In November 2022, Arizona voters narrowly approved Prop. 308, making Arizona the 24th state in the nation giving taxpayer-subsidized, in-state tuition rates to illegals. Its narrow passage on the ballot was preceded by its razor-thin passage at the state legislature, slipping out because two former Republican legislators, who since lost their seats to primary challengers, rolled their caucus and voted in lock step with Democrats to force it for a vote.
It was in part billed by proponents as only applying to “Dreamers,” or recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program established under the Obama administration. In reality, it allowed for anyone here illegally to get in-state tuition rates as long as they spent at least two years in an Arizona high school—signaling to the rest of the world that if you enter here illegally in time to go to an Arizona high school, American taxpayers will subsidize your tuition at our universities.
But they hid from the public one important fact. It unequivocally violates federal law…
Within President Trump’s first 100 days in office, he has issued back-to-back executive orders aimed at cleansing America of woke ideologies as well as dismantling the Green New Scam. States can hardly keep up with the rapid changes being made. U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary (USDOT) Sean Duffy is leading the effort to defund city projects involving road diets and “green infrastructure.” Leftists and bike-enthused activists are losing their minds over the removal of “Complete Streets” links on the USDOT website, horrified by the idea that vehicle travel might be prioritized over barely used bike lanes.
And if there ever was a city in Arizona that should be jumping on the Trump bandwagon – it’s the City of Prescott. Prescott is a conservative community where registered Republican voters out number Democrat voters 3:1. It’s “Trump Country.” But take a look at Prescott’s recently proposed General Plan and you would never know it.
In Arizona, every municipality is required by statute (ARS §9-461.05) to build out and adopt a General Plan that outlines a pathway for growth in the community, covering topics such as land use, transportation, environment, water, and energy. This seemingly innocuous document that must be ratified by voters has become a pathway for city bureaucrats to sneak woke ideologies and climate goals into city planning…
For decades, the rallying cry of “choice” has driven the abortion debate. Pro-abortion advocates paint it as a matter of personal liberty — a private decision between a woman and her doctor. But real choice demands full, honest information. And the latest evidence on chemical abortion reveals a disturbing truth that’s been hidden for too long.
A massive new study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, analyzing over 865,000 chemical abortions from 2017 to 2023, shows that 1 in 9 women who take the abortion pill suffer serious medical harm. That’s nearly 11% of women dealing with severe complications like hemorrhaging, sepsis, and infection — consequences that can lead to permanent damage, emergency surgeries, or even death. Another 5% need additional medical interventions, exposing the pill’s failure rate.
For anyone who claims to care about women’s well-being, these numbers demand immediate action. For the government agencies that regulate drugs and healthcare, they require urgent oversight. And for those who genuinely believe in the “pro-choice” principle, they demand a clear-eyed rethinking of what real, informed choice means.
Choice Without Truth Isn’t Choice
“Choice” means nothing without accurate information. The abortion pill has been spun as “safer than Tylenol,” but that’s a blatant lie. The FDA’s official label for mifepristone claims a serious adverse event rate of less than 0.5% — over 22 times lower than what the real-world data proves.
No one can make a good decision if key facts are hidden. In any other area of medicine, these numbers would trigger an immediate recall or at least a thorough review of safety guidelines.
When the FDA fast-tracked the abortion pill in the 1990s, it was with a promise: that safety standards would be rigorously upheld. Today, those standards in Arizona— like mandatory ultrasounds, in-person exams, and physician oversight — are being threatened and have been stripped away in other states by abortion-rights legislation.
The result? A pill once administered under a doctor’s care is now shipped through the mail, often with no medical oversight. No follow-up exams. No real informed consent. Women facing vulnerability—particularly those under the coercion of abusive partners—are exposed to severe risks affecting both their physical and mental well-being.
Pills That Kill: Medicine Turned Upside Down
Abortion advocates call the pill “medication abortion,” as if it heals. But real medicine heals. Chemical abortion does none of that. It destroys innocent unborn children and puts women’s health at risk.
Calling abortion “medicine” is a dangerous lie. True medicine doesn’t harm or kill. No one who truly believes in women’s health can honestly call this “medicine.”
The original “safe, legal, and rare” mantra has vanished. Chemical abortions now make up 63% of all abortions in the United States — and in some states, as high as 80%. Each pill dispensed means more danger for women — not less.
We’ve gone from “safe, legal, and rare” to “dangerous, deregulated, and widespread.” That’s a betrayal of women — and of the very idea of healthcare.
This Is About Women’s Health, Not Politics
This isn’t about partisan politics. It’s about whether women can truly make informed choices. It’s about whether agencies like the FDA and HHS will honor their mission to protect the public — or cave to ideological pressure.
If you believe in choice, you must also believe in full, honest information. Anything less isn’t choice — it’s propaganda.
If you believe in human rights, you must recognize every human life’s inherent worth — and the dignity of every mother’s health and future.
If you care about healthcare safety, you can’t ignore these numbers. You must demand a full review of the abortion pill’s safety — and an end to the lies that have kept women in the dark for far too long.
The Arizona Life Coalition, along with more than 100 pro-life organizations, has urged the FDA to act on this alarming evidence and reinstate the safety standards that once protected women. You can read that letter here.
What Can We Do?
We must ensure that every woman facing a crisis pregnancy has support and the truth — not abortion industry spin.
Demand that the FDA and other agencies incorporate this evidence into their safety evaluations. Share this information with your family, friends, and public officials. Urge them to reinstate common-sense safety standards. Push for a full review of a pill that seriously injures 1 in 9 women.
Medicine is meant to heal — not to harm and kill. Any healthcare policy or practice that does otherwise has no place in a just society.
Garrett Riley is the executive director of the Arizona Life Coalition, with a mission of inspiring pro-life choices through charity, education, and unifying collaboration.
A German politician arguing the question of whether to admit yet more Afghan nationals cited official government statistics regarding the crime rates, especially rape, committed by these migrants. Under German censorship laws, she has now been found guilty of illegal hate speech twice, fined thousands of euros, and been given a criminal record, simply for stating government-produced facts.
The United Kingdom, once a bastion of free speech, is now moving toward ever more strict speech restrictions. Meanwhile prosecutors, reluctant to anger Islamists, ignore grooming gangs preying on young women.
In the U.S., pro-Palestinian protesters broke into a graduation dinner at the home of the Berkeley law dean, screaming and chanting. No disciplinary measures were taken against the perpetrators, but the dean’s wife was accused of racism and Islamophobia. A civil rights investigation was launched against her.
Although most Americans are not fully aware, Islamist influences in our culture have become much more pronounced in the last few years. Islamists are still committed to the transformation of Western society into a universal Muslim caliphate. Such is Allah’s will. “Submission” (to Allah) is a translation of “Islam.” Time is not of the essence, but success is considered inevitable.
In the past, the never-ending effort to convert or kill unbelievers was carried out mainly through acts of terrorism. Islamists physically attacked crowds, beheaded civilians, and flew planes into buildings hoping to intimidate the infidels.
Western democracies responded with measures sacrificing personal liberties for security, which worked to stymie the high-profile attacks. In the 2016 election, terrorism was the second rated concern for Americans, slightly lagging behind the economy. By 2024, Islamic atrocities didn’t register in the polls.
But as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim and prominent advocate for international women’s rights, pointed out in the Hoover Digest, it would be a mistake to conclude that we defeated or even made any progress against Islamist jihadism. Instead, elements within Islam who argued for more gradual methods of subversion from within prevailed over those favoring frontal assaults.
Agents of radicalization have built up large networks of operators in the U.S. and other democracies. They identify and radicalize subjects vulnerable to Islamist messaging. Their emphasis now is to concentrate on converting one person at a time. One institution, one professor, one community are influenced to reject all thoughts of assimilation and instead join an exciting international movement to change the world.
The Islamists are seeing much greater success with their new strategy. Social media, including TikTok, is especially effective at spreading such messages among the uninformed, often using the language of our historic civil rights movement. Few of the new converts to Islamist wokeness can offer any information on the Gaza “genocide” they protest.
The Internet is being diverted from its former free-speech ideals into a regime of surveillance and censorship. Islamists have successfully infiltrated not only mosques, but universities, political organizations, and immigrant groups. Unassimilated immigrants and young males particularly make ready targets for conversion to Islamism.
The shifts in public opinion resulting from this propaganda campaign are becoming felt. The pervasive rise of virulent antisemitism among the young, especially on college campuses, and the tendency to attribute all social wrongs to Western influence should ring alarm bells. It’s not just the kids either. Teamsters Union members were recently videotaped at their Chicago headquarters learning to chant “death to Israel” and “death to America” —in Farsi, no less.
Islamists have also been able to use our beloved legal protections, unknown in their jurisdictions, against us. The meaning of “Islamophobia” has been changed from an irrational dislike of Muslims to virtually any unfavorable fact or opinion, no matter how justified. Thus Islamists, even as they despise and condemn us, have an all-purpose shield defending them from any criticism, including of their trademark terrorism.
Islamists seem to possess the mindset that their time may have come. The West is weak and vulnerable, with many no longer believing their ideals are worth defending. Western Europe is trending to Islamist-inspired policymaking with regard to speech and law-enforcement.
In the U.S., these threats are more distant, but the trends are ominous. Islamists are content to play the long game. For now, they are gaining ground.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
Here’s an economics lesson that belongs in the text books.
Student loan debt soared to more than $1.5 trillion during the Biden presidency and the response by Washington was to “forgive” hundreds of billions of these unpaid loans by deadbeat borrowers and let the taxpayers pick up the tab. It was never clear why the universities who charge exorbitant tuitions that have reached more than $75,000 a year at many elite schools shouldn’t bear the cost of the program – but that’s another story.
Those of us who watched these events upfold predicted that one result of this policy would be that many college graduates would stop paying back their loans. And guess what?
Just like clockwork, this headline from Bloomberg recently told the whole story:
“Student loans drive U.S. delinquency rate to highest since 2020”
Gee, who – except a bunch of head-in-the-sand- politicians in Washington – would have ever thought that forgiving as many people from paying their student loans as possible would increase future non-payments?
Well, the Biden administration for one. Now that the Department of Education is honestly reporting the data, we find that serious delinquency rates are over more than 10 times what the Biden Department of Education said they were.
There is an old saying in physics and economics: every action in the universe has a reaction. How many students in the future will pay back unpaid student loans when the next forgiveness program is right around the corner? So people who did the right thing and paid back their debts now have to pay more for the people who refused to pay back the money they owed.
In Washington, we love to reward vice and punish virtue.
As we said many times last year: expect student loan defaults to remain sky high for many years, as deadbeat borrowers wait for the next student loan amnesty program.
Fortunately, in the House of Representatives “Big Beautiful tax bill,” there are new caps of $50,000 on student loans for undergraduate students and $100,000 for grad students. This cap should help slow the stampede of higher tuition prices, which have grown two to three times the rate of overall inflation over the last thirty years. The availability of cheap student loans only fueled this stampede of tuition prices. The Wall Street Journal calls this move “The End of The College Free Lunch.”
The bad news is that we should anticipate bigger stashes of student loans to pile up at taxpayers’ doors in the years to come. The good news is that this scam has reminded us that in life incentives matter. This episode brought to light the financial foolishness of debt forgiveness programs and so hopefully we will never do this again.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, a cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, and a former senior economic adviser to Donald Trump. His most recent book is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
Secrecy, control, and parents without a voice. These factors apparently comprise the current motto of Superintendent Tom Horne and John Ward, head of the ESA department. As a six-year veteran parent in the ESA program, I know what I am talking about. Over the past two years, the changes I have seen have been nothing short of appalling, frustrating, and alarming. Instead of empowering parents with trust and the ability to make free choices in educating their students, the current Superintendent has done all he can to rob parents of the freedom granted in the lawmakers’ legislative intent in the historic bill that was passed in 2020.
I could spend hours sharing all the abuses that parents have experienced at the hands of Tom Horne. To save us all a bunch of heartache, I’ll leave it at one major concern: the ongoing development of the most recent edition of the parent handbook. As a longtime shareholder, I can tell you the current protocol of closed-door meetings and a handpicked handbook committee led by a non-ESA parent has never been the norm of this program. Even under former Superintendent Kathy Hoffman, a clear opponent to the program, parents were offered townhalls to make their voices heard.
This year, despite the State Board of Education’s President demanding that Superintendent Tom Horne offer a townhall, Superintendent Horne has remained silent for months. Instead, prior to the last State Board of Education meeting, Mr. Horne sent an email to parents, demanding they sit down and shut up.
I quote, “This email is particularly directed to ESA users who have been in disagreement with the proposed handbook: We received some concern from state legislators. We therefore agreed to postpone the vote on the handbook until the June meeting to give us a chance to sit down with the legislators and hopefully reach mutually acceptable agreements. We therefore respectfully request that those who have signed up to speak on this issue wait until the June meeting and not come to the meeting next Monday. The handbook will not be on the agenda, and once agreement is reached with legislators, any objections you have might be solved. It is best to come to the meeting when you know what the final proposal will be in June.”
Clearly Superintendent Horne has no interest in listening to the concerns of the parents.
Now, let us explore some major issues in the handbook itself. A large portion of the parental outcry has primarily been against the mandated caps in different spending categories. While the caps seem to be contrary to the law, I firmly believe they are merely a diversion from the real agenda of the ESA department. Take a moment to examine two critical footnotes.
For the second time in the last two years, we see a footnote that an acceptable expense category is as follows: “Any fees that may be levied by the Department to cover the costs of managing of the Empowerment Scholarship Account program” (pg 15, footnote 10). This means that the ESA department really wants to pull fees out of students’ accounts to cover administrative fees. Students already only receive 90% of the funding they would in public schools – and now the department wants to steal money from the kids to cover their own expenses?
Even more concerning is footnote 22 on page 52, which says: “The Department may ask for repayment of any items approved in error, if items are improper or unallowable under your ESA contract, state law, administrative rule, program policies, or this ESA parental handbook.”
For the first time in my experience as an ESA parent, Superintendent Horne and John Ward have approved auto approvals of expenses in the ESA program. Before this, every single purchase had to be approved, thus protecting tax dollars from being used improperly. However, because the current ESA department cannot be run efficiently or effectively (despite the program being handed over to Mr. Ward with turnaround times being 24-48 hours for every single order), they now want the buck to stop with the parents, not themselves as the lawful administrators of the program. This leaves parents in a position that if rules change or future ESA parent handbooks remove categories, the state can demand repayment. This has nothing to do with improper spending, but everything to do with bureaucratic inefficiency.
It is clear that Tom Horne is no advocate for school choice and no advocate for making the voices of parents heard. We parents have had enough. We will scream until our voices are hoarse, because we are the primary educators for our children and we should have a say in the proposed ESA parent handbook.
Rosemary McAtee is a home-educating parent of 7 students and a 6-year veteran of the ESA program.
