In the second quarter of this year, office vacancy in San Francisco rose to a record 37%, which means that more than a third of the commercial space is empty.

Kamala Harris was the district attorney for San Francisco for seven years, and then the Attorney General for California for six years after that. Her statewide office was favorable towards two soft-on-crime ballot initiatives, Proposition 47 and 57, over opposition by police unions to the latter.

As the San Francisco District Attorney, Harris refused to seek the death penalty for the murder of police Officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004, despite how many Democrats including former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein stated that capital punishment was warranted by the special circumstances of that case. Harris announced her decision of leniency for the cop-killer merely three days after the brutal murder of Officer Espinoza, before he was even buried and without speaking first to his widow.

The shocking murder of Officer Espinoza left their 3-year-old baby girl without a father. He had honorably served eight years with the San Francisco Police Department before he was gunned down in cold blood.

The president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association criticized Harris in an interview with CNN in 2019, questioning why she ruled out the death penalty so quickly. “What would her motives be to do this so soon after the death?” he asked, implying Harris’s political agenda.

Nicole Shanahan, the San Franciscan running mate of RFK Jr. who recently endorsed Trump, tweeted on Saturday that “crime here is spiraling out of control. People are nervous to walk downtown—even in broad daylight.”

We’ve got tech execs getting stabbed to death, an NFL first-rounder shot while shopping, and routine robberies, vehicle break-ins, and violent crime turning SF into a nightmare for families. Anyone claiming all is well is lying to you,” she added.

Yet this is where Kamala Harris was the top prosecutor when she sought prison sentences for petty marijuana violations while letting violent criminals go free. The epidemic of crime in San Francisco is the result of her policies, which have been continued by other liberals.

Shanahan has become a vocal California critic of Democrats, posting on her account highly effective videos against Kamala Harris. After she and RFK Jr. suspended their candidacy in favor of Trump, she observed that “Democrats spent millions on lawsuits to keep us off the ballots in states across the country.”

Now that we’ve suspended our campaign, they’re scrambling to keep us on the ballot. This is a party that truly believes in controlling the American voter and does not trust Americans to choose freely at the ballot box.”

San Francisco is ranked as the worst-run city in the United States, according to researchers at WalletHub. Photographs of the rampant vagrancy and maps of store closures there leave little doubt that it deserves this ignominious ranking.

This results from the liberal ideology that Democrats attempt to impose nationwide, with Kamala Harris. Americans should decline to put this in the White House.

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.

Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Trump-RFK Jr. Alliance Brings Swing States to Trump

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

In another sign of a party realignment, the endorsement of Trump by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brings many voters to the Republican side. It creates a coalition of the anti-war Left and conservatives who recognize that only Trump can end the war in Ukraine and restore peace through strength for our country.

Bobby and I will fight together to defeat the corrupt political establishment,” Trump declared to a full arena near Phoenix, which erupted in applause as RFK Jr. joined him on stage. RFK Jr. later told Tucker Carlson that he is joining Trump’s transition team to help pick who will be in the next Trump administration.

On Monday Trump honored the Gold Star families whose loved ones were killed during the ill-planned, chaotic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan by the current administration three years ago when Kamala Harris admitted she was the “last person in the room.” The suicide bomber who took their lives was a prisoner released from Bagram Air Base less than two weeks prior, after Biden-Harris allowed the Taliban to take control of the Base.

Eleven of the 13 murdered Americans were aged 20 to 23. One of their family members told Fox News Digital that “the only person who has reached out to our family over and over again and to all 13 families is Trump,” and that he “is the only president who kept our men and women safe who were serving this country. We 100% support him.”

Not only has Biden-Harris failed to fully honor these American soldiers, but during the Democratic National Convention (DNC) Kamala Harris demonstrated her support for continuing to put our country in harm’s way in foreign wars, such as the one in Ukraine. She said just enough to please neocon warmongers, and some pro-war Republicans who supported Bush, Dick Cheney and Romney announced they support Harris.

In endorsing Trump, RFK Jr. said that “three great causes drove me to enter this race,” and “these are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party, and then as an Independent, and now throw my support to President Trump.”

RFK Jr. identified these three reasons as “the cause of free speech, “the war in Ukraine,” and “the war on our children.” These are grassroots conservative issues, which should bring all voters who care about them to the side of Trump.

RFK Jr.’s endorsement speech explained that he left the Democrat Party “last October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money.”

RFK Jr. added that when the Democrat Party “abandoned democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting President, I left the party to run as an independent. … In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it.”

Lacking confidence that its candidate could win at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself [and] … deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me — and other candidates — off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail,” RFK Jr. stated. Democrats “ran a sham of a primary, rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden.”

The censorship of RFK Jr. by Biden-Harris extended to his postings on social media during the Covid pandemic. RFK Jr. was not allowed to intervene in the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case against the Biden administration’s censorship, despite evidence of the White House causing censorship of RFK Jr. on social media, and a federal judge has just granted him standing to pursue his own claims.

While Democrats unfairly excluded RFK Jr. from the ballot in many states, on Monday Democrats lost their attempt to exclude the popular Green Party nominee from the ballot in the swing state of Wisconsin. In 2016, Jill Stein won more votes than the margin by which Hillary Clinton lost in that Badger State, and Kamala Harris could lose it now for the same reason.

Michigan refuses to allow RFK Jr. to withdraw from the ballot in that pivotal swing state, but that may also boost Trump. Muslim voters in Michigan are looking to cast a protest vote against the Biden-Harris administration, which the option of voting for RFK Jr. or pro-peace Jill Stein gives them.

RFK Jr.’s internal polling showed that his supporters prefer Trump over Harris. Election forecaster Realclearpolitics.com places Trump in the lead by 287-251 in its no-toss-up electoral map, by finding that Trump is ahead in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

The Trump-RFK alliance sends a signal that in his second term, Trump won’t let another Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Deep Medical State impose their mandates again.

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.

Saturday, August 24, 2024

Maher Defends Not Having Kids

Bill Maher is back on the air, in a rant about something some said 4 years ago:
it's cat 1:03 ladies. Vance says the country is being 1:07 run by them. in 2020 he said not having 1:10 kids makes people more sociopathic and 1:13 less mentally stable and the people who 1:15 are most deranged and most psychotic are 1:17 people who don't have kids. ...

it's 2024 and 1:35 you're still saying that people who 1:37 don't marry and raise kids are inferior 1:40 weirdos. thanks philis shafley. let me 1:42 check my beeper to see if 1993 1:46 called. you 1:50 know 1993 that's the year I went on the 1:53 air with my first show Politically 1:56 Incorrect and 2:02 and one of the themes that made that 2:05 show different and you know 2:08 incorrect was that the host was always 2:11 pushing back against the idea that 2:13 choosing to remain childless and single 2:15 your whole life was to say the least odd

So are people without kids less mentally stable? He never answers that.

The causality might go the other way, with crazy people less likely to marry and have kids.

Maher says he pays school taxes, and is offended by any suggestion that he is less virtuous. Now he feels vindicated by the millions of others who have decided to not have kids.

The problem here is that Maher, and many others like him, do not understand correlations. No one is saying that he should have kids.

Tuesday, August 20, 2024

GOP Must Register Voters in Pennsylvania to Win

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Pennsylvania will pick our next president due to the Electoral College arithmetic. Trump held a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday and spoke there again on Monday, while Kamala Harris has repeatedly held events in Philadelphia.

The 19 Electoral College votes conferred by Pennsylvania make it the path to victory, as the largest of the toss-up states. If Trump wins the Sunbelt states where he has consistently led in the polls, then the Keystone State will live up to its nickname, putting him over the top.

Two more months remain for registering voters in Pennsylvania for this election, through October 21. Democrats with their superior ground game are feverishly signing up thousands of new voters, particularly liberal college students, but even more Pennsylvania voters are registering as Republicans.

The latest data show that the gap has narrowed to a 354,000 voter registration advantage for Democrats there, compared with their 810,000 registration advantage in 2020. Then Biden reportedly won the state by only 80,000 votes as many Democrats crossed party lines to vote for Trump there, plus Independents.

Biden’s roots in Pennsylvania gave him an edge there in 2020, compared with Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Kamala Harris lacks that local advantage. Biden carried multiple eastern Pennsylvania counties, including the one where he grew up, but Trump can win those counties now that Biden has been booted off the ticket.

The hero’s welcome given by the Democratic National Convention to Biden late Monday night sought to mollify Pennsylvania voters miffed at the mistreatment of their favored son. Adding insult to injury, Democrats snubbed Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro by picking Leftist Tim Walz from Minnesota as their VP nominee.

All this creates a tremendous opportunity for conservatives, Republican candidates, and everyone who cares about our country to urge the millions of unregistered Pennsylvania voters to sign up online so they will be able to vote. Pennsylvania makes it easy for a resident to check his registration status on a website and to register or update his address for voting.

An estimated 515,000 Pennsylvania hunters and gun owners are not yet registered to vote, while many who attend Trump’s massive rallies are not yet registered either. Easy online registration is available for Pennsylvania residents here.

The challenge is for Republicans to rack up enough of a winning rural margin to offset the expected ballot-box stuffing by Democrats in the two big cities of this State. The GOP U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick could win his race in Pennsylvania by embarking on a large voter registration drive.

Democrats already know that this is how elections are won and lost, and they will be registering many thousands of incoming liberal students at Philadelphia colleges in the next few weeks. The Republican side must match and exceed these registration drives by Dems.

Trump and his savvy new campaign adviser, Corey Lewandowski, understand that Pennsylvania is the key to victory. On Monday Trump gave a speech at a longtime manufacturer in York, Precision Custom Components, which is located in Southeastern Pennsylvania where more voters can be mobilized.

Trump stayed on message, a dismayed newspaper recounted, by focusing on the winning issues of energy, trade, tariffs, immigration, and cutting taxes. Trump promised to cut energy costs in half if reelected, and said he will tell the frackers in Pennsylvania to “drill, baby, drill.”

Trump again criticized Kamala Harris for opposing fracking, an issue on which she flip-flopped recently to try to avoid losing Pennsylvania. Fracking was central to reviving Pennsylvania’s economy after it slumped due to the loss of steel and other manufacturing decades ago.

Democrats have taken Pennsylvania for granted by placing a Californian atop its ticket, whose positions are hostile to the economic needs of this State. Democrats unwisely chose to host its national convention this week in Chicago, which is a liberal city disliked by Pennsylvania and all of rural America.

Once the “Second City” behind only New York City, Chicago will drop to fourth place behind Los Angeles and Houston. The population of crime-ridden Chicago has fallen to its lowest level since 1920, due to Leftist policies that Democrats want to impose nationwide.

Chicago has been the murder capital of our country for 12 years now, announced the New York Post. New York City is three times more populous than Chicago, and yet has barely half as many murders.

There is an epidemic of car-jackings in Chicago, more than 1,000 annually. This Democrat stronghold has not allowed a Republican to be mayor since 1931, nearly a century ago.

Rather than ruin our country as they have Chicago, Democrat delegates could first try to clean up the city they’ve destroyed. People who cannot run a city should not be running our country.

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.

Thursday, August 15, 2024

Phyllis Schlafly: the original tradwife

Phyllis Schlafly: the original tradwife

She was the anti-feminist who had it all

by Sarah Ditum

You could call Phyllis Schlafly the first trad wife. A mother-of-six, she would introduce herself in public as a “lawyer’s wife”, and embodied all the feminine virtues: “A blonde with deep blue eyes, a figure that can still be called willowy and a winning smile, she does not have to shout to get attention,” panted the NYT in a 1976 profile.

In her 1977 book The Power of the Positive Woman, she celebrated the “unique dignity” of the housewife’s vocation. Status, money, travel, power were all false gods: “None of those measures of career success can compare with the thrill, the satisfaction, and the fun of having and caring for babies, and watching them respond and and grow under a mother’s loving care. More babies multiply a woman’s joy.”

Psychology, not sexism, explained the difference between male and female lives. Men and women have different bodies; it followed that they would have different brains too. “Where man is discursive, logical, abstract, or philosophical, woman tends to be emotional, personal, practical, or mystical. Each set of qualities is vital and complements the other.” It would be mere quibbling to ask where “logical” ends and “practical” begins, or to locate the precise boundary between “philosophical” and “mystical”.

What mattered to Schlafly, who was born 100 years ago today, was that there are two sexes, whose stable, global and ineradicable differences cast them in complementary roles, which meant that she was also casually contemptuous of same-sex relationships. To Schlafly, abortion was a kind of violence not only against the unborn, but (and perhaps more importantly) against relations between men and women. To seek to make women somehow free from reliance on men — as the women’s liberation movement did — was nothing less than “neuterising society”.

With her modest tailoring, rigidly set hair and chic strings of pearls, Schlafly would be easy to mistake for an old-fashioned kind of woman. But her paeans to feminine accomplishments could sit happily in the Instagram captions of a modern domesticity influencer, and her analysis of gender politics barely distinguishable from the work of “reactionary feminists” such as Mary Harrington and Louise Perry. Schlafly was a reactionary, but she was also a visionary.

“Schlafly was a reactionary, but she was also a visionary.” As she mobilised her rhetorical skills and her network of volunteers against the Equal Rights Amendment to the US constitution, the feminists floundered in response. Their prescription of freedom for women was experienced by the Schlafly cohort as an attack on feminine privileges; worse, it was an attack on the kind of woman these God-fearing homemakers were. They were a living riposte to the idea of a women’s movement: these women wanted no part of it

For feminists, this lack of sisterhood could be infuriating, and Schlafly reaped all the benefits of goading her opponents. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, came to pieces during a 1973 debate against the personification of the phenomenon she had defined. After Schlafly said women were simply unwilling to do the work required to be elected to office, Friedan called Schlafly “a traitor to your sex, an Aunt Tom” and said: “I’d like to burn you at the stake.”

Such an unfeminine outburst would always fail against Schlafly’s grace and composure, especially from a woman no one was likely to describe as beautiful (the satirical website Reductress put Friedan at number one on a list of “5 Historical Ugly Women Your Daughter Can Idolize for the Right Reasons”). When Schlafly wrote in The Power of the Positive Woman that “if the… strident ‘spokespersons’ of women’s liberation would quietly fade away, dignified and capable women would have a better chance of being elected to public office”, it’s easy to imagine that she had her encounter with Friedan in mind.

Cooler heads on the other side to Schlafly could only express a kind of reluctant admiration. Other conservative women, noted Andrea Dworkin in her book Right Wing Women, inevitably revealed conflicts and struggles as they fought to surrender their own desires and become the good wives and mothers that God and nature had supposedly fitted them to be. Anita Bryant or Tammy Faye Bakker had a streak of tragedy to them. They expounded family values in their own statements, but their lives seemed to be exhibit A for the feminist analysis.

Not Schlafly, though: “She seems possessed by Machiavelli, not Jesus. It appears that she wants to be The Prince. She might be viewed as that rare woman of any ideological persuasion who really does see herself as one of the boys, even as she claims to be one of the girls,” wrote Dworkin. Schlafly had no sympathy for weakness, and no apparent weaknesses of her own. In The Power of the Positive Woman, she presents herself, unabashedly, as the Positive Woman to be emulated. Any unhappiness or frustration in the reader simply reveals her own lack of “positive mental attitude”.

This might seem like unfeminine immodesty from Schlafly, but of course it’s allowable because she had already defined her scope to exclude any possible competition with men. Schlafly could be the best at being a woman, without threatening masculine authority. As a political campaigner, she was fearsomely effective. Before Schlafly’s lobbying, the ERA had appeared to have a clear path to ratification; thanks in large part to her efforts, it never passed into statute.

And yet, the place of women was a late blooming interest for Schlafly. She may have been a lawyer’s wife, but she had a master’s degree in government, and a long career in conservative think tanks, including influential work on anti-communism. Her first book was A Choice Not an Echo: The Inside Story of How American Presidents Are Chosen, which gave a paranoid account of how “a small group of secret kingmakers, using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques, manipulated the Republican National Convention”.

In her later writing, she would mock feminists for believing in a “conspiracy of male chauvinist pigs” determined to deny them their happiness; but in A Choice Not an Echo, Schlafly is in full tin-foil hat mode as she describes a network of secret meetings and covert influence designed to hijack the Republican Party away from the Right. There is urgency to her message: the book was released in the summer of 1964, ahead of the November election in which Schlafly’s favoured candidate Barry Goldwater would represent the Republicans against Lyndon B. Johnson.

A Choice Not an Echo was judged a success in bringing activists over to the Goldwater cause. Goldwater himself, however, was a disaster. The Republicans suffered a historic wipeout: Goldwater won only his home state of Arizona, and five states in the deep south who were historically Democratic but were attracted by Goldwater’s resistance to the Civil Rights Act. America was not ready for the kind of culture war that Schlafly had in mind.

But it would be. Goldwater’s strange constituency of “businesspeople, Southerners, Midwesterners and libertarians” would eventually become the soul of the Republican Party: what seemed at the time like a total defeat for conservatism was actually laying the path for the coming of Ronald Reagan. And the inflammatory rhetoric and sense of victimhood that had made Goldwater repulsive in 1964 would return, eventually, in the form of Donald Trump — who would turn them into assets rather than faults.

Schlafly received little reward for her prescience, though. Newspaper reports said that she had hoped for an appointment to the Pentagon under Reagan; no appointment came, although her dedication to the Right-wing cause and her interest in security could hardly be doubted. Challenged by the feminist lawyer Catharine McKinnon on whether this was sex discrimination in action, Schlafly shrugged the implication away with her usual deftness: “It is the Reagan administration’s loss that they didn’t ask me, but it isn’t my loss.”

When she died in 2016, Trump — then the Republican nominee — eulogised her at her funeral. “Her legacy will live on every time some underdog, outmatched and outgunned, defies the odds and delivers a win for the people,” he said, as ever praising himself under the guise of praising someone else. (Schlafly had previously contributed a chapter to a book in support of Trump, though it is hard to think of anyone who more completely embodies all the aspects of 20th-century libidinism that she claimed to abhor.)

Perhaps this was her valediction: proof that she had finally been truly embraced by a Republican Party that she had helped to remake in her own political image. But it was proof, too, that she was easier to like dead than she had been alive. Dworkin was right that Schlafly saw herself as “one of the boys”, or at the very least as a superior kind of girl. Yet her value as a campaigner was always tied up with her sex, however much the early part of her life shows a far wider range of interests: she was useful, inasmuch as she was a woman speaking on the “woman question”, and no further.

Schlafly had no reason to see her career as a failure. She defeated the ERA and lived to see her kind of conservatism inherit America. The dire overreach of gender identity meant that, by the end of her life, she could congratulate herself on seeing through the excesses of the women’s movement from the beginning (however much that relied on, at best, a very partial version of the women’s movement). After her death, Trump’s presidency would ensure one of her dearest wishes in life: the undoing of Roe vs Wade.

Motherhood may well have been Schlafly’s greatest joy, but her status and success as a politician clearly mattered to her too. It is cheap but accurate to point out that her career made a lie of the beliefs she professed. She must have known, at least partially, that women were not all so naturally docile as she claimed: why care what the constitution says if you truly believe that women are created submissive? Like all trad wives, Schlafly celebrated a version of the domestic that she was incapable — or at least, unwilling — to accept as the entirety of her life.

Whether she’s a post-war women’s lib refuser, or a 21st-century influencer, the woman who earns her place in public life by proselytising for the feminine virtues of the private sphere lives her life in the jaws of a trap. The philosophy (definitely a philosophy rather than a strand of mysticism) that allows her to speak is one which, taken seriously, would deny her a voice altogether. Only intense cynicism can save her from her own contradictions. It was not Schlafly who suffered for her politics, and nor is it the tradwife who suffers now for her hashtags: it is the women who believe and follow them who end up in the snare.