Victor Davis Hanson

“Destroying democracy” — the latest theme of the left — can be defined in many different ways.

How about attempting to destroy constitutional, ancient, and hallowed institutions simply to suit short-term political gains?

So, who in 2020, and now once again, has boasted about packing the 156-year-old, nine-justice Supreme Court?

Who talks frequently about destroying the 187-year-old Senate filibuster–though only when they hold a Senate majority?

Who wants to bring in an insolvent left-wing Puerto Rico and redefine the 235-year-old District of Columbia — by altering the Constitution — as two new states solely to obtain four additional liberal senators?

Who is trying to destroy the constitutionally mandated 235-year Electoral College by circumventing it with the surrogate “The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact?”

Does destroying democracy also entail weaponizing federal bureaucracies, turning them into rogue partisan arms of a president?

So who ordered the CIA to concoct bogus charges of “collusion” to sabotage Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, the 2016-2017 transition, and the first 22 months of Trump’s first term?

Who prompted a cabal of “51 former intelligence officials” to lie to the American people on the eve of the last debate of the 2020 election that the FBI-authenticated Hunter Biden laptop was instead the work of a “Russian intelligence operation?”

Who ordered the FBI to connive and partner with social media conglomerates to censor accurate news deemed unhelpful to the 2020 Biden campaign?

Who pulled off the greatest presidential coup in history by using surrogates in the shadows to run the cognitively debilitated Biden presidency, then by fiat canceled his reelection effort, and finally anointed as his replacement the new nominee Kamala Harris, who had never won a single primary delegate?

Who ordered FBI SWAT teams to invade the home of a former president because of a classification dispute over 102 files out of some 13,000 stored there?

Who tried to remove an ex-president and leader of his party from at least 25 state ballots to deprive millions of Americans of the opportunity to vote for or against him?

Who coordinated four local, state, and federal prosecutors to destroy a former and future president by charging him with fantasy crimes that were never before, and will never again be, lodged against anyone else?

Who appointed a federal prosecutor to go after the ex-president, who arranged for a high-ranking Justice Department official to step down to join a New York prosecutor’s efforts to destroy an ex-president, and who met in the White House with a Georgia county prosecutor seeking to destroy an ex-president — all on the same day — a mere 72 hours after Trump announced his 2024 reelection bid?

Who but the current Democrats ever impeached a president twice?

Has any party ever tried an ex-president in the Senate when he was out of office and a mere private citizen?

When have there ever been two near-miss assassination attempts on a major party presidential candidate during a single presidential campaign?

Who destroyed the southern border and broke federal law to allow in, without criminal or health background audits, some 10-12 million illegal aliens?

Who created 600 “sanctuary jurisdictions” for the sole purpose of nullifying federal immigration law, in the eerie spirit of the renegade old Confederacy?

Who allowed tens of thousands of rioters, arsonists, and violent protestors over four months in 2020 to destroy over $2 billion in property, kill some 35 people, injure 1,500 police officers, and torch a federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic church — all with de facto legal impunity?

How do the purported destroyers of democracy find themselves winning 60-70 percent approval on most of the key issues of our times, while the supposed saviors of democracy are on the losing side of popular opinion?

How does a president “destroy democracy” by his party winning the White House by both the popular and Electoral College vote, winning majorities in both the Senate and House by popular votes, and enjoying a 6-3 edge in the Supreme Court through judges appointed by popularly elected presidents?

So what is behind these absurd charges?

Three catalysts: one, the new anguished elitist Democratic Party alienated the middle classes through its Jacobin agenda and therefore lost the Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, and now has no federal political power.

Two, the Democratic Party is polling at record lows and yet remains hellbent on alienating the traditional sources of its power — minorities, youth, and Independents.

Three, Democrats cannot find any issues that the people support, nor any leaders to convince the people to embrace them.

So it is no surprise that the panicked Democrats bark at the shadows — given that they know their revolutionary, neo-socialist agenda is destroying them. And yet, like all addicts, they choose destruction over abandoning their self-destructive fixations.

Trip Jennings

“Thank God no one let me write newspaper columns when I was 22.”

I said this flippantly to another journalist last week as I was telling them I was writing newspaper columns for the first time in my career. It was not so much a joke as an older man looking back on his younger self with clarity.

At 22, I did not have any striking insights to offer the world.

While I could string words and sentences together well enough to make interesting paragraphs, I only had a dim understanding of the world, mostly through second-hand information: through reading newspapers, magazines, and books. Plus, my experience up to then did not lend itself to great storytelling. My life had revolved around other affluent White people living in gated communities in the Deep South, a very particular geographical, socioeconomic bubble.

I didn’t possess the imaginative power to transform a life of relative ease into a compelling drama. Nor had my understanding of the world been punctured by a diverse set of people who could challenge my deepest-held assumptions by drawing on their own lived experiences to come up with competing theories on how the world worked.

The epiphany that I had grown up in a bubble would take years to sink in, and only after I had lived around the country and married a child of Mexican immigrants whose tales of growing up were so foreign to me that her experiences genuinely shocked me. By this time, thanks to journalism, I had already met people of different races and ethnicities, from all walks of life and socio-economic situations, disparate faith traditions, including quite a few people who’d been born outside the U.S.

I am not saying the only way to become more self-aware people must live elsewhere from where they grew up, or become a journalist or have a diverse personal network, although I believe all can help. Only that these experiences have helped me understand myself better — as well as the world in which we all live, which is wondrously and frustratingly complicated.

I think about this as I ruminate on our nation’s polarized politics and the fraying it has done to the bonds that hold us together as a country. Daily, it seems the tribalism that pits Americans against each other tightens its grip on us. And I wonder if a small factor in this scenario has to do with Americans’ decreasing desire to live far from where they grew up, which, in turn, makes them more prone to be wary of people who might have grown up differently than they did, at least when it comes to politics.

Researchers in the U.S. Census Bureau and Harvard University found in 2022 that nearly six in 10 young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up, and eight in 10 live within 100 miles. And in a marked difference from previous eras when a large portion of the American population moved regularly, new data showed that fewer than 10% of Americans moved in the annual period that ended in March 2024, the first time the figure had dropped below 10% since 1947, when the Census Bureau began tracking that figure.

I’m not saying that moving around would lance the fever of political polarization sickening our society. Or that moving is even practical for many Americans. It is expensive, and it is hard.

Honestly, I don’t know how to solve the sickness infecting our country.

But moving around and meeting new people from different circumstances and disparate worldviews, has made me more open to individuals who on first impression share nothing in common with me while making me more suspicious of people who decry that differentness is dangerous.

For that reason, I resonate much more with people who understand that in a society of 320 million people from all walks of life, belief systems and lived experiences that getting to know people in the messiness of their lives, which inevitably happens when you move around, might help us more than fighting from afar on social media or always sticking with our own kind.

Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.

Sherry Robinson
All She Wrote

The State Ethics Commission tore the mask off New Mexico Safety Over Profit and revealed – ta da! – trial lawyers.

After arguing that they didn’t have to register as lobbyists or reveal funding sources, NMSOP had a change of heart after reading the commission’s 73-page lawsuit. They settled by paying a $5,000 fine (the maximum allowed), registering with the state, and releasing their full list of donors, along with expenditures.

We learn that in recent years about 50 trial lawyers and/or their firms dug into deep pockets and found nearly $1.3 million to fight reforms of the state’s medical malpractice law and related measures. Three-quarters of donors are board members or past presidents of the Trial Lawyers Association. Many have waged the big-dollar lawsuits against healthcare providers that appear in the news. Four were outside the state, including showboat Iowa lawyer Nicholas Rowley, who ponied up $425,000. The Trial Lawyers Association was good for $245,000.

So much for the charade that NMSOP was just a group of regular folks. Now they want us to know who they are. In a recent newspaper ad, NMSOP said in red boldface: “We don’t hide our donors. We celebrate them.”

This is the group that crushed reform of the state’s medical malpractice law in the last legislative session. This law, delivered in 2021 by a former Trial Lawyers Association president and a compliant Legislature, has painted a target on the state’s doctors and caused malpractice insurance premiums and litigation to spike. New Mexico is the only state losing doctors.

This year, to fight medical malpractice reforms advanced by the nonprofit Think New Mexico, NMSOP advertised in newspapers and social media and attacked Think New Mexico in op eds. The Trial Lawyers Association in 2024 showered Democrats with $556,354 in campaign contributions.

According to followthemoney.org, the Trial Lawyers Association gave $15,200 to Sen. Peter Wirth, $20,700 to Sen. Linda Lopez, $10,700 to Sen. Joe Cervantes, $10,000 to Sen. Katy Duhigg, and $8,000 to Sen. Cindy Nava.

Here’s what they got.

The two key bills were SB 176, which protected injured patients but capped attorney payouts, and HB 243, which allowed New Mexico to join the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, an agreement among states to recognize each others’ professional licenses. It’s the easiest way to increase doctors, said sponsors. Companion bills would have done the same for other healthcare professions.

Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth, a lawyer, assigned SB 176 to three committees to slow it down. He defended the 2021 measure to the Albuquerque Journal and repeated NMSOP talking points about harming patients and holding insurance companies responsible.

Sen. Linda Lopez held SB 176 in her Health and Public Affairs Committee for 40 days of the session’s 60 days. Her biggest campaign donor in 2024 was the Trial Lawyers Association; with contributions from individual lawyers and law firms the amount doubles.

SB 176 died there on a 5-4 vote, with Democrats voting against. Donations to the five cost the trial lawyers less than $300,000.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Joe Cervantes sat on the compact bill, HB 243, more than a week after it passed the House unanimously. In committee he disparaged the medical compacts as a “creative way to make a buck.” He and Sen. Katy Duhigg made dozens of amendments until the bill was unacceptable to the interstate compact commission. The other compact bills also died. Trial lawyers don’t like the compacts because they wouldn’t be able to sue the interstate compact commissions that oversee the compacts. Why would they sue the commissions? Who knows?

Cervantes and Duhigg are both lawyers. Their law firms sue doctors. Does anybody think they might have a conflict of interest?

Now look at Rep. Mariana Anaya, who is holding a town hall on medical malpractice reform and doctor shortages. NMSOP’s newly released expenditures show that it paid Anaya’s consulting company $10,000 last October, after she had won her Democratic primary. With no opposition, she was effectively an incoming legislator. This is on top of the trial lawyers’ campaign donation of $6,000.

NMSOP has tossed us enough red herrings to start a seafood café: Greedy corporate-owned hospitals, greedy insurance companies, imagined limits on patients’ right to sue, and hospital horror stories.

Yes, providers make mistakes. Yes, some should find another profession. We feel for the victims and want to assure their care, but who is served by a $40 million verdict that either bankrupts the organization or cripples its ability to serve?

Our healthcare shortage is becoming a major issue. New Mexico Democrats are on the wrong side of this debate.

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.