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Cow Farts and Patties

COW FARTS AND PATTIES

 

Today we learn some new terminology by way of the proposed budget reconciliation bill of which 40 billion is earmarked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to address climate change. U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow is Chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. She says that most of the money goes to rural power, clean energy, and something now called “smart agriculture.”

 

Some of this sounds like good old fashioned common sense farming to preserve soil health, like no-till farming, rotational grazing, and the expansion of crop cover use, but for some reason sold to us now under a new marketing term, as if this had just been thought up by the Green New Deal policy wonks on Capital Hill, perhaps to justify the 8.5 billion dollar price tag. More pointed, however, is the $3.25 billion to help farmers develop whole farm conservation” plans to implement “environmentally-directed working farms.” What’s that?

 

At first it sounds okay, although obviously prioritizing conservation over production. But as you read on, it begins to sound eerily familiar for anyone whose been following events in the Netherlands. For those who need a quick primer, after the IMF destroyed Sri Lanka and literally brought down its government by enforcing zero carbon emissions standards for agriculture, the E.U. thought it a great idea to beta test the same thing in the developed world by mandating Dutch farmers to cull livestock herds in order to achieve nitrogen reductions. Have you seen the pictures of those bags the cows have to wear to capture their methane emissions? It’s completely insane.

 

This U.S. proposal touts a “once-in-a-generation investment in effective working lands conservation programs that will put farmers at the center of our national response to the climate change crisis.” Farmers? At the center of climate change? Oh, yeah, all those cow farts. But even the government estimates that our agricultural sector accounts for only about 10% of green house gas emissions. Something stinks like cow patties here.

 

I just finished writing a new piece about The Grid and the Greenwash of renewables, and now I feel like I’m writing the exact same piece again, only about agriculture. It is the same template—profligate federal subsidies for completely unproven and untested technologies, while potentially crashing proven methods, and creating engineered scarcity that will pay insiders handsomely.

 

Speaking of insiders, Joe Manchin has devised a plan to incentivize large corporate CO2 emitters to capture their emissions to be stored in the soil. This is called carbon sequestration, and it relies on pipelines that are “troublesome,” meaning they don’t work. Further, soil scientists don’t know how much carbon can be sequestered in soil or how long it can stay there. They don’t know how to track or quantify it. They do know there is a limit to how much carbon soil can hold and that saturation levels could be reached within a few decades. A few, as in three or four.

 

Never mind that carbon sequestered by other methods, like tree planting, is much easier to quantify and verify and lasts until you cut the tree down. You miss the point. The point is not to capture carbon, it is to shoot steroids into a carbon trading market and make an absolute killing. Exxon Mobile forecasts the carbon capture market will be $4 trillion by 2050, and you’d better believe they are participating, even while a dumbshow is being made of ending the oil and gas industry. It’s a puppet show for children. What this really is? Another massive transfer of wealth under the banner of the Green Economy, every bit as ineffective and disingenuous as “clean energy.”
 

They are encouraging farmers to “voluntarily” participate in carbon credits, but how long before the mandates rollout? And what will that do to American agriculture? Many farmers live season-to-season by the skin of their teeth. They haven’t the resources to invest in soil carbon sequestration technologies. It reminds me of King Biden saying Americans should save on their energy bills by buying electric cars. Let them eat carbon credits!

 

I can assure you that Texans are not interested in policies that put carbon trading ahead of food production. More and more these “existential” topics (the border, the grid, our elections, our food supply) reveal the fundamental issues of identity underlying them. What do we stand for so that we don’t fall for those who would make bank on our ignorance or inaction?

 

The bamboozlers are counting on your silence to be construed as consent. Fight Outloud, Texas.

Rage Against the Machine

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

 

I’ve known for awhile that it isn’t about right/left, Republican/Democrat, red/blue or conservative/progressive, though I have subscribed hugely to the populist/globalist polarity. But now I’m rethinking even that.

 

Now I think it boils down to this: there are people capable of pattern recognition and those who are not. Generally speaking, it is the leftists these days who corner the market on hypocrisy. One can only do that indignantly and with a straight face if a) one utterly lacks humor and irony and b) if one is totally incapable of pattern recognition.

 

This lack of pattern recognition makes Democrats in Harris county incapable of seeing an obvious pattern: “irregularities” (ie, botched) recent elections in Harris County that Lt. Gov. Patrick called “a disaster,” leading to the resignation of Elections Administrator Longoria, and the legal defiance of the Democratic run apparatus in that county suing the state of Texas for their upcoming election audit of Harris County elections.

 

It stinks like a beached catfish. Those of us capable of pattern recognition can see that hypocrisy is the order of the day, and that Houston is Texas’ Chicago. The politicos shifted election authority to an appointed figure and away from elected officials. They just changed the rules, like they do when they want to be able to manipulate election results. That’s also been a pattern we’ve recognized countrywide.

 

But, let’s face it, there is a political machine in Harris county almost as corrupt as Miami-Dade’s, and anyone with pattern recognition capability can see it. Anyone without cannot. Or is on the payroll.

 

Let’s not act surprised. Let’s not pretend that our sensibilities are offended by such a suggestion and that questioning election integrity is an act of insurrection. What a load of horse manure. After all, here we are in the state where LBJ pulled off the most brazen thievery of an election up to that point in U.S. history.” And then conspired to assassinate a sitting president. Buck up. We’re all adults here. Well, some of us, anyway.

 

Purportedly “legendary” Democratic operative turned whistleblower, Dallas Jones, admitted to being paid to mail fraudulent ballot applications in Harris County. As Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign director, he allegedly oversaw an organized voter fraud operation. Texas DA’s have identifiedmail-in mafia,” people who profit from organized mail-in ballot fraud.

 

But the Harris County Dem Commissioners voted to challenge the state planned audit because, why? Because County Judge Lina Hidalgo equated the audit to the January 6 riot in Washington D.C., that’s why. Unfortunately, the very same people who lack pattern recognition lack the sense of irony to see through her histrionic grandstanding.

 

Those of us with sufficient irony wonder, is it too much to ask that voters be legal citizens and live where they vote? Apparently, for the judge who struck down the portion of SB11 that requires voters to have a physical address attached to a post office box for the purposes of voter registration, the answer is yes. That smacks of voter suppression!

 

But back in Harris County, one of the Commissioners admits there were clearly election problems such as polling locations not opening on time, lack of training, incorrect ballots given to voters, and delays in counting ballots that violate state law: I would think there’s been voter suppression in Harris County,” he said, “simply because we don’t know how to run an election.” Now this man has a sense of irony.

 

But he’s got a real point too—ineptitude is playing a big role in the fouling of our elections. Organizations who monitor election integrity in Texas have noted the dire lack of well trained election workers and poll watchers. Many are not familiar with state law or election code. More than any other fix, getting well trained, smart and savvy people into every phase of the election process will help true the vote. These are the eyes and ears that are needed to ensure election authorities know we are watching and taking action.

 

We who wish for free and fair elections are raging against a machine. Whether it’s systemic ineptitude, an organized fraud operation, or actual machines—the electronic voting machines themselves. The voting manufacturing companies in use in our state—Election Systems & Software and Hart InterCivic—have acknowledged they put modems in some of their tabulators and scanners. The most common voting machines in Texas are known to be embedded with wireless modem chips, despite the persistent insistence that the machines are not hackable because they cannot be connected to the internet. Quite the opposite—they can be wirelessly connected by a phone signal. And the state of Texas does not even bother to inspect these machines. The companies themselves give a certification. The foxes are dining at the hen house.

 

The Texas GOP is looking for legislation in the upcoming session that will:

Restore felony penalties for Election Code violations and make them enforceable by any Texas jurisdiction, including our state’s Attorney General

Require citizenship verification of each voter

Restrict the distribution of mail-in ballots to only disabled, military, and citizens that are out of state.

Reduce the time allowed for early voting, and eliminate the three-day gap between early voting and election day.

 

That all sounds great and should help a lot, but I like the Fix Our Elections for Dummies approach that suggests four easy steps:

 

1. No more early voting

2. No more mail-in ballots for those not requesting them

3. Require voter I.D.

4. Count until it’s over. Duh.

 

And I’d add another three:

 

5. Paper Ballots

6. Paper Ballots

7. Paper Ballots

 

Unfortunately, it’ll be 2026 before SB1 requires all Texas counties to comply with my request.

Talk About the Weather

EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER…

…But no one is doing anything about it, as the old saw goes.

Well, that’s not strictly true. ERCOT is asking Texans to “conserve” during peak hours, and some utilities have reportedly been tampering with customers’ programmable thermostats. So there’s that.

And some environmentalists are clambering to have Biden declare a climate emergency so we can have the Feds bail out our mismanaged grid.

Likewise the Greensters are claiming that renewables, while they failed miserably during Snowmaggedon, are “bailing Texas out this summer,” at least according to Texas Monthly, even though wind power is delivering just “8% of its nameplate capacity during the heat of the day,” ERCOT admits. No doubt they will be pushing to double down on the solar-wind-boondoggle, brought to us by Federal subsidies for the benefit of the C.C.P. That’s heartening.

Last year proposals were submitted to incentivize the building of new power plants, one by none other than Warren Buffett, cuz ya know, he really needs those incentives. The Leg took a pass on that and kicked the can down the road, the way they have for 12 years already.

After the winter grid failure, bills were passed of which Gov. Abbott said, “everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas.”  One bill had mostly to do with weatherization of plants and lines for winter, but oops, it’s summer and the grid is near failure again. If power plants don’t get some down time for routine maintenance, there surely will be some catastrophic failures.

The other bill the Leg passed had to do with “securitization.” Essentially, when the grid failed to keep the energy flowing, ERCOT and the PUC intervened, setting prices at their maximum and keeping them there for days. Then, lawmakers stepped in “to socialize the cost of that failure — some $16 billion — among all ratepayers, orchestrating a bailout that we will still be paying for 30 years from now.” 

Energy Fellows at University of Houston decry these efforts as “Band-aid bills” and “willful disregard of public good.”

And even though heads rolled at ERCOT after the winter storm debacle, the new CEO seems as clueless as the last one. When asked about the threat of rolling blackouts this summer, he demurred that this summer’s temperatures have been “hotter than his models had projected.” Forbes magazine politely called this “a failure of imagination.”  I call it proof that CEO Brad Jones doesn’t live here.

And though between 500-600 thousand people moved to Texas in 2021 alone, it seems ERCOT was also taken by surprise by how much demand on the grid grew. Ok, clearly none of these people live here.

Otherwise they’d know that August is just arriving and our problems are not over, though somehow now  the implication is that it’s the consumers’ fault. Gosh, we’re using too much electricity! We need austerity!

ERCOT’s current pleas for customer conservation seem reminiscent of Biden’s going hat in hand to the Saudi’s to bail him out for his aggressive anti-oil policies. Frankly, all this ineptitude and inaction almost looks like a setup for us to fail and have to admit, at last, that on the face of it, deregulation and our state’s energy sovereignty are a total bust.

To which Texans should say a “Hail NO!” that resounds thru the halls of the Capital. Texans value their independence and, I believe, that extends to having our own grid. But we’d like it to function properly for the 26 million Texans who rely on it.

History has proven that Legislators can’t keep their mitts off. Because for as much as is touted about our deregulated energy market, it really isn’t. It’s a heavy mix of command economics with a dash of free market for flavor. This interjects “distortion” into the energy markets, a word that comes up repeatedly as you dive into this topic. Almost as frequently as “bailout.”

*  Subsidies for renewable energy will cost the state over $900 million this year. Combined with Federal subsidies the total comes to 2.16 billion, skewing the markets irretrievably.

*  Texans pay for electricity even when the renewable power generators fail. In fact, they pay more (something called “variability”)

*  Power companies are pushing hard for a “capacity” market that gives them guaranteed payment for energy production, whether it’s used or not. This is essentially a “bail in,” and it’s proven expensive in other parts of the U.S.

*  As much as $225 million of electricity is lost annually in transmission lines; energy the consumer can’t use but pays for anyway.

*  The Public Utility Commission’s authority to interfere in the market has gradually increased over the last two decades, and neither the grid nor the consumer has benefitted.

*  ERCOT and the Railroad Commission oversee the electricity and gas markets respectively, with little or no coordination between the two. This was a critical point of failure in Storm Uri.

During the winter storm, ERCOT held the price of electricity at its $9,000 cap after emergency conditions had ceased, causing providers to buy on the wholesale market at exorbitant prices. The price tag of this folly is an estimated extra 14 billion that will be “securitized.” In other words, the electric provider’s debt will be amortized to be paid off by us, the ratepayers, over the next 30 years.

Meanwhile, electricity prices have risen 65% even without taking into account the surcharges for securitization, mainly based on the decision to increase “peaker plants,” keeping more generation online in case of emergency, a sort of half step toward a capacity model which is considered by some to distort the market’s dynamics.

But by far the biggest distortion is renewables. As energy expert David Blackmon wrote, “Since the Texas legislature de-regulated the energy market and started heavily-subsidizing the installation of wind farms without the slightest initial plan on how to move the energy they generate to market or properly manage that energy as part of a complex integrated power grid… Texas today leads the nation in wind power generation, and also challenges energy 3rd-world basket case California for the leadership in rolling blackouts.”

But what does ERCOT CEO Brad Jones have to say? “I want as much wind and solar in this market as we can get.” Exactly the wrong response.

According to an article in The Federalist by Brent Bennett, “In a couple of years, Texas electric bills will start to look like California’s instead of the low-cost electricity the state is accustomed to.”

Hopefully reason will prevail and we will recoil from further renewables as from a hot stove.

So, the Leg passed a couple of stop gap measures, none of which solves the real problem. We have an aging grid.  A plant’s life is 30 years, and some of ours are 50 years old. Texas is booming and it takes 4 years to bring a new thermal (non renewable) plant online. 

On the gas side, there is no incentive for gas providers to weatherize their old wells. Retrofit is expensive, and they might opt to shutter wells instead. And since they made out like Madoff during the winter storm anyway, there’s no percentage in it. This highlights the deep disconnect between the electricity and gas markets, so deep that gas providers actually benefit from a dysfunctional grid. It is opined that SB3 and its winterization initiatives actually addressed this, but it remains to be seen. Jim Boyle, former counsel for PUC, said, “Can we rely on the Railroad Commission to do right in the rules and getting winterization in place? The answer is we can’t.” That doesn’t sound bullish.

Finally, ERCOT serves a dual role that looks pretty dicey—it monitors grid reliability and also brokers contracts traded in the wholesale market. In fact, they got sued in the latter capacity, Panda Power company accusing them of “fraud, negligent misrepresentation, and breach of fiduciary duty.”

As one University of Houston Energy Fellow declared, “The PUC and ERCOT have proven they’re incapable of acting in the public interest.”

So what are some potential policy takeaways that can fix this mess?

The following plank points are provided by The Energy Alliance:

Eliminate subsidies for renewable energy

 

Require Renewable Generators to Pay for the Costs They Impose on the Grid Because of Intermittency and Federal Subsidies

 

Resist power companies’ attempts to create a capacity market
 

Eliminate the PUC and Railroad Commission’s authority to manipulate market prices

Allow the market to provide the incentives for power companies to build new capacity to meet our growing demand

Ensure that customers pay only for the energy supplied to them, not the energy transmitted

 

These policy plank points are provided by the U of H Energy Fellows:

Create a Texas Energy Commission that combines the PUC and the Railroad Commission

Do not allow ERCOT to broker contracts on the wholesale electricity market

Reimburse consumers for ERCOT’s gross mismanagement of the Uri Storm grid failure

Incentivize grid operators to build more generation by levying a small fee on consumers

Allow utilities to face penalties and legal liability for grid failures
 

The Energy Alliance’s proposals are purely unfettered free market. The U of H Energy Fellow’s proposals are more geared to recognize the structural problems that plague the Texas Grid. To my mind, the practical approach is a blended one, that aims to free the market from the systemic problems that interference, variability, and distortion have created while not ignoring the crisis that lies directly ahead if inaction continues.

Food Security is Us

WHAT IS FOOD SECURITY, REALLY?

 

The definition of food security has previously been shaped by largely local factors and concerns, like providing locally sourced healthy meals for school lunches. Or addressing what has come to be called “food deserts,” describing an area where there is a grocery store shortage, limiting access to nutritious foods.”

 

But today, the entire conversation around food security is being shaped by forces far distant from our neighborhoods or even counties. And not just conversation, but actual policy.

 

“It is time to rethink how we grow, share and consume our food,” says one global authority. And who exactly will do that rethinking? The same self-appointed body that

said it in the first place—the  World Economic Forum, pushing their Great Reset under the guise of sustainability.

 

They cite water issues and global warming, of course, implying the foregone conclusion that global oversight and governance of food security is only achievable through a “sustainable agricultural system that ensures an affordable food supply for all”  by addressing greenhouse gas emissions, water use and water waste.

 

As people become more affluent they drift towards a diet richer in processed foods, meat and dairy.” And so they lament our healthy, nutrient dense diets, and promote the eating of insects and lab grown synth-meats. This is, apparently, what food “equity” looks like.

 

Take a gander at this “Transformation Map” from the WEF website: https://intelligence.weforum.org/topics/a1G0X0000057My4UAE?tab=publications charting the territory for the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, or SDG’s, and encompassing a mind bending array of topics from “youth perspectives”  to gender inequality, and drawn from so-called “expert and machine curated knowledge.”

 

Recognize that policy is now being crafted, at least in part, by AI, and good old central planning sold to us as “efficient business models” and “public-private partnerships”—in plainspeak, Communism and fascism, but with an updated technocratic flavor. It just sounds so much more modern and efficient.

 

So let’s see how that’s working out for some countries around the world.

 

Let’s start with Sri Lanka which, under the leadership of its President, decided in April 2021 to become the world’s first all-organic country. This was hailed as a great experiment in green policy making and, it turns out, a collusion with the IMF. It appears SDG’s (remember those?) were the IMF’s playbook for juicing the Sri Lankan economy and avowedly spending millions on a transformation to a new kind of capitalism. The WEF lauded the efforts as “impressive.”

 

The Sri Lankan government imposed a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and in short order the country went from self-sufficient to having to import staples like rice. The bottom fell out of tea, rubber, and coconut. “I cannot recall any time in the past when we had to struggle so much to get a decent harvest,” said a Sri Lankan farmer whose yields fell by a staggering 60%. Food prices skyrocketed, just as fuel prices rose. The only thing that flourished was social unrest.

After giving the nod to the government’s massive money printing, when it all went bust and the starving people took to the streets and threw the bastards out, the IMF dusted off its hands and walked away, as if to say, “our work here is done.” Now what is left of the government is giving its workers extra days off to “stay home and grow food.”

This was a beta test for the food policy of The Great Reset: green energy, SDG’s, inflation, collapse, starvation, all leading to the consolidation of power in the hands of those who engineered the whole thing. Classic problem-reaction-solution, or what I call the totalitarian dialectic.

Let’s look elsewhere. The Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of food, a massive achievement for a country a little larger than Maryland. To say that these Dutch farmers are expert in their fields (sorry, couldn’t resist) is an understatement. They are industrious, efficient and massively productive.

Unfortunately, their Prime Minister is a WEF running dog lackey. Even though the Netherlands has doubled its yields in recent decades while using the same amount of fertilizer, the government is enforcing EU edicts to reduce the use of nitrogen as a fertilizer and cull livestock herds. It is using these edicts as a battering ram for the “radical green fantasies and dodgy science” of a small group of lefties, many of whom, according to the NY Post, are vegetarians!

The fact that a 2019 article on the WEF website lauded the Dutch farmers (“Farmers in the Netherlands are growing more food using less resources” ) and now is throwing them under their own tractors belies the real motivation for the SDG’s. It isn’t about food production efficiencies at all. It’s about controlling the food supply by enforcing an engineered ideology.

The farmers say the government is angling to put them out of business and take their farms. How did that work out in South Africa, folks?

It should be coming clear to everyone: “Who controls the food supply controls the people.” Though it was globalist par excellence Henry Kissinger who said that, it might just as well have been Mao Tse Tung.

Real food security is an issue of sovereignty for the people of Texas, one that will not be solved at the federal level. It is governments’ collusion with globalists that is threatening our food supplies worldwide, and it is at the state level that we can take steps to remediate this threat.

The Astonishing Surplus

As we watch world governments and self proclaimed world leaders convene at venues like Davos in Switzerland or the G20 in Bali, we must painfully concede that these are not working meetings among colleagues, but public relations opportunities for elites, and that their meeting agendas are not for the purposes of holding discussions or debating ideas, but for rolling out foregone conclusions. The white papers, the intelligence reports, the off-books financial arrangements, etc. have long since been inked in their ‘honor among thieves’ modus operandi.

 

Now it’s all about the spin. The appearance of a process. At these gatherings, we the paupers are introduced as if in real time to what has actually long since been decided, and even implemented.

 

This presentation of policy with the threadbare veneer of inclusive process is the very definition of railroading. But what a long time indeed it has taken me to realize that this is more or less true of every political gathering and has been happening from the halls of legislatures to the rooms of school boards since time immemorial but with increasing alacrity and ham fisted-ness as the political ‘rule of law’ in our beloved Republic breaks down.

 

In a corollary to Stalin’s pith instruction that he who counts the votes determines the election’s outcome, we can infer the maxim that he who makes the policy sets the agenda for its presentation. The process is actually reverse engineered from the desired outcome.

 

And so it is that I began to think about the upcoming session of the Texas Legislature in more concrete and urgent terms. Granted, it is almost 6 months away, but we would be naive to think that the same jockeying for position, back room deals, and less than savory party machinations that inform the G20 are not already well underway in Austin, along with the customary preparations for  committee meetings and the budgetary process.

 

And those jockeys and lobbyists have just gotten a massive injection of steroids. It has come to light that Texas has a fundamental, even existential conundrum to consider: what to do with the “astonishing” haul of surplus cash that Texas has amassed as a result of its exponential economic growth.

 

There’s a lot to unpack here. First, the vital takeaway that Texas economics work. We are favorable to energy, small business, innovation, and not so much to regulation. Guess what? We were right! And good for us. But after we congratulate ourselves (which we should certainly do), the soul searching begins. It’s as if we’d been wage slaves all our lives and suddenly won the lottery. The burning question would now be, “what do we really want?”

 

For that is the precise position we find ourselves in now, and the answers we arrive at will only be as good as the quality of our introspection. We need that process of looking inward at our collective values as Texans before we are ready to put forth legislative answers to the big question: What the hell do we do with billions of excess taxpayer cash?

 

To back into this with a little context, Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar presented an economic update to state lawmakers at a meeting of the Texas House Appropriations Committee last week. According to his report, the Texas economy has been exceptionally strong since November of last year. Hegar said,We will be releasing a revised report on Thursday. … But I am going to warn you … stay seated in your seat when you read it. It is astonishing growth.”

 

I can see exactly how he was trying to manage the expectations of those legislators who believe that taxpayer dollars are their private slush funds. According to Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, “some lawmakers at Tuesday’s meeting already revealed their intentions to spend the money on pet projects.”

 

So this is where I think Texas Fights Outloud encourages us to get out ahead of the narrative. We want to shape this discussion, craft it and guide it, rather than be forced into a reactionary position. The surplus belongs to us. That much is clear and irrefutable. Following that assumption, it is up to us to determine what we would like to do with it, and this leads to what I call the ‘soul searching’ process we must engage immediately.

 

Texans for Fiscal Responsibility President Tim Hardin says the decision should be simple: give it back to Texans by eliminating property taxes. Texans are now paying the sixth-highest property tax bills in the United States, and those bills have increased by 181 percent in the last 20 years. There’s something to that, particularly considering that property taxes fund woke public education that is an anathema to many tax payers.

 

But there are far larger questions at play. What do we envision for our State in the next 10 to 20 years? What resources will we need to implement that vision? Knowing that we have an enviable surplus as we head into an inevitable recession or even depression, what would be the most wise course of action to protect our economy and the economic well being of Texans? What role does border security play in this scenario? Or the burgeoning secession movement?

 

Look, nobody in Austin wants to ask these questions. Their bread and butter is business as usual. I understand that, and that is precisely why I will not ask them to set such a far reaching agenda. Instead, I will ask we the people of Texas to do it. We will not allow the politicians to set the terms of policy then reverse engineer its presentation to us under the guise of legislative process.

 

No. We will determine the course of legislative action to pursue as a result of our deliberations. For it is our character as Texans that determines that course. I personally believe property tax relief has a very real place in our deliberations, but it is not the only responsible conclusion at which to arrive. There are many deeper questions that engage us at the very lifeblood of what it means to be a Texan, for it is this lifeblood, make no mistake, that generated this “astonishing” surplus in the first place.

 

This week we ask our audience, those who want to fight outloud, to search their souls and their values. What would we do, as Texans, if we won the lottery. Because the truth is, we just did.

Protect Texans

Texas: The Invasion’s Front Line

“SECURE THE BORDER AND PROTECT TEXANS”

 

As the Supreme Court disallows Trump’s “Remain In Mexico” strategy that had helped stem the tide of illegal immigration on our southern border, we will no longer have that policy in place to dissuade illegals from coming into Mexico to attempt entry into the U.S.

 

Now we are at the point of having to square off, toe to toe, not only with the masses of illegals overwhelming the border, but the cartels who are both the engine and the muscle behind them, and to whom Mexican law enforcement has already capitulated. In other words, now the invasion will play out exclusively on our soil. And Texas is the front line.

 

Did you know that:

 

            U.S. Border Patrol reported more than 3 million encounters during 2021, far                                               greater than the population of the entire Austin metro area?

 

            This number included human traffickers, jihadists and criminals on the terror watchlist?

 

            Monthly border crossings exceed 200,000 illegals?

 

            145,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended by Border Patrol in just 2021?

 

            1 in 3 women are sexually assaulted on their way to the U.S. border?

           

            Enough fentanyl has entered this country to kill every American five times over?

 

The issue is heating up as sheriffs, mayors and judges from border counties held a press conference outlining the impacts of the mass border incursions on their small communities. Time and again during the presser they intentionally used the word “invasion,” invoking Texans’ right to defend against it, and citing clauses from the U.S. and Texas Constitutions to support their position.

While praising Abbott for the financial largess he has lavished on the border issue, all acknowledged that it is not enough. It is up to the Governor himself to declare an invasion, giving the State of Texas the right not only to arrest, and detain, but deport illegals. These powers are granted by the U.S. Constitution under Article I, Section 10.

Abbott’s executive order stops short of such measures. While he authorizes the Texas National Guard and DPS to detain illegals, they will only be returned to the border. Many, including Ken Cuccinelli and Russ Vought of the Center for Renewing America are critical of Abbotts new order:

“The Governor does not appear to formally declare an invasion nor direct the National Guard and Department of Public Safety to remove illegals across the border directly to Mexico. That is critical. Otherwise this is still catch and release.”

 

The Center for Renewing America has also made Texcentric suggestions about handling the crisis internally: we could refuse state funds for localities that attempt to make themselves sanctuary cities,” implement E-verify, and stop subsidizing illegals with taxpayer dollars, curtailing access to State Financial Aid, in state tuition, public hospital care, education, and housing. Ken Paxton estimates that Texans pay upwards of $900 million per year to provide these benefits.

The Texas GOP is urging our elected officials to take the heat for this out of control crisis, crafting a priority statement for the upcoming legislative session. Secure the Border and Protect Texans” states:

“Texas shall immediately deny all taxpayer funded services and subsidies to illegal aliens. We call upon the Governor to assert his duty under Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the US Constitution to declare an invasion on our Texas border and do everything in his power to protect Texans from this invasion. The legislature shall direct the Governor to enter into an Interstate Compact with one or more states for Border Security.”

Texans can solve this crisis with the tools at our disposal. We have the know how. Now we need to mobilize the political will to make it happen.

The Gun Grab Part 2

GUN GRAB pt. 2

 

THE BACKGROUND

 

Last week Senate Democrats, with the support of 15 “Republicans,” passed the “Safer Communities Act.” GOP leader Mitch McConnell hailed the legislation as a “common sense package,” a now recognizable buzzword of the gun control lobby which infers that those who support the Second Amendment as it was crafted by our Founders lack common sense to the point of dangerous irrationality.

 

Fifteen Republicans (in name only) voted for the bill:

 

Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) 

Richard Burr (R-N.C)

Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.)

Bill Cassidy (R-La.)

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine)

John Cornyn (R-Texas)

Joni Ernst (R-Iowa)

Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)

Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)

Rob Portman (R-Ohio)

Mitt Romney (R-Utah)

Thom Tillis (R-N.C.)

Pat Toomey (R-Pa.)

Todd Young (R-Ind.).

 

The bill is being hailed as the first meaningful gun control legislation to have been passed in 30 years in the U.S., and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer let us know this is only the beginning, saying he hopes “it paves the way for future action on guns in Congress and at all levels of government.”

 

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), who voted no on the measure, said that not only does the bill infringe upon Second Amendment rights, it was also crafted without committee input or any opportunity to offer amendments on the Senate floor to improve or meaningfully examine the provisions.”

 

The intellectual disingenuousness of our legislators is typical but still worth pointing out—anyone in the Senate truly interested in discovering and crafting solutions to complex problems would have demanded honest and thorough debate. There was none of that.

 

The word “common sense” is shorthand for, “this was so obvious we don’t even need to think about it.” Isn’t this method always utilized with these issues so vital to the integrity of our system of governance by those who wish to fundamentally transform (as Obama said) the character of our nation through corrupting the very spirit and letter of our laws?

 

Everything is crafted behind closed doors, then rushed to the floor and pushed through.  In this case, Senators had less than an hour to read an 80 page bill before a vote was forced. Such a process cannot create effective, rational “common sense” legislation. It can create a virtue signal to mask what it really is—a deal.

 

Instead of hardening our school security, the bill blocks unspent COVID money from going to arm or train security on school campuses. It gives an option to expand access to abortion services and abortion counseling on school campuses. What? Why is there an option for states to fund abortion in school health centers in a juvenile mental health in school safety bill?”

 

Oh, it’s called Leftist Let’s Make a Deal, a game they are playing with taxpayer money, pushing federal funds out to encourage, in Schumer’s parlance, “all levels of government” to adopt red flag laws that overturn the fundament of due process and flagrantly violate both the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of our individual states.

 

The transformation sought can be expressed by those who actually do possess common sense—invert due process into ‘guilty until proven innocent,’ suppress dissent, disarm the citizenry, quash political opposition. Game over.

 

No thanks. We don’t like that game show.

 

~                      ~                      ~                      ~                      ~

 

THE ISSUE

 

13 Texas mayors wrote a letter calling for a special legislative session to consider, wait for it, “common sense” gun control. Here is the text of the letter, in case you missed it:

 

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TexasBig City Mayors, a bipartisan coalition of mayors from our state’s most populous cities, are calling upon our state leadership to take immediate action to prevent the next mass shooting in Texas. We represent a continuum of political ideology and have come together because we know most Texans have a strong desire for common sense reform to protect our children.  As mayors, we believe the legislature and executive leaders can come together to find the right solutions for Texas.

 

We are specifically calling upon Governor Abbott to call a Special Session and add the following to the call:

  • Require universal background checks for gun purchases.
  • Increase the age to purchase assault weapons in Texas to 21.
  • Pass Red Flag laws to identify threats before shootings.
  • Significant increase in mental health support funding.
  • Train and properly resource school safety officers

 

These reforms, supported by most Texans, would have prevented the shooters in El Paso and Uvalde from obtaining their weapons.

 

All our communities have supported our local law enforcement during these difficult times of civil unrest and pandemic-related violence. Pursuing gun policies that ease access to firearms makes the jobs of our first responders even more difficult.

Families are asking us how many more shootings must happen before we act. The communities of Uvalde, El Paso, Santa Fe, and Sutherland Springs deserve better. In response to mass shootings—Florida passed red flag laws, and we can do the same here in Texas.

In the immediacy after the shooting, state leaders specifically spoke about mental health disparities. We agree with the need to address this long-neglected area. Texas is ranked 50th in the nation for mental health care access by Mental Health America. We should do all we can to lift our state up from the bottom of this list.

There have been welcome and strategic proposals presented by other state leaders regarding mental health programs, specifically for students in school. We agree that significant investments in behavioral health, several magnitudes greater than what has been mentioned, are both needed and urgent.

Addressing gaps in mental health care access would require the state legislature to massively expand existing programs. This would mean more funding for school counselors, social workers, and support staff for public schools as well as enhancing accessibility at our mental health authorities. The lack of statewide access for mental health services has caused our first responders, especially our police, to all too often to be the only response to a person in crisis.

We can better support our first responders by funding mental health programs that allow for patient access and care instead of leaving law enforcement to handle these complex situations.

The problem that we face as a state, and that local law enforcement faces every day, is the ease with which dangerous individuals can obtain and access these weapons.

Protecting the 2nd Amendment means passing responsible policies that a wide majority of law-abiding gun owners support.

We cannot stand idly by while more of our fellow Texans, often our children and law enforcement officers, are laid to rest as the result of another preventable shooting.

Action is the only thing that will save more lives.pasted-image.tiff

 

 

These are all the same points Turncoat Cornyn helped to craft, thus paving the way for Schumer’s dream of more gun control at “all levels of government.” As if we couldn’t see this one coming. Doesn’t it just feel like a playbook?

I’m not going to color inside the lines on this one, folks. All of this is political theater. It is not meant to solve any problems of violence in our communities. If that were the case, certain self same mayors would not be in support of defunding their police departments or of DA’s who turn a blind eye to crime in their cities. It is under the watch of this same ilk that we’ve witnessed the explosion of crime rates across this country.

Nor would the Dems and their education lobby, the teachers’ unions, have pressed to remove police presence from the schools in the wake of the George Floyd incident. What did George Floyd have to do with security in schools? One thing only—emotional manipulation for the purpose of political expediency for the anti-gun, anti-law and order agenda.

What common sense does dictate is that gangs, criminals, cartels and other organized crime will not be subject to the same restraints as those citizens who abide by laws restricting gun ownership, and if there were any common sense in this discussion, it could start with the Gun Controllers making this unqualified admission.

But again, this is political theater, not “common sense” legislation. Poor Thomas Paine is rolling in his grave.

The playbook we are seeing acted out is about getting us into field position to outlaw private gun ownership, and to consolidate the government’s monopoly on force, a social engineering project we’ve been subjected to for a very long time that completely countermands the intentions of our Founding Fathers and neatly paves the path to authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, political theater is not confined to the halls of Congress or to legislative bodies. The surreal, fabricated feel of these escalating events has all the fingerprints of the very serious and deadly theater of real politik, false flag operations.

Why are over 98% of these shooters vulnerable young men on psychiatric drugs? If you haven’t read Dr. Mercola’s analysis of these stats, please read his well researched article posted above in this blog space.

In all these mass school shootings, the F.B.I. is always lurking in the shadows. The shooters have been interviewed multiple times by the F.B.I. or law enforcement who put them on watch lists. And yet this fact never deters their future acts of violence? Simple incompetence could not create such a predictable pattern. The role of F.B.I. informants in the Whitmer “kidnapping” scenario and in J6 is gradually coming to light. Recent evidence shows that the Buffalo shooter was in touch with a “retired” F.B.I. agent. And so on.

Could it be that these individuals are sought out by the Feds to be recruited for such operations? Recently the parents of a severely mentally disabled man revealed details of how the FBI recruited and groomed their son as a right-wing terrorist, fully aware he was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. We know they tried to recruit Oathkeeper Jeremy Brown in advance of January 6th.

More recently and closer to home, the standing down of the entire Uvalde Police Department bears ruthless scrutiny, not likely to be forthcoming from the official DOJ process getting underway that seeks “to identify lessons learned and best practices” in active shooter situations. Sounds more like an apologia than an investigation.

"As with prior Justice Department after-action reviews of mass shootings and other critical incidents, this assessment will be fair, transparent, and independent,” said a DOJ spokesman, adding, “The Justice Department will publish a report with its findings at the conclusion of its review.”

Great. Another Warren Commission or 911 Report to throw in the dustbin of history.

So, false flag or no, the Gun Controllers have capitalized on a spate of events to create an urgent legislative agenda based more on emotion than reason.

 

Now, with the cover of the Uvalde shooting, we have this coalition of Texas Mayors touting the same talking points that Cornyn was complicit in putting forward, and claiming to represent “most Texans.” Just as Beto O’Rourke seized the moment to interrupt the press conference following the Uvalde tragedy using emotional manipulation for his own political grandstanding, what passes for debate about gun control is relegated to knee jerk reactions and dependent upon buzz words like “protecting our families” and “safer communities.”

 

You mean like in Chicago?

 

Perhaps that’s a fit for a city that elected the likes of Austin Mayor Steven Adler, a city where reportedly “when you call 911, nobody comes.” But it’s not a fit for us. Corpus Christians will not stand for that, thank God. We have an abiding interest in bona fide solutions to our many problems, rather than the political posturing that engrosses so many of the large cities in our state and across the country. We are lucky that way. People don’t go into politics here to set their caps for the state or national scene, and that gives us a buffer. We can have authentic dialogue lacking in larger settings, and that’s the beauty of small town politics. Because even though we are the 7th largest city in Texas, we have the ethos of a small town. We like it that way.

 

And as Americans we are singularly blessed with a blueprint for principles of governance called the Constitution which not only guides us, but enumerates our rights.

 

So we invite our Mayor, Paulette Guajardo, to return to reason and disavow the dubious company she keeps in this letter. Turn toward the people of Corpus Christi with contrition and an invitation to solve the many problems that beset us, including those of violence, crime, drugs, and gang activity. We seek substantive solutions rather than those born of expedient political posturing. It is not, Madame Mayor, about catching the nearest way. It is about the very difficult but noble work of thoughtful governance within the framework of the Constitution.

The Gun Grab, part 1

The Gun Grab, pt. 1

According to Breitbart News, Mitch McConnell tapped” Cornyn to partner with him to work with Senate Democrats to craft a supposedly bipartisan response to the Uvalde shooting. Well, maybe not so bipartisan. This weekend at the Texas GOP convention in Houston, Cornyn was viciously booed” when he took the stage. Attendees chanted, no red flags,” and go back home,” which I can only construe actually means return to D.C., the natural environment of such slimy creatures.

 

Elsewhere, Cornyn appeared to position himself as the initiator of the framework that’s been hammered out and introduced under the guise of bills in the house, I suppose claiming unspoken moral authority in the aftermath of the Uvalde debacle.

 

While the truth is that Uvalde is yet another shining example of the failure, if not outright complicity, of both local law enforcement and the F.B.I., Cornyn’s apologia, that it’s easy to criticize such a complex situation in hindsight, no doubt left McConnell with a warm and cozy feeling that he could count on our RINO Senator to collaborate with him. And, yes, I mean that in the WWII sense.

 

After their back room dirty work was done, the House passed “Protecting Our Children” (H.R. 7910), proposing to increase the minimum age for purchase of semi automatic weapons to 21, prohibit large capacity magazines, bar “straw purchases” for 3rd parties, and set secure firearms storage regulations for homes.

 

But even more treacherously slick on this slippery slope toward the normalization of gun confiscation is H.R.2377, also passed by the House. The legislation allows courts to issue “extreme risk protection orders” that bar an individual who shows risk of misuse from possessing a firearm.

 

The exact terrain of the slippery slope is the review done of the individual’s mental health records by the courts. We’ve all had an object lesson in the so-called impartiality of our current court system. What, pray tell, is the likelihood of courts weaponizing FERPO’s against political opposition? 100%, I’d say.

 

And further, the bill creates a new grant program to assist states and local governments to implement and carry out similar legislation closer to home, known as "red flag laws.” This really appears to have been the proverbial straw this weekend for the convention delegates in Houston. And well it should be. Such policies have no place in the bastion of 2A rights that is Texas.

 

But Cornyn sidestepped the philosophical divide by dismissing the dissent, characterizing those who objected as a “mob” and their attitude one of hate. Sound familiar? Let me connect the dots: dissent is hate, opposition is suspect if not outright illegal. And while Cornyn may have the dubious luxury of throwing shade like that at the inmates of the J6 Gulag, let me remind you these are his actual constituents he’s talking about here.

 

Case in point why we need to go after this with both barrels blazing. We are all in the crosshairs of this anti second amendment juggernaut. Cornyn needs to be brought to heel, and then ousted before he tries to set his cap to replace McConnell as Republican Senate leader.

 

And at the state and local levels, we need to hammer home to our representatives that we will NOT accept red flag laws in return for filthy federal lucre, and we will not enact them under any circumstance.

 

No matter how many false flags the Feds perpetrate.

It Came from China

Today I want to step back for a moment from focusing on the individual issues we at Texas Fights Outloud have identified as “existential,” and look for a common thread that ties them together. A lowest common denominator threat undermining our security and our sovereignty.

 

A secure border and power grid, fair elections, and reliable food supply chains—what do these issues have in common? They certainly are the bedrock of every Texans’ well being. Without adequate and affordable energy, commerce suffers and, as we recall from Snowmaggedon and are bracing to witness in Europe this winter, people will suffer greatly and even die.

 

The lack of a secure border is taxing not just our border patrol resources, but those of communities across the state forced to absorb an unprecedented influx of illegals. And the flood of illicit drugs is flat out killing Texans. There is no sugar coating that ugly reality.

 

And though many of us may not be aware of the threat to our food supply and from whence it comes, every one of us knows that access to food is the first order of our survival. This issue runs far deeper than lack of selection on the shelves of your local grocery store, or shortages of cat food. It too shares a common thread with our other existential issues.

 

Our last refuge— transparent and fair elections to replace officials who do not protect our sovereignty—is unfortunately a questionable one. The evidence mounting against the reliability of voting machines, their software, and the people who control them, is impossible to ignore. This is not late breaking news. Texas’ own Bev Harris broke this story in 2004 with her book, Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century. (You can download her ebook for free here: http://blackboxvoting.org/BBVbook-all.zip )

 

Furthermore, it is appearing more and more likely that foreign interference (I am not speaking of Russiagate) has also played a role in digitally mediated voting results. While this aspect has yet to unfold, evidence is being compiled.

 

These issues represent our sovereignty as a state, and we are threatened by a common influence that can be identified. As President Trump so memorably enunciated, “It. Came. From. Chi-na.”

 

Last week House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy visited Houston to discuss the CCP with fellow Republican House members, and its incursions into every facet of America—supply chains, intellectual property rights, media and academic propagandists. This infiltration is aided and abetted by the Biden Administration that has dismissed espionage charges against 130 Chinese Nationals and dismantled the DOJ investigative initiative into the activities of the CCP in the U.S.

 

As with all of our existential issues, it is fruitless to look toward D.C. for solutions, the very powers that be who created these situations. We must be responsible for our own answers. As I’ve said repeatedly, we have the resources and wherewithal to accomplish the task, but the political will has been lacking. That’s where we come in. We must apply the political pressure on our officials to tackle these problems. They are not insoluble, but require solutions that fly in the face of political expediency.

 

Texas Scorecard is doing an excellent series on CCP infiltration into Texas commerce, including the energy, real estate, and manufacturing industries. I highly recommend it and will link articles below. We in South Texas have been home to the "largest single investment by a Chinese company in a US manufacturing facility,” the TPCO plant in Gregory. We’ve allowed the purchase of large tracts of land near a military installation, possible incursions into our grid with CCP connected ownership of wind farms, and the purchase of food processing plants by CCP connected companies. Chinese nationals (the site of Blue Hills wind farm) own more land in Val Verde County than U.S. citizens.

 

This is a quote from the website of the Guanghui Group that developed the Blue Hills Wind Project in Val Verde County:  “We have been and will continue to be driven by the principle of keeping the Party in mind and obeying the Party’s commands. In the future, Guanghui will take Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as its guide.”

 

Six states have bans against foreign ownership of land. Texas does not. Texas Republican Congressman Lance Gooden admitted that, The Chinese ownership of land in this nation is very scary to me.” Foreign acquisition of land along the southern border is done in concert with the cartels in order to foster the flow of Chinese fentanyl into our country. These are coordinated actions.

 

We’ve given them access to our grid, and our food supply and our border with little thought for security implications,  nor with any thought of protecting our intellectual property. For example, China has oil shale, but not the technology to exploit it. So they invest in U.S. shale projects to gain the knowledge they need to build out their own infrastructure. Same with food processing technology. This is a transfer of intellectual property without oversight or even compensation. It’s just a bad idea.

 

The wind and solar farm scheme hawked endlessly by the federal government and wolfed down hungrily by Austin politicians is wholly to the benefit of China, by which they may gain a direct grip on our grid, and access to security industry alerts, private industry insights and national security threat assessments. All subsidized by the Federal government! As if that weren’t enough, China  manufactures the junk that harvests “renewables”—turbines, batteries, and solar panels, reputedly made by the slave labor of Uyghur Muslims, coming soon to a landfill near you. Except those batteries. We don’t know what the hell to do with those.

 

Its just crazy,” said Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller (R). “Why do we do that? Are we just, I guess, greedy, maybe?” Bingo. The political expediency of catching the nearest way is undermining us at every turn, whether it be selling off our agricultural lands, or forfeiting control of our grid to intermittent sources, ultimately benefitting the CCP, not Texans.

For 50 years the Chinese Communist Party has launched an assault on the American way of life,” McCarthy said at his meeting in Houston, and reported that Republicans are crafting a legislative agenda to block CCP interference in our country called Commitment to America. A link to receive information is below.

But we cannot wait for action at the federal level. In 2021 Texas passed SB 2116, prohibiting businesses from hostile countries (China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia) from gaining access to critical infrastructure. That was a start, but we need to go further, much further.

 

Ag Commissioner Miller recently approached the chair of the Water, Agriculture, and Rural Affairs Committee (State Senator Charles Perry) about filing a a bill to address the problem of foreign land ownership, but was met with a decided lack of interest. Miller characterized Perry’s thinking like this: “If you want to sell your land to our biggest enemy, you should have the right to do that.” Is that what passes for free market economics these days?

We respectfully and adamantly disagree, and as the Commissioner added, “I think most patriotic Texans would disagree.”

 

https://texasscorecard.com/state/communist-china-in-texas-targeting-oil-gas/

https://texasscorecard.com/state/communist-china-in-texas-food-choke-point/

https://www.republicanleader.gov/commitment/

Do the Right Thing

Five more Texas counties have joined in calling the crisis on our southern border “an invasion,” bringing the total number of counties to seventeen—Parker, Goliad, Wise, Wilson, Johnson, Live Oak, Tyler, Atascosa, Terrell, Kinney, Burnet, Medina, Chambers, Liberty, Orange, Hardin and Ellis. Ellis County was particularly pointed in placing responsibility on Gov. Abbott to immediately prevent and/or remove all persons trespassing as well as invading the sovereignty of Texas and that of the United States.”

That’s a pretty comprehensive call to action, and one that can only happen if the Governor invokes Article I, Section 10 of the United States Constitution and Article IV, Section 7 of the Texas Constitution. And while Abbott did sign an executive order last month calling the situation an “invasion,” he has stopped short of allowing state police or the National Guard to deport illegals. Instead, he has waffled, citing worries that doing so would place state officials at risk of federal prosecution. To which my response is, I think AG Paxton is up to the task. He’s the feistiest Attorney General we’ve ever had. Bring it!

Instead, Abbott goes for political theater and optics. His order last year to stop commercial trucks at the border likely resulted in few or no seizures of smuggled drugs or humans, but rather in snarled lines at the points of entry that slowed Texas businesses. Likewise, his authorization to return illegals to the border is an empty gesture, as it falls short of deportation.

Finally, his busing of border crashers to New York and D.C., while successful in making him a burr under the blanket of those blue municipalities, is little more than a cute photo op, as Arizona gubernatorial candidate, Kari Lake, called it. It does precisely nothing to mitigate the tidal wave of illegal immigration, the damage that paramilitary and narco-terrorist cartels are inflicting on our border communities and beyond, nor the suffering to which trafficked humans are subjected.

Perhaps the biggest tell among this last round of counties declaring an invasion is the one from Ellis County, where the Board of Commissioners voted unanimously in favor of the declaration. Ellis County is south of Dallas, a full seven hours away from the border, yet to a man, the Commissioners recognized that the flood of drugs and unvetted illegals issuing from those border counties affects all of Texas. Just the explosion of fentanyl in the state has far reaching impacts on the safety of our communities, and the mental health and well-being of our citizens. Crime rates and incidence of drug overdoses are the stats that tell the story.

Compare and contrast Abbott’s inaction to the campaign promise Lake has breathed fire into—the very first day after she is elected Arizona Governor, she will declare the incursions on her state’s southern border “an invasion.” There is no grandstanding here, no political one upmanship. We’ve seen the drone footage of the cartels’ foot soldiers imbedding themselves on the U.S. side of the Arizona border. They are taking ownership of the border on both sides. And Kari Lake is dead serious about stopping it. Is Abbott? Don’t we as Texans have the obligation to demand that he takes a similar hard line stance?

While I cannot prove this as of yet, there is anecdotal evidence of the narco-terrorist organizations commandeering Arizona ranches along the border at gunpoint. This sort of thing had been commonplace in Mexico, and now it’s here. Will it take the invasion becoming a full occupation for Abbott to take the vital and necessary action to uphold and protect our state’s sovereignty? By then, Governor, I’m afraid it will be too late. Then you will need more than the National Guard. You will need an army.

Nothing short of a declaration now by Governor Abbott that invokes the Constitution and unshackles law enforcement at all levels to do its job will suffice. The rest is smoke and mirrors. The time to point fingers at the Biden Administration has long past. Their agenda to destabilize and bankrupt the country, undermine the working class with cheap illegal labor, and forever change the outcome of our elections in their favor by diluting the electorate with illegal votes is crystal clear.

They’ve zero interest in securing the border and we all know it.  But we have an existential interest in doing so. This is an issue that deeply impacts the future of all Texans. It is time we demand that Abbott do the right thing.

Red Flags

TALKING POINTS FOR “RED FLAG” DISCUSSION

Adapted from an article in the Epoch Times by Dr. Joseph Mercola

 

Mass shootings and mental health, the real cause of the problem

 

97.8 Percent of Mass Shootings Are Linked to This

 

  • While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out that mass shootings are far more likely the result of mental illness, depression and behavioral problems
  •  
  • Gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are not the problem, because the more gun control laws that have been passed, the more mass shootings have occurred

 

  • 97.8 percent of mass shootings occur in gun-free zones,” as the perpetrators know legally armed citizens won’t be there to stop them

 

  • Depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings really take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants

 

  • Antidepressants, especially selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are well-known for their ability to cause suicidal and homicidal ideation and violence

 

The more gun control laws that are passed, the more mass murders have occurred. What is not debatable is that this sick phenomenon of mass murderers targeting ‘gun-free zones,’ where they know civilian carry isn’t available to law-abiding Americans, is happening.

 

This is what’s listed on the box of SSRI’s as side effects: anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, aggressiveness, hostility, and mania.”  Patients report emotional blunting, lack of empathy, psychosis and hallucinations. 

 

Couple this with the cultural wars effecting implosion of the nuclear family, faith, and education, plus the glorification of graphic violence propagated non-stop by Hollywood for decades, and the video gaming industry lust for first person shooter murder scenarios, and the conclusion is well nigh inevitable. And that’s without the Feds actually buying these kids guns to implement their false flags.

 

As Jeff Snyder put it in The Washington Times: ‘But to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow.’”

 

Doubly bad when the lawless is the F.B.I. itself!

 

Let’s shift the gun control conversation to where it belongs—the deterioration of our collective mental health at the behest of the culture at large.

 

“As far as I can tell, mass shootings have far more to do with societal norms, dangerous medications, a lack of high-quality mental health services, and the normalization of violence through entertainment and in politics, than it does with gun laws per se.” 

                                                                                                            —Dr. Joseph Mercola

H.R. 4593

Since Joe Biden took office, an estimated 1.3 million people have entered our country illegally, including 42 known Jihadists on the FBI watch list. The explosion of illegal immigration on our southern border at the current administration’s behest has led to untold human misery. The cartels’ power on both sides of the border has escalated dramatically, filling their coffers with the profits of human trafficking and massive drug smuggling. Their “safe houses” are becoming fixtures in residential neighborhoods all along the border and even into the Texas interior. While human trafficking and the empowering of the cartels is bad enough, perhaps even worse is the Fentanyl, much of it from China, pouring unimpeded across our border. Fentanyl overdose is now the leading cause of death for adults 18-45 in this country.

 

These economic immigrants have been lured by the promise of largesse from our current administration, with the inevitable outcome that it will undercut wages for the working class, including the Hispanics whose families came here legally and who’ve worked so hard to establish themselves as citizens of this country. They are fed up. A recent poll showed that 65% of Hispanics want to see the border entirely closed.

 

Title 42 acted as a thin bandaid on this ocean of illegal immigration, allowing us during COVID to expel aliens under the auspices of this public health act. Biden has sought to end this protection, but has been temporarily blocked from doing so by the judiciary. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Title 42 will be inactivated in the near future.

 

In the meantime, Mexico has stated it will no longer accept our Title 42 expulsions of Venezuelans, Columbians, Nicaraguans, Africans, Peruvians, so our government is now waving them across our border. The largest caravan in history is now headed to Del Rio. In two weeks’ time, Eagle Pass will be absolutely overrun by 12,000 illegals.

 

The Federal government which created this disaster has neither the will nor the motivation to stop it. It is imperative that states step into this breach of national security and sovereignty. The “Securing the Border States Act” gives them the necessary leverage to do so.

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