When I became a senator, I knew that I was going to be reading a fair amount of legislation. I also expected to read briefing books, data on government programs, and the writings of judges and political appointees whose nominations I would be considering for confirmation as part of my job.
What I didn’t know was all the other reading the job would entail.
In the spring of 2022, for instance, I ended up sitting in my office thumbing through the latest editions of neo-racist propaganda for children, most memorably the book Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi. Other titles were similarly absurd. I’m sure that anyone who happened to pass by and see me sitting there with my boots on my desk making my way slowly through this woke slush pile from hell would have been surprised. Surely, they’d say, you could just look up the summaries online, or maybe assign some poor congressional intern the task of wading through this interminable nonsense?
Maybe. But for as long as I’ve been in government, and even when I was a lawyer in private practice, I’ve always found it’s better to examine the original sources yourself. My apartment in Washington, D.C., is filled with books and stacks of papers; so are several rooms of my home back in Texas. Most of these are books that I’ve enjoyed throughout my life—from biographies to history to economics to literature—while others are things that I’ve read to prepare for oral arguments, debates, congressional hearings, and even campaign stops over the years. I’m sure that somewhere on my shelves, you’d find things that would surprise you. Compendiums of Critical Race Theory, for instance, and several books authored by Karl Marx, cited in the pages of this book.
In recent years, I have also spent many hours sitting in the basement of the Capitol at a small table in the Senate’s sensitive compartmented information facility, the only place I am permitted to read most classified government documents. (Unlike some former senators from Delaware, I don’t think you can just take these things home on the plane with you and peruse them at your leisure in the garage by your Corvette.)1 Sitting in the SCIF, as it’s called, I’ve read documents about everything from foreign intelligence to nuclear preparedness to cyber-vulnerabilities to FBI background files on Supreme Court nominees, all while a military aide watches from a desk out front and makes sure I don’t stuff anything into my briefcase (or in my pants, as Clinton national security advisor Sandy Berger was convicted of doing with classified documents).2 On the walls are posters that look like they could have come from World War II, bombarding anyone who enters the SCIF with messages like Only YOU Can Stop a Leak.
I should confess that fairly early in my Senate career I eagerly rushed down to the congressional SCIF looking for whatever information the government had about UFOs. I went in with every expectation that I would find at least one document about little green men, flying saucers, or secret experiments conducted out in the deserts of Nevada. It gives me no pleasure to report that I walked out of the SCIF that night extremely disappointed.
Of course, most of my reading doesn’t have to happen inside a secret facility. Most of it doesn’t deal with things like UFOs or secret intelligence operations our military is conducting overseas (though some of it does). Most of my reading, rather, consists of news reports, books, and widely available technical documents. Some of it isn’t reading at all, but rather watching YouTube videos and reading Twitter threads about every subject imaginable. With some regularity, I have to master materials in all these media to prepare for confirmation hearings.
In the first six months of 2023, exactly three non-judicial Biden nominees were defeated in the Senate. All three were before the Senate Commerce Committee, where I’m the ranking member (the senior Republican).
The first was Gigi Sohn, a left-wing activist whom Biden had nominated to the Federal Communications Commission. She hated Fox News, in particular; some of her notable prior comments included these remarks:
“I believe that Fox News has had the most negative impact on our democracy. It’s state-sponsored propaganda, with few if any opposing viewpoints.”3
“I agree that scrutiny of big tech is essential, as is scrutiny of big telecom, cable & media. And trust me, the latter have played their own role in destroying democracy & electing autocrats. Like, say, Fox News?”4
She had also liked and retweeted other leftists labeling Donald Trump a “White supremacist” and calling for defunding the police.5
Most astonishingly, she had spent years supporting and fundraising for Fight for the Future, a group that erected billboards across the country accusing multiple senators on the Commerce Committee of being “corrupt.” They had called Roger Wicker and Marsha Blackburn (both Republicans) corrupt, but also numerous Democrats. So I asked Ms. Sohn if she agreed with the group that Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema was corrupt. She said “no.”
I asked her if she agreed that Montana Democrat Jon Tester was corrupt. She said “no.”
I asked her if she agreed that Michigan Democrat Gary Peters was corrupt. She said “no.”
At this point, Maria Cantwell, the Washington State Democrat who’s chair of the committee, asked, somewhat jokingly, “Am I next?” And I laughed, “As it so happens, you are!”
Just a few months earlier this same group, supported by Sohn, had sent a letter to Chuck Schumer demanding that he fire Cantwell as chair of the Commerce Committee—because we had not yet confirmed Gigi Sohn.
As I observed, it was the first time I had seen a nominee so extreme that she had attacked half of the committee charged with confirming her, including her own party.
I also noted ruefully that I was a little offended that this left-wing group hadn’t attacked me. “What do I have to do to attract their ire?” I asked.6 I’m glad to say they heard me; shortly thereafter they put out a tweet trying to crowdfund a billboard attacking me, which featured the website tedcruzhatesfreespeech.com. Well, it turns out the group wasn’t particularly competent… they didn’t actually own that website.
So I bought it.
And I encouraged folks to support the billboard and go to the website that had been set up to attack me—which now automatically redirects to my campaign fundraising page on tedcruz.org!7
Needless to say, having a left-wing radical like Sohn as the deciding vote on the Federal Communications Commission—with massive power over television, radio, telephones, and the internet—would have been profoundly dangerous. But, thankfully, exposing her extreme record was enough to defeat the nomination.8
The second non-judicial Biden nominee to be defeated was Phil Washington, whom Biden had nominated to become the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which issues and enforces standards on manufacturing, operating, and maintaining aircraft in the United States. As you might imagine, this is an important job. The administrator is required to oversee thousands of planes and pilots and to do everything possible to ensure the safety of the roughly two million Americans who fly every day.
As presidential appointments go, this one is typically nonpartisan. If you look at past heads of the FAA, they have typically been apolitical experts in aviation. Most of them have either served in the military or worked as a commercial pilot, or both. At a minimum, the people who have held this position at the top of the FAA have typically spent decades working in aviation.
In the age of Joe Biden, whose every move seems to be dictated by the woke neo-Marxists who surround him, congressional oversight has become immensely important. It has never been more vital to ensure that the people who staff our federal government are competent, clearheaded, and free of left-wing ideological extremism. That’s not to say that Joe Biden isn’t free to nominate anyone he wishes to fill federal positions, of course, or that those nominees can’t assume those positions if the Senate confirms them. But it is my job to make sure that if these people are extreme or unqualified—which, when the Biden administration is involved in the nomination process, is not an uncommon occurrence—the American people know about it.
By all appearances, Phil Washington was a decent man who had served honorably in the military for twenty-four years. The problem was that he didn’t know a damn thing about airplanes.
So, at his hearing, I asked him about his experience.
“Have you ever flown a plane?”
“No, I have never flown a plane.”
“So, you weren’t a military pilot or a commercial airline pilot?”
“No, Senator.”
“Have you ever worked for an airline?”
“No, Senator.”
“Have you ever worked as an air traffic controller?”
“No, Senator.”
“You ever worked for a company that manufactures airplanes?”
“No, Senator.”
“You ever worked for a company that fixes airplanes?”
“No, Senator.”
Washington’s lone claim to “aviation” experience was that he had spent the previous twenty months as the CEO of the Denver airport, which basically meant he was in charge of the parking and restaurants and stores—essentially, running a giant shopping mall. But I gave him a chance to explain whether any of that related to aviation safety:
“You’re in charge of coffee shops and clothing stores and newsstands. You’re not in charge of the pilots, are you?”
“No, Senator.”
“You’re not in charge of the airplane mechanics, are you?”
“No, Senator.”
“You’re not in charge of the air traffic controllers, are you?”
“No, Senator.”
At that point, it was clear to every observer that Phil Washington had precisely zero experience in aviation safety. But perhaps he was a quick study. Maybe he had learned about it in his free time. So I asked him about the worst air disasters in the past decade, the two recent crashes of Boeing 737 Maxes—one on Lion Air in 2018 and the other on Ethiopian Airlines in 2019—that together had resulted in the loss of 346 lives. At the time of those crashes, I was the chairman of the aviation subcommittee of Commerce, so I spent quite a bit of time meeting with experts and learning about the technical details of both crashes. I was one of the first to call for grounding every 737 Max (something the FAA did shortly thereafter) until we could be confident it wouldn’t happen again, and I had played a leading role at a subsequent hearing cross-examining the CEO of Boeing for the shockingly poor corporate behavior that precipitated the crashes. The CEO resigned shortly thereafter.
In short, the crashes were caused because a new system Boeing had installed, called the MCAS system, automatically steered the nose of the plane down, repeatedly, in response to erroneous signals from what are called the angle of attack (AOA) sensors that incorrectly indicated the plane nose was rising at too steep an angle. Each plane has two AOA sensors, but on at least one of the planes a bird strike had sheared one of the sensors off the plane, and the MCAS system responded to false data. Inexperienced pilots didn’t know how to respond, and the plane tragically steered itself down directly into the ground.9
I asked Washington about the specifics of the crashes:
“OK. The MCAS system is responsible for the crashes at issue. What happens when you get a different reading from two different sensors?”
“Can you repeat that question, Senator?”
“What happens when you get a different reading from two different angle of attack sensors?”
“Well, I think human reaction needs to take over if that occurs.”
“So why did that not happen on the Lion Air and Ethiopian Air flights?”
“Well, Senator—I’m not a pilot. I don’t know if I can answer that particular question….”
“Mr. Washington, I believe you. But, at the end of the day, that’s the fundamental problem. For this administration to nominate someone as FAA administrator who can’t answer the question why were 346 people killed in horrific crashes that resulted in the 737 Max being grounded for a long time is striking. By the way, Administrator Dickson [under Trump], after the FAA recertified the 737 Max, he went and flew it personally.”10
At the end of the questioning, nobody in the room believed Phil Washington had the experience necessary to be the administrator of the FAA. And that was enough to defeat his nomination.11
The third nominee to be defeated was Ann Carlson, whom Biden had nominated to run the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The NHTSA, like the FAA, is an agency with critical safety responsibilities. And once again, Biden had nominated someone with no actual experience with highway safety. Instead, Carlson was a law professor at UCLA and an environmental extremist. As the Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at UCLA and a faculty affiliate of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, she had helped a for-profit law firm specializing in “climate change lawsuits” sue numerous energy companies.12 As one of her UCLA colleagues said, Carlson was “the perfect person for the job” because she would “play an important role in crafting automobile-efficiency standards that are central to the country’s efforts to address climate change.”13
All of that qualified Carlson to be a card-carrying Green New Deal zealot, but none of it related to automobile safety. (Which does actually matter!) But it seems that the Biden White House didn’t care. Presumably they wanted an activist running the agency, someone who could use its authority to wage ideological war on internal combustion engines. Thankfully, Carlson’s record as an environmental extremist was undeniable, and I think Senate Democrats were a little shell-shocked from the defeat of Sohn and Washington. My team and I were able to build such strong opposition to Carlson among energy producers and farm and agricultural groups that it became clear she wouldn’t have the votes to get through, and so the White House pulled her nomination before her hearing.
This pattern exists across the government. Over the past three years I’ve seen the Biden administration repeatedly nominate people for key positions who were manifestly unqualified to serve. In some cases, these people have been confirmed over my strident objections, as was the case with Judge (now Justice) Ketanji Brown Jackson. A vast percentage of the time, these people were nominated because they were “diverse”—meaning that they belonged to some supposed “victim” group that the Biden administration believed was underrepresented in the federal government—or because they were willing to follow orders from woke neo-Marxists in the White House.
Usually, both.
As president, Joe Biden has not prioritized expertise or competency when nominating people to fill his administration. Ideology and political activism appear to be much more important in the selection process. Anyone who doubts this need only consider the resumes of Pete Buttigieg, who heads the massive Transportation Department despite only ever having been the mayor of a small town, and of Rachel Levine, who seems to have been given control of a major portion of the Department of Health and Human Services solely because Levine is a “transgender woman.”
There was a time, for instance, when the Biden administration was pushing a candidate to become comptroller of the currency (a position within the Treasury Department) who, as recently as 2019, had expressed openly Marxist views. And when I say “Marxist,” I don’t mean simply that this woman, whose name is Saule Omarova, believed in high taxes and the transfer of wealth. I mean she studied Marxism in the Soviet Union at Moscow State University, she wrote her undergraduate thesis on “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital”14 while studying on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship,15 and—while at Cornell Law School—she was a member of a Facebook group called “Marxist Analysis and Policy.”16
That group does not even try to hide its mission. This is the description on the Facebook page: “This Marxist group is a platform for analysis, policy and polemics from the perspectives of a diverse range of Socialist and anti-capitalist views…. We are against exploitation, inequality, racial discrimination and ecological destruction at the core of Capitalist social relations. The working class has the potential and the ability to change Capitalism and in the process change itself. Only working people, by their own efforts, can free themselves from Capitalism. We stand for the self emancipation of the working class and Socialism.”17
Now, I have been sounding the alarm about Joe Biden and the neo-Marxists who surround him for over a hundred pages now, but even for them, this seems a little too on the nose. As my good friend John Kennedy memorably said to Omarova at her confirmation hearing, “I don’t know whether to call you Professor or Comrade.”18
Thankfully, last year the Senate defeated her nomination. Being unqualified to lead an agency is one thing, but believing that the entire economy that the agency you want to work in regulates amounts to “exploitation, inequality, racial discrimination, and ecological destruction” is ridiculous. It’d be like giving the Joker a job as the Gotham City police commissioner.
As Biden continues to fill the government with Marxists—mostly Cultural Marxists, but on occasion some old-school economic Marxists—it becomes clearer and clearer just how seriously this administration is attempting to transform the federal government, and by extension American society. Since day one, they’ve been quite clear about this goal, at least to those of us who’ve learned to read their long, buzzword-laden documents.
Take a look.
From their first days in the White House, the folks in the Biden administration appear to have been governing according to the principles of Cultural Marxism. Hardly a day goes by when they don’t speak about “equity” and “antiracism” as if they are the highest goals of the American government. Most of the executive orders the president has signed and the key legislation his administration has tried to pass includes provisions about race, gender, and past oppression that would completely reorient the goals of the federal government.
Take Executive Order 13985, for instance, one of the first that Joe Biden signed when he took office.19 It reads like some unholy conflation of Karl Marx, Ibram X. Kendi, and a freshman at Wesleyan University using ChatGPT to write a C-grade essay on racism.
According to this executive order—which Biden somehow squeezed in between one initiative to shut down our oil industry and another to eliminate gas stoves—“entrenched disparities in our laws and public policies, and in our public and private institutions, have often denied… equal opportunity to individuals and communities. Our country faces converging economic, health, and climate crises that have exposed and exacerbated inequities, while a historic movement for justice has highlighted the unbearable human costs of systemic racism.”20
This language, which might at first seem unintentionally vague and sloppy, is in fact intended to be vague. It is written to hide the fact that “equity,” as the word is used by the modern Democratic Party, has nothing to do with equality of opportunity. It has nothing to do with making sure that everyone, regardless of race or gender, is treated equally under the law.
And of course there is absolutely no need to sign an executive order to that effect. Under federal law, it is already illegal to treat people differently based on their race, gender, or religion. I would encourage anyone who doubts this to read the full text of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was passed into law over the strident objection and filibuster of Southern Democrats. (When the Left demagogues on race, one very inconvenient fact for them is that a much higher percentage of Republican senators supported the Civil Rights Act than did Democratic senators.)
What the Biden administration wants to do, instead, is promote equality of outcome, ensuring that the United States government—and, eventually, all schools, businesses, universities, and other institutions—replaces the goal of fairness with “equity,” a term that is nearly impossible to define and even harder to implement.
As I’ve pointed out before, the word “equity” itself is a rather insidious piece of political propaganda. You almost have to admire how easily left-wing activists have been able to insert it into public life and government documents without anyone so much as batting an eyelash. To those who haven’t immersed themselves in the strange, borderline incomprehensible literature on which this concept is based, I’m sure the word looks just like “equality” and seems to mean the same thing. I suspect that when most people heard President Biden read the summary of Executive Order 13985, they didn’t think twice about the strange new word that was now the number-one priority of the federal government.
It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider the true meaning—and, more important, the implications—of making “equity” the central guiding principle of our federal government. It does not mean “equality,” as President Biden’s executive order suggests.
Here, for the uninitiated, is an explanation of the difference between the two words from the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, which is fairly representative of the average leftist’s view on the matter:
While the terms equity and equality may sound similar, the implementation of one versus the other can lead to dramatically different outcomes for marginalized people.
Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.21
In other words, the federal government cannot stop until all outcomes are equal. Presumably, that means that all institutions must have equal representation, and that all groups in society—however you choose to define those groups, whether along racial, ethnic, or sexual lines—must have the same outcomes across the board. If someone conducts a study and finds that Nicaraguan people who identify as transgender, say, make an average of three dollars less per year than non-Nicaraguan, non-transgender citizens, equity has not been achieved.
And if that outcome has not been achieved, it is probably because someone, at some point in the past, rigged the system against trans Nicaraguans out of racism and transphobia. It’s not because we live in a nation of more than 300 million human beings and some of those human beings will—because of disparate abilities and disparate effort—achieve more or less than other human beings. In the eyes of the neo-Marxist Biden administration, everything can be explained by racism. As Ibram X. Kendi himself has put it, “As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism.”22
Although it may not be evident on a first read, this executive order—along with many other documents published by the Biden White House—is an explicitly neo-Marxist document. Rather than drawing economic battle lines the way Karl Marx and his first disciples did, it reframes the debate along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality. Anyone who has ever been discriminated against or “marginalized” is now part of the revolutionary class, and the solution is to ensure mandated “equity” for all people.
If you’re wondering just how radical this idea is—and how much of a change it represents from government policies of the past—consider that even Senator Bernie Sanders, once the most woke, far-left extremist in the United States Senate, doesn’t quite know what to make of it. Asked about the difference between “equity” and “equality” on a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Senator Sanders reacted to the question with the kind of confused look he usually reserves for people who ask about the three different expensive homes he owns.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said.
A few minutes later, after Bill Maher patiently explained the difference between the two concepts, Senator Sanders admitted that he believed “equality” was a better goal than equity.23
By the time Senator Sanders got this question, of course, it was already too late. The tentacles of the federal government had already glommed on to nearly every institution in the United States, attempting to reorient them toward the strange new goal of equity.
This took several bizarre forms. In the realm of transportation, for instance, Secretary Pete Buttigieg seems to have made it his principal crusade to fix the unbearable “racism” of our nation’s roads and bridges. Speaking in July of 2022, as airline flights were being cancelled at record levels and the price of gas was nearing all-time highs—problems that you might think fall under the purview of the secretary of transportation—Buttigieg instead spoke at length about how “there is racism physically built into some of our highways.”24
As proof for this odd claim, Buttigieg said that in the early twentieth century “an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach… in New York was… designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices.”25
To anyone familiar with political history, the remark set off alarm bells. Secretary Buttigieg’s source was The Power Broker, a thousand-page biography of city planner Robert Moses that was published in 1974. (This book by Robert Caro, along with his four-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson, is almost required reading in political circles.) It tells the story of how Robert Moses, a progressive Democrat who was never elected to public office, was able to work the levers of civic power and redesign much of New York City and Long Island according to his will.
The book is an excellent achievement of biography. But it is also, as Vincent J. Cannato has pointed out in City Journal, “deeply flawed.”26 In its pages, you’ll find a portrait of Robert Moses that contains very little nuance, despite the book being longer than anything Leo Tolstoy ever published. Caro seems to have decided relatively early in the reporting process that his subject was racist—which, given the time he lived in, might well be true—and to have shaped and framed all the available evidence to make this point.
Sometimes this zeal to construct a narrative made him get things wrong, and the “racist overpass” anecdote is one example. According to several historians, including one at Columbia University whose students spend months every year trying to prove that anecdotes from the book are correct, it’s just “not true.” As even the fact-checker at the Washington Post had to acknowledge, initially coming out in defense of Buttigieg’s claim,27 the evidence is that the low height of these overpasses was “due to cost.”28
Now I know that it may seem strange to linger for so long over a mildly stupid claim that Pete Buttigieg made more than a year ago. I’m sure that in the months since he has made remarks that would make the one about racist roads look like the solution to a complex differential equation.
But I think it’s important to note just how reductive and idiotic the modern Left’s view of history—and the present—has become. The fact that these people, who have been so indoctrinated with the black-and-white, good-and-evil worldview of Cultural Marxism that they probably don’t even recognize it, can look at something as innocuous as a concrete highway and see evidence of racism means that there is virtually nowhere they won’t be able to find racism (or sexism, or transphobia).
Below, by the way, is a list of things recently labelled “racist.” Presumably the Biden administration believes we should address all of them through government action in order to bring about perfect “equity.” (Each item on this list comes from a real article or book, links to which can be found in the endnotes section of this book.)
If the people pushing this nonsense were all professors in humanities departments, that would be one thing. But they’re not. The people who decide how the federal government will spend trillions of dollars are fully on board with these ridiculous ideas. The reason Pete Buttigieg went on his rant about racist highways in the first place was to gin up support for a billion-dollar project to make the highways less racist.39
When the federal government completely reorients itself to pursue a nonsensical, inherently Marxist goal like “equity,” these are the kinds of programs we’ll have—programs that spend trillions of dollars, make wealthy White liberals feel good about themselves, and bring zero results. And when the federal government’s view of history is so flattened and stripped of nuance and dissent that even something as innocuous as a highway overpass can be racist, there is no limit to what it can spend these trillions of dollars on.
Of course, when it comes to the modern Left, a few trillion dollars in wasted money is the best-case scenario. As we’ve seen repeatedly over the past few years, the pursuit of “equity” at all costs can lead us to much darker outcomes than debt.
Consider, for instance, the various proclamations that the Biden administration has issued in defense of “gender-affirming care” for children. Again, this phrase doesn’t sound terribly offensive when you first encounter it. Much like “equity,” “gender-affirming” sounds like a perfectly reasonable policy goal to most Americans. Why would anyone want to stop children from getting “healthcare” that “affirms” something as important as their gender?
But like “equity,” the phrase “gender-affirming care” masks a terrible reality. That reality, sadly, is that over the past decade, largely thanks to the spread of Critical Theory and the advent of social media, an astounding number of young people have fallen under a grave misapprehension about the nature of sex and gender. According to this idea—which is now enthusiastically supported by some of the top medical associations in the country—children who prefer to wear clothing that is more typically worn by the opposite gender, or who play with toys that don’t seem to align with their biological sex, must be trapped in the wrong body.
It’s difficult to know exactly where this bizarre notion came from. But its effects are clear. According to a study published in, of all places, the New York Times, the number of children identifying as transgender in this country has nearly doubled since 2017.40
To most people, this is a troubling trend that should be treated with extreme caution. As we’ve seen over the past few years, once a child is launched down the path of trying to change his or her gender, the road back can be immensely difficult, even impossible.
But to the Biden administration, this sharp rise in children who identify as trans is good news. This is an administration, after all, that has decided to base its every policy objective on the principle that there are millions of people in special “victim groups” being oppressed in the United States every day. The more people who claim to belong to such “victim groups,” even if those groups are brand-new and growing at alarmingly fast rates, the more this warped view of the world makes sense.
So it’s no surprise that the Department of Health and Human Services under Joe Biden, which is led by a “transgender woman” named Rachel Levine, has repeatedly passed guidance that encourages children who are struggling with their gender identity to go through dangerous and often irreversible procedures to “affirm” their gender.41
Of course, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider what this word “affirm” actually entails. What the Biden administration is really saying when they use this word is that any child who feels that he or she has been “born in the wrong body” should first be referred to a gender clinic, where a doctor will do a cursory evaluation and then prescribe off-label drugs to stop the onset of puberty. Once that’s done, the child will be offered a course of “top surgery” and “bottom surgery,” depending on which direction the sex change is going in.
Even these are sanitized terms for what is really going on. “Top surgery” is a medically unnecessary double mastectomy that renders a girl who has it unable ever to breastfeed. Anyone who wants a vivid—and accurate—description of “bottom surgery” needs only to visit the website of Teen Vogue (of all places), which recently published an explanatory article, complete with videos, about the procedure. According to a blurb beneath the video (and with apologies to the fainthearted), it shows how “the scrotum [of a patient] is opened in order to remove the testicles, and how the tip of the penis is severed in order to fashion a clitoris. The remaining scrotum sack and shaft of the penis (the long part) are then repositioned to create the vagina’s labia and vaginal canal.”
When the procedure is done in reverse, the details are even more gruesome. They can also be found in the same video, published by Teen Vogue and marketed to young women who are confused about their sexuality.42
As the journalist Abigail Shrier has written in her excellent book Irreversible Damage—which transgender activists succeeded, for a time, in getting pulled from the shelves of some bookstores—the transgender craze has historical analogues. “The Salem witch trials,” known for public hysteria and demands for absolute conformity, are “[close] to the mark. So are the nervous disorders of the eighteenth century and the neurasthenia epidemic of the nineteenth century. Anorexia nervosa, repressed memory, bulimia, and the cutting contagion in the twentieth…. Three decades ago, [teen girls] might have hankered for liposuction while their physical forms wasted away. Two decades ago, today’s trans-identified teens might have ‘discovered’ a repressed memory of childhood trauma. Today’s diagnostic craze isn’t demonic possession—it’s ‘gender dysphoria.’ And its ‘cure’ is not exorcism, laxatives, or purging. It’s testosterone and ‘top surgery.’ ”43
The key difference between these past crazes and the current one, of course, is that the United States government never encouraged young girls to, for example, become anorexic. But today, the government—which has been overtaken by neo-Marxists who, having run out of victim groups to defend, are driven to invent new ones every day—is encouraging the propagation of a serious mental disorder, and of “care” that “affirms” that disorder, all so these folks can make themselves feel good about defending “LGBTQIA+ youth.”
In order to do so, they need to ignore mountains of evidence. They must ignore, for instance, the fact that a high proportion of transgender children eventually grow out of their gender dysphoria: “For decades, follow-up studies of transgender kids have shown that a substantial majority—anywhere from 65 to 94 percent—eventually ceased to identify as transgender.”44 They must ignore the fact that hundreds of people who’ve undergone sex-change surgeries have now come to deeply regret the decision, often speaking of the decision to transition as “the worst thing that’s ever happened to” them.45
And yet anyone who brings up these valid objections is labelled a bigot or a transphobe. The person objecting is told that more than 80 percent of young people who identify as trans have reported suicidal thoughts; failing to give in to their every delusion is therefore a form of genocide.46 Oddly enough, trans activists never stop to wonder whether the extremely high rates of mental illness among so-called “transgender youth” are simply due to the fact that gender dysphoria, the condition that defines trangenderism, was itself recognized as a mental disorder, until recent years when that definition was sanitized and erased.47
Again, this might not be so bad if the problem were simply a social one. But the government is now involved, and it’s getting much worse, including at the state level. The California State Assembly has passed a bill that would take custody and visitation rights from parents who don’t “affirm” a child’s gender.48 A new law in Washington State allows shelters to take in “transgender minors”—children—without notifying their parents, effectively permitting state-sanctioned kidnapping when parents don’t go along with the new dictates of the Left.49
This law, and the many others like it that will surely be up for debate in state houses all over the country, reveals the most sinister thing about Cultural Marxism: that beneath all the nice talk about “equity” and “antiracism,” it is about power. No matter how well-intentioned or innocuous it might sound, every policy we’ve heard about from the Biden White House—the banning of gas stoves, the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, and the promotion of drag shows for children—is really about killing our past traditions and disbanding the family, and doing so by force if necessary.
When Joe Biden says that providing “gender-affirming care” is the best way to show our children love, understand what that means. It means that, in the name of their extreme ideology, the Cultural Marxists now want children under the age of sixteen years old subjected to life-altering drugs and permanent sterilization. Teenaged girls are having double mastectomies.50 And this is now a multi-billion-dollar business at clinics and hospitals nationwide.51
My view is simple: No child has the maturity to make the serious, life-altering decision to be sterilized or permanently mutilated. And any adult who does that to a child is engaged in child abuse.
Anyone who doesn’t believe that the nice, liberal administration of Joe Biden will act with extreme violence toward anyone who stands in its way should, at the very least, spend a few minutes considering the career and recent actions of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has effectively become the “enforcer” for the Biden administration.
On March 1, 2023, just a few hours after I had completed my questioning of Phil Washington, I walked down the hall to the hearing room of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where some of my colleagues had begun questioning Attorney General Merrick Garland.
By that date, I had already questioned the man many times. During his confirmation hearing in February of 2021, I had expressed concerns—concerns that would, unfortunately, be vindicated by his conduct in office—that he would use his position as attorney general to attack the political enemies of the Biden administration, turning what was supposed to be a non-partisan department into a de facto weapon of the state. In the twenty-four months since that hearing, which ended in Merrick Garland’s being confirmed by a vote of 70 to 30, he had brought many of my worst fears to life, in some cases surpassing anything that I could have dreamed up.
I’m sure that if I had suggested during his confirmation hearing, for instance, that Merrick Garland would soon be sending the FBI after parents who’d showed up at school board meetings to protest the teaching of Critical Race Theory in their kids’ classrooms, that would have been dismissed as impossible. If I had suggested that he would do so in response to a memo from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) that labelled these parents “domestic terror” threats and suggested going after them using the Patriot Act, that would have been deemed absurd.
But that’s exactly what happened on October 4, 2021, when Merrick Garland sent a memo warning of “an increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members.”52
During my questioning of Merrick Garland in October of 2021, we had had a tense exchange about the circumstances surrounding his crackdown on parents. I pointed out that none of the incidents cited in the footnotes of the NSBA’s initial memo had involved any actual incidents of violence or intimidation. One of them, in fact, was an incident involving a man named Scott Smith, who was tackled by police when he spoke a little too loudly at a school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia.
As many people soon found out, Smith’s daughter had been sexually assaulted in school by a boy wearing a skirt—a boy who had only been in the girls’ bathroom with Smith’s daughter because the school had a policy, no doubt in accordance with the Biden administration’s guidance that allowed students to use the bathroom that best aligned with their chosen gender identity.53 After the assault, the school had transferred him to another school, where months later he sexually assaulted another young girl. (He is now, finally, a convicted sex offender.)54 It’s no wonder that Scott Smith felt the need to speak up at the school board meeting, during which several school administrators claimed that the assault never happened and anyone who expressed concerns about the school district’s transgender bathroom policies was either bigoted or delusional. Any father would have done the same thing.
Garland’s targeting of parents like Scott Smith is part of a pattern. Sadly, Merrick Garland has become the most political attorney general in our nation’s history. He has repeatedly been willing to use the machinery of the Department of Justice to target and persecute Biden’s political enemies.
Take, to give another example, Mark Houck, who was awakened in the early hours of the morning on September 23, 2022, by a full team of FBI agents with body armor and rifles, who pointed their guns at Houck and his wife—all in full view of his seven children.55
His crime, according to the Department of Justice, involved a small altercation that Houck had been in more than a year earlier, during which he had shoved someone.
Under normal circumstances, of course, a shove wouldn’t have resulted in an early-morning FBI raid. But the circumstances, in the view of Merrick Garland and the Biden DOJ, were not normal. That was because the altercation that Houck had been in took place on the sidewalk in front of an abortion clinic, where Houck had been leading a peaceful pro-life protest. By all accounts, this was something he did often, always remaining quiet and calm while he made his points and read from scripture.
That afternoon, however, a stranger had begun screaming at Houck and taunting his son, who was standing nearby. According to testimony that Houck would give later, the man had yelled racial slurs at Houck’s son and told the twelve-year-old boy, “Your dad’s a fag.”
Understandably upset, Houck shoved the man out of the way. As any father might have done.
The man fell backward, injured his finger, and later filed charges.56
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be the kind of case that draws the attention of the FBI or the Department of Justice. If the altercation had taken place on almost any other sidewalk in the United States, it probably wouldn’t have reached a courtroom. Indeed, the radical left-wing prosecutor Larry Krasner refused to bring a case against Houck, sensing that such a case would likely be impossible to win.
Then Merrick Garland stepped in.
At some point, the Biden DOJ under Merrick Garland decided that Houck should be prosecuted under the “Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act,” which was passed during the Clinton administration to prohibit “violent, threatening, damaging, and obstructive conduct intended to injure, intimidate, or interfere with the right to seek, obtain, or provide reproductive health services.”57
These were bogus charges, which is why Mark Houck was acquitted on January 30, 2023, and is considering suing the Biden DOJ for prosecutorial misconduct.58
But the charges weren’t meant to stick. They were meant to serve as a warning to other sidewalk counselors and people who participate in similar activities outside abortion clinics.
Around the same time as Mark Houck was arrested, we saw dozens of violent attacks on crisis pregnancy centers across the country by violent left-wing groups. In July of 2022, these terrorists firebombed a clinic in Nashville and scrawled “JANE’S REVENGE” on the side in spray paint. Similar attacks had occurred in many cities.59
But it appears as if the Department of Justice did almost nothing. In the months after these attacks occurred, there was virtually no evidence of any movement by the DOJ on finding these violent criminals, investigating them, or prosecuting them.60
The double standard was obvious.
When I questioned Garland about the obvious disparity between the DOJ’s treatment of these two sets of events, asking him to explain why a sidewalk counselor like Mark Houck had his home raided by federal agents armed with rifles and a battering ram while left-wing terrorists were free to keep firebombing as they pleased, he said that I was wrong.
“It is a priority of the department,” he said, “to prosecute and investigate and find the people who are doing those firebombings. But they are doing it at night and in secret… and we have found two, or one group, which we did prosecute.”
“You found one,” I said, “how many have there been?”
“There have been a lot. And if you have any information specifically as to who those people are, we would be glad to have that.”61
As more than a few people noticed during this hearing, Attorney General Garland seemed to have come up with a new policy for the Biden Department of Justice. Apparently, they don’t prosecute violent crimes anymore if they happen at night. It’s too hard to find the perpetrators. Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the DOJ will now only go after criminals who have the good sense to do their bombings, assaults, and vandalism in the light of day—especially if their victims are conservative Republicans.
Which brings us to the main point, obvious to careful observers for almost three years now. The Department of Justice under Merrick Garland has repeatedly failed to prosecute the crimes of left-wing groups like Jane’s Revenge, apparently because Merrick Garland and Joe Biden, not to mention the rest of his crew in the White House, don’t care about those crimes. Instead, it seems that they are sympathetic to the violent criminals who commit these acts because they have the same political beliefs.
This, keep in mind, is coming from the same DOJ that decided to devote thousands of man hours—the “most wide-ranging investigation in [the DOJ’s] history,” according to Garland62 (more “wide ranging” than the investigation into 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history)—to the prosecution of virtually everyone present at or around the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, including a student from the University of Kentucky who was sentenced to a month in prison though she was convicted of nothing more serious than “entering and remaining in a restricted building.”63 It’s the same DOJ that, despite Mark Houck’s offer to turn himself in voluntarily, decided it would be better to send dozens of FBI agents to his home with guns, shields, and a battering ram, where they could terrorize the man’s children and show his neighbors what would happen if they decided to go against the Biden White House on a core issue like abortion.
When I asked Garland whether he had personally approved that raid, he dodged responsibility, claiming that the FBI had decided to conduct the raid on its own. Of course, the FBI reports to the Department of Justice, which is under the control of the attorney general, so I asked him if he would like to apologize to Mrs. Houck and her seven children, who were woken up early in the morning to the sight of armed men screaming with guns.
He said no.
Keep in mind that apologizing would have cost him nothing. At the very least, he could have expressed sympathy for the children who were forced to endure the traumatic experience of an FBI raid before breakfast. But he didn’t, because he and other Biden administration officials undoubtedly believe that Mark Houck—and, by extension, his family—are on the wrong side of history. And apparently Houck’s pro-life beliefs make it okay (in their minds) to send federal agents with guns to his home and traumatize his children, if only because it should discourage more people from speaking out against the government in the future.
This, you might notice, is where Marxist movements always lead. A single set of ideas comes down from the top, and anyone who dissents even slightly must be taken out or silenced by the state. Already we’ve seen how the Biden administration has done this through social media censorship, public shaming, and even the use of heavy weaponry.
But these are far from the only means that the government has to enforce its neo-Marxist ideas.