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About theartfuldilettante

The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.

Is there a Deep State ?

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As a former intelligence officer, I find it amusing to read articles in the mainstream media that blithely report how the latest international outrages are undoubtedly the work of CIA and the rest of the U.S. government’s national security alphabet soup. The recurring claim that the CIA is somehow running the world by virtue of a vast conspiracy that includes the secret intelligence agencies of a number of countries, using blackmail and other inducements to corrupt vulnerable politicians and opinion makers, has entered into the DNA of journalists worldwide, frequently without any evidence that the current crop of spies is capable of doing anything more complicated than getting out of bed in the morning.

One problem with the theory about total global dominance through espionage is the sheer logistics of it all. Directing political and economic developments in two hundred nations simultaneously must require a lot of space and a large staff. Is there a huge office hidden in Langley? Or the Pentagon? Or in the White House West Wing itself? Or is it in one of the secure facilities that have been popping up like mushrooms just off of the Dulles Toll Road in Herndon Virginia?

To provide evidence that intelligence agencies extend their tentacles just about everywhere, the other claim that is nearly always made is that all former spooks are part of the conspiracy, as once you learn the secret handshake to join CIA, NSA or the FBI you never stop being “one of them.” Well, that might be true in some cases but the majority of former spooks are quite happy to be “former,” and one might also observe that many voices in the anti-war movement, such as it is, come from intelligence, law enforcement or military backgrounds. Of course, the conspiracy theorists will explain that away by claiming that it is a conspiracy within a conspiracy, making the dissidents little better than double agents or gatekeepers who are put in place to make sure that the opposition doesn’t become too effective.

Given the fact that how the so-called American “Deep State” actually gets together and plots is unknown, one would have to concede that it is an organization without much structure, unlike the original Turkish Deep State (Derin Devlet), which coined the phrase, that actually met and had centralized planning. I would suggest that the problem is one of definitions and it also helps to know how the national security state is structured and what its legitimate mission is. The CIA, for example, employs about 20,000 people, nearly all of whom work in various divisions that collect information (spying), analysis, technology and also are divided into staffs that work transnationally on issues like terrorism, narcotics, and nuclear proliferation. The overwhelming majority of those employees have political views and vote but there is a consensus that what their work entails is apolitical. The actual politics of how policy comes out the other end is confined to a very small group at the top, some of whom are themselves political appointees.

To be sure, one can and probably should oppose the policies of regime change that the Agency is engaged in worldwide but there is one important consideration that has to be understood. Those policies are set by the country’s civilian leadership (president, secretary of state and national security council) and they are imposed on CIA by its own political leadership. The Agency does not hold referenda among its employees to determine which foreign policy option is preferable any more than soldiers in the 101st Airborne are consulted when they receive orders to deploy.

Nearly all current and former intelligence officers that I know are, in fact, opposed to the politics of U.S. global dominance that have been pretty much in place since 9/11, most particularly as evidenced by the continued conflict with Russia, the ramping up of aggression with China, and the regime change policies relating to Syria, Iran and Venezuela. Those officers often consider the invasions and exercise of “maximum pressure” to have been failures. Those policies were supported by truculent language, sanctions and displays of military readiness by the Trump Administration but it now appears clear that they will all be continued in one form or another under President Joe Biden, likely to include even more aggression against Russia through proxies in Ukraine and Georgia.

The officers engaged in such operations also observe that regime change has basically come out of the closet since 2001. George W. Bush announced that there was a “new sheriff in town” and the gloves would be coming off. Things that the intelligence agencies used to do are now done right out in the open, using military resources against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria while the biggest change of all, in Ukraine in 2014, was largely engineered by Victoria Nuland at the State Department. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was also active in Russia supporting opposition parties until the Kremlin forced them to leave the country.

So, it is fair to say that the Deep State is not a function of either the CIA or the FBI, but at the same time the involvement of John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey in the plot to destroy Donald Trump is disturbing, as the three men headed the Agency, the Office of National Intelligence and Bureau. They appear to have played critical leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what they may have done would have been either explicitly or implicitly authorized by the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, and others in his national security team.

It is now known that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan created a secret interagency Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with Clapper, Brennan fabricated the narrative that “Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.” Brennan and Clapper promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and substantively different even though the “evidence” produced to support that claim is weak to nonexistent.

I would, nevertheless, argue that their behavior, though it exploited intelligence resources, was not intrinsic to the organizations that they led, that the three of them were part and parcel of the real Deep State, which consists of a consensus view on running the country that is held by nearly all of the elements that together make up the American Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City. It should come as no surprise that those government officials who are complicit in the process are often personally rewarded with highly paid sinecure jobs in financial services, which they know nothing about, when they “retire.”

The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. Even though it does not actually meet in secret, it does operate through relationships that are not transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity will be exposed. One notes that while the Deep State is mentioned frequently in the national media there has been little effort to identify its components and how it operates.

Viewed in that fashion, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country and are even able to coopt those who are ostensibly dedicated to keeping the country safe becomes much more plausible without denigrating the many honest people who are employed by the national security agencies. The Deep State conspirators don’t have to meet to plot as they all understand very well what has to be done to maintain their supremacy. That is the real danger. The Biden Administration will surely demonstrate over the next several months that the Deep State is still with us and more powerful than ever as it operates both inside and outside the government itself. And the real danger comes from the Democrats now in charge, who are if anything more given to playing with consensus politics that involve phony threats than were the Republicans.

Philip Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.

Bravo, Rand Paul

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Bravo, Senator Rand Paul. We’re supposed to blindly follow Fauci the Quack, because he’s a political animal who shapes his science according to political winds. Yet when Rand Paul, a physician himself, counters with ACTUAL science and medicine about the absurdity of wearing masks and locking down even after vaccinations, he’s greeted with righteous stammers and incoherent stutters. Although election integrity is gone and Rand Paul can never be President, at least, for the moment, we still have a few brilliant embers of rationality and dissension in the former republic of America.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

If You’re Thinking About the 2022 and 2024 Elections, You’re in Denial

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It’s fascinating to watch denial.

I’m talking about denial by the good guys, the lovers of liberty — not the Communists and the socialists.

Lovers of freedom now talk eagerly of the 2022 and 2024 elections. Can Republicans take back the House and Senate? Will Trump run in 2024? Or will another prominent Republican, such as Florida’s governor?

To hear people talk, you’d think the fraud of the 2020 election never happened. You’d think they’re all confident in the integrity of elections, the same elections that gave us Joe Biden as an occupying ruler. As if nothing ever happened.

I understand that in human beings, denial serves a purpose. To a great extent, our subconscious minds won’t let us accept the awful, horrible truth of a profound loss. We all go through denial in the early stages of a devastating or life-altering loss, such as the death of a loved one. It’s a similar, devastating loss to lose your liberty, when you — and generations before you, in the United States — could always count on a good degree of freedom.

However, in cases like the death of a loved one, you still must confront the absence of the lost person every hour of the day. The denial helps soften the blow. But it doesn’t give you a free pass to pretend the lost person is still here.

Similarly, kidding yourself that elections even matter any longer, after what the leftist media and oligarchy pulled off in 2020 — well, that’s truly unhealthy. It’s like pretending the dead person is still alive.

You can counter, “What else are we supposed to do?” That’s kind of like saying, “Well, reality is terrible. So what else am I to do, other than get drunk every day, or abuse heroin?” Or, “What else am I supposed to do? I miss my spouse. I wish she wasn’t dead. So I have no choice other than to pretend she’s still alive.”

Whatever the solution to the loss of our liberty, self-deceit is not the answer. I’m not obliged to GIVE you an answer — that is, the alternative to self-delusion — when arguing that self-delusion is never a good idea. Even if we have no answers, self-delusion will never be an answer. Closing your mind to reality is not the way to figure out what to do.

I don’t know what’s going to become of our former republic. I don’t know what’s going to happen to those of us who dissent. So far, the issues are mask mandates and partial, indirect censorship by the government through compliant tech giants. In the near future, the issues will get tougher. There will be vaccination requirements. And gun confiscation. And deplatforming, i.e., being run out by your banks or credit card companies, or your jobs, for failing to appear woke. And outright censorship, perhaps even gulags or jail sentences for dissenters, as aides to Bernie Sanders — now the mainstream of the ruling Democratic Party — have openly recommended. The people who recommended these gulags are sitting in government offices in D.C, or are listened to by people who do. They’re not fringe figures, like they were even 5 or ten years ago. They have real power. And they know they’re staying in power. There will be no red wave, not if they pull off what they pulled off in 2020 and probably before then.

You don’t have to be paranoid to see these things coming. All of the known facts support it. President Trump is not only out of the White House; he’s effectively silenced. They will get him into prison, if they can, and with American Communists holding sway even over the U.S. Supreme Court (7-2), they will probably succeed.

Even if most former Trump voters and honest Republicans/non-leftists are mostly in denial, the dictators on the other side suffer from no such delusions. They know they have pretty close to a guarantee of retaining power — well, forever. But they’re not complacent about it. They’re actually quite afraid. And frightened dictators are the worst kind. They fear losing their power and will justify anything — absolutely anything — to hold on to it, as well as expand it. You see how they’re going after President Trump and anyone who went to the rally in D.C. on January 6. They mean it.

Self-delusion is not the answer. By pretending that the elections of 2022 or 2024 even matter, we’re bypassing the very important task of figuring out what our options really are — including, but not limited to, things like secession and mass civil disobedience. Clear your heads of the denial drivel so you can figure out what to do for yourself, because you’re now living under a dictatorship.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Indoctrination: The Left’s Attack on our Public Schools

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To learn more about the Freedom Center’s campaign to halt indoctrination in K-12 schools, please visit our website, www.stopk12indoctrination.org. To subscribe to the Stop K-12 Indoctrination newsletter CLICK HERE. To donate to our campaign to stop K-12 Indoctrination CLICK HERE.

Our public schools have traditionally been the cornerstone of our country’s democratic values, teaching students how to think, not what to think. But in recent years, these most important institutions of instruction have been subverted by left-wing radicals.

Today’s K-12 classroom is a war zone. The left has used its control of teachers’ unions, teacher training schools in the universities, and textbook publishing to launch an all-out effort to indoctrinate students as young as kindergarten age with “correct thinking” on subjects ranging from the perdurability of white racism and the “fluidity” of gender to the evils of “Islamophobia” and the coming man-made Armageddon of climate change.

To combat this onslaught, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has initiated a campaign called Stop K-12 Indoctrination. Its fundamental principle is that students should be taught how to think, not what to think. Its centerpiece is a Code of Ethics that works, in collaboration with state legislators, to forbid teachers from using the classroom to advance an ideological agenda. Its flagship publication is a weekly newsletter, under the editorship of Sara Dogan, that reports from the educational battlefront.

The subjects covered by the Stop K-12 Indoctrination newsletter show the extent of the left’s penetration into American public education and the ambition of its indoctrination effort:

• The teacher in a Virginia high school fired for refusing to use male pronouns for a biologically female student who identifies as transgender.

• The teacher in Janesville, Wisconsin, who showed a leftist video in class titled “Why the Rich Love Destroying Unions” produced by the al Jazeera Media Network.

• The text assigned by the public high school in Newton Massachusetts funded by the Saudi Arabian oil company Aramco that states, among other things, that there is a “Hollywood Jewish campaign” to portray Arabs negatively in films and that Jerusalem is “Palestine’s capital.”

• The textbook for first graders in Elk Grove California that glorified California Governor Gavin Newsom, then running for office, as a “Champion for Peoples’ Rights” because of his support for gay marriage.

• The public charter school in Atlanta that dropped the morning recital of the Pledge of Allegiance in favor of a “Wolf Pack Chant” because the Pledge is insufficiently “inclusive.”

Indoctrination: The Left’s Attack on our Public Schools is a compendium of these and several dozen other tales which reveal the devastating scope of the Left’s corruption and takeover of our once-proud public school tradition.

These are educational horror stories. But they show that the left’s attempted takeover of the nation’s public schools can succeed only if it is allowed to take place in the dark. That is why the Stop K-12 Indoctrination newsletter is so important. The steady light it shines on this sinister effort is both a disinfectant and also a battle cry for concerned parents, education advocacy groups, and state officials who have the ability to ensure that our nation’s classrooms are places of objective and unbiased learning.

COVID Relief: The Biggest Raw Deal in Human History

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COVID relief? What a joke!

The government takes money from productive, reopened states like Texas and Florida — and funnels that money to forever-closed states like New York, California and Massachusetts.

So the productive states are paying for the non-productive, shut down states … as a reward for political loyalty.

It’s economically insane. It’s morally obscene.

What’s in this for the red states? How is supporting New Yorkers and Californians indefinitely in the interest of Texans and Floridians?

And what about the red portions of blue states? New York and California are filled with red counties. The recall effort of the fascist governor in California wouldn’t exist without those red counties.

At what point do red states — and red parts of blue states — say, “enough is enough”? We’re talking about the worst raw deal in human history.

Democrats are unaccountable sociopaths. The more they get away with, the more they will attempt to get away with. That’s how it works. On our current path, they WILL be coming for your guns, your private savings accounts, your property, and anything else they feel like seizing. They have no boundaries, no scruples, no respect for rights or rule of law…they possess NO virtues whatsoever. All they care about is what they can get away with; and they’re getting away with EVERYTHING, so far.

Have millions of Americans forgotten how to be angry?

It’s unsustainable, and it can’t stand.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Cancel Public Schools

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Afriend who volunteers at a Sunday school in Harlem for low-income children called me the other day, greatly upset: She had been working with a pair of students who failed to learn the assigned reading, which was a short psalm or a prayer. She thought perhaps the fourth graders, a boy and a girl, weren’t applying themselves. The truth was much worse: The two children turned out to be illiterate.

Their public school teachers had passed them, grade by grade, into the fourth, and no one had ever taught them how to sound out words. Their teachers graded spelling tests and assignments—they knew they were passing kids who couldn’t read.

The two fourth graders didn’t understand words like “will” or “firm.” They couldn’t read them, and they didn’t know what they meant. Yet these children were intelligent. They were eager—touchingly, pathetically eager. And by the end of the hour with my friend they had made tangible progress. But what is one hour, compared with 35 hours every week in public school?

The New York City public school system spends $28,800 per student per year—more than anywhere else in the world. A brand-new public school teacher with a master’s degree and zero prior experience starts at $65,000 a year, plus benefits. And the children can’t read.

It’s little wonder that children become disaffected, bellicose—what we popularly call “troubled.” Little wonder that they turn to drugs and gangs and crime. When material isn’t taught well, and when the children can’t understand, they often blame themselves. They feel stupid, then resentful. Before long they’ve decided that education isn’t for them, and soon they’ll be lost forever—their potential to live happy, decent, productive, and socially healthy lives is destroyed. Their teachers and the school system are the destroyers.

The same friend of mine told me one day how another of her Harlem kids, a seven-year-old girl, had come to her in tears: The girl’s school teacher had asked everyone in class to say what they wanted to be when they grew up. The girl had said she wanted to be a mother. Her (female) teacher said her choice was wrong, apparently making her feel that it was not just incorrect, but morally unacceptable. The teacher actually made the child stand in front of the class as an example of a bad girl. No wonder she was in tears—her childhood dreams were taken away from her, and she was humiliated for having them.

This incident is not simply a questionable decision on the teacher’s part, nor is it a bad yet defensible judgment. It is child abuse. It is criminal behavior. The teacher should be in prison. She definitely shouldn’t be a teacher. And yet, given the lifelong protection she enjoys as a union member in the public school system, she will most likely go on doing her share to ruin the lives of dozens or hundreds or thousands more children—children from poor neighborhoods with no one to protect them. Children who are being sentenced to permanent lower-class status and a life of menial work, to depression and frustration and worse, by the sick, demented, and obscenely expensive criminal enterprise that is the New York City public school system.

New York politicians may be corrupt, and they may be terrible people, but they are smart enough and care enough about their own kids to keep them far, far away from the public schools whose unions they pad with our money. They know perfectly well public expenditure on education has nothing to do with education, and is simply a means of buying power. In a sensible world, they would be on trial for racketeering.

I’ve suggested before in this column that politicians should be forced to send their own children to bottom-performing public schools. This might get the schools to produce better results, but it wouldn’t do anything to cure the basic corruption of the system.

If you instead gave each family in New York $29,000 per year per child to spend on their kids’ education, you can bet they’d come up with something vastly better. For one thing, they could send the children to private school, where the average annual tuition in New York is about $19,000. But there are more creative solutions as well: Three or four families might group together and hire themselves a first-rate tutor. Slightly larger groups could form simple one-room schools, for say 35 kids: There would be enough to hire high-quality teachers for every subject. Or the parents could do what an increasing number of better-off families do, and educate their kids at home in cooperation with other families.

But homeschooling, especially without that money, won’t be an option for poor families where both parents work long hours or for single-parent households. This is precisely the situation public education was supposed to provide against, of course. The failure is not just New York’s: Public education is a failure in every city across the entire country.

A Cato Institute paper years ago made the excellent point that the creation of the modern welfare state under FDR did more than to destroy a certain spirit of independence on which Americans prided themselves: It also destroyed countless clubs, charities, social groups, and church organizations. The private money that had funded these organizations, Americans’ donations and gifts to charity, was confiscated by the government in the form of taxes. It was the first and greatest step towards unraveling a society based on faith, hope, and charity and replacing it with a society based on bureaucracy. Again, Marxism is a dictatorship of the bureaucrats.

Every child should have an education. It does not follow that we need public schools. And in practice, public schools do not educate. It’s easy enough to see this from the national literacy and numeracy rates. The more schools spend, the less they succeed in teaching. This is without even touching on the dastardly political indoctrination that exposes our children to the socialist biases of their hardly-less-ignorant teachers.

If you were to abolish the Department of Education (as the brilliant BBC series Yes, Prime Minister suggested back in the 1980s) and also abolish every single public school in the nation, education would not cease. On the contrary, it might actually start happening. You would see, in short order, hundreds of new schools funded by donations both of money and of time—charity schools in the most basic and most important form of charity. These would be schools certified not by the government but by a demonstrable ability to teach children. (Demonstrable, that is, to the parents themselves, not to a corrupt licensing board.

As politicians remind us by keeping their own kids out of public schools, as well as by avoiding public transportation, public healthcare, and public services generally, we do not trust the government with anything we take seriously. No one who has enough money to make the choice lets the government educate his kids or fix his teeth or get him to work on time.

An investor I knew used to say that if you’re looking to invest in an ice cream shop, you don’t start by looking at the balance sheets. You start by tasting the ice cream. Well, the government officials who run our schools don’t want to taste their own ice cream. They know what it would taste like. As an investor in your child’s education, that should tell you everything you need to know.

If we took the future of the nation seriously, we would end public schools tomorrow. We would then take our young children, sit them down with the first and simplest of McGuffey’s English textbooks from the 1880s, and teach them to read.

Dan Gelertner

Ayn Rand on Minority Rights

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The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

The defense of minority rights is acclaimed today, virtually by everyone, as a moral principle of a high order. But this principle, which forbids discrimination, is applied by most of the “liberal” intellectuals in a discriminatory manner: it is applied only to racial or religious minorities. It is not applied to that small, exploited, denounced, defenseless minority which consists of businessmen.

Yet every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen.

Where’s Our 1776 Moment ?

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America desperately needs a 1776 moment. And soon. Today’s villains are so much more depraved and insane than anything the colonists faced back in 1776. I don’t know what it will take for Americans to realize they no longer live in even a slightly free, remotely rational society. Denial is still rampant, and I know denial is part of the human mechanism for coping. Yet we are on an entirely unsustainable path. What will the tipping point be? Or will there be one? My guess is that it will happen when they come for the guns, and propose the seizure of retirement accounts or homes for the good of the collective. Or maybe when the currency loses all value.

Don’t you dare say you weren’t warned.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Wisdom

Democrats Want Vaccine Passports to Attend Concerts, but no Voter ID

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While Democrats aim to eliminate voter ID laws under the 800-page election bill H.R. 1, also known as the “For the People Act,” they contrarily flirt with the idea of mandating citizens show proof of COVID-19 vaccine or testing results.

According to H.R. 1, states are to be prohibited from requiring voter identification, including things like witness signatures, and notary stamps. This would ultimately overturn laws in 36 states, as noted by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Republican attorneys general, led by Indiana’s Todd Rokita, wrote in a letter to Congress in early March that the bill would erode faith in our elections and systems of governance.

“As introduced, the Act betrays several Constitutional deficiencies and alarming mandates that, if passed, would federalize state elections and impose burdensome costs and regulations on state and local officials. Under both the Elections Clause of Article I of the Constitution and the Electors Clause of Article II, States have principal—and with presidential elections, exclusive— responsibility to safeguard the manner of holding elections,” the letter stated.

Why would mandating proof of vaccination be acceptable if laws that reasonably mandate people demonstrate they are an American citizen by ID are not?

In an executive order in January, President Joe Biden urged government agencies “to assess the feasibility” of having COVID-19 vaccination certificates, and documents available for digital purposes. Subsequently, 30 airlines and travel organizations penned a letter to Jeff Zients, the COVID-19 Recovery Team Coordinator, telling Zients to take action on vaccine passports for international travel.

On March 9, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki fielded a question on “vaccine passports,” noting that “we recognize that as many Americans get vaccinated, questions will come up, and they’re already starting to come up, as to how people will be able to demonstrate they are vaccinated. I think it’s important to remember only about 10 percent of the American population is vaccinated at this point. We’ve obviously made progress, but we have more work to do.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a “Pilot Program” recently that forces New Yorkers to display an “excelsior pass” in order to gain entry to Madison Square Garden and Barclays Center. IBM has partnered with the state to deliver the program.

“The Excelsior Pass will play a critical role in getting information to venues and sites in a secure and streamlined way, allowing us to fast-track the reopening of these businesses and getting us one step closer to reaching a new normal,” Cuomo’s press release read.

In February, the International Air Transport Association announced a new travel app that will provide the U.S. government and others with the vaccination status and COVID-19 test results for passengers.

“Similar to a mobile airline boarding pass, individuals will be able to either print out their pass or store it on their smartphones using the Excelsior Pass’s ‘Wallet App,” Cuomo added. “Each pass will have a secure QR code, which venues will scan using a companion app to confirm someone’s COVID health status.”

The New York Times, who has been ardently in favor of H.R. 1, contemplated the idea of vaccine passports.

“There are clear upsides: grandparents reuniting with out-of-town grandchildren; sports, concerts and other events partly but safely returning; resumption of international travel and some tourism; businesses reopened without putting workers at undue risk,” the Times writes.

As noted by CNN also in December, “Vaccination cards will be used as the ‘simplest’ way to keep track of Covid-19 shots, said Dr. Kelly Moore, associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition, which is supporting frontline workers who will administer Covid-19 vaccinations,” writes John Bohnfield and Amir Vera.

Former 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang favored the idea, noting that “mass gatherings” ought to be vetted with “a bar code.”

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz called HR. 1 a “universal voter fraud law” on Fox News last week.

“You know, it’s an amazing thing, we came out of this last election where we saw multiple instances of serious allegations of voter fraud, and the Democrats and the media took on the talking points that voter fraud doesn’t exist [and] that anyone who says it exists is somehow engaged in a conspiracy theory,” Cruz said. “Now with HR.1, the Democrats are seeking to lock in their advantage. They want mail-in balloting everywhere. They want no photo ID.”

H.R. 1 will head to the Senate at a date to be determined.

Gabe Kaminsky is an intern at The Federalist and a student at the University of Pittsburgh. His work has appeared in The Daily Wire, Townhall.com, Fox News, The Washington Times, The American Conservative, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and other outlets. He is a participant in the Academy program at The Heritage Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @Gabe__Kaminsky