As Leftists Inflame Global Culture War . . . What Can Touch Their Hearts And Consciences To Change?
By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The political left wing continues to force its agenda around the world, from Washington, D.C., to France to Brazil to Arizona. What tools are at hand for other people to push back? Touching hearts and consciences? Rejecting arrogant politicians? Praying and marching?
After Abby Johnson fled her job as the manager of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Texas in 2009, she told what it was like there.
Although abortion clinic workers may euphemize the dismembered infants as “products of conception” or POCS, Johnson said she heard them called “pieces of children.”
With the same macabre attempt at humor, there was a place called “the nursery.” That’s where the dismembered infants’ bodies would be reassembled, in order to check that all the pieces had been removed, and none were left inside the mother to cause infection.
One day, unable to bear this, Johnson got in her car and drove to the nearby office of “40 Days for Life,” the fledgling pro-life organization that would grow worldwide whose members had been thoughtfully talking to her through the fence by the sidewalk at the abortion clinic.
Johnson knew these were people she could speak with, and now she told them she was leaving Planned Parenthood.
She later wrote and spoke often about her experiences of a world unknown to society at large — a world with facts ignored by promoters of permissive abortion. She didn’t leave it because some demonstrator dressed up like the Grim Reaper, Johnson said, but “because God was softening my heart and because the sidewalk advocates I talked to were kind and loving.”
One day, Johnson said, she had looked out her window at the abortion clinic and saw among the praying pro-lifers a nun dressed in her full religious garb who “just fell to her knees and she was just weeping. And I was really shaken by that because I just remember thinking, this is very real for her, in a way that I don’t even understand.”
The nun had seen a couple driving away who’d been at the clinic. A June 2020 article at the “LiveAction” pro-life website said, “The visible grief the nun showed over the couple’s aborted baby tugged at Johnson’s conscience. Johnson was dedicated to serving Planned Parenthood and selling women abortions.”
Pro-lifers’ goal not only is to save preborn babies and their mothers from abortion, but also to convert workers in the abortion industry, and the world beyond that.
That can be a difficult line to walk. Pro-lifers don’t want people to think permissive abortion is a minor matter, or just a rhetorical question. They want the pro-abortion side, like Abby Johnson, to feel they can leave behind a world centered on slaughtering millions of defenseless infants.
But, like Johnson’s interior dispositions, they need to have a heart open to being softened and a conscience that can be troubled. Not every abortion employee walked away like Johnson. She went on to found a nonprofit organization to help them leave called “And Then There Were None” (abortionworker.com).
It describes its mission: “To provide financial, emotional, spiritual and legal support to anyone wishing to leave the abortion industry.”
The abortion industry often euphemizes. It’s determined to impose its environment on everyone, but often retreats to evasive language — as if it’s ashamed of itself — like “choice” and “reproductive freedom.”
During the 2022 midterm campaign in Arizona, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs refused to debate both her Democratic primary-election opponent and her Republican general-election foe. “Low profile” might have been Hobbs’ middle names.
Hobbs tried to avoid letting people know much of what to expect of her — as Democrat Joe Biden had done when running for president in 2020.
But, like Biden revealing a sharply leftist agenda once he was declared president, Hobbs launched her governorship with a radical flair after massive voter suppression in Maricopa County on November 8 supposedly gave Hobbs a narrow win over GOP nominee Kari Lake.
On January 10 Phoenix radio talk host James T. Harris (KFYI, 550 AM) said Hobbs seeks culture war, although starting such a war is what conservatives are told to avoid.
In the text of her state of the state address as governor on January 9 to enumerate issues, Hobbs emphasized permissive abortion even before she presented her views on Arizona’s serious water problems.
“Now, ensuring a strong, safe future for Arizona means defending the freedoms of all of its residents,” Hobbs said. “I refuse to stand by and do nothing as my daughter — or anyone’s daughter — now has fewer rights today than I did growing up.”
In her weird way, Hobbs was telling the state that she wants the freedom to see her own grandchildren aborted.
Little Jacinta being shredded? Little Jason being poisoned? She didn’t want them anyway.
Carrying on with euphemisms and lies, Hobbs said, “An overwhelming majority of Arizonans — more than 90 percent, in fact — believe abortion should be legal. It is time we all heed the message of the people of this state and meet this moment to ensure that we can always make our own health-care decisions.”
Waving her rhetorical fist, the lady who barely could talk about her views before Election Day now declared to the state:
“My administration will always protect reproductive freedom for all Arizonans. I will not support, and I will use every power of the governor’s office to stop, any legislation or action that attacks, strips, or delays the liberty or inherent right of any individual to decide what’s best for themselves or their families.”
Then Planned Parenthood’s view slipped out that certain people’s babies are undesirable. Said Hobbs: “My budget will also match the federal Title X money our state receives to provide reproductive health services and family planning medication, bringing our total to more than $12 million. This step will increase the program’s impact here in Arizona and for significantly more low-income women.”
What a change from the opening lines of her talk, where Hobbs asked to “have candid discussions about the issues facing our beloved state and how we can work together to ensure a better future for every family and community.”
Only after her abortion screed did Hobbs turn to serious problems about “our state’s most precious resource — water.”
During cultural change, when did the abomination of the massive dismemberment of preborn infants — even a person’s own grandchildren — become an activity for someone like Hobbs to relish, applaud, and promote?
Hobbs ducked this topic like most others during her campaign because, one guesses, she was ashamed of it — until she subsequently felt empowered and puffed up to threaten the very existence of the next generation of Arizonans.
Like the elderly, doddering Biden, Hobbs seemed to think her existence was far more precious than defenseless babies’.
(As a sidelight, Hobbs’s voice sounds like a teenager’s. Sometimes people go to speech coaches to correct impediments. Could someone teach Hobbs to sound like an adult?)
A few Republican legislators in the chamber for her address stood and turned their backs on Hobbs or walked out.
On January 9 the Arizona Freedom Caucus issued a news release about its members walking out that began: “As was foreseeable, Katie Hobbs utilized the time-honored State of the State Address to once again promote her radical, woke policy initiatives, rather than address the profoundly serious concerns that Arizonans have regarding the political and fiscal realities of daily life.”
It continued: “On the heels of an election riddled with violations of Arizona law and that once again left Arizonans disenfranchised and lacking confidence in our state’s local governments, Katie Hobbs has now affirmed what many reasonably feared: This governor has no intention of using her office to correct existing corruption and restore the faith of Arizonans in their state and local governments.”
It quoted Arizona Freedom Caucus Chairman Jake Hoffman, a state senator, that caucus members and Republican legislators “will fight her extremism every step of the way.”
State Rep. Joseph Chaplik, the caucus’ secretary, said: “A governor who insists on far-left activism, even when it imperils the very people she is sworn to serve, does not deserve the unquestioning deference of legislators. The Arizona Freedom Caucus will never back down in the face of Hobbs’ attempts to implement her fascist agenda in our state.”
An “Independent
Investigation”
A radical like Hobbs has to be shown she doesn’t rule the roost, and needn’t expect to. Pressure works. Look here.
Although the corrupt Maricopa County political establishment had laughed off massive voter suppression against Republicans here on November 8, the county Board of Supervisors edged toward trying to ease some of the public resentment on January 6 by announcing an “independent investigation” of some election issues.
A joint statement by supervisors’ Chairman Bill Gates and Vice Chairman Clint Hickman said: “This Board of Supervisors has always been committed to continuous improvement. When things don’t work, we find out why. Today we are announcing an important step in our efforts to get to the bottom of the printer issues that affected some Vote Centers on Election Day last November.”
Hardly inspiring confidence, the statement said the head of the investigation is Ruth McGregor — an elderly veteran Democrat who once served as chief justice on the Arizona Supreme Court.
The statement said, “Justice McGregor will hire a team of independent experts to find out why the printers that read ballots well in the August Primary had trouble reading some ballots while using the same settings in the November General. Our voters deserve nothing less.”
Well, good luck with another coverup.
Meanwhile, on January 9 talkingbiznews.com reported The Wall Street Journal announced that its reporter Eliza Collins was taking over a new Journal beat to cover politics in Arizona. Her background with Politico and USA Today didn’t suggest she would be breaking with media narratives on the scene here.
Both The New York Times and The Washington Post already had beats that seemed shaped to portray Arizona as a crazy conservative place. Will Hobbs’ love of permissive abortion make them smile at the Grand Canyon State?
A Potemkin Village Visit
On January 9 Fox News’ Tucker Carlson took a look at some hotspots around the globe, and how they’re all aimed to hurt their nations’ own people.
Carlson showed a video of a huge demonstration in Paris over that weekend protesting Frenchmen being starved because of high energy costs but, he said, was ignored by most media. The energy crisis was due to intentional damaging “climate change” policies that Joe Biden supports, Carlson said.
He also showed videos of Brazilians protesting left-wing rule by recently installed President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was maneuvered back into office after criminal conviction and is trying to turn Brazil into another Venezuela.
Lula’s presidential path sounds much like Biden’s, with polls showing him with a supposedly unbeatable lead that didn’t stand up, then being inaugurated as reportedly the oldest man to hold that nation’s presidency.
After weeks of peaceful protests throughout Brazil against Lula stealing the election from conservative incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, some agents provocateurs reportedly set off strife in the capital city of Brasilia so that Lula’s rule could strike out against them.
Carlson also showed videos of civil war in Mexico between cartels and the army, including near the U.S. border, that media often ignore.
For the first time in his presidency, Biden made a brief, tightly controlled trip to a U.S. city bordering Mexico, El Paso, on January 8, which critics likened to a Potemkin village visit, a reference to the creation of an exhibition to leave a false impression of better conditions.
Although 1,000 illegal immigrants reportedly were nearby who could have provided an embarrassing conversation for Biden, he supposedly couldn’t reach out to them.
Critics said Biden eventually felt forced to go to the border because Republicans had won a majority in the U.S. House for this congressional session and would hold hearings right at the border.
Meanwhile, the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors controlled immigration, headlined on January 9, “United Nations to Hand Out Hundreds of Millions in Cash to U.S.-Bound Immigrants in 2023.”
Border lawbreaking never seems to lack incentives.
