RUTHFULLY YOURS

Speaking recently in South Korea, Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States, publicly celebrated America’s “strong alliance” with “the Republic of North Korea.” Apparently Kim Jong-un thought that was as funny as I did, because the chubby dictator responded by firing off some missiles just as Madam Vice President was packing her bags. People don’t like it when Kim starts firing missiles because you never know what sort of payload they may carry or where they might land.

Madam Vice President is made of stern stuff, though. She shrugged off both her exhibition of bone-crushing ignorance and the modern world’s equivalent of minatory saber-rattling. Indeed, back home, she heard that Hurricane Ian had flattened large swaths of Southwest Florida, destroying the homes and businesses of untold thousands. There she was, publicly declaring that the Biden Administration would be doling out aid to victims “based on equity,” directing funds first and foremost to “communities of color.”

You can’t make it up, but then you don’t have to. Bidenland does all the heavy lifting.

Recently, we were told that the government (i.e., the taxpayers) will be footing the bill for billions upon billions of dollars in student loan debt. The following week, after someone figured out how expensive it would all be and the lawyers began salivating over the obvious illegality of the scheme, the administration began quietly walking back the plan to make Peter, who paid off his student loans, also pay for Paul’s.

It’s sometimes hard to keep up to date on all the wonderful things happening in our country, partly because the administration has been aggressively partnering with various media companies to censor news they don’t like, which is more and more of it. Just Friday, it was reported that some 20 conservative media sites—including the New York Post, Just the News, Fox News, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, the Epoch Times, and Breitbart—were flagged as peddling “disinformation,” i.e., stories that the administration did not like regarding the 2020 presidential election. Particular individuals, all of them conservative, were also flagged as having disseminated “disinformation.”

Who is doing the flagging? Allow me to introduce you to the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of four private companies that, in concert with the government, busied itself during the 2020 election cycle burying such stories as the one about Hunter Biden’s laptop and which is now trim and back in the fight to keep a lid on anything that might be embarrassing to the Democrats during the 2022 midterms. One observer cut to the chase by asking “How is this any different from what happens in Communist Party-controlled China?” “The scary thing is,” he continued, “the EIP is only a single office within the greater government-wide Ministry of Truth.” Yes it is.

Things are listing ever more surrealistic in Bidenland these days. You may recall Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who died in a car crash this summer. News of the crash was everywhere in the press. Joe Biden himself issued a statement registering his sorrow over the accident. But that was in August. Addressing a bipartisan conference this week, Biden was disappointed that Walorski was not present. “I want to thank all of you here, including bipartisan elected officials like . . . Senator Braun, Senator Booker, Representative . . . Jackie, Jackie are you here?” Answer came there none, and that was scarcely odd because . . . well, you know.

I am told that some enterprising printer has been making a packet from sales of specially printed copies of the 25th Amendment, but it is possible that that is just more “disinformation.” What is not disinformation is the president’s foggy-day-in-London-town mental state. “Where’s Jackie?” is destined to enter the language as firmly as “Let’s Go Brandon.”

The black comedy of the Biden Administration arises from the disjunction from the way things are and the way their spokesmen (and spokeswomen, bien sur) tell you they are. I have a deep appreciation for the comic figure of Karine Jean-Pierre, the president’s press secretary. Did you know that she is black and a lesbian and a woman? I wager you have heard that. (Is it redundant to say that she is both a woman and lesbian? It is getting harder and harder to keep these things, er, straight.) She really is special. Just last week, she wheeled her muppet head into the press briefing room and said, with a straight face, that the United States economy was going gangbusters: “one of the strongest job markets that we have seen on record,” she said, not to mention “a transition to a more steady and stable growth.”

Growth? In fact, the stock market is cratering, inflation is surging, home prices are imploding, and the job market is positively scary. We’ve just clocked three quarters of negative growth. Meanwhile the administration continues to embrace the fantasy of “green energy,” a phantasm one of whose most dangerous corollaries is a repudiation of fossil fuels, the stuff that actually makes the economy go. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is one of many ringing alarm bells. “Inflation is up 13%,” he noted “gas costs $4 to $5 a gallon [or more], and grocery bills are too high because Democrats promised to eliminate what literally powers our economy: fossil fuels.”

This is the point where I revert to one of my favorite themes, downgrading the place of the Washington establishment in the metabolism of American life. Ultimately, I think the business conducted in the city should be either shut down (much of it is pernicious) or distributed across the country, with special attention paid to Alaska, Hawaii, and Death Valley. We could start by holding the next presidential inauguration outside of Washington. It would not have to be held at Mar-a-Lago, though the weather is nice there at the end of January.

And here’s another idea, inspired by Kamala Harris’s suggestion that government aid (i., as I said above, e., taxpayer dollars) should be directed first of all to “communities of color.” To counter that racist idea, I suggest that we prohibit any entity or initiative that receives federal funds from collecting any data on race, sex, gender, ethnic origin, and the like.

Implementing such a proscription will be easy-peasy for our government. It’s the sort of thing they specialize in. After all, that’s what legislation like Title IX is all about, using federal money as a weapon to further various left-wing policies.

Sure, the original, brief statute simply held that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” But think of what absurdities it has licensed! Forcing colleges to accommodate males pretending to be females in athletic contests, mandating the construction of transexual bathrooms (well, the bathrooms themselves are not transsexual, but you know what I mean), etc., etc. It’s always this way when you put government funding together with the coercive power of that.

So I propose we cut it all off by reversing the stipulations of many of the original programs. Title IX, like so many other pieces of the civil rights legislation, is facially anti-discrimination. In operation, on the ground, it actively deploys discrimination while pretending to combat it. Forbidding the mandated process—counting how many blacks, Indians, Asians, you happen to have at your institution, for example—would be a big step in ridding ourselves of such mischievous governmental overreach.

I have other ideas, which I shall share in due course, but I think this is enough for one column. Just say no!