Fentanyl Crisis Rattles Dems

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Only four states share a common border with Mexico, but the millions who crossed that border illegally since Joe Biden took office didn’t stay there. Some of those unlawful migrants brought the lethal illegal drug fentanyl to unsuspecting customers across Middle America.

Fentanyl is 50 times more deadly than heroin, which used to be the most feared addictive drug. In much of the country fentanyl has become the leading cause of premature death, outpacing accidents and homicide.

On Friday, a bust in Florida seized enough fentanyl to kill 2.7 million people, some of it hidden in a Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal box. On Monday in York County, South Carolina, authorities announced their seizure of a cache of fentanyl—more than 30 kilograms—that was enough to kill every person in the entire county.

In Mesa, Arizona, a shop owner and employee are accused of selling thousands of fentanyl pills from a Mexican drug cartel for many months. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has warned against brightly colored fentanyl pills, called “rainbow fentanyl,” which look like candy and attract kids.

A month ago Biden’s own Attorney General, Merrick Garland, admitted that “across the country, fentanyl is devastating families and communities.” He identified the source as the outlaw drug cartels operating in northern Mexico, yet Biden has done nothing to disrupt their operations or close our border to the traffickers who bring their deadly product to our country.

The Department of Justice describes the Mexican drug cartels as “ruthless, criminal organizations that use deception and treachery to drive addiction with complete disregard for human life.” But instead of matching its actions to those strong words, the DOJ spends its resources on political investigations of Americans who oppose the Biden regime.

Open borders and defunding police are what Democrat politicians stand for, and for a while it seemed they would get away with it. Now the fentanyl crisis may be turning undecided voters against Democrat candidates.

Polls have shown a steady decline in support for Democrat candidates as the public wakes up to the fentanyl problem, and how Democrat policies have made it worse. A political ad for Trump-endorsed Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania reminds voters that his opponent “John Fetterman supports decriminalizing dangerous drugs like fentanyl and heroin.”

In the first year of the Biden Administration, there was a sharp increase of 15% in overdose deaths to a new record of 107,000. Much of that was due to fentanyl that flooded across the southern border soon after Biden opened it to illegal immigrants and the criminal cartels who profit from them.

Communist China ships precursor chemicals to Mexican drug cartels who produce the fentanyl, according to the DEA, and the cartels then send it across the border that Democrats refuse to close. The deadly fentanyl is everywhere now, and continues to pour into our country.

This is a top campaign issue in many of the races that will determine who controls the U.S. Senate. In addition to Pennsylvania, races in Arizona, Nevada, and Ohio are turning on the problem of fentanyl as allowed by Democrats’ open border and soft-on-crime policies.

In Ohio, Trump-endorsed JD Vance has described illegal fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. Vance points out that his opponent Tim Ryan, who has been a Democrat congressman for two decades, “has done nothing to stop the flow of fentanyl.”

As sparks flew in their debate earlier this month, JD Vance explained that the Democrat Ryan “talks about wanting to support a stronger border. … Well, Tim, you’ve been in Congress for 20 years, and the border problem has gotten worse and worse and worse.”

Even Gov. Ron DeSantis made fentanyl an issue in his debate against Charlie Crist in Florida Monday night. “If you’re trafficking that garbage, that poison, you’re killing people in our state and we’re going to treat you like the murderer that you are," DeSantis said.

The Democrat Crist “has endorsed the idea of 'reallocating funding away from the police,' I guess to give to social workers. But if someone’s robbing your house, you don’t want a social worker coming to help you, you need the police,” DeSantis declared.

In the deep blue state of New York, the Republican Lee Zeldin has surged in the polls as he is endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police and making crime the top issue. Repeated headlines and surveillance footage showing people being pushed onto the subway tracks have New Yorkers on edge.

The historic advantage that Democrats used to enjoy with Hispanic Americans has dropped by almost half since the last midterm elections. According to a recent Economist/YouGov poll, Biden’s approval rating among Hispanic voters has fallen to 46%, and a remarkable 61% of this group now say that our country is headed in the wrong direction.

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.

Arizona’s Kari Lake is 2022’s breakout political star

Rich Lowry in the NY Post:

Kari Lake is this campaign season’s breakout star.

The “Stop the Steal” die-hard and political novice who is running for governor of Arizona looked like a no-hoper, but now has to be favored to win in November.

Lake is a new politician who is reminder of the oldest of conventional political adages: Candidate quality matters. The exceptionally poised former news anchor is a stand-out performer on the campaign trail.

She is in a line of women champions of a grassroots, right-wing populism that runs from Phyllis Schlafly to Sarah Palin to Marjorie Taylor Greene, spanning the 1950s to today.

These are wildly divergent figures — Schlafly was one of the most consequential leaders of post-war conservatism; Greene hopes to finagle a seat on the House oversight committee should Republicans take back the majority.

Yet there are common threads in this line of “momma bear” populists: a fervent opposition to the elite; a disdain for the Republican establishment; a hatred for the press; a dark or frankly conspiratorial view of the world; a fervent base of support from activists and ordinary voters; and a fearlessness and instinctive combativeness that made or makes these women even more hateful to their opponents and admirable to their supporters.

What’s new about Lake and Greene is that loyalty to Donald Trump and the insistence that the 2020 election was stolen are now the litmus tests for this populism. When Schlafly got her start, the intensity of someone’s anti-communism was the measuring stick.

Herschel Channeled Reagan in Winning Debate

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Republican Herschel Walker was not expected to win the much-anticipated debate with the glib Leftist pastor, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA). Democrats usually win such debates as the moderators come off the sidelines to take swings at the Republican, and Walker is just a self-described country boy from rural Georgia.

Instead, Walker decked Warnock and the liberal moderator with charismatic zingers that remind some old-timers of Ronald Reagan. In early 1980, a debate moderator turned off the microphones to try to silence Reagan in New Hampshire, and he famously protested by shooting back, “I paid for this microphone, Mr. Green!”

The moderator’s real name was Joe Breen, not Green, but no one cared about that. Applause erupted in support of Reagan, and that episode launched his successful two-term presidency and defeat of communism.

During Friday’s Walker-Warnock debate the forked-tongue preacher Warnock made the snarky remark that “I’ve never pretended to be a police officer.” That was a cheap shot at Walker, whom liberals have criticized for supposedly overstating his work with law enforcement after his spectacular football career.

Most other Republican candidates would have gotten defensive and responded with a stuttering answer that left viewers thinking the dig hit a nerve and was onto something. But that was not Reagan’s effective style, or Walker’s.

Walker responded by holding up his five-pointed gold star, clearly recognizable as a law enforcement badge. The audience erupted into spontaneous applause at the spirited, dramatic response by Herschel to the cheap shot by Warnock.

But then the liberal moderator improperly jumped in, perhaps dismayed that Walker captured the moment so perfectly. Trump also encountered a one-sided moderator in 2020, prompting Trump to tell Chris Wallace, "I guess I'm debating you, not him" and "I'm not surprised."

“Mr. Walker, you are very well aware of the rules tonight. And you have a prop that is not allowed. Sir, I asked you to put that prop away,” the moderator declared with authority.

Herschel dealt with the moderator as he did so successfully with fearsome NFL linebackers, by running over their attempt to tackle him. “This is not a prop. This is real,” Herschel retorted.

Now liberals are trying to turn the episode into some kind of “badge-gate” kerfuffle, as they have harped on Herschel’s five-star badge ever since. But the Johnson County sheriff told NBC News that he gave Walker the badge and has no objection to Walker’s use of it in his campaign and during the debate.

Other Republicans should have similar badges, now that headlines of mass killings are nearly daily and police departments have been emasculated by Democrats. Violent crime has increased sharply while progressives have been waging a war on our valiant officers in blue who struggle to maintain law and order.

On Thursday, a mere 15-year-old in Raleigh, North Carolina, went on a shooting spree in a peaceful neighborhood that killed a dog and five people including two veterans, one of whom was an off-duty police officer. The assailant was dressed in camouflage as some teenage boys addicted to violent video games like to do when they turn their gaming into reality.

Meanwhile, across the country in Stockton, California, an example of what appears to have been a type of profiling enabled apprehension of a suspected serial killer while he was hunting at 2 a.m. for another victim to murder. This illustrates what good police work can accomplish if the Left is stopped from interfering with their work.

Police arrested a black man dressed in all-black clothing as he was thought to be driving around to look to murder his seventh random victim in Stockton in the past few months. He donned a mask around his neck and was driving in a wandering pattern after midnight in the city.

Progressives have objected to effective policing by insisting it is based on profiling, and have blocked the “stop and frisk” policy that was so effective in reducing crime in New York City until liberals ended it in 2014.

When the debate moderator brought up the issue of abortion, Herschel had another zinger for the Leftist preacher Warnock: “Instead of aborting those babies, why are you not baptizing those babies? If Black Lives Matter, why are you not protecting those babies?”

When Warnock blustered that a “patient’s room is too small” for the government, Herschel retorted that “there’s a baby in that room as well. And he’s asking the taxpayers to pay for it, so he’s bringing the government back into the room.”

Even the liberal media felt compelled to admire Herschel’s debate performance, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s headline was that “Herschel Walker’s debate performance scores points for his campaign.” Herschel’s Reaganesque performance boosts the entire Republican field as the race for Senate control goes down to the wire.

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.

Weaponized Prosecutions Create a Biden Police State

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

As many as 20 top Republicans have reportedly been targeted by Democrat prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, a county that voted 3-to-1 for Biden in the last election, according to a recent report in the New York Times. Specious allegations of racketeering and conspiracy are part of the arsenal in this and other political prosecutions being unleashed against Trump and his advisors.

Last week Fulton County prosecutors misled the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit by pretending that the signatures on the Georgia mail-in ballots were twice verified. Instead, as confirmed in data posted by the non-partisan Ballotpedia, Georgia opened the floodgates to mail-in ballots in 2020 without maintaining normal verification and rejection rates.

Ballotpedia’s table of mail-in or absentee ballots in the last three elections show that Georgia increased its allowance of mail ballots by a record 1.1 million (from 213,000 in 2016 to 1,316,000 in 2020). At the same time, its rejection rate fell from 6.4% in 2016 to a rock-bottom 0.4% in 2020.

Those mail-in “votes” were overwhelmingly for Biden, without meaningful verification of their authenticity. Every percentage point reduction in the rejection rate likely meant 11,000 more votes for Biden in a state he reportedly won by only that slim margin.

Ballotpedia charts all the states by the change in rejection rates of their mail-in or absentee ballots from 2016 to 2020, and Georgia ranks as the very worst in the country by that crucial measure. Georgia decreased its ballot rejections by 30 times the national average reduction in ballot rejections between the last two presidential elections.

Yet not only do prosecutors in Georgia fail to acknowledge this disparity, they reportedly plan to indict the Trump advisers and ultimately Trump for daring to criticize the malfeasance of Georgia election officials in allowing questionable ballots to be counted. A worse political misuse of prosecutorial power is difficult to imagine, and on Monday the Fulton County prosecutors even filed court papers to compel testimony by a police chaplain from the small town of Montgomery, Illinois.

Texas courts have already stood up against the Fulton County travesty by properly rejecting Georgia’s attempt to haul Texans before the Democrat-stacked process in an Atlanta courtroom. A Texas appellate court expressed its strong doubts that the Fulton County proceeding is even legitimate, as it ruled that a Texas resident can ignore Fulton County’s subpoena.

Ballotpedia data show that the rejection rate of only 0.15% in Georgia of invalid signatures on mail-in/absentee ballots in 2020 was far less than in many other states, and comparable to the national average rejection rate for ballots failing to contain any signature at all.

For nearly two years, Fulton County prosecutors have been unable to find any real crime committed by any Trump supporter or Republican in criticizing Georgia’s improper election procedures. Now in the Eleventh Circuit, Democrats are pleading a belated urgency as they demand immediate testimony by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

In Nevada on Saturday, campaigning for Republican Adam Laxalt for U.S. Senate, while polling indicates a GOP recapture of the Senate if he wins, Trump lambasted the weaponizing of prosecutions. “The Democrats are locking up their political opponents, spying on their political rivals, silencing dissent and using the full force of government law enforcement and the media, the fake media, to try and crush our movement,” Trump said.

“Every freedom-loving American needs to understand the time to stand up to this growing tyranny is right now in this election,” he added. No president has ever campaigned so hard for others, and by doing this Trump makes the Republican Party Great Again.

“We don't have the luxury of waiting. The only way evil will triumph is for good men and women to do nothing,” Trump said in channeling the great conservative statesman Edmund Burke, who courageously defended the American colonies as a member of the English Parliament.

Georgia Democrats should not be allowed to stuff the ballot box with unverified votes again this election, or misuse prosecutorial power such that Republicans are deterred from criticizing this form of election fraud. The entire country is affected by an improper election process in Georgia, and more states in addition to Texas should start ruling against attempts by Fulton County to haul non-Georgians to Atlanta.

The Fulton County proceeding is creating a split between states in a way that our country has not seen in a long time. Traditionally the courts in one state are quick to comply with requests by a prosecutor in another state, but political prosecutions are ending that “comity.”

“Biden and his Left-wing handlers are turning America into a police state," Trump properly declared in Nevada. He decried what he describes as “weaponizing” of prosecutions by Democrats.

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 Court, New Senate

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The new U.S. Supreme Court, with Biden’s Senate-confirmed appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson, began its Term with oral arguments on Monday. Control of the U.S. Senate is to be decided in just five weeks, and our federal judiciary teeters on the edge.

Some might wonder why it is so important for Republicans to win the Senate, while Democrats continue to control the White House. Two words sum up why: federal judges.

Biden has already stuffed the federal judiciary with 84 new Leftist judges, more than any recent president at this stage, and another 57 Biden nominees are pending before the equally divided Senate. Only a GOP-controlled U.S. Senate can stop Biden’s mad dash to change our laws through activist judges, as the GOP did in 2016 when Obama tried to replace Justice Scalia with Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court.

Roe v. Wade could even be reinstated if Biden and Democrats get their way in this election, and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg just gave the ACLU $3 million toward that goal. Democrats have an immense fundraising advantage in the four states on which the next Senate depends: Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia.

As polls show a dead heat in the Georgia U.S. Senate race, the pro-abortion side just ambushed NFL great Herschel Walker with a scurrilous accusation from more than a decade ago. This is on top of the attempts by Georgia’s Fulton County prosecutor to bring specious charges against top Republicans, including Trump, for daring to question the election results reported there last time.

Democrats are masters of the “October surprise,” as they attempted to smear Trump in October 2016. That liberal tactic did not work against Trump in 2016, and it should not work against Walker this year either.

Herschel Walker’s opponent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) supports abortion-on-demand, and wants to force taxpayers to pay for it, too. Warnock repeatedly votes to confirm Biden-nominated federal judges who want to reinstate Roe v. Wade.

Walker, who frequently cites the Bible, opposes Roe and could be the deciding vote against confirming federal judges who want to reinstate that mistake. Preferring Walker over Warnock is an easy choice for anyone who believes the issue of abortion should be “returned to the people and their elected representatives,” as the Supreme Court properly held in the Dobbs case.

Prior to early voting, ambush by the liberal media of Republican candidates occurred the week before Election Day. George W. Bush was hit by the liberal media with something from his distant past, a DWI conviction, the Thursday before Election Day in 2000.

Polling suggested that this tactic cost him a few percentage points, erasing his several-point lead. For the next six weeks our nation was convulsed in political chaos until December 12, when the Supreme Court stepped in to stop the one-sided Florida recount.

Similar Supreme Court intervention should be forthcoming to shut down ongoing attempts by politicized prosecutors to file charges against Trump and top Republicans. On its first day of its new term, the High Court ducked an issue central to the Mar-a-Lago raid concerning whether federal prosecutors can get away with using “filter teams” to rifle through private documents seized from someone’s residence.

With its 6-3 Republican-appointed majority, this Supreme Court should not be dodging these issues. This Court may be at its zenith in conservative strength, but that will not mean much unless it welcomes Trump’s appeals, including Trump’s emergency request Tuesday afternoon for the High Court to intervene concerning the Mar-a-Lago raid.

Trump campaigns tirelessly for Republican candidates in the swing states, and if the GOP retakes control of the Senate it will be thanks to Trump. This Sunday Trump returns to Arizona for a massive rally to boost Republicans there.

Private property depends on this election, too. On its first day of oral argument, the Supreme Court heard why the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should stop controlling water located on private property.

Many farmers and homeowners are unable to determine if a lake on their private property is subject to federal regulation and control merely because of its potential connection to a separate navigable waterway. This federal interference blocks improved management of surface water during droughts.

Private property owners face criminal prosecution if they improve their own wetlands that the feds later claim are regulated by the EPA. Enormous fines can be imposed against private property owners who merely build around their own surface water, and litigation drags on for more than a decade as this pending case has.

At oral argument, Biden’s Justice Jackson sought continuation of EPA authority over private surface water. Under her Leftist view, it should not even matter whether a bit more than a puddle is actually connected to a navigable waterway, such that the federal government would control many private lakes and marshes.

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.