The Crazy Left
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a leading voice of the left who often says bizarre things. It's easy to laugh off her bizarre remarks, but that's a mistake. She is representative of the progressive movement, and her millions of social media followers give her tremendous power and influence on Capitol Hill.
In her latest interview with the New Yorker, AOC makes a number of wild claims. For example, she says that like the planet, our democracy only has 10 years left. She insists that we're heading back to the Jim Crow era, and she blames legislation that simply returns our election laws to the pre-pandemic era of 2019.
She also suggested that the crime wave we're suffering through is the result of the expanded child tax credit expiring at the end of December. Seriously, you can't make this up!
But that doesn't explain the surge of murders and other violent crimes that occurred in 2021, when the full tax credit was in effect.
The crime AOC tries to explain away in her own congressional district and in the city of New York almost always victimizes minorities -- blacks, Asians, Hispanics, the elderly, the powerless and the vulnerable.
For most of our history, it wasn't hard for "compassionate" liberals and civil rights leaders to choose between minority thugs and minority victims. But that's not today's woke left, which is all in on critical race theory and the "systemic racism of law enforcement." Now the cops are the bad guys and the criminals are the victims!
The truth is that the left's "soft on crime" philosophy is costing New York's minority communities job opportunities. What business owners would want to invest in unsafe neighborhoods?
Her crazy ideas are resulting in minority students getting a bad education because the schools and streets are unsafe. Her crazy ideas are resulting in more violent crime because thugs are released with no bail, while the cops are handcuffed, demoralized and defunded.
How is that "compassionate"?
But AOC is worried about "Jim Crow laws." Give me a break!
The Authoritarian Left
A consistent theme of these reports over the past two years has been a disturbing trend exposed by the coronavirus -- the authoritarian impulse that runs through all levels of government.
We've seen it in arrogant school boards, authoritarian governors and at the highest levels in Washington, D.C. But if AOC is really worried about threats to democracy, she ought to be condemning the latest actions of liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Our authoritarian president recently called Trudeau and demanded that he crackdown hard on the Freedom Convoy (protesting truckers). In this case, the leader of Canada apparently didn't mind being "pushed around" by the United States.
Last night, Trudeau invoked Canada's Emergencies Act for the first time in the country's history. He's now treating the nonviolent truck drivers as terrorists or domestic enemies threatening "the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada."
That's what Canada's Emergencies Act was intended to address -- threats to the state, not truck drivers.
Canadian civil liberties groups are appalled by Trudeau's dictatorial edict. He's not only threatening to seize trucks blocking roadways, he's now threatening to seize the truckers' bank accounts and to suspend their insurance policies. And he's going even further.
The Canadian government is also threatening the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. Its donors have now provided financial support to what Trudeau evidently considers "terrorists" and "enemies of the state."
Can you imagine the outcry if Donald Trump had done anything like this during the violent leftist riots in 2020? Can you imagine if he had tried to shutdown the BLM organization and targeted the corporations that donated millions to that radical Marxist outfit?
Meanwhile, GiveSendGo went offline yesterday. It was hacked and the personal information of individual donors was compromised. A video was posted on the site saying the platform funded "hate groups, disinformation and insurrection."
Who are we to assume hacked the site? Was it Trudeau's government, which just declared a state of emergency? Or was it bitter leftists who hate Christian conservatives? Either one seems just as likely.
There's considerable irony here in that the trucker convoy demonstration is about freedom! Many truckers are simply fed up with the way Canada's leftist government has exploited the pandemic to shrink freedom.
This protest is not a violent assault on the government. The mayor of Ottawa lost his mind because kids were having fun in "bouncy castles." Does this look like a bunch of violent thugs to you?
Sadly, it seems "freedom" has become the new "F-word" in Canada.
By the way, Justin Trudeau never invoked this emergency power during the epidemic of church arsons that have swept Canada. The government won't even acknowledge the problem.
Somewhere Lord Acton is saying, "Told you so." The British historian famously said, "All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Runaway Inflation
Inflation shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Wholesale prices surged 1% in January, and 9.7% over the past year. That's the highest level in more than ten years.
The cost of everything is skyrocketing. Used cars are up 40%. Gas is up 41%. Beef, pork and chicken are all up by double-digits.
The only thing not "inflating" is Joe Biden's approval rating, now down to 34% in the latest poll.
The Culture Of Death
I am often asked why our society has become so coarse. Why are so many obscene things now acceptable in the popular culture? How can musicians sing about "popping people" (killing them) and refer to women and minorities in such derogatory terms? The list goes on and on.
As I have pointed out my entire career, liberty has become unmoored from virtue. And the further we get from our Judeo-Christian foundation, the more the hounds of hell are unleashed.
Our country was built on the idea that our rights come from God, not government. That's what the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence says:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
But in 1973, the highest court in our land said something very different. It said preborn children have no rights we are obligated to respect. Instead of preborn children having any rights, the court declared that killing preborn children was a fundamental right.
The Supreme Court reaffirmed that decision in 1992, declaring that liberty was "each person defining their own meaning."
Well, people can define their own meaning in all sorts of horrible ways, and they often do. Many of those people are locked up in prison because their definition of liberty negatively affected someone else, just as abortion negatively affects (kills) a baby.
But with those two decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, the Supreme Court planted the seeds for a culture of death. We've destroyed millions of innocent preborn lives in the years since. We've gone from a society where abortion was only whispered about because it was shameful to today when the left says, "Shout it, and be proud of it."
Soldiers who have seen a lot of death and horror often suffer in civilian life from PTSD. They have trouble staying grounded. Their life often goes off the rails. America has been in the middle of death and horror for 50 years caused by abortion on demand.
We all know what happens in those "clinics." A child dies and a woman is exploited. Yet, even in the middle of the pandemic, when we shut down our economy to save lives, the left insisted that abortion centers were "essential" and allowed them to remain open.
We are sitting on top of a mound of skulls of aborted babies. Perhaps we are suffering a national PTSD from the violence in the womb that destroys the most innocent among us. Pray for wisdom and courage at the Supreme Court as it reconsiders 50 years of abortion on demand.
Just my thoughts.