When I told a friend that I was writing a couple of columns on the 10 dumbest ideas of 2021, the response was "How can you limit it to just 10?"
But one has to start somewhere, and Part I flagged the trend toward dropping SAT and ACT score requirements in college admissions (in order to hide racial preference schemes), proposals for a global minimum corporate tax (to protect high-tax nations from "unfair" competition), the introduction of critical race theory, "anti-racism," and related racist pedagogy into public schools (to further divide us along racial lines, at as early an age as possible), allowing biological men who claim to be women to compete against biological women in sporting events (thereby contradicting just about everything we know about human biology and believe about fairness), and the idea of wiping out college loan debt (so that people who don't have college degrees end up paying for those who do).
But when it comes to the worst of the worst, we get these:
5. Packing the Supreme Court because there aren't enough liberals on it.
Yes, Congress has constitutional authority over the federal courts and Democrats (for now) control Congress, but what would prevent a future Republican-controlled Congress (and one will arrive at some point) from returning the favor and tacking on still more justices, in their case conservative ones?
Within a few decades the Court could become a 50 member "super-legislature" that is thoroughly political in nature (as legislatures purposely tend to be) and which no longer even pretends to perform its proper constitutional role of properly interpreting the Constitution.
Such is the danger of trying to change the rules in pursuit of short-term political advantage (see the latest threats to "nuke" the Senate filibuster)--the other side can do it too, and everyone ends up losing.
4. Defunding or even abolishing police departments.
Demonizing the police leads to "de-policing," which leads to emboldened criminals, which leads to more crimes (as the latest data so amply demonstrate).
Put differently, there is always an inverse relationship in law enforcement--whatever makes policing more difficult makes crime easier to commit, and the public accordingly less safe.
A nod in this area must also go to woke prosecutors who fail to prosecute for minor offenses, redefine crimes as something less than crimes, and lower or even do away with cash bail under the banner of combating "systemic racism."
In the name of ideology, those entrusted with deterring crime thus end up encouraging it, and make American urban areas increasingly unlivable in the process.
3. The Biden administration's Build Back Better boondoggle.
In the so often unfortunate annals of human governance, it is difficult to find a precedent for a nation that has a national debt that is nearly 150 percent of GDP and which continues to rise in leaps and bounds seriously contemplating spending trillions of dollars more on projects that range from nice but unnecessary to downright frivolous.
All this while its highest elected official claims with a straight face that it won't cost a thing, won't add to the deficits, and won't contribute to what is already the worst inflation in 40 years.
If not for the common sense of one West Virginia senator, we would have flunked the most basic test of fiscal literacy.
2. Paying financial compensation to families who were separated when trying to enter the country illegally (since scuttled by the Biden administration after appropriate public outrage).
Not securing the border and refusing to enforce the nation's immigration laws (a consequence of our democratic process that Democrats always claim to be defending) is bad enough, but what bigger welcome mat could you put out than six- or even seven-figure payments to illegal immigrants, to be paid for by American citizens, many of whom won't make that much money through honest toil in their entire lifetimes?
A nation that can't (won't) secure its borders and no longer even tries to keep its streets safe isn't going to be a nation much longer.
1. The concept of equity, at least as understood by the Biden administration and the woke left.
What Biden and his minions want is not equality of treatment but the precise opposite--the expansion of racial preferences in all aspects of American life, in essence, the creation of a massive, medieval racial spoils system wherein people are treated differently merely on account of the color of their skin.
If racial statistical discrepancies are detected in any area, this is taken as conclusive evidence of systemic racism, and preferences must be imposed to achieve the proper (precisely proportionate) racial representation.
The concept of equity in such contexts justifies the abolition of any process or standard which fails to produce such proportionate outcomes, which in practice means the abandonment of the concept of merit itself (now viewed as a pernicious white supremacist concept).
Christine Rosen in Commentary sums up where this all leads by noting, "If all differences are intolerable inequities, all measures of difference will have to be eliminated."
Combating racism now requires committing racism, and equity requires that individuals be treated unequally and as something other than individuals.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.