If your friends are squeamish about voting for President Donald Trump, I understand. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Trump in 2016 because of his temperament and because I didn’t trust his promises. Yet it seems Joe Biden’s character is worse, and Trump’s successes in his first term have brought me around. I think they will convince your friends, too.
This is the fifth in a series of articles explaining the president’s policy successes and giving a full-throated defense for his reelection. The first focused on Trump’s foreign policy achievements, the second delved into his record on protecting the right to life, the third explained his record on civil rights, and the fourth focused on his economic achievements. This final article will explain Trump’s record in fighting the Left’s radical insanity.
In recent years, Democrats, the legacy media, schools, and various established interests have endorsed radical ideologies that threaten America’s social order and undermine basic truths about what it means to be male and female. President Trump has pushed back on these dangerous notions.
During the same month that the Supreme Court unilaterally amended the Constitution to redefine marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), former Olympian Bruce Jenner publicly declared his transgender female identity as “Caitlyn.” The LGBT movement launched a full-court press to normalize the idea that biological men could become women and vice versa. Activists have every right to push their agenda, but the Obama administration rushed to force this agenda on the American people.
In 2016, Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) redefined the Civil Rights Act of 1964, arguing that North Carolina’s House Bill 2 engaged in illegal sex discrimination against transgender people. The bill merely stipulated that school restrooms and locker rooms that are not single-occupancy must be single-sex, and that students can only use the facility that matches their biological sex on their birth certificate.
The DOJ’s move here (and with a similar change in 2014) was monumental. The Obama administration redefined “sex” — which has always referred to a human being’s biological sex as male or female — to include “gender identity,” a much more amorphous concept that could not have been further from the minds of Congress when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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With the stroke of a pen, the Obama administration made transgender ideology the law of the land, undermining North Carolina’s state law and emboldening transgender activists to push their agenda even harder.
To make matters worse, the army under Obama shifted to the position of providing taxpayer-funded transgender hormone therapy for convicted spy Chelsea Manning. As if to underscore the point, Obama personally commuted Manning’s sentence in his last days as president.
Furthermore, under Obamacare, coverage for transgender “treatments” tripled under Medicare and Medicaid — even before Bruce Jenner made his splash by calling himself “Caitlyn.”
Democrats have jumped on the bandwagon, nominating transgender candidates. Schools have pushed transgenderism in kindergarten, and some parents have even lost custody of their children for refusing to acknowledge a transgender identity.
Many men and women have rejected transgender identity, finding themselves permanently scarred by the “treatments” they once welcomed. One man described his artificial female anatomy as a “Frankenstein hack job.” Endocrinologists have warned that experimental cross-sex hormones and so-called “puberty-blocking” drugs actually cause a disease. Republicans have sponsored legislation to ban the use of such experimental treatments on children.
The Trump administration has reversed most of the Obama policies on these issues. The administration returned to the biological definition of sex in federal law. In March, the Department of Justice filed a statement of interest supporting fair play in women’s sports opposing the transgender rules that allowed biological males to defeat females.
Under Trump, the armed services returned to the biological definition of sex, launching what many transgender activists called a “military transgender ban.” Yet the “ban” only requires the military to refer to people according to their biological sex — which is important for many reasons, not least because male and female bodies react differently to various drugs.
Miriam Ben-Shalom, the first open lesbian to be reinstated to the U.S. Army after getting booted over her sexual orientation, told PJ Media that the “military transgender ban” could not be more different from Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. “As one who helped bring the end to the ban on LGB military service and DADT, I am offended that a mental aberration is being compared to being a sexual human being,” she said.
Meanwhile, Democratic nominee Joe Biden has jumped on board the transgender train, even championing gender transition for 8-year-old girls. He has pledged to gut religious freedom protections for people who disagree with transgender identity, condemning Trump for giving “hate” a “safe harbor.” Biden would return to the Obama policy of jamming transgender ideology down Americans’ throats.
President Trump has also stood up against the rising tide of Marxist critical theory. After the horrific nearly 9-minute video showing police officer Derek Cauvin’s knee on the neck of George Floyd, protests and riots spread across America. Many Americans sought advice on how to understand the alleged systemic racism Black Lives Matter activists protest against. “Anti-racist” texts like Robin D’Angleo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist push a radical and dangerous notion of underlying systemic racism that encourages an unguided revolution.
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Marxist critical theory encourages people to reinterpret various aspects of American society assuming they must be rooted in racist discrimination and historic oppression.
This ideology has skyrocketed into the American mainstream.
The New York Times‘s “1619 Project,” for example, sought to redefine America, claiming that the true founding came not with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 but with the arrival of the first slaves in 1619 (ironically, even this date is incorrect). The Times has had to issue embarrassing corrections to the project, and it even backpedaled from the project’s central claim, but the project’s founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize and Oprah Winfrey has announced she will help produce a documentary series based on the project.
When vandals toppled a statue of George Washington in Portland, they spray-painted “1619” on the statue. When Claremont’s Charles Kesler wrote in The New York Post “Call them the 1619 riots,” Hannah-Jones responded (in a since-deleted tweet) that “it would be an honor” to claim responsibility for the destructive riots. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) called for the “dismantling” of America’s “economy and political system,” in order to root out supposed racist oppression.
Portland activist Lilith Sinclair provided a chilling example of Marxist critical race theory and its ability to inspire an aimless revolution. “There’s still a lot of work to undo the harm of colonized thought that has been pushed onto Black and indigenous communities,” she said. As examples of “colonized thought,” she mentioned Christianity and the “gender binary.” She said she organizes for “the abolition of … the “United States as we know it.”
Millions of Americans peacefully took to the streets to protest after the death of George Floyd, but many of those protests devolved into violent riots, which have proved the most destructive (in terms of insurance claims) in U.S. history. While Democratic nominee Joe Biden has condemned violent looting and arson, he refused to call out antifa or Black Lives Matter agitators, instead attacking “right-wing militias” as if they were the true instigators of violence.
While leftists repeat claims of “institutional racism,” the riots have victimized the black community. The destruction disproportionately hit black communities in Kenosha, Wisc., Minneapolis, and Chicago. The riots destroyed black lives, black livelihoods, and black monuments. At least 26 Americans have died in the riots, most of them black.
For these and other reasons, many black leaders have denounced the official Black Lives Matter movement, the founders of which have described themselves as “trained Marxists.” Over 100 black pastors recently condemned the Black Lives Matter movement and urged Nike to distance itself from it.
In this context, Trump has directed his administration to counter Marxist critical race theory in schools and in federal government training materials. He also directed federal contractors to avoid “white privilege” trainings that demonize people based on the color of their skin and condemn America as inherently racist. On Constitution Day, he announced he would launch a “1776 Commission” to advance American patriotism in public schools to combat Marxist critical race theory.
While America has a troubled history on race, the U.S. has taken tremendous strides to achieve full equality before the law and to eliminate any racial discrimination. Claims of systemic racism do a disservice to this important progress.
The president has faced tremendous push-back for these stances against far-left ideologies on transgenderism and Marxist critical race theory. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, many human resources firms, and more companies joined the ACLU and the NAACP in condemning Trump’s executive order against “white privilege” trainings.
Yet Trump has stood firm, imposing policies that champion biological sex and the positive truths about America.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
