Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink (9 page)

We also saw an unvarnished display of TDS at the 2020 State of the Union address, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dramatically ripped up her copy of Trump's speech. But what was supposed to appear as a spontaneous act of righteous indignation was quickly revealed as an orchestrated stunt—film clips circulated of Pelosi, earlier in the address, hiding her copy of the speech under a table and slightly pre-ripping the pages to ensure they tore properly when her dramatic moment arrived.
¹⁷
House Republicans sought to reprimand her ridiculous conduct, but failed by a vote of 224 to 193.
¹⁸

An unrepentant Pelosi excoriated Trump again at her weekly news conference, attacking his State of the Union address, his record on health care, his economic policies, and his impeachment defense efforts. Pelosi also took a cheap shot at my friend Rush Limbaugh, who has been the leading conservative voice in the country for a generation now, having paved the way for me and many others to follow, a patriot who's done more to advance freedom in this country than Pelosi and all her colleagues combined. Trump awarded Rush with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the SOTU speech a few days after Rush announced he has advanced lung cancer. At her news conference, Pelosi flippantly said that when Trump mentioned a cancer diagnosis, she thought he was getting ready to honor Congressman John Lewis, who suffers from pancreatic cancer and has already received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Pelosi and her friends have been demonizing Rush for years with false accusations of racism and other horrendous slanders, but her disparagement of Rush, his award, and his illness was a new low.

Pelosi also doubled down on tearing up Trump's speech. “It's appalling the things that he says. And then you say to me, ‘Tearing up his falsehoods, isn't that the wrong message?' No, it isn't. I feel very liberated. I felt that I've extended every possible courtesy. I've shown every level of respect.” This sounds delusional, since Pelosi has shown
Trump nothing but scorn. She treated him contemptuously during negotiations on the border wall and helped impeach him on a transparent hoax, reneging on her vow that impeachment could not advance on purely partisan lines because it would be too divisive.
¹⁹
In fact, at her press conference Pelosi displayed malicious glee over impeaching Trump, bragging, “He's impeached forever, no matter what he says. You're never getting rid of that scar.”
²⁰
Considering Trump was acquitted in the Senate, this is like declaring that a person indicted on a phony charge and then found not guilty is “indicted forever.”

We can't let Democrats get away with changing the subject when we compare our respective agendas. But when they're forced to discuss the issues, they try to dupe Americans into thinking they're not as extreme as they sound. Every American must understand that if Trump is defeated by any Democrat, even one mistakenly thought of as a “moderate,” America will never be the same again.

Don't be fooled if presumptive nominee Joe Biden pretends to distance himself from some of his party's more radical proposals. The party has embraced a radical agenda, and that will be America's agenda if they regain control. Biden, as we've seen, has already shown his willingness to bend to the radicals' will, and he would be putty in their hands. When Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden, they both announced that they were working together to form six working groups to focus on education, criminal justice, climate change, immigration, the economy, and health care policy during the 2020 campaign. More ominously, Biden told the socialist Sanders, “I think people are going to be surprised that we are apart on some issues, but we're awfully close on a whole bunch of others.”
²¹

Anyone who thinks a vote for Biden is a vote for the Obama administration platform is mistaken. How do I know? Because Obama himself said so. In his speech endorsing Biden, Obama declared, “If I were running today, I wouldn't run the same race or have the same platform as I did in 2008,” adding, “Joe already has what is the most progressive platform of any major party nominee in history.”
²²
As radical as Obama policies really were, Obama is already indicating that more progressivism is in order.

So let's now turn to the specific policy proposals of today's Democratic members of Congress, senators, and former presidential hopefuls, which are nightmarish on their face and which, if properly understood by the American people, would spell electoral disaster for Democrats. None of these proposals was treated as radical by the Democratic establishment, and if Biden is elected, he will be pursuing most of them. If empowered, Democrats have promised to take or consider taking the following actions:

• Enact the Green New Deal
  
• Ban fracking, thereby reversing our newfound energy independence
  
• Subordinate some of our sovereign authority to international bodies like the UN
  
• Pack the Supreme Court with additional justices
  
• Appoint leftist activist judges throughout the judicial branch
  
• Gut the Second Amendment and confiscate our firearms
  
• Suppress our First Amendment speech and religious freedoms
  
• Expand the federal administrative bureaucracy and erode states' rights
  
• Abolish or nullify the Electoral College
  
• Downsize the military
  
• Promote federally funded abortion on demand including, in some instances, infanticide
  
• Abolish private health insurance and wholly socialize medicine through Medicare for All
  
• Impose a wealth tax
  
• Increase the death tax
  
• Raise taxes on individuals and businesses by reversing the Trump tax cuts
  
• Increase the top marginal income tax rate to 70 percent
  
• Abolish student debt and tuition
  
• Enact a universal basic income (also called a citizen's income, guaranteed minimum income, or basic income)—the idea that the federal government should pay a federal cash subsidy to certain groups of Americans or all Americans regardless of their work status
  
• Greatly increase the minimum wage
  
• Abolish the border and grant mass amnesty
  
• Abolish ICE
  
• Make it easier for immigrants with criminal records to enter our country, including criminal illegal immigrants who were already deported
  
• Expand welfare benefits and provide free education and health care to illegal immigrants
  
• Recalibrate our foreign alliances away from Israel and toward Iran
  
• Make transgenderism the “civil rights issue of our time,”
  ²³
  including mandating gender-neutral restrooms, allowing biological males to compete in female sports, and making gender identity a protected class under federal civil rights laws
  
• End all new drilling and mining on federal lands
  
• Provide slavery reparations
  
• Legalize voting for convicted felons
  
• Enact “race-conscious laws”
  
• Empower the government to micromanage what we can eat and drink
  

It's an impressive list of bizarre and destructive proposals, but let's begin by looking at the granddaddy of them all—the Green New Deal.

While AOC claims she is concerned about the environment, it's hard to distinguish her concern for the earth from her passion to impose socialism on America. There's no denying that many environmentalists truly believe much of the apocalyptic lunacy they preach, but it's also clear that they use fearmongering to advance their statist agenda. AOC's former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, admitted as much in connection with his boss's climate agenda. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn't originally a climate thing at all. Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
²⁴

Notice that Chakrabarti didn't say the GND is about both climate and the economy, but that it originally had
nothing
to do with climate. He also said it's about “the entire economy.” That's not code for socialism, it's a naked admission—they want to control the economy from top to bottom, which should horrify adherents of free markets everywhere. It's a ruse to trick us into giving up our liberty and our wealth so leftists can realize their vision of a socialist utopia. If they succeed, people won't just be leaving New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California—they'll be leaving America.

AOC and her loose-lipped aide are not the only ones who see climate hysteria as a Trojan horse for socialism. In
Curbed
, writer Diana Budds explains that the GND “is really about designing an entirely new world. It involves unbuilding our mistakes—and building an equitable, just, and sustainable future.”
²⁵
Roll Call
writers Benjamin Hulac and Elvina Nawaguna argue, “At its core, the Green New Deal
is an economic stimulus plan designed to use climate change, as it accelerates and its effects come into sharper view, as a springboard to confront issues such as income inequality that a warming world will aggravate.”
²⁶
So the real concern isn't that climate change will kill us all in ten years, but that it will make the rich richer? You can't make this up.

No one should doubt the connection between environmental alarmism and socialism. Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben confidently asserts that President Trump and the Republicans are completely out of sync with the American people on the environment. “That's why all the thinking that falls under the general rubric of the Green New Deal is so smart,” writes McKibben. “It understands the climate crisis as a lens through which to view the world—a change to address not only its rising temperature but the rising inequality that roils our politics. If your own life is insecure, it's harder to imagine change of the kind we need to deal with this moment. Ideas like a federal job guarantee for anyone who wants to help with the renewables transition are important precisely because they give people a chance to get their feet on the ground.”
²⁷

The Green New Deal is horrifying, ambitious, reckless, and fiscally incoherent. But it cannot be dismissed as some pie-in-the-sky leftist fantasy, because Democrats are dead serious about it. It's not just activists promoting this, but intellectuals, commentators, journalists, and Democratic Party officials.
²⁸
Ninety-eight House representatives cosponsored the bill. In my research, however, I've found there's not much objective analysis of the plan. Google search pages are filled with links to leftist reports, from think-tank analyses to opinion pieces, praising the scheme as a practical blueprint for saving the planet. So whatever you do, don't take this plan lightly.

In
Politico
, Michael Grunwald recalls that the GND has been tried before. As if to prove my point that Obama is no moderate, Grunwald notes that Obama “signed a prototype Green New Deal into law in February 2009, pouring an unprecedented $90 billion into clean
electricity, renewable fuels, advanced batteries, energy efficiency, a smarter grid, and a slew of other green initiatives.”
²⁹
Look how that turned out with Solyndra—the solar panel manufacturer that went bankrupt after receiving half a billion dollars in federal loan guarantees—and the rest of Obama's green boondoggles! Grunwald says we may not have realized what Obama was really doing because the green scheme was hidden in Obama's $800 billion stimulus package. “People don't understand how forward-leaning the stimulus was on climate issues,” said Congresswoman Kathy Castor.
³⁰
“There was an incredible amount of green stuff in it that people didn't see,” says progressive activist Sean McElwee.
³¹

So what exactly is the GND? The congressional resolution, sponsored by AOC and Senator Edward J. Markey, declared that it is the federal government's “duty to create a Green New Deal” to accomplish specified goals “through a 10-year mobilization.”
³²
An “overview” of the resolution stated, “The Green New Deal resolution [is] a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since Word War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all.”
³³

The GND resolution's “mobilization” includes, among other things:

• “Guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.”
  
• “Providing all people of the United States with—(i) high-quality health care; (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing; (iii) economic security; and (iv) access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and nature.”
  
• “Providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States.”
  
• “Meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”
  
• “Upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximal energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification.”
  
• “Overhauling transportation systems in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in—(i) zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; (ii) clean, affordable, and accessible public transportation; and (iii) high-speed rail.”
  ³⁴
  

Try to wrap your mind around this. The GND would summarily scrap America's oil and gas drilling industry and its hundreds of thousands of employees just when this industry and its shale revolution have made us a net exporter of oil for the first time in seventy-five years.
³⁵
America is now the largest oil-producing nation in the world.
³⁶
Not Russia. Not Saudi Arabia—the United States of America. Donald Trump launched this revolution by reversing leftist environmental policies and unleashing fracking, opening the Keystone Pipeline, the Dakota Pipeline, and ANWAR. The GND would undo all this progress by banning all fossil fuels—all oil and natural gas, and nuclear energy—the most affordable sources of energy and prosperity. It would, according to the sponsors' overview, “totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary, create affordable public transit available to all, with [
sic
] goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle.”
³⁷
You read that correctly—no more planes and no more gas-powered cars.