The Great Wall of Washington
The same people who called Trump “bunker boy” want to turn their House into a gated community.
According to Joe Biden, Democrats were supposed to be building bridges — not walls! Tell that to his party’s leaders, who are actually considering a plan to add a permanent, razor-wire fence around the Capitol complex. Despite major pushback from both parties, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have told reporters that they’ll “defer to the experts” when it comes to securing America’s representatives — even if it means turning the People’s House into a supermax.
Reaction to the idea, which acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman rolled out last Thursday, has been fierce. “It’s a mistake to turn the home of our democracy into a fortress,” Democrat Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), a retired Marine, fired back. On the GOP side, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) joined in their outcry, declaring that she was “adamantly opposed” to walling off the Capitol. And what good would that do anyway, some said sarcastically, if Pelosi is telling people that “the enemy is within?”
Asked what she meant, the House speaker said, “It means that we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other members of Congress.” Members of her own party were appalled at her insinuation. Some, like former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard called that kind of talk “incredibly dangerous.” “This kind of broad, inflammatory rhetoric is like throwing a match into the tinderbox,” she shook her head. Pelosi needs to apologize, Gabbard insisted. “If this is a [criminal threat], let law enforcement deal with it… [But] if there is no evidence of what she is talking about, it’s inciting further division and further harm potentially and further destroying the possibility of our country coming together.”
Meanwhile, the irony of what some Democrats suggesting isn’t lost on Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who — like most Americans — watched the city of Washington, D.C. burn in the summer riots. When the president gave his RNC acceptance speech, leaders like Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) were physically attacked by the mobs outside the White House, and we never heard a peep from liberals like Pelosi. Apparently, they were too busy mocking the president for putting up a temporary fence. Now, the same people who called Trump “bunker boy” want to turn their House into a gated community. The hypocrisy would be astounding if we weren’t so used to it.
“Optics matter,” Blunt insisted. “I think how people… look at the building matters. This is the truly the citadel of democracy [for the] whole world. And I do think we want to be very thoughtful here that we don’t overreact.” He pointed back to the Oklahoma City bombing when Bill Clinton “temporarily” closed Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Lafayette Park. It never reopened. “We don’t want to see that happen again.”
Of all the seats of government in the world, he said, “Our capital, the Capitol building itself, has always been the most open, the most accessible.” In normal times, “thousands of people walk through [the hallways] every week… They become part of our work… So I think we want to be very careful that we don’t [partition] the Capitol away from the people.” And frankly, that’s what the Left is trying to do. They’re using the despicable actions of January 6th as an excuse to demand these extreme measures that would ultimately separate people from their government.
Some of this, Blunt insisted, “is just pure politics… Trying to take advantage of the moment [to] suggest that the radicals in America are all somehow on the right end of the spectrum.” Suddenly, you don’t hear any discussion about the “weeks and months of federal buildings that were attacked in Seattle and Portland.” Weeks and months, statistics show, that resulted in the “largest single-year increase of homicides” in history. But the way to stop all of this violence, is not to build a barrier. It’s keeping the building as open as it can be, so that people get a sense that this is a country where people freely debate and work with each other.
And let’s face it, Blunt pointed out, there are a lot of ways to attack a building or a group of people that no fence will stop. Law enforcement is going to have to take a lot of other things into consideration, he said — including access for the public. Because at the end of the day, the real threat is surrendering the freedom our country stands for to stop an invasion that might never happen. “The Capitol Hill riots ought to be condemned as an un-American spectacle,” National Review’s editors agreed, “…but it would also be un-American, and a change with worrying symbolic power, if the locus of popular government were forever visibly separated from the people themselves.”
If Democrats want to lower the temperature, Blunt suggested, they need to stop dividing the country into “us vs. them” instead of “our ideas vs. their ideas.” The more we stray from debating the issues to degrading other people, the more dangerous America becomes.
Originally published here.
Waking up to Woke Schools
The Left’s radical insanity is so contagious, even the most secluded school districts aren’t immune. The latest casualty is the public school district in Ames, a community of 62,000 residents in central Iowa, hardly a hotbed of Leftist radicalism. But this week, in observance of African American history month, the Ames school district is sponsoring a “Black Lives Matter week of action,” foisting on children such principles as “globalism,” “queer affirming,” and “trans affirming.”
The Federalist’s Executive Editor Joy Pullman reported on the indoctrination program and joined me Tuesday night on Washington Watch. She has grown used to seeing these woke training programs in mostly-white communities like Ames (79 percent of public school children in Ames come from white families) because they are “basically a wealthy self-flagellation exercise for white people.”
They don’t resonate with the values or priorities of ethnic minorities. Instead, they act as a way of “relieving guilt and making people feel good about themselves rather than actually addressing the real difficulties and challenges and concerns that Americans who aren’t white have.”
That’s a generous assessment. Another motive for these programs is the intentional deconstruction of the family and, with it, Western civilization. Another principle promoted by Ames’ training program is “black villages,” defined as “disrupting the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”
The problem is, destroying the family is the worst possible way to help impoverished children. As Pullman said, “a married two parent family is the gold standard for every possible outcome for a child.” On average, children who grow up with a mother and a father have a higher income and a higher level of education than children who don’t. This is shown beyond question by innumerable studies.
“In the name of anti-racism,” Pullman said, these programs really advance “bigotry.” They falsely claim that nuclear families are for whites only and discourage ethnic minorities from setting their children up from success. She said slandering the nuclear family to non-white students relies on the “assumption that because of your skin color, you’re somehow unable to attain success.”
And so parents who try to assuage their feelings of guilt by endorsing these Leftist trainings are really undermining the success of their own children, while not helping minority children at all. It’s “misguided compassion,” as Pullman said.
That’s not to say problems don’t exist. But there’s a better way to fix them. It just requires a little more work, responsibility, and personal sacrifice.
Pullman says the solution starts when we ask ourselves, what can I do? What can I do to, “not solve the world’s problems, but solve my neighbor’s problems?” Instead of giving in to consumerism and “spending every single cent and resource” on ourselves, we should be attuned to those who are suffering in our own communities.
“Who is a little boy and girl in my neighborhood who is not in a good situation, who can be incorporated into our family life? Who can I take to church personally?”
The book of James says the heart of religion is “to care for the widow and orphan in their time of need and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.” You don’t have to look far to find a child that doesn’t have a mom or dad, irrespective of color. We can, and should, push back against the ever advancing woke ideology of the Left. But we have even more moral authority to push back if the church is taking the lead in addressing the needs of their own community. So before you click away or close the tab, ask yourself, “How can I help those in need?”
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
