By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
As we look ahead to another year – and another presidential election, and another international Olympics, and all the other disparate opportunities for confusion that come with a new year in the modern world – it might be a pipe dream, but we should try to demand a return to honesty from our public figures.
We can’t demand easy, painless answers; too many of the problems they’ve made for us will be painful to fix, no matter what course we take. But surely we can demand honesty, at least about the big picture.
One of the biggest lies in current parlance is the ridiculous assertion that carbon dioxide, which every animal produces by exhaling and every plant depends on for life, is somehow dangerous. In fact, for carbon-based life forms, as we all are, carbon dioxide is imperative, and the planet would benefit from more of it, not less of it.
Countless studies and exposes – from the Heartland Institute, from Congressional committee inquiries, and from independent researchers – have proven that the alleged science at the heart of this fear was entirely fabricated, largely for financial gain and corrupt politics.
Most of the truly destructive initiatives of the modern Left are pushed under the guise of this imagined need to do away with CO2. From the automobile to the jet, from your home’s water heater to your kitchen stove, even the very power plants we depend on for our health, livelihood and culture, the Left blames most of their crushing, dictatorial bans on this one outrageous lie.
Once you admit that the fear of CO2 is a lie, the entire leftist agenda is exposed as tyranny and fraud.
Secondly, our society spent hundreds of years trying to find a reasonable balance between the sexes, a balance in which the special and different characteristics and abilities of men and women can be individually respected, removing undue favoritism and restrictions while promoting societally beneficial programs for each.
In the past ten years, the malevolent deceit of the trans movement has undone those centuries of advancement.
It’s easy to make fun of ridiculous characters like the Biden-Harris regime’s airport luggage klepto and its Pennsylvania public health officer, and other ludicrous men in drag in public office.
But the mainstreaming of this foolishness has robbed hardworking girls in sports of a lifetime of work, snatching medals, scholarships, and endorsement deals away while often destroying brands, programs, and college reputations.
Yes, sometimes we go too far with the quota culture. But if we’re going to have a women’s team and a men’s team, whether in swimming or baseball or boxing, then we have to return to restricting these competitions to people of their respective biological classifications. The “Lia Thomases” of the world are destroying not just amateur sports, but the entire funding vehicle that enables hard-working and deserving girls to get into college.
And it’s time to admit that affirming a delusion, instead of trying to help correct it, is destructive to not only that individual patient but society as a whole, as well.
Third, our political system has long been rooted in promising to “solve” people’s problems with other people’s money. Eventually, we all screamed for decades, that bill would come due in the form of inflation. Finally, in the years following the 2020 “pandemic,” it has.
Two lies are intricately and inextricably linked: that the National Debt doesn’t matter, and that business gouging causes inflation.
In fact, while there are some employer-employee choices that do contribute to inflation without government involvement (such as massive multi-year private union contracts like those of UPS and the ILWU, which lock in price increases rather than allowing them to settle after a temporary spike), for the most part, almost all inflation is caused by government overspending.
No matter whether it’s funded by taxation, borrowing, or monetizing, all government spending leads to inflation because by printing more “dollars” than the free market produces, all dollars in circulation are necessarily devalued. It’s as immutable as the laws of physics.
We must acknowledge that we can no longer afford the politics of bread and circuses. Every new government program, whether objectively good or bad, adds to our National Debt because we can’t afford ANY of them. We must restrain the temptations of both regular welfare and corporate welfare, both energy subsidies and stimulus checks. We must not only stop expanding the bureaucracy; we must start cutting it back aggressively.
Every citizen’s standard of living, every retirement fund, every legacy that we individually hope to leave to our grandchildren, is diminished by government overspending. Unless we are literally attacked on our soil by a foreign nation and need to mount an immediate response, our full attention needs to be focused on cutting the size of our cripplingly bloated government.
Now, let’s talk about our out-of-control southern border.
Is there anything more unbelievable than the Biden-Harris regime’s claim that controlling the border is difficult?
President Trump managed to reduce illegal immigration to a trickle without even being allowed to finish building the wall. Illegal immigration has only skyrocketed since the arrival of the Biden-Harris regime because it has been invited, encouraged, funded and rewarded.
We can debate the reasons why the modern Left supports open borders – they need the votes, they favor replacement theory, they like having cheap nannies and gardeners, they have taken all they can from blacks and Indians so they need new minority populations to take advantage of – there could be dozens of reasons, all of them bad but accurate, to explain the position.
But this much is undeniable: it’s easy to control the border, and we must do so, as soon as possible.
This flow of illegal aliens contributes to the crime problem, to the welfare state, to the diminishment of our shared nationhood, to the growth of the national debt. It is a slap in the face to law-abiding immigrants who did it the right way; it is an intentional destruction of the advancement opportunities of whole generations to come.
The Biden-Harris regime claims it needs to negotiate with foreign governments to get them to reduce the flow; but everyone knows – yes, everyone – that the Biden-Harris regime wants these millions of gate-crashers every year, because it weakens our society, diminishes our standing, cripples our economy and increases dependence on both our government and our enemy, China.
As we watch them put up these illegals in government-funded hotels that the average American citizen could never afford, the lie that “the border is uncontrollable” is shown for the vicious and outrageous claim that it is.
Our problems are not irreparable. With a free market, the rule of law, and a return to the values of our Founding Fathers, these United States could indeed return to the prosperity and stability we once enjoyed.
But that requires honesty – in politics, pop culture, education and the media. It requires an end to the many public lies with which we have learned to live in recent years.
As 2024 approaches, is that really too much to hope for?
Copyright 2023 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. Once a County Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, after serving as president of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook, Twitter, Gettr or TruthSocial.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, “The Tales of Little Pavel,” and his 2021 political satires about current events, “Evening Soup with Basement Joe,” Volumes One, Two, and Three, are available in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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