What Mayra Flores Victory Shows About Hispanics and Conservatism

Doug Blair talks to Cesar Ybarra:

Cesar Ybarra: Great to be back at The Heritage Foundation.

Blair: Of course. Well, we’re always happy to have you. Let’s talk about that election in South Texas. Republican Mayra Flores just won a massive victory in a South Texas district that hasn’t elected a Republican in more than 100 years and that went for President [Joe] Biden back in the 2020 election. So, how did we get here? How did this shift happen?

Ybarra: Yeah, I think this speaks to Ronald Reagan’s message of Hispanics are Republican, they just don’t know it yet. And I think since then, Republicans have been doing a better job at explaining the Republican Party platform to Hispanic voters.

This has been amplified just by the terrible job that President Biden and the congressional Democrats have been doing with the economy, right? We have high-rising inflation, the border is in a state of disaster.

… A recent poll just came out and they polled people in Texas 34 District on what the biggest issues were for them. No. 1, the border. No. 2, inflation. Guess what? The Democrats did not have a plan to get that fixed, which is how Mayra Flores was able to promote her message of what she was for, and she got across the finish line with 51%.

I mean, we would’ve been happy if she would’ve gone to a runoff in August, but she crushed it and got that 51%, and is going to be a U.S. congresswoman next week. I mean, I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it. It’s awesome.

Blair: Let’s talk about Flores herself. Can you give us a profile on Flores? What’s she like; is she a moderate, is she pretty conservative?

Ybarra: She’s pretty conservative. I wouldn’t say she’s a moderate. She came to America when she was 6 years old, through the legal way. Grew up in South Texas.

Her husband is a Border Patrol agent, so she has some skin in the game when it comes to how our Border Patrol agents are being treated by this administration. She has some skin in the game in living in a border town, in a border community where her constituents are living the day-to-day flaws of the border insecurity that is being perpetuated by the Biden administration.

So, I wouldn’t call her a moderate. I would say she’s strong conservative. I mean, if you look at her yard signs, they said, “Dios, Familia, Patria”—God, family, country. Those three things are super conservative.

And again, I was talking to some of my friends today who were sending me stories about Mayra Flores. And I said, “When I tell you guys that Hispanics are conservative, this is exactly what we’re talking about.” We’re talking about someone like Mayra Flores. And she spread that message, and I think she speaks on behalf of all Hispanics when they talk about God, family, country.

Blair: Given that there was such a radical shift, obviously, this district, like we said, hadn’t elected a Republican in over 100 years, and it still went for President Biden just two years ago. Is this something where we’re seeing Latinos shift based on their own policy preferences changing, or is it based on the parties, like the Democrats and the Republican change?

Ybarra: I would say it’s more on policy. I would say it’s more on policy because again, right, when you start talking about inflation and border insecurity, you talk about, well, what’s causing this? It’s policy. And it’s policy that is being driven by Democrats, and frankly, by squishy Republicans. We know that Hispanics identify more as conservative than as Republican or Democrat.

So that’s what I would say. They’re starting to realize that their policy preferences are best aligned with Republican candidates. And that’s something that is being demonstrated in the polls that we’ve done at FreedomWorks through our Hispanic Grassroots Alliance. And it was definitely validated in Mayra’s race.

Blair: Now, you’ve mentioned you’ve done some polling data about this. Are we seeing this race as a one-time, a one-off, or are we seeing this pattern emerge in other elections?

Ybarra: Yeah. I mean, you have Adam Laxalt in Nevada. I’ve been seeing a lot of trending topics of him kind of doing well with Hispanic voters out in Nevada. Hopefully we can perform well in Arizona. In the polling that we’ve done, it seems like Hispanics down in the Tucson area are not as strong as folks in Florida or in Texas, or maybe Nevada.

So there’s still some work to do. This is not something for us to puff our chest and say, “We’re there.” I just think Mayra Flores is a good case study of what happens when we do the right kind of messaging and campaign investing. But I just think that it’s not going to happen in two years or four years; this is a 10-year, 20-year project, where we have to continue spreading our message and not get complacent.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/17/what-mayra-flores-victory-shows-about-hispanics-and-conservatism/

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Ministry of Truth 2.0? WH Launches New 'Task Force,' And the Woman in Charge Is Even Worse Than Jankowicz

President Joe Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board didn’t even survive a month.

On May 17, just weeks after she was appointed to lead the Orwellian-named branch of the Department of Homeland Security, Nina Jankowicz abruptly resigned and the administration announced the pause of what many described as the “Ministry of Truth.”

The reason? Disinformation, of course!

“The Board has been grossly and intentionally mischaracterized: it was never about censorship or policing speech in any manner,” DHS said in a statement.

This was in spite of the fact the board would have lent the resources and the bully pulpit the federal government enjoys to amplify the narrative it chooses in online discourse, and that it had chosen Jankowicz — who had once argued she, as a disinformation expert who was verified by Twitter, should be allowed to edit or provide context to other users tweets — to amplify it.

But never mind. Pop the champagne bottles, as so many opposed to the proposed board did.

“It’s a cause of momentary celebration that the Department of Homeland Security was forced by popular anger to ‘pause’ its Disinformation Board and the absurd Resistance cartoon they hired to run it,” independent journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted at the time.

The key word in that tweet may have been momentary.

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse, another body to address online “disinformation,” inter alia, with amorphous powers and a similarly vague purview to the Disinformation Governance Board.

Its name sounds a lot more neutered than the “Straight Outta 1984” moniker the DGB was slapped with. That said, the administration managed to find the one member of the distaff gender who might be less welcome in the job than Jankowicz was: Vice President Kamala Harris.

(Here at The Western Journal, we chronicled the disquieting nature of the proposed Disinformation Governance Board, from its inception to Jankowicz’s sudden resignation last month. We also noted how it could come back to life in a form very much like this. We’ll remain vigilant about the left’s attempts to punish what it deems “disinformation,” “misinformation” and “malinformation” — and you can help us by subscribing.)

That’s right, America. We could be seeing the Disinformation Governance Board 2.0, just led this time by Cap’n Cackle and a blue-ribbon panel of Biden Cabinet members, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Now, there are similarities and there are differences.

Just like the DGB, the powers and reach of the task force are more of a rough sketch than a final draft.

The DGB, you may recall, was intended to focus originally on Russian propaganda and “irregular migration.”

The task force, meanwhile, is supposed to be focused on “gender-based violence,” specifically against “[w]omen, adolescent girls, and LGBTQI+ individuals, who may be additionally targeted because of their race, ethnicity, religion, and other factors,” according to a White House memo.

The memo gave the task force until Dec. 13 to develop a “whole-of-government approach” to tackle the issue, which includes working with Big Tech to try to nip it in the bud.

“This affects all of us if it affects any one of us,” Harris said in remarks Thursday, according to a White House transcript. “And we therefore, all of us, have a responsibility to stand together to support those who have gone through this, but to also recognize they shouldn’t have to be alone fighting on this issue.”

“Hate has become so common on the Internet that, as a society, it’s kind of becoming normalized, and for users, some might say unavoidable,” she continued.

The vice president added that “recent events have also made it clear that we face new threats” — and while the context doesn’t make it clear what was being discussed, the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York were the clear inferences to be made from that statement.

Neither one of those, it’s worth noting, has the slightest whit to do with “women, adolescent girls, and LGBTQI+ individuals” specifically.

And, as the New York Post’s Steven Nelson said during Thursday’s White House media briefing, while reporters were told the task force would be different from the DGB, the memo specifically mentioned combatting “disinformation” as part of its mission.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre didn’t have any specific answers as to why it would be different from the DGB, saying she “was not on the background call” and that Nelson should talk to Harris’ team.

Further questions arise when one looks at where “disinformation” is mentioned in the memo.

The first mention: “Online harassment and abuse take many forms, including the non-consensual distribution of intimate digital images; cyberstalking; sextortion; doxing; malicious deep fakes; gendered disinformation; rape and death threats; the online recruitment and exploitation of victims of sex trafficking; and various forms of technology-facilitated intimate partner abuse.” [Emphasis added.]

Now, curious it would mention “online harassment” and “doxing.” That brings up whether the case of Taylor Lorenz would be covered.

Lorenz, you may remember, is the Washington Post reporter who doxed the founder of the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, opening her to death threats and other harassment. Lorenz was unapologetic about that — but here was the lachrymose journalist just a few weeks prior, crying during an interview when she talked about the online harassment she had received, in part because of doxing:

Guess which one of these is likely to draw the attention of the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse?

More ominously, we have the nebulous category of “gendered disinformation.” What does that include?

We obviously don’t know — which is interesting, because a lot of hot-button issues can fit under the aegis of this vague term.

An opinion on transgenderism that departs from liberal orthodoxy? The belief children shouldn’t be subjected to transgender treatments? The idea that men are born men and women are born women, with innate physical and psychological characteristics?

Those could all comfortably fit under the umbrella of “gendered disinformation.”

And that leads us to the equally problematic second mention of the word “disinformation.”

In a section where it described how the task force would “assess and address online harassment and abuse that constitute technology-facilitated gender-based violence,” the memo said it would work at “developing programs and policies to address online harassment, abuse, and disinformation campaigns targeting women and LGBTQI+ individuals who are public and political figures, government and civic leaders, activists, and journalists in the United States and globally” and “examining existing Federal laws, regulations, and policies to evaluate the adequacy of the current legal framework to address technology-facilitated gender-based violence.”

If views about gender or transgenderism that fall afoul of the left are covered under the deliberately nonspecific term “technology-facilitated gender-based violence,” one could theoretically interpret this as an invitation for the Biden administration to put its thumb on the scales of social media — and silence what little freedom is left to speak out on the issue on Silicon Valley’s tech platforms for good.

Now, is this the “Ministry of Truth” 2.0? It’s thoroughly unclear — but the writing on the wall isn’t an appealing augury.

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/ministry-truth-2-0-wh-launches-new-task-force-woman-charge-even-worse-jankowicz

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Have we reached an American Tipping Point?

In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called “The Tipping Point,” which has since been rolled into the conventional wisdom. The idea is that viral products start very small, gain new adherents, tap into a special something that relates to the fear of missing out, and the climb goes higher and higher until that one magic day when everyone has to have it. That’s the tipping point. The burden of the book is to demonstrate this thesis.

It works in reverse, too, and here we can draw on Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962). His book is more about failure than success. In his model, the orthodoxy that everyone accepts without question is challenged by a new way of thinking that is dismissed out of hand and censored. Its adherents are denounced as cranks.

Then reality begins to change the outlook. The real world gradually stops reflecting what the prevailing orthodoxy would predict. There are too many anomalies. Doubters appear and grow. Eventually it becomes unbearably obvious that the orthodoxy has flopped in its promise. It fails and its promoters gradually go away and its scions go into hiding.

The proponents of the orthodoxy never admit error, but their disappearance creates what he calls a pre-paradigmatic moment. It makes room for debate and argumentation over what will replace what failed and who or what will come to represent the new orthodoxy.

These stories of how ideas rise and fall apply not only to business and science, but also to economics and politics. In that sense, we’re certainly arriving at the pre-paradigmatic moment in many areas. The orthodoxy in science, politics, and economics is all failing at the same time and at a remarkable pace, so much so that it can’t help but disorient everyone.

There are some major events that signal this change, and they’ve all happened in the last half year or so.

First, after a year and a half of the preposterous attempt to “slow the spread,” “track and trace,” “flatten the curve,” “quarantine and isolate,” and otherwise do the scripted dance somehow to control that which is remarkably good at evading all control, COVID finally swept the whole of the American Northeast in the United States. For the first time, the respiratory virus hit the Zoom class that had been hiding in homes for 18 months.

It was obvious at this moment that the entire effort had been pointless and destructive. Every study that had pretended to correlate infection with distancing, masking, capacity restrictions, school closures, and vaccine mandates all went belly up. None of them were reproducible after this point. Fully 18 months of fake science was in tatters while the “heretics” who said lockdowns would never work were vindicated.

Nothing was more devastating than the realization that the vaccines don’t work in any of the ways we normally define what it means for a vaccine to work. They don’t prevent infection. They don’t stop transmission. What that means is the complete end of the public health rationale for vaccine mandates, or for getting vaccines at all.

For a small cohort of the population, they provided time-limited assistance against severity, but that’s on the clock before you have to get another and another, and that raises another problem of creating a compromised immune system. None of this is in dispute anymore. So much for the carnage of coercion, job losses, political division, and institutional upheaval they’ve created!

Second, the ferocious arrival of inflation this year has shocked everyone and infuriated the public like no other trend in my lifetime. It has devastated the Biden administration at the polls. Not even CNN is able to defend him anymore. And you have this ridiculous presidential spokesperson muttering gibberish that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and doing it in front of the television every single day. Not one reporter can figure out what she’s saying. It’s so incoherent that it’s not worth reporting.

Meanwhile, in the same way the Biden administration couldn’t control the virus, it can’t control inflation. That’s become perfectly obvious. Their only answer is to demonize the meat packers, shipping companies, and oil producers for not pumping enough and overcharging for their products. But this is the same administration that has waged a ruthless attack on meat, commerce, and oil for 18 months, as if they had no idea what the effect of that might be on the markets!

It truly boggles the mind.

Here’s a picture of how the Biden inflation has devastated commerce domestically and internationally. And notice the date of the change here: January 2021 is the turning point. There’s simply no way that the culpability can be assigned elsewhere. Even if the monetary roots of this inflation date back a year earlier, the administration did absolutely nothing either to prevent or repair this.

Third, a remarkable special election just took place in Texas. Republican Mayra Flores snatched a congressional seat from the Democratic Party. It’s a stunning win for the GOP. Flores herself is not a fancy Ivy Leaguer, but rather an immigrant who attended plain schools and began as a heroic health care worker—one of the front-line workers who was early on exposed to COVID. She was braving it out while the Zoom class elites were hiding.

As for her politics, let’s just say that she has mercifully avoided the woke virus. As an immigrant, she’s profoundly aware of how the immigration chaos in the border areas of Texas has violated people’s property rights and appears to be a deliberately constructed policy solely for the purpose of securing political control for the Democrats. In other words, this isn’t the immigration I’ve long championed: It’s a political ploy to game the political system.

Flores called it out and won the hearts of the whole district regardless of previous political allegiances. It’s a terrifying scene for the Democrats, raising the prospect not only of a full takeover of the House and Senate by Republicans, but even bringing about a rout so huge as to raise real questions about the party’s future.

Let’s put this all together. First, you have the failure of the official “science” that wrecked the country through lockdowns and mandates. Second, you have the failure of official “economics” that somehow thought it was fine to wage war on commerce and paper over it with new money from the Fed. Third, you have the failure of woke-based identity politics, which denies human volition based on biology such that certain “races” and certain genders are only allowed to think one way.

If one had failed, that would be notable. All three failing at once is beyond belief. It creates an awesome moment, a shattering of an orthodoxy that had been shoved down the throats of everyone, but which is now very obviously failing in every respect.

The political fallout will be the most conspicuous, but there’s much more at stake. It isn’t really about one party over another. This is the failing of an entire administrative state, that class of permanently employed bureaucrats that has taken over the management of science, society, and economy from the people and their representatives. That’s the paradigm that has failed. Now comes the pre-paradigmatic moment and the struggle for a new orthodoxy. Let us hope it’s freedom itself.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-american-tipping-point_4537705.html

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A welfare explosion in Australi

It is one of life’s sad realities that, as soon as there is an attempt to improve the population’s welfare, unscrupulous individuals take advantage of the best of intentions.

Our welfare system could be said to discourage work and self-reliance, it also tests the ability to pay for it.

Over the years, we have seen solo parent support encourage more pregnancies for financial gain, without financial input from fathers. The unemployment benefit was established as temporary support for those out of work, for some it has become a permanent and sometimes multi-generational way of life; while jobs in agriculture and hospitality are unfilled, we have an unemployment rate which, although temporarily improved, is high by OECD comparison.

Accident Compensation is another scheme that has become blighted by ‘permanent invalids’, who seem capable of mowing the lawn whilst incapable of work. The cost of aged care continues to rise, whilst their children expect the government to pay the bills – and complain when they consider care to be substandard. Welfare demands are still higher in the Aboriginal population, with average benefits at $40,000 per capita, compared with $20,000 for non-Aboriginals.

The cost of these good intentions has risen rapidly, from $160 billion in 2017, to currently $200 billion, with an increasing proportion funded by the federal government.

The latest addition to the welfare bill is the NDIS, a scheme introduced by the Gillard government designed to support those under 65 with significant, permanent disability.

The scheme was initially trialled in 2013, in Tasmania for young adults, in South Australia for children, in Victoria for general groups, and in New South Wales for older adults. It was formally launched in July 2016 and, by year’s end, covered 30,000. West Australia joined in 2020.

The initial cost was estimated at $4 billion for the year 2016-17, with funding provided by an increase of half a per cent in the Medicare levy. It was planned to cover Musculoskeletal conditions, cancer, visual and hearing impairment, and neurological conditions such as stroke, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injury.

In August 2017 mental health disorders, including anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and autism, became eligible; by November that year, the number of enrolments had increased to 120,000.

At the completion of enrolment, it was estimated that 400,000 would be supported at a cost of $14 billion. By 2019-20, the first full year of operation, the cost had ballooned to $22 billion (1.1 per cent of GDP). By June 2021 there were 463,000 claimants, now 480,000, with an average individual cost increasing to $71,000.

Forward estimates now suggest a spiralling increase to $42 billion by 2024-25 (1.5 per cent of GDP), and $46 by the following year; future figures up to $60 billion have been suggested, with as many as 860,000 supported. The government is rightly concerned as to why this has occurred, and what can be done to control costs.

One aspect of the increase is the increasing inclusion of behavioural disorders, once considered the result of bad parenting, now reclassified into the psychiatric domain as new conditions are invented. Autism is a clear-cut diagnosis, autism spectrum diagnosis in Australia increased from 30,000 cases in 2003, to 60,000 by 2009 and 120,000 by 2012; as diagnostic boundaries expand, the latest estimate is 230,000 cases (approximately 1 per cent of the population), with around half being children.

The same increase has been noted in other countries: in Canada, it expanded from 4 per 10,000 in 2003, to 20 per 10,000 and by 2020 to 1 per cent (100 per 10,000). In the UK, the incidence was 5 per 10,000 in 1990, now increased to 1 per cent of children and 2 per cent of the general population. The estimated incidence in India remains low at 3 per 10,000 (0.03 per cent), and worldwide 60 per 10,000 (0.6 per cent). A recent Japanese study suggests this increase in incidence may be a consequence of exposing children to excess screen time at a young age; the study also revealed that 90 per cent of 1-year-olds were exposed to between 1 and 4 hours daily. The WHO has advised total bans on use in the very young.

Projections are the total number here will continue to rise, to 1.5 per cent, 350,000 cases, as diagnostic criteria are refined and milder degrees are included. With no specific test the diagnosis is subjective and, as milder degrees are added, the autism spectrum becomes a major cost. The proportion claiming NDIS support because of mental or behavioural problems has progressively increased, reaching 66,000 by the end of 2021 and predicted 90,000 by 2030; other, new psychological disorders have the potential to add further to the numbers.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCDC) is now estimated at 3 per cent of the Australian population, around 500,000; attention deficit disorder (ADHD) is now found in 5 per cent, and Asperger’s syndrome has now been reclassified as part of the autism spectrum. The latest behavioural problems to add to the diagnostic alphabet are oppositional defiance disorder (ODD) and conduct disorder (CD).

It seems that bad behaviour, as well as being a problem in the classroom, is becoming a cost to the taxpayer and a source of income for some parents and psychologists.

The latest conditions are not, as yet, included in the NDIS list, but parents of children with ADHD are being encouraged to explore the additional diagnosis of the autism spectrum to qualify for payment. As of June 2019, one-third of those funded by NDIS for psychological disorders had autism spectrum as their primary diagnosis; evidence is accumulating that the explosion in numbers is due to young children having excess screen time exposure, instead of parental input. Care now involves psychology, counselling, and even art and music therapy.

Since the Covid pandemic disability diagnoses have soared with up to one in five now eligible for assistance. Claims relate to ‘social-emotional’ disability (7 per cent), cognitive disability conditions (12 per cent), and physical disability (3 per cent). Since the start of the pandemic, an extra 43,000 children have been added, a 12 per cent increase; the increase in ‘lockdown’ Victoria was even more pronounced at 17 per cent.

Another explanation for the cost blowout is the increasing severity of disability classification, with individual payments increasing by an average 12.5 per cent annually.

After an increase of 23 per cent in 2 years, the federal government has become concerned about spiralling costs: attempts to rein in costs have reduced per capita spending from $71,200 in 2020 to $68,500 in 2021.

The states, (who had historically been responsible for the disabled) had initially been responsible for 50 per cent; their contribution had been limited to a 4 per cent annual increase, meaning the federal proportion is rising to 60 per cent of the total.

Following a revue this year, it wanted to introduce an independent assessment of both diagnosis and severity of both current and future eligibility. This review and subsequent planned legislation, has inevitably produced an outcry from the welfare lobby groups, as well as the left of politics who are always happy to spend other people’s money. A simple (but unlikely) solution would be to revert to the original premise and exclude psychiatric disorders.

Welfare and disability advocates demand yet more support for the NDIS, and even suggest it saves money! Currently, the Australian government spends around 40 per cent of GDP gross domestic product, with around half that amount spent on welfare. The leaders in welfare are the Swedes at around 25 per cent, now overtaken by the French who spend 30 per cent of their GDP on welfare. Not only has the proportion spent on welfare increased, but the total spending is now increasingly supported by borrowing and accumulated debt; this has increased from about 40 per cent of GDP to nearly 100 per cent since the Covid lockdowns.

Future projections of NDIS costs are heading toward $60 billion, with a new Labor government the problem remains the same- how to pay for it. They need to grasp the nettle and assess the worth of this and other welfare schemes – ultimately, we must accept what we can afford, rather than what we want.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/ndis-used-or-abused/ ?

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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