Numerous left-leaning strategists have freely admitted that COVID was a god-send to the "never let a crisis go to waste," grow-government, camp.  At this point it's clear to everyone across the spectrum that the pandemic emergency has been a Golden Goose of homeric proportions.  But it's not alone in the cornucopia of crises.  While the public has shouldered the cost of massive infrastructure bills decade after decade (remember Obama's massive "shovel ready" pitch?), bridges and roads continue to crumble.  What goes with all that?  Reflect on the value of perpetual crisis (and decrepitude).  The strategy is just as evident on the local level.  A fortune - tens, hundreds of millions - has been fleeced from the public and wasted on special interest schemes that have done nothing but exacerbate good water and river management (crippled forestry, industry, and dairy to boot).  Read on.

Joe Biden and the Uses of Nihilism
Victor Davis Hanson, January 31, 2022 - Blade of Perseus
American Greatness

Chaos is the new, the intentional, normal. A pandemic of nihilism has been unleashed upon the land. As in Lord of the Flies, when laws, rules, protocols, traditions, and customs are mocked and dismantled, primitive human nature in the raw is unleashed. 
​
Madness now reigns in every quarter, from the iconic to the irrelevant to the fundamental. Statues of Lincoln, Douglass, and Jefferson are toppled or defaced. The rules of capitalization have been altered. We are told that 1619, not 1776, was our founding date—and this by a “civil rights” activist-journalist who had no idea of the date that the Civil War began.

Quite quickly after the revolutionary boilerplate, America began reverting to its natural Hobbesian or Thucydidean essence. If you dispute that, look at looted packages along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Try walking the nocturnal streets of Chicago or Baltimore. Visit the sidewalk homeless of San Francisco. Fly over our constipated ports. Drive into our empty new car dealerships. Pull up to our European-priced gas pumps. Shop in the emptying shelves of our Sovietizing food and discount stores. The common theme of the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show, apparently, is that the entertainers must have written lyrics threatening the police, denigrating women, using the N-word . . . and be worth $100 million.

Of course, that is what the elites celebrate, as people struggle to buy food, gas, and cars. The police are under attack and being killed on the street. The public is bewildered about criminals not being punished, workers paid to stay home, and biological men commandeering women’s sports. 

Abnormal is normal; normal is despised and discarded.

Friends and associates of all races and ethnicities are increasingly suspicious of each other. They are fleeing to the ancient refuge of tribal solidarity. Red states are hated, although they function, and are sought out; blue states are praised, even as they fail and residents flee. Our “leaders” are doing their best to confirm the age-old invective of our enemies that e pluribus unum simply cannot work.

Americans keep being pounded with “Vaccination! Vaccination! Vaccination!”—but never with commensurate advice on therapies, affordable drugs, and pragmatic protocols to survive COVID-19, as it often breaks through to the already thrice vaccinated.

Americans could tolerate the misinformation and the contradictions emanating from the CDC, the NIH, and NIAID. But only if the deceptions were issued with some humility and qualifiers, reminding us of our shared ignorance about the mysterious virus. Instead, pompous and insufferably sanctimonious bureaucrats sent out flurries of false knowledge, as if they were religious edicts, with implied medieval punishments for the apostates. Apologies never follow.

The public cannot fathom the border. Prior presidents hunting for cheap political gain (Republicans for more labor, Democrats for new constituents) were lax on immigration enforcement. Yet no president has ever deliberately invited in more than 2 million foreign nationals—entering illegally, impoverished, unvaccinated, untested, and without background checks. No prior president has not only violated his oath of office to enforce the laws of the United States, but simply and intentionally destroyed the law as it was written. Apply the Left’s 2019-2020 impeachment standard to Joe Biden’s first year, and he would be impeached the minute a Republican majority captured the House.

Americans sense the United States is losing all influence abroad, as allies gravitate to or appease China and Russia. The public does not lament the loss of global clout and prestige alone. Rather, the people also fear the end of the ancient American strategy of keeping foreign enemies far distant from the homeland.

As they figure out the themes of the present madness, Americans become troubled as they attempt to fathom the characteristics of the ongoing nihilism.
 
One, they see much of the sudden anarchy as self-induced, deliberate, agenda-driven, and as correctible as it was avoidable. In other words, the catastrophe of 2021 was no accident, but a tactic in service of a strategy.

Two, they conclude that the nihilism intentionally targets the despised middle class—those who tend to obey the rules, who pay their taxes, who don’t get arrested, who largely keep quiet—and who are standing in the way of a revolution. These Americans are underrepresented in crime, in upward mobility, and on most college campuses, but overrepresented in suicide rates and the death tolls in optional wars abroad.

For their part, the hoi polloi conclude that the more that they are libeled as “victimizers,” the more they are becoming the actual victims. Indeed, the heroic “victimized” are the ones most often flouting the law, committing violent crimes, and tearing down the institutions that in bygone days provided security and prosperity for everyone.
 
Three, ordinary citizens feel the law has utterly vanished. Sometimes it simply is ignored, as we see with revolving-door criminals who kill, maim, and loot with near impunity. Sometimes the law simply is asymmetrically applied. The administration correctly jails those convicted of illegally entering the Capitol and trashing the chambers of government, but it then grants de facto amnesties to the thousands who deliberately injured, torched, and looted for 120 days of riots, death, and mayhem in 2020.
 
Joe Biden meanders through his photo-ops indifferent to American civilization collapsing around him. His first year was the most disastrous of any presidency in history. Should that calamity continue, Biden will be known by posterity as the most inept president to have held office.

So why does he not take to the bully pulpit to deplore the current smash-and-grab, carjacking, and murder epidemic now reaching either all-time highs or levels not seen since the 1970s? Does Biden have a shred of empathy for the widow of a murdered policeman, the spouses and parents of those mowed down in Waukesha, the children shot dead in Chicago?

Joe Biden defended his policies by saying that automobile price spikes account for one-third of the spiraling consumer price index. So what? Does that mean inflation is somehow tolerable—as if citizens don’t drive cars most days of their lives? 

Is Biden aware that his administration’s core inflation definition and the consumer price index itself exclude energy as well as food price increases? What the real inflation rate is no one knows—but all understand that what we see and feel every day is far worse than what we are told. 

Biden has never explained to us the humiliation in Afghanistan—other than to whine that the generals failed to warn him of his own folly. Does he know why now Vladimir Putin again ponders attacking his neighbors—but did not between 2017 and 2020?
 
Did Biden ever consider the fast-tracking of pipelines, more fracking, a restoration of 2020 levels of oil and gas production, and more leases granted to avoid America’s continued dependence on the Russians and the Middle East? Instead, Biden begged Russia and the Saudis—both of whom he has derided—to pump more of the oil he despises, and which we have in abundance but will not use.

Did Biden once say stop the new racial tensions, or argue that Americans should worry first about the content of our character not the color of our skins? Has he ever worried about the racial cauldron he has lit and fueled? Not at all. 
Instead, Biden has done his best to inflame race through his own vile racist slurs. The recent “you ain’t black,” “junkie,” “boy, “negro,” are added to his prior inflammatory repertoire of “clean African-American,” “put y’all back in chains,” and the racist Corn Pop saga. 

Second, Biden demagogues race to win the support of his base of racialists. Has any president ever announced ahead of time that only those of a particular race and gender would be eligible for selection as his running mate and first Supreme Court nomination? At least Harvard keeps quiet about its racialism and does not flaunt the idea that it systematically discriminates against Asians.

So, in a vast multiracial democracy of tribal competition and tensions, Biden has done his best to turn Americans against each other—and has succeeded in a fashion that would have made his old Dixiecrat Senate mentors Robert Byrd and James O. Eastland proud. 

The mystery is perhaps not that nihilism has swept through America as effectively as Omicron, but why the president and the Left unleashed it. So, what explains the madness? 

First, Biden is cognitively challenged to the point of not being physically or mentally able to meet the challenges of the presidency. His handlers know it. The media knows it. And the public knows it, too. 

Irony has become the Left’s enemy. After screaming that Donald Trump should be removed under the 25th Amendment, that he should take a mental competency test, and that everyone from the acting director of the FBI to Ivy League psychiatrists must scheme to prove he was nuts, they all have grown silent. The Left’s quiet reflects that they are terrified that anyone else might successfully do to a genuinely enfeebled and failed president what they themselves attempted to do to a cognizant and successful president.

Biden’s assigned task in 2020 was to put a familiar “centrist” veneer on a radical agenda. Thereby, the hard Left, with the help of COVID-19 and Silicon Valley, could push that agenda past an unsuspecting public. Upon election, Biden would not revert to old Joe from Scranton deploring the leftist tool that he had become.

The movers of the agenda are the hard Left of the Democratic Party, those who circle around Bernie Sanders, the Obamas, Elizabeth Warren, and “the squad.” The shock troops are Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the millions on the campus, and the internet mob. The more confusion, chaos, and anarchy that follows, the more of their agenda they hope to push through, if not by legislative vote, then by executive edict, court decision, or simply ignoring the law. 

The third catalyst of the woke chaos are the hyper-rich—the franchise owners of the Left. These are the huge donors who nourish the think tanks, the media, the PACs, and the legal teams—the Zuckerbergs, the Soroses, the Bezoses and the rest of the Silicon Valley plutocracy. 

Equally important are the hypocritical professional classes—the tech upper-echelon, the media cohorts, the corporate lawyers and CEOs, the various university professoriate and administrations, the celebrities, the professional athletes, and the bicoastal movers and shakers. On the one hand, they are assuming that Americans won’t actually vote for their neosocialist utopias, which can be enacted only by changing the rules or demography or both. And on the other hand, they are hedging that their money, influence, and power will insulate them and their own from the stampede at the border, the growing criminality in the cities, price hikes that batter the middle classes, and the tribalism and racialism they helped to greenlight.

In normal times, such hard-left agendas have no resonance. But during a plague, lockdown, riots and arson, during murder and mayhem, chaos and anarchy?

- - -
You may want to visit Dr. Hanson's website that offers both public and subscription content.

     How long have people been cooking with gas safely?  Natural gas (along with propane) is by far the cleanest of 'fossil fuels' - highly efficient.  For more than 100 years, gas has been used for lighting, cooking, and heating, often without powered vents. Come on.  "...risk to public health and the planet"?   That's large.
      There's a big push on right now locally to require everyone to "move to electricity."  Those making the demands have got to be clueless about the generating capacity that exists, and how limited "the grid" is (substations, wires, the distribution system).  Maybe these folks think that "electricity comes from outlets."   But there's no way that the electrical system can handle the quantity of energy demand that the zealots have in mind.   At the risk of being branded skeptics, WE do think the timing of articles like this while The Administration is pushing "Build Back Better" is no coincidence.
​

Gas stoves in kitchens pose a risk to public health and the planet, research finds

Washington Post, January 27 2022
Maxine Joselow

Stanford University study comes as cities across the country seek to ban natural gas in new buildings, prompting industry pushback
 
The appliances release far more of the potent planet-warming gas methane than the Environmental Protection Agency estimates, Stanford University scientists found in a study published Thursday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The appliances also emit significant amounts of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that can trigger asthma and other respiratory conditions.

Scientists and climate activists have increasingly urged homeowners to switch to all-electric stoves, water boilers and other appliances, even as the natural gas industry fights in New York and across the country to keep the signature blue flames of gas-burning stoves as a staple in American homes.

“If you have the financial ability to swap out a gas stovetop for an electric induction cooktop, I do think it’s a good idea,” said Rob Jackson, a Stanford earth science professor and co-author of the study. “It’s a good idea for the planet and for air quality.”
Nationally, more than one-third of households — about 40 million homes — cook with natural gas. In California, 60 percent of households favor the popular fuel.
The researchers in Thursday’s study measured emissions from stoves in 53 homes across seven California counties. They used their findings to estimate that methane emissions from gas stoves in the United States have a comparable climate impact to about 500,000 gas-powered cars driven for a year, Jackson said.

The battle over climate change is boiling over on the home front
Methane, the main component of natural gas, is the second-largest contributor to climate change among greenhouse gases. Although it dissipates more quickly than carbon dioxide, it is more than 80 times as powerful in the first 20 years after it is released into the atmosphere.

The researchers also found that more than three-quarters of the methane emissions occurred when the gas stoves were turned off, suggesting that leaks persist even when the appliances are not being used for cooking or heating. Emissions of nitrogen dioxide, meanwhile, were more closely correlated with the amount of gas burned.

Tim Carroll, an EPA spokesman, noted that the agency previously has not included emissions from inside homes and buildings, known as “post-meter” emissions, in its Greenhouse Gas Inventory, an annual report on every sector of the U.S. economy. But the agency plans to update its approach.

“EPA looks forward to reviewing the new study,” Carroll said in an email. “While post-meter leak emissions (including leak emissions from stoves) are not currently included in the GHG Inventory, EPA plans to incorporate an estimate for these post-meter emissions in the upcoming 2022 GHG Inventory.”

The American Gas Association, a trade group that represents more than 200 companies, has defended the industry’s efforts to reduce its climate impact, noting that total methane emissions from natural gas systems have declined 16 percent from 1990 to 2019 and that residential natural gas use amounts to only a small portion of U.S. emissions.

“We are committed to going even further by investing nearly $30 billion each year to modernize our system and $4.3 million every day to help our customers and communities shrink their carbon footprint through energy efficiency improvements,” Karen Harbert, the association’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

The group added that agencies such as the EPA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission “closely monitor and have evaluated homes with natural gas piping and natural gas appliances and have never taken action to limit their use.”

The EPA does not regulate indoor air pollution because it lacks the authority to do so under the Clean Air Act, which covers only sources such as automobiles, power plants and other industrial facilities.

But in 2018, the EPA set a one-hour outdoor exposure limit of 100 parts per billion for nitrogen dioxide, a common pollutant that forms when fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal are burned at high temperatures. Exposure can have a range of harmful effects on the lungs, including increased asthma attacks and inflammation of the airways, according to the American Lung Association.

Thursday’s study found that families who don’t use their range hoods or who have poor ventilation can surpass the one-hour outdoor standard within a few minutes of stove usage, particularly in more cramped kitchens, which are more common in poorer communities.

“It’s definitely an environmental justice issue because lower-income households are more susceptible,” said Eric Lebel, a senior scientist at PSE Healthy Energy, a research institute in Oakland, Calif., who worked on the study as a graduate student at Stanford.

New York City last month became the largest municipality in the country to ban gas use in new buildings, overcoming opposition from the fossil fuel industry and real estate developers. The New York City Council, a majority-Democratic body, voted to require new buildings under seven stories to go electric by December 2023. Taller buildings have until 2027.

In recent years, gas bans have spread from liberal enclaves in California to bigger cities across the country, including Boston, Denver and Seattle. Last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) proposed the first statewide gas ban by 2027, a move that climate activists cheered while calling for a faster timeline.

The gas industry has waged a campaign in statehouses across the country to preempt such bans, arguing that they deny consumers choice of a reliable fuel. Republican-controlled legislatures in Southern states including Alabama, Kentucky and Texas have passed industry-backed bills to prevent cities from restricting fossil fuel use.

Frank Maisano, an energy policy expert at Bracewell, a law and lobbying firm, who has worked with gas industry clients, criticized the methodology of Thursday’s study.
The researchers conducted the study by “wrapping kitchens in plastic, which is in no way a realistic measure of the circumstances in a typical home,” Maisano said in an email. “It is too bad that we aren’t trying to find out more important things about indoor air quality rather than pushing a political agenda centered around electrification.”

The study’s authors said they stand by their findings, which went through a rigorous peer-review process. Jackson added that he hopes the conclusions persuade some Americans to ditch gas stoves for induction cooktops, which can boil a pot of water in nearly half the time of a conventional burner, despite often costing more upfront.
​
“Some people have an affinity for gas stoves,” he said, “but if we could just get them to try electric cooktops, they would never go back.”

     It's been over sixty years since the "the big three" tv networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) went national.  In many places they provided all tv entertainment over the air. "Competition being what competition is," content was driven by advertising revenue.  While from the start commercial tv did offer some high quality plays and other highbrow material as specials, "educational" content was limited. When public broadcasting was first proposed the cause was noble.  Now, 30-40 years on, scores of special interest material is available 24-7, much free or nearly-so.  There's a river of subscription and specialty programming available on cable networks like Discovery, Science, Ovation, BBC (constant cooking, home improvement, sci-fi, and much-much more) plus YouTube and subscription streams.  You get the picture.  None of this is news, really.
     The big issue addressed below is the matter of public broadcasting's bias, political speech being paid-for with public funds. [Some may not have noticed, but Seattle's deeply-progressive "non-profit" Crosscut acquired KCTS-TV (channel 9).]

Fire Public Broadcasting
Mike Gonzalez - National Review, Jan 26 2022

End Taxpayer Funding for NPR
​NPR and PBS routinely present woke opinion as fact, and broadcast views that are anathema to at least half the country. Time to yank their taxpayer dollars.

Public broadcasting ceased long ago to reflect the views of the American public. Today, in fact, it serves coastal elites who disdain the public. Its most recent controversy is but the latest reminder of its insufferable toadyism toward Acela-corridor views — and why it should finally be weaned from the taxpayer’s dime.

Yes, I know that NPR and PBS claim that the percentage of their budget that is borne by the taxpayer — grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and “federal agencies and departments” — is in the single digits. That is misleading, as it fails to account for local radio affiliates that get gobs of taxpayer money. But let’s take them at their word. In that case, it shouldn’t be hit so hard if we tell public broadcasting to just rely on its membership model and sponsors.

Asking conservative Americans to contribute to public broadcasting’s coffers is, on the other hand, a form of despotism. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.” The dead white man from Virginia may no longer be quoted by the public broadcasters, but he still wrote the Declaration of Independence.

PBS and NPR reflect only the views of either the administrative state or the identitarian Left — regularly using, for example, the term “Latinx,” which is embraced by 2 percent of Americans of Latin background but offends 40 percent. The imposition of woke gender psychosis matters more to employees of NPR and PBS than the view of rubes named Gonzalez or Perez, who are increasingly turning conservative anyway, so they can be ignored.

The public broadcasters also religiously use, in newscasts not opinion items, such terms as “the Big Lie” and the January 6 “insurgency,” as if they were unquestioned facts and not mere phrases used only by those on the left of the American spectrum.

They pretend, in other words, that when conservatives raise questions about election integrity, it constitutes not just a lie, but the Big Lie. But when the Left does the same thing, as President Biden just did preemptively with the 2022 midterms, they nod along in sage agreement. Likewise, they assume that the riot on the Capitol constituted an insurgency, but not the many months of riots and protests that Black Lives Matter organized across the country throughout 2020.

Its latest controversy is a direct result of this woke provincialism. Nina Totenberg, the Supreme Court beat reporter at NPR, related on Thursday that Chief Justice John Roberts had asked Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch to wear a mask, and that Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor had attended hearings virtually because of Gorsuch’s behavior. All three justices have publicly denied all aspects of this story, but NPR is digging in.

I am, perhaps, in a minority that sides with NPR on this one. Sotomayor’s staff must have leaked this to Totenberg, who ran with it. Sotomayor herself then must’ve thrown Totenberg under the bus.

However, it is also clear why Totenberg ran with it. She’s a fixture of the Washington swamp, whose denizens would triple-mask to go to the restroom. Covid has given them an excuse for avoiding something they already hated doing, visiting “fly-over country,” so they are never around Americans for whom masks are anathema. Gorsuch, in not wearing a mask, was engaging in what is, to them, risky, antisocial boorishness.

NPR and PBS routinely air views that are stomach-churning to at least half of America, propounding the idea that America is systematically racist, that whites enjoy “privilege” no matter what their station in life, and that slavery is at the very center of our national narrative, constituting our sole origin story.

They use your dollars, in other words, to change your country through the use of critical race theory as well as woke gender ideology.

NPR, for example, recently carried a four-part series asserting that white kids are racist and that the Census Bureau is too white, and complaining that white congregations are using hymns written by African slaves to chant for social justice.

PBS is no better. It recently went to bat for the George Soros–backed rogue prosecutor in Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner, whose reluctance to prosecute criminals has contributed to record murder levels there.

The residents of the City of Brotherly Love who are seeing their loved ones perish, the millions of Americans who hate masks and lockdowns or who despise having their supercilious woke betters calling them names they loathe, shouldn’t have to pay to be insulted. It is outrageous that they are forced to contribute to the salary of political activists like Yamiche Alcindor who use PBS and NPR as their platforms.

In 2008, the writer David Mamet told the story of the moment he turned conservative. He and his wife “were riding along and listening to NPR,” he recalled. “I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f*** up.”
Many of us have had that moment. For the years 2021 to 2023, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has requested half a billion dollars from Congress. Time to spend that money elsewhere.171

MIKE GONZALEZ is a senior fellow in Heritage’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy and its Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Fellow. His most recent book is BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.  

     In 1858 Abraham Lincoln said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand."  While almost 164 years have passed since that poignant point was made, polarization and division are being stoked and honed for political and personal gain. Grievance is a business.  Official directives are being expanded and laid down from Washington DC and Olympia to institutions like courts and our public schools, demands for nebulous "equity" no matter how specious the claim.  Divisive and emotionally torturous teachings are aimed squarely at the young and uninformed.  What's worse, grievance has become a tangible currency benefitting factions that generate and promote their own discord.  Read on.

A House Aggrieved Cannot Stand
Adam Ellwanger
The American Mind - Salvos, Jan 22 2022

Our rulers stoke a civil
conflict because they want
to win it.

Over the course of history, societies have chosen different forms of moral currency. In Rome, your virtue was determined by your nobility of ancestry and comportment. In Medieval Europe (and the first two centuries of the American republic, perhaps) piety was the determinant of moral virtue. Today, grievance is America’s moral currency. Understanding this is key to understand exactly what a civil war would be about.

January 6, 2022 brought the first anniversary of the turmoil at the Capitol. In addition to neurotic public remembrances, the date brought with it a wave of hand-wringing furvor over whether we are approaching another civil war. The prospect of a civil war is more than clickbait. The acrimonious division that was previously contained to the political realm now sets the terms of social interaction everywhere: in schools, restaurants, the workplace, the grocery store, the church. It is the price our establishment pays for its own radicalization. Confronting the civil strife that this rolling revolution creates is a dangerous thing to even talk about—when respected voices broach the subject, this signals to the masses that such a conflict is a possibility, and that increases the possibility of it occurring.

The coverage from outlets such as Politico and The New Yorker displays two types of “civil war” articles. In one, the author pretends he has no idea what such a war would even be about. In the other type, the risk of conflict is attributed wholly to the alleged delusions and purportedly violent tendencies of the political right. The former embodies a lame attempt at obfuscation; the latter suggests that one side of the conflict holds all the culpability for the rising aggression. But in their dissembling, both types inadvertently show that the true cause of the conflict would be a battle over the legitimacy of mass grievances and the deliberate refusal of those in power to address—or even acknowledge—them. Through their incessant denial that the public’s concerns have any merit, the media is fanning the coals that would ignite such a war.

Politico exhibits the idea that there are no grievances: “One side unreasonably believes that President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory was stolen, and the other side reasonably fears that former president Donald Trump’s followers are so slavishly under his spell that they are willing to hijack the legal apparatus guaranteeing free and honest elections in order to facilitate his return to power in 2024.” It’s that simple: one side is full of unreasonable, hypnotized conspiracy theorists, and the other side is rational, patriotic defenders of Democracy who would have no problem at all, if not for the threat posed by the yokels who unjustifiably oppose them.  

The New Yorker’s reporter believes the civil war might occur because troglodytes and bigots have given up on democracy: put differently, they have grievances, but not ones that deserve any attention. For example, David Remnick claims the current strife exists because people were worried about what Obama’s 2008 victory represented: it “vividly underlined the rise of a multiracial democracy and was taken as a threat by many white Americans who feared losing their majority status.” Remnick goes on to say, without evidence, that the conflict is fueled by “the consuming resentment of many right-wing, rural whites who fear being ‘replaced’ by immigrants and people of color, as well as a Republican Party leadership that bows to its most autocratic demagogue and no longer seems willing to defend democratic values and institutions.” The institutional left is entirely innocent in deepening these divisions: “The battle to preserve American democracy is not symmetrical. One party, the GOP, now poses itself as anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic.”

Moral Currency and Political Power
When “grievance” is mentioned on the right, it is often invoked derisively to refer to today’s fetishization of “systemic injustices.” Throughout the late twentieth century, as the left became increasingly dependent on the votes of racial, linguistic, and ethnic minorities, Democrats encouraged those groups to understand historical hardships and injustices as debts that had to be paid in the present, perpetually. The paying of these debts took the form of many legal, economic, and educational reforms aimed at addressing these grievances, reforms which also served to justify the expansion of the state. Over the decades, many Americans logically came to the realization that leveraging these grievances (a way of calling in a debt) was a way to reap sociopolitical rewards.

Joshua Mitchell’s recent book ably demonstrates how these realities establish a moral economy. Grievance becomes currency—it can buy things. Like a kind of money, people are incentivized to collect and spend their grievances. I do not mean to suggest that certain minority—or majority—groups do not have some legitimate grievances; they do. Minorities and majorities both know well what can be gained from leveraging their grievances. When grievance serves as the moral currency in a society, it is natural that every individual will seek to realize whatever gains can be had from demanding satisfaction. The problem today isn’t the existence of grievances, or even a will to redress them. The problem is the fetishization and commodification of grievance.

Today’s populist discontent is a byproduct of the grievance economy—and a backlash against the unfair rules by which it operates. When moral virtue is determined wholly by the grievances held by a particular individual or class, this encourages an endless deliberation about which grievances are legitimate (and thus, embody real debts), and a toxic calculus to determine who has more grievance (and therefore, a more compelling demand for redress). In short, the people with the most grievances become the good people—people whose concerns are granted a disproportionate weight in public life. The people who purportedly have fewer grievances are implicitly marked as bad people—people whose demands for political satisfaction can be safely ignored.

The effect of this grievance economy is that you have an entire nation of people who have been trained to be aggrieved, but the regime rules by ensuring that certain grievances will be routinely dismissed. These are deemed to have arisen from historical “privilege”—privilege that must be surrendered so as to pay the debt to the aggrieved. Many people who seem to have little privilege are nevertheless deemed as beneficiaries of it. These are the rural, white members of the working class who have been abandoning the Democratic party at a rate identical to the one at which the left has fetishized minority grievance. When a society implicitly states “grievance is what matters,” but tells certain aggrieved groups that their gripes are illegitimate, it is no surprise that this creates alienation. Because a large government like ours is justified precisely on the grounds of its responsiveness to all the needs of its citizens, this alienation is understandably directed at the regime and its clients. As a result, our leaders’ dismissal of public grievances leads to one more grievance.

The irrepressible question is whether the citizens the media blames for our nation’s intensifying conflict have legitimate grievances, and, if so, why?

A Long Train of Grievances
Over the last 50 years, our leaders progressively outsourced our manufacturing, which had served as the backbone of middle-class economic stability. Not only did the government not incentivize companies to stay in America--the state actively accelerated the departure. This loss of millions of middle-class jobs finally produced a generation with significantly less wealth than their forebears—something that hasn’t happened since before World War II.

For a half century, the state refused to secure the border. Amnesty was periodically provided to those who had entered illegally, which incentivized others to come. Non-enforcement of labor laws that would bar illegal immigrants from working put low-skilled American workers in direct competition with foreigners, who would accept lower pay, making low-wage jobs harder to get. By the arrival of the Obama era, our elites were moving from a mere tolerance of illegal immigration to an endorsement of it: after all, many of the new arrivals were ethnic minorities—an aggrieved class in need of deference.
The influx of illegal immigrants has flooded the nation with drugs: notably, the often-fatal opioid fentanyl, almost all of which comes from our geo-political rival China. This results in an epidemic of addiction and drug death among the very groups most impacted by the betrayals referenced above.

To make matters worse, the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve and the flood of government spending have further undermined the purchasing power of what little money the working class is able to earn. The endless printing of money only increases a stupefying national debt. Of course, Americans’ diminished purchasing power is increasingly irrelevant, as a supply chain crisis (an effect of our dependence on foreign manufacturing) ensures that many needed goods are not available.

Moreover, a complete lack of accountability among our leaders fuels the alienation of typical American citizens. Obama’s IRS worked to combat conservative fundraising to minimize its influence in the 2012 election. No one was held accountable. States like California and Colorado are allowed to enact policies that directly subvert existing federal law——and it is tolerated. Obama admitted he had no legal authority to act unilaterally to address immigration——then he ordered DACA anyway, an effective amnesty for millions of people who entered the country illegally. The courts affirmed it.
Hillary Clinton illegally used a private server to conduct her business as Secretary of State and deleted over 30,000 emails from those servers, in direct violation of a subpoena. Not only was no one held accountable for the violation of data security protocols, but no one was held accountable for the destruction of evidence.

With the 2020 election on the horizon, all the institutional powers in America colluded to undermine and sabotage the Trump reelection campaign: creating misinformation disguised as news stories to damage Trump, while censoring any damaging stories to the Biden campaign by labelling them “misinformation.” This is to say nothing of the litany of procedural abuses that were implemented at the state and federal level to weaken the Trump vote, increase the Biden vote, and loosen rules to ensure election integrity in ways that would favor Biden. Much of this activity was patently illegal. Weeks later, after the inauguration, the media gleefully admitted to this malfeasance. But no one was held accountable.

All of this is to say nothing about the misery inflicted on the middle class by authoritarian lockdowns and the medical establishment’s unconstitutional political power during the Covid-19 pandemic.

These examples point to two compounding injuries. Affected citizens suffer the indignity of a government that routinely denies their grievances a place in the political process by ruling through policies it sets against them. It was this hostile disregard that led to the rise of a figure like Trump, an outsider who promised to address their concerns. The second injury did even more to amplify the current opposition to the regime: when the people elected Trump, the elite powers ensured that he would not be able to govern, and then ensured that he would not be reelected. Essentially, the state told Americans: “Not only will we not address your grievances, we will also enact safeguards so that you may not elect someone who will.” Thus, the people who claim to be defending American democracy have negated what little democratic power many citizens actually held.

As a coda to this litany of abuses, the elite institutions tell these citizens not only that their grievances are illegitimate, but that those grievances are imagined.

Then they pretend they have no idea why Americans are angry.

Sovereignty on Its Head
Today, the United States government has inverted the idea of sovereignty: it carefully takes account of the external demands made upon our nation by foreign powers and peoples, while it sees itself as internally sovereign in relation to the people it rules. The state does not recognize its obligation to respond to certain classes of citizens—and when the people use their vote to register their discontent with this abdication of duty, the state ensures that this discontent will be contained and neutralized.

In a democracy, the regime itself is not meant to be sovereign in relation to the citizens it governs: that’s authoritarian autocracy. Democratic government is not independent from the will of the people—on the contrary, if it won’t address their grievances, then it must yield to a majority of citizens’ decision to install officials who will. Ultimately, grievance is also the political capital of our society—the state holds sole power to decide whose grievances are legitimate and whose are not. The resolute rejection of the grievances claimed by half the country has understandably provoked an enormous anger. The continued refusal of elites to acknowledge these grievances only accelerates our cultural fragmentation—and thus increases the chances of what would surely be a catastrophic “civil war”—one that they claim they do not want.

Adam Ellwanger is Professor of English and director of the graduate program in rhetoric and composition at the University of Houston—Downtown. Reach him at @TheHereticalTruth on Parler.