Do you remember filling up your tank on the day that President Trump left town? I do, because my 12-gallon Focus cost about $27.
Do you remember the last time you filled up the tank? Once again, I do, and I spent over $50.
Let’s just say that there is a big difference between $50 for something and $27. Once upon a time, say two years ago, $50 took your wife to a nice restaurant. Today, you spend that much to drive her to your date night.
And that’s the problem with Trump-hating. No matter whether you loved or hated his tweets, his presidency looks better and better with every passing day.
Americans remember that Trump was in fact a very successful president, despite unprecedented partisan harassment, much of it illegal.
Trump reversed the post-Reagan decline in per capita income growth, and specifically made the United States the first serious jurisdiction where the lower 20 percent of income-earners were gaining income in percentage terms more swiftly than the top 10 percent.
He ended unemployment and oil imports, and practically ended illegal immigration (Noonan blames Trump for its revival), ended North Korean missile overflights against Japan, squeezed Iran so hard that its ability to finance terrorism withered, and the Middle East peace process advanced very substantially.
American economic growth effectively prevented the further narrowing of the gap between the U.S. economy and China’s.
Trump withdrew from the policy of allowing unsubstantiated ecological fears to generate massive unemployment within the United States to the benefit of cheap labor competitors, and he got the NATO allies starting to pay appreciably for their own defense for the first time in decades.
He left a roaring, non-inflationary economy, and a relatively untroubled international horizon.
Barring terrible tactical errors, of which he’s capable, Trump will be back, and will return much wiser and more formidable than we remember him.
Most Americans may not remember everything that Mr. Black explained. They do know that things were better off for everybody when President Trump was in. People remember that “roaring, non-inflationary economy, and a relatively untroubled international horizon.”
The Trump-haters have a major problem. The voters liked President Trump’s results because they experienced them.
Yesterday’s Rasmussen survey of likely voters finds that 57% consider Joe Biden’s performance on the economy to be “poor.” That strikes me as a death knell: there is no way a president viewed in such a negative light on the economy can be re-elected. No matter how unappetizing their alternatives–Kamala Harris? Pete Buttigieg?–the Democrats have no choice but to put Biden out to pasture and find someone else for 2024.
The voters’ antipathy toward Biden is driven in large part by the fact that 52% say he is mostly responsible for sky-high fuel prices. The majority is right, but the real problem for Democrats is that there isn’t much they can do (or are willing to do) to get out from under the fuel price fiasco.
In truth, various Democrats have admitted off and on for some years that their policies are intended to raise the price of energy, which they see as a good thing. Biden has floated this idea once or twice, asserting that the current price of gasoline will facilitate a transition to “green” energy. But you can’t sell that theory to the voters:
Ninety-two percent (92%) of voters view the rising price of gasoline, home heating oil and other petroleum products as a serious problem, including 68% who consider rising fuel costs a Very Serious problem.
There is virtually no constituency for the Democrats’ actual belief that high gas prices are good for us. That leaves them in deep trouble. They can’t abandon the policies that are driving up the cost of petroleum products, because the environmentalists own the Democrats lock, stock and barrel. But neither can they admit to voters their true purpose, or try to minimize the devastating effect that inflation, driven largely by the cost of energy, is having on people’s lives. I don’t see any way out.
For now, the Democrats are trying to ride out the midterms as best they can. Once the election is behind us, I think they will try to figure out what to do with Biden. Persuade him to resign for reasons of health? Remove him under the 25th Amendment? Hope he survives long enough to complete his term and find someone else for 2024? The last option is probably most likely, unless Biden’s dementia deteriorates to the point that continuation in office is untenable–a point that may not be far off.
But regardless of what happens to Biden, energy represents an intractable problem for the Democrats. What they want and what the American people want are fundamentally at odds. To make matters worse, there is no transition to wind and solar going on, and no such transition is going to happen. At some point, it will be obvious to everyone that liberals have devastated our economy and damaged the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans, and accomplished nothing. That will make Biden’s current discomfiture look mild by comparison.
Hillary Clinton just became the most recent Democrat to claim we’re “standing on the precipice of losing our democracy” and of all people, Hillary ought to know. After all, it was her minions and her campaign that undertook the most dedicated effort in U.S. history to undermine a political opponent with a “dirty tricks” campaign that deliberately misused government assets to make an unprecedented attack against a political opponent. Now, thanks to John Durham’s investigation, we know with certainty that Hillary’s campaign was behind the fake Alfa Bank scandal and the accusations of Trump being an agent of Russia all along, and that she personally authorized the seditious behavior. How do we know? Robby Mook testified to that fact in front of a jury while at risk of penalty for perjury.
Hillary is like the arsonist who puts a gasoline-soaked match to her own house and then complains when it catches fire. No single American citizen has done more damage to our federal government since Benedict Arnold, who tried to sell the defense plans of West Point to the British during the Revolutionary War. Her husband Bill debased the presidency by having sex with an intern in the Oval Office. Then he committed perjury on the witness stand and followed that by lying to the American people. No other human being in my lifetime has done more damage to the collective mental health of our nation.
She’s not just bad, or dumb — no, Hillary is pure evil. Bill was stupid, and he got caught. Without Hillary covering for him and working feverishly behind the scenes to destroy Bill’s accusers, he would have been forced to resign. Hillary wasn’t just Bill’s wife; she was his accomplice and co-conspirator. The billing records of the Rose Law firm didn’t hide themselves in the White House during the Clinton presidency. She’s the one who turned $1,000 investment into $100,000 worth of “cattle futures.” There’s a long running joke about the number of suicides connected to the Clintons, but it’s important to take serious note that the Clinton Body Count even has its own Wikipedia page. With every increase in the death toll, it becomes harder and harder to believe it’s all just part of some fringe conspiracy theory. With that much smoke, there’s got to be a fire burning somewhere.
The truth is out there, but it isn’t being reported. It has been rumored that the mainstream media serves as the public relations arm of the Democrat Party, and the evidence to support that theory becomes more obvious every day. The late great Rush Limbaugh used to regularly mock the media in show segments such as the famous montage talking about George Bush needing to select Dick Cheney to add “gravitas” to the ticket. Obviously, someone is distributing a set of talking points to the media on a regular basis, and the talking heads are so stupid they don’t even bother to edit the script before reading it on camera.
When Trump was in the White House, the media acted as his adversaries. With Biden in the White House, the media have become his accomplices.
So, what does the mob do? Mob stuff. They try to impose majority rule in every instance and intimidate their ideological opposition with rallies, protests, and showing up in the middle of the night heavily armed and prepared for assassination. They form an echo chamber to repeat the message until it becomes a mantra.
According to (soon-to-be former) Democrat representative Stephanie Murphy only a few days earlier, the United States “came perilously close to losing our democracy and it was because there was a man in power who cared more about his personal gain than he did about his commitment to this country and the Constitution.” Personally, I’d say $5 per gallon of gas is a much bigger threat to our freedom than the Orange Man could ever be, but that’s just me, and that’s without suspecting that January 6th was a hoax. However, if reports are true that Trump authorized the deployment of the National Guard, but Nancy Pelosi rejected the offer of assistance, then the wrong people have been put on trial.
And of course, the media wouldn’t be doing their job without simpletons like Max Boot parroting Democrat talking points about “losing our democracy” while the cost of living skyrockets due to the Biden administration’s penchant for printing money like it was going out of style and causing massive inflation. When your “token conservatives” are writers like Boot, David Brooks, Jennifer Rubin, and Bill Kristol, you really don’t have any conservative writers. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness; it dies in blatantly obvious partisan reporting.
Yes, gas is expensive, but suddenly everything has gotten a lot more expensive. No matter where one looks, whether it’s at energy policy, transportation, social issues, domestic policy, or foreign policy. Let’s Go, Brandon. Anywhere but Pennsylvania Avenue.
As far as “losing our democracy” is concerned, it’s impossible to lose something you’ve never had. The U.S. has never been governed by a democracy. Our government is a constitutional republic and always has been, from the moment of its inception.
What Hillary and her ilk are really worried about is the end of the Democrat Party. If the truth about the Clintons (or the Bidens) ever became public knowledge, their political careers would be over forever.
John Leonard is a freelance writer. His seventh book, titled The God Conclusion, will be available July 7th and is currently available for preorder on Amazon.
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.
Haitian migrants wait near the international bridge in Matamoros to meet with immigration lawyers.
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.
Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement of civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race, society, and law in the United States and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice. The word critical in its name is an academic term that refers to critical thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming people.[1][2] CRT is also used in sociology to explain social, political, and legal structures and power distribution through the lens of race.[3][4] For example, the CRT conceptual framework is one way to study racial bias in laws and institutions, such as the how and why of incarceration rates and how sentencing differs among racial groups in the United States.[5] It first arose in the 1970s, like other critical schools of thought, such as critical legal studies, which examines how legal rules protect the status quo.
A key CRT concept is intersectionality—the way in which different forms of inequality and identity are affected by interconnections of race, class, gender, and disability.[6] Scholars of CRT view race as a social construct with no biological basis.[7][8] One tenet of CRT is that racism and disparate racial outcomes are the result of complex, changing, and often subtle social and institutional dynamics, rather than explicit and intentional prejudices of individuals.[8][9][10] CRT scholars argue that the social and legal construction of race advances the interests of White people[7][11] at the expense of people of color,[12][13] and that the liberal notion of U.S. law as “neutral” plays a significant role in maintaining a racially unjust social order,[14] where formally color-blind laws continue to have racially discriminatory outcomes.[15]
Academic critics of CRT argue it is based on storytelling instead of evidence and reason, rejects truth and merit, and opposes liberalism.[21] Since 2020, conservative U.S. lawmakers have sought to ban or restrict the instruction of CRT along with other anti‑racism education in primary and secondary schools,[9][22] as well as relevant training inside federal agencies.[23] Advocates of such bans argue that CRT is false, anti-American, villainizes White people, promotes racial leftism, and indoctrinates children.[24][25] Advocates of such bans have been accused of misrepresenting the tenets and importance of CRT and of having the goal of broadly silencing discussions of racism, equality, social justice, and the history of race.[26][27]
The outstanding feature of the Democrat Party is how well it mirrors the descent of the culture. Check that — Democrats don’t just mirror our rotting culture, they’re leading the race off the cliff. That’s what progressivism — the Democrats’ defining worldview — does: it daily leads a once godly and moral nation toward a Grand Canyon-sized hole. Sometimes in tiny steps, other times in sprints. Lately, it’s a sprint.
Progressivism is a catchall for modern decadence — rationalized, deemed fashionable, and pimped by elites. Democrats have become updated versions of debauched Roman emperor Caligula and his court.
The list of debaucheries Democrats’ champion is long. They offer a dark, vulgar, inverted world: Criminals are victims, and victims are disregarded. Democrat-run cities teem with hoodlums and worse. Cities are becoming illicit drug sanctuaries. The homeless (mentally and emotionally disturbed, drug and/or alcohol addicted) roam streets like extras from the Walking Dead. Abortion is no longer about being “legal, safe, and rare.” It’s naked infanticide. Institutional corruption appears endemic (the FBI, DoJ, and much of corporate America, for example). Decades-old sexual permissiveness was the gateway to today’s spreading sexual perversion.
Take the openly lesbian Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel. No one would give a fig about her sexual preference but for a comment she made.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel reportedly said Wednesday that “drag queens make everything better” and that there should be “a drag queen for every school” during an event in Lansing.
Later, Nessel backtracked, claiming “she was only joking.” But it’s an odd joke, given the very public storm raised recently about efforts to sexually indoctrinate (“groom”) kids, starting in preschool and kindergarten. Hence, we’ll say that Nessel is just trying to weasel out of her offhand endorsement of staging degenerate spectacles for children.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has a decidedly different take than Nessel’s.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he was considering sending Child Protective Services against people exposing children to drag shows.
As well DeSantis should — along with every other governor and legislature who prioritize children’s welfare. Educators who expose students, and parents who permit their kids to be exposed, to this trash should be charged with reckless endangerment. School administrators and teachers promoting any form of sexual indoctrination of children should be fired and pensions and benefits stripped. Parents who consent to their children’s participation in any debauchment should face having their kids removed from their custody.
Despite modern conceits, human nature hasn’t changed since Caligula — far longer, actually. Yes, we moderns possess more knowledge about the world, given the accretion of knowledge over time, and should learn from history, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of our ancestors. But the lure of base instinct among influential cohorts in modern America is proving stronger than knowledge and reason. Moral probity is a choice.
Alas, there’s no vaccine against the Seven Deadly Sins, though Klaus Schwab — and a mini-me like Anthony Fauci — surely harbors the conceit that one can be produced — or a merger of machines and humans can eliminate all sin. Then again, in today’s twisted culture, the Seven Deadly Sins are celebrated in popular culture. Hedonism is regent.
The fall of America — if it ever occurs — won’t come first from terrible government. Biden is a decrepit man — a liar and notoriously incompetent from his earliest days in politics. Aside from Biden’s serial lies, he’s also corrupted, perhaps criminally so. He’s fronting a cabal whose leftist policies and governance are badly injuring citizens.
Elephants can’t fly; progressivism doesn’t work. That reality is decades in the making. It’s intriguing how perceptions lag despite a mountain of accumulated proof. Delusion and self-interest are powerful drivers as to why progressivism hasn’t yet been staked through the heart.
Democrats and elites are pursuing folly with dogged determination. An aspect of folly is persisting in a failed worldview despite plain evidence to the contrary. Barbara Tuchman’s historical survey The March of Folly is a smart primer on how humans capably mess up governance. This can be extended to culture, which, despite thousands of years of trial and error and evolved “best practices,” is still prey to human weaknesses and vice.
As to Biden, his string-pullers, and congressional Democrats, they can be swept away through honest elections — if they happen — this year and in 2024. The practical damage — attacks on conventional energy, rising inflation, profligate spending, an open border, and rampant crime — can be repaired.
But the cultural damage that Democrats and their allies are inflicting isn’t easily fixed. That damage is multifaceted and saturates the culture. Democrats aren’t the cause of our societal cancer — that predates their malevolence — but they’re now its leading purveyors. They’re a means to a squalid end.
The U.S. Supreme Court is about to overturn Roe v. Wade. The expected decision doesn’t end abortion; it simply devolves it back to the states. Yet abortion zealots threaten a “Summer of Rage” should SCOTUS rule against Roe. Already, over 40 churches and pregnancy centers have been attacked by pro-abortion thugs.
Court conservatives’ neighborhoods are being picketed, with Nancy Pelosi’s and Chuck Schumer’s blessings. Justice Brett Kavanaugh — who Schumer once threatened — was targeted by a leftist assassin. Nonetheless, Pelosi dragged her feet pushing through legislation affording justices and their families greater physical protection. Twenty-seven House Democrats voted no.
Rage, destruction, and killing — starting with killing too-many-to-count babies in the womb — sums up the modern pro-abortion movement. Near-term abortion is unambiguous infanticide. When these haters can’t prevail, they unleash wrath, vandalize houses of worship, and attack centers dedicated to protecting and nurturing innocent life. Their acts are brazen expressions of their perversity. Democrats’ silence is assent.
Marxists have always been about destroying traditional society. Marxist doctrines and sensibilities suffuse the Democrat Party.
Marx made destruction — and by inference, cultural debasement — a tenet of his manifesto; it’s a precondition to achieving utopia, per Marx, who was a hate-filled, dissolute man. Of course, humans can’t achieve perfection in an imperfect world. That’s the stuff of magic mushrooms and mental illness.
Marxism, including its offshoots (fascism is one such), wherever tried, has led to ruin. Traditional Russia was destroyed by communists. Lenin and Stalin killed millions, smashed faith and family, relentlessly terrorized populaces, and bequeathed to generations of Russians a gutted society. Recovery will be long coming, if ever. If utopia is hellish and vacant, Lenin and Stalin succeeded beyond Marx’s wildest dreams.
Taking back the culture will require sustained, broad engagement by Americans, starting at the grassroots and working up. Most Americans are, in the main, a faithful and moral people. But most Americans don’t define and lead the culture. That was ceded decades ago to a generation, the Boomers — the culture definers among them — who have gradually given way to successive generations of definers as eager — if not more so — to advance moral squalor under the guises of modernism and liberation.
For too long, sensible Americans have been cowed or hoodwinked by secularists (atheists) into retreating from the public square. Too many folks bought, in the names of civility and rights, that Judeo-Christian beliefs must be prohibited from defining society. That claim would stun our Founders, who were adamant about the chief role of faith, and the moral standards that issue from faith, as basic to the republic.
Patriots must cease being reluctant to openly declare for faith and traditional values as the underpinnings for a healthy, moral, and more just society. Moreover, as parents have begun to do with school boards, decent folks need to step forward and take charge. Mighty movements have humble beginnings. America will be revitalized through a web of communities dedicated to right living.
J. Robert Smith can be found regularly at Gab @JRobertSmith. He also blogs at Flyover.
On Monday the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled 7-0 that the Minneapolis mayor had breached his duty to staff the police department at the minimum level specified by the city charter. (The Supreme Court also ruled that the city council was in compliance with the related funding requirement.) For some reason or other, the police department has “lost” 300 officers since the summer of George Floyd. The city is now some 100 police officers short of meeting its legal requirement to staff the department at the minimum level set by the charter.
Given the difficulties of recruiting under the circumstances, the city is confronted with a complicated situation. The city will be put to the challenge of proving up compliance with the charter’s minimum staffing requirement or its good-faith efforts comply. The mayor may be able to prove that he is unable to get this basic component of his job done. Maybe the city is incapable of providing a minimum level of police protection. After all, who in his right mind would go to work for the Minneapolis Police Department? Let us get a clue.
The Supreme Court order presents a late opportunity to chew over the crisis confronting the city. The 300 officers who have taken retirement or disability since the summer of George Floyd should have set off a warning flare along with the crime wave that has accompanied the department’s shrinkage. Even if the department were able to meet the legal minimum staffing requirement, it would still be short-staffed.
The restoration of civic order is a long way away. Complacency nevertheless reigns. Single party rule is not a recipe for good government.
The police department continues to take a beating from all comers. Most recently, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights has charged it with systemic discrimination. Has anyone (other than me) questioned the likelihood that the department is guilty of 10 years of “race based policing,” as charged — a period (January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2020) that covers the leadership of Tim Dolan, Janeé Harteau, and Medaria Arradondo?
The Supreme Court order brings a variety of issues to the fore, all of them basic to the city’s survival. We await the commentary of the Star Tribune editorial board on these issues. Turning to the paper today, we find the attention of the editors turned elsewhere. They opine that “Voters suffer with fewer choices.” Unfortunately, the editorial is not referring to the city’s only daily newspaper.
No, the editorial refers to races for sheriff and county attorney in counties around the state. “A contested, competitive race allows voters to at least consider different perspectives on how an elected job should be done.” This is true of course, but it isn’t the case in Hennepin County (which includes the city of Minneapolis), at least this year. However, the lack of choice decried by the editors applies in spades to the city’s only daily newspaper.
In Minnesota, a new rule relating to certification of teachers is in process. As I understand it, the rule has proceeded without legislative action and ultimately will come before an administrative law judge who will (I assume) approve it, absent enormous public outcry. The rule provides that you can’t be licensed as a teacher in Minnesota unless you subscribe to neo-Marxist theories of race, gender and so on.
B. The teacher understands multiple theories of identity formation and knows how to help students develop positive social identities based on their membership in multiple groups in society. ***
D. The teacher fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves. E. The teacher understands and supports students as they recognize and process dehumanizing biases, discrimination, prejudices, and structural inequities. ***
C. The teacher understands bias in assessment, evaluates standardized and teacher-created assessments for bias, and designs and modifies assessments that minimize sources of bias. ***
E. The teacher plans how to achieve each student’s learning goals by choosing anti-racist, culturally relevant, and responsive instructional strategies, accommodations, and resources to differentiate instruction for individuals and groups of learners.
F. The teacher features, highlights, and uses resources written and developed by traditionally marginalized voices that offer diverse perspectives on race, culture, language, gender, sexual identity, ability, religion, nationality, migrant/refugee status, socioeconomic status, housing status, and other identities traditionally silenced or omitted from curriculum. ***
H. The teacher creates opportunities for students to learn about power, privilege, intersectionality, and systemic oppression in the context of various communities and empowers learners to be agents of social change to promote equity. ***
H. The teacher encourages critical thinking about culture and race and includes missing narratives to dominant culture in the curriculum. ***
C. The teacher understands the historical foundations of education in Minnesota, including laws, policies, and practices, that have and continue to create inequitable opportunities, experiences, and outcomes for learners, especially for Indigenous students and students historically denied access, underserved, or underrepresented on the basis of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, language, socioeconomic status, or country of origin.
D. The teacher understands how prejudice, discrimination, and racism operates at the interpersonal, intergroup, and institutional levels.
E. The teacher explores their own intersecting social identities and how they impact daily experience as an educator.
F. The teacher assesses how their biases, perceptions, and academic training may affect their teaching practice and perpetuate oppressive systems and utilizes tools to mitigate their own behavior to disrupt oppressive systems.
G. The teacher uses a variety of self-assessment and problem-solving strategies to analyze and reflect on their practice and to make adaptations and adjustments toward more equitable outcomes. ***
Subp. 8. Standard 8. Racial consciousness and reflection.
A. The teacher understands multiple theories of race and ethnicity, including but not limited to racial formation, processes of racialization, and intersectionality.
B. The teacher understands the definitions of and difference between prejudice, discrimination, bias, and racism.
C. The teacher understands how ethnocentrism, eurocentrism, deficit-based teaching, and white supremacy undermine pedagogical equity.
D. The teacher understands that knowledge creation, ways of knowing, and teaching are social and cultural practices shaped by race and ethnicity, often resulting in racially disparate advantages and disadvantages.
E. The teacher understands the histories and social struggles of historically defined racialized groups, including but not limited to Indigenous people, Black Americans, Latinx Americans, and Asian Americans.
F. The teacher understands the cultural content, world view, concepts, and perspectives of Minnesota-based American Indian Tribal Nations and communities, including Indigenous histories and languages.
G. The teacher understands the impact of the intersection of race and ethnicity with other forms of difference, including class, gender, sexuality, religion, national origin, immigration status, language, ability, and age.
Personally, I wouldn’t allow a “teacher” who “understands” those things within 100 yards of one of my kids.
Where does the impetus for this kind of evil come from? Certainly not from parents, students or citizens generally. The extreme left-wingers who orchestrate this kind of revolution without ever having to bring it on for a vote are experts at manipulating bureaucratic processes, always with the complicity of a worthless press.
If these proposed licensing changes are implemented, no sane person will want to be a teacher in Minnesota. Only an aroused and organized populace can stop this extremist demand that we all become neo-Marxists. My organization will lead the charge to defeat this terrible evil.
MN Prager Discussion Group 
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