They Walk By Faith, Not By Slight
They hate you, that's true. But they believe they're right, and that's why they're doing this.
As I’m writing the draft of this piece, the price of gas just hit $4.29 in my area. That’s a 30 cent jump overnight, after another 30 cent jump overnight last week. At times, while driving home from the gym at night, I sigh and put my head in my hands, this close to weeping for my country. These are the highest prices I have ever seen in my life, and knowing what that means both for the expense of filling my own gas tank, as well as the wider impact these price explosions will have on everything from food to clothes to travel, drains me even more than a long workout.
As this was happening, I also listened to New Jersey Congressional candidate Ian Smith on Tim Pool’s podcast. About halfway through the show, while talking through various issues du jour, Ian arrived at the conclusion that the elite/political/ruling class hates us, the regular American.
I won’t contest the point that they hate us. It’s plainly obvious. For proof, you need only look back to Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment or Barack Obama’s “guns and religion” remark.
So yeah, they hate us. But that’s not why gas prices are in the stratosphere.
Of course, the political class and the Biden administration are blaming the astronomical increases on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and to be certain, the sanction campaign in the U.S. and Europe has dealt a crippling blow to the energy supply, but as has been repeatedly pointed out, it’s the Biden administration’s policy failures that have resulted in prices nearly doubling since 2020.
Biden shut down the Keystone XL pipeline his first day in office, and the company overseeing the project has since scrapped it. On top of that, the administration is in a legal fight over whether or not they can include something called the “social cost of carbon” in their environmental analyses for fossil fuel extraction leases. But instead of allowing those leases to continue, Biden is suspending new leases while the suit is ongoing. What’s worse, the Interior Department is recommending even tighter restrictions on new leases. And a planned sale of leases in the Gulf of Mexico was thrown out by a judge in the District Court of Washington D.C. because the judge thought the Biden administration wasn’t considering greenhouse gas emissions enough. Because polar bears or whatever. Judging by the actions Biden has already taken, we can probably assume that those leases are out the door too.
But we’ve since run up directly against the consequences of those bad decisions, and everyday Americans are suffering those consequences at the gas pump (and soon everywhere else). So why isn’t team Biden listening to the now-bipartisan calls to revamp domestic energy?
Why do they keep talking about electric cars?
Why does Pete Buttigieg insist that buying a Tesla means you won’t have to worry about gas prices ever again? Why does he say that we should buy oil from Iran, because we shouldn’t seek “permanent solutions to immediate short-term problems?”
Why are the “critical minerals” the White House is pursuing the ones that go into wind turbines and electric car batteries?
Why is Jennifer Granholm talking about an “energy transition?”
How can Jen Psaki pstand there and psay that energy independence means wind and solar?
The answer is simple: Because they believe it.
They don’t believe their decisions are bad. They don’t believe there are negative consequences for their bad decisions. They do believe that this is a temporary problem, and that bearing temporary “costs,” is worth “standing up for our values.” They believe the U.S is at the cutting edge of a rapid and necessary transition away from fossil fuels.
And they simply can’t admit they’re wrong.
It’s not just that going back on their promises would not only draw the ire of the environmental lobby, which forms a sizable part of their voting base.
It’s not that they’re too stubborn to let their beliefs be challenged.
It’s actually worse than either of those. Going back on any of their environmental commitments would be an existential ideological crisis. They simply aren’t mentally equipped to process alternate views.
They've sunk so much brain space into environmentalism, they've so thoroughly insulated themselves from the world outside their information bubble of the corporate press and interest groups that they simply cannot mentally process the adverse effects of their policy failures.
It’s like living in a hall of mirrors. Everywhere you look, the only thing you see is yourself reflected back at you. You look at yourself from different angles, sometimes your image is warped by a trick of the light, but it’s always you. And when it’s just you looking at yourself, communicating with yourself, to yourself, you lose your grip on reality and start to believe that reality is just you.
It’s no wonder Team Biden has such a profound disconnect. They live in a world constructed by Leftist control of our major institutions– press, universities, media, etc. As such, everybody from the low-level staffers at the Executive Departments to the Cabinet Secretaries is inundated with this line of thinking. It’s Leftists talking for Leftists, to Leftists. A complete, self-containing network, shielded from the average American by a wall of propaganda and ideology.
A complex, but insular system. Completely cut off from reality. There simply is no breaking in. It must be destroyed in its entirety and replaced. And that’s a discussion we will keep having as we march on.