Gen Z Turns to Socialism in Desperation

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Gen Z men, the pivotal swing voters under age 30 who helped elect President Trump in 2024, are supporting socialist candidates in shocking numbers. As many as eight members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) could be elected to Congress in three months.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a sky-high approval rating of 58%, more than double his disapproval rating, after Gen Z voters elected him in a landslide last fall. None of the conservative criticisms of him has made a dent in his popularity.

Some Republican consultants hope the Democrats’ shift to socialism will make it easier for Republican candidates to win in the general election. But there is no sign of a significant migration of traditional Democrats or Independents to the Republican Party.

It would help if more voters understood what the DSA really stands for. Their platform includes abolishing the Presidency, Senate and the Supreme Court, while opening our borders and emptying our prisons.

DSA members seek to abolish corporations and impose government rent-controlled housing. They want a “single payer” government-run health care system, which would cause Canadian-style shortages, and vow to “finish Reconstruction” by imposing a race-based woke agenda.

But explaining the DSA platform to young voters has not deterred them from casting ballots for the socialists. Instead, Republicans need to recognize that many young Americans are in dire financial straits, and seek to alleviate that.

Annual college tuition and expenses can exceed $100,000 at private colleges, yet D.C. politicians continue to pump money into higher education while doing nothing to bring down this exorbitant cost. Likewise for health care, such that insurance premiums surpass even mortgage payments for many young couples.

The job of government is not to impose price controls, but to rein in inflation. Yet the cost of groceries has risen by 33% since 2019.

A new Texas Public Opinion Research poll on the Senate race in Texas, which Republicans must win to keep control of the upper chamber, shows Democrat James Talarico leading the Republican Ken Paxton by 45-40%. By far the top issue for voters there is affordability and the cost of living, about which Gen Z is particularly distressed.

Mayor Mamdani’s approach to this problem is doomed to fail, as happened in Chicago, where 7 publicly subsidized Save A Lot stores are closing. Undeterred by this lesson, Mamdani promised that 5 city-operated grocery stores will sell a core basket of food at 30% less than privately owned stores, at prices fixed for an entire month to prevent the current sticker shock of many unexpected increases.

Mamdani’s first city-owned grocery store won’t open until next year in the Bronx, and the second one will not welcome shoppers until 2029, so this initiative is mostly symbolic. But to his credit, his stores will not sell lottery tickets, or alcohol and cigarettes.

The liberal Chicago Tribune, which supported the publicly funded scheme to address so-called “food deserts,” admits that “city-owned grocery stores … are not the answer.” Meanwhile, the German-owned Aldi chain, which somehow manages to sell a broad range of fresh foods and groceries at prices that average 30% less than other chains, recently announced a massive expansion with a target of 3,200 stores across the U.S.

But Republican officials have been creating an impression of pandering to oligarchs rather than making life more affordable for young people. Only 20% of Gen Z own stock outside of a retirement plan, and yet national policy seems devoted to what is good for the stock market rather than for the struggling consumer.

The Wall Street Journal recently published the best responses on this issue by members of Gen Z at college, and observations included the fact that wages have not kept pace with inflation since 2009. Rent eats up 40% of income, while medical debt is steep.

The debt that Gen Z men are incurring due to the growing addiction to gambling is staggering, too. Americans, mostly young men, are spending twice as much money on sports gambling now than on books, music, movies, and museums combined.

Congress held another ineffective hearing on the sports gambling crisis last week, again failing to make progress on this issue. Meanwhile, gambling interests are suddenly pouring many millions of dollars into elections, such that many politicians are afraid to stand up against them.

Enter the socialists with their promises to protect and help Gen Z, by improving affordability, ending the oligarchy, and stopping predatory business practices. Sometimes the socialists deregulate, as Mamdani recently did for small businesses in New York City by terminating duplicative licensing requirements.

There is still time for Republicans to announce a new “Contract with America” that was so successful in the 1994 midterm election that it became a GOP landslide. The agenda should start with what would be good for Gen Z, the key voting bloc that should not be ignored any longer by the Republican Party.

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.

Planes Collide with DEI

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

After Delta Airlines reaffirmed its full commitment to the DEI ideology, one of its planes crash-landed, flipped upside down, and burst into flames at Toronto Airport. Everyone miraculously survived this latest plane crash that happened once the plane was oddly cleared to land amid a crosswind having gusts up to 40 mph on its approach to the airport.

DEI means that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are the priority in hiring and promotion, and protection against firing inept workers. President Trump has issued two Executive Orders against DEI, and many large corporations have recently rescinded or rolled back their DEI programs, including Amazon, Disney, Google, GE, GM, and Pepsi, while major banks are taking DEI off their websites.

Donald Trump’s trademark phrase was “You’re fired!” long before he ran for president. Now, as president for the second time, he’s been refreshingly firing everyone who stands in the way of transforming the federal government from DEI to a merit-based system.

Trump should consider firing those in charge of air travel safety, including investigators of these crashes. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) asserts exclusive authority over analyzing such crashes in the United States, but this federal agency is liberal like other federal agencies.

The initial statements by the NTSB chairwoman last Friday seemed to avoid holding anyone accountable for the mid-air collision last month in D.C., despite how it killed all 67 people on the American Airlines plane and a military helicopter. No collision of this magnitude should happen today, and any suggestion that no one was severely at fault is grounds for firing the investigators.

Yet at this rate no air traffic controller will be fired for this deadly collision near Reagan National Airport, even though the day before a similar mid-air collision near the same airport was averted only by an alert pilot aborting his landing and recircling. Air traffic controllers are federal employees and they adopted a policy a decade ago to make it nearly impossible to fire any of them, no matter how incompetent.

During the Obama Administration the use of a merit and skills-based exam, the AT-SAT, was deemphasized in hiring air traffic controllers. Instead a biographical test based on DEI became more important in hiring decisions in this occupation on which the lives of thousands depend daily.

An air traffic control expert, Michael Pearson, told Just the News that the numerous errors made by air traffic control in the recent D.C. crash included failing to “tell the jet that the helicopter was in sight” and failing to give timely “safety advisories” when alerted about the impending collision in the sky. In addition, the “helicopter route was horrible” while “the controller didn’t apply the rules properly,” Pearson said.

But the air traffic controllers’ association, which functions like a union in impeding the ability to fire workers, has immunized the federal employees against being fired by adopting the Air Traffic Safety Action Program. Under this policy “employees are promised that no punitive or disciplinary actions will be taken as a result of reporting errors that could impact safety, provided those errors are not the result of gross negligence or illegal activity.”

The NTSB is already protecting its fellow federal government workers by speculating that the altitude meter in the military helicopter may have somehow malfunctioned, and that a belated warning was “stepped on” by an interruption and hence may not have been heard. But air traffic controllers should ensure their messages are timely heard and acted upon, or else take immediate action to warn others as the DC controllers failed to do.

Missing from the NTSB statements is criticism of air traffic control for not alerting the helicopter pilots to divert their course until less than 30 seconds before the collision. Subsequently the air traffic controller told the helicopter pilot to fly “behind” the landing aircraft, which lacked an urgent altitude change needed.

Pete Buttigieg, who oversaw the air traffic controllers for four years in the Biden Administration, is turning the tables by demanding, “The flying public needs answers.” So while the biased NTSB withholds real answers, Buttigieg blames Trump to boost his campaign for U.S. Senate in his adopted state of Michigan.

A lawsuit has been pending for many years in federal court challenging how air traffic control hiring practices have disadvantaged qualified candidates from the leading training program, called the Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative. This lawsuit, captioned Brigida v. US Dept of Transportation, was certified as a class action in February 2022 in federal court in DC.

Several hundred employees of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have been fired by Trump, but not any air traffic controllers or their supervisors. The recent two crashes, one in Canada, suggest that replacing DEI with a merit-based system for air traffic control is badly needed.

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.

California Up in Smoke, Thanks to Liberals

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The cost of the fires in Los Angeles County is estimated to range up to $250 billion, far more than the damage done by the Great Chicago Fire which destroyed that city in 1871. The losses from the Chicago Fire, considered one of the worst in history, were a smaller inflation-adjusted $5.7 billion.

The cost of rebuilding Chicago, which was done quickly, was contained because it was funded by its own residents, businesses, donations, and architects determined to build a great city. By 1893 it held a most spectacular World’s Fair with 27 million visitors from around the world over six months, and Chicago quickly became the railroad hub for America.

New lumber began arriving in Chicago for its rebuild while there were still hot embers in burnt buildings. There was not a smoldering feeling of entitlement as seen among liberals in Los Angeles today, or demands that the federal government serve as the gravy train of handouts.

President Trump made a remarkable trip to Los Angeles to implore its residents to reclaim their property and start their own construction as soon as possible. Time is money, and extensive delay in rebuilding the devastated areas of Los Angeles could be as costly as the immediate loss in value from the fires.

But California is a regulatory nightmare where radical environmentalists obstruct construction projects at every turn. More than a decade ago Californians enacted Proposition 1 (2014) by a landslide vote of 67% to create new reservoirs to supply more water to the arid Los Angeles basin, which could have doused the fires.

Billions were allocated for the promised new reservoirs, and Congress kicked in hundreds of millions of dollars more at American taxpayer expense. Yet no new reservoirs have been built in California since 1979.

Environmentalists file lawsuits to delay or stop construction, while liberal California judges too often rule in favor of the Left there. The California Environmental Quality Act allows lawsuits to contest findings by California agencies that are required to assess the potential environmental harm of infrastructure projects.

The Palisades and Eaton fires near Los Angeles destroyed 40,000 acres, which is 20 times larger than what burned in the Great Chicago Fire. Rainfall is pouring down on Southern California in late January but nearly all of it flows into the ocean because of the lack of reservoirs there.

Currently there are only three routes to bring water to southern California, which has very little of its own. The first route is the Los Angeles Aqueduct built by the great William Mulholland in the 1900s, which brings water from the Owens River valley on the east side of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Next is the Colorado River Aqueduct built in the 1930s, which brings water from the Colorado River at Lake Havasu, but that diminishing water supply is also needed by fast-growing Arizona. Finally, there is the California Aqueduct built in the 1960s, which is the only route to bring water from north of Sacramento where water is abundant, but that water must be shared with the enormously productive farms in California’s fertile Central Valley.

The coastal city of Rancho Palos Verdes embarked on a multi-million dollar project of “dewatering wells,” which has removed more than 112 million gallons of water to protect million-dollar homes against instability in the earth. Now that the vegetation is gone due to fires, the risk of mudslides from sudden downpours is getting worse.

While recently touring the carnage near Los Angeles, Trump, himself a builder of magnificent skyscraper apartments and hotels, and golf courses, rightly criticized the interference by liberals with the owners of burned-out property gaining access to their own land to clear the wreckage and start rebuilding now. Not next year, not next month, but immediately, Trump urged local officials to allow it.

California liberals want the rest of America to pay for their costly regulations that impede sensible construction and affordable living. The notorious California Coastal Commission asserts its own veto power over all human activity near the ocean, where much of popular California is.

Environmentalists obstruct the routine clearing of underbrush necessary to avert disastrous wildfires from spreading so quickly. When Tom Daschle was the Democrat Senate Majority Leader from South Dakota, he inserted into legislation a special provision to prohibit federal judges from interfering with the removal of underbrush in his state.

An illegal alien, already convicted of a felony, was arrested and is considered a person of interest in connection with the start of one of these conflagrations, the so-called Kenneth Fire. He was caught carrying a blowtorch near where that fire started.

California has plenty of money, and it is time for its many billionaires to pick up their oars and row their own boat to aquatic self-sufficiency within the next decade. Rural America elected Trump over fierce opposition by wealthy California Leftists, and rural Trump voters should not be burdened with the expense of restoring the liberal lifestyle that just went up in smoke.

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.

“Transgender Lunacy” Remains a Big Issue

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Transgender activism was on the ballot in November and lost big in the presidential and U.S. Senate races. But there is no sign that Democrats are letting up on this issue, and on Monday Biden said he “strongly opposes” a restriction on transgender surgeries on kids of service members contained in the defense authorization bill, which many Democrats voted against for that reason.

Under Biden, transgenders serve openly in our military, but Trump can end that along with banning federally funded transgender drugs and surgeries on minors. “I will sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation,” Trump announced in Phoenix on Sunday, and “get transgender out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools.”

An estimated 1.3 million adults and 300,000 youths in America identify as transgender, and those numbers have been growing rapidly due to encouragement from schools, liberal professionals, and culture. Unfortunately, Democrat-appointed judges rule for the transgender side every time, as no Democrat crosses the agenda of Planned Parenthood which has expanded into the transgender business.

In its final hours, the Senate confirmed the 235th Biden-appointed judge to the federal courts, one more than it allowed Trump to appoint in his first administration. In addition, hundreds of federal judges appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama are still deciding cases.

Two recent decisions within the same federal circuit illustrate the immense divide between Democrat and Republican-appointed judges on the transgender issue. A Republican-appointed judge in Pennsylvania held in favor of three mothers after a teacher taught transgender identity to first-graders, while a Democrat-appointed judge in New Jersey ruled against a father objecting to transgender facilitation without his consent.

In the New Jersey case, a widowed father was dismayed to learn that the public high school where his daughter was a freshman was using male pronouns for her without his knowledge or approval. He sued in federal court to stop this abuse of his parental rights, but the court ruled against him and in favor of the school.

The student’s interest in transitioning was supported by a school club known as “Students Advocating for Equality,” or SAFE. Its purported purpose is to “promote open discussion and awareness about modern cultures and topics surrounding intersectionality while aiming to make positive contributions to [the] community and school.”

Not only did school officials conceal from the father that they were referring to his daughter by male pronouns, but they also excluded from an email teachers who would be candid with the father. Even though gender dysphoria among teenagers is known to be potentially dangerous, the father was kept in the dark and the Biden-appointed federal judge ruled against his motion for a preliminary injunction, which is now on appeal.

Trump has ingeniously proposed that school principals be elected by a vote of parents instead of by tax-salaried administrators or school boards. “If you have a bad principal that’s not getting the job done, the parents will—under the Trump administration—be allowed to vote to fire that principal,” Trump told Moms for Liberty last summer.

Trump could force that change with strong regulations from his Department of Education, which could tie federal funding to schools that allow more parental control. Similarly, new transgender regulations of schools could deny federal funding where biological males are allowed to compete as transgenders in girls’ sports.

Last week NCAA president Charlie Baker appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Republican Senators Musgrave, Kennedy, and Hawley took the opportunity to challenge him about allowing male-bodied athletes to invade college women’s sports. Baker tried to deflect pointed questioning by saying he was just following federal law, but when Sen. Hawley challenged him to identify the law he was following, he could not do so because there is none.

Almost daily a women’s sports team defaults in a scheduled match because an opponent includes a transgender player who is a biological male. Lawsuits are pending over this issue, which the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly dodged while many lower courts are pro-transgender.

At oral argument in early December in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court challenging Tennessee’s sensible ban on transgender surgeries and drugs for minors, which 26 states have enacted, all three Democrat-appointed justices spoke against this good law. Earlier the liberal Montana Supreme Court blocked a conservative Montana law that protected children against transgender procedures.

As boys who say they identify as girls are allowed into girls’ locker rooms, in Westosha, Wisconsin, an outraged father declared “I find it unacceptable that a 14-year-old girl is required to change in front of a 16-year-old boy to complete a required class in school.” In Reno, Nevada, a boy identifying as a girl “gets a front-row seat to view naked females,” complained a girl’s grandmother.

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.

The Leftist War on Self-Defense

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The prosecution of an unarmed former Marine for acting in self-defense to protect passengers on the New York City subway has sparked a nationwide uproar. This latest salvo in the Leftist war on self-defense has liberals demanding additional charges against the hero.

Daniel Penny, only 24 years old, is a white ex-Marine sergeant from Long Island who wrestled down and restrained a troubled black man, Jordan Neely. With no police officers in sight, Neely was menacing multiple passengers on the moving subway train until Penny restrained Neely while asking others to call the police.

The dramatic rescue by a quick-thinking civilian is reminiscent of other recent episodes in which an ordinary citizen stepped up to save others from harm. The bystander who averted a massacre at an Indiana shopping mall last year, 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken, was hailed as a hero then, as Daniel Penny should be applauded now.

Other passengers on the subway also viewed Neely as dangerous, and helped restrain him. Penny deserves the praise he’s receiving nationwide for acting in self-defense, and $2.5 million from 50,000 donors has already poured in to support his legal defense.

We don’t know yet what legal or illegal drugs may have triggered frightening behavior by Neely, who has a long criminal record that included punching a 67-year-old woman in the face and breaking her nose less than two years ago. A toxicology report would ordinarily be necessary before declaring a cause of death, but the New York City medical examiner is a political appointee of its Democrat mayor.

The police who were called to the scene saw no reason to arrest Daniel Penny, and no charges were initially brought even after Neely was declared dead at a hospital. Self-defense and protecting others has never been a crime, and should not become one now.

But after days of street protests demanding that Penny be prosecuted for murder, the New York City medical examiner announced that Neely’s death was a homicide caused by “compression of neck (chokehold).” District Attorney Alvin Bragg, famous for his political indictment of Trump over non-crimes, mollified the Leftist protesters by charging Daniel Penny with manslaughter.

The failure of both Bragg and the medical examiner to await the results of the toxicology report proves that politics, not medical science, is the driving force behind the manslaughter charge. It is reminiscent of the George Floyd case, with Penny being made a scapegoat just as the bystander officers in that case were.

The fake medical science in the first jury trial in the Floyd case included a prosecution witness who bizarrely invited jurors to grab their own necks, as though that would prove anything scientific about the cause of death in a criminal suspect who was intoxicated by an illegal drug. Imagine a similar stunt if Penny goes on trial in a hostile venue in New York City.

There are 100,000 unexpected deaths caused annually by illegal drugs in the United States, which is more than double the number of gun homicides. Inevitably, some drug-related deaths will occur while an erratic intoxicated person is being restrained.

When the Leftist mob calls Daniel Penny a vigilante instead of a Good Samaritan, it undermines the rule of law necessary to attain justice. If there is a rush to prejudge or find a scapegoat every time someone on drugs dies while being restrained, then self-defense will no longer be safely available to anyone.

There has been an outpouring of support for this hero, but the jury pool in New York City is not representative of the rest of our country. The District Attorney’s office has far more resources than Penny can possibly raise, while protesters are still demanding that the charges against him be upgraded to include murder.

Despite the partisan divide over this case, one New York Democrat has publicly defended the subway hero. Former Governor David Paterson said on Sunday that Penny “did something because he saw danger for other people and tried to prevent it. He did not meet the threshold where you charge someone.”

Paterson suggested that District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a fellow African-American, may have charged Penny merely because other minorities have died under similar circumstances in the past. During his single term as governor, Paterson often used his pardon power to correct injustices.

An Army sergeant convicted of killing an armed Black Lives Matter protester in Austin, despite asserting that it was in self-defense, just received a harsh sentence of 25 years in prison. Penny could be imprisoned for 15 years if convicted of manslaughter, but reasonable self-defense should not face such punishment.

Donald Trump observes that Penny ”was in great danger and the other people in the car were in great danger.” There should not be a prosecution of an unarmed Good Samaritan who acts quickly to defend others.

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.

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.

Pork and Injustice in Senate Gun Control Bill

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

With fanfare, a gun control compromise was announced by the U.S. Senate on Sunday and its supporters seek passage by the end of next week. But instead of addressing the recent mass shootings, this legislation wastes billions of dollars in handouts to liberal groups while advancing feminist ideology.

The mass shootings had nothing to do with alleged domestic violence. Yet a central part of this gun control bill is to broaden a lifetime deprivation of Second Amendment rights of men subjected to accusations by women.

Teenage boys are the worst perpetrators of the mass shootings, who typically lack any relationships with girls. Yet the Senate gun control bill jeopardizes rights and reduces job opportunities for men who have been accused by women of unwanted touching, as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was.

Ten Republican Senators, four of whom are retiring now at relatively young ages, support this gun control bill. None of the other six are up for reelection this year, and half of them include perennial anti-Trumpers Mitt Romney (R-UT), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Bill Cassidy (R-LA).

The 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate will block passage unless all ten Republicans cross over to the Democrat side on this. After wasting $54 billion on Leftist politicians in Ukraine, allocating billions more to Leftist groups in our country may not seem like much.

But a billion dollars to push enactment of gun control at the state level, such as euphemistically named “red flag” laws that can be misused, could improperly go toward tipping the scales in close elections. The billions of dollars in new funding for mental health clinics would not have prevented the recent shootings by defiant teenagers.

If mental health experts cannot distinguish between men and women, how could they reliably identify potential killers? In some cases mental health clinics can be a means to take children away from good parents, or install mental health testing in public schools to detect and deflect conservative political attitudes.

Couching feminist ideology in gender-biased terminology, the legislation seeks to close the so-called “boyfriend loophole” to cause lifetime deprivations of Second Amendment rights. A spat with a girlfriend, as many popular athletes, politicians, and others have once had, would then be misused to stigmatize and exclude for life these men from ever holding a job that entails carrying a gun.

The Lautenberg Amendment, enacted in 1996, already denies for life the Second Amendment rights of any man ever convicted of a minor misdemeanor domestic violence charge, which is sometimes broadly defined to include even offensive touching of one’s wife. Now Democrats want to expand this to enable any girlfriend to make a false accusation that could result in men being barred for life from jobs in the military, police, or other gun-carrying professions.

Johnny Depp spent millions of dollars and several years of his life to clear his name of false domestic violence accusations. But most men are unwilling or unable to do that, instead accepting a misdemeanor plea bargain; they should not permanently lose their constitutional rights and job opportunities because of it.

Gun control zealots want to expand the draconian Lautenberg Amendment, even though it would not have prevented any of the recent mass shootings by teenage boys. The Senate bill would deprive men for life of Second Amendment rights based on a mere restraining order requested by a girlfriend, which is often issued based on an unproven accusation and without a hearing for the accused.

Many injustices already arise under current law when a man does not realize that a misdemeanor offense from decades ago senselessly makes it unlawful to possess a gun for his own defense today. Rather than be warned about this or moderately fined, he faces mandatory imprisonment for owning a gun for self-defense merely because of an obscure federal law.

Harsh penalties in this draft gun control bill would be enforced by inflexible federal courts, and a bill proposed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) seeks 5-year mandatory minimum sentences for a gun peacefully carried by someone having a minor outdated offense. Some judges like locking up someone for a long time for the “offense” of harmlessly carrying a gun, based on an outdated misdemeanor triggering a deprivation of his Second Amendment rights.

Older men, husbands, and fathers are not the people who have been committing these horrific shootings. Teenagers addicted to video games are the culprits, yet this supposedly bipartisan legislation is silent about that.

Gun rights were unjustifiably taken away from peaceful participants in the Trump rally on January 6. One who pled guilty to a minor misdemeanor petitioned the judge to restore her gun rights, which the Trump-appointed judge granted but was criticized for it by the media.

Pouring billions of dollars into Leftist groups to advocate for state gun control laws, funding bigger mental health clinics, and imprisoning older men due to an unproven domestic accusation or minor misdemeanor will do nothing to stop mass shootings by teenagers.

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.

Leftists Prefer Censorship over Democracy

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The Left’s promotion of censorship has shifted into high gear. Formerly in the vanguard of demanding freedom of speech, Leftists now openly advocate for censorship of views they dislike.

There is no First Amendment freedom in Europe, where new rules are being drafted by the European Union (EU) to punish disfavored online speech. There is nothing democratic about this push for censorship.

The European Commission is the unelected body of bureaucrats that governs the European Union, whose membership fell to 27 when Britain exited in January 2020. The Commission is expected this week to approve censorship of online speech critical of LGBTQ+, which can mean anything contrary to traditional gender norms.

These new rules against free speech on the internet have not yet been fully released, but they will take aim at vocal conservatives in Poland and Hungary unsupportive of the direction in which the EU is trying to take those pro-Trump countries. Economic pressure keeps those countries inside the liberal confederation.

In April, at the Istanbul Convention, the additional Eastern European countries of Bulgaria and the Czech Republic also pushed back against the attempt by the EU to erode family values. Like Russia, all of these formerly communist countries have seen firsthand the immense harm that liberals cause, and those countries are not returning to the bad old days.

There is nothing democratic about the European Union, as these and other rules are created by a handful of Leftists without any popular support. It is ironic how liberals clamor for democracy when it suits their agenda, while doing the opposite in overriding the will of the people who are supportive of family values in Eastern Europe.

Even Ireland recently heard a public call for it to consider leaving the EU for reasons of nationalism, as espoused by its champion MMA fighter Conor McGregor. A Dubliner, McGregor pointed out that being in the EU makes the Ireland government merely “messengers” and “lap dogs” rather than the independent sovereignty the Irish people sought when they broke away from the United Kingdom a century ago.

Totalitarian new Covid confinement rules imposed by the EU against its member nations, including Ireland, sparked McGregor’s ire. There seems little point in holding elections in Ireland and throughout Europe if an unelected commission of the EU can invent and impose whatever suffocating laws it likes.

Later this week Biden is holding an online Democracy Summit to which he invited more than 100 countries, many of which, like Ukraine, have too much corruption to qualify as functioning democracies. Biden snubbed Hungary, even though it is one of the most democratic countries in the world, and Hungary promptly retaliated by vetoing resulting decisions that would require unanimity by EU member states.

A third of Americans recognize that many elections in our own country are not honest. Democracy assumes that voters should fill out their own ballots without pressure for certain candidates, but liberal political operatives harvest and deliver ballots for a candidate like Joe Biden who does not even have full mental faculties.

Fortunately, pockets of remaining democracy in the United States are reflected in how voters continue to move right in reaction to the tactics by the Left. The highly respected Cook Political Report has just changed its assessment of 3 key governor races to describe them as toss-ups after they were previously listed as leaning toward reelection of the incumbent Democrats.

These are the battleground states of Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, all essential to the Democrats’ quest to win the next presidential election. Most notably in Michigan, with its prize of 15 electoral college votes, the incumbent Gov. Gretchen Whitmer faces continued dissatisfaction with her dictatorial lockdowns during the pandemic.

Remarkably, the Cook Report also updated its assessment of the Democrat strongholds of Oregon, New Mexico, and Maine in order to reflect growing Republican strength there. Longtime Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) surprisingly announced his retirement from Congress, rather than stand for reelection in 2022.

The real democracy in the United States is in Republican primaries, where elections are not stolen and people are willing to vote out incumbents who fail to accomplish what they promised. On Monday that was illustrated by the entry of former U.S. Senator David Perdue into the Republican primary race for the governor of Georgia, against the turncoat incumbent Brian Kemp.

Immediately Donald Trump endorsed David Perdue, who will bring a choice not an echo, which was sorely lacking in the anti-Trump governor’s bid for reelection. Governor Kemp presided over a takeover of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats by liberal Democrats, and then he obstructed restoration of election integrity there.

A sweep of the Georgia primaries by pro-Trump candidates would be a big step toward saving our country. If liberals truly supported democracy, they would be applauding.

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.

Democrats’ Assault on Free Speech

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Liberals have realized that the massive support for Donald Trump and his views is not going away. As long as freedom of speech survives and distrust of the liberal media persists, Democrats are unable to capture control of the minds of the American people.

First they wrongly impeached President Trump for a political speech, and now the Democrats are going full throttle to censor anyone who speaks out for ordinary Americans as Trump did.

Newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is the latest target of this liberal censorship. Despite being sworn in less than merely a month ago, Greene is being subjected to an all-out national attack by Democrats to silence and marginalize her.

That is a surprising amount of attention given to a freshman barely weeks after the opening of the new session of Congress. During Biden’s first 100 days, one would think that the Democratic leadership in Congress would have better things to do than obsess about the blond housewife from Georgia.

Well, Phyllis Schlafly was just a blond housewife from a small town in Illinois when she defeated the Leftist agenda. Five years ago, Trump himself was just a businessman whom the media insisted would never be elected president.

A plain-speaking American, Rep. Greene is no ordinary congresswoman as she single-handedly wakes up the entire country to what is happening. She tweeted that “America Last globalists are clinging to relevance because the People have rejected them.”

Leftists were aided by a handful of Republican congressmen who are so hateful of Trump that they refuse to defend freedom of speech by him and those who support him. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) voted to impeach Trump for his speech rather than stand up against Leftist control of free speech for all of us.

Nearly a dozen county Republican organizations throughout Wyoming are exercising their right of free speech to censure Cheney. The South Carolina GOP has done likewise to Rep. Tom Rice there for his pro-impeachment vote.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), whose weak leadership as Senate Majority Leader contributed to the loss of the GOP majority in the Senate, has failed to defend the importance of freedom of speech. “Conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party,” he declared in support of the censors.

Rep. Greene shot back, “The real cancer for the Republican Party is weak Republicans who only know how to lose gracefully. This is why we are losing our country.”

Rep. Greene is so right about that. Charismatic and effective, Rep. Greene’s outspokenness resonates with Americans as Trump’s own statements have.

For that she has been subjected to relentless smears by the Left and intrusive scrutiny of everything she has ever said long ago. She married in college and her husband runs a construction company, we are told, while she raised their three children.

Twitter suspended her amid her enormous following there, and she has started on Telegram where she instantly picked up a large crowd. She is not backing down, nor should she.

On her first day in Congress she wore a mask with the lettering “TRUMP WON,” and she has introduced articles of impeachment against Biden. She told Never-Trumper Mitt Romney to grow a spine.

Rep. Greene was elected with 75% of the vote over her Democrat opponent after President Trump called her “a future Republican star.” Democrats should be abiding by democracy in Georgia’s 14th congressional district, rather than excluding their duly elected representative from committees.

Yet the same liberals who preach about respecting democracy are being anti-democratic towards Rep. Greene and the many Georgians who elected her. Rather than improperly banning her from sitting on House committees, the real issue should be whether the two senators from Georgia elected based on unaudited signatures on numerous mail-in ballots should be seated.

The “unity” professed to be a goal of Joe Biden does not mean conciliation by the Left, but instead silencing the conservative opposition to the liberal agenda. The ferocious attempt by Democrats to destroy Rep. Greene illustrates how far they will go to stamp out freedom of speech for all of us.

New terms are invented as euphemisms for this assault against our basic free-speech rights. “Deplatforming” sounds innocuous, but it means censoring someone’s entire website on the internet, even though it may have millions of followers.

Churches may be the next target. The right to free speech in the First Amendment, which is unique to the United States, was supported in colonial America by pastors who wanted to be sure that they would never be intimidated for what they say from the pulpit.

After taking control of the White House, liberals’ real goal is to silence Trump and demonize his supporters to the point that neither Trump nor anyone like him can ever be elected 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 pseagles.com.

Removing Statues, to Smear America

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Americans first watched in horror as mobs of anarchists seized the streets of our major cities, breaking windows, setting fires, and looting stores. Then they began pulling down statues that had stood for decades, or in many cases, more than a century.

The real targets of the violent Leftists are not George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, whose faces are carved into Mount Rushmore. Rather, the goal is to discredit America itself by smearing those who gave us the freedom and prosperity we enjoy today.

Local police in Democrat-controlled cities have mostly stood and watched silently, neither stopping the destruction nor arresting and charging those responsible. At the White House, President Trump reacted on Twitter, promising to restore order if local officials fail.

The restraint by our president came to an end last night when a mob reached Lafayette Square in front of the White House. Cheered by onlookers who broke through a chain link fence, a small group of men tied ropes around the massive bronze figure of our 7th president, Andrew Jackson, mounted on a horse at the center of the park.

United States Park Police arrived at the scene to disperse the unruly crowd mere moments before the vandals would have toppled the 15-ton statue, though not before it was defaced with ugly words like “Killer Scum” that will be costly to remove. It is unlikely that the vandals had any appreciation for what Jackson achieved and stood for.

Andrew Jackson was perhaps the most influential American between the founding of our nation and the Civil War, who more than anyone else defined the scope of presidential power. He was also the first president to represent the common man, triumphing over the elite of his day, and voluntarily retired after two terms when he could have won reelection repeatedly.

“Last night, we stopped an attack on a great monument,” Mr. Trump told reporters the next morning. “I just want to thank law enforcement. Numerous people are in jail and are going to jail today.”

Aside from the character of the man it commemorates, the Jackson statue is remarkable in itself as an important work of art. It was the first bronze statue cast in the United States, and the first equestrian statue in which the horse is balanced on its two hind legs.

“We are looking at long-term jail sentences for these vandals and these hoodlums. They’re bad people, and they’re not taking down our monuments.”

What a difference from last Friday, when a mob succeeded in toppling and burning a statue of a Masonic leader, Albert Pike, in Washington’s Judiciary Square. The statue of Pike had been erected in 1901 with the approval of Congress after a nationwide fundraising campaign by the Masons.

Some weak Republicans have sought compromise with the radical anarchists by evicting Confederate statues from public spaces. But what about Arlington National Cemetery, where America’s honored dead are buried?

Arlington sits on the 1,100-acre estate once owned by the Virginian Robert E. Lee and his wife, who inherited the property from Washington’s adopted grandson, George Washington Custis. Some 400,000 American heroes rest in peace there under the silent watch of the now-empty Custis-Lee Mansion.

The ongoing attacks on statues has little to do with the Confederacy, as the vandals are just as resentful of most of the men in American history. The mob has attacked statues of patriots who fought for our country under the Stars and Stripes, including Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Teddy Roosevelt.

The mob continued to depose statues of other great historical figures, including Francis Scott Key, author of our national anthem; Father Junipero Serra, the humble Franciscan friar who brought Christianity to California; and Christopher Columbus, who started it all in 1492. The orgy of destruction culminated last week with the toppling of a statue of George Washington by protesters in Portland, Oregon.

The victims of this outbreak of anarchism were not promoters of slavery. Teddy Roosevelt, for example, was born in New York City merely two years before the Civil War started, but Democrats have agreed to remove a remarkable statue of him outside its famed American Museum of Natural History.

Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, was the man who penned the revolutionary phrase “all men are created equal” in our Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s words were instrumental in ending slavery.

Ironically, it was white Leftists in Portland, Oregon who used an ax to tear down a statue of Jefferson. Portland is one of the least diverse cities in the nation, and yet wants to accuse great Americans of racism.

This is not really about a sculpture or monument, of course. It is an attempt to make America the object of scorn, while denying credit to those who made America great.

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 pseagles.com.

Trump is aligned with Schlafly's views

The St. Louis River Front Times reports:

Schlafly didn't live to see Donald Trump elected as President of the United States, but she did endorse his candidacy before her death and likely would have been thrilled to see him in the White House. No president's views or administration has ever seemed so closely aligned with Schlafly's views, and Trump's presidency has proven that Schlafly's once extreme right-wing beliefs are now acceptable to even moderates in the Republican party.

Only the left-wing news media considers those beliefs to be extreme right-wing.

The article has some info on the upcoming FX biographical series on Phyllis Schlafly

Liberal Takeover of Methodists Despite Losing Vote

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

At their annual conference last February, conservative Methodists won the vote to keep the 3rd largest Christian denomination in America traditional on the subjects of marriage and the clergy. They decided that, like the Catholic Church and many other denominations, the United Methodist Church would continue with a one-man, one-woman approach to matrimony, and not have openly LGBTQ clergy.

As the largest Christian denomination in the United States other than the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptists, both of which prohibit same-sex marriage, the United Methodist Church has roots going back to the fiery Anglican preacher John Wesley. The American Revolution made it no longer practical for colonists to remain members of the Anglican Church run by the King of England.

Methodist Presidents of the United States have included George W. Bush, William McKinley, Rutherford Hayes, General Ulysses S. Grant, and James K. Polk. Today there are nearly 7 million Americans who are members of the United Methodist Church, and more than 5 million mostly conservative foreign members, with an estimated 32,000 congregations worldwide.

A marriage by a Catholic in a Methodist Church is typically recognized by the Catholic Church if approval is sought beforehand. About a hundred American colleges and a small number of secondary schools have Methodist roots.

The university elites demanded that doctrine be changed to authorize same-sex marriage ceremonies in Methodist churches. But after a full debate of the issue, Methodists rejected changing their doctrine by a healthy 53-47% margin in at their conference held in St. Louis last February.

The conservative voters even prevailed in strengthening the traditional doctrine on marriage. So why are they losing anyway, despite winning the vote?

Two days after New Year’s, a group of Methodists announced a brokered settlement by which the United Methodist Church would adopt same-sex marriage and ordain openly LGBTQ clergy. If approved at its upcoming international conference in May, conservatives would have to accept this doctrinal change or get out.

A supermajority vote would be required before a conservative congregation could split off and continue with the traditional doctrine. The settlement offers them $25 million in church funds to leave, which is a clever way for the liberal side to try to buy off just enough opponents to take control of the entire church for themselves.

By why aren’t the liberals who lost the election by 6 percentage points the ones who are leaving instead? Rather, in a deceptive takeover strategy, they are using church funds to buy themselves a majority.

History buffs might notice that in the Russian Revolution of 1917 the victorious minority called themselves Bolsheviks (which means majority) and unfairly labeled their opponents as Mensheviks (which means minority). When Leftists are in a minority, then they look for other ways to win.

The settlement includes a $39 million payment (from church funds) on the issue of race, which is irrelevant to the marriage dispute. Perhaps it is an attempt to win over African congregations which oppose same-sex marriage.

Another portion of the settlement allows the clergy of conservative congregations to hold onto their pensions which they have earned. But they have a legal right to their pensions without the settlement.

Christianity Today, the same liberal newspaper which called for President Trump to resign, quickly blessed the settlement. It declares that the deal to allow the liberal faction to take over the United Methodist Church is somehow “an answer to prayer,” even for conservatives.

The leadership of the single largest Methodist congregation, the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City area, immediately announced its support for the settlement. But it had already been pushing to change the Methodist doctrine about marriage.

It is ironic that a similar approach by Democrats is taken about President Trump. They lost the 2016 election, but instead of accepting the election outcome they maneuver to try to nullify it.

As with the impeachment of Trump, the relentless attempt to take control of the Methodist church is coming from university elites. They are akin to the wealthy financial and media supporters who have made Pete Buttigieg a contender in the Democratic presidential race for its nomination, despite being merely a former mayor who lost in a landslide in his attempt to be elected to statewide office.

A total of 93 college and university presidents demanded that the Methodist church change its centuries-old doctrine about marriage. But as in the recent defeat of the British Labour Party, working class Americans reject the ivory tower agenda.

The proposed settlement is not really a “split” or a “schism” as it is being promoted. Rather, it is an attempt to pay conservatives to abandon and leave their own church in which they have a majority, in order to allow the liberal minority to take it over.

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 pseagles.com.

UC Berkeley only hires Leftists

Every wonder why colleges are dominated by such leftist political beliefs? There are several explanations, but the University of California at Berkeley now scores all faculty applications for commitment to leftist beliefs before even being considered for academic merit.

See here and here for details.

Top Conservatives of 2019

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) was the conservative of the year in the Senate, despite being its youngest member in his rookie year. His landslide defeat of the entrenched liberal favorite Claire McCaskill was the biggest victory of the midterm elections, and Sen. Hawley then exceeded all expectations.

He earned a coveted seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and quickly became its strongest member. Rather than rubber-stamp nominations as his colleagues had been doing, Sen. Hawley went to work.

He blocked the confirmation of a liberal nominated to the federal bench, despite intense pressure to stand down. Michael Bogren, who compared religious liberty by a Catholic farmer to views of the KKK, had been nominated for a lifetime position in the Western District of Michigan.

Other Senate Republicans seemed just fine with this nomination, even after Bogren aggressively defended his extreme view under questioning by Senator Hawley during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. But once Hawley led on this, other Republicans felt compelled to follow.

Bogren ultimately withdrew, enabling Hawley to set the precedent that similar future nominees will not be confirmed. Too many nominees by Presidents Reagan and the two Bushes sailed through the U.S. Senate despite being closet liberals.

Democratic candidates for president should take note also. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated for the Supreme Court despite a track record of supporting abortion and even opposing laws against statutory rape of underage girls, Republicans failed to ask her a single meaningful question and voted almost unanimously for her.

Hawley also took on Big Tech, while other senators were afraid to. He sponsored legislation against censorship by internet giants, which exclude or marginalize conservative speech.

Hawley promoted the America First agenda of Donald Trump, while other Republican senators waste their time and ours by talking about impeachment. In one of the finest speeches of the year, Hawley declared that we should adopt pro-America policies and reject the failed globalism approach of the past.

Many others also deserve recognition for standing strong for conservative principles in 2019. President Donald Trump himself, of course, has taken an inhuman amount of abuse by the Left and yet finishes 2019 with numerous impressive achievements, from the economy to the courts.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and other House Republicans were so vigorous in their defense of President Trump that liberals could merely obtain impeachment articles which are not worth the paper they are written on. The only history that was made by Nancy Pelosi and her crew was in withholding their bogus impeachment from the Senate.

Attorney General Bill Barr did a splendid job in cutting off the gravy train that Robert Mueller and his political hacks rode for two years. Barr published reports that thoroughly discredited the false allegations by liberals against President Trump concerning the 2016 presidential election.

Barr delivered a speech at Notre Dame in October in which he criticized the mandatory LGBT curriculum which is being imposed on New Jersey public schools. He lamented “the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system and a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square.”

Barr is fighting that erosion in a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, on appeal from a liberal decision by the Montana Supreme Court. That state court prohibited allowing state scholarships to go to students who are attending religiously affiliated schools, a ban that undermines religious liberty.

A “shout-out” also belongs to those who stood against the Never-Trumpers in the Republican Party while they continued to nitpick and betray our president. Nikki Haley, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, exposed a scheme in the White House to go around him, which she rejected.

And let’s not forget the ordinary people who deserve recognition for their conservative actions this past year. Special thanks are warranted to the lifelong British Labour Party voters who repudiated their own political party as it lurched leftward, thereby burying it in a landslide loss not seen since before World War II.

On the other side of the world, there were the courageous protesters in Hong Kong who successfully stood against tyrannical demands by Communist China. They forced China to withdraw its extradition legislation which would have snuffed out remaining freedoms in Hong Kong by enabling China to punish Hong Kong residents through the use of the corrupt Chinese justice system.

Finally, there were liberals who also made 2019 a special year. Jeffrey Epstein did everything liberals like Bill Clinton could have asked for, including protecting him in the end.

Hunter Biden was a gift to conservatives in 2019 who keeps on giving. His dad Joe wants to defy any subpoena by the Senate to avoid explaining how the notorious Hunter ended up living in a multimillion-dollar mansion in posh Hollywood Hills.

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 pseagles.com.