Commentary: Progressive Policies are Designed for Civilizational Suicide

Biden UN

We all understand, in the timeless words of the poet Robert Burns, that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Most Americans are accustomed to assessing the various failed initiatives of our country’s leaders as well-intended actions that turned out badly. The Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraq wars, the 2008 financial meltdown, and the COVID pandemic overreaction, all in hindsight, can be viewed as simply the unfolding of human stupidity in the contingency of time.

In accordance, it is understandable that many are inclined to believe that our country’s current serious problems are, once again, merely the failed result of well-intentioned policies. But what if, we ask, seemingly fumbled programs were intended to be the initial throes of civilizational suicide? What if apparent missteps were actually directed at the purposeful destruction of a prosperous, free, safe, and secure society?

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Commentary: Once a Vaunted Dream, Now ‘Liberty and Justice For All’ Is a Tattered Cliche

Throughout history, the tyrannical abuse of governmental power has been a fearsome thing to behold. Wise men instituted laws in an effort to tame that abuse. The Constitution of the United States, for example, was framed in large part as a prophylactic against the coercive power of the state. The Framers witnessed the “long train of abuses and usurpations” perpetrated by the British crown and resolved to respond. The Constitution dealt with many other things, to be sure, but concern about tyrannical abuse of power by the government and its minions is patent from the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence straight through the Constitution and its Amendments. The idea was that we Americans would live in a polity governed by “laws, not men.” That is to say, laws would be legitimately formulated, clearly defined, and administered impartially, so far as was humanly possible. How are we doing on that score?

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Commentary: The Justice System Is Now a Weapon in Progressives’ Arsenal Against Political Enemies

Attorney General Merrick Garland gave his best Captain Renault impression on Capitol Hill in denying a double standard in how the Justice Department investigated (or didn’t) Hunter Biden (and his father) versus how they pursue his political rival. Shocked, shocked, indeed.

Those experiencing the less pleasant side of judicial double standards see rather clearly the woke hall pass.

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Nearly 200 North Alabama Churches Leave United Methodist Church over Disputes Between Traditional Christians, Progressives

Nearly 200 Alabama churches officially seceded from the United Methodist Church (UMC) last weekend following years of conflict over social and theological issues.

Members of the UMC’s North Alabama Conference (NAC) approved the decision to leave at their meeting on Saturday at the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Center (BJCC). 

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Commentary: ESG Is Evil

The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scoring system is undergoing intense scrutiny. It also has become quite a political football, with conservative governors, attorneys general, and other officials pushing back against the movement while progressive politicians argue that ESG needs to go further.

This political tug-of-war has exposed the evil essence of ESG: It is an attempt by progressives to arm-twist the leaders of investment firms controlling the allocation of over $20 trillion in investment capital away from firms disfavored by progressives, including, most notably, producers of fossil fuels.

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Commentary: Hoaxes, Scams, and the Left

Here is the hard-discovered truth.

The Left, which now controls all the centers of power and the commanding heights of the world economy, seeks to codify their ideology as science, and thereby make it irrefutable. You can’t disagree with it or you are a kook or insurrectionist. You are outside what Thomas Kuhn, called the “paradigm of normal science.”

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Commentary: The Groomer ‘Panic’ Is a Hill Worth Dying On

Joe Biden commemorated Pride Month by promising to take the fight for equality to the next level. Gay marriage was yesterday’s battle. The issue of the day is making sure that children with gender dysphoria—or “trans youth,” as Biden called them—have uninhibited access to “gender-affirming care.” By this, Biden meant often irreversible medical interventions such as puberty blockers and sexual reassignment surgery. 

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Commentary: Yes, They’re Coming for Your Guns

handgun with ammo

Perhaps, like me, you’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that the un-American Left is ignorant of many things. But then they open their mouths and remove all doubt. 

The most recent example comes from the gaping maw of Elie Mystal on MSNBC, where he claimed that, like everything else in this country apparently, the Second Amendment is the creation of long-dead, racist white supremacists who supported it for the sole purpose of putting down slave revolts keeping the enslaved populations in bondage. Of course, there is as much “truth” to that as there is in the 1619 Project. Progressives use such revisionist history to discredit the founders so that they can dismantle the founders’ republic.

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Commentary: The New ‘Blue Confederacy’

Why are progressive regions of the country—especially in the old major liberal cities (e.g., Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle)—institutionalizing de facto racial quotas through “proportional representation” based on “disparate impact”? Why are they promoting ethnic and racial chauvinism, such as allowing college students to select the race of their own roommates, calibrating graduation ceremonies by skin color and tribe, segregating campus “safe spaces” by race, and banning literature that does not meet commissariat diktats?

Why are they turning into one-party political fiefdoms separating the rich and poor, increasingly resembling feudal societies as members of the middle class flee or disappear? What does it mean that they are becoming more and more intolerant in their cancel culture, and quasi-religious intolerance of dissent, on issues from climate change and abortion-on-demand to critical race theory and wokeness?

Isn’t it strange that there are entire states and regions wholly reliant on the money and power of “one-crop” Big Tech monopolies? And why, in the 21st century no less, are Democratic-controlled counties, cities, and entire states nullifying federal law?

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Far-Left Activists Plan to Further Harass Kyrsten Sinema at Boston Marathon

Kyrsten Sinema

Radical far-left activists publicly announced their plans to continue harassing Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) over her opposition to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, this time with plans to follow her around at the Boston Marathon, Fox News reports.

The Green New Deal Network, an alliance of 15 far-left groups, issued a press release declaring their intent to follow and harass Sinema at the annual event on Monday, in an act known in politics as “bird-dogging.” The pressure from radical activists stems from Sinema’s refusal to support the “Build Back Better Bill,” an effort to shove through many far-left agenda items through the legislative process known as reconciliation; reconciliation, which is often reserved exclusively for budgetary matters, cannot be filibustered and thus only requires a narrow majority of 51 votes in order to pass.

Sinema, along with Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), has repeatedly refused to support a bill that costs as much as $3.5 trillion, instead advocating for a reduction in the overall cost.

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Commentary: The Tyranny of Experts

The principles and policies of America’s original progressives have received renewed attention over the last decade, both in academia and in public discourse. Today’s progressive politicians and intellectuals have pointed to their roots in the original progressive movement; moreover, the connections between the original progressive calls for reform and the language and shape of our politics today have become increasingly obvious. In what follows, the relevance of original progressivism to government today will be more fully explored. There is no better place to begin than with our administrative state. This essay deals with the general principles of the administrative state and its roots in the original progressive movement.

The term “administrative state” has come to have a variety of meanings, but at its core it points to the situation in contemporary American government, created largely although not entirely by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, whereby a large, unelected bureaucracy is empowered with significant governing authority. The fundamental question for many of those making reference to an “administrative state” is how it can be squared with government by consent and with the constitutional separation-of-powers system.

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Moderate Clyburn Takes Shots at Progressive Nina Turner After Ohio Election Loss

Nina Turner

The primary election might be finished in Ohio’s 11th District, but Rep. James Clyburn (D-MD-06), the third-highest ranking Democrat in Congress, is still making his presence felt.

“These are creations, and to say all we got out of endorsing Joe Biden was a federal holiday? That’s the kind of BS that sent me to Cleveland, I was going to stay right here in South Carolina minding my business until I got called stupid,” Clyburn told Axios. 

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‘Too Risky’: Progressives Are Upset CDC Lifted Mask Mandate

mask in persons hand

Progressives voiced their dismay following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated guidance that vaccinated people no longer need to wear masks indoors or outdoors.

Progressives and medical experts immediately criticized the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mask guidelines, arguing that the alteration was extreme and would be harmful to certain parts of the population. Others said the new guidance is confusing and disincentivizes people to get vaccinated.

“The CDC has done an about-face that’s shockingly abrupt: it’s confusing & could actually disincentivize vaccines,” Dr. Leana Wen, a George Washington University public health professor, tweeted after the announcement Thursday.

“Yes, vaccinated people are well-protected and not a threat to others,” she said in a later tweet. “But do we trust that the honor system—won’t unvaccinated people pretend to be vaccinated & stop wearing masks?”

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Commentary: Those Who Should Be the Defenders of Civilization Are Determined to End It

The year 2020 witnessed a long series of writs lodged against an America beset with plague, quarantine, recessions, riot and arson, and the most contested election since 1876.

What was strange was not so much the anarchist Left’s efforts in the present to wipe away the past to recalibrate our Animal Farm future. What was odder were both the absurdities of the complaints against American civilization, and the unwillingness or inability of Americans to rebut them and defend their own culture.

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Newt Gingrich Commentary: Antifa and The Left’s Civil War Against America

The news media wants to ignore the depth of the violence and the forces causing the violence and simply rerun their permanent refrain that this is all about racism (see the Washington Post story that “Racial inequality in Minneapolis is Among the Worst in the Nation” as an example).

The news media will resist deeply the idea that Antifa is a factor and that the violence is designed to hurt America.

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Commentary: The Unbearable Truths About Our Current Political Moment

Sometimes the truth is like mythical kryptonite. It radiates power and yet promises great destruction. And so reality is to be left alone, encased in lead, and kept at bay.

Take the Chinese genesis of the COVID-19 epidemic. We started in February with the usual Chinese deceptions about their role in the birth, transmission, and worldwide spread of the virus.

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Commentary: Beto O’Rourke Is a Clockwork Leftist

In an 1819 landmark Supreme Court ruling, McCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall famously opined: “The power to tax involves the power to destroy.” What the esteemed Chief Justice couldn’t have foreseen was how the regressives would seek to use the power to tax to destroy revealed religions and subordinate them to the Left’s “civil religion.”

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Commentary: Leading Progressives Blame the Wrong Culprit for Rising College Costs

by James D. Agresti   Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and certain media outlets are blaming steep rises in college costs on reduced government funding for higher education. The reality is that inflation-adjusted government spending per college student has risen by about three times since the 1960s and is now at…

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Commentary: Ignore Medicare for All Advocates’ Claims on Life Expectancy in US.

by Robert Moffit   Ponder this: If self-styled “progressives” in Congress impose total government control over health care, will ordinary Americans enjoy a longer life span? Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chief sponsor of the Senate “Medicare for All” bill (S. 1804), often reminds us that the United States spends roughly…

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Commentary: The Left Is Doubling Down on Schemes to Pack the Supreme Court

by Jarret Stepman   Anything the left can’t control, it aims to destroy. From campaigns to abolish the Senate to the growing movement to upend the Electoral College after Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election, progressives have few qualms about getting rid of long-standing constitutional institutions. Now they’re…

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Commentary: The Progressive Ideas That Fueled America’s Eugenics Movement

by Bradley Thomas   Progressive ideology focuses on the “common good” while devaluing individual rights. This mindset, however, has disturbing consequences: when you elevate the “common good” over the rights of individuals, individuals become expendable. Such a mindset can lead to some disturbing practices. Eugenics and the Progressive Era Indeed,…

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Dr. Carol M. Swain Commentary: Progressives’ Duplicitous Use of Abortion Activism to ‘Cull’ the Black Population

by Dr. Carol M. Swain   Do black lives matter to progressives? The most obvious answer is “No.” The lives of marginalized populations have never mattered to progressives. A hint about how progressive elites think and operate is found in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 2009 interview with The New York…

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Commentary: Pulling Young Americans Back From the Brink

by Daniel Davis   During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton often delivered the line: “America is great, because she is good.” It was a feel-good line, deployed then as code for “America is too good to elect Donald Trump.” Notwithstanding the thick irony of Clinton claiming to be the virtuous…

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Commentary: Progressive Politics Are Not Really Progressive

by Victor Davis Hanson   Some progressives lamented the apparent defeat of radical progressive African-American candidates such as gubernatorial nominees Stacey Abrams of Georgia and Florida’s Andrew Gillum by blaming allegedly treasonous white women. Apparently white women did not vote sufficiently en bloc in accordance with approved notions of identity…

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Commentary: The Democratic Party’s Reckless Disregard for the Nation’s Institutions

by Jarrett Stepman   Sometimes progressives do a great job of becoming caricatures of themselves. The progressive worldview is marked by a tendency to embrace utopian dreams, and a general disregard for tried and true traditions and institutions. Ted Kennedy captured this instinct in 1968 when he said, quoting George…

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Christian Leaders Release Video on Soros’s ‘Rented Evangelicals’

The American Association of Evangelicals (AAE) is warning about progressive wolves in Christians’ clothing. The AAE on Monday released an explosive three-minute video, “Soros’s Rented Evangelicals” exploring the George Soros network’s funding of “evangelical mascots” and a “Rent-an-Evangelical” tactic to confuse and divide the Christian vote for the pro-faith, pro-life…

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