Stephen Miller’s “dark prediction” about Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending package hits the nail on the head: “This is madness,” Miller explained. The “bill is the most radical piece of legislation in our lifetimes. It’s basically the Green New Deal, combined with Critical Race Theory, combined with massive amnesty and open borders, combined with the complete destruction of the American economy.”
Miller’s description of this Pandora’s Box of assorted evils should be applauded because it goes beyond the conventional GOP/Fox News talking point about high costs and added inflation. It underlines what is truly loathsome about the bill now before Congress, namely, subsidizing America’s woke cultural transformation, a project to which the Democrats are fervently committed and upon which they are delighted to lavish trillions.
For reasons of political opportunism, Republican senators like Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) seem happy to concede the cultural war to the other side, while focusing on the problems of added taxes and inflationary effects. No doubt these GOP senators think they can appeal to “moderates” and soccer moms by staying away from what is truly revolutionary about the spending package. They focus on what this package may do to our pocketbooks, which is also the only interest of “moderate” Democrats Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).
Unfortunately, the Democrats are pursuing a cultural war against traditional families and communities, biblical morality, and the survival of a country with borders. There is no way that a party that hopes to oppose this cultural Left can prevail without first recognizing what it is fighting against. I won’t hide my hand here as the author of books on the “post-Marxist Left,” in which I argue that today’s Left is chiefly about cultural revolution and only secondarily about economic redistribution and centralized planning. Although this Left enjoys the enthusiastic support of corporate capitalists, it is bleeding working-class backers.
It would be best to call out these adversaries as well-placed cultural radicals rather than as budget-busters. Giving money to AOC’s Green New Deal, critical race theory, or the settlement of more illegals crossing our borders with government assistance, is not first and foremost a budgetary issue. It is about cultural transformation and the enactment of a woke agenda. Deroy Murdoch properly describes Biden’s spending package as an act that weaponizes “racial fetishism.”
Another clarification that deserves mention here is Mollie Hemingway’s discussion of the 2020 presidential election in Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Much space and many words have been devoted to illuminating the massive irregularities that accompanied that election, including informative commentaries in American Greatness and in the October issue of Chronicles. All these analyses certainly make telling points, but even more important than the reported vote numbers may be the circumstances in which the election was held. It took place after the mainstream media here and throughout the Western world had lied for four years about a president they didn’t want in office.
In this frenzied crusade against Trump, as Hemingway conclusively shows, the FBI and other government surveillance agencies were ostentatiously investigating a far-fetched Russian collusion narrative that turned out to be blatantly false. Big Tech cancelled damning evidence from Facebook and Twitter that Biden as well as his son and brother were implicated in highly suspect dealings with foreign governments, and they took this action just before the election. The mainstream media obligingly hid any report that could endanger Biden’s election.
Further, Big Tech magnate Mark Zuckerberg distributed $519 million to Democratic state governments to outsource the election management, including the harvesting of absentee ballots. Attempts to enact voter identification in battleground states met sharp opposition from the media and the Democrats as a new form of Jim Crow. Meanwhile meetings took place among powerful interests, which went from the Chamber of Commerce to BLM, to make sure that proper actions were taken so that Trump would lose the election.
According to Rigged, the context in which Trump’s reelection bid unfolded may be more relevant than those questionable ballots that arrived at vote-counting stations at strange hours. The most alarming aspect of the election was the relentless, systematic way in which certain interests controlled the events. Trump was harassed night and day while in office and then forced to run against powerful enemies from behind the scenes.
I was thoroughly underwhelmed when National Review ran a long article in March about how accusations against a “cabal” manipulating the election were false and dangerous. Such a perspective ignores the disturbing circumstances in which Trump’s presidency and reelection campaign took place, as revealed in Hemmingway’s account. Looking at whether ballots were marked in the proper spots has become a diversion from a far more pressing problem. It is whether an election can ever again take place in this country that is not controlled by unelected powerbrokers. However extravagant may be his phrasing, former President Trump’s insistence that the election of 2020 was rigged is entirely true and it remains an urgent problem.