On November 3, 2026, Arizona voters will decide the fate of Proposition 142. The measure would prohibit preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity in public institutions. Supporters call it a return to the constitutional promise that all Americans are equal under the law. Critics call it a rollback of programs meant to correct past inequities.
But there are two visions behind this fight, and they are older than the ballot measure itself.
One vision holds that the government should weigh group history to correct group-based disparities, a position shaped by theories of structural and systemic power. The other vision holds that equality means the law treats every person the same, without regard to group identity, a position shaped by classical liberal and natural rights philosophy. Merit, character, and individual effort determine outcomes under this view, not government classification.
Frederick Douglass, born a slave in Maryland who taught himself to read after his lessons were forbidden, had this exact vision. He fought for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, for equal protection under law, and for the plain idea that all men are created equal. He never asked the government to rank citizens by race. He wanted it to stop.
Karl Marx, born the same year as Douglass into comfort and support from Friedrich Engels, built a different framework, one where history is a struggle between oppressor and oppressed classes, resolved only through state power. He sought the type of government classification that is before Arizona today, where people are not seen as individuals but part of their respective collective.
Arizona Proposition 142 forces a choice between descendants of these two arguments, in the operation of public schools, employment, and contracting.
The ballot language is public record. The debate deserves the same clarity Douglass demanded in his own time. Read the text, weigh the history, and decide what equal protection actually requires.
One by one, cities and towns across Arizona are abandoning their contracts with Flock Safety, the manufacturer of the controversial Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) you see around town. The black pole with a little solar panel on it? That is the infamous surveillance tool that has been taking over American communities in the name of safety at the small price of freedom.
These systems were not directly approved by voters or even the elected representatives. Many of these ALPRs likely would never have been approved by voters had they been given the choice. Privacy and government surveillance are across-the-board concerns. Whether on the right or left, Americans do not want their every move tracked.
Beyond privacy concerns, cases of law enforcement officers using Flock in inappropriate ways, such as stalking ex-wives or checking on family members, are not new. Across the country, Flock’s expansion has been accompanied by numerous cases of misuse.
Let’s take a look at where Arizona municipalities currently stand with Flock…
Dr. Jennifer Johnson is the union-backed, Menzel-aligned progressive candidate for the Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD) Governing Board in the 2026 election. A career educator, she campaigns on the slogan “Experience Matters.” That is true, but parents’ experience with a public education system led by professional educators, like Dr. Johnson, also matters.
Americans’ satisfaction with K–12 education has fallen to 32%, the lowest level in Gallup’s 27-year trend, while dissatisfaction has reached a record 67%; only 8% are completely satisfied. These figures point to widespread concern about public education and growing demand for reform and alternatives. The survey is consistent with the results shown in the 2024 National Assessment of Education Progress.
Similar concerns are evident in SUSD: academic performance has continued to decline under Menzel, parents are withdrawing their children, and the district is closing schools. Yet Dr. Johnson’s website states, “SUSD is already recognized as a leader in academic achievement, and I am committed to ensuring that success continues for all students.”
A leader in academic achievement? In FY2025, fewer than half of SUSD eighth graders were proficient in math (49%) or science (47%). Among 11th graders, 55% were proficient in math and only 22% in science. Despite these low proficiency rates, SUSD advances or graduates 98% of its students. SUSD high school teachers say incoming freshmen are unprepared for high school course work, and college professors report the same. How does graduating academically unprepared students prepare them for life after school?
If Dr. Johnson, an experienced education professional, considers these results evidence of leadership, that’s a problem.
On top of that, Dr. Johnson’s only ties to SUSD are her relationships with Dr. Menzel and other district staff. She became a Scottsdale “resident” only recently and was recruited to run for the Governing Board to act as another rubber-stamp vote for Dr. Menzel’s agenda. Like current Board President Dr. Donna Lewis, also an education professional, Dr. Johnson has no prior history, experience, or connection with SUSD. She would further weaken meaningful board debate and again deny SUSD parents and the public the opportunity to hear opposing views on district policies and decisions.
In June, Dr. Pittinsky explained his vote to extend Menzel’s contract and approve a raise by citing surveys that described SUSD as well run. However, the Arizona Auditor General reported that district data showed SUSD moving toward the high-risk category because of declining enrollment and other financial pressures, including the transfer of more than 36% of capital funds to operations. Keep that in mind.
Yes, experience matters. And for decades Americans have experienced a steady decline in public education, a decline we have seen firsthand in SUSD under the influence of teachers’ unions and so-called education experts, like Dr. Menzel, Dr. Lewis, Dr. Pittinsky, and Dr. Johnson.
Scottsdale residents, SUSD students, and their families cannot afford another Governing Board mistake.
Mike Bengert is a husband, father, grandfather, and Scottsdale resident advocating for quality education in SUSD for over 30 years.
For residents of Yuma County, concerns over biosolids are nothing new.
For years, residents, growers, businesses, and local officials have raised concerns about odors, flies, dust, debris, and the sheer volume of treated sewage sludge being brought into southern Yuma County and applied to agricultural land.
And for years, Yuma kept asking for action.
On September 10, the Arizona State Land Department finally acted, finding AgTech LLC in default on one State Trust Land lease and declining to renew four others after determining that continued leasing was not in the best interest of the State Land Trust.
According to the state, AgTech applied more than 68,000 dry metric tons of treated sewage sludge in 2025 alone, with more than 97 percent originating from California utilities.
But Yuma’s fight over biosolids did not begin in 2026.
Yuma County’s own timeline shows the Board of Supervisors formally discussing nuisance and public health concerns surrounding biosolids as far back as 2016. In 2020, the Board formally opposed a proposed 6,000-acre biosolids site. Then, in 2025, the Board formally asked the Arizona State Land Department to terminate AgTech’s lease in response to continuing complaints about odors, flies, dust, and debris.
The County could not terminate the lease itself. That authority belonged to the state.
Still, another year passed.
The issue has since received considerably more attention from statewide officials, with the recent action publicly highlighted by both the Governor’s Office and Attorney General’s Office.
Then, on September 10, 2026, after years of local complaints and more than a year after Yuma County formally requested termination of the lease, the State Land Department acted. The decision came less than two months before Arizona’s general election.
For local grower Tyler Woodman, however, the story goes back much further.
“I have been ‘dealing with it’ for about 20 years,” Woodman said.
Woodman farms roughly a mile north of some of the sites and described years of smelling trucks and odors when the wind shifted, watching the number of trucks traveling through the area and hearing concerns from agricultural workers and neighbors about flies.
Eventually, he said, frustration turned into action.
“Seeing that every route that everyone has ever taken never seemed to bear fruit for whatever reason, I just simply had enough,” Woodman said.
Woodman began filing public records requests with the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and Arizona State Land Department and digging through inspection reports and other records himself.
“After that, I did FOIAs for ADEQ and ASLD, and the stuff I was reading in their inspection reports troubled me deeply,” Woodman said. “So, I just kept digging.”
His questions increasingly centered on the amount of biosolids being applied, the acreage being used, and whether existing oversight was sufficient.
Woodman said one of the things that troubled him most was the feeling that responsibility for oversight was fragmented among agencies.
“Overall, I just kinda got this weird feeling that no one was really in charge and ADEQ didn’t really have the tools they needed to enforce things even if they wanted to,” he said.
The recent State Land Department decision does not settle every question surrounding biosolids in Yuma. Residents continue to call for additional environmental testing, while AgTech disputes the state’s conclusions and has said it intends to appeal the lease decision. The company maintains that it has been a responsible steward of the land and has challenged the process used by the state.
Woodman himself is also now facing a defamation lawsuit filed by AgTech over statements he made while speaking publicly about the company’s operations.
But perhaps his explanation for continuing to dig best captures why the issue has resonated with so many people in Yuma.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” Woodman said. “You don’t want to be wrong about what you think is going on, but you also don’t want to find out you’re living next to a superfund site.”
Whatever comes next, one part of the history is already clear: Yuma did not suddenly discover this issue in 2026.
Residents had been complaining. Growers had been asking questions. County officials had been pressing state agencies for action. The Board of Supervisors had formally requested termination of the lease.
Since the approval of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 by every nation on earth except the United States, the ever-compliant global media has flooded newsprint, airwaves and digital space with narratives that China is moving away from coal. We have been assured by tens of thousands of scholarly, peer-reviewed “studies” that the communist government there is rapidly displacing its gigantic fleet of coal power plants — bigger than the rest of the word’s combined — with glorious solar panels and windmills and battery arrays so enormous they’d cover Taylor Sheridan’s 6666 Ranch in the Texas panhandle.
It all makes for a glorious narrative, one heavily encouraged by Xi Jinping’s government in its ceaseless drive for acceptance by the global community and accumulation of geopolitical and hegemonic leverage. The narrative has gained such a high level of acceptance that China is invariably treated at the annual COP and World Economic Forum events as a full participant in the impossible globalist drive for Net Zero by 2050 even though its own nebulous commitments do not even begin to kick in until 2060 and beyond. In the meantime, China continues to expand its coal power fleet and ramp up its mining operations every year, a fact which seems to always be “unexpected” by the media’s preferred “experts” on such things.
Just one problem: It’s all a myth. In a recent analysis, Canadian energy analyst Dr. Joseph Fournier details the realty, which is that the Xi government remains as wedded to coal as former British prince Harry remains wedded to former Netflix star Meghan Markle. Fournier points out the fact that Chinese policymakers framed coal as “the sea-calming divine needle (a reference to the mythical magic staff of Sun WuKong) or ballast stone of national energy security” in the country’s 14th Five-Year Energy plan published in 2020. That framing continues to shape the 15th Five-Year plan published earlier this month, in which authors reaffirm coal’s role as the country’s “foundational” energy source.
This year’s planning report does emphasize “clean and efficient utilization” of coal, as well as “promoting the peaking” of its use, but stops short of specifying the year in which said glorious “peak” might happen or how many years the period of phasing it all down will take. Why play such word games? Because again, it’s all a grand game.
Not that the Chinese haven’t invested massively in wind and solar – they certainly have, so much so that the country’s “renewable” sector contributed as much as 10% to China’s gross domestic product in 2024. Of course, the troublesome reality there is that those wind, solar and battery installations and exports were manufactured in factories powered by coal, fed by raw metals mined by diesel-powered heavy equipment, realities the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations (UN) and their media cheerleaders prefer to ignore.
They’ve built so much of the stuff in fact that this year has seen record levels of curtailment of these weather-reliant energy sources. An estimated 360 terawatt hours of wind and solar went wasted during the first half of 2026 alone, a near-50% year-over-year increase.
The latest Five-Year Plan goes on to call for strengthening coal’s regulatory function within a “new-type power system,” concentrating production in northern security bases, modernizing mines to reduce emissions and pollution and diversifying some coal enterprises into chemicals and other industrial businesses. It also emphasizes methane controls and efficiency upgrades for existing plants but predictably makes no mention of hard consumption caps or rapid retirement schedules.
So, should we really expect China, a nation with transparent designs on global domination, to just voluntarily surrender its Divine Needle to gain praise from climate alarm prophets of the global order? Don’t be silly.
That brings us to another troublesome reality which Dr. Fournier describes: The fact that, at current consumption levels, China’s domestic coal supplies will be essentially depleted over the next 30 years or so. In his report, Fournier says the evidence at hand “does not describe a nation merely hedging against uncertainty. It describes a state systematically preparing for regional war and coercive resource acquisition.”
After all, energy security is in fact inseparable from national security. Why would any rational person expect China to voluntarily give up on protecting that?
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Is the world still transitioning to green energy in the era of Donald Trump and in the midst of, yet again, geopolitical unpleasantness in the oil-rich Middle East?
While climate activists bewail the Trump administration’s embrace of fossil fuels and its corresponding disdain for solar panels and wind turbines, a new report released by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Research says greener days may yet be in our future.
The report, “Glass Half-Full: Building a Decarbonized U.S. Power Sector,” sees a green light at the end of Trump’s dark tunnel of dismantling Biden-era climate policies. Focusing exclusively on electricity generation over the next decade, the report uses a mathematical model to compare how much “clean power” will survive the Trump administration’s phase-out of wind and solar subsidies and its scuttling of other green-energy initiatives with what would have been produced under Biden-era climate policies.
According to the model, the energy transition is alive and well, with about three-quarters of the “clean electricity capacity” that would have come online under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act and power plant regulations surviving the Trump onslaught. Yes, onshore wind power will take a hit, and other decarbonization initiatives will be delayed. But writing in The Washington Post, the MIT report’s author, Lily Bermel, a visiting fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Global Energy Policy, urged the “climate community” to continue pursuing “deep decarbonization.”
But the headwinds that the vaunted transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is encountering show no sign of letting up. A recent report from the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership between labor and environmental organizations, found that the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act and other Trump energy initiatives have already delayed or canceled 223 wind and solar projects representing at least $82 billion in capital investment and 111,000 green-energy jobs. While a few coastal wind facilities survive, since March, developers have canceled five leases for offshore wind projects in coastal California, New York, Maine, Louisiana, and North Carolina valued at over $3.9 billion. In accordance with agreements developers negotiated with the Trump administration, most of that money will be redirected to oil and gas projects, geothermal development, and upgrading the power grid.
Furthermore, “deep decarbonization” has been aggressively pursued in Europe, with disastrous results.
“From 2015-2025, the first decade of the Paris Agreement on climate change, global energy consumption rose by more than 14%, with sharply contrasting dynamics,” notes Samuel Furfari, professor of energy geopolitics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. “Europe’s decrease in energy use is no triumph of ecological heroics but rather the outcome of the assault of the EU Green Deal on competitiveness and its predictable deindustrialization and economic decline.”
Citing a recent Energy Institute report showing fossil fuels make up 86% of global primary energy consumption, with wind and solar accounting for just 3%, Furfari, writing in The Center Square, throws cold water on the idea of an energy transition. “The dominance of fossil fuels in the world energy system persists even as wind and solar, expensive and intermittent, expand. The world is undergoing an energy addition, not a transition, as new technologies supplement the growing capacity of legacy sources.”
Japan, the world’s fourth-largest economy and once a champion of decarbonization, has responded to the recent Middle East energy bottlenecks by reducing its liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports from that troubled region (while increasing LNG imports from the U.S.), ramping up coal-fired generation, and restarting nuclear power plants. Wind and solar power, along with battery storage, are being pushed aside.
Back in the U.S., Elon Musk’s SpaceX recently disclosed plans to develop a natural-gas power plant in Grimes County, Texas, where it is developing a massive new chip manufacturing facility.
“Musk is relying on dozens of gas turbines to power data centers he says are necessary to train the artificial intelligence at the center of his business plans,” The Wall Street Journal reported. Texas abounds in wind turbines and solar panels, but they can’t produce the round-the-clock power 21st-century technology demands.
In addition to failing to meet the soaring global demand for affordable and reliable energy, what is billed as “clean energy” — in the MIT report and elsewhere — isn’t really clean. Wind turbines and solar panels may not produce carbon emissions, but they do create waste — lots of it. Disposal of giant wind turbines in landfills is often the only way to deal with equipment that is no longer serviceable.
“Blades are frequently buried in fragments in several landfills throughout the Great Plains, transforming sites in Wyoming, Iowa, and South Dakota into wind turbine graveyards. By 2050, the cumulative decommissioning material from wind turbines could reach 133 million tons,” noted Ariel Cohen in Forbes.
Out-of-service solar panels, laden with lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals, pose their own environmental problems. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, by 2030, the nation could have as much as one million tons of solar panel waste on its hands.
These not-so-clean, weather-dependent energy sources will never be more than bit players in today’s fast-moving, technology-driven industrial revolution.
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and senior policy analyst with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
