This post deals with a matter that's a recurring theme over at my Substack, Precipice, namely, the ever-narrower sliver of ideological terrain I inhabit.
My latest post here at LITD, "The Institutional Right In America Is At Least As Sick As It's Been for Eight Years," mentioned a couple of recent developments that particularly stand out as substantiation for my assertion. There are some updates for those. Not only does the speaker lineup for this year's CPAC make clear that that gathering has devolved into an irredeemable sewer, but it now appears organizer Matt Schlapp has a scandal issue, having allegedly felt up a Hershel Walker campaign worker, as well as in-the-pits staff morale. And the documented coverup by Fox hosts and executives regarding MAGA claims of a stolen 2020 election has now gotten real. Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are collectively suing Fox for $4.3 billion in damages. (Fox only has $4 billion in cash on hand.) News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch said under oath in a Dominion-case deposition that he let the on-air talent continue to spew nonsense because it ensured the greatest flow of dollars to Fox.
I offered a whiff of that narrow-sliver-of-terrain stance by mentioning my misgivings about The Bulwark and Principles First.
The shorthand for why I harbor misgivings is this: many prominent figures associated with those entities have publicly stated that they voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
That's a bridge too far for this conservative.
And no, I didn't vote for the Very Stable Genius in either 2016 or 2020. I wrote in Evan McMullin and Ben Sasse, respectively, in those elections.
Joe Biden has been happy to take his administration as far to the left as the most progressive elements in his party want to go.
He has taken the phone-and-pen notion of law-making by executive fiat even farther than his old boss Barack Obama.
The CHIPS and Science Act, duly passed by Congress and signed into law by Biden last August, was already a collectivist leap, all about "investment," read wealth redistribution, in making the US semiconductor industry impervious to what the Chinese were doing. Now, Biden says these subsidies come with conditions. US manufacturers will have to have onsite daycare for employees, limit stock buybacks, and share "excess profits" with the government.
I hope you don't need me to point out what makes this so pernicious.
But in case you find yourself in a discussion about this with someone less steeped in principle-driven thought, here are the most obvious objections:
- It blurs the lines between the executive and legislative branches beyond what is constitutional.
- It engages in social engineering - specifically, in weakening the family.
- It demonizes profit, which is the gauge by which business organizations monitor their health.
- It uses bribery to tell private organizations how to conduct their affairs.
On Tuesday, the Court heard challenges to Biden’s attempt to spend half a trillion dollars cancelling the college and graduate school debts of 43 million people.
With whose money? The national debt, of course, because Congress didn’t appropriate funds for this or raise taxes or fees to pay for it.
Biden claims to be using the emergency powers of the HEROES Act passed after 9/11, the purpose of which was to let presidents suspend some student loan rules for soldiers serving abroad.
Even Nancy Pelosi and Biden’s own Department of Education warned him that he didn’t have the power to do this.
And as if his Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government executive order of January 2021 wasn't enough of an identity-politics intrusion, now comes the order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. It creates "Equity Teams" in every stinking agency of the Beltway leviathan that will annually submit "Equity Action Plans" to the Office of Management and Budget.
A question: Does there come a point at which these "underserved communities" are no longer "underserved"? That is, does this annual-submission-of-equity-plans edict have an anticipated shelf life?
Actually, I have another question. What does "underserved," and, by inference, "served," mean? What kind of "serving" falls within the proper purview of government?
No, I can unequivocally state that voting for Joe Biden in 2020 was no act of rectitude.
Now, here's where we get back to the narrow-sliver-of-terrain metaphor. The main reason the Biden is getting away with these crowbar whacks to our freedom is that nearly everyone decrying them is a Neo-Trumpist wackadoodle. They happen to be correct about the Democrats, even if they are every bit as poisonous to the American experiment.
I didn't quit being a conservative when I quit being a Republican.
Some folks whose intellects would be useful right now did.
It's a good thing the gout in my right foot is subsiding. It's getting every harder to maintain my balance on this sliver.
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