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Weekend Read: What the Left Did to Our Country

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Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Will their upheaval  succeed?

 

In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence—the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.

With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor—obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.

The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.

After getting elected through temporarily pivoting to racial ecumenicalism and pseudo-calls for unity, they reverted to form and governed by dividing the country. And then the two left the White House as soon-to-be mansion living, mega-rich elites, cashing in on the fears they had inculcated over the prior eight years.

To push through the accompanying unpopular agendas of an open border, mandatory wind and solar energy, racial essentialism, and the weaponization of the state, Obama had begun demonizing his opponents and the country in general: America was an unexceptional place. Cops were racist. “Clingers” of the Midwest were hopelessly ignorant and prejudiced. Only fundamental socialist transformation could salvage a historically oppressive, immoral, and racist nation.

The people finally rebelled at such preposterousness. Obama lost his party some 1,400 local and state offices during his tenure, along with both houses of Congress. His presidency was characterized by his own polarizing mediocrity. His one legacy was Obamacare, the veritable destruction of the entire system of a once workable health insurance, of the hallowed doctor-patient relationship, and of former easy access to competent specialists.

Yet Obama’s unfufilled ambitions set the stage for the Biden administration—staffed heavily with Obama veterans—to complete the revolutionary transformation of the Democratic Party and country.

It was ironic that while Obama was acknowledged as young and charismatic, nonetheless a cognitively challenged, past plagiarist, fabulist, and utterly corrupt Joe Biden was far more effective in ramming through a socialist woke agenda and altering the very way Americans vote and conduct their legal system.

Stranger still, Biden accomplished this subversion of traditional America while debilitated and often mentally inert—along with being mired in a bribery and influence-peddling scandal that may ultimately confirm that he easily was the most corrupt president to hold office in U.S. history.

How was all this possible?

Covid had allowed the unwell Biden to run a surrogate campaign from his basement as he outsourced his politicking to a corrupt media.

Senility proved a godsend for Biden. His cognitive disabilities masked his newfound radicalism and long-accustomed incompetence. Unlike his past failed campaigns, the lockdowns allowed Biden to be rarely seen or heard—and thus as much liked in the abstract as he had previously been disliked in the concrete.

His handlers, the Obamas, and the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren radical Democrats, saw Biden’s half-century pretense as a gladhander—good ole Joe Biden from Scranton—as the perfect delivery system to funnel their own otherwise-unpopular leftwing agendas. In sum, via the listless Biden, they sought to change the very way America used to work.

And what a revolution Biden’s puppeteers have unleashed in less than three years.

They launched a base attack on the American legal system. Supreme Court judges are libeled, their houses swarmed, and their lives threatened with impunity. The Left promised to pack the court or to ignore any decision it resents. The media runs hit pieces on any conservative justice deemed too influential. The prior Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer whipped up a mob outside the court’s doors, and threatened two justices by name. As Schumer presciently put it, they would soon “reap the whirlwind” of what they supposedly had sowed and thus would have no idea what was about to “hit” them.

Under the pretense of Covid fears, balloting went from 70 percent participation on election day in most states to a mere 30 percent. Yet the rates of properly rejected illegal or improper ballots often dived by a magnitude of ten.

Assaults now followed on hallowed processes, laws, customs, and institutions—the Senate filibuster, the 50-state union, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, Election Day, and voter IDs.

Under Biden, the revolution had institutionalized first-term impeachment, the trial of an ex-president while a private citizen, and the indictment of a chief political rival and ex-president on trumped up charges by local and federal prosecutors—all to destroy a political rival and alter the 2024 election cycle.

Biden destroyed the southern border—literally. Eight million entered illegally—no background checks, no green cards, no proof of vaccinations. America will be dealing with the consequences for decades. Mexico was delighted, receiving some $60 million in annual remittances, while the cartels were empowered to ship enough fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year.

“Modern monetary theory,” the Leftist absurdity that printing money ensures prosperity, followed. It has nearly bankrupted the country, unleashed wild inflation, and resulted in the highest interest rates in a quarter-century. Middle-class wages fell further behind as a doddering Biden praised his disastrous “Bidenomics.”

Biden warred on fossil fuels, cancelling federal leases and pipelines, jawboning lending agencies to defund fracking, demonizing state-of-the-art, clean-burning cars, and putting vast areas of oil- and gas-rich federals lands off-limits to drilling.

When gas prices predictably doubled under Biden and the 2022 midterms approached, he tried temporarily to lease out a few new fields, to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and to beg the Saudis, and our enemies, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, and the Russians, to pump more oil and gas that Biden himself would not. All this was a pathetic ruse to temporarily lower gas prices before the mid-term elections.

Biden abandoned Afghanistan, leaving the largest trove of military equipment behind in U.S. military history, along with thousands of loyal Afghans and pro-American contractors.

Biden insulted the parents of the 13 Marines blown up in this worst U.S. military debacle since Pearl Harbor. He lied to the parents of the dead that he too lost a son in the Iraq war, and when among them later impatiently checked his watch as he seemed bored with the commemoration of the fallen—and made no effort to hide his sense that the ceremony was tedious to him.

Vladimir Putin summed up the Afghan debacle—and Biden’s nonchalant remark that he wouldn’t react strongly to a “minor” invasion of Ukraine if it were minor—as a green light to invade Ukraine.

When Biden did awaken, his first reaction was an offer to fly the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the country as soon as possible. What has followed proved the greatest European killing ground since the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge, albeit one that has now fossilized into a Verdun-like quagmire that is draining American military supply stocks and killing a half-million Ukrainians and Russians.

Suddenly, there are three genders, not two. Women’s sports have been wrecked by biological men competing as women, destroying a half-century of female athletic achievement. Young girls in locker rooms, co-eds in sororities, and women in prison must dress and shower with biological men transitioning to women by assertion.

There is no longer a commitment to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union is a woke, intolerant group trying to ban free expression under the pretense of fighting “hate” speech and “disinformation.”

The Left has revived McCarthyite loyal oaths straight out of the 1950s, forcing professors, job applicants, and students applying for college to pledge their commitment to “diversity” as a requisite for hiring, admittance, or promotion. Diversity is our era’s version of the Jacobins’ “Cult of Reason.”

Race relations hit a 50-year nadir. Joe Biden has a long history of racist insults and putdowns. And now as apparent penance, he has reinvented himself as a reverse racial provocateur, spouting nonsense about white supremacy, exploiting shootings or hyping racial tensions to ensure that an increasingly disgusted black electorate does not leave the new Democratic Party.

The military has adopted wokeism, oblivious that it has eroded meritocracy in the ranks and slashed military recruitment. It is underfunded, wracked by internal suspicion, loss of morale and ginned up racial and gender animosity. Its supply stocks are drained. Arms productions is snail-like, and generalship is seen as a revolving door to corporate defense contractor board riches.

Big-city Democratic district attorneys subverted the criminal justice system, destroyed law enforcement deterrence, and unleashed a record crime wave. Did they wish to create anarchy as protest against the normal, or were they Jokerist nihilists who delighted in sowing ruin for ruin’s sake?

Radical racial activists, with Democrat endorsement, demand polarizing racial reparations. The louder the demands, the quieter they remain about smash-and-grab looting, carjacking, and the swarming of malls by disproportionally black teens—even as black-on-black urban murders reach record proportions.

In response, Biden tried to exploit the growing tensions by spouting lies that “white supremacy” and “white privilege” fuel such racial unrest—even as his ill-gotten gains, past record of racist demagoguery and resulting lucre and mansions appear the epitome of his own so-called white privilege.

This litany of disasters could be vastly expanded, but more interesting is the why of it all?

What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism. The border is not porous but nonexistent. Mass looting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences. Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must. The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become precivilizational—there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.

The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade. Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.

Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.

In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist. Nothing escapes it—not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.

The operating principle is either to allow or to engineer things to become so atrocious in everyday American life—the inability to afford food and fuel, the inability to walk safely in daylight in our major cities, the inability to afford to drive as one pleases, the inability to obtain or pay back a high interest loan—that the government can absorb the private sector and begin regimenting the masses along elite dictates. The more the people tire of the leftist agenda, the more its architects furiously seek to implement it, hoping that their institutional and cultural control can do what  ballots cannot.

We could variously characterize their efforts as destroying the nation to save it, or burning it down to start over, or fundamentally transforming America into something never envisioned by the Founders.

Will their upheaval  succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.

*****

This article was published at American Greatness and is reproduced with permission.

 

The Impending Thermidor Reaction in Jacobin America

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Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

At peak woke, our reign of terror is beginning to lose momentum because its continuation would destroy all the work of 247 years of American progress and sacrifice.

 

The decade-long French Revolution that broke out in 1789 soon devolved into far more than removing the monarchy, as it became antithetical to the earlier American precedent. American notions of liberty and freedom were seen as far too narrow, given the state, if only all-powerful and all-wise, could mandate “equality” and force “fraternity” among its subjects.

Each cycle of French revolutionary fervor soon became more radicalized and cannibalistic—until it reached its logical ends of violent absurdity.

Originally, the idea of curbing the power of a Bourbon king through a parliamentary republic became lethally counter-revolutionary.

Soon even attacks on the Catholic Church and the abolition of the monarchy entirely were deemed insufficient. The king himself and his consorts had to be beheaded. Monasteries and churches were to be ransacked, and priests exiled or lynched.

The sometimes moderate Girondins, who favored constitutional government, were mostly executed by their former friends among the Montagnards. In turn, the latter were soon deemed too conservative for the emerging crazy Jacobins. So they, too, had to be decapitated. The ensuing year-long reign of terror guillotined thousands of innocents, deemed guilty of being guilty of something.

By 1793, the revolution had turned nihilist and suicidal. The foundational date of France was recalibrated (not as 1619 but) as 1789—or “year one.”

Jacobins sought to wipe out religion, both materially and spiritually. They replaced God, first, with the atheistic “Cult of Reason” and then a stranger still “Cult of the Supreme Being”—a dreamed-up, living, humanistic god that only the murderous Robespierre could fully envision, but eerily similar to our own Green New Deal deity.

The months of the year themselves were renamed, the days of the week renumbered and relabeled. Statues were toppled, first at night, later in shameless daylight. Place names were erased and renamed. The original revolutionary heroes were not to be mentioned; their uncouth successors deified. Money was printed to “spread the wealth”—until it was worthless.

Murderous cancel culture ran unchecked. Yesterday’s French revolutionary became today’s counterrevolutionary—and tomorrow’s decapitated.

Almost everyone who originally had opposed the absolute monarchy, and, like the Americans, wished for a constitutional replacement, was eventually executed by revolutionaries who were then executed by more radical revolutionaries. The longer and more radical the revolution ran, the meaner, dumber, and more deadly the revolutionaries who emerged from the woodwork.

Finally, what could not go on, did not go on, as French society unraveled. Then the so-called Thermidors put an end to the madness of the Robespierre brothers and their sidekick, the 26-year-old Saint-Just, and did to them what they had done to thousands.

The final revolutionary correction saw a Directory, then a Consulate, and finally the dictator Napoleon—the self-described emperor who claimed he was the final absolutist manifestation of the “Revolution.”

A Revolution of the Disingenuous

We are swept up in similarly scary revolutionary times, after the perfect storm of the 2020 rioting, the COVID destructive lockdowns, and a radical socialist takeover of the old Democratic Party.

Decades of successful and legitimate efforts to ensure equality of opportunity, a safety net for the poor, and increased civil liberties have transmogrified into an “equity” agenda, or state-mandated equality of result—or else!

“Diversity” is now an Orwellian word for racial essentialism to the one-drop degree. Jim Crow racism was not eliminated permanently. It now has resurfaced as woke or “good” segregation. Racially separate facilities and events are apparent “reparatory justice.” Black activists are calling for $800 billion in reparations from San Francisco, a city that is melting down as we speak.

The old precivilizational tribalism and monotony of thought are now deemed “diverse.” “Inclusion” means replacing one racial hierarchy of the 1950s with a newer one of the 2020s. Woke leftists prove “inclusive” by excluding as “haters” and “denialists” any who disagree and cannot be easily refuted.

Opportunists Abound

The Nike admen Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James ended up with millions of dollars in endorsements ultimately derived from Communist Chinese exploiters of servile labor—a fact that all their pseudo-revolutionary performance art cannot mask.

Like the rich and elite Montagnards and Jacobins, well-off, degreed suburban grifters suddenly became “woke” arbiters of the “correct.” Thousands of diversity, equity, and inclusion czars bloated administrations, broke university budgets, and terrified faculty and employees with their panopticon surveillance. And yet did any of them result in a single better student reader, or at least one more accomplished university math major? Have K-12 scores soared with DEI monitors on hand?

We have not descended to the guillotine yet, but we are getting there with online cancel culture, doxxing, deplatforming, boycotts, mandatory diversity statements, indoctrination training, ostracism for an incorrect word, and violence redefined as activism.

Black Lives Matter ended when its supposedly Marxist architects all vanished into comfortable bourgeoise estates and cushy retirements—along with the millions of dollars they shook down from guilt-ridden corporations.

#MeToo sputtered out once the mantra of “believe women” turned its attention to candidate Joe Biden and Tara Reade. It turned out that she most certainly must not be believed when she swore the Delaware Democrat had sexually assaulted her.

Supposed transgendered heroes vie for profitable TV endorsement commercials that are as lucrative to them as they are ruinous to their employers.

In our revolutionary times, mediocre biological male athletes “transition” into female sports and suddenly become rich and famous. Women who transition to males, for some reason, find no such profits from male competitions.

A black transient with 42 arrests and three assault convictions is accidentally killed by a would-be Samaritan bystander who takes action to stop his threats on the subway. The tragedy becomes a rallying cry for “activist” leaders, eager for continuous notoriety and profits, while 10,000 black people murdered per year, mostly by other black people, do not earn a snore from these same “civil rights” leaders.

The World Upside Down

Like Revolutionary France, our woke revolution was contrary to human nature and therefore had to be imposed by force or coercion.

Merit is the great enemy of wokeness. One day SAT tests were blind mechanisms to allow the less privileged to compete on the basis of talent rather than parentage. The next day such tests were deemed counterrevolutionary, racist enemies of the people. Universities boast of rejecting 60-70 percent of those who scored perfect on SATs, as if their excellence was proof of their “privilege.”

Jurisprudence was tarred as racist, as if laws against shoplifting, looting, smash-and-grab, car-jacking, and arson were created only by elite white men who never had the need to steal or loot and who therefore made silly, arbitrary laws against them.

Like the Jacobins, our woke elite deem prisons arbitrary detention centers. So thousands of those arrested for committing violent crimes have either never been charged, never convicted, never sentenced, or never incarcerated. These exemptions rest on the principle that the revolutionaries who destroyed the enforcement of law have the wherewithal to protect themselves from the dystopia they created.

Borders disappeared, apparently on grounds they were 19th-century racist relics. Yet sanctuary cities prove the least welcoming of the tens of thousands they all but invited into distant other towns and counties.

The homeless were no longer deemed vagrants, or selfish in their take-over of public spaces, but the victims of an oppressive society.

So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection were rebranded as mere lifestyle choices of the unfortunate, not to be judged wrong or unlawful by the victimizers who supposedly made thousands homeless. Ancient laws of hygiene and municipal cleanliness were thrown out as bourgeois, as cities reverted to the protocols of their medieval forebears.

Leftists who created these Frankenstein-like monsters, like the fictive Dr. Frankenstein himself, became targets of their own experiments. It was no longer enough to support civil rights for the transgendered. Suddenly any questioning of the wisdom of biologically born males competing in women’s sports or of teenagers with penises undressing among teenage girls in locker rooms, or of state-sponsored drag-queen shows with children in attendance condemned one as transphobic and worse.

Advocating a secure border and strictly legal immigration was proof of nativism. Equal opportunity for all races was racism. Advocacy for the use of natural gas as a needed transitional fuel indicted one as a climate “denialist.”

As our woke version of the Jacobin revolution accelerated, society itself began to unwind—as expected given America relied on meritocracy, free expression dissent, the rule of law, forbearance, and tolerance.

In less than three years, our major cities became filthy to the point of unhealthiness. Violent crime and thievery drove businesses and commuters away. Subways at night became the domain of the homeless and criminal. Vacancy rates in San Francisco or downtown Portland shot up to 25 percent or more. Millions began leaving Jacobin blue cities and states, and headed for sanctuaries in more suburban and rural red states.

Once-trusted and familiar government agencies became weaponized—and inevitably incompetent. The FBI was not interested in the organizers of 120 days of violent looting, arson, murder, and rioting in summer 2020, or the threatening mobs who showed up at the homes of Supreme Court Justices. Instead, it fixated on parents at school board meetings, Latin Mass Catholics, former Trump Administration officials, and anyone daring to question the Russian collusion or Russian disinformation laptop hoaxes.

The Pentagon brass oversaw a flight from Afghanistan, in the greatest military humiliation in modern American history. Yet at the same time, it focused on rooting out white rage and white privilege despite presenting no data to substantiate its accusations. Former intelligence officers and “authorities” misled the country and warped an election, to ensure Americans did not take seriously the incriminating evidence in Hunter Biden’s laptop of the Biden family’s widespread corruption.

So, the world became topsy-turvy. Throwing a firebomb into a police-occupied patrol car earned a light sentence, while protesting illegally at the Capitol won a decade in prison.

An American who did not get vaccinated was to be thrown out of the U.S. military; an illegal alien crossing the border unlawfully without a vaccination might earn a free phone and free lodging in a big-city hotel.

The more the government printed money it did not have, the more the country was slandered as cruel and mean to its underclass. The more standards were dropped for admission, hiring, promotion, and retention, the more employers were deemed unfair and bigoted.

As the American Jacobin phase accelerated, the more it, too, seemed to pursue its own destruction. Few now trust that the graduates of the Ivy League and marquee universities know what they once did. And why not, when students are admitted without test scores, but are assured passing grades, watered-down classes, and graduation to be synonymous with admission?

The U.S. military fell short by thousands of recruits. And why not, when it advertised for manpower with invitations from drag queens, and hounded those as racists who had died at twice their numbers in the population in Afghanistan and Iraq?

A Counterrevolution Is Coming

At peak woke, our reign of terror is beginning to lose momentum because its continuation would erode all the work of 247 years of American progress and sacrifice.

Former and current liberals—an Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Glen Greenwald, Naomi Wolf, or a Richard Dreyfuss—are deemed counterrevolutionaries for questioning the excesses of wokeism, and so began questioning the premises of wokeism itself.

New polls showed scant public support for open borders, for multiple sexual identities, and for biological men competing in women’s sports. Reparations from an insolvent government to black Americans—on the principle that those whose ancestors might have been enslaved eight generations ago were owed money from those whose ancestors might have owned slaves eight generations ago—is widely rejected by the general population.

When corporations like Anheuser-Busch or Disney tried to ingratiate themselves to the woke Jacobins, they lost billions in revenue—just as the woke Pentagon has lost thousands of recruits.

Woke networks like CNN have smaller audiences than some one-person podcasts.

A desperate and woke NBA now brags that its recent playoff televised audience reached over 4 million viewers. A quarter-century ago, when the U.S. population was nearly 60 million smaller, the pre-Jacobin NBA won over 70 million viewers who watched the 1998 finals.

Joe Biden, the thin veneer of the woke revolution, polls below 40 percent. Even that favorability is propped up by the consensus that he has no idea where he is or what he is saying—and thus at least is deserving of 40 percent support for not being responsible for what he has empowered.

A counterrevolution is building, not just because people are angry at what has become of their country, but because they now are learning that if they do nothing, they will have no country—and soon.

*****

This article was published at American Greatness and is reproduced with permission.

The Useful Veneer of the Aging Democrat

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Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Joe Biden is now 80 years-old. He will be 82 when he campaigns for the 2024 presidency—and a clearly debilitated 86 should he be elected and fill out his second term. He has been in government for over a half-century.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and current representative from California is 83.

Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the second-ranking Democratic House member behind Pelosi, was House majority leader until early this year. He is 83, and has been an elected official for nearly 60 years.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is 72, with 48 years in elected government.

Democratic luminary and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) is 89, and ailing—after 53 years as an elected official.

James Clyburn (D-S.C.) is House minority whip and 82.

These are the official faces of the Democratic Party.

They came into power and maturity three decades ago during the Clinton years of 1993-1999.

Decades ago, they sometimes supported strong national defense, secure borders, gas and oil development, fully funding the police, and a few restrictions on partial-birth abortions.

Not now.

Their role has changed from that of liberals of the Clinton era to serving as the thin power-holding veneer that masks the new real Democratic Party.

The party has been changed beyond recognition by Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the so-called Squad, the Congressional Black Caucus, newly elected senators like the Georgia duo of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock—and Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Yet Biden and company are still familiar American faces.

Their final role is to acculturate the electorate to the new Democratic Party.

Its radicals are breathing down their necks to get out of the way. Yet for a while longer they still need such an ossified veneer of respectability to ease the transition to what is now essentially a socialist-European green party.

This new Democratic Party believes in defunding the police.

It supports the George-Soros-funded state and city district attorneys.

These prosecutors seek either to release violent criminals without bail or reduce their felonies to misdemeanors.

Critical legal and race theories are their creeds. So they argue that crimes have little to do with individual free will.

Criminals are not deterred by tough enforcement of the laws. Instead, “crime” reflects arbitrary constructs of a racially oppressive hierarchy.

They believe the woke revolution of using race and gender in lieu of a meritocracy should dominate government and corporate boardrooms.

Racial separation in graduations, dorms, and university programs are needed reparations.

Big Tech is their ally. All the better when it partners with government, especially the FBI and CIA, to suppress “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

They believe gender is socially constructed. Thus transitioning biological males can and should compete in women’s sports.

They want a Green New Deal right now, one that calls for the abolition of natural gas and oil for electricity generation and transportation.

Abortion is seen as a God-given right—even as a baby passes through the birth canal.

Climate change is their religion, trumping any concern for the viability of the middle-class suffering from inflation, high interest rates, and recession.

They want semiautomatic rifles to be banned. Concealed handgun permits should be almost impossible to obtain.

The more voters skip Election Day through mail-in balloting and early voting, the better.

There is no longer “dark money,” only useful “correct” money.

The more that Silicon Valley and Wall Street grandees quietly reroute hundreds of millions of dollars into hard-Left PACs and “nonpartisan” causes, the more the donors should expect lucrative crony-capitalist green deals and government concessions.

Much of the ideology of the new Democratic Party arose in academia, like critical race theory and modern monetary theory. The giveaway word is “theory”—a mask for any absurd doctrine that can be dressed up as a sophisticated new idea.

When Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the new Democratic minority leader in the House or Elizabeth Warren in the Senate advocates these positions, the voters recoil. That pushback is understandable, since almost none of these notions polls above 50 percent.

The role of a calcified Biden, Pelosi, Feinstein, Hoyer, or Clyburn is to reassure voters through their notoriety and apparently staid exteriors that they are hardly the sort to embrace revolution, although that is exactly what they do.

“Ol’ Joe” Biden’s old guard and the new hard Left play a game of mutual advantage.

The new majority of radical Democrats allows the old fogies to bask in the limelight until they drop—exempt from counter-revolutionary criticism or interparty primary challenges or demands to retire.

In return, the codgers reassure the nation that old faces like theirs cannot possibly be polyester revolutionary socialists—despite their role in airbrushing and photoshopping the radical catastrophe unfolding before our eyes.

*****
This article was published by American Greatness and is reproduced with permission.

The Manic Methods of Mad Democrats

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Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

We are faced with a revolutionary party well known from history that aims to change the nation into something unrecognizable by most Americans—and it feels that it has created the means to do it.

For all Joe Biden’s talk about “semi-fascist” and “un-American,” “ultra-MAGA” Republicans, it is the Democratic Party that has far more radically changed. It is descended into a woke, neo-socialist, radically green party. And it is committed, as Barack Obama once promised, to fundamentally transforming America. How it proceeds with that agenda is now as entirely predictable as it is creepy.

Election Warping
Before any presidential or midterm election, strict news suppression ensures that all bad news will follow, not precede, the voting. The Twitter files, Project Veritas ambush interviews, the Podesta emails, and occasional left-wing braggadocio like Molly Ball’s now infamous post-2020 election revelations in Time magazine, confirm the fusion between the media and the Democratic Party.

To the degree there is any independent journalistic inquiry about Biden—such as we are only now seeing with Biden’s security violations—it is likely only because the party wants the 80-year-old enfeebled Biden out of office.

The Democratic-media-deep-state nexus quashed all 2020 pre-election revelations about the embarrassing Hunter Biden laptop. Its contents more or less proved that the Biden family was corrupt.

Twitter and Facebook confessionals show how, in lapdog fashion, social media forbade coverage of the truth about the laptop. More than 50 former intelligence officers, organized by the confessed liars John Brennan and James Clapper—both of whom have admitted to deceiving Congress while under oath—used their former titles to fortify the pre-election lie that Hunter’s laptop was likely Russian disinformation.

A poll conducted after the election revealed that those voters who knew of the story might have changed their vote had they known the truth. Neither Clapper nor Brennan nor any of their subordinates has ever apologized. Their lack of contriteness recalls the late Senator Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) post-election brag about his effective pre-election lies concerning candidate Mitt Romney’s taxes: “Romney didn’t win, did he?”

Joe Biden, his lawyers, and the Justice Department likely knew that Biden had violated national security laws surrounding classified documents. Yet they suppressed that information until the 2022 midterms were over. The same is true of the pre-midterm news blackout of the massive fraud of mega-Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried. In close Senate races, where Democrats often referenced the Mar-a-Lago, it might well have mattered if they were confronted with Biden’s Garage-gate scandal, and the Madoff-like albatross of the obnoxious Bankman-Fried and his enabling family.

The list of 2022 pre-election gambits is endless. Biden offered amnesties for both student-loan debt payments and federal marijuana convictions. But perhaps the most flagrant Biden pre-midterm contortion was his sudden interest in flooding markets with oil and gas, hitherto reduced in supply within the United States due to his own green handlers.

Biden requested the Saudis to postpone OPEC cutbacks until after the election. Prior to the midterms, he begged illiberal regimes like Venezuela, Iran, and Russia to pump more oil as well. They were not keen to help him out, so, in the weeks leading up to the midterms, Biden began draining millions of barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve to reduce gasoline prices, even as he lied that his own policies were bringing down oil and natural gas prices. Then shortly after the midterms, Biden announced he would cease drawing down the reserve that was banked at low prices under Trump and instead would buy a few million barrels at sky-high prices.

Since the election’s conclusion, he has been silent about concerns for the voter’s gasoline and natural gas price woes. Why the change?

Projection
The Democratic Left has mastered the art of projection. Most of their own nefarious activity (now soon to be revealed) will be recalibrated as the crimes of their opponents.

Hillary Clinton used three firewalls to conceal her employment of the fabulist Christopher Steele. He, in turn, never set foot in Russia to do any research. Instead, Steele, via money from the Clinton stream, enlisted a Moscow-based Clintonite Charles Dolan and Russian Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko, either to invent fantasies, or pass on real Russian disinformation.

Clintonites in and out of government then released the resulting concocted “dossier” to the media on the eve of the 2016 election, supposedly proving that Trump was, as James Clapper would later lie again, “A Russian asset.”

In truth, Hillary was a colluding conduit for Russian disinformation and tried to warp the election by spreading Steele’s lies among top government officials to lend authority to preplanned media leaks, as the FBI deceived FISA court judges to spy on Clinton’s political opponents.

Then we come to election denialism, which began in earnest in 2000 when, almost immediately after the final Florida count, the Democratic National Committee pushed the lie that the Electoral College vote was illegitimate, and George W. Bush was “selected not elected.” In 2004 it was Senator Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) turn. She, along with the recent chairman of the January 6 committee, U.S. Representative Benny Thompson (D-Miss.) and 31 other House members, voted to refuse to accept the Electoral College vote from Ohio.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton led the charge that Trump was “illegitimate” and had stolen the election. She never recanted and was soon joined by scores of Democratic officials, including perennial election-denier former President Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden. Her surrogates like Jill Stein sued to invalidate the election on the premise that computers were rigged, while has-been Hollywood actors peddled videos begging the electors to renounce their state popular vote tallies.

As a rule, leftists who most ardently denied the 2016 election—current House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is the most notorious example—were the most vigorous in attacking conservatives for “denying” the 2020 election.

Stacey Abrams, who lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election by more than 50,000 votes but who described herself as the “real” governor, created a lucrative career barnstorming the country and lecturing Democratic audiences about how “voter suppression” had “robbed” her of the governorship.

Since 2000, as a general truism, the only presidential elections Democrats did not deny were those they won.

Suppression
We now know that prominent Democrats such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), along with the FBI, successfully used Twitter and Facebook to ban bothersome news stories and silence political opponents. The locus classicus of such efforts was the left-wing banning of the president of the United States from social media platforms while Iranian theocrats, ISIS, and the Taliban freely used them.

The reading public is only now learning through the Twitter disclosures of the accurate Nunes House Intelligence Committee majority memo, and the utterly fraudulent Schiff minority version—truth that was self-evident, but mostly suppressed by the media.

Again, Molly Ball outlined how Silicon Valley poured hundreds of millions into selected precincts to warp the voting turnout, how it suppressed unwelcome news, how the Democratic elite modulated the 2020 violent street demonstrations to fit Biden’s advantage, and how corporate America help to fund and advance what she called variously a “cabal” and a “conspiracy.”

Changing the Rules
It is hard to determine any major constitutional norms or long-held customs and traditions the new Jacobin Party has not sought to alter or junk to its own advantage. Remember there is no consistent policy concerning any of these proposed changes. Radical demands for reforms from the Left hinge only on their perceived short-term temporary political advantage.

In the House, Democrats destroyed the old idea that the minority leader was granted his own party’s selections to serve on congressional committees simply to stack the January 6 committee. They also recalibrated congressional House subpoenas as matters of criminality and staged performance-art arrests of anyone who resisted—the antithesis to the manner in which the subpoena denier and former Attorney General Eric Holder simply ignored all summons with impunity.

Jacobins normalized the idea of impeaching a first-term president the moment he lost the House, and to conduct such a proceeding without a special counsel’s report or serious cross examinations. They also introduced the new idea of impeaching a president twice, and then once he left office to try him as a private citizen in the Senate.

Thanks to Democrats, we have a new custom of raiding a former president’s private home in search of classified presidential papers, on the allegation that said president had not yet used his legal authority to declassify them.

The Democrats predictably want to end the filibuster and destroy the Electoral College—but predicated in the former case only on whether they currently enjoy a Senate majority, and in the latter only when it lost the Electoral College vote but won the popular balloting.

The Democrats wish to bring Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. into statehood. Were it a matter of adding new conservative states, and with them four additional conservative senators, they would abort the idea in its infancy.

They want to stack the court by enlarging it to 15 justices. Had any conservative voiced such “reforms” during the heyday of the Warren Court, he would have been denounced as an insurrectionist nut.

To ensure nationwide outlawing of voter IDs, Democrats tried to pass a national voting law to surpass the constitutional directive that the primary responsibility to establish voting laws remains with the states.

In just four years, the Left engineered the most radical changes in voting laws in U.S. history. The result was that in many states, under the excuse of COVID, some 70 percent of the electorate did not vote on Election Day—even as the rejection rate of improper non-Election Day balloting plunged.

The Left clamored for extended balloting because it had mastered the arts of mass-mailing absentee ballots, third-party ballot harvesting, ballot curing, and relaxing rules on authenticating addresses, and signatures, and matching ballots with registrars’ lists.

Asymmetries
One overriding principle of the new Democratic Party is asymmetry—or the notion that the Left’s moral superiority earns absolute exemption from the very methods they employ against their opponents.

Disproportionality explains why the historic Mar-a-Lago raid was constructed in bogus fashion as a legitimate search for “nuclear codes.” Yet it would have sparked outrage had the FBI, on rumors of Biden sloppiness, sent armed agents into Jill Biden’s underwear drawers looking for classified papers concerning Ukraine and Iran, or towed away Joe Biden’s Corvette to get access to a garage full of unlawfully stored classified papers, or strewn Biden’s papers across the floor for an FBI concocted photo-op.

The buffoonish protestors and rioters of January 6 were to be jailed for months without formal charges, put in solitary confinement, and often sentenced to the maximum punishment possible. But the rioters, shooters, and killers of 120 days of mayhem and violence during summer 2020 were calibrated as “summer of love” rowdies. Antifa and Black Lives Matter sort of, kind of got a little bit out of hand in torching a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic Washington, D.C. church, as well as trying to storm the White House grounds, sending the president into an underground bunker.

That Antifa and BLM plotted much of their anarchy and violence on social media unimpeded was unremarked upon. That fact mattered not at all in comparison to the illegal paraders and rioters of January 6. Police who shoot unarmed protestors usually have their identities immediately revealed; yet when they lethally shoot the likes of an Ashli Babbitt, their identities are suppressed, and their questionable conduct lauded.

The Left destroyed the southern border to attract 5 million illegal-alien and impoverished future constituents from Mexico and former Third World Latin American and Caribbean countries. Had conservatives fast-tracked a massive legal immigration program to attract 5 million skilled and degreed immigrants from Europe or the former British commonwealth, the Left would have gone berserk in their cries of “racist,” and their current “demography is destiny” boasts suddenly would be replaced by the slur of “Great Replacement Theory.”

Donald Trump was deemed crazy. A Yale physiatrist made the rounds on television and in Congress to claim he needed an intervention and straitjacket. The FBI and an interim attorney general discussed wearing a wire to entrap Donald Trump and convince his cabinet he was nuts. If the FBI and the Justice Department did the same to Joe Biden, the Left would have claimed a coup was in progress.

Ditto if a major former Bush official wrote, in Rosa Brooks fashion, 11 days after the inauguration of Joe Biden, that he should be removed by either the 25th Amendment, impeachment—or a military coup.

Would anything be comparable to the twisted genre of murderous fantasies among has-been politicians, Twitter creatures, and grade-C actors—competing to dream up how Biden should be torched, stabbed, decapitated, hanged, dismembered, and shot, in the manner of the four-year venom from Trump haters? Would the FBI investigate all that if there were?

What would the Left have done if a conservative version of Madonna had screamed on Inauguration Day that she dreamed of blowing up the White House, as rioters flooded D.C. streets?

Joe Biden daily forgets where he is and what he is doing. Someday historians will fault those who knowingly used a non compos mentis septuagenarian, without regard for the interests of the American people, to mask a radical neo-socialist agenda.

Biden shakes imaginary hands. He insists his son died in Iraq. In his mind, Brian Sicknick was murdered on January 6. In Walter Mitty-style, he brags that he has been a semi-truck driver, an arrested civil rights activist, a major college football prospect, a U.S. Naval Academy scholarship prospect, and on and on. If Biden was given the Montreal Cognitive Test, as was Trump, he would likely flunk it outright.

Conservatives should be aware that they are not dealing with the party of JFK and LBJ. The Democratic Party has nothing in common with the agendas of a slick Bill Clinton and is well beyond the “fundamental transformations” of arch-narcissist Barack Obama.

We are faced with a strictly disciplined, no-nonsense revolutionary party, well known from history that aims to change the nation into something unrecognizable by most Americans. And it feels that it has now created the means to do it.

*****
This article was published by American Greatness and is reproduced with permission.

America Runs on Diesel!

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Editors Note: When the President of the United States said he will shut down the fossil fuel industry, what do you think happens to capital flows for the industry? When the ESG movement said they will not fund the fossil fuel industry, what do you think happens to capital flows? Well, what happens is that capital for investment does not flow, as no one wants to invest in a 20 or 30-year investment in refineries, pipelines, and production, knowing they will be put out of business before they can make a return on investment. The result is no new production infrastructure to replace what is old and wearing out. This creates a shortfall in capacity, creating shortages, plain and simple. The Progressives get what they want, a forced conversion from one fuel choice to another. But Progressives have done this before they have developed viable, practical, and affordable alternatives. So when you can’t fill your tank, farmers can’t get fuel and cut production, and the food can’t be transported to the grocery store because of fuel shortages, know that it was all because of Democrat policies. Policies that are designed to cater to rich environmentalist contributors, and did not take into consideration the real needs of regular people. For them, the “environment” does not include people. Especially people like you.

 

Unfortunately for the Green politicians, most of the US economy moves on diesel fuel. I know, I know, it’s a fossil fuel and thus more odious than the fossils that inhabit our Capital building but let’s remember that almost everything we buy is delivered by a diesel-powered truck, train, plane or boat. It’s bad enough that the cost of filling a tank with diesel fuel has jumped by 228% over the past year but now the EIA is reporting that we are down to a paltry 25-day supply in the country.

There are some who will read this and try to guess what this will mean to them. In the simplest terms, it means that nothing in this country moves. Nothing! Why so alarmist? We are not running out of gasoline so how bad can it be? Look at the fuel delivery process to your local gas station, which will end shortly after we run out of diesel fuel, and there will be nationwide gas shortages. There will be no way for the grocery stores to re-supply and those shelves will empty. If the military has any MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) left, we will all be lining up for them but we’ve probably sent them all to Ukraine along with most of our ammunition. If this administration wants to see real unrest: try holding a professional or college football game without beer and hot dogs and watch the outcome! Literally, nothing in this country will get to its destination without diesel fuel.

It was only 20 months ago when this nation was completely energy-independent. No shortages and the prices at the pump were a mere fraction of what they are now. This is not a drill, this is a core component of our economy and it is about to stop, completely. Call or write your U.S. Senators and Representatives today: let them know that they need to fix this now! And, for the love of everything you hold dear, pull the Republican levers on November 8th!  We must stop the idiots in this administration from doing any more harm to our nation.

The only way to do that is to vote RED and throw these ‘woke’ progressive and radical legislators out. YOU have that power. Your vote matters.

When the Family Is Abolished, People Starve

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Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

Editors’ Note: In the current election cycle, Republicans remain concerned that they have lost the college-educated suburban soccer moms. Democrats hope to use abortion as the wedge issue to keep moms from drifting towards Republicans because of crime, illegal immigration, and the economy. There is a certain irony here that conservatives need to use to inform suburban moms, and moms everywhere, and that is this: it is Democrats who are anti-family, anti-female, and anti-procreation.  Democrats want small families or no children at all.  The only current countries that apply the current abortion position of the Democrat Party, are North Korea and Communist China. Further, that is why Democrats push birth control in schools, homosexual and transgender advocacy in schools and society at large, and unlimited state-funded abortion on demand. Some of this stems from what the author below explains, the deep anti-family tradition of the left.  We see this in the Communists Manifesto but also in Nazi ideology. Both hate the bourgeoisie family. But one sees it today played out in the declarations from Black Lives Matter which calls for the destruction of the nuclear familty to environmentalists who believe the “carrying capacity” of the earth is stretched by “overpopulation.”

We see it also in the alteration of language to obliterate mothers by calling them “birthing persons” and even the Air Force Academy accepting language that obliterates the idea of Mom and Dad. We see it in forcing women to compete with men in sports and allowing adult men who have gone through puberty to declare themselves to be women and force women out of their own locker rooms. The point here is: you can’t be a suburban soccer mom if there are no children and no mothers. Further, it is hard to live the suburban life of an individual house, minivans, and soccer practice, if you don’t have a husband who helps pay the bills and helps raise the kids. Also, the vast majority of women, want a long-term loving and sexual relationship with a man. Remember, it was the left that spread the nonsense that ” a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” in the 1970s. Democrats love feminists who hate men because in so doing they can undermine the traditional nuclear family. Finally, you can’t live a comfortable suburban life without a good capitalist economy that provides employment opportunities, cheap gasoline, and inexpensive electricity; all things Democrats seek to undermine. The Democrats embrace the progressive idea that all sins can be laid at the feet of white males. So, for “soccer moms” we simply ask: who really is your friend here? What kind of environment is that to raise a son, white or otherwise? And how do you expect your daughters to find decent and successful men to marry if society and politics constantly degrade the role of men and fatherhood? Yes, Republican legislators will likely put some restrictions on abortion and let that be settled by the people and their representatives in the legislature. But Democrats want to destroy masculine men, procreation, the free enterprise system, the traditional nuclear family, and the idea of womanhood itself. Almost all decisions require trade-offs. For college-educated mothers, the trade-offs are some restrictions on abortions or the destruction of the traditional nuclear family and the free enterprise system. We never really would have thought that the idea of family is something that would appear on a ballot, but this election cycle, it certainly does. For women, they have to ask themselves: is the right to kill your baby up to the point of delivery the most important thing in your life, or is faith, family, and freedom a more important value?

 

Sophie Lewis wants to Abolish the Family. In her sympathetic review of Lewis’s book, Erin Maglaque traces through the “utopian” views of the anti-family movement. She tells of the 19th Century Fournier communes that “freed” women of the “drudgery” of cooking for their families. Lewis wants to expand on the idea of kitchenless households to include collective childcare. Maglaque writes,

The family, Lewis and other abolitionists and feminists argue, privatises care. The legal and economic structure of the nuclear household warps love and intimacy into abuse, ownership, scarcity. Children are private property, legally owned and fully economically dependent on their parents. The hard work of care – looking after children, cooking and cleaning – is hidden away and devalued, performed for free by women or for scandalously low pay by domestic workers.

“If we abolish the family,” Magaque writes, “we abolish the most fundamental unit of privatization and scarcity in our society. More care, more love, for all.”

Family abolitionists see themselves as liberators, but their dreams are dystopian. Only through force can the family be abolished as a crucial foundation of society.  There is no love in force; the utopian hope of “more love” really means more hate for all.

“More love for all” was not how it worked out when Mao sought to abolish the family during his Great Leap Forward. Like the Chinese communists, Lewis sees no need for every family to cook, wash clothes, and raise children. For the Chinese, instead of paradise, the outcome was the worst man-made famine in history.

In his meticulously researched book Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962, Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng reports, in harrowing detail, the totalitarian-induced famine that killed 36 million Chinese. The toll of Mao’s famine exceeds, by many times, the toll of Stalin’s death by starvation of Ukrainians.

Mao and other Chinese communists, according to Jisheng, saw  “the family as the social foundation of the private ownership system and a major impediment to communism.” In a 1958 speech Mao said: “In socialism, private property still exists, factions still exist, families still exist. Families are the product of the last stage of primitive communism, and every last trace of them will be eliminated in the future.” Mao continued, “in the future, the family will no longer be beneficial to the development of productivity … Many of our comrades don’t dare to consider problems of this nature because their thinking is too narrow.”

Jisheng took a deep dive into the Chinese Communist Party archives. Chinese premier Zhou Enlai believed “thorough liberation required liberating women from their household duties.” Enlai “promoted communal kitchens and communal nurseries as the sprouts of communism.” Vice-chair of the Communist Party Liu Shaoqi observed: that “by eliminating families it would be possible to eliminate private property.”

The intent was to make the Chinese population more controllable and China more productive. A 1959 party report laid out the results:

People eat together in the canteens and go out to work together … Before the canteens, commune members could only work for seven to eight hours a day; now they work an average of ten hours a day … At breakfast, as soon as the bowls are pushed away, the section heads lead people out to work … Before and after meals, commune members read newspapers and listen to radio broadcasts together, improving their education in communism.

Food is usually cooked by families because it is efficient that they do so. During the Great Leap Forward, communal kitchens were rapidly established, some feeding up to 800 people. Jisheng reports, “The communal kitchens were a major reason so many starved to death. Home stoves were dismantled, and cooking implements, tables and chairs, foodstuffs, and firewood were handed over to the communal kitchen, as were livestock, poultry, and any edible plants harvested by commune members. In some places, no chimneys were allowed to be lit outside the communal kitchen.” In short, households lost even the ability to boil water.

The consequences were catastrophic. Jisheng writes, “Eliminating the family as a basic living unit reduced its capacity to combat famine.”

Introducing communal kitchens meant people had to go to a kitchen to be fed. Jisheng observes, “In the mountain regions, people had to tramp over hill and dale for a bowl of gruel.” The details reflect the mad arrogance of the planners:

In the spring of 1960 the newly appointed first secretary of Yunnan Province went to the countryside for an inspection. In the hill country he saw an old woman, covered from head to toe in mud, lugging a basket up a slope during a rainstorm on her way to the kitchen. Some villagers told him that this elderly woman had to cover only two hills and seven-plus kilometers, which was not so bad; some had to travel fifteen kilometers on their donkeys to reach the communal kitchen, spending a good part of a day fetching two meals.

The abolition of the family meant families couldn’t divide labor as they cared for the young, elderly, and infirm. Individuals can see through the eyes of love, but all that mattered to the communists was productivity. A party official proclaimed: “Even the old and feeble cannot be allowed to eat for free, but must contribute their effort. If they can’t carry a double load, they can share a load with someone else, and if they can’t use their shoulders, they can use their hands; even crawling to the field with a bowl of dirt in one hand contributes more than lying in bed.”

The communists seized homes. Jisheng reports, “Kindergartens, nurseries, and facilities for the elderly were established with resources seized from families without compensation, and homes were vacated to house the facilities.”

Of course, none of this was voluntary. Jisheng explains that “Cadres and militia ransacked homes and sometimes beat and detained occupants. When villagers handed over their assets, it was in an atmosphere of extreme political pressure. The campaign against private property rendered many families destitute and homeless.”

Jisheng describes, how initially, with “free” food, commune members gorged themselves:

The communal kitchens were most damaging in their waste. During the first two or three months that the canteens operated in the autumn of 1958, members feasted. Believing that food supply problems had been completely resolved, Mao and other central leaders worried about “what to do with the extra food,” which in turn led villagers to believe that the state had access to vast stores of food to supplement local supplies when they ran out. The slogan was, “With meals supplied communally, there is never any fear of eating too much.”

Of course, as food ran out, not all were equal. Jisheng reports on how the cadres [officials charged with managing communist party affairs] “helped themselves to white rice, steamed rolls, stuffed buns, steamed buns, and meat and vegetable dishes, while ordinary commune members ate watery gruel.” The gruel “was often execrable. Boiling cauldrons of congee might contain rat droppings and sheep dung.”

Operating in a totalitarian hierarchy, the cadres lost their humanity. Jisheng continued to explain how a cadre member “needed only to gain the confidence of his direct superior to become a ‘local despot’ with utter impunity. Corruption eroded already inadequate food supplies and intensified the famine.” They were slaves “facing upward and a dictator facing downward.” Jisheng graphically reveals the brutality of the cadres:

Cadres inflicted brutal punishment on villagers, who had mixed feelings about the communization process, who furtively consumed the collectives’ seedlings out of hunger, or who had no strength for the massive irrigation projects, and on some conscientious cadres. Punishments included being beaten while suspended in midair, forced into protracted kneeling, paraded through the streets, deprived of food, exposed to the cold or the sun, and having one’s ears or fingers cut off. In the villages, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat was in fact the dictatorship of the cadres, and those with the greatest power were able to inflict the greatest amount of arbitrary abuse.

Jisheng’s book is not an academic from-a-distance analysis, but an up-close, visceral account. Looking at the specific evils of totalitarianism is instructive:

On October 15, 1959, Zhang Zhirong of the Xiongwan production team, upon failing to hand over any grain, was bound and beaten to death with kindling and poles. The brigade’s cadre used tongs to insert rice and soya beans into the deceased’s anus while shouting, “Now you can grow grain out of your corpse!” Zhang left behind children aged eight and ten who subsequently died of starvation.

On October 19, 1959, Chenwan production team member Chen Xiaojia and his son Chen Guihou were hung from the beam of the communal dining hall when they failed to hand over any grain. They were beaten and doused with cold water, both dying within seven days. Two small children who survived them eventually died of starvation.

On November 8, 1959, Zhong Xingjian of the Yanwan production team was accused of “defying the leadership,” and a cadre hacked him to death with an ax.

According to Jisheng, the few officials “who spoke the truth were labeled ‘deniers of achievement’ and ‘right deviationists,’ and were subjected to merciless struggle.” When one party secretary admitted, “there was no food and that the procurement quota could not be met, he was lifted by his arms and legs and hurled like a battering ram against the floor.”

Do not assume these examples reflect a few bad seeds. In Tombstone, Jisheng reports that over 50 percent of the cadres participated in crimes against humanity. The cycle of violence is revealed in this account of a cadre member: “If you didn’t beat others, you would be beaten. The more harshly you beat someone, the more firmly you established your position and your loyalty to the Communist Party. If you didn’t beat others, you were a right deviationist and would soon be beaten by others.”

Jisheng sums up what families experienced during the Great Leap Forward: “Families were scattered to the winds, children abandoned, and corpses left along the roadside to rot.”

How Totalitarianism Created the Famine

Jisheng is blunt; the cause of death by starvation was totalitarianism:

The basic reason why tens of millions of people in China starved to death was totalitarianism. While totalitarianism does not inevitably result in disasters on such a massive scale, it facilitates the development of extremely flawed policies and impedes their correction. Even more important is that in this kind of system, the government monopolizes all production and life-sustaining resources, so that once a calamity occurs, ordinary people have no means of saving themselves.

The historical evidence links famine to tyranny. In “Democracy as a Universal Value,” Nobel laureate in economics Amartya Sen wrote,

In the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. We cannot find exceptions to this rule, no matter where we look: the recent famines of Ethiopia, Somalia, or other dictatorial regimes; famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; China’s 1958-61 famine with the failure of the Great Leap Forward; or earlier still, the famines in Ireland or India under alien rule. China, although it was in many ways doing much better economically than India, still managed (unlike India) to have a famine, indeed the largest recorded famine in world history: Nearly 30 million people died in the famine of 1958-61, while faulty governmental policies remained uncorrected for three full years. The policies went uncriticized because there were no opposition parties in parliament, no free press, and no multiparty elections. Indeed, it is precisely this lack of challenge that allowed the deeply defective policies to continue even though they were killing millions each year. The same can be said about the world’s two contemporary famines, occurring right now in North Korea and Sudan.

In Jisheng’s view, Mao and his minions “considered no cost or coercion too great in making the realization of Communist ideals the supreme goal of the entire populace.”

The totalitarian hierarchy meant the 1958 goals set by Mao of surpassing the United Kingdom in steel production in two years would be carried out by the cadres, no matter what the cost. Yet, as Jisheng writes, “The steel furnaces didn’t actually smelt any iron; rather, the woks and cooking utensils of the peasants, the door knockers from their homes, and the bells from temples were all melted down in order to report success.”

Mao’s goal of rapid industrialization meant impossible demands were placed on the peasant farmers. The records and testimony Jisheng reviewed are clear. Party officials “met” those demands by lying about crop yields. With inflated crop yields came “high state procurement quotas.” Most counties met their quota “by taking every kernel of grain ration and seed grain from the peasants:”

If farmers were unable to hand over the required amount, the government would accuse production teams of concealing grain. A “struggle between the two roads” (of socialism and capitalism) was launched to counteract the alleged withholding of grain. This campaign used political pressure, mental torture, and ruthless violence to extort every last kernel of grain or seed from the peasants. Anyone who uttered the slightest protest was beaten, sometimes fatally.

The result was the “prolonged agony” of starvation. Jisheng writes:

The grain was gone, the wild herbs had all been eaten, even the bark had been stripped from the trees, and bird droppings, rats, and cotton batting were used to fill stomachs. In the kaolin clay fields, starving people chewed on the clay as they dug it. The corpses of the dead, famine victims seeking refuge from other villages, even one’s own family members, became food for the desperate.

Out of fear and faith, Jisheng describes, “People sat alongside storage depots waiting for the government to release grain, crying out, ‘Communist Party, Chairman Mao, save us!’ Some people starved to death sitting next to the grain depots.”

Graphically, Jisheng recounts, “Commune members first lost weight, then swelled with edema, then wasted away until they vomited fluid and died.” One father “was afraid that his sons, ages three and four, would be left with no one to care for them, so he drowned them in a pit just before he died.”

When nothing else was left, some ate their own or exchanged children to be eaten. In a memoir, official Yu Dehong wrote: “There were cases of cannibalism in nearly every village, and many incidents so tragic that I cannot bear to speak of them.”

Jisheng, echoing Sen, writes, “It is a tragedy unprecedented in world history for tens of millions of people to starve to death and to resort to cannibalism during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or epidemics.”

Had Mao and his cadres learned from Stalin’s playbook? Jisheng’s reporting echoes the Holodomor:

To prevent starving people from fleeing and spreading news of the disaster, county party committees deployed armed guards to patrol borders and access roads. Sentry posts were set up on roadways, and checkpoints at every village. Bus stops were manned by police officers, and long-distance buses could be driven only by party members. Anyone discovered trying to leave had all his belongings confiscated and was beaten. Xinyang’s rail depots were monitored by the railway public security bureau. The peasants could only stay home and await death.

The peasants “were swollen with starvation, while the cadres were swollen with overeating.” The destruction of the family in China didn’t mean “more care, more love.”

Mao knew. Communist Party Vice-Chair, Liu Shaoqi told Mao, “History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!”

None of this is what family abolitionists, like Lewis, have in mind. Despite all his horrific crimes, Mao didn’t have mass starvation in mind when he set out to abolish the family. Mao blamed the unfathomable millions of dead “on political and class enemies.” As always, with totalitarians, “mistakes were made, but not by me.”

*****

This article was published by AIER, The American Institute for Economic Research, and is reproduced with permission.

 

The Coming Radical Political Shift

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Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Editors’ Note: The following article defines today’s Democrat party accurately. One no longer has to dissect through their ‘moderate’ messaging that has hidden their true agenda for decades. What you are seeing is what we get when today’s Democrats have unbalanced power. The Founders’ design of our Republic made every citizen sovereign rather than the government being sovereign and established that we are governed ‘by our consent’. Your vote is your consent. As you cast your ballot between now and November 8th, remember that the consequences of the consent you give will be how we are governed going forward. It is time to de-radicalize our governing class. Our future is in great jeopardy. The GOP is not a perfect party but it is not the party that engineered the southern border invasion and that is undermining our liberty, the rule of law, our children’s innocence and the security and safety of our neighborhoods and personal well-being. Let us resoundingly move the Democrats aside with this election by voting Republican all the way down your ballots and then demand the best from those we consent to govern us.

Many people believe that the current state of the Democrat Party is a danger to our constitutional structure and the underpinnings of what has made America the great country it has become. If you believe that is true you have not seen anything yet.

This column purposely strays from making predictions and rarely has done so in the last fifteen years of publishing weekly. The case that is being laid out is based on everything that is historical, facts you know, and historical reality.

We do not know for sure, but it is highly likely that the Republicans will take over the House of Representatives. It is hard to tell what will happen with the U.S. Senate. But with the current societal factors, particularly the economic ones, the chances of the Republicans taking control of the Senate increase daily. The overruling of Roe v. Wade changed little.

Let’s look at where that will leave the Democrats. They currently have leadership in the House and Senate that is collectively octogenarian. The last time the Dems took a beating, losing 63 seats in 2010, political normalcy would have seen the leadership tossed to the side. That did not happen because the remaining members of the house were the most liberal Democrat members and they kept Nancy Pelosi as their leader. However, this time she will be 82 years old and her top leadership team is just as old. There are legitimate questions about whether they will even remain in their seats.

There will also be pressure from the younger members to replace them and to toss Chuck Schumer in the Senate. The good thing is that the new leadership will not hide their leftist political leanings. They will be unabashed Leftists which will at least make matters clear to the voting public. Though many of the candidates supported by the far-left wing of the party have lost their primaries, many have won. There are already 100 members of the so-called “progressive caucus.” Now the caucus will completely control the House and members in the Senate will be in a greater position of control.

As for the presidency, the last two Democrats ran as moderates. They were barely disguised. We all remember then-candidate Obama proclaiming, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He lied about being a moderate right up to the time his team realized McCain and his team were incompetent and Obama believed his election was a lock. Obama was tame compared to Biden who we were told was moderate. Biden signed 22 executive orders in his first week demonstrating he was even more prepared than Obama to transform America.

The Democrats remaining in Congress will feel even bolder and express no need to disguise their plans. They were a lot more forthcoming in 2021 than they were in 2009. Many of these far-Left elected officials expressed no indication they wish to hold back on their plans. They believe that not only are their policies the correct ones for our country, but they believe the reason the Democrats have failed is that the policies have not been implemented. In their minds, if the policies were enacted we would be so much better off as a country.

Here is where the radical political shift happens. Republicans will not stay in power forever. The history of our country shows a back-and-forth when the electorate gets upset with the party in power. We vote out one party and hand over the control of government to the other. We did in 2020 even though we had no clue what Biden really stood for. He had campaigned from his basement in Delaware. People were upset with Trump and dumped him even though we got someone totally unprepared to be President. Look what he has wrought.

The next time is going to be different. The leaders of the House and Senate will come from the radical wing of the Democrat party. The President will as well. They will enact some of their extreme plans which to them are mainstream, such as expanding the Supreme Court or ditching the electoral college. Fortunately, our Constitution is very difficult to amend though they will do their best to try.

If you believe some of the actions of the Left are over-the-top now, I can only advise you have not seen anything yet.

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This article was published by Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.

Democrats Attack Lake as ‘Extremist.’ 2024 Republicans Flock to Her

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Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Editors’ Note: In less than 21 months, from the very beginning of the Biden Administration and with razor thin majorities in the U.S. Senate and House, Democrats have devastated our nation, its citizens, and their liberty in so many ways. Severe induced inflation, an open southern border and historic invasion of America by (invited) illegal aliens, a resulting fentanyl crisis with the unending tragedy of so many young deaths in every state, the unleashing of violent urban and suburban crime with the defunding of police and the war on the fossil fuel industry in the name of (dishonest) clean, green energy are some of the products of their radical agenda. Every American feels the pain.

What do children and dishonest adults do when they are challenged, caught or jeopardized by their bad intentions or behavior? They project their behavior and actions onto someone else. Projection is a classic sign of intellectual dishonesty in adults and can be effective on occasion. Everything the radical left, now known as the Democrat Party, does is projected onto the Republican party in the most pejorative and fear-inducing ways – “they are fascists”, they are “ultra MAGA”, “they are extreme”, “they are a threat to democracy” (America is a Republic), “they are a party of white privilege”, and on and on. If you want to know what the Democrat Party is doing and what their ideology and methods are, just ask what they are accusing (projecting) liberty-loving conservatives and Republicans of. How do you respond? YOU VOTE! Republican candidates are not perfect but  vote Republican all the way down your ballot – the radical Democrat Party deserves a severe electoral loss and Americans must rise up and restore government to ‘We the People’ on November 8th.

Kari Lake in Arizona is leading that charge. Just listen to what the Democrats say (project) about her!

 

It is a busy week for Kari Lake and for Republicans who harbor White House ambitions. Several are more than eager to share the stump with the Arizona gubernatorial candidate, a fact that Democrats believe underscores their arguments about the “ultra MAGA” right and the rise of GOP extremism.

Tuesday morning in Scottsdale, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem will have coffee with Lake and her supporters. The next afternoon in the Phoenix suburbs, Lake will share the stage with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Former President Donald Trump arrives Sunday to host a rally in the town of Prescott Valley.

Some have already stumped for Lake, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in August. Others have promised they will, like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, but haven’t yet put a date on the calendar.

“Why is it a surprise that Republicans are helping Republicans?” a Noem spokesman asked RealClearPolitics before getting a plug in for the candidate: “South Dakota is proving that freedom gets results, and Kari Lake will bring the same principles to Arizona.”

But Lake isn’t a generic Republican candidate. A longtime former Phoenix television anchorwoman who routinely excoriates her former profession, she has called for the 2020 presidential election to be decertified, condemned the vaccine mandates as government overreach, and aggressively mixed it up with regional and national reporters alike. In short, Lake is a Republican after Trump’s heart. Other politicians, despite the criticism, want in.

The race between Lake and Democratic nominee Katie Hobbs remains a tossup. In a state Biden narrowly won, the RealClearPolitics Average has the Republican out front with a slim 2.2-point lead., so it would be on the national radar anyway. But Lake, who brings an undeniable energy to the stump, adds a heightened level of controversy to the mix.

[Here is the Democrats’ projection] “Kari Lake is as extreme as they come – from touting Arizona’s 1901 abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest to endorsing Donald Trump’s Big Lie that incited an attack on our Capitol,” DNC spokesperson Ammar Moussa told RCP. “It’s no surprise that national Republicans are flocking to Arizona to embrace Lake and echo her ultra-MAGA agenda because this is exactly what the Republican Party stands for today.”

Democrats and President Biden are eager to make the midterms a referendum on what they see as GOP extremism, rather than the economy or inflation where the White House remains underwater in polling…..

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Continue reading this article at Real Clear Politics.

The Left Is Not Like Us

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Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Progressives do not want the same things as most Americans.

My colleague at the National Association of Scholars, David Acevedo, recently explained that the academic left does not apply “double standards,” because they don’t share the standards they flout. Rather, he writes, their “behavior is perfectly consistent with its true standard: gain power, crush resistance, and destroy the West by any means necessary.”

Acevedo is on point for all radical leftists, not just the academic variety. Their policies intentionally destabilize national security, personal safety, prosperity, the nuclear family, and religion, and are designed to cede America’s leadership to the so-called rules-based international alliance.

Progressives pretend to live in a utopia in which the rules of economics, physics, psychology, and science are suspended as they pursue unrealistic, tactical goals. Radical left leaders understand this dichotomy. Just as they have conceded high gas prices would force the middle class to buy electric cars, they believe the other harms they cause will facilitate achieving their ultimate objectives.

The far left readily acknowledges its preference for a centrally directed government, trillions of dollars of additional spending, higher taxes, the “green new deal,” the end of fossil fuels, restorative justice, racial and gender balancing, open borders, an LGBTQ+ obsession, and shutting down conservative voices. Now that its leaders are becoming comfortable admitting to being socialists, and even “trained Marxists,” the mask is dropping on their true ambitions.

Building on The Communist Manifesto’s call for “abolition of the family,” BLM initially sought to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” Many local chapters of BLM call for the abolition of capitalism. Oregon’s Department of Education characterizes its mission as “the restructuring and dismantling of systems and institutions that create the dichotomy of beneficiaries and the oppressed and marginalized.” An initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sees its mission as “dismantling white supremacy.” The American Medical Association calls for “disrupting and dismantling existing norms.” The main trade publication for architects complains that “racism is a metastasis that is baked into every kernel, from planning and zoning to multi- and single-family housing and conversations about public and private space.”

“To love capitalism is to end up loving racism,” Ibram X. Kendi opines. Rather than be guided by the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution , and the Federalist Papers, radical leftists are guided by “social justice,” and “redistributive justice” through which government, academia, and corporations extort benefits for favored minorities from the privileged.

The left’s preoccupation with defunding police, and depriving them of both lethal and non-lethal tools, restorative justice, decarceration, eliminating cash bail, decriminalizing felonies, and refusing to prosecute lower level crimes, or seek sentencing enhancements, has caused violent crime to explode in major cities, up from five to 40 percent compared to the same period last year in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle and Washington, D.C. They misdirect that Covid, the war in Ukraine, or tax loopholes has caused this increase is legerdemain. Criminals understand this. In Los Angeles, for example, there is a rush to obtain plea deals before the possible recall of progressive district attorney George Gascon. About 75 George Soros-linked district attorneys control the jurisdictions of 72 million Americans. With turnover exceeding 75 percent in many of these offices, experienced prosecutors are leaving, further eroding law enforcement.

The Biden administration’s war on the fossil fuel industry has erased America’s energy advantage, threatened prosperity and energy shortages, and forced America to seek accommodations from others. Bowing to radical left policies, instead of strengthening America’s infrastructure, the administration bizarrely used the Defense Production Act for solar panels, sought oil from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, and has considered seeking oil from Iran.

The left is committed to open borders. Since Biden took office, most Trump-era restrictions on illegal immigration have been rescinded. Unenforced borders are an invitation to terrorism, and drugs, and are intended to change elections in the near-term, and erase America’s separate existence in the long term.

Progressives, who vociferously advocate trillions of dollars of additional spending the U.S. cannot afford, this year pushed the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio to 134 percent, well above the World Bank’s 77 percent redline, contributing to record-breaking inflation, deficits, and interest rate hikes that can hobble the economy. Elizabeth Warren advocates taxing unrealized gains, while other progressives more simply want to increase rates on upper incomes. Both would destabilize the economy and shift investments out of the United States.

The left’s obsession with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has, as its avowed goal, supplanted expertise, and merit with socially engineered outcomes based on race, gender identity, and sexual orientation. It is axiomatic that this will reduce productivity and prosperity, and provoke racial division. As Kendi concedes, DEI is intended to dismantle capitalism.

Polls show that most people support the rights of adults to make decisions about their bodies. But, after years of promoting the transgender and nonbinary ethos, including an all-out push by the Biden administration, recent Pew and Gallup polls found that just 0.6 percent to 0.7 percent of adult Americans identify as transgender, and another one percent as nonbinary, including pre-ops who might never transition. Gallup found that just 7.1 percent of U.S. adults identify as other than heterosexual.

Numerous recent polls commissioned by liberal Democrat organizations show that Americans reject the progressive effort to replace biological sex with the concept of “identification,” and favor banning the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity to children in kindergarten through third grade (see here and here). Progressives have abused about one million post-op transgenders as pretext to destroy girls’ sports and humiliate women as menstruating and birthing persons (it is unclear how these terms apply to post-menopausal women, or adoptive mothers). Transferring power over children to the state and destroying nuclear families and religion are long-standing Marxist objectives.

Whether it’s Homeland Security’s suspended Disinformation Board, forcing out non-compliant teachers, university professors, editors, Sharon Osbourne, or comedians, trying to fire Joe Rogan, or fining football coaches for questioning orthodoxy, the left is aggressively punishing those who do not adhere to its dogma.

The riots immediately after George Floyd’s death cost more than $2 billion in property damage and as many as 30 deaths. Those losses continue to grow. Yet, Democrats, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, refuse to condemn or prosecute left-wing protestors who violate federal law, and often encourage their protests. Just a few weeks after Garland commenced a counter-terrorism investigation of parents who disagree with liberal school boards, and as the Justice Department continued to lock up January 6 bystanders, Garland rejected guilty pleas offered by two left-wing lawyers accused of terrorism for distributing and using Molotov cocktails in Manhattan. He instead offered them a lenient plea to a lesser charge.

The progressive rebuttal is Donald Trump, January 6, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and Donald Trump (again).

Progressives are winning the battle of ideas through their control of education, most entertainment, technology, and media companies, and professional organizations, and the acquiescence of many institutional investors and public corporations. The occasional mainstream win in Virginia, San Francisco, or at the Supreme Court, will not change the trajectory. If anger over transitory vexations like Donald Trump and January 6, important though they may be, prevents centrists and traditional conservatives from recognizing the asymmetric significance of the alternatives, the siege on American values, freedoms, and leadership will inevitably prevail.

In less than 100 days, we can start changing course, but only if Trump supporters, anti-Trumpers, and never-Trumpers channel their anger to achieve a productive result.

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This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

The Thesis That Drove American Politics Crazy: The Emerging Democratic Majority

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Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

In 2002, President George W. Bush stood astride the post–September 11 political world and Republicans looked poised to do the unthinkable and strengthen their positions in Congress in a midterm year. Yet liberal scholars John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published a provocative thesis: A new Democratic majority would “emerge” by the end of the decade. Traditional middle-class and working-class Democrats would be joined by growing ethnic minority populations, especially Asians and Hispanics; by working, single, and highly educated women voters; and by a growing share of the professional class, paving the way for a new majority. After President Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, the thesis seemed airtight and its guidance likely to live long after the decadal horizon its authors had adopted. Except, just after the majority “emerged,” it started to crack. Judis observed surprising resilience in the Republican coalition and Republican strength with middle-class voters in the 2014 midterm elections, presaging the shocking election of President Donald Trump in 2016. By 2022, Judis and Teixeira’s “emerging majority” appears tottering, with Teixeira himself, a self-described “social democrat,” departing the Democratic establishment–aligned Center for American Progress for the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, in part because of institutional liberalism’s “relentless focus on race, gender, and identity.” But where stands The Emerging Democratic Majority at 20? How correct were its predictions, and can one find the seeds of the emerging majority’s demise in the book that declared it?

 

The year 2002 was not a good year to be a Democrat. George W. Bush had been elected president two years before and boasted stratospheric approval ratings thanks to the apparently successful military response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Democrats had broken the Republican federal trifecta Bush carried into office—the first Republican federal trifecta since the Eisenhower administration—after the defection to the Democratic caucus of liberal ex-Republican Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords (I) but had to defend seats in states Bush had won. Making matters worse, charismatic left-progressive champion Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) was killed in a plane crash while campaigning within two weeks of Election Day. And the midterm House elections were shaping up very differently than the usual midterms in which the president’s party typically loses seats: The GOP always looked likely to hold its majority with the potential to grow it.

These dynamics, and the hangover from their victory over Al Gore—popular President Bill Clinton’s Vice President—had Republicans and conservative commentators like Bush’s political consultant Karl Rove and Almanac of American Politics author Michael Barone speculating about the possibilities for a new, lasting Republican majority. Democrats had not won a majority of the national presidential vote since 1976, and in 1994, Republicans had broken the Democrats’ 40-year hammerlock on the U.S. House of Representatives. The Grand Old Party was riding high.

But amid this Republican ascendancy, two liberal scholars—New Republic editor John Judis and Century Foundation fellow Ruy Teixeira—published a provocative thesis backed by data: A new majority was on the cusp of power, but it would be Democratic, not Republican. In their imaginatively named The Emerging Democratic Majority, Judis and Teixeira argued that the country was on the cusp of a transition from an industrial economy focused on suburban-urban and black-white divides with residual Protestant values to a postindustrial economy focused on “ideopolises” with secular-progressive values and a commitment to racial equality. That transition would grow the numbers of single women, immigrants, and professionals in the economy and, tantalizingly for the down-on-their-luck Democrats, the electorate would swing left. The old Democrats in organized labor, the white working classes, and African American communities would join with the “women’s movement,” immigrants, and professional workers to advance a new “progressive centrism” of secular values, abortion access, regulation of business, and a stronger welfare state.

While Bush’s Republicans won in 2002 (and 2004), the elections of 2006, 2008, and 2012 seemed to confirm Judis and Teixeira’s thesis in the main. Barack Obama’s Democrats dominated the Pacific Northwest, New England, the industrial Midwest, and the mid-Atlantic, as the “emerging majority” thesis predicted. Hispanic voters seemed to have moved Florida, Colorado, and Nevada firmly into the Democratic column while progressive professionals joined the traditional party base of liberal black Americans to turn Virginia blue and make North Carolina highly competitive.

While Texas, Arizona, and Georgia’s turns to the left were a bit beyond the decadal time horizon that The Emerging Democratic Majority took, liberal commentators could not help but note the same demographic dynamics that delivered Virginia and Colorado to the “rising American electorate” would deliver them to Obama’s successors. The GOP split harshly between a professional consultant-and-commentariat class that proposed liberal immigration reform as a desperate rearguard action to stem losses with Hispanic Americans and a populist activist-and-entertainer class that demanded the party double down on restrictionism. Liberals chortled at Republicans’ apparent no-win scenario, and the Democracy Alliance funded ethnicity-based and other identity-based outreach efforts to the New American Majority to whom the future belonged.

But even during the headiest days of the Obama era, there were skeptics of an emerging Democratic majority. Sean Trende, a political analyst with RealClearPolitics and the American Enterprise Institute, was perhaps the most prominent. His work, both at RCP and in his book The Lost Majority, questioned some of Judis and Teixeira’s key implicit and explicit assumptions like time-cyclical realignment theory, a high floor for Democrats with white voters, and the primacy of liberal immigration as a motivation issue for Latino and Asian voters. Most important for this counterthesis is the idea that American elections are driven by contingency—that is, in the possibly apocryphal words of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, by “Events, my dear boy, events.”

By 2015, the results of the midterm elections of Obama’s presidency in 2010 and 2014 were impossible for Judis to ignore. Building off the unexpected election of Gov. Larry Hogan (R) in his home state of Maryland, he warned that, at least at the sub-presidential level, the “Democratic advantage of several years ago is gone.”

Two years later, the country inaugurated a Republican president who had done almost everything the emerging majority thesis, even as modified by Judis in his 2015 writing, would suggest was not how to win a presidential election. Donald Trump ran a campaign based on his belligerent persona, celebrity appeal to the white middle and working classes, and populist opposition to liberal trade agreements and illegal immigration. Trende would be left to write a post-mortem, deeming the emerging Democratic majority a liberal “God That Failed,” whose prescription of Clintonite progressive centrism had been superseded in political minds by a teleological assumption that capital-D Demographics would drive the Party of Jackson into near-permanent power.

In 2020, amid what may have been the worst political environment for an incumbent president since Herbert Hoover’s landslide loss in 1932, President Donald Trump lost the Electoral College by a combined 43,000 or so votes in three states. But even in defeat, Trump buried the emerging Democratic majority, perhaps to an even greater degree than he had in victory. Hispanics, especially in the overwhelmingly Mexican American Rio Grande Valley and the largely Cuban- and South American-descended portions of South Florida, swung firmly to the Party of Lincoln. Two Asian American Republicans joined Congress from districts in heavily Asian American Orange County, California. And the white working-class redoubt of Iowa, which Judis and Teixeira predicted would help anchor a Democratic majority, stayed staunchly Republican.

Whatever the new, likely fleeting, majority Joe Biden’s Democrats enjoy is, it is not the one that Judis and Teixeira predicted would “become the majority party of the early twenty-first century.” Emblematic of the Democratic Party’s departure from the “progressive centrism” the book espoused is Teixeira’s departure from the Democratic establishment–aligned Center for American Progress to the center-right American Enterprise Institute in July 2022 as he expressed increasing alarm at the Democratic Party’s deteriorating position with working-class and middle-class ethnic minorities.

Nothing in the rise and fall of the emerging Democratic majority suggests a Republican majority is inevitable: As anyone who lived through 2020 should know, events prevail over all political theories. But it is a warning against both hubris in the certainty of future victory and against despair at the prospect of future defeats. The political future, like the future of all things, remains unwritten.

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This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.