When naming government bills, truth in advertising is not required — nor is its lack legally actionable. A good example is the $1.9 trillion Covid-relief package signed into law by Joe Biden last March. While sold to America using coronavirus woes as a pretext, much of the allocated money is funding woke schemes that promote left-wing agendas.
As Fox News reported Friday:
What do an armored SWAT vehicle in Pittsburgh, “restorative justice” educational discipline in New York City, racial healing pop-ups in Minneapolis, and school vape detectors in Montgomery, Ala., have in common? They’re all funded by federal taxpayers through the hastily-passed American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Democrats advanced through Congress on a party-line vote in early 2021.
The $1.9 trillion bill was framed as an emergency measure to help the United States dig out of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences.
But much money is going toward projects that are seemingly unrelated or barely related to the virus or the recovery from the pandemic.
…Among the spending tenuously related to the pandemic, Minneapolis allocated $300,000 to, “Promote healing and positive activation in the Black community to build and implement a larger vision of an equitable and resilient recovery from COVID-19 and racial trauma. These pop-up style events will help address the need for healing and social cohesion.” This is according to a tracker of funding for large cities and counties run by the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution.
Yet that’s not all. Fox reported in May on other endeavors funded by ARPA:
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which received $135 million from the plan, announced last October that it had allocated $87.8 million in ARP funds to “nearly 300 cultural and educational institutions to help them recover from the economic impact of the pandemic, retain and rehire workers, and reopen sites, facilities, and programs.”
However, many of the institutions were awarded grants for projects that had little to do with addressing recovery efforts from the pandemic, according to research from American Crossroads shared with and verified by Fox News Digital.
For instance, $499,023 went to the University of Montana for multiple programs on racial justice, including a public lecture series on “racial justice, death and Indigenous knowledge.”
Another $50,000 in ARP funds went to a nonprofit organization in the Northern Mariana Islands called 500 Sails for “reopening programs that teach Indigenous canoe-building and explore pre-colonial sea life.”
Commenting on this, pundit Monica Showalter (who deserves a hat tip for the above) writes:
We got canoe-building. We got vape detection. We got SWAT tanks, which should come in handy when Joe comes after the Republicans. We got racial healing pop-ups.
What we don’t have is any obvious COVID relief, unless Joe Biden considers making bureaucrats rich the same as COVID relief. It certainly is relief to them and to the profligate wokester blue cities that are still trying to think up things to spend that COVID relief cash on.
The only thing the American people are getting for this $1.9-trillion spend-a-thon is inflation. We pay for it not only through the national debt, but through inflation, which is a double-pay hit on taxpayers.
This is no exaggeration. Not only do the middle class’ taxes help fund this, but money printed up via Uncle Sam’s legalized counterfeiting operation does also — and this is a hidden form of taxation. Why?
Because when money backed by nothing substantive is created and enters circulation, it dilutes the currency and diminishes the value of the dollars in your pocket. The result is rising prices, of course, which means it’s regressive taxation, as it hits the poor and middle class hardest. It’s also universal, affecting even those who don’t directly pay federal income tax.
In other words, it’s a way of getting the middle class, which by and large doesn’t vote for leftists, to fund the left-wing schemes through which their country is undermined, their kids are indoctrinated, and their future imperiled.
Consider, for instance, that when hearing the NEH “allocated $87.8 million in ARP funds to ‘nearly 300 cultural and educational institutions,’” one may ask: What does the Left consider “culture” and “education”? It’s a good bet that some of this money may be used to promote the MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender”) agenda, critical race theory, DIE (diversity, inclusion, and equity) programs, and other woke schemes.
And that’s how you get funding for politically correct social engineering that, if pitched to Americans honestly, would never see the light of day: Give your product (bill) a marketable name — and only list dangerous substances well down on a sometimes vague ingredients list so long that virtually no one will read it.
Worse still, finding duplicitous ways to fund leftism’s march is nothing new. For example, under a 1976 law, radical groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State can not only sue a locality, but, upon prevailing in court, can compel that jurisdiction to pay their legal fees (with the residents’ tax money, of course)!
Then there was the Obama administration, which, reported Daily Wire in 2017, “funneled billions of dollars to left-wing activist groups — such as the National Council of La Raza [The Race], National Urban League and National Community Reinvestment Coalition — through a slush fund scheme of the Department of Justice.”
So you probably didn’t know that you “donate” to left-wing causes. But you do — whether you like it or not.
