People often ask if it is hard to think of things to write about. Actually, with all the silliness surrounding us, the problem tends to be the opposite -- picking among so many possibilities, to the point where I sometimes simply opt not to choose, as with columns like this.
• Yes, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pulled a "stunt" by sending illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard, but it was also a remarkably effective one for highlighting the hypocrisy and empty virtue-signaling of woke Democrats.
During the Cold War, there was always an inverse relationship between leftist fondness for communist dictatorships and their geographical distance from them; communism was a lot easier to like if you wouldn't have to live under it.
So, too, now with so much of the leftist woke agenda -- it's all good, but only so long as you can pose and posture and don't have to accept the consequences, in this case the actual burdens of illegal immigration in "sanctuary cities" that sprout up the farther you get from the border.
The larger problem is that the Biden administration is blatantly failing to fulfill the solemn duty that presidents promise to perform when taking the oath of office, which is to faithfully uphold the nation's laws. In Biden's case, the law is being purposely ignored, an offense then compounded by persistently and brazenly lying about it ("the border is secure").
That failure to enforce the law is a failure of the rule of law that should be troubling to all of us, regardless of our views of immigration and whether we are Democrats or Republicans.
There has always been debate over what constitutes sufficient grounds for impeachment of a president and one wonders where refusal to uphold the law fits therein.
• The central problem of the contemporary left is the lack of any "limiting principle." This lack is usually cited when it comes to welfare state programs in terms of the demand to constantly spend more once you've started to spend (once people acquire a "right" to what they didn't earn; that is, to other people's money, what don't they have a right to?), but it might apply even more clearly to social and cultural issues.
It seems that nothing is too crazy to receive consideration and eventual acceptance in such quarters these days, such that ideas that only a few years ago would have provoked laughter have now acquired the status of orthodoxy, with no dissent tolerated.
Perhaps nothing reflects this inability to say "No, that's just too nutty" than the left's failure to distinguish men from women, forcing it to defend the "right" of biological men to hang around women's locker rooms and advocate the genital mutilation of confused children.
Unlike Democrats, even Stalin and Mao knew what a woman was, and weren't afraid to say so.
• Rather than assume responsibility for various problems and assure us he is working to solve them, President Biden has an unfortunate habit of trying to convince people that what they see as problems really aren't and that everything is just peachy-creamy.
This probably won't work, however, with inflation, given the nature of the issue.
You can try to convince people that the border is secure, because most Americans live far away from it. You can downplay rising crime because most Americans don't live in crime-infested inner cities and therefore aren't personally victims of it. People might even believe that high unemployment isn't a problem because most of them at any given point still have jobs.
But whatever smoke Biden blows on inflation is seen through by all Americans every day, as they reach into their wallets to purchase goods and services. And they will grow angry if you tell them they aren't seeing what they are seeing.
• Perhaps the greatest fraud in American politics involves the innocuous-sounding phrase "Diversity, equity, and inclusion." As with "anti-racism" (which really means more racism, only now directed at new targets, i.e,. white folks), the perversion of language by "progressives" (in itself a misleading label, since little they recommend would produce "progress") is necessary to enact their agenda.
Used in the way progressives us it, "diversity" consequently means the embrace of racial proportionate representation (the allocation of resources to different racial groups in strict accord with their percentage of the population; accompanied by the assumption that disproportion is ipso facto evidence of racism), "equity" the adoption of racial preferences and quotas (in order to achieve the desired proportionate representation), and "inclusion" the exclusion of anyone who resists in any way the "diversity" and "equity" parts.
If accepted as an organizing principle in our lives, "diversity, equity, and inclusion" will mean the creation of a gigantic racial spoils system that will pit group against group, intensify racial conflict, and devalue merit to the point of producing societal dysfunction.
Chief Justice John Roberts once said that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Put differently, you can't use racism (defined as treating people differently based on race) to combat racism, and you can't get to a society where race matters less through policies that make it matter more.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.