https://www.illinoisreview.com/illinoisreview/2022/09/slander-insults-and-agitation-joe-returns-to-his-roots.html

On September 1, Joe Biden headed to Independence Hall in Philadelphia – where the Continental Congress met, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were created – and instead of rising to the heights deserved by the rooftop that once held the Liberty Bell, he sank below the gutters outside, and delivered a rant worthy of the lowest shop steward, the most guttural petty mobster.

In an insult-laden speech, Joe Biden kicked off his part of the midterm election season by insulting America’s voters and slandering the conservative movement.

None of this should be surprising, of course, as insult and slander have enjoyed the featured position in his toolbox throughout his fifty-year political career.

It is the nature of the attacks, however, that one finds surprising. He calls conservatives “extremist.” He calls conservatives “unAmerican.” He calls conservatives “a threat to Democracy”. For him, of all people, to accuse his opponents of these things, would be shocking if we didn’t know him by now. There’s a word for this, though Joe Biden probably wouldn’t know what it means: Chutzpa.

As Biden was ranting, news was breaking in the foreign press… as it always is.

In Russia Thursday, businessman Ravil Maganov, a vocal critic of the invasion of Ukraine, fell six stories to his death from a Moscow hospital window. Apparently, you don’t criticize Vladimir Putin without eventually regretting it. Nobody can exactly say that the oil executive was pushed, but the word on the street is that Vladimir Putin has long arms indeed.

In the Netherlands, news coverage Thursday concerned meetings between the Dutch government and the Dutch farmers. One of the most productive parts of Europe, agriculturally speaking, their farmers have called on the government to relax the insane environmentalist extremism that has them ordering reductions in fertilizer, reductions in production, reductions in the raising of meat and grain alike… all in the service of the crackpot theory that carbon dioxide is endangering our weather. The government refuses to back down, and farmers are learning to their horror that their own elected government is doing to their economy what only foreign enemies like Hitler and Napoleon had ever done in the past – robbing them of their livelihoods, robbing their nation of its standard of living.

In England, a report was released Thursday that more illegal migrants – what we call illegal aliens over on this side of the Pond – crossed the English Channel into England in August than in all of 2020. Great Britain, while being much smaller than the United States, shares much in common with the United States on this issue, as with many. A nation built on a common language, common culture, and common law has found itself threatened as hundreds of thousands of illegals overwhelm the system, far faster than they can assimilate, so many of them without even the slightest interest in joining the great British republican tradition of limited monarchy that made them one of the greatest countries in the world.

Even farther north, in Scotland, the Scottish government Thursday definitively slapped down requests to alleviate the ongoing energy shortage by authorizing further oil drilling on Scottish land and in Scottish territorial waters. No compassion for the millions without power this summer – no compassion for the millions whose jobs are jeopardized due to power blackouts in industrial districts. They have no interest in compassion; the cult of global warming must be appeased. The political desire to publicly ban petroleum outranks the all-too-ordinary human desire to work, eat, and live.

The news doesn’t improve when we return our gaze to these United States.

As Joe Biden was preparing to read his evening’s teleprompter, the markets were continuing to plummet, some six percent this week alone, since being hit with the double-barrelled blasts of Biden’s massive “income reduction act” (as analysts are now calling it) and the illegal and inconceivable student loan giveaway in recent weeks. The markets always try to imagine positives below the surface, but analysts are finally beginning to put away their rose-colored glasses and admit to themselves that this regime is just nothing but a one-dementia-patient wrecking ball to the U.S. economy.

A week after unilaterally decreeing that the Democrat-ruled state of California will no longer allow its residents to have gasoline-powered cars in a few years, the same state decreed that the million Californians who already have electric cars are forbidden from charging them when needed, because the state has idiotically banned the necessary sources of power to support them.

Also on Thursday, it was revealed that pro-crime radical John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, is such an advocate for criminals that he has two recently paroled convicted murderers on his campaign staff. Republican candidate Mehmet Oz makes the important point that Fetterman isn’t just a potentially ignorant executive, unaware of his employees; Fetterman chairs the state Board of Pardons that freed the two killers. He can hardly claim he doesn't know they're on his payroll and his campaign donors are paying for their "service" to him, whatever that service may be.

Also on Thursday, new evidence surfaced in the developing story of how the Biden administration in Washington has been ordering willing leadership of social media to censor the political speech of their members, apparently ever since they moved into the White House last year. The more we learn, the more evident it becomes that the ludicrous “fact checking” that Facebook, Twitter, and others employ has not just been their own idea, but has been guided and spurred forward by a corrupt regime that clearly hasn’t the slightest interest in respecting the First Amendment of the Constitution they swore to uphold.

That’s the news from the coasts; what happened in the heartland on Thursday? Well, Chicago’s DePaul University, located in the once safe and wealthy neighborhood known as Lincoln Park, issued a safety alert to its students, after two sexual assaults on campus in just three days. This is a campus with its own security force and a network of call boxes and cameras all over the university, but you just can’t keep out the big city crime anymore in Democratic cities that insist on releasing known criminals back into the community as fast as they pick them up.

What do these stories have in common?

Each of these cases – just a sampling of hundreds of stories like them, both within the United States and around the world – represents the same core problem: governments choosing to make society worse, rather than to make society better.

Local and state governments are chartered, among other things, to regulate the utilities to ensure that there are sufficient power, water, and roads for their residents. They are chartered to remove criminals from our midst so that we can live in reasonable safety. It’s not so much to ask. But more and more, governments do the opposite; they choose snail darters over the supply of water to the people; they choose to reward criminals and jeopardize the law-abiding. They choose an indefensible fear of “two degrees of warming” - imagined to occur a century in the future - over the economic security and genuine basic needs of the public today.

So many of today’s national governments are no better. We see them refusing licenses to produce the energy their people need; we see them tying the hands of farmers and refusing to allow their own agriculture sector to feed a starving population.

In short, we see government overreach at every way, at every level. Wherever today’s Leftists are in charge – call them socialists or Democrats or liberals or progressives, it doesn’t matter; they’re all just statists – wherever they rule, destruction follows in their wake.

A Russian president shouldn’t have the power to have a critic killed in a hospital, but he has assumed that power. An American administration shouldn’t have the power to silence its critics, but it too has taken it on.

An American city or county government should be zealously protecting the safety of its residents, by locking up the drug dealers, robbers, rapists and killers that roam its streets; but more and more, these local governments take the side of the criminals and leave the innocent citizens to live in fear.

These are the enemies of the American Republic – and for that matter, across our borders and across the oceans, these are the enemies of their own republics, their own people, as well. Just as the people of Illinois, California and Pennsylvania deserve better than we get from the Democrat politicians who run our states into the ground, so too do the good people of Great Britain, and the Netherlands and Russia too, all deserve better than they are getting from the statist leaders who have taken control of their countries.

Joe Biden can lash out all he wants. He can make as much of a fool of himself – and of his voters – as his long-corrupted soul desires. It won’t change the facts.

Who are the extremists today? Not the people who want to go to the office or the factory and earn a living. Not the people who want to farm their fields, feed their families, educate their children. Not the people who want to drive their cars, heat their homes, walk their neighborhoods, stroll along the lakefront.

No. The extremists are the ones who would prevent them from doing so. The extremists are the ones who shut down our energy sources and water sources. The ones who release killers from jail back onto our streets. The ones who tax and regulate our employers out of business. The ones who close our theaters or our farms or our food processing plants, in the deranged service of the World Economic Forum, the climate hoax, the marxist dialectic.

Joe Biden can scream “Extremist!” at the top of his lungs. But he can’t change the truth.

The biggest extremist on this scene is Joe Biden. He and his administration are as anti-American as they can be, and both they and their allies, in state capitols and city halls across the country, are the real dangers to the American republic – to not only our standard of living, but our very way of life, our traditions, and our future.

The sooner the voters show them the door, the better.