Everyone knows that political pundits, social media influencers, and the corporate media love a good narrative. And one of their favorites for years has been the claim that Arizona is trending blue—that a demographic shift toward Democrats is inevitable.
This ‘conventional wisdom’ is repeated so often that much of the Republican political class in the state has accepted it as fact. Some are even advising candidates that the only path forward for Republicans is to abandon their conservative principles, embrace center-left policy solutions, and settle for a future of divided government.
But a funny thing about narratives and conventional wisdom: numbers don’t lie, especially those showing party preference when people are registering to vote.
Last month, the Secretary of State updated the statewide voter registration data prior to the Presidential Preference Election. The latest figures show that Republicans are once again the largest voting bloc in Arizona, surpassing Independents by nearly 40,000. This is certainly an important development—especially given all the attention it received on social media when Independent registrations surpassed Republicans last year.
But that’s not the most significant voter registration trend…
It’s time for COVID mandates to go away forever. And last month, one Arizona town took a step in this direction when it passed a resolution that needs to be a trend in every city throughout our state.
With a desire to take proactive measures to protect citizens’ constitutional rights, the Queen Creek Town Council passed Resolution No. 1540-23 with a unanimous vote during its regular meeting in September. And it’s quite clear. While the town recommends that people exercise personal responsibility to prevent illness, it committed to not implementing mandates concerning masks, vaccines, business closures, curfews, or “any similar measure.”
COVID mania just won’t go away. The deadly strains of the virus have been gone for two years now, and yet the recent outbreak of a mild flu-like variant is again stoking panic on the Left.
Nearly 100 universities are requiring masks this fall.
Lionsgate movie studios in Los Angeles and Atlanta-based Morris Brown College this week stated they are reinstating not just mask mandates but social distancing measures and contact tracing.
CNN, which led the panic in 2020 and 2021 — causing manic school, restaurant and business shutdowns and vaccine mandates — recently put out a headline on its website that encouraged its readers not to go outside without a mask on. Really? The latest evidence finds this is less dangerous than a normal flu virus and tracking data suggest that the wave has already peaked.
What’s even more disturbing here is that the leftist medical community and the media aren’t renouncing their calls for mitigation strategies that were catastrophically wrong in the panic era of 2020 and 2021 — but instead calling for more of these assaults on freedom in the future.
It is one thing for well-meaning medical experts to have disagreed about how to best combat a once-in-a-half-century deadly virus. We didn’t know exactly what we were dealing with. But now we know with concrete scientific evidence that most mandates and lockdowns had a small impact on the spread of the virus and on fatalities. It turns out there was almost no difference in death rates in states with strict lockdowns and no lockdowns at all. The same is true of cross-country evidence.
Healthy children were never at risk from COVID (something we knew early on), so shutting down schools for one or two years was a sop to the teachers unions but a disaster for this generation of kids. Test scores are the worst in 30 years.
Before the pandemic, only 15% of public school students were chronically absent — more than 18 or more days a year.
Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee’s data shows an estimated 6.5 million additional students are now chronically absent. In Connecticut and Massachusetts, chronic absenteeism remains double its pre-pandemic rate.
But polls show that Democrats — even those that are highly educated — generally still support the lockdowns that were mandated. These are the same people who lecture about “following the science.” The most comprehensive study by experts at Johns Hopkins University found death rates from lockdowns were reduced by 0.1 percent. But how many people died from the isolation of lockdowns, delayed health screening from cancer, the increase in drug overdoses?
Biden’s vaccine mandates only made Americans more resistant to get pricked. They backfired.
Worst of all, Anthony Fauci, who remains a hero of the Left, recently not only refused to admit the errors of his advice but said the “lockdown was absolutely justified.”
Why does this bizarre rewrite of recent history matter? Because the fearmongering Left can’t wait to install new lockdowns every time we have a new flu virus and health scare. They’ve even started putting out feelers for occasional climate change economic shutdowns.
Those who love freedom must strenuously resist this coming tyranny.
Let’s face it. America botched its response to the COVID pandemic.
Traditionally, as in the Spanish flu and polio pandemics, authorities have recommended common sense public health measures and protected the vulnerable. This time, they ordered sweeping lockdowns of the economy and closed schools, churches, and businesses.
The results were economic devastation, educational stagnation, greater income inequality, and loss of civic life.
Sweden, even though it has a reputation for a more collectivist mindset than our “land of the free” got it right. Their health officials adopted a live-and-let-live strategy, mostly rejecting lockdowns and letting normal life go on.
Initially, health outcomes suffered some, partly because Swedes neglected to adequately protect their nursing homes. But today, probably because of herd immunity, Sweden’s death rate is just over 1614 per million, compared to 2335 in Britain and 2836 in the US.
Even better, Sweden avoided the multiple consequences Americans now face. GDP growth is projected to be 5% larger than pre-pandemic, and they don’t face a mountain of future debt. Since schools stayed open without face masks, there were no lost years of education and test scores are up.
Unfortunately, America’s response to the self-inflicted wounds caused by our COVID panic caused yet more harm. When confronted with the results of their mismanagement, America’s governing leftists reverted to their universal solution for all ills: spend more money.
So last March, President Biden triumphantly announced “help is here” as he signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. We were assured that the truly massive spending would help defeat the pandemic, reopen schools, and revitalize the economy, creating at least 4 million additional jobs.
We now know the bill was a colossal failure. We didn’t get more jobs, but we did get ominous inflation even though Biden had insisted that “no serious economist” predicted inflation as a result of the spending surge.
The inflation was totally predictable. At least 1.8 million people declined to reenter the workforce when the $300 per week unemployment benefit supplement was extended. That’s understandable since one study indicated that in 19 states, a family of four with two “unemployed” adults could receive $100,000 in total government benefits.
Meanwhile, trillions more were pumped into the economy. This excess demand, combined with fewer goods and services being produced, was the perfect recipe for inflation, which “serious economists” now acknowledge is probably here to stay.
Why did the plan have no effect on COVID? Answer: it didn’t really try. PolitiFact concluded only 10% of the bill addressed COVID health impacts and 1% went to advancing vaccines, the most effective way to impact serious disease.
Instead, the ever-vigilant spenders saw their chance to enact a wish list and took it. Their dreams that came true included $20 million for “preservation of Native American languages,” raising Obamacare subsidies, and a massive expansion of the child tax credit.
Since the feds are sitting on so much surplus funding (sarcasm alert), $350 billion went to state and local governments to help them weather the pandemic. But even when the bill was being considered, it was already clear that state-local tax revenues were growing, and their budget crisis never materialized. It was simply an excuse for feds to shovel out money, mostly to their friends in Democrat states.
Public schools were also showered with $120 billion to help them reopen safely. But the funds came with no requirements attached. By the end of FYI 2022, only $40 billion will have been spent, leaving education administrators with an $80 billion slush fund. Thanks, COVID.
So, another $1.9 trillion accumulates onto our debt load, and we have precious little to show for it. We have fewer jobs than were predicted in the “baseline” without the bill, and there was minimal or no effect on the course of the pandemic.
Lesson learned? Nah. Biden preposterously proposes spending yet more on Build Back Better, an even larger collection of handouts, as an inflation cure. Yet our debt is not only higher than ever ($30 trillion) but rising interest rates now will make our debt service more expensive and hasten the Day of Reckoning.
The Arizona House passed HB2507 on Wednesday, a bill declaring that religious services are to be considered essential during a state of emergency. While all House Republicans voted for the bill, several Democrats voted against the majority of their party to pass it: State Representatives César Chávez (D-Maryvale), Diego Espinoza (D-Tolleson), Alma Hernandez (D-Tucson), Daniel Hernandez (D-Tucson), Robert Meza (D-Phoenix), and Lorenzo Sierra (D-Avondale).
However, the bill would require that religious organizations comply with safety or occupancy requirements contingent upon other essential services. The only way around occupancy requirements would be in the case that the government couldn’t provide proof that their requirement was the least restrictive means of furthering their compelling interest. If the government violates these protections, then a religious organization could receive declaratory and injunctive relief, compensatory damages, and attorney fees.
In Canada, worship wasn’t considered an essential practice throughout the pandemic. One preacher, Artur Pawlowski, has been arrested five times for keeping his church open and opposing the draconian government. Last week, Pawlowski was arrested for speaking to members of the Freedom Convoy, the truckers protesting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s dictatorship. Pawlowski’s speech reportedly caused the truckers to change their mind about abandoning their protest: instead of leaving the border for Edmonton, they heeded Pawlowski’s charge to “hold the line.” According to Pawlowski’s lawyer, law enforcement keeps Pawlowski in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.
The Canadian government further winnowed away at the freedom of religion by outlawing certain beliefs, such as opposition to homosexuality.
Pawlowski grew up under the Soviet Union’s Communist regime in Poland. Like Pawlowski, the state representative behind HB2507, Ben Toma (R-Peoria), grew up in a dictatorship that his family eventually fled: the communist dictator of Romania from 1965 to 1989, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Toma offered details of his experience in an interview with James T. Harris on “The Conservative Circus.” Toma expressed fear that the government’s response during COVID-19 marked a descent into an authoritarian state. He noted how his bill helped push back against dictatorial trends exhibited by the government throughout 2020: disincentivizing and outlawing religion to increase government reliance and subservience.
“If your ultimate allegiance is to God, then you have something on which to rely on, to sort of fight back against state overreach,” said Toma. “But once you take God out of it, then the only thing you can rely on is what? You end up having to trust the state. To me, that’s the scariest possible solution because that’s how we got some of the worst dictators and some of the worst criminals, guilty of genocide and everything else across the world.”
AZ State Rep. Ben Toma discusses the tyranny going on in Canada as he speaks on his personal escape from Romania un https://t.co/KEIfNHfVwI
In addition to the hostility toward religion, Toma observed that other signs of communism were present in the country, with implementation or entertainment of ideas like rationing, supply chain shortages, social credit, and censorship.
Governor Doug Ducey hasn’t lifted Arizona’s state of emergency yet.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
