The whiney leftist mind

The whiney leftist mind

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

Modern progressives assume moral and intellectual authority.

Consequently, their supposedly superior ends naturally justify almost any means necessary to achieve them.

Among the elite, the Democrats' "blue-wall" states were once considered a testament to the wisdom of the Electoral College. When that wall crumbled in 2016 to Donald Trump, the Electoral College suddenly was blasted as a relic of our anti-democratic founders.

The nine-person Supreme Court was once beloved. On issues like abortion, school prayer, same-sex marriage, pornography, and Miranda rights, the Left cheered the Court as it made the law and ignored legislatures and presidents.

Republican Court picks – Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, Lewis Powell, John Roberts, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Potter Stewart, and Earl Warren – would often flip leftward. How could they not be swayed by the greater brilliance of their liberal colleagues?

From affirmative action to Roe v. Wade to Obamacare, apostate Republican justices for a half-century greenlighted legislating from the bench.

In response, was there any serious right-wing talk of packing the court with six additional justices to slow down its overreaching left-wing majority – or of a mob massing at the home of a left-wing justice? Certainly not.

But now?

Suddenly a narrow constructionist majority has returned matters of abortion to the states. And the once-beloved Court is being slandered by leftist insurrectionists as illegitimate.

Every sort of once unthinkable attack on the courts is now permissible.

Confidential draft opinions are leaked illegally. A senior senator threatens justices by name at the doors of the Court. The homes of justices are surrounded by heckling protestors. And the very life of a justice is threatened by a would-be assassin close to his home.

Consider also the Senate filibuster. Former President Barack Obama not long ago ranted that it was racist and a 180-year-old relic.

Obama's logic was infantile. When Democrats were in the Senate minority, he was giddy that the filibuster could slow down the Republican majority. Indeed, while a senator, Obama himself filibustered the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

When Democrats were in the majority, however, a pouting Obama blasted the filibuster as a racist, Jim-Crow roadblock.

Can the January 6 committee issue some universal declaration that defeated candidates should not question the integrity of an election, much less call for it to be ignored?

Apparently not. In 2016, a defeated Hillary Clinton claimed the winner, Trump, was illegitimate – this from the architect of the entire Russian collusion hoax.

Clinton then trumped her own inflammatory rhetoric by urging Joe Biden not to accept the 2020 tally of the balloting if he lost.

Former President Jimmy Carter agreed that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and Trump was thus illegitimate.

Hollywood actors appeared in commercials, insurrectionary style, urging Republican electors to renounce their constitutional duties and instead elect Clinton.

On racial matters, the Left is most intellectually bankrupt.

During the recent confirmation hearings of African American nominee to the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Left alleged that tough questioners were racists and sexists for "bullying" Jackson.

Yet she got the kid-glove treatment compared to the character assassinations of past conservative nominees. Brett Kavanaugh was smeared as teen-aged rapist and targeted by former Democratic media heartthrob Michael Avenatti, now an imprisoned felon.

Currently, loud mobs of affluent, young white women have been circling the home of African American Justice Clarence Thomas – just one of five court justices who voted to let the states decide the status of abortion.

Thomas did not write the majority opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, but then again, leftists have a toxic fixation with Blacks who do not appreciate their condescension.

In the left-wing mind, the buffoonish Capitol riot on January 6 was an "insurrection."

Yet the much larger May 31, 2020, riot that sought to storm the White House grounds and sent the president into a bunker was the sort of mob violence that "was not going to stop" in the words of now Vice President Kamala Harris.

The recent pro-abortion mob assault on the Arizona state senate, the Left insists, was an apparent cry of the heart.

What would the Left do if after 2022 midterms a Republican-majority Congress emulated its own infantile tantrums?

Imagine new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., tearing up a President Joe Biden State of Union address on live television.

How about the House impeaching Biden twice, even as a private citizen in 2025?

Envision a 22-month, $40-million investigation of the entire Biden quid pro quo, corrupt family syndicate?

What if McCarthy booted left-wing congressional representatives from key select committees?

And what if conservatives showed up screaming at the gates of one of Obama's three mansions?

How odd that leftists are destroying the very customs and traditions whose loss will come back to haunt them when the Democrats lose the Congress in November.

Cry-baby tantrums won't win over the public. These nonstop puerile meltdowns have turned off most Americans who tire of whiny narcissistic hypocrites. 

SCOTUS Rules the Value of Life is Secured

SCOTUS Rules the Value of Life is Secured

Brad Dacus, Pacific Justice Institute
Washington, D.C.— The U.S. Supreme Court has overruled the landmark 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade, concluding that there is no constitutional right to an abortion.


“The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives," stated Justice Samuel Alito in the 6-3 majority opinion.  He added, "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.
"

President and Founder of Pacific Justice Institute, Brad Dacus, stated, “This is a landmark day for Americans across this great country for  the defense of those who cannot defend themselves. For over 25 years, PJI has stood strong in defending in courts the lives of the pre-born and the sanctity of life. Under God's direction, this is a pivotal reason why I founded PJI.” Mr. Dacus asserted, “This supreme court decision will send reverberations across the country and allow states to further protect life. With our unique positioning of offices in states across the country, we stand ready to work to assist legislatures to take full advantage of this historic decision.”


“Today marks the greatest opportunity in 50 years to protect women, unborn children and future generations. All children are precious. All women and all families deserve true respect.  We must remember that Roe has, for decades, actively barred states from protecting unborn children and their mothers.  Now we must ensure that across our nation – state by state – women and children receive the support, legal protection and dignity that they have been denied for decades,” declared PJI Nevada attorney, Emily Mimnaugh.


PJI Chief Counsel, Kevin Snider, stated, "This is an important milestone to protect the most vulnerable members of our country.  But the fight is not over.  We expect to face many tough battles across the country as this moves to the States.
"

Through providence, PJI is perfectly positioned to undertake this momentous state-by-state mission as the largest Christian legal defense group in the US, with 22 offices across 18 states. For the past 25 years, the cause of the pre-born has been at the heart of our ministry at PJI. From signature victories at the Supreme Court (AB 775) to protecting churches and pro-life clinics unjustly interfered with and even sued by Planned Parenthood to presently fighting right now in federal court for a nurse practitioner who was denied jobs in women’s health because she would not perform elective abortions...  We will not stop.

 

SCOTUS Delivers Huge Win for Christian Schools

 

SCOTUS Delivers Huge Win for Christian Schools

Abby Liebing, The Western Journal 

While many have been focused on the Supreme Court’s decision about abortion, the court just ruled in favor of parents seeking more school choice for their children in the case of Carson v. Makin. The case brought a national focus on the crucial question of religious freedom in the debate over school choice in the U.S.

In a  6-3 decision, the court ruled that religious schools cannot be kept from benefiting from state programs that offer aid for parents paying for private education, according to The Associated Press.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority ruling.

“Maine’s ‘nonsectarian’ requirement for its otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,” Roberts wrote.

“Regardless of how the benefit and restriction are described, the program operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise.”

The court split along its usual ideological lines with Justices Kagan, Breyer and Sotomayor in dissent.

Carson v. Makin revolved around the question of whether a state has the right to restrict students’ access to state-sponsored financial aid programs if those funds were used to attend a private religious school that had religious teaching.

This case was sparked by the state of Maine’s laws that allows students who live in areas without a secondary school to attend private schools using the tax dollars that would have otherwise been spent at a public school.

However, that state tuition aid is only available to schools that are “nonsectarian,” meaning, they do not have religious instruction.

Maine’s tuition aid does not exclude schools that are identified as religious, or have religious ownership. It simply specifies that schools that require religious instruction do not qualify for the tuition program. 

A group of parents (collectively the “Carson” side of the case), sued the Maine Department of Education and its commissioner, Pender Makin,  saying that the “nonsectarian” requirement for the state financial aid program is a violation of their “First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion,” the Legal Information Institute of Cornell summarized.

“Maine’s sectarian exclusion discriminates based on religion. Like all discrimination based on religion, it should be subjected to strict scrutiny and held unconstitutional, unless Maine can show that it is necessary to achieve a compelling government interest,” Michael Bindus argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the plaintiffs.

Maine’s school tuition assistance program has been around for a very long time and for over a century did allow families to choose sectarian schools for their children.

“For well over a century, parents in Maine could choose ‘sectarian,’ or religious, schools for their children.  But in 1980, the state’s Attorney General issued an opinion concluding that including religious choices in parents’ menu of options violated the federal Constitution’s Establishment Clause,” the Institute for Justice, which represented Maine families challenging the state, wrote in high court arguments.

“As a result, the Maine Legislature in 1981 passed the current law that excludes religious schools from the tuitioning system—a law prohibiting towns from paying tuition to any “sectarian” school, which the state defines as a school that provides religious instruction. Maine’s law thus singles out families who choose religious schools, and only those families, for discrimination,”

Attorneys for Maine, however, argued that the state’s tuition program does not discriminate but carries out the state’s obligation to provide “religiously neutral” education.

“Maine has determined that, as a matter of public policy, public education should be religiously neutral. This is entirely consistent with this Court’s holdings that public schools must not inculcate religion and should instead promote tolerance of divergent religious views,” Christopher Taub argued on Makin’s behalf.

Conservative social media reaction on the case was jubilant.

Eric Schmitt, Attorney General of Missouri, tweeted how this decision is a “big win for religious liberty.”

The Cato Institute tweeted that this new decision adds to the long line of decisions that the court has been making concerning religion and schools.

The justices in dissent, however, said they are concerned about the direction the court is headed.

“With growing concern for where this Court will lead us next, I respectfully dissent,” Justice Sotomayor wrote in the dissent.

However, the court has ruled that Maine was actually discriminating against religion.

“The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools—so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion,” Roberts wrote. “A State’s antiestablishment interest does not justify enactments that exclude some members of the community from an otherwise generally available public benefit because of their religious exercise.”

Abby Liebing is a Hillsdale College graduate with a degree in history. She has written for various outlets and enjoys covering foreign policy issues and culture.

‘The Cartel Controls Everything Here Now’

 

Border Dispatch, Part II: ‘The Cartel Controls Everything Here Now’

John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist 

The ongoing border crisis has transformed illegal immigration into an industrial-scale international smuggling black market.

MATAMOROS, Mexico —  It’s easy to find gut-wrenching stories at the border. Ask almost any migrant you meet in northern Mexico and you’ll hear about the violence and hardships they endured to get as far as they have. 

Alba Luz Perdomo, for example, fled Honduras with her husband and 13-year-old daughter after a gang killed her brother and threatened to kill them too. But that was just the beginning of their troubles.

They were forced to leave a farm where they had been working in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco by locals who told them foreigners weren’t welcome. In Monterrey, Perdomo’s daughter was nearly abducted by their landlord. They sought help from a man claiming to be a pastor in Matamoros, but who turned out to be a human trafficker and kept the family in his house for 20 days before they managed to escape. 

Now they’re living in a migrant shelter in Matamoros, just across the river from Brownsville, Texas. But they’re afraid to leave the walled compound of the shelter because the local cartel keeps trying to recruit her husband. Perdomo says she doesn’t want to cross the border illegally, but doesn’t know what to do. “I’m asking God to do something,” she says, “because this is horrible.”

It’s impossible not to feel sympathy for this woman and her family. Their story is shockingly commonplace among migrants stuck in Mexican border towns like Matamoros and Reynosa, where I recently traveled with a pair of colleagues, Emily Jashinsky and David Agren, to better understand the ongoing border crisis. (Read part one of this series here.)

But too often, sympathetically conveying these stories — many of which are impossible to verify — is the extent of the media’s coverage of the crisis. It makes for a compelling read and, especially when President Donald Trump was in office, a just-so morality tale complete with villains and victims and a heroic struggle for justice. For left-leaning reporters, it confirms all their prior assumptions about the anti-immigrant bigotry of Trump and his supporters, and the bravery and nobility of the migrants (and, by extension, of themselves).

Of course, such biased coverage has the effect of obscuring the causes of the crisis and clouding our understanding of how it’s playing out. But looking beyond the personal stories of hardship and suffering we usually see in the corporate press — and beyond the outrage-driven coverage we often see in conservative media — we can discern the outlines of an entire black market industry around illegal immigration that’s been created and sustained by U.S. border policy, which cartels and smugglers are using to enrich themselves at the expense of migrants and the American people alike.

Consider the story of Ramon and his wife Veronica and their two-year-old daughter. They left Nicaragua, Ramon told us, because of poverty. We spoke to them on a recent weekday afternoon at the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, Texas, where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement drops off nearly everyone it discharges from federal custody in that area. They had just been released that morning along with about 70 others.

Their story, like many others on the border, is terrifying. When Ramon and Veronica and their daughter reached Reynosa, their bus was stopped at a cartel checkpoint and they were asked for a code. (When migrants pay off the cartel they get a code. That’s how the cartel keeps track of who’s paid and who hasn’t.)

They hadn’t paid and didn’t have a code, so the cartel kidnapped them and took them to a stash house with a bunch of other families. Ramon says the house had no water, no food, no electricity. They were held there 10 days, until family members back in Nicaragua were able to get together $3,000 (a thousand for each of them) and pay the “cartel tax.”

After they paid, they were taken over the river by boat, picked up by Border Patrol, and were released a few days later on humanitarian parole. In this case, they were released on parole through a relatively recent bureaucratic innovation designed to streamline the processing of illegal border-crossers and prevent overcrowding in federal detention centers.

They say they were only asked for the address and telephone number of their destination. ICE discharged them with a sheaf of documents that allows them to travel inside the United States — which they’ll need to do, because they were also given a date, 30 days out, to report to an ICE office in central Washington State, where they’re headed.

What they don’t have is a court date or work permits. For whatever reason, their parole documents, which they showed us, did not include a work authorization number. This concerned them greatly, as it did most everyone we spoke with at the Respite Center who didn’t have work authorization.

The irony is that Ramon and Veronica, if their story is true, might actually have a compelling case for political asylum. But they seemed far less concerned with filing an asylum claim than with getting a hold of work permits.

The two are in fact connected. If you successfully file an asylum claim, you also get authorization to work in the United States while the case runs its course, which, because immigration courts are so backlogged, now takes almost five years. This is one reason so many illegal immigrants arrested after crossing the border are claiming asylum. Even if they have no chance in court, they can work in the United States in the meantime and send money to their families back home. For many migrants, that’s the ultimate purpose of crossing the border in the first place.

But there are other ways to get authorization to work besides filing an asylum claim. We spoke to a group of Haitian men at the Respite Center who had all been released under a slightly different iteration of humanitarian parole. Their paperwork differed significantly from Ramon and Veronica’s. Not only did these men have authorization to work, they had court dates for removal proceedings that were months away, some more than a year. A staff member at the Respite Center told me she had seen court dates for removal proceedings (not asylum hearings) as far out as 2026. 

The Border Has Become a Vast Criminal Enterprise

The bureaucratic morass these people are pulled into upon crossing the border is dizzying. Even for an American citizen and a native English speaker, it’s hard to follow. No wonder the reality of U.S. immigration policy gets distilled down to a few essentials on the south side of the Rio Grande.

What most migrants there believe is in fact the truth, more or less: if you can get across the Rio Grande, you will probably be allowed to stay. Under what conditions and for how long is not as important to them as crossing the border and getting released from U.S. custody, preferably with permission to work.

Because of this, smuggling networks and cartels are able to collect massive revenues from migrants, knowing that once inside the United States they will be able to earn far more than they could back home or in Mexico. That’s why, for example, the cartel that kidnapped Ramon and Veronica held them until family members back in Nicaragua came up with a cash payment of three thousand dollars.

Those family members no doubt went into debt with local loan sharks to come up with the money, as migrants’ families are often forced to do. But if Ramon and Veronica can get into the United States and start working, it will ultimately be worth it. For some migrants stuck in northern Mexico, failing to get into the United States isn’t an option; if they don’t get in and start working, their families back home will never be able to repay the loan sharks.

This is dynamic now all up and down the border. Indeed, it’s hard to overstate the extent to which illegal immigration has become an industrial-scale, international smuggling black market that operates according to these incentives.

In Matamoros, Pastor Abraham Barberi, who runs one of two migrant shelters in the city, told us that back in 2019, when some 3,000 migrants were concentrated in a sprawling encampment near the international bridge, the cartel came in and made every person there pay a tax. “The cartel made a lot of money off that,” Barberi told us. “A lot of money.”

The 54-year-old pastor has been working in Matamoros for more than 20 years, and personally knows many members of the cartel here, which he says “controls everything here now,” including the police and the municipal government. Even the predominantly Haitian migrant community, we were told, has been infiltrated by the cartel as a way of keeping track of newcomers. (As if to underscore the point, a few days after we left town the cartel imposed blockades along main roads in Matamoros and set fire to a bunch of vehicles, supposedly in retaliation for the arrest of a Gulf Cartel boss.)

“They know you’re here,” Barberi tells us at one point, but quickly adds that we’re safe, not to worry. “They won’t bother you because they don’t want trouble with the U.S. government, or any foreign governments.” He says the cartel leaves him and his shelter alone, not just because they know he’s doing good work but because he’s not trying to profit off the migrants in his care.

“If we were doing something illegal with the migrants, or we were charging them to stay here, collecting money, profiting from them, the cartel would be here in a heartbeat,” he says, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “They would want a part of it. But they know we’re not doing that. I have asked the coyotes [smugglers] please, don’t do business here, do it over there. And they respect that.”

At the same time, Barberi adds, when the cartel-affiliated smugglers want customers, they know where to find them. “In a sense, their business is right here. They don’t have to go around looking for them.”

It’s not just cartels in border towns that see migrants as potential “customers,” it’s also Mexican officials in the country’s interior. Miguel, a Salvadoran taxi driver who came to Reynosa with his wife and three kids, relayed a common story we heard from others in the shelters: that on the bus ride north, when they reached Monterrey, uniformed and armed federal agents boarded the bus and asked everyone for their papers. Miguel and his family had none, so the agents demanded payment.

Variations of this story are common. Sometimes it’s not federal agents but state police or cartel gunmen. What emerges, though, is a picture of official corruption at every level of Mexican society that enables hundreds of thousands of migrants to transit through Mexico each month and arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s a massive and lucrative business.

Every aspect of illegal immigration has been monetized, including information — and often outright misinformation. Barberi told us he found out recently that his name, address, and phone number were being sold for a thousand dollars in Central and South America by people claiming that if migrants could just get to Barberi’s shelter in Matamoros, he would take them across the border. 

Now, Barberi tells arriving migrants right away that no one at his shelter is going to take anyone across the border. Often, he says, they also think there’s a list they can get on to get into the United States. Barberi tells them there is no list, it doesn’t exist. He says he wishes the U.S. government would make a video explaining all this and post it to social media, to deter people from coming. He has repeatedly asked the U.S. consulate to do this, to no avail.

But even if such a video or PR campaign existed, it would be going up against the personal testimony of hundreds of thousands of people who are crossing the border illegally and being released into the United States every month. There is nothing the Biden administration can say, no message it can send, that refutes the tangible results of its policies: people are getting in, and they are staying.

The Respite Center where we met Ramon and Veronica only allows migrants to stay 24 hours. Hundreds of people churn through there every day. Even those like Ramon and Veronica, who said they had no money left to travel to Washington state, will soon move on, somehow. Veronica told us they were “waiting to see what will happen,” that a friend in Washington might loan them the money for airfare, and that throughout their ordeal, “We have always trusted in an all-powerful God.”

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

What the January 6 committee might have been

What the January 6 committee might have been

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

Congress should investigate fully the January 6 riot at the Capitol – and similar recent riots at iconic federal sites.

But unfortunately, it never will. Why not?

The current committee is not bipartisan. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., forbade Republican nominees traditionally selected by the House minority leader to serve on the committee.

No speaker had ever before rejected the minority party's nominees to a select House committee.

Pelosi's own cynical criteria for Republican participation was twofold: Any willing minority Republican members had to have voted to impeach former President Donald Trump while having no realistic chance of being reelected in 2022.

Of some 210 Republican House members, that left just Representatives Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., who were willing and able to fit Pelosi's profile.

A real investigation would have ignited argumentation, cross-examination, and disagreements – the sort of give-and-take for which congressional committees are famous.

In contrast, the January 6 show trial features no dissenting views. Its subtext was right out of the Soviet minister of Internal Affairs Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria's credo: "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

If Trump was not considering a third run for the presidency, would the committee even have existed?

Its slick Hollywood-produced optics demonstrate that the committee has no interest in inconvenient facts. Why did a Capitol officer lethally shoot a petite unarmed woman entering a Capitol window? And why was the officer's identity and, indeed all information about his record, withheld from the public?

Why did the committee not investigate whether large numbers of FBI agents and informants were ubiquitous among the crowd? After all, progressive New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg who was there on January 6, claimed, "There were a ton of FBI informants amongst the people who attacked the Capitol."

About his own journalistic colleagues advancing a psychodramatic "insurrection" narrative, Rosenberg scoffed, "They were making too big a deal. They were making (Jan. 6) some organized thing that it wasn't."

A real committee would also investigate why there were lots of warnings that a large crowd would assemble, but apparently little government follow-up to ensure security, should rogue elements turn violent.

A real committee would learn why the government and media insisted that officer Brian Sicknick was killed by Trump supporters – even when it was known he died of natural causes.

None of the questions will be answered because none will be asked because the committee's role is not inquiry but confirmation of a useful narrative.

A real committee would also investigate the other, far larger and more lethal riots on iconic federal property months earlier.

On May 31, 2020, for example, violent demonstrators tried to rush the White House grounds. Rioters sought to burn down the nearby historic St. John's Episcopal Church.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser mysteriously did not send police to reinforce overwhelmed Secret Service agents who, at moments, seemed unable to keep the mob from the White House itself.

The giddy New York Times later crowed, "Trump shrinks back." Was the Times preening that the president was a coward for retreating from a righteous mob?

As a precaution, the Secret Service removed the president and first family to a safe underground bunker.

Such riots near or at the White House continued for much of the fall, before mysteriously tapering off in the last weeks before the election.

Less than three weeks after the violent Washington riot, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris seemed to incite the continuing violent protests, "They're not going to stop . . . This is a movement . . . they're not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not."

Note that Harris' cheerleading was joined by a host of prominent left-wing luminaries who contextualized the violence. The "1619 Project" architect Nikole Hannah-Jones boasted, "Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence."

Former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo pontificated, "And please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful."

Note that the 2020 summer rioting, arson, and looting continued for nearly four months. Its toll resulted in over 35 dead, some 1,500 police officers injured, around 14,000 arrests, and between $1-2 billion in property damage.

The violence was often aimed at iconic government buildings, from courthouses to police precincts. There were never any federal investigations to determine why state, local, and federal officials allowed the destruction to continue.

Why were the vast majority of those arrested simply released by authorities?

And how had antifa and BLM radicals orchestrated the violence using social media? What was the role of prominent elected officials in either condoning or encouraging the violence or communicating with the ring leaders?

A truly bipartisan House select committee dedicated to ending all violence directed at the White House, the Capitol, or federal courthouses might have been useful in probing this dark period in American history.

And that is precisely why there was no such committee.

California Demands Residents Use Less Water

 

California San Jouquin farmers have railed for years 

concerning the sheer amount of river water that drains

 unchecked into the Pacific Ocean.

After Nixing 50-Million-Gallon-A-Day Desalination Plant, California Demands Residents Use Less Water

Tristan Justice, The Federalist 

California residents were slapped with tighter water restrictions Tuesday two weeks after state officials spiked plans for a $1.4 billion saltwater desalination plant in Orange County amid a season of historic drought.

The State Water Resources Control Board unanimously voted to implement a statewide watering ban for ornamental lawns at businesses and commercial properties as residents brace for a prolonged drought, the driest drought of its length in 1,200 years. Local government will also be required to reduce water use by up to 20 percent.

“California is facing a drought crisis and every local water agency and Californian needs to step up on conservation efforts,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a press release upon adoption of the new restrictions. “These conservation measures are increasingly important as we enter the summer months. I’m asking all Californians to step up, because every single drop counts.”

The latest map from the U.S. Drought Monitor updated Thursday shows the entire state under drought conditions. Reservoirs meanwhile remain depleted while snowpack is only at 8 percent of normal levels by this point in the year, according to state data.

Despite the dire drought conditions also placing an increasingly unreliable power grid in jeopardy of periodic blackouts, the California Coastal Commission rejected the latest proposal from a major water developer to construct a desalination plant in Huntington Beach. If built, the company behind the project, Poseidon Water, says the plant would make 50 million gallons of drinking water available to residents on a daily basis by next year. After a more than two-decade effort to appease public officials for a green light on construction, the state Coastal Commission unanimously turned it down based on routine concerns over risks to marine habitat and “environmental justice.” The commission argued the energy-intensive process of desalination presented too much of a coastal hazard while raising local water prices.

California, the most populated state with the fifth most coastline of any in the nation, has 12 desalination plants in operation as drought worsens across the western United States. Less than 8 percent of the western U.S. excluding Colorado and Wyoming are under normal water conditions, which are both entirely rated at minimum as “abnormally dry” by the National Drought Mitigation Center.

The Sovietization of American Life

 

The Sovietization of American Life

Behind all our disasters there looms an ideology, a creed that ignores cause and effect in the real world—without a shred of concern for the damage done to those outside the nomenklatura.

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

One day historians will look back at the period beginning with the COVID lockdowns of spring 2020 through the midterm elections of 2022 to understand how America for over two years lost its collective mind and turned into something unrecognizable and antithetical to its founding principles.

“Sovietization” is perhaps the best diagnosis of the pathology. It refers to the subordination of policy, expression, popular culture, and even thought to ideological mandates. Ultimately such regimentation destroys a state since dogma wars with and defeats meritocracy, creativity, and freedom. 

The American Commissariat

Experts become sycophantic. They mortgage their experience and talent to ideology—to the point where society itself regresses. 

The law is no longer blind and disinterested, but adjudicates indictment, prosecution, verdict, and punishment on the ideology of the accused. Eric Holder is held in contempt of Congress and smiles; Peter Navarro is held in contempt of Congress and is hauled off in cuffs and leg-irons. James Clapper and John Brennan lied under oath to Congress—and were rewarded with television contracts; Roger Stone did the same and a SWAT team showed up at his home. Andrew McCabe made false statements to federal investigators and was exempt. A set-up George Papadopoulos went to prison for a similar charge. So goes the new American commissariat.

Examine California and ask a series of simple questions. 

Why does the state that formerly served as a model to the nation regarding transportation now suffer inferior freeways while its multibillion-dollar high-speed rail project remains an utter boondoggle and failure? 

Why was its safe and critically needed last-remaining nuclear power plant scheduled for shutdown (and only recently reversed) as the state faced summer brownouts? 

Why did its forests go up in smoke predictably each summer, as its timber industry and the century-old science of forest management all but disappeared from the state?

Why do the state’s criminals so often evade indictment, and if convicted are often not incarcerated—or are quickly paroled? 

Why are its schools’ test scores dismal, its gasoline the nation’s highest-priced, and the streets of its major cities fetid and dangerous—in a fashion not true 50 years ago or elsewhere today?

In a word, the one-party state is Sovietized. Public policy is no longer empirical but subservient to green, diversity, equity, and inclusion dogmas—and detached from the reality of daily middle-class existence. Decline is ensured once ideology governs problem-solving rather than time-tested and successful policymaking.

In a similar fashion, the common denominator in Joe Biden’s two years of colossal failures is Soviet-like edicts of equity, climate change, and neo-socialist redistribution that have ensured (for the non-elite, in any event) soaring inflation, unaffordable energy, rampant crime, and catastrophic illegal immigration. Playing the role of Pravda, Biden and his team simply denied things were bad, relabeled failure as success, and attacked his predecessor and critics as various sorts of counterrevolutionaries.

Biden rejected commonsense, bipartisan policies that in the past kept inflation low, energy affordable, crime controlled, and the border manageable. Instead, he superimposed leftist dogma on every decision, whose ideological purity, not real-life consequences for millions, was considered the measure of success.

The Caving of Expertise

Entire professions have now nearly been lost to radical progressive ideology.

Do we remember those stellar economists who swore at a time of Biden’s vast government borrowing, increases in the monetary supply, incentivizing labor non-participation, and supply chain interruptions that there was no threat of inflation? Were they adherents of ideological “modern monetary theory”? Did they ignore their own training and experience in fealty to progressive creeds?

What about the Stanford doctors who signed a groupthink letter attacking their former colleague, Dr. Scott Atlas, because he questioned the orthodoxies of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the state bureaucracies—who we now know hid their own involvement with channeling funding to deadly gain-of-function research in Wuhan? Did they reject his views on empirical grounds and welcome a give-and-take shared inquiry—or simply wish to silence an ideological outlier and advisor to a despised counterrevolutionary?

Or how about the 50 retired intelligence “experts” who swore that Hunter Biden’s laptop was not genuine but likely Russian disinformation? Did they really rely on hundreds of years of collective expertise to adjudicate the laptop or did they simply wish to be rewarded with something comparable to a “Hero of Woke America” award?

Or what about the 1,000 medical “professionals” who claimed violating quarantine and protective protocols for Black Lives Matter demonstrations was vital for the mental health of the protestors? Or the Princeton creators of a video identifying Jonathan Katz as a sort of public enemy for the crime of stating that racial discrimination of any sort was toxic?

Career Advancement, Cowardice, and Membership in the Club

There can be no expertise under Sovietization; everything and everyone serves ideology. Our military—especially its four-star generals, current and retired—parroted perceived ideologically correct thought. Repeating party lines about diversity, white supremacy, and climate change are far more relevant for career advancement than proof of prior effective military leadership in battle. 

The ultimate trajectory of a woke military was the fatal disgrace in Afghanistan. Ideologues in uniform kept claiming that the humiliating skedaddle was a logistical success and that misguided bombs that killed innocents were called a “righteous strike.” Afghanistan all summer of 2021 was to be Joe Biden’s successful model of a graduated withdrawal in time for a 20th-anniversary commemoration of 9/11—until it suddenly wasn’t.

Pentagon decision-making increasingly privileges race, gender, sexuality, and green goals over traditional military lethality—a fact known to all who are up for promotion, retention, or disciplinary action.

How predictable it was that the United States fled Kabul, abandoning not just billions of dollars worth of sophisticated weapons to terrorists, but also with Pride flags flying, George Floyd murals on public walls, and gender studies initiatives being carried out in the military ranks. Ask yourself: if a general during the Afghanistan debacle had brilliantly organized a sustainable and defensible corridor around Bagram Airfield but was known to be skeptical of Pentagon efforts to address climate change and diversity would he be praised or reviled?

The elite universities in their single-minded pursuit of wokeness are ironically doing America a great favor. For a long time, their success was due to an American fetishization of brand names. But now, most privately accept that a BA from Princeton or Harvard is no longer an indication of acquired knowledge, mastery of empiricism, or predictive of inductive thinking over deductive dogmatism. 

Instead, we now understand, various lettered certificates serve as stamps for career advancement—proof either of earlier high-school achievement that merely won the bearer admission to the select, or confirmation that the graduate possesses the proper wealth, contacts, athletic ability, race, gender, or sexuality to be invited to the club.

Universities’ abandonment of test scores and diminution of grades—replaced by “community service” and race, gender, and sexuality criteria—has simply clarified the bankruptcy of the entire higher education industry. 

Our “diversity statements” required for hiring at many universities are becoming comparable to Soviet certifications of proper Marxist-Leninist fidelity. Like the children of Soviet Party apparatchiks, privileged university students now openly attack faculty whose reading requirements or lectures supposedly exude scents of “colonialism” or “imperialism” or “white supremacy.” 

Faculty increasingly fear offering merit evaluation, in terror that diversity commissars might detect in their grading an absence of reparatory race or gender appraisals. The result is still more public cynicism about higher education because it is apparent that the goal is to graduate with a stamp from Yale or Stanford that ensures prestige, success, and ideological correctness—on the supposition that few will ever worry exactly what or how one did while enrolled.

We have our own Emmanuel Goldsteins who, we are told, deserve our three minutes of hate for counterrevolutionary thought and practice. Donald Trump earned the enmity of the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the IRS. Now Elon Musk and his companies are suddenly the targets of the progressive state, including repartees from the president himself. To vent, the popular Soviet directs its collective enmity at a Dave Chappelle or Bill Maher, progressives who exhibit the occasional counterrevolutionary heresy.

Cabinet secretaries ignore their duties—somewhat understandable given their resumes never explained their appointments. What binds a Pete Buttigieg, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Jennifer Granholm is not expertise in transportation, border security, or energy independence but allegiance to an entire menu of woke policies that are often antithetical to their own job descriptions.

“Diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” started out as mandated proportional representation as defined by the state allotting spoils of coveted admissions, hiring, honors, and career advancement by race and gender percentages in the general population. The subtext was that federal and state governments imported and incorporated largely academic theories that alleged any disequilibrium was due to bias. 

More specifically, racial and sexual prejudices were to be exposed and punished by morally superior castes—in politics, the bureaucracy, and the courts. There was never any interest in detailing how particular individuals were personally harmed by the system or by the “other,” which explains the Left’s abhorrence of racially blind, class-based criteria to establish justified need.

Reparations

In the last five years, American Sovietization has descended into reparatory representation. Due to prior collective culpability of whites, heterosexuals, and males, marginalized self-defined groups of victims must now be “overrepresented” in admissions, hiring, and visibility in popular culture 

As the Soviets and Maoists discovered—and as was true of the Jacobins, National Socialists, and cultural Marxists—once radical ideology defines success, then life in general becomes anti-meritocratic. The public privately equates awards and recognition with political fealty, not actual achievement.

Were recent Netflix productions reflections of merit or ideological criteria governing race and gender? Do the Emmys, Tonys, or Oscars convey recognition of talent, or of adherence to progressive agendas of diversity, equity, and inclusion? Does a Pulitzer Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, or a MacArthur award denote talent and achievement or more often promote diversity, equity, and inclusion narratives?

Consequences of Failing Up

Where does woke Sovietization end once accountability vanishes and ideology masks incompetence and malfeasance?

We are starting to see the final denouement with missing baby formula, epidemics of shootings and hate crimes, train-robbings reminiscent of the Wild West in Los Angeles, Tombstonesque shoot-up Saturday nights in Chicago, spiking electricity rates and brownouts, $7 a gallon diesel fuel, unaffordable and scarce meat, and entire industries from air travel to home construction that simply no longer work. 

Everyone knows that the status of our homeless population in Los Angeles or San Francisco is medieval, dangerous, and unhealthy. And everyone knows that any serious attempt to remedy the situation would cause one to be labeled an apostate, counterrevolutionary, and enemy of the people. So, like good Eastern Europeans of the Warsaw Pact in the 1960s, we mutter one thing under our breath, and nod another publicly.

Behind all our disasters there looms an ideology, a creed that ignores cause and effect in the real world—without a shred of concern for the damage done to those outside the nomenklatura.