When the far left began to subsume cultural institutions, there was one “holy grail” (pun very much intended) target that they had their eyes set on: The church. While some […]

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The Left is attacking pregnancy centers again. Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin. First Choice is a network of pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) serving vulnerable pregnant women in New Jersey.

Matthew Platkin is New Jersey’s attorney general, and he is trying to make life hell for PRCs in his state. How? By launching a series of politically targeted lawsuits with the goal of donor doxing and death by paperwork. 

Platkin has targeted First Choice on the basis of its religious and pro-life views by issuing the organization a burdensome subpoena seeking confidential donor and client information. It’s good old-fashioned lawfare.

I say the Left is attacking PRCs again, but it’s never really stopped. The last time PRCs had their day at the Supreme Court it was because Democrats, led by then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris, tried to force the pro-life centers to advertise and refer for abortion, a violation of their free speech and, in many cases, religious beliefs. Thankfully, the Supreme Court agreed with the PRCs.

Since then, the Left has only turned up the pressure on PRCs through rhetorical attacks, legal harassment, and outright vandalism and violence. Why?

Because pregnancy resource centers are unquestionably an increasingly important—and arguably essential—part of a post-Dobbs world that shifted the legal landscape around abortion. Yet the stubborn realities of crisis pregnancy have not. Pregnancy resource centers exist not only to meet the immediate needs of those women, but also to help those who want to be moms thrive in that role. This perpetually vexes the Left’s pro-choice idealogues.

What Pregnancy Resource Centers Do

Pregnancy resource centers first stabilize an almost always unstable situation. They meet the immediate health and material needs of pregnant moms in crisis. For some, that means baby supplies (diapers and formula). In just one year, PRCs nationwide served an estimated 1.85 million people, providing 2 million baby outfits, 1.3 million packages of diapers, 19,000 strollers, and more than 30,000 car seats. In New Jersey, where Platkin is on the hunt, PRCs served more than 23,000 men, women, and children with 8,713 pregnancy tests, 6,872 ultrasounds performed by licensed medical professionals, 9025 packs of diapers, 75,472 baby outfits, and 1,658 cans of formula.

For others, that help takes the form of housing. A woman named Monica found such help when fleeing domestic violence and homelessness while pregnant. Aid for Women pregnancy center’s maternity home, Heather’s House, took her in immediately and stayed with her for the course of her pregnancy and after she had a baby boy. The center’s staff even babysat while Monica took ESL classes.

“I can’t even begin to express how much Aid for Women has impacted my life. I was able to work on establishing a life for me and my son,” she said in an interview. “Everything in my life has been touched by Aid for Women and their support of me, not just having a place to live, but real support of me as a woman and as a person, has changed the direction both of our lives could have gone.”

Helping mothers establish a life is what PRCs specialize in. An estimated 1 in 4 women report their abortion as “unwanted or coerced,” 60% of post-abortive women say they would have preferred to have their baby if they had more emotional or financial support. One study found that 61% of women reported “high levels of pressure” to have abortions. PRCs provide women the support they need to not only make a true choice, but also to thrive as mothers.

Many offer career counseling, life coaching and parenting classes. One PRC so empowered Claire Anctil-Cathey that the former client went on to establish one herself. She said her pregnancy was like “being in total darkness” until she sought help at a PRC. It was like “being led into the light by people who just stepped in and cared for me and provided me the support that I needed one step at a time to get to a place where I was on my feet.”

“No one’s ever looked at them and said, ‘Well, you can do this, and we can help you,’” Claire says of her center’s clients. “Our main goal is to provide these women with the same sort of support that they would have from a loving, healthy family.”

This is what New Jersey’s attorney general and the Left want to shut down. So far, it isn’t working. The number of PRCs increased by 35% over a decade, and they now outnumber abortion clinics by a 3-to-1 ratio. Small wonder that 70% of those polled said PRCs should receive public funding.

They have become an essential part of a new, genuinely pro-mother era. The Supreme Court should shield them from ideological attacks aimed at shuttering them.  

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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On this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler examine how the Left put forth the “waxen effigy” of former President Joe Biden, then used the autopen to enact its radical policies.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. 

Jack Fowler: Well, Victor, since we’re talking about fake things, let’s talk about the autopen, which was used by Joe Biden in thousands of ways to free people, criminals, hardcore criminals, murderers, dirt bags, etc. We’ve heard a lot about this for the last year, and [President] Donald Trump put out a statement the other day and I’d like to get your comments on it.

Here’s what he wrote on Truth Social:

Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the auto pen, which was approximately 92% of them is hereby terminated and no further force or effect. The autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the president of the United States. The radical left lunatics, circling Biden around the beautiful Resolute Desk in the Oval Office took the presidency away from him. I’m hereby canceling all executive orders and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden because the people who operated the autopen did so illegally. Joe Biden was not involved in the autopen process, and if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Victor Davis Hanson: That raises a lot of issues. No. 1, I don’t know how you post facto, go back and undo things that he did. I mean, I don’t know why he pardoned Hunter Biden, [former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, I think [Dr. Anthony] Fauci. Are all of those invalid, and if so, who adjudicates that?

What if they say, “No, he’s pardon me”? So, they’re all going to have to go through the courts. When Trump says things like “Sleepy Joe Biden” and all of this, people, they kind of roll their eyes and [think], “There goes Trump.” But actually, he’s responding to something that is quite egregious. We’ve never had it in American history.

We came close with Woodrow Wilson and Edith Wilson covering up his stroke for over a year. But we never really had a president that at some point, I think, in the campaign of 2020, there were two decisions made. One, that the Democratic Party was going to lose, according to the polls, if they nominated an Elizabeth Warren, a Cory Booker, a Bernie Sanders, a Pete Buttigieg, etc.

And two, given that Joe Biden was the only viable candidate, they were going to use him as a moderate veneer and sell him to the American people as a return to normalcy. That is, we would start remembering what Joe Biden said in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Remember when he talked about a jungle and crime, and his poor mother was endangered, and he was against illegal immigration. So, they passed that nonexistent Joe Biden as a waxen effigy. Then they used him, and they perpetrated the most radical agenda, I think more radical than the New Deal. They destroyed the border. They destroyed jurisprudence as we know it. They weaponized all the [Justice Department], the FBI, the CIA. They destroyed deterrence abroad. They sort of begged Iran to get back in the Iran deal.

The Kabul pullout was the worst military disaster in the last 50 years. It empowered [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to go into [Ukraine]. I could go on.

So, Trump has a point, and the question is, they knew he was incompetent, non compos mentis. He was not in control of his faculties. And then they had another agenda and that was to get particular green, DEI, ESG, radical initiatives into the Cabinet and the institutions that had no public support. And they put them on the desk, and they used the autopen and to the degree Joe Biden knew about it, and I don’t think he even did. There’s no way that he can ever under oath identify any of those things in detail. Just no way it’s going to happen.

So, then the question is, are they going to call in the people who did it and what will they say? “Well, I talked to Biden.” Well, do you have documents? “No.” And then people will say “To what degree does Trump”—as do all presidents—“use the autopen?” And he’ll have to explain that he has done it on his direction, or he has an executive order, or he has a written chief of staff order, or somebody is in the room with him. I don’t know.

But he’s got a good point is what I’m trying to say. And it sounds crazy, but what was really crazy is what they did. This was the biggest sham perpetrated on the American people in my lifetime. It makes Watergate look like a joke. They had somebody who completely was a zombie and didn’t know where he was or what he was saying, and they used him as a prop to initiate and advance a radical agenda that had it been explicit and open, and people knew what they were going to do about the border or crime or critical race, critical legal theory, or DEI, they would’ve never voted for it. They knew that and that’s why they kicked out all the other nominees. Like dominoes, they quit the primary of 2020.

He hadn’t won Nevada, he hadn’t won New Hampshire, he hadn’t won Iowa. And Jim Clyburn and everybody said, “I will deliver the black vote in South Carolina. And we will win, and then we will get them all out. We’ll promise them various things. We’ll promise Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders a socialist agenda. We will promise Pete Buttigieg a cabinet post, etc.” And that’s where we are.

And Trump, he’s got a right to be furious, and that he doesn’t speak about it in sober and judicious tones, a lot of people resent that. But compared to what actually happened, his description—as uncouth and crude as it can be—is absolutely spot on.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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A "full travel ban" from countries "flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies" was flagged Monday by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a meeting with President Donald Trump.

The post Kristi Noem Previews Sweeping Travel Ban on Countries Dumping ‘Killers, Leeches, & Entitlement Junkies’ in U.S. appeared first on Breitbart.