I spend probably too much time on social media these days, but occasionally something very stimulating pops up that requires thought and analysis. One of those was a provocative tweet from “Matt Van Swol,” a self-styled “Former Nuclear Scientist for US Dept of Energy.” On 17 March, he posted a comparison that contrasted what has passed for widely believed consensus versus the actual truth about nine important issues du jour.
That got me to thinking about each issue, and the below is the result. Let’s get cracking….
For decades, the Democrat Party and the broader American left built a governing philosophy on a foundation of deliberate misidentification. Name the problem wrongly, propose the wrong solution, spend trillions achieving nothing, then demand more money and more power to try again. This was not incompetence. It was a system — one that preserved Democrat political power, funded the left-wing nonprofit complex, expanded the administrative state, and kept the problems alive precisely because solved problems generate no votes, no donations, and no dependent constituencies.
A constitutional conservative like me looks at this record and calls it what it is: not a series of policy failures, but a series of policy successes for the people running the system, at the direct expense of the American people they were sworn to serve. What follows is the honest diagnosis the Democrats and their legacy media sycophants have spent decades suppressing.
THERE WAS NEVER A HOUSING PROBLEM; THERE WAS AN ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION PROBLEM
The Democrat Party’s transformation on immigration is one of the most consequential and cynically motivated policy pivots in modern American political history. A generation ago, in the 1980s and 1990s, factions favoring more or less immigration were found in both parties. But the Democrat Party abruptly changed its immigration policy when its leaders began to hope that they could import voters from other countries to compensate for the loss of voters that Democratic policies were alienating.
The 1996 Democrat Party platform stated plainly: “We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it.” Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Those days are gone, replaced by a party that made open borders not a failure of policy but the policy itself.
The consequences for American housing were direct, mathematical, and devastating. Between 2021 and 2024, the foreign-born population increased by six million people — the largest such influx over such a short period in American history. Six million additional people competing for an already insufficient housing supply does not produce a housing crisis. It produces an immigration crisis with housing consequences. In states like California and New York — governed by Democrats who proudly declared themselves sanctuary states — the Biden-era surge accounted for 100 percent of all rental price growth and more than half of all growth in owner-occupied housing.
Democrat-run sanctuary cities actively thwarted the ability of federal immigration officials to identify and deport illegal aliens, while those same governors presided over rising rents, overrun hospitals, and strained school systems — and called it compassion. Behind the vainglorious virtue-signaling were the sordid motives of votes and money: census population figures — including illegal aliens — determine the allocation of more than $2.8 trillion in annual federal spending, meaning that every illegal alien added to the population increases the federal funding flowing to Democrat-run jurisdictions.
The working American who could not afford rent was not the victim of a housing market failure. They were the victim of a Democrat Party that chose imported population over its own citizens. That was never a housing problem. It was an illegal immigration problem with a Democrat Party address.
THERE WAS NEVER A DEBT PROBLEM; THERE WAS A FRAUD PROBLEM
The Democrat Party is the party of big government as a matter of explicit, foundational ideology. From the New Deal through the Great Society through Obamacare through the American Rescue Plan, the left’s answer to every problem has been the same: a new federal program, administered by a new federal bureaucracy, funded by new federal spending. The scale of that spending — and the fraud it inevitably generated — is not a side effect of Democrat governance. It is its natural product. Governments that believe their own virtue are governments that stop auditing themselves.
The Government Accountability Office’s Comptroller General testified that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud alone — between $1,800 and $4,000 per American household every single year. These are not abstract numbers. Congressional investigators documented $382 million in fraudulent unemployment payments issued to individuals with birthdates in the future, to infants, and to people listed as 115 years old. The Small Business Administration extended $312 million in business loans to children aged 11 and under.
The left’s response to documentation of this fraud was not outrage — it was protection of the programs generating it. Every proposed audit, every proposed spending cut, every proposed accountability mechanism was met with the same Democrat accusation: you want to hurt the poor, the sick, the vulnerable. Fraud was the shield, and compassionate rhetoric was the sword used to keep the shield in place.
The GAO’s High Risk List — programs identified as vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement — has existed for more than 30 years. Medicare has sat on it for more than 30 years. Democrat Congresses that controlled the chambers during that period received those reports, filed them, and appropriated more money to the same programs.
The American taxpayer was not undertaxed. The American government was being looted — and the looting was protected by a political philosophy that treats government spending as inherently virtuous and government accountability as inherently hostile to the public interest. That was never a debt problem. It was a fraud problem, and it was a fraud problem that the left’s big-government theology made structurally inevitable.
THERE WAS NEVER A BORDER PROBLEM; THERE WAS AN ENFORCEMENT PROBLEM
Open borders are not a Democrat policy failure — they are a Democrat policy success, pursued deliberately, for documented political and financial reasons. The Democrat Party changed its immigration policy when its leaders began to hope that they could import voters to compensate for the loss of voters that Democrat policies were alienating.
The net effect of increases in both legal and illegal immigration in the 2020 Census shifted 17 House seats and 17 Electoral College votes, resulting in a net gain of 14 seats in Blue States. Of the 24 congressional districts where one in five adults is not an American citizen, 20 were won by a Democrat in 2022. This is not coincidence. It is strategy — and it is a strategy that required the border to remain open regardless of the cost to American citizens.
For today’s Democrat Party, unlimited illegal immigration is not a failure of policy — it is the policy, pushed at every level of government. The sanctuary city movement began in the 1980s as a Democrat project, with San Francisco’s 1989 “City and County of Refuge” resolution as a milestone, growing to more than 560 jurisdictions by 2018 — overwhelmingly blue cities and counties.
Democrats built the infrastructure of non-enforcement at the local level and then, under Biden, extended it to the federal level itself, directing executive agencies to cease applying the laws of the United States at the southern border. The Biden-Harris Administration deliberately dismantled border security, unleashing the worst border disaster in American history.
The laws requiring border enforcement were always on the books. The authority to enforce them was always vested in the executive. What was absent was a Democrat Party that had any interest in enforcement at all — because enforcement would have closed the population pipeline on which Democrat electoral and financial strategy increasingly depended. That was never a border problem. It was a Democrat Party problem masquerading as a policy challenge.
THERE WAS NEVER A CRIME PROBLEM; THERE WAS A PROSECUTION PROBLEM
The Democrat left’s “criminal justice reform” project was not a response to genuine systemic injustice — it was an ideological campaign, funded by concentrated left-wing political money, to dismantle the enforcement mechanisms that protect law-abiding citizens in favor of a theory of social justice that treats criminals as victims and law enforcement as the threat. It was implemented through the targeted election of progressive prosecutors in America’s largest cities, funded overwhelmingly by left-wing donors, and it produced exactly the results its critics predicted.
A survey of six jurisdictions with progressive district attorneys found that every city or county logged a lower overall felony conviction rate and a lower conviction rate for violent and serious crimes. On average, these prosecutors dropped 20 percent more felony cases than their predecessors. Homicides in Baltimore increased 65 percent under one progressive prosecutor’s tenure, felony defendants became 23 percent less likely to be convicted, and felons in possession of a firearm became 46 percent less likely to face conviction. The theory held that less prosecution meant less injustice. The reality was that less prosecution meant more dead Americans in the cities that the left claimed to care most about.
The Democrat response to this documented carnage was to double down. Democrat governors shielded progressive prosecutors from accountability. Democrat mayors refused to restore bail requirements. Democrat state legislatures passed laws reducing criminal penalties and emptying jails. Left-wing political rhetoric provided cover for policies that prioritized ideological goals over public safety, leading to violence against law enforcement and heinous, preventable murders of American citizens.
The victims of this policy were not the wealthy. Democrat donors funding it from their gated communities — they were the working-class and minority Americans living in the cities where the left conducted its experiment in consequence-free crime. That was never a crime problem. It was a prosecution problem manufactured by a Democrat ideological project that treated the safety of American citizens as expendable.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS, PART I
Are you getting the picture that the Democrat Party is not your friend and has been obfuscating the truth with the groveling assistance of Democrat-controlled media? I will cover the remaining issues in Part II of this two-part series.
The end.