It is a mere 3 days since President Joe Biden took the oath of office and he is already furiously backtracking on his Covid campaign promises. Back on October 29, 2020 at a campaign rally in Coconut Creek FL, Biden tore into President Trump’s handling of the virus—a task that didn’t really require much effort. Anyway, candidate Biden pledged “I’m not going to shut down the economy, I’m not going to shut down the country, but I am going to shut down the virus.”
Sometime after January 20, Biden discovered that his desk in the Oval Office did not have a red button labeled “Virus Killer”. And so the reset began. At his Friday press conference Biden proceeded to announce “there’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.” He went on to project that Coronavirus deaths would rise by another 50% to reach “well over 600,000.”
In the meantime he did say that he is sticking to his target of 100 million vaccinations delivered in his first hundred days in office. Left unmentioned is that we are already vaccinating about 960,000 people daily. Which means that Biden means to raise the vaccination rate all of 4% over the next several months. Pretty impressive for a guy who promised to make the coronavirus his #1 priority.
But he has been busy on other fronts. Like gender identity. The executive order he just signed reads as follows: “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the rest room, the locker room, or school sports. . . . All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.”
Note that the executive order references gender identity, not sex. Meaning that you don’t have to be a girl to play on a girl’s sports team; you merely have to self-identify as female. Which, among other things, means that girl’s sports are essentially over. They will be dominated by boys claiming to be girls.
The Biden team is busy pretending that the President is merely enforcing the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision handed down in 2020. But in that 6-3 decision, the majority opinion for which was authored by Justice Gorsuch, the Justices took pains to say that it was limited to employment status and had no bearing on “sex-segregated bathrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes”.
The Court went further to note that their decision was limited to the language of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The majority specifically noted that under Title IX of the 1972 amendments “we do not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.” (See Abigail Shrier in the Wall Street Journal here.)
As bad as this is, it’s actually even worse than it appears at first glance. On the matter of gender identity Mr Biden has gone so far as to say that “in prison, your sexual identity is defined by what you say, not what the prison says.” Which effectively means that sex (or gender) is simply a social construct; biology is not determinative.
This conceit denies the profound difference between men and women. Not only that, it is part of a much grander project; namely the utopian transformation of society into one without differences, and therefore without hierarchies.
It is a vision of human beings as undifferentiated cogs in a machine, the equivalent of ants living in an ant colony. There is no room for individualism, for decency, for joy, for love; only for the dream which inevitably leads to marching orders. It is a vision as old as the hills and has always and everywhere led to authoritarianism and human misery.
But of course there will always be hierarchies. There can be hierarchies of competence that are freely chosen and held to account. Or there can be unaccountable hierarchies that are aristocracies of power not subject to the rules designed for mere mortals. The difference is that one is beholden to the idea of truth; the other denies there is any such thing. For them all that matters is power.
Around 490 BC, it was Protagarus, who laid the foundation for today’s postmodernism by arguing that “Man is the measure of all things”. Plato understood Protagurus to mean that there was no objective truth. Things are either true or not true based on how an individual perceives them.
There is a great irony here. Joe Biden, who endlessly goes on about “following the science” apparently doesn’t realize that if there is no truth there is no science. And all his talk is nothing more than what he likes to call “Malarkey”.
JFB
