A Party at War With the Truth

22.08.2024 05:05

Monday and Tuesday nights were historic events for American politics.

No, seriously, they were.

What you’ve seen in the first half of this year’s Democratic National Convention has been an exposition of something unprecedented — an utter divorce from reality, natural law, and morality. The Democrats are now a political party completely unmoored from accountability to any of the three. They no longer believe in political or governmental restraint and in fact are actively hostile to those notions.

Sam McCarthy and I talked quite a bit about this subject, and the spiritual war that underlies it, in the first segment of this week’s Spectacle podcast, and you should definitely check that out here. But there’s an aspect to this that deserves its own mention in this column.

Which is that we’re seeing now what you get from a political party made up of people who ascribe to this woke neo-paganism that the corrupt ruling elite of the West is attempting to foist on our societies. Namely, that lies now carry the same weight as the truth.

You just have to tell them more often, and with feeling, and you have to scream quite loudly and use your most hateful words to shout down your critics.

Joe Biden on Monday night gave example after example of this. Biden, shunted off to a past-his-prime-time speaking slot because it was more important for the Democrats to platform one extreme pro-abortion speaker after another in the midst of their opening-day lineup, repeated something of a Greatest Hits of Presidential Mendacity during that hour-long speech.

They were all there. We had:

The Charlottesville “very fine people” lie, debunked even by the leftist propaganda site Snopes, but told with such indignation that if you didn’t know Biden’s history of bald-faced fibbing, you might believe every word;
The “suckers and losers” lie;
The “dictator on day one” lie;
The ridiculous claim that border crossings are now fewer than when Donald Trump left office;
The idiotic claim to have built a half million electric vehicle charging stations, when in fact the actual number is … eight.

And many more.

Biden’s speech capped a first night that was full of indefensible statements. For example, there was AOC presenting herself as “working class” because she chose to tend bar in her twenties rather than get a real job after earning two degrees from Boston University (current annual tuition: just more than $90,000) and then hitting the jackpot at what was essentially an audition for the role of a left-wing politician. That came just after making the spit-take-inducing claim that Kamala Harris, who grew up in the ritziest neighborhood in all of Canada after moving from the San Francisco Bay area, where her parents held jobs as a Stanford economics professor and Cal Berkeley biochemist, and whose adult life consisted of playing the role of mistress to the most prominent local politician in town until such time as he elevated her into a position within California’s political elite, as “middle class.”

The audience applauded at that remark, but not immediately. It was as though the delegates weren’t sure they could quite make that whopper stick.

Hillary Clinton followed soon after, and she made the claim that she’d broken a glass ceiling and paved the way for Kamala Harris, which was peculiar. Clinton, after all, became a national political figure thanks to the electoral success of her husband, was given a Senate seat in New York by the Democrats, lost her first bid for the presidency, was a figure of scandal for running government business as Secretary of State through an unsecured email server that the Russians and Chinese soon had access to (and for the obvious purpose of peddling influence while in that job), then proceeded to lose the presidency to Donald Trump thanks to one of the worst presidential campaigns of this century. Exactly what glass ceiling has she broken?

And there was Andy Beshear, the lisping beta male governor of Kentucky, who prattled on about “empathy” and “compassion” while discussing the need to promote abortions in America — as though what’s at stake in that discussion isn’t the ending of human life for, in the vast majority of cases, convenience’s sake. And Beshear, confronted Tuesday morning by JD Vance’s critique of such statements on MSNBC, proceeded to express a wish that some member of Vance’s family might be impregnated in a rape.

This isn’t the conduct of people who subscribe to traditional Judeo-Christian principles.

Tuesday wasn’t much better. The Democrats professed their enlightenment and competence while running far over time and pushing the keynote speech mostly out of prime time, filling up the prime time schedule with a procession of nondescript hack politicians all saying the same things, and then offered up a bit of hilarity.

First there was Bernie Sanders, who prattled on about how terrible it is that there are billionaires in America. Sanders was followed immediately thereafter by the corpulent Illinois governor J.P. Pritzker, who opened his address identifying himself as a billionaire and insinuating that Trump is not. Pritzker’s fortune was, as we all know, inherited rather than made. I’ve never been able to ascertain whether Sanders, who in a different context would surely happily liquidate Pritzker and confiscate that hotel fortune on behalf of the collective, cares whether Pritzker is self-made.

Then came Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff for a beta-male paean to his wife — reminding us all why she didn’t even take his last name on in a hyphenated moniker — before Michelle Obama took the stage.

And in a speech long on theatrics and drama, swooned over by all the usual media mavens, Michelle told us that her mother was “suspicious” of people who “take more than they need.”

Excuse me?

The Obamas had a net worth of less than $3 million when Barack was elected president. They’re worth more than $70 million now. They have houses in ritzy Kalorama in D.C., Martha’s Vineyard, and a new mansion in Hawaii on the way. Who in the hell is Michelle Obama to talk about how suspicious it is to “take more than they need?”

And exactly what goods or services are the Obamas providing to the public to merit the better part of a $70 million net worth gain in seven years and change?

That begat Barack Obama’s address. And give the man credit, he’s an exceptionally skilled orator. But the substance of his remarks made iron the fact of today’s Democrat Party. Which, as I discussed in detail in my book Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, is Obama’s creation.

In the aforementioned Spectacle Podcast episode, Sam and I talked about the neo-paganism loose in the land, something we owe credit to John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist for bringing to the fore in his recent book. The larger argument around that description of the modern Left and the Democrat Party playing Sinn Fein to its IRA is the pagan idea that with enough power and influence, you can change the very reality around you. Obama embodies this idea completely, and his speech Tuesday night full of purposeful lies and forced delusions was emblematic of it.

Two lines from the speech were particularly striking. The first involved Biden: “My first big decision as your nominee turned out to be one of my best,” he said. “And that was asking Joe Biden to serve by my side as vice president.”

By all accounts it was Obama and Nancy Pelosi who staged the coup that removed Biden as the Democrats’ nominee last month. Obama famously cautioned that we should “never underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.” And we’re supposed to believe he thinks picking Biden as his running mate was one of his best choices?

That was an insult to his audience. This was a bigger insult to the American people:

“The other side knows it’s easier to play on people’s fears and cynicism. They will tell you that government is inherently corrupt.”

It isn’t playing on people’s fears and cynicism to note that government is corrupt. Two-thirds of the American people think the country is on the wrong track, and one reason why is that we’re $35 trillion in debt thanks to a government that is clearly incapable — perhaps intentionally so — of performing the most basic tasks assigned to it without taking on ruinous expense in the attempt. Why is it that the private sector is capable of accomplishing with pennies on the dollar tasks that the federal government Obama is so enamored of cannot?

The most obvious explanation is corruption. The kind of corruption that, for example, created the Trump–Russia hoax. You’ll notice that Obama didn’t touch that one, even though the bulk of its abuses happened on his watch and were committed by his people, perhaps even at his direction, before Trump’s inauguration.

But of course, Barack Obama is the man who told Bill O’Reilly to his face, as the facts of the Fast and Furious and weaponized-IRS scandals were tumbling forth, that “not even a smidgen of corruption” was present in his administration. Large lies are his stock in trade — and so is government corruption. Or do you think Obama was somehow unaware of Clinton’s email server and Biden’s family influence-peddling business?

It isn’t that these things were glossed over. Or that they were denied. They weren’t addressed at all. The response to accountability for actual performance in, as CNN’s conservative commentator Scott Jennings observed Tuesday, 12 of the past 16 years holding power in the White House is to throw insults at Trump and gaslight the public.

As for the poor performance, they name it success.

On Wednesday, as if to add comic irony to the breathtaking lies tumbling forth from the rulers on that Chicago stage, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised downward its estimate of the number of jobs generated by the economy from quarter two of 2023 through quarter one of 2024 by a massive 818,000. It turns out that reality refuses its banishment no matter how strenuously the Democrats attempt to shove it away.

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