The Book of Exodus said that God “hardened the Pharaoh’s heart.” I don’t pretend to understand the theology behind that. But I think I can ken the psychology it points to: The kind of dunderheaded, willfully blind, self-destructive stubbornness that can sweep over a people, and lead it to destruction.

We saw it in the Germans, who after the ruination that militarism brought them in 1918, proceeded to embrace just 15 years later a far worse, genocidally militarist regime. This time the cities of Germany wouldn’t just be starved, but bombed, and the country severed in half.

We saw it in the Japanese, who wouldn’t let go of their fanatical imperialism and emperor-worship until most of their cities had been fire-bombed, and two of them actually nuked. (And still most of the government didn’t want to surrender.)

And we’re seeing that same irrationalism dominate our own elites today. Has God hardened their hearts? No, privilege has deadened their brains.

Never Apologize, Never Explain, Never Repent

Did we learn nothing from our ten years of futile sacrifice in Vietnam? The chaos we sowed in Cambodia?

From the unjustified war based on lies that saw us invade sovereign Iraq, causing the deaths of some 500,000 civilians (far more than have died in Ukraine, by the way)? Our futile, destructive occupation of that country, which saw two U.S. presidents wink at the genocide of Christians?

How about from our twenty-year war for nothing in Afghanistan, which we left more fanatically anti-American and jihadist than we found it? What’s a few trillion dollars and thousands of dead or damaged soldiers, here or there?

Your Grandchildren Will Be Paying for Ukrainian Oligarchs’ Coke Habits

Our Congress is trying to vote a $40 billion slush fund to pour into Ukraine, one of the most corrupt countries on earth. We are openly saying that our goal is not peace between that nation and Russia, but an open-ended “quagmire” that kills as many Russians as possible and degrades that nation’s economy. God bless Senator Rand Paul, who’s trying to stall this train-wreck in the Senate. All but some 70 Republicans supported this ludicrous cash-dump in the House, as did the supposedly antiwar Democrat left. Here’s Tucker Carlson describing exactly what happened:

The Russian peace plan our government has encouraged Ukraine to reject was far from unreasonable. It asked Ukraine to give back the regions full of Russian-speakers who were part of Russia for hundreds of years, and got transferred to Ukraine in 1960. And it demanded that Ukraine not join the anti-Russian military alliance that NATO has become — having long ago lost its real mission of containing aggressive Communism. (That’s gone in Russia now, but thriving in China, whose boots Joe Biden keeps licking.)

If you’ll remember, when tiny Cuba tried to ally militarily with Russia, President Kennedy risked a nuclear war to prevent that. He backed an invasion of Cuba, and let the CIA start a 20 year campaign of trying to assassinate its president. That’s the kind of thing sovereign states do, and Putin did it. Imagine what we’d do if Mexico tried to ally with Putin.

NATO: A Nuclear Suicide Pact

With our encouragement, Sweden and Finland are seeking to join the obsolete nuclear suicide pact that is NATO. That would create still more hair-triggers for the apocalypse, still more countries we’re obliged to fight Russia over. We must defend “freedom” in Europe. This in a Europe which viciously censors free speech, locked citizens in their homes over COVID, and nearly imprisoned a pastor in Finland for quoting the Holy Bible. We must defend those “Western values” whatever the cost.

Meanwhile, the same administration that claims to be defending national sovereignty in the Pripet Marshes won’t lift a finger to stop the ongoing invasion across the Rio Grande. Drug traffickers, human traffickers, and other organized criminals now control our southern border. But we’re pouring our borrowed billions into brokering territory disputes around Chernobyl.

Could a Russian Occupation Regime Be Any Worse?

And Republicans are going along with it all. They’re barely emitting a squeak about the threats to freedom here at home. The most recent ones, I’ll remind you, include:

• The ongoing legal persecution of non-violent January 6 protestors. (Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters who looted our cities and firebombed courthouses walked free.)
• The FBI opening investigations of parents for complaining at school board meetings over Marxist Critical Race Theory. (The Justice Department won’t act to stop threatening mobs outside the homes of pro-life Supreme Court justices.)
• The creation of a “Disinformation” bureau inside the Department of Homeland Security, to monitor and suppress online speech. (Meanwhile, even Fox News won’t permit the words “2000 Mules” to be spoken on its network.)

We Live in a One-Party State

None of this is an accident, people. This is no coincidence. We need to see American politics as it is, not what it pretends to be. The U.S. has been a de facto one-party state since the 1990s, with two factions of that party squabbling over comparatively petty details. The dominant factions of both parties agree on all the important things, but differ on implementation:

The U.S. must maintain a vast, costly overseas empire, with military bases and formal war-making alliances. The Democrats want to do this a little more cheaply, sometimes. We must intervene and overthrow governments, occupy countries, and flood them with U.S. money. The Democrats want to include transgender clinics and abortion in those aid deals, to which some Republicans occasionally and ineffectually object. Sometimes the two factions of the One Party squabble over which enemies to attack. (Serbia or Iraq? Libya or Afghanistan? Syria or Russia?) Usually, to keep everybody happy, both sides get their wars. It seems only fair.

The U.S. must leave its borders essentially unguarded. The Republicans want the cheap labor, the Democrats the cheap votes. Republicans agree to occasionally make noise and pretend they object to this, and the Democrats pretend to believe them, accusing them of “xenophobia” with perfectly straight faces. Why should we be surprised that while American babies go hungry, our government is shipping truckloads of baby formula to illegal immigrants at the border?

Our first national priority is massaging the egos and assuaging the moral hissy fits of our “cognitive elite,” the people who went to prestigious colleges and can afford to send their kids to the same. These people want transgender surgery for seven-year-olds at the moment, so that is what they will get. If next year they insist that we transplant the heads of dogs onto cats, they’ll get that too. And somehow those who oppose it will be convincingly tarred as “chimeraphobic.” Or more likely, just “racist.”

The other essential American value is the financial bottom lines of enormous, multinational companies, such as Disney, Nike, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Since these companies have been taken over politically by the same thin-skinned elitists, these companies must push all the right moralistic hot buttons. They’ll fund abortions, purge conservatives, and promote child-grooming materials. But don’t ask them to take a financial hit by boycotting China, for instance, which keeps labor prices low by using slave workers in concentration camps. That’s taking “corporate responsibility” too far.

The interests of parents, of churches, of blue collar workers and rural communities, must always come third, if they matter at all.

The Demopublican, Republicrat coalition that’s closing our lives in a vice, and playing nuclear chicken with Russia, should in the interests of honesty simply merge. It can call itself the America Last Party.

If you’re not satisfied with that, then do your research to find America First candidates and vote in the primaries as if your life depended on it. 

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”