A Kingdom of the Anti-American Elite

Joe Biden, a man who 34 percent of Americans think is not sufficiently mentally alert for his office, is presiding amiably over a regime infested with anti-American forces. 

by Conrad Black

It is disappointing that the wave of national revulsion that must be rising up from the depths of American public opinion has not broken over the heads of the cancelers, statue-defacers, bigots, defamers of American history, and secular iconoclasts. Official committees in various cities, such as San Francisco and Chicago, recommend taking the names of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and other great American statesmen off schools (where teachers refuse to give up their paid vacations and go back to generally under-educating and often deliberately misinforming their students) and other public buildings. The waves of censorship are lapping at the feet of Shakespeare. Can the Bible be far behind?

Joe Biden’s secretary of health and human services is a militant atheist and compulsive abortionist, responsible for the prosecution of the Little Sisters of the Poor for declining to pay the contraception, sterilization, and abortion expenses of those whom they employ or house.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas denies a “crisis” exists on the southern border, even though illegal entries are well over 100 percent above figures from a year earlier, detention facilities are overflowing, and many new arrivals test positive for the coronavirus. The Democrats who lifted the level of the Rio Grande by several feet with their crocodile tears about Trump’s “cages” said to remind Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Auschwitz (and which were, in fact, erected by the Obama Administration) have reactivated the cages and done the Great Orange Monster one better by proposing to ship migrant children to Virginia in containers humanized by paintings of butterflies on their internal walls.

Climate czar John Kerry actually professes to believe that without drastic measures to restrain the use of carbon, the world will be on an irreversible march to the destruction of earthly life in nine years. His budget should be reduced by 99 percent, with the balance devoted to his psychiatric help.

Midway to 100 Days

There are many kooks, militant socialists, other-worldly faddists, and monomaniacs being packed into senior echelons of several departments, reflecting the ramshackle coalition that supports the administration. The president and his foreign policy team have professed a desire to return to the Iran nuclear agreement, though that country is deemed to be only months away from a nuclear military capability, and even if it adhered to the original terms, will have a green light to deploy nuclear-tipped missiles in five years. Since the ayatollahs evidently think that Biden, unlike his predecessor, is unlikely to interdict the course of the country’s nuclear military program with airstrikes, they are demanding the abandonment of U.S. economic sanctions before they reenter talks over resumption of adherence to the insane nuclear agreement that was the cornerstone of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. So far the Biden regime appears to be resisting this temptation with some fortitude.

At the midway point of the proverbial first 100 days, there is no indication at all that Biden will resist the pressures from the Left in his party. It is indicative of the desperate condition of the moderate American majority that Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is being touted as a bulwark of the Constitution defending the filibuster and the need for reasonable bipartisan support of legislation. If Manchin adheres to that stance after the full treatment from the Democratic congressional leadership, he will be the most distinguished congressional Democrat since Lyndon Johnson.

The administration appears to be unable to demarcate spheres of influence between the ecological zealots who shut down pipelines which are by far the environmentally safest way of transmitting oil and natural gas, from the agitations of the Democrats’ traditional supporters in organized labor who are not charmed by John Kerry’s breezy proposal that the more than 20,000 Keystone XL pipeline and offshore oil exploration workers who had been rendered redundant by executive order on Inauguration Day compensate themselves by putting in for unionized jobs making solar panels.

Biden’s defense secretary, General Lloyd Austin, tells us the greatest security threat to the United States comes from internal subversive organizations, and it is implied that these are white supremacists. Civil servants, like most American elementary, secondary, and post-secondary students, are taught the malignant critical race theory and it is legitimizing the monstrous self-directed blood libel that America is based on racial exploitation and was always a racist enterprise. There is not and has not been for many years the “systemic racism,” as even Biden now claims afflicts the country.

No Time to Weep

It is all mad and tends to confirm the fears of Abraham Lincoln, who famously said that no foreign army could “by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years,” that America “will live forever or die by suicide.”

The United States led the Western allies to success against Nazi Germany and the Japanese imperialists and it led the Western world to success in the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of international Communism. There followed a roughly 25-year hiatus before the Chinese threat was recognized, albeit as a distant and really only economic threat, when the United States was like the unbound Prometheus having vanquished every significant foreign enemy.

Francis Fukuyama wrote a persuasive book that history had reached its culmination with the triumph of democracy and the free market. In such times it was inevitable that complacency would arise. But it was impossible to foresee that blacks, after decades of immense gains and the consecration to their welfare of hundreds of billions of dollars, to say nothing of their elevation to the highest positions in the country—including the presidency—would deliver themselves in significant numbers into the hands of extremist demagogues prominent in the movement to tear down even the statues memorializing Frederick Douglass.

Joe Biden proclaimed on January 6, without evidence, that the vandals who stormed the U.S. Capitol were white supremacists. All bad people are racists and all bad things are racist. It is nonsense; a moron with an IQ in single figures could see clearly that all of this is a fiction. It is a good thing that Americans have come to realize that a great deal of their showmanship and self-puffery was an exaggeration of the country’s virtues and a whitewash of many inconsistencies in the nation’s history.

Every important nationality has a mythos, and there are generally fictions in all of them. But it is a shameful and outrageous injustice to denigrate the legitimate and uplifting ideals of the principal authors and continuators of the American experiment. Never in the history of the world has there been anything remotely like the rise of the United States from a few million settlers in two long lifetimes to worldwide preeminence. The United States has been the chief superspreader of democracy and the free market and every American should be proud of his country. Joe Biden, whom 34 percent of Americans think is not sufficiently mentally alert for his office, is presiding amiably over a regime that is infested by anti-American forces.

The attempted woke atomization of America into an immense congeries of irate complainant groups eventually will be overcome by Richard Nixon’s silent majority of decent and patriotic citizens who love their country. To borrow a phrase from George Orwell, “even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the left-wing intelligentsia” It is not time to weep for America, it is time to build it back much better than this tower of Babel and of self-hate that has slouched into office in Washington.

First published in American Greatness.