Shame of the Nation The root cause of the American crisis is the moral depravity of the ‘Woke’ progressives. David Horowitz
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/moral-dimension-crisis-we-face-david-horowitz/
Everyone can sense that the political situation we find ourselves in is anything but normal. Yet the language we use to describe current conflicts is a language designed to frame them in the category of politics as usual – only perhaps more so. In speaking about current conflicts, we focus on the surface “issues” that divide us – a record inflation, off-the-charts crime waves in our urban centers, a humanitarian crisis at our southern border. Sometimes we sum it up as a double standard in the justice system that treats violent leftists as “peaceful protesters” and public school parents concerned about the abuse of their children as “domestic terrorists.” That juxtaposition gets us closer to the true nature of the conflict. But it is still inadequate to the gravity of the political moment, suggesting that progressives simply fail to understand the issues at hand.
But they understand them very well. For progressives the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the “revolution” – the
“re-imagining” and transformation of American society into a future where genders are selected and “social justice” prevails. That goal is so worthy and so necessary, it justifies any and all means to achieve it. Once this is understood, one can see that under the surface of the crises we face is a sinister force that poses an existential threat to our way of life – a threat far more immediate than the so-called climate apocalypse.
Morality is about following rules that ensure virtuous ends. Detach the means from the ends and what you get are the totalitarian regimes that have blighted the modern era. At the root of the current American crisis is what can only be described as the moral depravity of the “woke” progressives and their radical agenda.
Is this extreme? How else to describe Senator Elizabeth Warren’s response to the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade with a call – unopposed by her Democrat colleagues – to close the nation’s 3,000 private “crisis pregnancy centers.”[1]
These pregnancy centers are already being physically attacked by violent, pro-abortion vigilantes on the left.[2] Their crime? They are specifically set up to provide advice, support, medical services and free supplies to individuals and couples who are pregnant, in difficult personal circumstances, and facing complex life decisions. Why would Senator Warren see such facilities as a threat unless she sees herself as the leader of a death cult, whose members regard life in the womb – in and of itself – as a threat to their “woke” agendas? Why is their no condemnation of Warren by her Democrat colleagues for this cruel and inhumane proposal, which strikes at the heart of our very purpose as a species for existing – reproduction?
The same question could be put to the Democrats over their uncritical support for Planned Parenthood – an organization that was explicitly created as a eugenics project to eliminate inferior races, specifically African Americans.[3] Currently, Planned Parenthood receives hundreds of millions of dollars in annual subsidies from the federal government,[4] which it supplements with profits from selling the dismembered body parts of the babies it aborts.[5]
Why, one might ask, wouldn’t Planned Parenthood put aside $100 million of those revenues to create a comprehensive adoption service with the intention of saving the lives of babies whose mothers might consent to that option? Especially since the number of Americans seeking to adopt unwanted babies exceeds the number of babies aborted in any given year.[6] Why indeed, unless Planned Parenthood wasn’t also a member of Warren’s death cult?
What is the rationale for not providing such a service (and choice) to its pregnant women clients? The answer is obvious. Doing so would undermine the foundational myth of the abortion movement – that abortion is about a woman and her body, and doesn’t in fact involve another life. But it does. The pregnant woman is host to an unborn human being, whom her choices and actions have implanted in her womb in transit to an independent life. By hiding and even attacking this alternative, the abortion movement is in denial of its fundamental obligation to the most vulnerable among us.
This detachment from the reality of one’s actual choices and actions, accompanied by a lack of compassion for one’s victims, are the hallmarks of the sociopath – devoid of conscience and lacking a moral compass. They are also the common theme of progressive crusades to “re-imagine” the world and make it “a better place,” without regard for the brutal consequences of their actions, or the suffering they cause. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
Open Borders
Joe Biden won the presidential election by a margin of 0.027% of the votes cast.[7] On day one of his presidency, Biden announced the first of 94 executive orders – including many that were blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.[8] Their purpose? To nullify America’s immigration laws and open the nation’s southern border to an invasion of millions of unvetted aliens from 200 countries, smuggled into the United States by sex trafficking, drug-dealing, paramilitary, criminal cartels.
The Trump measures Biden cancelled had reduced illegal entries at the southern border by nearly 80%.[9] One of the measures that Trump experimented with was zero tolerance for illegal crossings which involved immediate incarceration as a prelude to deportation.[10] Because U.S. law does not permit the incarceration of minors for the crimes of their parents, this meant the temporary separation of children from their parents. The Democrats from Biden on down seized on this fact to accuse Trump of “ripping children from their mothers’ arms” and keeping them in “cages” reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps.[11]
“Let’s talk about what we’re talking about,” an outraged Biden said about Trump’s zero-tolerance policy during the presidential debates. “What happened? Parents were ripped—their kids were ripped from their arms and separated, and now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal. It’s criminal.”[12]
These attacks backfired when the photos of children in the “cages” supplied by Democrats were shown to have been taken during the Obama administration. In other words, the targets of the Democrat attacks were actually remnants of an Obama administration policy that had been run for years as holding cells without protests from the same “progressives” who were up in arms about Trump. As for Trump, he was disturbed enough about the plight of the children that after two months he abandoned the “zero tolerance” policy even though it meant failing to deport some illegal adults.[13]
From the outset, Trump had made it clear that immigration should take place legally and, therefore, no illegal migrants were welcome. On day one of taking office, Biden reversed this policy, and declared the opposite, specifically inviting even unaccompanied minors to enter the country without fear that they might be turned away at the border.[14]
By February 2021, just a month after Biden’s executive order went into effect, the number of unaccompanied children in the custody of Health and Human Services more than doubled, to 6,581. In April, the figure grew to 20,339.[15] This was nearly nine times the number of children who had been in custody under Trump in April of the previous year.[16] The number then continued to hover between 12,000 and 16,000 per month in the fall of 2021.[17] Yet no cries of anguish were heard from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the “Squad” and the Democrats who had been so “horrified” by the former president’s two-month zero-tolerance policy.
“Humanitarian crisis” doesn’t begin to do justice to the suffering inflicted on these children during their thousand-mile cartel-run treks. The Hill described the journey from Central America and Mexico to the United States, as “one of the most dangerous trips in the world.”[18] In a report documenting the conditions of migrants between 2018 and 2020, Doctors Without Borders noted that 57% of the illegals who were questioned had been victims of some type of violence, in addition to the harsh conditions of the route itself.[19]
Despite these facts, Biden and members of his administration, like Kamala Harris, avoided visiting the border or recommending changes in the policy. They continued to deny that the crisis was a “crisis” insisting instead that it was a “challenge,” and continued to make statements and implement policies encouraging parents to send their children in the custody of violent human traffickers, on this dangerous, potentially life-threatening journey.[20]
The number of child rapes at the hands of the smugglers, the number of deaths from exposure and drowning will never be known. Nor will the scourge of communicable diseases. In a March 2021 sampling of girls at one temporary shelter for migrant teenagers in San Diego, for example, nearly 10 percent tested positive for Covid-19.[21] Fourteen percent of migrant children at a facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, likewise tested positive.[22] In May 2021, Health and Human Services reported having found more than 3,000 coronavirus cases among migrant children in Texas during the preceding 12 months.[23]
This suffering was not of course confined to minors. Nearly one-third of female migrants say they were sexually abused along the way, usually by rapes.[24] In 2021 alone the bodies of over 650 migrants who had died from exposure, drowning and other causes were retrieved by border patrol agents.[25] That was a number dwarfed by the casualties inside the United States where 70,000 people were poisoned to death by fentanyl,[26] a principal product of the drug trade run by the Mexicans and Chinese, whose sales flourished as a direct result of the Biden administration’s policies.
The open border created by Biden’s executive orders is effectively controlled by the paramilitary Mexican cartels which force the migrants they smuggle to incur thousands of dollars in debt, making them hostages even after their arrival. During Biden’s presidency, three million unvetted migrants from 200 countries have crossed into the United States,[27] in the process creating a multi-billion-dollar criminal operation.[28]
All of the suffering caused by these facts are direct consequences of the policies instituted by the Biden Democrats, who continue to pretend – in the shameful words of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, that “the border is secure.”[29] Brazen lies of this order to cover up atrocities of this magnitude reflect the boundless contempt Democrats harbor towards everyone subject to their rule – migrants and American citizens alike. Inaction and deceit in the face of this level of human suffering is in itself a morally depraved response to a humanitarian crisis without precedent in the nation’s history. And yet it has sparked no revolt or opposition within the Democrat Party.
For progressive Democrats the end – in this case changing the demographics and voting patterns of the American electorate – justifies the means: sacrificing the innocent lives of unaccompanied minor children and desperate adults, lured into the nightmare of an overland “middle passage” by a president without empathy or compassion towards those whose suffering he and his administration have caused.
Burdening working- and middle-class Americans with the bill for these callous policies, while exposing them to the predations of the thousands of criminals who slip into the country undetected is simply unconscionable. It is also politically counter-productive. So insensitive are Democrats to the needs and lives of ordinary Hispanic Americans they didn’t foresee the actual electoral consequences of their schemes which have alienated large segments of their Hispanic-American constituencies.
A Tsunami of Violent Crime
The same immoral calculus lies behind the Democrats’ sponsorship of the record crime waves unleashed in America’s major cities following the death in police custody of fentanyl addict and career criminal George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Floyd’s death – along with dozens of others – was deliberately mis-represented as a racial killing despite the fact that no evidence was ever presented that the arresting officers were motivated by a racial animus. Indeed, one of the indicted officers was black, one Asian, and one married to a “woman of color” making such a charge preposterous on its face. In a little noted interview following the verdict, the chief prosecutor on the case, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison was asked by Sixty Minutes whether there was a racial element to the death of Floyd, who had just ingested 4 times the lethal dose of his favorite drug prior to his encounter with the police. The attorney general’s answer: “No. We couldn’t find one…. We don’t have any evidence that Derek Chauvin [the white officer who had pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck] factored in George Floyd’s race as he did what he did.”[30]
Disregarding the facts in the case, the criminal organization Black Lives Matter launched a national “campaign” to punish both police and ordinary citizens for an alleged scourge of racist terror directed at innocent blacks. It was the greatest racial hoax ever perpetrated in this country, and led directly to the greatest eruption of civic violence on record. There were violent riots in nearly 220 cities,[31] arsons and assaults resulting in $7 billion in property damage,[32] and the killing ultimately of thousands of individuals not only in the immediate line of fire from violent street rioters but also as a result of the “Defund the Police” movement spearheaded by Black Lives Matter, national leaders of the Democrat Party, and Democrat mayors and city council members in America’s major urban centers.
This anti-law-enforcement campaign was amplified by unfounded charges of “systemic racism” against police departments by leading Democrats beginning with Biden and including local leaders of Democrat-run cities, which were often headed by black Americans. These officials further burdened local law enforcement and demoralized officers by instituting policies of “no cash bail” and releasing tens of thousands of convicted criminals from state prisons and local jails. In the process, they created a pro-crime culture that led directly to unprecedented levels of violent crimes against law-abiding, vulnerable citizens.
Abetted by a “progressive” press that suppressed video evidence of the left-wing violence, and presented the riots as “mainly peaceful,” the protests created a lynch mob mentality in which verdicts preceded and eventually supplanted due process, so that President Biden announced he was “praying for the right verdict” on the eve of the Chauvin trial in 2021, in which a verdict of innocence would inevitably produce more violent riots as everyone knew. Amidst this officially inspired hysteria, armed career criminals resisting arrest were portrayed as victims of a savage race war against innocent black victims, while the fact that they were engaged in the criminal act of resisting arrest was barely mentioned in media reports. Most notoriously, Breona Taylor was portrayed as a martyr “murdered in her sleep” when she was actually standing in a hallway next to her boyfriend who was firing his gun at the police who had arrived with a warrant for Taylor’s arrest.
As a predictable result of this lynch mob hysteria, in the year of Floyd’s death the increase in the U.S. murder rate was the largest since 1905, and possibly ever, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control. The rise in the nation’s murder rate in 2020, even exceeded the 20% increase measured in 2001, which was driven by the terrorist attacks of 9/11.[33] In total, the anti-law-enforcement hysteria promoted by Democrats, and their pro-criminal policies has resulted in nearly 5,000 additional homicides every year since 2019.[34] The overwhelming majority of these homicides were committed by blacks against other blacks.
Unleashing violent criminals on innocent, law-abiding citizens, while at the same time defaming and crippling law enforcement agencies reflects such indecency, such callous disregard for human life and law-abiding behaviors that it is hard to imagine a major party in a democracy supporting such efforts. Or manifesting the level of contempt they reflect for the very people whose interests the Democrats are constantly claiming to defend and champion.
Abort the Court and the Constitution
Unfortunately, in the last six years Democrats’ contempt for the lives and efforts of ordinary Americans has grown into an assault on the democratic system itself, and not just alleged abuses of that system. The Democrats’ response to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is emblematic of the Democrats’ corrosive view of the Constitution as an outdated and disposable instrument when it doesn’t serve their immediate purposes.
The Court’s decision to reject Roe v. Wade was met not with legal counter arguments but with widespread calls to reverse the result whether by legislative measures or thuggish and illegal campaigns of intimidation against the justices who argued that Roe had been unconstitutionally decided. The unconstitutional measures supported by the Democrats were accompanied by a long-planned and long-discredited campaign to have the party in power in the executive branch pack the Court with pro-Roe justices and turn it into an appendage of the ruling party. This “nuclear” remedy would destroy the independence of the judiciary forever, and with it the system of checks and balances that is the heart of the constitutional order that has shaped this country’s legal system and defended its freedoms for over 200 years.
The Democrats’ view of the constitutional order as disposable was also manifest in its years of attacks on Voter ID’s and the general integrity of the election system through reforms that would make it more vulnerable to voter fraud.
An even more sinister aspect of the Democrat Party’s war on America’s constitutional order has been its support for Marxist race theory, which dismisses the Constitution as a “white supremacist” document that people are bound not to respect because it is the alleged basis of the systemic racism that has oppressed black Americans from the time of their arrival in Virginia in 1619. The nomination and appointment to the Supreme Court of Ketanji Jackson Brown, a believer in Critical Race Theory, and thus its contempt for the Constitution, which as a Supreme Court Justice she has sworn to defend, is a measure of how dangerous this movement has become.[35]
The attack on the social contract under which Americans have attempted to live for more than 200 years is the core of the current crisis, and its issues like the Roe v. Wade decision. It explains why progressives are so uninterested in the Roe argument itself – i.e., the actual merits of the case. It is why they are so ready to dispense with due process, with the agreement to live by a neutral set of rules and deliberative resolutions when an impasse is reached. It is why they are so ready to support mob rule, and to replace reasoned argument with intimidation. Their guide is not the reasoned process on which the Constitution insists, but the pursuit of a “re-imagined” future, based on untested and discredited ideas.
Trump Derangement & the One-Party State
When looked at from this perspective, the 2016 election of Donald Trump represented an existential threat to the progressive agenda. Progressives responded with a scorched earth “Resistance” to a duly elected president. This took the form of an unprecedented campaign of character assassination designed to delegitimize the new president, his administration, and the 63 million Americans who had voted for him. It was in fact a frontal assault on American democracy and the two-party system that sustains it.
It began with a coordinated attack, spear-headed by politically corrupted intelligence agencies, to tar Trump as a colluder with the Russians – a traitor – and also a “white supremacist” and therefore “unfit for office.” The damage these lies did over the next four years to the authority of the president, and thus to the nation he headed, is incalculable. But even the exposure of these lies – which were actually the product of a collusion between the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the Kremlin – did nothing to stem the tidal wave of slander directed at Trump and the 63 million “racists” and “deplorables” who had voted for him.
There have been four presidential impeachments in the 250 odd years since the Constitution created the procedure. Half of them have been directed against Trump, whose four-year term was by any measure one of the most successful administrations in the history of the nation – attested to by the fact that he is the only incumbent president ever to receive more votes – eleven million more, in fact – in his re-election bid than he received the first time.
And even this understates the effort to smear and slander him and his supporters.
Democrats even tried to impeach Trump after he left office. This effort made no sense except that the virulent hatred directed at him was not just to remove him from the White House but to bury him as a political figure– to block the 74 million Americans who had voted for him in 2020 from returning him to office. It was a campaign to end democracy as we know it, and replace it with a one-party state.
Just before the Senate failed to convict Trump in February 2021, the new Senate Majority Leader, Democrat Chuck Schumer, publicly vowed that if the Senate convicted Trump, he would hold a vote to block Trump from ever holding public office again. The legal basis for such a ban would be a questionable interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed to prevent leaders of the Confederacy who had engaged in an armed rebellion from holding office in the government against which they had declared war. It was as though the Democrats had no filters for their Trump hatred, the relentless themes of whose presidency had been patriotic—to put “America First,” and “Make America Great Again.”
Senator Tim Kaine filed his own resolution not only to censure Trump but to bar him, under the same clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, from ever holding public office again.[36] Even this was not enough for Democrats on the warpath. Thirteen House Democrats sponsored a bill that would have barred the federal government from naming any buildings or monuments after Trump and would also have prevented him from being buried at Arlington National Cemetery.[37] Representative Linda Sánchez (D-California) went a step further and introduced a “No Glory for Hate Act” that would bar Trump from receiving his federal pension, office space, and paid staff, as other former presidents have. According to the Washington Times, Sánchez said Trump’s name should not even be permitted to appear on a park bench.[38]
When Pelosi created a House Committee to investigate the January 6 events, she appointed the Trump-hating Republican Liz Cheney as its Vice Chair. Cheney described the mission of the Committee in these revealing words: “At this moment, we are confronting a domestic threat that we have never faced before. And that is a former president who is attempting to unravel the foundations of our constitutional republic. And he is aided by Republican leaders and elected officials who have made themselves willing hostages to this dangerous and irrational man.”[39]
“Deranged” doesn’t even begin to describe the manic disconnects of these hate tantrums, which culminated in the formation of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol – a protest described by Democrats as “an armed insurrection” to overthrow the United States government, even though no arms were found on the demonstrators and no one among those arrested was charged with attempting to overthrow the government.
Even the most common charge against the convicted protesters – trespassing – was concocted, since the extensive video-tapes provided by the Capitol security cameras showed Capitol Police willfully escorting crowds of protesters into the building. This was of a piece with the Committee’s official description of itself as “bi-partisan,” when all nine members had voted to impeach Trump, and Speaker Pelosi had denied House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy the right to select his own representatives or to have defense counsel present and due process observed, as had been the case with every previous Committee investigation in the nation’s history.
The Democrats couldn’t afford to allow a defense of those attacked by the Committee as “insurrectionists” who had carried out the worst crime against their country since 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. They couldn’t allow a response because the dark charade they were staging, consigning mainly middle-aged, law-abiding and patriotic Americans distressed by the massive irregularities in the 2020 election to months and even years of solitary confinement. Two of those individuals, charged with trespassing, were so depressed by the humiliating charges and conditions of their imprisonment that they committed suicide.[40]
But the main reason dissent on the Committee couldn’t be tolerated was that the charge that Trump was guilty of inciting an insurrection to overturn the election was transparently a farce. In his “Stop the Steal” speech at the Ellipse, Trump had spelled out his plan for the protests. His supporters were to go “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol to stiffen the spines of “weak Republicans” so that they would vote to decertify the electors, as Jamie Raskin and other leading Democrats had done four years before.[41] If they failed, and Biden was made president, they were to go back to their districts and primary the weak Republicans so that the theft of the election would not be repeated. Period.
On January 3rd – three days before his speech – Trump had met with the Secretary of Defense and General Milley in the White House to discuss security issues. According to the report of the Pentagon Inspector General, at the meeting, Trump offered to provide national guard troops to protect the Capitol.
“[Defense Secretary] Miller and GEN Milley met with the President at the White House at 5:30 p.m.,” the IG reported. “At the end of the meeting, the President told Mr. Miller that there would be a large number of protestors on January 6, 2021, and Mr. Miller should ensure sufficient National Guard or Soldiers would be there to make sure it was a safe event. Gen Milley told us that Mr. Miller responded, ‘We’ve got a plan and we’ve got it covered.’”[42] On January 6, there were no national guards present to keep the event safe as Trump had proposed.
The most important questions that the January 6th hearings were designed notto answer were these: “What was the role played by the federal government in the break-in of the Capitol on that date? Was the break-in enabled by the Democrat Party to further its goals of persuading the Justice Department to file a criminal indictment against Trump, bury him as a political figure, and tarnish the mass movement he had inspired?
A question of equal moment would be: How much injustice against the innocent is the Democrat Party prepared to tolerate and sanction to achieve its ends? Four people who were present at the Capitol on January 6 died during the protest.[43] All of them were Trump supporters, and three of them died of medical emergencies. A fifth — Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick – died the following day. But Democrats attempted to portray these individuals – without evidence – as victims of the “Trump insurrection.” To accomplish this, they spread the falsehood that Officer Sicknick – an ardent Trump supporter –– was killed by a blow to the head from a fire extinguisher during the protest.[44] In fact, Sicknick died at home in his bed of natural causes the day after the Capitol event. But the lie was repeated by Democrats many times after it was corrected, including by the January 6 Committee Chair, Democrat Bennie Thompson.
If the Democrat Party was so ruthless as to place people charged merely with a suspected count of trespassing in solitary confinement for months on end to the point where they committed suicide, what injustice would it not countenance in the service of its agendas? This question was raised in the most disturbing manner by the cold-blooded murder of Ashli Babbitt, a 40-year-old air force veteran. The murder of Babbitt, who was unarmed and threatening no one, was captured on video-tape along with three officers who seemed intent on not noticing the crime committed within arms-length of where they were standing.
Babbitt’s killer was Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd, who had a record of recklessness with his weapon. Pelosi concealed his identity for weeks on end, while she worked to see that no charges were filed against the killer, and then that the case would disappear. The only way to describe this is that the Speaker of the House is an accomplice to murder, as are all the members of the January 6 Committee whose mission is ostensibly to get to the truth of what happened in the Capitol on that date. Not a single Democrat is on record objecting to this atrocity, or seeking to get answers as to what transpired.
The Democrats are a party that has lost its way. Its moral standard is “the ends justify the means,” which is no moral standard at all. In other words, it lacks a moral compass, which is why the nation that it runs lacks one too.
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