In the Battle of the Acronyms, perhaps no contest is more ferocious than the slugfest between the DSA – that’s “D” for dumb and “S” for commie, I mean “socialist” – and ICE (always excepting TDS vs MAGA). A wacko woman steers her car into an ICE agent. He shoots her. The media calls make up and tries to turn the dead woman into the second coming of Saint George Floyd.
There was a warehouse full of outrage just waiting to be paraded at prime time but somehow the entertainment fell flat. Renée Good, the woman in question, didn’t have what it takes to triumph in the victimology sweepstakes. The anti-Trump media wept for a week and then went on to other wheezes.
Nevertheless the Democratic Socialists of America have kept an eye on ICE. The outfit charged with enforcing our immigration and customs laws is by nature a high-profile agency. If a previous administration allows, nay, encourages millions (that’s “millions” with a boatload of zeros) of grifters from the Third World to scamper over what used to be America’s southern border and set up shop in suburbia, then removing such interlopers is going to be a very public enterprise.
A year or two back, some enterprising soul had the idea of renaming ICE “NICE,” the “N” standing for “National.” Donald Trump signaled his approval but somehow the new name never caught on. I suspect that neither CNN nor the New York Times was keen on the new name. Still, I like it. For what ICE does is nice: it helps make America great again by removing people – I believe the favored word is “folx” – who have broken the law by residing in the United States illegally.
The DSA loves illegal immigrants. Why? Two reasons. First, they help fray the fabric of our common culture. Second, they are a reliable voting bloc for the left. The more illegal immigrants, the more potential voters for the left.
This is so obvious that I hesitate to set it down in black and white. But we live in a moment when the most obvious things are overlooked, misunderstood, ostentatiously lied about. What is a woman? A female candidate for the Supreme Court found that an imponderable question. Tim Walz, the Governor of Minnesota, is so clueless that he installs tampon dispensers in schoolboys’ bathrooms.
The DSA, like socialist enterprises everywhere, glories in such chaos. It’s the old Orwellian trick. Get the rubes to believe that two plus two equals five and they are putty in your hands. You can then get them to believe, and do, anything you want. I think it was Voltaire who said that if you can get people to believe absurdities, it is easy to get them to commit atrocities. Experience suggests that this is true.
In “The Purloined Letter,” Edgar Allan Poe hid the incriminating document in plain sight. It took a clever detective to recognize it. Agents of the DSA are expert in such blatant acts of camouflage. The DSA is a small organization. At last count it had 120,000 members. But that is up from 5,000 in 2016. How can we explain that explosive growth? Everyone knows Winston Churchill’s description of socialism as the “philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy” whose “inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” This is so clearly true that it is almost embarrassing to say it.
But such is the goulash we live with today. What is a woman? Is anyone really confused about that? No, not really. But they pretend to be. Why? In a word, power. Perhaps the most obvious phenomenon in American culture is the sudden efflorescence of anti-Semitism, especially (but not exclusively) on college campuses. Hamas slaughters 1,200 Israelis on October 7. The response is “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” and such at Columbia, Yale, Harvard and other swank redoubts for the morally obtuse.
The DSA, like socialist enterprises everywhere, glories in such chaos
Jewish students and faculty were harassed, spat upon and vilified. The Trump administration moved decisively to counter the anti-Semitism. The result? Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, cranks up the Democrat projection machine to 11. Oh, yes, anti-Semitism at American campuses is real, he said in a letter of August 18 to Harmeet K. Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. But the real problem is not anti-Semitism but – you guessed it – Trump! The DoJ’s investigation, you see, is just a “fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature… [T]he whole project was designed to harass professors and administrators at major universities, to curtail their freedom of speech and academic freedom, and to strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that they had already been awarded on the merits of their applications.”
Raskin’s unhinged, seven-page expostulation would be funny were it not in earnest. “Freedom of speech?” “Academic Freedom?” What Raskin is talking about is students and outside agitators – many of them illegal immigrants – taking over college buildings, damaging college property, kidnapping maintenance men and calling them “Jew lovers.” Raskin’s letter is full of wild accusations of misconduct on the part of the Trump administration. But it is a sterling specimen of that unholy genre that tells its practitioners to be obvious and ostentatious in their lies when they decide to economize on the truth.
Naive observers, encountering Raskin’s smelly missive, might think that it is unconnected with the minatory antics of the DSA. Seasoned observers know that they are cut from the same bolt of toxic, anti-American cloth. What I call the socialist goulash is a witches’ brew of lies, paranoid fantasy and totalitarian aspiration. Raskin is one of its more clownish impresarios.
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