Commentary
Widespread news reports over the past several months point to a confluence of at least six cataclysms facing Americans as a direct result of actions taken by the U.S. political class.
A cataclysm is defined as a “catastrophe,” “a momentous and violent event marked by overwhelming upheaval and demolition,” and “an event that brings great changes.”
Part I examines three cataclysms.
Cultural Marxism
Karl Marx sought to destroy the family, individuality, and “certain truths” such as Judeo-Christian values. His ideological descendants in the U.S. political class are hard at work toward those ends, with cataclysmic implications for traditional American values, culture, and society at large.Cultural Marxism is on the march throughout the United States in capacities unimaginable just a few short years ago, including so-called critical race theory and transgender activism.
In one of President Joe Biden’s first executive orders, he telegraphed “an ambitious, whole-of-government initiative that will take a systematic approach to embedding DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] in Federal hiring and employment practices.”
The latest result of that EO is the Department of Education pushing a regulation that alters the grant approval process for American History and Civics Education programs in order “to support the development of culturally responsive teaching and learning” (“culturally responsive” being a code phrase for DEIA and critical race theory considerations). This is groupthink über alles.
At the same time, normalizing the LGBTQ-plus agenda has been a policy goal of the Democratic Party for decades, first through support for homosexual marriage and now through administrative state actions to advance the radical transsexual agenda.
As reported by Fox News during a congressional hearing on April 6, “Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra appeared to express support on Wednesday for taxpayer funds being spent on gender reassignment surgeries on children.”
The HHS is now pushing truly revolutionary policies and regulations for so-called “transgender adolescents,” including “‘Top’ surgery—to create male-typical chest shape or enhance breasts;” and “‘Bottom’ surgery—surgery on genitals or reproductive organs, facial feminization or other procedures.”
Elements of the political class seek to displace the role of parents in order to convey state-approved gender messaging to minor children. The twin pillars of desecration of Judeo-Christian values and destabilization of America’s cultural institutions and basic science are being undermined by elements of the U.S. political class at all levels of government.
Green New Deal
The premise behind the Green New Deal (GND) is that human-generated carbon dioxide emissions have caused all global warming since 1820, that warming has caused all kinds of evolving problems, and that all these bad things can be stopped if we end the use of carbon-based fuels and start paying carbon taxes.The carbon (and other) taxes are intended to fund massive public investments in carbon-neutral technologies, such as renewable power, clean energy manufacturing, zero-emission transportation, and sustainable farming.
The political problem for environmentalists and GND supporters is that the premise itself has never been proven. A recent report, titled “World Atmospheric CO2, Its 14C Specific Activity, Non-fossil Component, Anthropogenic Fossil Component, and Emissions (1750–2018),” concludes (emphasis added): “Our results show that the percentage of the total CO2 due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018, much too low to be the cause of global warming.”
Despite the lack of any real proof of a “climate crisis,” GND goals and concepts infuse all of the Biden administration’s whole-of-government effort to tackle the “climate crisis” in order to achieve an 80 percent “clean energy” grid by 2030 and a 100 percent “clean energy” grid by 2035.
The Democrats championed the passage of the “Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Summary,” which is stuffed with $500 billion for GND investment priorities.
The $500 billion is merely a down payment on the GND, which is estimated to cost nearly $93 trillion to implement fully. Replacing oil, gas, and nuclear energy sources with green energy substitutes is decades away from being technologically feasible. And for what?
The Heartland Institute summarizes what the GND—if fully implemented—would mean for the average American: “[T]he GND would force every American to replace their gasoline and diesel cars and trucks with expensive short-haul electric vehicles; their gas furnaces and stoves with electric systems; their home, local and state electrical and transmission systems with expensive upgrades that can handle a totally electric economy.”
Full GND implementation would lead to economic destabilization by disrupting every sector of the U.S. economy and could only be brought about through government mandates divined by the U.S. political class. A cataclysm to be avoided!
Open Borders
The Biden administration has refused to enforce existing U.S. immigration laws, which has led to a flood of illegal aliens across the U.S.-Mexico border since January 2021. The numbers are staggering: 2 million illegals total in 2021, with over 1 million added so far in 2022.According to recent news reports, that flood is expected to increase in May: “The Department of Homeland Security is bracing for as many as 18,000 migrants per day at the southern border if Title 42 is revoked,” according to ABC News. That would work out to over 6.5 million illegals crossing the border in a single year.
Title 42 is a clause of the 1944 Public Health Services Law that the Trump administration used to quickly expel illegal aliens from the United States during the pandemic due to the high probability of them introducing communicable diseases into the country.
The Biden administration’s “immigration policy” amounts to little apprehension at the border with minimal to no public health screening; taxpayer-provided temporary housing in hotels; free transportation, healthcare, legal services, and career and educational services; and instant rubber-stamping of asylum claims on the border. Millions of people are willing to brave the cartels and the human traffickers to take that deal courtesy of Uncle Sam!
Illegal aliens in great numbers destabilize the country by creating long-term problems that are expensive to solve: communicable diseases, increased crime rates (especially narcotics and human trafficking), welfare dependency, excessive strains on public health and education services, and competition for unskilled jobs.
Concluding Thoughts for Part 1
Induced by the U.S. political class, Cultural Marxism, the Green New Deal, and open borders each conform to the definition of cataclysm: a catastrophe, a momentous and violent event marked by overwhelming upheaval and demolition, and/or an event that brings great changes.Each by itself is destabilizing the country in a dramatic fashion in terms of significant changes and deleterious effects on the American economy, culture, constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, values, politics, crime rates, law enforcement, institutions, and society in general. All three together present nothing short of a collective existential threat to the American Republic as created by the Founding Fathers. All brought to your doorstep by the U.S. political class, perhaps intentionally.
The second part of this series will examine three other cataclysms that the U.S. political class has jump-started, the damaging effects of which are frequently in the news: communist China’s penetration of America, the corruption of public education, and the criminalization of political dissent.
Read part II here.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
