Victor Davis Hanson

A few Democratic officeholders, activists, and pundits are finally coming to their senses that their brand is toxic to a majority of the American people.

The Biden administration killed what was left of it in a number of ways.

First, it serially lied to Americans about the cognitive decline and cancerous condition of President Joe Biden, both while in and after office.

Only when caught did the complicit media fess up that the Biden inner circle serially misled the American people about Biden’s inability to fulfill the duties of the presidency.

Second, left-wing politicos used Biden as a waxen effigy. His job was to pose as a “moderate” cover to push through the most radical and unpopular agenda in the last half century.

Only that way could “Old Joe Biden from Scranton” and his backroom handlers ram down the throat of the American people unpopular policies that nearly wrecked the country: hyperinflation and $7 trillion in new debt, weaponization of the government, and partisan lawfare, an open border and 12 million illegal aliens, a racialist DEI commissariat, a crackpot Green New Deal, defunding the police, biological men competing in girls’ sports, and two theater-wide wars abroad.

Third, without either a functional president or viable initiatives, the new hard-left Democrats sought to brand Donald Trump as “Hitler” and half the country who supported him as “fascists.”

For nearly nine years, the Democrats launched one failed hoax after another on the American people: “Russian collusion,” “laptop disinformation,” and the lying so-called “51 intelligence authorities.” They proved quite willing to undermine the rule of law by manipulating the court system in efforts to destroy their bogeyman, Trump.

Never had the American people seen a political party engineer 93 bogus indictments of a rival candidate and ex-president. Two dozen states tried to take Trump off their presidential ballots. And the Biden Department of Justice sicced an FBI SWAT team to barge into Trump’s home.

The people finally got tired of all the potty-mouthed Democrat videos, the congressional stunts and meltdowns, the pampered rich kids rioting on elite campuses, the knee-jerk obsessions with racial slurs, the firebombing of Tesla dealerships, the romanticization of left-wing political murderers — and always the adolescent tantrums over Trump.

The Democrats had mostly given up on democracy some 13 years ago. That was the last time they transparently and democratically nominated Barack Obama a second time as their presidential candidate.

Ever since, their nominations have been rigged.

In 2020, party insiders — terrified of the left-wing crazy primary field — forced out all the leading contenders.

Then they coronated the debilitated but still supposedly useful moderate Biden as their COVID-era candidate. Biden then bragged that he would pick his vice president on the basis of race and gender.

What followed was the most bizarre campaign in history.

Biden stayed put in his basement and outsourced his candidacy to the partisan media.

Party activists changed long-standing voting laws in the key swing states. For the first time in American history, 70 percent of Americans did not vote in person on Election Day — the majority of them by design Democrats.

Next, in 2024, they forced the now no longer useful Biden off the ticket, nullifying his 14 million primary voters.

Then, without a vote, they rammed in inept Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee. As a failed candidate in 2020, she had never won a single delegate.

Some in the party now concede it must roust out its radicals.

But Democrats will not.

AOC and her Squad, the unhinged Jasmine Crockets of the party, and the ossified socialist Bernie Bros would demonize any Democrat who offered a sane reboot.

A few fossils in the party may think they know how to save it. But they are terrified that the medicine would be considered far worse than the illness that prompted it.

Would Democrats consider embracing measured and legal-only immigration?

No — the crazy base would scream “xenophobe!”

A return to meritocracy and the Martin Luther King notion of race as incidental, not essential, to who we are?

Again, that would be called “racist!”

Maybe reforms to fix failed schools with vouchers, school choice, and charter schools?

Again, “racist!”

How about developing gas and oil reserves and nuclear power to lower energy costs for the struggling middle class?

That would be condemned as “destroying the planet!”

Restore police forces, end critical race and legal theory, and deter criminals with tough sentencing?

Again, “racist!”

How about ceasing the whiny fixations with “white privilege” and “white rage?” Or quit seeing a “white supremacist” under every bed?

Again, “racist!”

The left created DEI — the use of race to adjudicate every political issue.

And like any addictive, toxic drug, they now can neither survive with DEI — nor without it.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

Sherry Robinson
All She Wrote

Former Las Cruces Mayor Ken Miyagishima, in declaring his candidacy for governor, did something no other Democrat has been willing to do: he challenged his fellow Democratic candidates to refuse campaign funding from trial lawyers.

Miyagishima stated correctly that New Mexico’s malpractice laws and the spike in litigation and insurance premiums in recent years is driving doctors from the state.

“We are the only state that is losing doctors,” he told the Albuquerque Journal, referring to data from the New Mexico Medical Society, which reported that we lost 248 doctors across the state from 2019 to 2024 while neighboring states added doctors.

Thanks to Democrats and their benefactor, the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association, changes in malpractice law since 2021 multiplied malpractice lawsuits and spiked court awards and settlement costs.

I’ve previously written about how Dems torpedoed the malpractice reform bill in this year’s legislative session. There’s more.

Think New Mexico had a package of bills to address our healthcare shortages. The bipartisan think tank has a long track record of advancing useful legislation, but this time David faced Goliath. The trial lawyers have deep pockets and matching clout.

One of the most important bills was the bipartisan HB 243 by Rep. Marian Matthews, a moderate Democrat from Albuquerque, and House Minority Leader Gail Armstrong, R-Magdalena. It would have allowed New Mexico to join the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, an agreement among states to recognize each others’ professional licenses. Forty-three other states have joined.

“It’s the easiest way to have a substantial increase in doctors, Matthews said. “It could provide expertise that’s not even available in New Mexico.”

Companion bills would have done the same for other healthcare professions.

HB 243 passed the House unanimously and then sat in the Senate Judiciary Committee more than a week before being heard. Matthews and Armstrong were pleased that Rick Masters, the compact’s general counsel, came to New Mexico to present before the committee. “They went out of their way to work with us.”

Matthews, herself an attorney, was astounded by what happened next. Sen. Katy Duhigg, D-Albuquerque, spent hours reading every line and paragraph the Senate Judiciary committee wanted stricken. Duhigg made dozens of amendments that transformed the bill.

“We told them if they insist on changing the bill it would be unacceptable to the compact. They did it anyway. It was ugly,” Matthews said.

It should be noted that the law firm of committee Chairman Joseph Cervantes, D- Las Cruces, sues doctors. So does Duhigg’s lawfirm.

The gutted HB 243 died on the Senate calendar. The other compact bills also died.

Why? Because the trial lawyers object to a provision in the compacts that prevents them from suing the interstate compact commissions, which oversee the compacts. “There is no good reason to sue them, but the lawyers object to the idea of shielding anyone from potential lawsuits,” said Fred Nathan, of Think New Mexico.

In the aftermath, Republicans called out Dems for tanking these bills, and the governor agreed with them.

“People die when they can’t get access to healthcare,” she said. She complained that her public safety bills died in the same committees that defeated the healthcare bills, and she chastised the trial lawyers by name.

“Just look at the number of malpractice cases brought in New Mexico,” she said. “Look at the number of law firms coming from out of state to prosecute cases here.”

Duhigg sent her constituents a long letter bragging about her accomplishments during the session but didn’t mention her role in depriving them of doctors.

Meanwhile, I keep hearing from doctors. A surgeon describes colleagues planning to retire early or leave the state. “All of this is lawsuit driven,” she writes. “These are good surgeons! They are kind, thoughtful, skilled. They didn’t go into surgery for money; there are so many easier ways to make money.

“Ours is a stressful field at baseline. Complications hurt us and haunt us, but they are a reality of practicing surgery. As much as we would love to have perfect outcomes, as hard as we work for it, we know that complications will happen. In New Mexico, we are punished for situations we can’t control. And as the number of doctors declines, we get busier and busier, patients have less primary care, and we face uncontrollable emergency situations. It is truly a vicious cycle.”

Candidate Miyagishima worries his name might be an obstacle. If he champions healthcare providers and stands up to the trial lawyers, everybody will know his name.

Sherry Robinson is a longtime New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. She is the author of four books. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.

Victor Davis Hanson

One reason why the public turned on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) was its insistence that roughly 70 percent of the country was stereotyped as victimizers by virtue of their skin color.

In contrast, the other “diverse” 30% were de facto considered the victimized.

In such absurd binaries, the left returned to the old “one-drop” rule of the antebellum South, suggesting that anyone with any nonwhite ancestry was a minority victim.

And once that Marxist-inspired dichotomy was institutionalized, a corollary was established that the self-declared racially oppressed cannot themselves be racist oppressors.

But human nature is universal and transcends race.

One lamentable characteristic of our species is that we are all prone to excess and crudity if not deterred, especially once civilizational restraint is lost.

We are now witnessing examples of what follows when anti-white stereotyping and racism are given a pass — as long as the purveyors can claim their victimhood entitles them to bias.

Recently, WNBA basketball stars Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark got into one of their now-characteristic on-court rivalries. But this time around, Reese mocked Clark as a “White gyal (sic) running from the fade.”

Reese assumes that her status as a Black star grants her immunity from backlash — a privilege unlikely to be extended if the roles were reversed.

Or is her crassness a simple reflection that 60 years after the Civil Rights movement, it is deemed cool or deservedly acceptable to use the word “white” derogatorily?

After all, loose-cannon Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-TX, in one of her accustomed racialist rants, recently went after her party’s big Democratic donors, who raised a record amount of money for Kamala Harris’s short-lived campaign.

Crockett played the race card when claiming that Democratic insiders were already backing the next party nominee as the “safest white boy.”

Her racist irritation is puzzling. After all, two out of the last four Democratic presidential nominees have been African-Americans.

Yet it is certainly easy to see why Crockett, who endlessly spouts off about race in congressional sessions, used the pejorative “white boy.” She knows that there are no repercussions given her race and, to a lesser extent, her gender and left-wing ideology.

Recently, a past 2018 slur resurfaced from another House Democrat, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-MN. She had falsely claimed, “I would say our country should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths in this country.”

Omar’s stereotyped smear was not only racist but also factually incorrect.

The FBI’s 2018 data on perpetrators of murder, when the race of the offender was known, reveals that 54.9% of the nation’s murderers that year were African-American, who constitute about 13% of the population.

And when the race of the murderer in rare interracial killings was known, blacks were more than twice as likely to murder whites as whites were to kill blacks.

During recent controversies over leaks at the Pentagon, former UN Ambassador Susan Rice, during the Obama administration, injected race by smearing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. She leveled a trifecta race/gender/sexual orientation slur — all irrelevant to the issue at hand: “Well, if you’re a white male Christian cisgender macho MAGA man, you can be as dumb as a rock and be deemed qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense.”

Rice still chafes that as a sometimes-official Obama administration spokeswoman, she serially and deliberately misled the country about the fatal 2012 terrorist attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi.

In all these cases, there was no fallout from racial categorization and demonization. Again, we apparently accept the pernicious idea that those identifying as an oppressed group cannot themselves voice illiberal stereotypes.

But while our political elites and celebrities seem fixated on using racial putdowns for career advantage and personal notoriety, the people increasingly ignore their entrenched and off-putting racism.

For example, in a recent Rasmussen poll surveying public attitudes toward Trump’s first 100 days in office, 62% of Hispanics voiced approval (higher than the 49% of whites). And 39% of blacks agreed.

One result of the 2024 campaign was that while Democrats seemed fixated on racial stereotypes, the public had moved on.

Voters increasingly see class considerations transcending race. That fact may explain why exasperated and flailing Democrats and leftists desperately seek to resurrect racial polarization instead of finding a popular middle-class agenda.

Historically, tribalism erodes a multiracial democracy.

It did when white leaders in the past expressed racist attitudes toward blacks. And it will again if black elites simply flip the paradigm and do the same.

(Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.)