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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Remember What the Democrats Did

Voters are unlikely to forget that the party in power has masked and indoctrinated their children while pushing radical ideology.

Elected,President,Of,The,United,States,Of,America,,Joe,Biden
(Vectorfarmer/Shutterstock)

Political horse-race types are predicting a GOP blowout in today's midterm elections, and if it comes to pass, Democrats won’t have much to blame beyond their own insanity. By insanity, I mean the party’s determination to go to war against reality, wielding bizarre language games that would leave Humpty Dumpty blushing. There is only so much of it the nation could tolerate.

Examples abound. Allow me to pick four broad themes.

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Start with the erasure of women aimed at accommodating the most extreme gender ideologues. In case you have forgotten, in January 2021, one of the then-incoming Democratic majority’s first moves was a proposal to eliminate all non-“gender-inclusive” language from House rules. “Father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister,” and the like were to be replaced with “parent, child, sibling, sibling of parent,” and so on. Also last year, the Biden White House replaced “mother” with “birthing people” in a document that, hilariously, addressed “maternal health.” Ordinary Dem politicians made this dystopian grammar their own. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, for example, has spoken of “people with periods” in a video on menstrual products. A Biden high-court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, refused to define what a woman is, saying “I’m not a biologist."

Second, there has been the push to promote sexual deviance among the very young in public schools. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, for example, has called for “a drag queen in every school,” though she later claimed, implausibly, that she was joking. California state Sen. Scott Wiener in June talked about “offering Drag Queen 101 as part of the K-12 curriculum,” adding: “Attending Drag Queen Story Time will satisfy the requirement.” The New York City Department of Education has defended expenditures of up to $200,000 for drag in schools by insisting, "This is life-saving work." When Muslim-American parents in Michigan objected to such content in school libraries, Rep. Rashida Tlaib accused them of falling for an “ugly, bigoted, and well-funded hate” agenda. The books in question included one supplying instructions for "Boy-on-Boy Sex."

Third and relatedly, there was the resolve to keep kids masked in Dem-governed cities and states—combined with the galling hypocrisy of the blue officials who handed down these diktats. One of the most damning pieces of political communication I have ever seen comes courtesy of New York Republican gubernatorial hopeful Lee Zeldin. It is a photograph of Zeldin’s Democratic opponent, incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul, and other officials smiling unmasked in the back row, while in the front row a group of small children are tightly masked. Zeldin’s caption: “Parents will never forget.” Long after we knew that masks were mostly useless, and that children are at minuscule risk from the virus and transmit it at lower rates than adults, Democratic governors and mayors insisted on maintaining mask requirements for children in daycares and schools. This, despite well-documented evidence of the developmental harms associated with kids being left unable to decode facial expressions.

Finally, there is the Dems’ self-inflicted insanity at the border. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. government finally got a handle on the crisis at our southern border with the Remain in Mexico policy. The Biden administration scrapped it for no good reason, inviting a deluge of newcomers that wreaked havoc on border communities in places like Arizona and Texas. As if being overwhelmed by the policy shift weren’t enough, Border Patrol agents in one instance also came under attack from the administration, which accused them of “whipping” migrants. The administration continued to harass them even after the falsity of the media narrative became clear.

Not all of the Republicans fighting to be elected in these midterms have interesting ideas for addressing the nation’s deeper crises. Many are establishment GOP hacks. When it comes to foreign-policy hawkism, many are as bad, if not worse, than the Biden administration. Too many of them make populist economic noises without walking the walk on issues like labor and free trade. Very few of them have the intellectual depth and independence shown by the likes of J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, for whom I especially wish Godspeed.

Then again, some elections come down to simpler, more visceral questions. Do you believe “woman” and “mother” (and sexual difference more generally) are worth defending? Do you oppose teaching 12-year-olds about “boy-on-boy sex”? Do you think it was a mistake to mask children, given their Covid risk profile, which we knew about as early as spring 2020? Does the United States have the right to a sovereign border? 

Well, as you go to the polls today, there you have it.