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The “longshoreman philosopher”  Eric Hoffer once observed, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” This course of corruption has been ubiquitous in U.S. history, but especially characterized the postwar period. In contemporary times, the post-Cold War period, it is accelerating and now reaching terminal velocity.

One of the great causes in our history was the Civil Rights Movement begun in 1954. The people who comprised it made a dignified moral and historical argument against segregation, onederived from Christian ethics and the Prologue to the Declaration of Independence, and eschewing the parochial identarianism and violence of leftist activists. The results were the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It didn’t take long, however, for that noble cause to become a business, then degenerate into a racket that exploited discriminatory government polices like affirmative action, all predicated on a made-up “compelling state interest” called “diversity”––an Orwellian term that relied on crude racialist, superficial group characteristics, while ignoring the true diversity of individual hearts and minds.

The Civil Rights Movement then became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party and government agencies backed by federal law and enforced by hordes of bureaucrats. Consultants, trial lawyers, administrators, educrats, and diversity “trainers” waxed fat on political power and redistributed taxpayer loot.

Today’s diversity 2.0 DEI cartel has expanded the reach and power of Diversity INC to corporate C-Suites and Boards of Directors, magnifying the corruption. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote recently, “Grifters and opportunists mask their selfish agendas under the cloak of neo-Marxist care for the underprivileged or victimized minorities. Meanwhile, they seek to profit illegally as if they were old-fashioned crony capitalists.” 

This corruption of our constitutional order and foundational principles–– the assaults on the integrity of the First Amendment rights to free speech and religion, or the 14th amendment’s guarantee of “due process,” the “equal protection of the laws,”and the accountability of power to the people ––is a dire threat to our ordered freedom and political equality, for such debasement relentlessly subjects our republic to regulatory tyranny.

Equally dangerous is the corruption of science in order to advance political goals by marketing them as expressions ofscience. We saw this happen in real time during the Covid pandemic, when politicized mitigation measures like mask mandates, arbitrary “social distancing” diktats, and compelled lock-downs of schools, churches and businesses were imposed and enforced, and scientists who questioned those mandates were attacked, denigrated, and censored.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical barons and federal agency mediocrities got rich. The cost of these policies was more deaths than the virus caused, and long-term damage to children’s education and social development. And nobody has been held to account.

More insidious has been the transgender movement based on the unscientific claim that sex identity is a function of psychological perceptions and trauma, rather than biology. Worse, medical professionals, who we assume are trained in medical science, have endorsed harmful treatments like cross-hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and gruesome irreversible surgeries.

Yet despite the exposure of this fraud as quackery, it shows no signs of abating. For example, the Heritage Foundation reports, “The new study from British pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass confirms what we’ve always known: Children presenting with sudden onset gender dysphoria are actually suffering from other mental health diagnoses—not true gender dysphoria. Her research debunks the gender ideologues’ frequent talking point: that the imposition of medical “gender-affirming care” on mentally ill children is not only necessary, but life-saving.”

This obvious truth shouldn’t surprise us, given the real science of sex identity, not to mention common sense. Writing in the Boston Globe, professor of mathematics Alan Sokal, and professor of evolutionary biology Richard Dawkins explained, “Whether a mammal embryo develops into a male or a female is determined by a pair of sex chromosomes: XX for females, XY for males,” with a miniscule number of chromosomal anomalies.

The authors note, “Much is speciously made of the fact that a very few humans are born with chromosomal patterns other than XX and XY arguably fall outside the standard male/female classification. . . . Even so, the sexual divide is an exceedingly clear binary, as binary as any distinction you can find in biology.”

Yet the lucrative “transitioning” industry’s medical doctorscontinue to profit from dangerous treatments and surgeries, as do the counselors and psychologists who recommend that confused children undergo such poisonous and mutilating procedures. Then there are the political profiteers: trans activists who hijack primary school curricula and libraries, stage drag queen shows, and labor to usurp the authority of parents, even as “misgendering” ersatz “boys” and “girls” by not using their new made-up pronouns is deemed a crime, and biological males appropriate actual women’s sports and diminish opportunities for women athletes.

Debased science, politicized cheerleading media, and big government regulatory agencies combine to empower this lucrative racket, as intrusive big government agencies from the DOE to the DOJ serially interfere in local schools and weaken the authority of families.

The biggest and most economically destructive grift, however, is “climate change,” an Orwellian euphemism for “anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming.” The first two begged questions claim that dangerous increases in atmospheric CO2 are caused by human-created emissions from burning fossil fuels, and that such emissions are reaching levels that will make the planet unlivable, and destroy civilization–– despite decades of research that has exposed this claim as an unproven hypothesis, one that’s been serially challenged by real scientists.

For example, in 1998 31,000 scientists, over a third with Ph.Ds., signed this statement:

“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial evidence that increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

Since then scores of books, most recently Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism, have detailed in depth the evidence for this conclusion.

Yet shielded by the gate-keeping media, and promoted by intrusive big governments at all levels, “Climate change” is pronounced “settled science,” and provides the authority for massive changes to our economy, most perniciously the efforts to decarbonize our sources of energy, and replace cheap, abundant fossil fuels with “renewable” electricity like solar and wind––all funded by government subsidies and grants.

Indeed, this push to eliminate in a few decades internal combustion vehicles, including hybrids, and replace them with all-electric cars and trucks, is already disrupting our economy. For example, electricity prices since Joe Biden took office and began implementing his feckless “green new deal” decarbonizing policies, “electricity prices have soared 29.4%—about 50% more than overall inflation,” as the Wall Street Journal has reported, in part because “Federal regulations, renewable subsidies and state green-energy mandates are forcing fossil-fuel and nuclear plants to retire prematurely. Solar and wind need backup from so-called peaker gas plants, usually at a hefty premium. During power shortages, spot prices can hit $10,000 per megawatt hour compared to $30 to $60 on a normal basis.”

More revealing of the dubious science, this “solution” for mitigating allegedly catastrophic rises in temperatures won’t make a difference: “Heritage Foundation research has shown that using the Environmental Protection Agency’s preferred Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change, the associated policies would reduce global temperatures by less than 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, even using alarmist assumptions about the extent of climate change.”

And don’t forget that beyond the West, countries like China and India, the first and third largest emitters in the world, continue to use dirty coal to produce energy, and have no intention of following the West into committing energy suicide.

These examples of rackets create by venal scientists, unaccountable government agency clerks, and ideologically driven media and politicians, illustrate Hoffer’s formula. But the bill will be paid by we the people, who are heading for fiscal calamity, and the transformation of our constitutional balanced-and-checked government, unalienable rights, and personal freedom, into a technocratic tyranny of a globalist elites.