Weaponized

Auteur

SETH BARRON (NEW YORK, NEW YORK) is a New York City-based reporter and editor who has covered local politics closely for more than ten years. Barron is the Managing Editor of The American Mind, a publication of The Claremont Institute, and was fromerly Associate Editor of urban policy at City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, Barron is a widely-read columnist and reporter on politics and issues in New York City. Barron became intimately familiar with the ins and outs of New York City politics through his City Council Watch blog, and then worked in City Hall as legislative director for a council member from Queens. His work has appeared in the New York Post, New York Daily News, *and Wall Street Journal and also appears regularly on *Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News to discuss New York City issues. He frequently appears on a range of local and national television and radio programs as a commentator.

The author lives & works in New York City.

https://www.city-journal.org/contributor/seth--barron_849

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/expert/seth-barron

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/authors/seth_barron/

https://www.foxnews.com/person/b/seth-barron

https://muckrack.com/seth-barron/articles

https://nypost.com/author/seth-barron/

Texte du rabat

THE ELITES LOATHE THE IDEA THAT THE U.S. CONSTITUTION RESTS POWER IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE.

It has become a common observation that a pernicious agenda—sometimes called Progressive, “woke,” or “equity based”—has spread throughout American society. Every aspect of life and culture—from schooling, to television, to the workplace, and to sports—is now suffused with this program. 

The agenda has multiple overt aims, including the rectification of historical racial injustice by deconstructing legacy notions of merit and the value of work, now redefined as the values of white privilege. It seeks to undo segregated residential patterns by altering the political geography of the country, concentrating the population in dense urban areas, reversing “white flight” by eliminating the suburbs that have caused so much harm. It plans to undermine the traditional family structure by cultivating confusion about gender norms and sexuality among American children. It aims to end the system of punishment for violating the law by redefining crime and “reimagining” the function of the police in order to turn them into enforcement agents for socio-political standards rather than protectors of people and property. And it seeks to end the meaning of “America” as a nation by dissolving the difference between citizen and foreigner.

These are all familiar tendencies in modern life—we hear people complain generally about them on social media or cable news all the time—even if we don’t necessarily connect them or see them as part of a unified, revolutionary effort to change America. Seth Barron’s WEAPONIZED proves exactly how the Left is waging war on the American people by attacking specific institutions of the American way of life, essentially sucking all power up the chain, away from the people and into the hands of a managerial, administrative class that has its own vision for the future of the country.

This elite class wants control over everything. It is intolerable for them that any corner of American life is being run contrary in any way to the totalizing, even totalitarian, vision they have of our society. 

The elites loathe the idea that the U.S. Constitution rests power in the hands of the people, and that states and localities are reserved certain key rights. Our historical system enshrines self-rule—the principle that communities comprised of self-regulating subjects can govern themselves best—while the Left believes that the people who don’t live somewhere are the best equipped to set the rules there.

This is a war against the sovereignty of the American people, and the hour is late.

Contenu

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,…