Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Remember when Donald Trump was attacked daily for his cruel and racist immigration policies? When the clichés du jour were “ripped from their family’s arms” and “held in cages”? The “cages” filling the news were actually from the Obama era, but progressives notoriously take liberties with the truth when taking advantage of a useful crisis.
Under Trump’s policies, in fact, we recovered some control of our border and started reducing the death and disorder the Dems’ virtually open border produced. “Asylum seekers,” an elastic category that seldom required evidence that a migrant faced lethal threats in his home country, now waited in Central America or Mexico for their application to be processed rather than being “caught and released” at the border and sent off to the rest of the country with only perfunctory monitoring.
With the incentive of easy entry gone, the long columns of marching hordes of migrants disappeared from the news, and apprehensions and deportations accelerated. A serious security wall was under construction. Illegal immigration, still an issue requiring our attention, was less in the news, and not just because of Covid. Trump, as he had promised, had taken common-sense actions and actually enforced our laws.
So of course, once back in power, the Dems set about recreating the Obama years’ dangerous chaos on our border. A couple of months in power is all Joe Biden has taken to return apprehensions to 70,000 a month, and the “the highest February numbers that we’ve ever seen in the history of the [Unaccompanied Alien Child] program,” according to a Health and Human Services. And the drug mules and cartel human traffickers are back in business, to the tune of over $2 billion a year. A problem that was under control has not just returned, but been willfully worsened.
But it’s not just immigration. On issue after issue, the willful errors are piling up, belying the Democrats’ pretentions to be the “party of science” and a higher morality than greedy, mean conservatives.
Take HR 1, the proposed bill to federalize elections and sweep away the remaining safeguards of electoral integrity. Mail-in voting, an invitation to wide-spread fraud, would become an imposed universal option, and identification requirements minimal. The practice of “ballot-harvesting,” votes being mass collected and delivered to polling stations, will offer even more opportunities for skulduggery. The chaos of 2020––which the establishments of both parties hastened to drop down the memory hole––will become the norm. Any remaining trust in the integrity of elections, the lynchpin of our political freedom and our ability to hold political power accountable, will be gone. The Democrats having lost confidence in half the voters, they will dissolve them and reelect a new one.
This bill is so obviously un-Constitutional that it should never survive the legal challenges sure to follow. But following Trump appointments, the hopes conservatives had for a Supreme Court dedicated to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been lessened recently by a few of the Court’s cowardly decisions, especially the one to ignore the copious evidence of fraud in the last election. Some members of the Court already had given us causes for concern. When supposed originalist Justices rewrite Civil Rights legislation after they “discover” that lawmakers half a century ago really meant that biological sex included the current, unscientific fad of “gender,” psychological sex identity, it’s time to be concerned.
Then there’s the year-long litany of willful errors created by the Covid hysteria. A virus that targets the already dying elderly was treated like the 14th century Black Death that wiped out a third of the population. “Expert” advice from government hirelings like Anthony Fauci was proclaimed then contradicted at breakneck speeds. Prima donna mayors and governors like Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom issued arbitrary diktats that destroyed people’s lives and businesses while their own and those of the cognitive elite did just fine.
A whole generation of schoolkids have been damaged by shutting down schools to gratify the teachers’ unions. Half the country have turned masks into a combination of voodoo talismans warding off evil, and public badges of superior morality and intelligence. And given how useful the pandemic was at getting a demented mediocrity elected president, don’t expect widespread vaccination to rein in the totalitarian impulses of the Chicken Littles and political grifters who want to wring every ounce of electoral and policy advantage from the hyped-up endless crisis over a virus with a 99.9 percent survival rate for all ages.
That’s just a few of Biden’s policy decisions that are taking us down the road to perdition. Returning to the Paris Accords on “climate change,” and reversing some of Trump’s attempts to rein in the warmists’ draconian regulations on gas and oil production, ensure that energy prices––already starting to rise–– will make life more expensive for those in lower income levels who have already been left in dire straits by the willful damage done to the economy by the shutdowns. Abroad, the attempt to restart the Munich-level appeasement of the Iran nuclear deal that Trump walked away from is making our allies in the Middle East nervous, even as our European “allies” salivate over the new profits they can rake in once the mullahs are mollified and bribed back into the “rules-based international order.”
And don’t forget the most significant development in the Middle East in decades, the Abraham Accords among Israel and several Muslim states. A reordering of the region’s alliances away from the moribund and dysfunctional “Palestinian peace process” has created an opportunity to strengthen our influence in the region and create a united front against the genocidal mullahs and their jihadist adventurism. So, of course, the Dems’ presidential ventriloquist’s dummy is undoing that epochal development to please the anti-Semitic “woke” cadres.
The lesson to be learned here is broader than just the blunders of the current administration. For a century we have been watching the pretensions of technocratic governance––the notion that bureaus and agencies possess “human sciences” and can know human motives and behavior as well as physicists can know material nature. But human beings are “irreducibly complex,” to borrow a phrase. We do not know human nature with enough precision and certainty to generate laws of behavior that can be more predictable than the collective wisdom and experiences acquired and handed down from generations––wisdom like the capacity of all human beings to choose evil for no other reason than they can.
What historian Jacob Burckhardt called the “terrible simplifiers,” those who would simplify human nature to fit some abstract ideological notion, have been the great destroyers of human life and happiness for over two hundred years. Some have been well-meaning, others purposely evil, still others venal and full of lust for power. We’ve had a front-row seat to their depredations this past year, and the costs can be reckoned in the lives lost to Andrew Cuomo’s lethal policy of sending Covid patients to nursing homes and then attempting to burnish his reputation and prestige by covering up his deadly error; the kids committing suicide because they’ve been isolated from the world of human contact, and other “deaths of despair” wrought by “experts” claiming more “scientific” certainty than the possess; and the staggering increases in murder and violent crimes in cities allowed to descend into anarchy.
These willful errors promise to continue as the Democrats, the self-proclaimed party of reason and “science,” double and triple down on policies that have proven disastrous in the past, and will continue to do so until we the people put a stop to it with our votes.
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Photo credit: Gage Skidmore
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