Still the Only Thing We Have to Fear

On March 4, 1933 newly elected President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt made this famous declaration during his inaugural address: “…let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself; nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” FDR had his faults, as all leaders do, but uttering those words to a nation terrified by hopelessness and dread was a shining moment in his career.

On February 20, 2023 The Pipeline's editor Michael Walsh wrote this: “…democracy does not "die in darkness." It dies in chaos, brought on by fear, engendered by uncertainty and birthed of instability…” While I’m not willing to suggest that Walsh's eloquence should move him to seek elected office, or to be regularly photographed grinning with a fancy cigarette holder clenched in his teeth, I do believe that his declaration is every bit as profound as Roosevelt’s was ninety years prior.

In 1933 Americans were terrified by enormous economic upheaval few citizens understood. The disaster seemed unsolvable to most. In 2023 Americans are terrified by rapid advances in technologies and the sciences that – to many – seem to create problems as equally dangerous and apparently unsolvable as the Great Depression did in 1933.

FDR: Fear itself.

This writer is not an expert on all technologies and all of science. We’ve advanced way to far for anyone to lay claim to being a modern-day Da Vinci. That said, this writer is an expert on the complex intersection of chemistry, environmental protection, risk evaluation, and public policy. In that world Walsh’s description holds true: all rational parts of that equation are dying in chaos, brought on by fear, engendered by uncertainty, and birthed of instability. Moreover, I firmly believe that is the case in many, likely most, other areas of scientific discipline when they intersect with public policy or popular trends. In this era of mass, instantaneous communication, nothing is guaranteed to attract more attention than communicating fear.

Consider how many people routinely purchase indoor “air purifiers” that are designed to remove air contaminants from indoor air by generating the most widely regulated air pollutant in America: ozone. Ozone is basically oxygen on steroids; three oxygen atoms bonded together rather than the usual two. The extra atom gives ozone some unique properties, among which is its ability to react with a variety of air contaminants and remove them from the air we breathe. So far so good, except for the fact that ozone is itself a highly regulated air contaminant. Reducing ozone in the air we breathe has been the focus of EPA and environmental group efforts for over fifty years.

The EPA has reduced the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone three times since the original Clean Air Act was promulgated. Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama all reduced the ozone standard, largely in response to environmental group claims that the preceding standard was not sufficiently protective of human health. There are mountains of regulations designed to reduced ozone formation. Vehicles have catalytic convertors largely to reduce ozone formation. If you live in an urban area, you pay for low vapor pressure gasoline in the summer months to reduce ozone formation. The push to reduce ozone formation affects the price we pay for electricity, natural gas, consumer goods, and a host of other areas.

Liberals have toyed with the ludicrous idea of banning natural gas-fired appliances, but none seems moved to grab this incredibly low-hanging fruit: Americans are routinely purchasing air-pollution generators in the name of improving air quality! It’s the sort of exploitation of fear and ignorance that would have amazed even Orwell.

Beware the O-Zone.

Ozone-generating air purifiers are just one example of the ignorance and hypocrisy that infects issues involving science and technology. Fire up your favorite search engine and try out the following queries: “manganese pollution,” “lead toxicity,” and “poly-aromatic hydrocarbons cancer risk.” You’ll find some dry, technically-accurate but boring as hell to read discussions involving those keywords published by government agencies and academics, and you’ll also find articles in which “experts” warn readers about the extreme danger associated with exposure to those compounds.

But how significant are these supposed dangers? Let’s start with manganese. Do you or a loved one take a multi-vitamin on a regular basis? Take a look at the ingredient list. Chances are you’ll find manganese listed among the minerals included.

This may give you pause. There are plenty of stories out there that describe manganese as a dangerous neuro-toxin. There are plenty of community leaders, political types, and environmental activists wringing their hands about the fate of the poor, innocent children exposed to this poison. So what the heck is it doing in your vitamins?

The answer is that manganese is an important and necessary micro-nutrient. Your body doesn’t need a lot of it, but it needs some of it. Chemicals are neither inherently toxic or non-toxic. The dose makes the poison, so it’s the amount one is exposed to and the route of exposure that ultimately matter. Good luck finding any member of the modern intelligentsia who understands, much less can explain, that simple fact.

Most everyone is aware of the dangers associated with ingesting lead. Less well known is that virtually every kitchen in the United States contains bowls and utensils that contain lead. For lead is a minor, but measurable, component of many grades of stainless steel—and whose kitchen doesn’t have a stainless item in it?

Does the amount of lead contained in stainless steel or how it is held within the lattice structure of the metal present any concerns about lead exposure? Not really, but don’t expect the fear-mongers to figure that out, even if they cared to do so.

Safety first.

And Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH)? There’s plenty of literature talking about how these potentially toxic and/or carcinogenic compounds can be formed during the combustion of coal, oil or natural gas. True, so far as that goes, but in very tiny amounts that will expose the average citizen to concentrations so low they are hardly of concern.

On the other hand, the smoke from your campfire, the cloud coming from your charcoal grill and any smoked food you consume will contain much more PAH compounds than anything a power plant will expose you to. That doesn’t keep me from enjoying smoked and barbecue foods, but then I’m not a hypocrite.

If you’re reading this piece, most experts agree that you are probably alive. Other experts tell us that sometime in the future you will cease to be alive. In between then and now, do yourself a favor: enjoy life. One of the ways you can enjoy it best is by tuning out the sad, ignorant masters of exploitation and propaganda who dream up ways to try to control your behavior by exploiting your natural tendency to exercise extreme caution when facing fear itself.

THE COLUMN: To Save America, Repeal the 26th Amendment

For only the second time in their sordid history—the first was the repeal of Prohibition—the Democrats have found a "progressive" law they want to repeal. It's the woefully misbegotten 26th Amendment to the Constitution, the one passed by Congress and ratified by the states that gave 18-year-olds the right to vote. It's one of the briefest pieces of legislation ever to emerge from the bowels of Washington, rushed through in a Vietnam-era fever to mollify the young people who were rallying in their thousands and ten thousands to protest the war. Here it is:

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The impetus behind the amendment was the slogan, "old enough to fight, old enough to vote." The reference was to the draft, which yanked multiple platoons of baby boomers out of their ordinary lives and packed them off with a gun in their hand to fight for LBJ and Tricky Dick Nixon. Well, that's not exactly true: those kids of the era smart enough or rich enough to attend college were deferred under the Selective Service Act, the theory being that there was no need to sacrifice the best and brightest when you could ship a year's worth of high-school mechanics-in-training off to the rice paddies as cannon fodder in a war the American government most certainly did not want to win, while preserving the Robert Strange McNamaras of tomorrow for lives in corporate or governmental servitude. Who knows, you might even get a president—or two or four—who managed to dodge military service and bounce straight from academe or business into the Commander-in-Chief's chair without ever picking up a gun.

Nope from Hope.

Through Joe Biden, a total of 16 presidents (or 14, depending on how you count) never spent any time near a boot camp or one of the service academies, including FDR (who was, however, Asst. Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1920), William Howard Taft (Secretary of War 1904-1908), John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge. These usually were men who came of age during peacetime, in contradistinction to the 31 men who fought for their country, including the five Civil War presidents such as Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and a raft of presidents who saw action during World War II (Eisenhower, JFK, Nixon, et al.). It wasn't until Bill Clinton supplanted veteran George H.W. Bush in 1992 that the era of the draft dodger got fully underway, with only George W. Bush having spent any time in the military among the most recent five presidents.

Amazingly, we heard nary a peep from the likes of Grant and Ike or the men who served under them regarding the "unfairness" of being sent to fight before first casting a ballot. This is partly because the draft, in its various manifestations during American history, generally came during a time of national emergencies and then stopped; a peacetime draft didn't appear until 1940, with the U.S. on the verge of war in both Europe and Asia. The military is now all-volunteer (i.e. a professional standing army, a notion previously abhorrent to Americans).

More important, the vote was considered a privilege, not a "right" (there is no such right in the Constitution), and it was correctly judged that a young man needed to attain his majority and his maturity before he could share in the governance of the Republic. The franchise, therefore, represented a coming-of-age of the men to whom it was granted. It was never intended to be "universal."

Choom Gang this.

By 1971, however, the Vietnam War had already been going on for nearly a decade, and under the spectacularly bad management of phony veteran Lyndon Baines Johnson (Silver Star for riding in an airplane) and the quintessential egghead, McNamara (disqualified for combat service during WW2 by "bad vision"), and three years after Nixon promised he had a "secret plan" to end the war, the natives were growing restive. Especially the Boomer generation, who had experienced neither the Depression nor the war, as their parents had; hardship was unknown to them.

During that period, a college education—once reserved for the upper classes and meritocratic strivers—was gradually transforming from something that only a very small minority of American men and women enjoyed into something deemed to be necessary to achieving a middle-and-upper-class lifestyle. This was when a wag-the-dog attitude toward higher education began to take root, not least in academe itself. Because holders of a college degree generally earned more than their high-school-only counterpart, it became axiomatic that the degree itself caused the rise in income. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Further, graduate degrees at that time tended to be highly specialized; the figure of the Eternal Graduate Student appeared, in part to continue avoiding exposure to Selective Service, although those deferments were eventually done away with as well by the time the draft was finally abolished in 1973. It is this context, therefore, that the move to lower the voting age took hold and eventually, in the teeth of massive opposition to the draft—not the war, which most Americans supported until LBJ's ineptitude had become clear to all—must be considered.

Five deferments for asthma.

The war is long gone, lost from the start by American unwillingness to devote the resources necessary for victory, but the 26th amendment lives on. So I wish I could hail the latest Democrat proposal to repeal the 26th, but alas I can't, since the cure is worse than the disease:

More than a dozen House Democrats this week proposed an amendment to the Constitution to allow 16-year-olds to vote in an apparent attempt to make it easier to enact left-leaning policies like gun control and pro-environmental measures. Democratic Rep. Grace Meng of New York introduced a resolution that would do away with the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, which allows U.S. citizens to vote if they are at least 18 years of age. The resolution would replace that with new language that says: "The right of citizens of the United States, who are sixteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."

Meng hadn’t released a statement on her proposal by early Thursday afternoon. But she released a statement in the last Congress, indicating a belief that lowering the voting age by amending the Constitution would let younger people have a say on many of the positions supported by Democrats. "Our young people, including 16- and 17-year-olds, continue to fight and advocate for so many issues that they are passionate about from gun safety to the climate crisis," she said. "They have been tremendously engaged on policies affecting their lives and their futures."

Yes, you read that right: 16. At an age when boys are eating boogers and lighting farts, getting more tattoos than the average sailor, and having sex with high school girls. At an age when girls (they're not even close to being "women") are pondering sex change operations and seeking out abortion services and getting even more tattoos than the average hooker. And these are the unformed humanoids with whom the Democrats (unformed humanoids themselves, to be sure) want to entrust the nation's future?

Missed me by this much.

So yes: repeal the 26th. And then restore the status quo ante, to 21. It was an amendment passed in the heat of the moment and under tremendous political pressure. It didn't do Nixon any good; a year after it became law, he was forced to resign over the now-trivial matter of Watergate, less than two years after he had won one of the greatest landslides in American history. (America's first media coup; Trump was the second). Like Trump, he was reviled from the start, cordially loathed by the Democrat/Media Complex, tortured weekly by the Washington Post's singularly nasty political cartoonist, Herbert Block, and never handed an even break.

Ditto Trump with the Covid hoax, played for a fool by Anthony Fauci and the Democrats and maneuvered by media pressure into crashing a "vaccine" that has proven more deadly than the semi-imaginary disease it was meant to "cure," the news of which was conveniently withheld by Big Pharma and the media until after the election, at which point it was administered to a reluctant populace at gunpoint by a party of political opportunists who now want to bring you... the 16-year-old voter.

Where will it stop? It won't, until we stop it. As I like to say, they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. Next will be the 12-year-old voter, then the 8-year-old voter; by the time the Democrats reach the unborn voter they may finally reconsider their position on abortion, but by then the Republic will have passed into history, the victim of its own unlimited appetite for diversity, tolerance, and "progress." The parable of Chesterton's Fence comes once more to mind, except this time the fence has been demolished, the teenagers are not about to bring it back, and the grownups are long gone.

THE COLUMN: To Save America, Repeal the 18th Amendment (Again)

This week, we come not only to bury the 18th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, known as Prohibition, but also to praise the 21st, which put a stake through the 18th's nasty dark heart just 14 years after its passage in 1919. Prohibition was enforced by a singularly bad piece of legislation called the Volstead Act which, although vetoed by Woodrow Wilson, was nevertheless overridden by a Republican congress, and which thus put D.C. muscle behind the "Noble Experiment" (Herbert Hoover's words) in bossing the American people around for their own good.

The 18th was the third of the four so-called "Progressive Era" amendments, which began in 1913 with the 16th (income tax) amendment and continued down its gruesome anti-freedom path that same year with the 17th amendment. As is typical of a Leftist policy mandate, the amendments purported to solve a relatively minor problem by creating an ongoing and very destructive large one.

After all, the country had managed very well during the first century of its existence by limiting the reach of the federal government into the states' prerogatives and the citizens' lives by restricting its access to revenue to excise duties and tariffs; similarly there was no urgent need to tinker with the Founders' carefully wrought structure of the Senate by effectively nationalizing the upper chamber via popular election rather than appointment by the state legislatures. In a single year, the entire relationship of both the states and the citizenry vis-a-vis the federal government had changed utterly and irrevocably.

Down the drain it goes.

The 18th, and its homely sibling the 19th (also passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states the following year) similarly dealt profound blows against the nation-as-founded. While it's true that the Founders had provided for altering the Constitution via the amendment process, they had not envisioned using that process as a battering ram against the very nature of the document itself.

The first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, did not tamper with the main body of the 1789 Constitution; passed in 1791, it was more like a codicil of necessary afterthoughts and corrections (always in favor of personal liberty and less governmental power) after the principal job—creating a sturdy new nation out of whole cloth—had been accomplished. Other amendments, both before and since, were mostly concerned with various mundanities, such as the timing of federal elections and jurisdictional issues.

But just a century or so after the official founding of the Republic, busybodies from both parties decided the time had come for some "fundamental change." Led by three aggressive presidents—Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Wilson—Washington undertook an astonishing power grab—the legislative and political equivalent of the Supreme Court's self-serving Marbury v. Madison—whose deleterious effects still resonate today. The 18th reads:

Section 1
After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Section 2
The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The "appropriate legislation" was the Volstead Act, under the strictures of which, "no person shall on or after the date when the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States goes into effect, manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish or possess any intoxicating liquor except as authorized in this Act, and all the provisions of this Act shall be liberally construed to the end that the use of intoxicating liquor as a beverage may be prevented."

Why is this wine different from all other wines?

The Volstead Act significantly added possession to its list of lifestyle crimes, which in the end was probably what ensured its demise. In New York, gangsters such as the British-born Irishman Owney Madden and Dutch Schultz (born Arthur Flegenheimer in the Bronx) made fortunes by assuming the risks of manufacture and sale of beer and profiting handsomely; Madden's brew, "Madden's No. 1" was the most popular brand of beer in New York City. They served their own booze in the nightclubs that sprang up to service thirsty customers; Madden himself owned the Cotton Club, where he employed Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Lena Horne; and the Stork Club, where he used Sherman Billingsley as the front man. Prohibition was not only a gift to gangland, but to American popular music as well.

Further, there were some legalized exceptions: kosher wine for Passover, for example, which led to such wonderfully ecumenical scenes as Irishmen lined up around the block in Manhattan to buy some kosher wine and thus help celebrate both Passover and St. Patrick's Day, two of the holiest days of the calendar on the Lower East Side.

The impulse behind Prohibition was of course the temperance movement and the Cleveland-based Women's Christian Temperance Union, a midwestern collective of hatchet-faced women agitating both against booze and in favor of women's suffrage. We think of Prohibition today as a quasi-moral crusade and ignore the suffrage part, but in the minds of the WCTU they were twinned.

In 1879, the formidable Frances Willard became president of the WCTU and turned to political organizing as well as moral persuasion to achieve total abstinence. Willard’s personal motto was “do everything.” The WCTU adopted this as a policy which came to mean that all reform was inter-connected and that social problems could not be separated. The use of alcohol and other drugs was a symptom of the larger problems in society. By 1894, under “home protection” the WCTU was endorsing women’s suffrage. By 1896, 25 of the 39 departments of the WCTU were dealing with non-temperance issues. However, temperance, especially in terms of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, was the force that bound the WCTU’s social reforms together. To promote its causes, the WCTU was among the first organizations to keep a professional lobbyist in Washington, D. C.

And America heard the call.

A hidden element behind the passage of both the 18th and the 19th amendments was xenophobia. American had just experienced a huge wave of immigration from Europe, dirt-poor Irish, Italians, and Jews, which had followed an earlier movement of Rhineland Germans. Neither Catholics nor Jews were terribly popular among the WASP ascendency and the newcomers' fondness for the hop and the grape, combined with business acumen, was a selling-point behind Prohibition: a way to hurt the immigrants right in their own kitchens, parlors, bars, and social clubs. Because more immigrant voters eventually meant a loss of political power for the natives, something had to be done about it. (Sound familiar?)

Human nature being what it is, Prohibition soon turned out to be unenforceable. Places like New York City quickly gave up trying, and the police began acting as informants and enforcers for the gangsters, their clubs, and their breweries. Once, when the feds decided to raid Madden's brewery, the Phoenix Cereal Company on the 10th Avenue, in the heart of the Irish neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen, the cops tipped off Owney, who shut it down for evening, and ordered his men to park their cars up and down the avenue so that the feds would have to double-park in order to conduct their raid. While they were inside, the the NYPD ticketed and towed them.

Further, Americans were sickened by such outbursts of violence as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929, a turf war between Al Capone's South Side Italians and Irish mobsters from Bugs Moran's gang on the other side of town. Seven people were machine-gunned to death. In New York Irish-born gunner Vincent's Coll's inadvertent murder of 5-year-old Michael Vengalli in heavily Italian East Harlem during a drive-by shooting on 107th Street in 1931 had the newspapers howling for Coll's head and giving him the monicker, Mad Dog Coll.

Things couldn't go on like this. Sentiment for Repeal burgeoned. As I have Owney Madden say in my American Book Award-winning novel (and his "autobiography"), And All the Saints:

By now, even the Feds had pretty much given up enforcing Prohibition, and Hoover trumped up a typical Goo-goo commission, this one named after some clown called Wickersham, to prove that what they thought had been such a swell notion just ten years earlier that they went and amended the Constitution was now a rotten idea and what they needed to do was, of course, amend the Constitution again. This, I thought, was the true genius of Goo-goos and reformers everywhere; that they never had to admit Reform was a mistake, and if it was, then all it took was more Reform to set it right.

Repeal had legs.

And so the 21st amendment was passed by popular acclaim in 1933, in the first year of the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. It included this critical provision: "The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited." In other words, the regulation of alcoholic beverages was returned to the states, the same philosophy behind the recent Supreme Court Dobbs decision, which contrary to Democrat propaganda did not "outlaw" abortion, but simply returned the decision-making sovereignty back to the individual states. And that may be a clue as to how we might repeal many other amendments, laws, and court decisions: by returning to federalism.

In the meantime, America rejoiced: happy days were here again. And while the 18th had failed in its primary mission of reducing the political power of unfavored minorities (many of whom were immigrant men without wives), the Protestant establishment had already succeeded in passing what it thought was an even more powerful weapon to ensure its continued political dominance: the 19th amendment.

And here you thought that was about giving women the vote, but you never thought to ask why. We'll answer that question next week.

'A Battle for the Soul of America'

Even a blind pig, as the saying goes, can find a truffle once in a while. And when the porker in question is the Biden administration, including the president himself, any sign of acuity or even sentience is welcome. During last week’s orgy of Democrat schadenfreude over the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 “insurrection” of unarmed Americans wandering through the hall of the Capitol and taking selfies – when not being murdered by trigger-happy policemen – Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., delivered himself of this remark: “I’ve said it many times… we are in a battle for the soul of America.”

Well, it’s true – he has said it many times, especially near the end of the campaign in 2020. The phrase has been a staple of the Democrats’ repertoire of cliches, right up there with “good-paying jobs,” “build back better,” and promises to “shut down” Covid-19. And it’s also true that we are, indeed, a battle for the soul of America – although references to “soul” are pretty funny coming from the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition.

Let's go, Brandon! No joke.

Pretty funny coming from a party that traces its lineage back to slaveholder Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party, and whose first vice president, Aaron Burr, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers.

Pretty funny coming from the party that seceded from the Union upon the election of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln; took up arms against the United States; fought a bloody civil war; and assassinated Lincoln just a few days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in 1865.

Pretty funny from the party that founded, aided, and abetted the Ku Klux Klan, declared “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” and steadfastly opposed civil-rights legislation from the presidencies of Andrew Johnson to that of Lyndon Baines Johnson, when it suddenly discovered the power of the black vote.

Pretty funny coming from the party that honored its first official “Democrat” president, slaveholder Andrew Jackson – the man who forcibly evicted the Indians of the Southeast and sent them on their way to Oklahoma (“Indian Territory”) via the infamous Trail of Tears – with annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinners across the country, an event that has since changed its name to, among things, the Liberty and Justice Celebration, the Hoosier Hospitality Dinner, the Humphrey-Mondale Dinner, the Johnson-Jordan Dinner, the Kennedy-Clinton Dinner (whoops!), and the Eleanor Roosevelt Dinner.

Pretty funny coming from the party whose most notable president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, prolonged the Depression from 1933 to 1941 thanks to his quasi-socialist economic policies (FDR was an open admirer of Benito Mussolini until that became politically impossible) and then rounded up loyal Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor and sent them to concentration camps – with the support of a Supreme Court that Roosevelt had earlier browbeaten into compliance with his policies by threatening to “pack” it. (A tactic the current Democrats are once again considering in order to bring the Court to heel.)

And pretty funny coming from a president who has sided throughout his career with racist Democrats like the late Robert Byrd (a former member of the Ku Klux Klan), who was praised by George Wallace, who viciously attacked Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at his confirmation hearings in 1991, and proudly boasted that his home state of Delaware – a slave state throughout the Civil War, even though it stayed in the Union – was “culturally part of Dixie.” A president who, in a speech in Georgia, just called opponents of the Democrats’ bid to federalize national elections “domestic enemies.”

In sum, what does it tell you about a party that has to run this hard, this fast and this far away from its own past? About a party that has to resort to claims that the two parties somehow miraculously “switched sides” at some point between the LBJ and Nixon administrations (even though there’s absolutely no evidence that it ever happened)? A party that wants you to forget just about everything it’s stood for until five minutes ago?

It tells me they’re not to be trusted, no matter what they say. Writing as my fictional left-wing lunatic character, David Kahane, in the pages of National Review in 2009, I called them “a criminal organization masquerading as a political party,” and followed that up in 2012 with a short pamphlet called The People v. the Democratic Party, in which I explored the Democrats’ sordid history at some length.

And these are the people with whom we are engaged in a battle for the soul of America.

However, no matter how often the Democrats wrap themselves in the flag, execrate the memory of the Trump presidency – which they view as an unfortunate interregnum between the Obama administration and what is now the third Obama term, with perhaps (if Michelle runs to supplant Biden in 2024) another one or two to come – and, increasingly, regard any opposition as not only unprincipled but seditious, they still can’t run away from their past. Unfortunately for us, their past is just prologue.

Manzanar: brought to you by the Democrat Party.

For all their talk about “our democracy,” the Democrats have never believed in a pluralistic, republican society. Their neo-Jeffersonian ideal is a borderless (and thus unlimited) political entity led by aristocrats with money, education, and social standing, lording it over a vast but tractable plantation of serfs, peons, and other deplorables. (Think Mexico.) The “democracy” they’re building embraces Ivy League graduates, tech zillionaires, familial networks, globalist proclivities, a permanent bureaucracy of “experts” (a legacy of another Democrat president, Woodrow Wilson), and a religion that worships Mammon, not God.

As fast as they can, they are rendering irrelevant the idea of federalism in favor of a concentration of power in a few hands in Washington, D.C., a neutered Congress, and rule by executive order that evokes nothing less than ancient Rome during the violent Caesarian transition from Republic to Dictatorship. Slowly, steadily during their long march through the institutions they have nationalized medicine, fundamentally transformed the military from a fighting force to a sure-to-be-fatal exercise in diversity, inclusion, and equity, destroyed public education, demolished the monuments of the past and, should they stay in power, promise you a “Great Reset” future in which you’ll own nothing, like it, and dine on bugs.

Like the Wizard of Oz, Joe Biden shouts at you to pay no attention to the figurehead standing at the podium while his wicked witches and flying monkeys ready another assault on America-as-founded and its institutions. Biden and his party answer to a higher authority, perceive an arc of history that bends toward their idea of “justice,” and will “by any means necessary” compel your conformity. They wake up every morning and ask themselves: how can we punish our enemies today? And then they set about doing just that.

So Biden was right. He’s said it many times. This really is a battle for the soul of America. And you’re the enemy.