Weaponized

Table of Contents of WEAPONIZED: The Left’s Control of State Power by Seth Barron Introduction: How struggles over seemingly unrelated issues—from school funding to immigration to absentee voting—are part of a war against local control. Chapter 1: The Meaning of Borders Donald Trump’s gravest sin was his call to build a “big beautiful” wall on the border with Mexico. Why? Because it would work, and it would affirm the sovereignty of the United States as a real nation—an exercise in self-governance that the country had undemocratically abdicated long before. The elite vision of the United States—on the left and the right—is as a kind of clearing house for financial transactions, a source of fodder for expeditions and wars, and a sump for the dispossessed of the world in order to displace the legacy population, which retains some nostalgia for constitutional America. In 2017, Nancy Pelosi said that “Immigrants make America more American.” This chapter will examine opposing viewpoints on the meaning of America. Is it a place for people who live here now and their “posterity,” as the Constitution says, or does it belong to people who have never set foot here? Chapter 2: You Didn’t Build That Since Trump’s expulsion from office, the border has ceased to exist in any meaningful way. Millions of people are permitted entry and millions more are encouraged to come. This chaos is hidden and unreported. It is contrary to the wishes of the American people, but it’s clear that this decision is not up to them. The Left continually repeat that “it wants to build bridges, not walls,” as though real walls and metaphorical bridges cannot coexist. This chapter will discuss the elite “Open Borders” movement on both the Left and the Right, and show how unlimited immigration is a war on labor by depressing wages. It will also discuss the Left’s open support for flooding the country with nonwhite immigrants as a means of achieving permanent political power. This chapter will review the nationwide effort, led by the federal government and executed by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to distribute the immigrant population throughout the United States, typically in secret. It will examine the effect on local communities of managing a sudden influx of poor, unskilled migrants, and the associated problems of assimilating these groups.  It will also review the many ways in which the government and pro-immigrant groups have tried to grant rights to people who tried and failed to enter the country. Chapter 3: “Secure the Blessings” The Left loathes many aspects of the way we vote, starting with the Electoral College. They present the fact that the country does not operate as a direct democracy as though no one noticed this before. In fact, the Founders were very careful to protect the rights of the minority by giving each state equal representation in the Senate, so the biggest population centers can’t control the whole country. Ending the Electoral College and the Senate would end the power of the states; this would represent the end of America as we know it. This chapter will review the meaning of our Federal system and why it is so crucial for Americans to retain their sovereignty. Chapter 4: “Defending Our Democracy” The very first item on the Democrats’ agenda when they won in 2020 was to end local oversight of the voting process. The Left wanted to make permanent all the loosened regulations of the lockdown, including ballot harvesting, ballot curing, no checks on signatures, etc. in order to remove the authority of local officials and ballot box observers to keep an eye on the process. In the name of clean elections, the Left wants to obscure all the processes associated with them. In order to keep voting fair, the Left wants to make it easier to cheat. And to keep elections equitable, localities and states must have to get federal approval to do anything related to voting. This chapter will detail the many ways in which the Left, while bleating about “defending Our Democracy,” does all they can to dismantle it. It will explain how “Our Democracy” is meant literally—it belongs to them, not us. Chapter 5: Defund the Police It has been noted that the Left calls racist anything it doesn’t control. Local police forces are the one government institution that, despite a unionized workforce, is largely “non-woke” and remains responsive to the needs of the law-abiding citizenry. Police draw heat for arresting nonwhites out of proportion to their population, but this is simply a reflection of their higher rates of crime, which is beyond dispute. The “Defund” movement blew up after the George Floyd riots, but the “abolitionist” perspective has been growing since the re-election of Obama in 2012. This chapter will review the attack on police, policing, and law and order. Theorists such as Michelle Alexander content that slavery and Jim Crow never really ended, because America developed police forces to manage and discipline the black population. Others admit that “mass incarceration” is fueled not by harsh sentences for minor crimes but by the wide prevalence of major violent crimes. Chapter 6: Public Safety vs Political Crime Defunders claim they want to “reimagine” public safety, but what this really means is the redirection of control of the policing function to “the community,” which in effect means federally-approved non-profit organizations such as those that have been the beneficiaries of massive payouts by former District Attorney of New York Cy Vance. The Left has nothing against policing, surveillance, the security state, or police violence: they simply want it directed against their enemies. The vision the Left has of policing in the future would be a federalized structure that attends largely to political crime (“hate crime”) and worries itself with “anti-democratic activists.” Violent crime and street crime would be handled by well-funded community groups that pursue violence interruption and restorative justice practices. Chapter 7: Let No Child Get Ahead The Left is obsessed with how schools have failed nonwhite children, but the fact that schools are staffed and run almost entirely by leftists is not permitted to enter the conversation. Instead, we are told that the reason why every single school district in America demonstrates the same “achievement gap” between white and Asian students on one hand, and black and Latino students on the other, is a question of funding. The Left insists that the inequitable funding of schools by local property taxes is a legacy of segregation, and entrenches segregationist principles even when public education is nominally integrated.  While many localities do fund public schools through property taxes, the disparities are less than is commonly imagined. Many districts, such as New York City, the largest school district in the nation, fund schools on a per-pupil basis. Many states allocate state money to make up for funding disparities, and all poor schools receive federal Title I funding. Of course, it’s not at all clear that more money equals better educational outcomes. New York City spends more than almost anywhere else in the country, and its outcomes are subpar.  This chapter will review the arguments regarding local funding of schools and the false allegations that the achievement gap is caused by so-called segregation. I will discuss charter schools and other “choice” considerations as possible solutions to the problem. Chapter 8: Your Children Are Our Resource But the effort to control local schools goes beyond the question of local funding. As the pandemic demonstrated, the national teachers union wields astounding power over educational policy and practice, and coordinates with the Democratic Party at the highest levels. The federal government even colluded with an obscure committee of state school board associations to classify parents who attend school board meetings as domestic terrorists. Efforts to impose critical race theory instruction, transgender education, and other radical ideologies through the schools are a key tenet of leftist activism. This chapter will review attempts to subvert parental input or even knowledge of curricular content, and the extent to which the Left sees control of the schools as key to its control of the future. A key part of this chapter will explore the war on charter schools, religious schools, and homeschooling, which are increasingly described as dangerous, a threat to democratic institutions, the locus of sexual abuse, and failures even by their own terms. Chapter 9: Segregation Forever It is now widely believed on the Left that U.S. residential and developmental patterns have entrenched inequality throughout the nation. “Redlining,” or the federal practice of guaranteeing mortgages in stable or growing neighborhoods, has been cast as a vast exercise in segregation. In reality, while many black people did have trouble obtaining mortgages, so did everyone who lived in poor, substandard housing stock in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.  The Left is also preoccupied by the idea that the highway system intentionally divided nonwhite neighborhoods; we hear this argument about New York City. However, in many cases, the communities that were divided were entirely white, and only became minority neighborhoods later.  This chapter will review the arguments and myths about postwar urban development, the real estate market, and trillion-dollar efforts to expand homeownership among nonwhites. Certain claims about Robert Moses’ racism will be given special attention. Chapter 10: Magic Dirt, Tragic Dirt The power of neighborhoods to determine what they should be like through regulation of development is crucial to community identity and self-determination. But a concerted army of pro-density activists known as YIMBYs (“Yes In My BackYard”) are motivated by an ideological fixation on destroying the suburban model of single-family housing, which they view as racially exclusionary, environmentally destructive, and economically destructive. They blame single-family zoning as the root cause of persistent inequality, homelessness, and climate change. Their vision of the future is hyperdense mixed-use residential living, mass transit, and a trend toward socialized housing. The principle that “ZIP code is destiny” animates their desire to effect population transfer to ensure that all communities are racially mixed, at the same time that they decry the gentrification of minority neighborhoods.  Laws to restrict the right of cities and neighborhoods to impose land-use restrictions have passed at the state level in Washington, Minnesota, and to a limited extent California. This is a nationwide movement that aims to repair the long-lasting effects of redlining, which supposedly denied blacks the ability to build “generational wealth.”  Tied back to the original point of the book, YIMBYism is a form of Open Borders on the local level. The idea is that Americans have no right to determine what their own communities should be like. That prerogative belongs to people who haven’t gotten there yet.