by Conrad Black
Everything has gone so terribly wrong for the Biden Administration, and in the ways that were widely predicted, that it is hard to believe Joe Biden could be perceived as a successful or at least potentially successful president if only he had avoided being such a tool of the Democratic extreme Left. On the afternoon of his inauguration, he killed the Keystone XL Pipeline and curtailed fracking and offshore oil and gas exploration, and ordered the end of construction of the southern border wall. The consequences have been over 200,000 illegal migrants entering the United States across the southern border most months and the rise in the price of gasoline from approximately $2 a gallon to $5 a gallon across the country.
As practically everyone outside his immediate entourage saw and predicted, these were disastrous errors. The excuse regularly given in the case of the wall was that Biden had inherited a “broken” immigration policy. In support of this outrageous falsehood, all that could be offered was the tear-jerking fabrication about children being separated from their parents and confined to cages that reminded that eminent authority on modern European history, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of “Auschwitz.”
In fact, Obama had installed those facilities while Biden was vice president, and they were not in any conventional parlance actually cages. The migrant children who stayed there undoubtedly received the most nourishing meals and useful exercise and education in the best and most sanitary comfort that they had ever known. Many of them were not related to the adults from whom they were separated, but as everyone who follows the issue knows, were merely props to facilitate the claim that the migrants were authentic fugitives from injustice, and to capitalize on the bias of civilized American authorities not to separate people from their ostensible minor children. In most cases this was a fiction and mere tactics to tug at America’s heartstrings.
Unfortunately, the least successful attorney general of recent times, (apart from the increasingly inept Merrick Garland—Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch were merely odious, not, unfortunately, entirely unsuccessful), Jeff Sessions, did not see the public relations minefield that he was plunging into head-first when he approved these separations. But it was in fact not at all the heart-rending act of cruelty that Trump’s critics represented. The speaker’s comparison with Auschwitz is on a par with the widespread effort of prominent Democrats to represent Trump as a person of Nazi attitudes and sympathies: it was as vile and unfounded a campaign of defamation as American politics has ever known.
Trump’s “broken” immigration policy was the most successful the country has had at least since Eisenhower’s time in the 1950s, and the border was on the verge of a full and functioning restoration that would have enabled the country to admit those whom it wished to admit and decline those whom it wished to exclude, when Biden was inaugurated. There can be only one conceivable explanation for the current policy of admitting such a flood of unprocessed arrivals, which doubtless includes many worthy and good people who will unquestionably be assets to the country and its future. But it is also demonstrably true and in any case inevitable, that this mass of undocumented migrants contains an inordinate number of riffraff, dangerous criminals, and people incapable of contributing usefully to American life and certain to be a dead weight on the social, law enforcemtn, and educational services of the country where they have illicitly arrived.
The only possible motive for this otherwise inexplicable step toward national suicide is the notorious view of the Democrats that almost all of these people will be so grateful for having been admitted to the United States, they will become permanent Democratic voters. This made the initial landmine under the whole concept of American citizenship, the sanctuary city, even more explosive: municipal authorities ordered the police not to carry out the immigration laws of the country. That this has been permitted to go on for decades almost uncontradicted andl, if it is not reversed, it will be seen by historians as a first step in the self-induced collapse of the American state.
These measures are complemented by the further ambitions of the Democrats—incited by their horror at the rejection of the political establishment in the election of Donald Trump as president—contained in H.R.1 and complementary proposals in the Senate demanding all verification of voters’ identity be scrapped and that unlimited ballot harvesting be encouraged. There were accompanying ambitions to add the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states of the Union and reliable sources of permanent election of Democratic senators. Additional assurances of a permanent Democratic majority were to be provided by the reduction of the Senate to a straight majority vote for any measure, and by the expansion of the Supreme Court to assure that any constitutional inconveniences would be quickly dispensed. The Democrats have been astonishingly successful in their effort to ensure that the constitutional requirement that voters be citizens is overlooked. This remains a battle still to be decided.
Most of this egregious program has already been abandoned and, even if undocumented immigrants continue to pour in at their present rate, indications are that it annoys members of the Latin American community who reached the country legally as well as the complacent majority of Americans that is finally recognizing the danger of these insane policies in numbers that will more than counter the influx of new doubly illegal (as undocumented, non-citizens) voters. The aggrieved are likely to support the next administration, exasperated at what prior to President Trump was for decades a euphemism for cowardly inactivity: “comprehensive immigration reform.”
This must have been the motive for the otherwise insane Biden immigration policies and it is not clear whether Biden himself, who masqueraded for decades as a pillar of bipartisan constitutionality, signed on to this for this motive or if he actually believes the campaign bunk about protecting the families of wretched persecuted fugitive families. Whatever his motive, it is a disaster and is seen by practically everyone to be a disaster, and the rejection of the Democrats in the midterm elections and in the next presidential election will become steadily more likely (and overwhelmingly so) the longer Biden allows his Inauguration Day blunder stopping the southern border wall to continue. The contemptible spectacle of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas nodding like an articulate figurine as he says “The border is closed” merely aggravates an intolerable state of affairs.
The administration’s pursuit of higher energy costs, presumably to facilitate the enactment of a radical green program, is a parallel disaster, both in its proportions and in the ease with which it could have been avoided, and could even now be corrected. There is no evidence that the world is really becoming warmer in a way that poses any danger to life or is outside existing, long-established climate cycles. Nor is there any conclusive evidence that the world’s temperature is influenced by human conduct.
The desire to inflict terrible costs on our societies to reduce carbon emissions is a fusion of the misguided fervor of legitimate but overwrought conservationists and the cynical reappearance of the international Left, defeated in the Cold War but now attacking capitalism from the more promising and apparently idealistic perspective of the salvation of the planet. The release last week of 50 million barrels of oil from the strategic reserve, three days consumption, is universally seen as the paltriest tokenism.
Carbon dioxide is essential to life but for the purposes of the militant green movement it has been portrayed as a virtual poison. This is all nonsense and fortunately it will not require an arcane and incomprehensible scientific argument to establish that fact. We will be saved from ourselves by a consumer revolt at skyrocketing energy costs.
Biden and his followers and minders will go down more than anything else on these two issues. If the president just kept his head at least on his first day in office and dodged these two bullets, he might not be facing the dismal personal and national future that he did this Thanksgiving weekend.
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Conrad Black reports for American Greatness.
Photo “Joe Biden” by The White House.
