American citizens are revolting against leftist policies

OPINION:

If you live in a northern climate, you can’t help noticing that the groundhog was right; spring is coming early.

Warm winds are turning the land green again in many places. Along with those warm winds, we also see welcome breezes blowing wisdom through unlikely places.

Not in Washington, alas. President Biden, on Thursday night in his State of the Union address, emitted enough sulfur and brimstone to heat up the planet by several degrees. 

More on that later. First, some good news. 

Oregon, stung by a deadly toll of overdose deaths, especially in Portland, is reversing course. The legislature passed a bill overturning the state’s uniquely liberal drug law. It awaits the governor’s signature.

In 2019, 280 people in Oregon died of drug overdoses. Trending data indicate that 2023’s final toll will be around 1,250 deaths—a more than 400% increase from four years earlier.

What happened between 2019 and 2023? Two devastating things.

Oregon voters in 2020 approved Democrat-sponsored Measure 110, legalizing possession of small amounts of deadly drugs—even heroin, cocaine and fentanyl. 

In January 2021, Joe Biden took office as president of the United States. 

His very first actions undid President Trump’s successful border policies and unleashed a flood of millions of unvetted illegal aliens. 
The surge includes criminals, sex traffickers and human mules bearing fentanyl and other opiates that are killing 100,000 Americans every year. 

In San Francisco, citizens are revolting against the filth, crime and degradation that the Democrat city government’s politics have reaped.

In 2020, Mayor London Breed defunded the police by $120 million. This past week, however, voters approved tough-on-crime measures that she championed. 

One of them requires welfare recipients to undergo drug screenings. This is the kind of thing that usually would get you called “racist” in woke San Francisco. But drug abuse, crime, homeless tents, and sidewalk human waste and needles have turned the city into a no-go zone, and people are fed up. 

Citizens began their rebellion in 2022 by recalling their soft-on-crime Marxist district attorney, Chesa Boudin. They also recalled three far-left school board members who were vilifying Abraham Lincoln and other Americans who had schools named after them. 

In Washington, D.C., where crime is rampant, with carjackings nearing 1,000 a year, the city council unanimously approved reforms aimed at backing police and restoring order.  

Curiously, they failed to reduce the felony threshold for theft from $1,000 to $500, even though some stores are closing because of ransacking mobs. 

They apparently didn’t learn a lesson from what happened in California. Democrats passed a law effectively making shoplifting okay up to $950. This apparently inspired a wave of flash mob looting. 

In New York City this past week, Gov. Kathy Hochul dispatched the National Guard to restore order to subways in the City That Never Sleeps. It’s too dangerous to sleep when thousands of recidivists sprung by soft-on-crime policies are seeking their next prey.

Ms. Hochul does not face reelection until 2027. But her Democratic Party, irrefutably accused of being soft on crime, faces voters in November, including for the presidency.

That brings us to the current White House occupant, whose angry State of the Union address on Thursday was a masterpiece in obfuscation, selective “facts” and lies.

Mr. Biden has deliberately exposed America to an unprecedented invasion, declared war on our energy industry and unleashed ruinous inflation. His weakness has helped touch off several wars and attacks on U.S. interests. 

So he claimed that everything was great and reiterated his support for abortion and climate hysteria. 

Accusing Republicans of wanting to end “reproductive freedom,” he exclaimed, “My God, what freedoms will you take away next?”  
If I were Mr. Biden, I wouldn’t bring God into a defense of killing human babies in the womb. 

As far as defending freedom, this is the man who is locking up political opponents, using federal agencies to censor dissent and expanding government power at a breakneck pace.

He claimed credit for the “toughest” border security measures in history while making clear that more aid to Ukraine was his top priority, not defending U.S. sovereignty. He also announced that the U.S. would build a pier to pour American aid into Gaza. 

Democrat lawmakers cheered wildly, of course. He could have been reciting a dictionary, and they would have gone nuts. It works the same way for Republicans when a GOP president speaks.

But I think this is all for show. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is waiting to take the nomination when the party figures out that drugs and the media can no longer cover for Mr. Biden’s senility. 

The former San Francisco mayor is all in on abortion and climate extremism.  

As the Wall Street Journal noted, Mr. Newsom, in 2022, paid for 18 billboards in seven states to promote California as an abortion sanctuary. His Campaign for Democracy PAC released a video in February showing a young woman crying for help and chained to a bed with a rape kit nearby. 

This is on par with the Democrats’ Medicare scare ad during the 2012 campaign that featured a Paul Ryan lookalike pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair off a cliff.

The donkeys are running against the wind, hoping that Americans won’t notice that their party has been pushing the entire nation off a cliff over the past four years. 

• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.