Seth Barron

Weaponized

The Left's Seizure of State Power

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

THE ELITES LOATHE THE IDEA THAT THE U.S. CONSTITUTION RESTS POWER IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE. It has become a common observation that a pernicious agenda-sometimes called Progressive, "woke," or "equity based"-has spread throughout American society. Every aspect of life and culture-from schooling, to television, to the workplace, and to sports-is now suffused with this program. The agenda has multiple overt aims, including the rectification of historical racial injustice by deconstructing legacy notions of merit and the value of work, now redefined as the values of white privilege. It seeks to undo segregated residential patterns by altering the political geography of the country, concentrating the population in dense urban areas, reversing "white flight" by eliminating the suburbs that have caused so much harm. It plans to undermine the traditional family structure by cultivating confusion about gender norms and sexuality among American children. It aims to end the system of punishment for violating the law by redefining crime and "reimagining" the function of the police in order to turn them into enforcement agents for socio-political standards rather than protectors of people and property. And it seeks to end the meaning of "America" as a nation by dissolving the difference between citizen and foreigner. These are all familiar tendencies in modern life-we hear people complain generally about them on social media or cable news all the time-even if we don't necessarily connect them or see them as part of a unified, revolutionary effort to change America. Seth Barron's WEAPONIZED proves exactly how the Left is waging war on the American people by attacking specific institutions of the American way of life, essentially sucking all power up the chain, away from the people and into the hands of a managerial, administrative class that has its own vision for the future of the country. This elite class wants control over everything. It is intolerable for them that any corner of American life is being run contrary in any way to the totalizing, even totalitarian, vision they have of our society. The elites loathe the idea that the U.S. Constitution rests power in the hands of the people, and that states and localities are reserved certain key rights. Our historical system enshrines self-rule-the principle that communities comprised of self-regulating subjects can govern themselves best-while the Left believes that the people who don't live somewhere are the best equipped to set the rules there. This is a war against the sovereignty of the American people, and the hour is late.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Humanix Books
• Seitenzahl: 304
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. Juli 2025
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 228mm x 152mm
• ISBN-13: 9781630062699
• ISBN-10: 1630062693
• Artikelnr.: 67451188

Autorenporträt

SETH BARRON (NEW YORK, NEW YORK) is a New York City-based reporter and editor who has covered local politics closely for more than ten years. Barron is the Managing Editor of The American Mind, a publication of The Claremont Institute, and was fromerly Associate Editor of urban policy at  City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, Barron is a widely-read columnist and reporter on politics and issues in New York City. Barron became intimately familiar with the ins and outs of New York City politics through his City Council Watch blog, and then worked in City Hall as legislative director for a council member from Queens. His work has appeared in the New York Post, New York Daily News, and Wall Street Journal  and also appears regularly on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News to discuss New York City issues. He frequently appears on a range of local and national television and radio programs as a commentator. The author lives & works in New York City. https://www.city-journal.org/contributor/seth--barron_849 https://www.manhattan-institute.org/expert/seth-barron https://www.realclearpolicy.com/authors/seth_barron/ https://www.foxnews.com/person/b/seth-barron https://muckrack.com/seth-barron/articles https://nypost.com/author/seth-barron

Inhaltsangabe

Table of Contents of WEAPONIZED: The Left’s Control of State Power by Seth
Barron
Introduction: How struggles over seemingly unrelated issues—from school
funding to immigration to absentee voting—are part of a war against local
control.
Chapter 1: The Meaning of Borders
Donald Trump’s gravest sin was his call to build a “big beautiful” wall on
the border with Mexico. Why? Because it would work, and it would affirm the
sovereignty of the United States as a real nation—an exercise in
self-governance that the country had undemocratically abdicated long
before.
The elite vision of the United States—on the left and the right—is as a
kind of clearing house for financial transactions, a source of fodder for
expeditions and wars, and a sump for the dispossessed of the world in order
to displace the legacy population, which retains some nostalgia for
constitutional America.
In 2017, Nancy Pelosi said that “Immigrants make America more American.”
This chapter will examine opposing viewpoints on the meaning of America. Is
it a place for people who live here now and their “posterity,” as the
Constitution says, or does it belong to people who have never set foot
here?
Chapter 2: You Didn’t Build That
Since Trump’s expulsion from office, the border has ceased to exist in any
meaningful way. Millions of people are permitted entry and millions more
are encouraged to come. This chaos is hidden and unreported. It is contrary
to the wishes of the American people, but it’s clear that this decision is
not up to them.
The Left continually repeat that “it wants to build bridges, not walls,” as
though real walls and metaphorical bridges cannot coexist. This chapter
will discuss the elite “Open Borders” movement on both the Left and the
Right, and show how unlimited immigration is a war on labor by depressing
wages. It will also discuss the Left’s open support for flooding the
country with nonwhite immigrants as a means of achieving permanent
political power.
This chapter will review the nationwide effort, led by the federal
government and executed by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to
distribute the immigrant population throughout the United States, typically
in secret. It will examine the effect on local communities of managing a
sudden influx of poor, unskilled migrants, and the associated problems of
assimilating these groups. 
It will also review the many ways in which the government and pro-immigrant
groups have tried to grant rights to people who tried and failed to enter
the country.
Chapter 3: “Secure the Blessings”
The Left loathes many aspects of the way we vote, starting with the
Electoral College. They present the fact that the country does not operate
as a direct democracy as though no one noticed this before. In fact, the
Founders were very careful to protect the rights of the minority by giving
each state equal representation in the Senate, so the biggest population
centers can’t control the whole country.
Ending the Electoral College and the Senate would end the power of the
states; this would represent the end of America as we know it. This chapter
will review the meaning of our Federal system and why it is so crucial for
Americans to retain their sovereignty.
Chapter 4: “Defending Our Democracy”
The very first item on the Democrats’ agenda when they won in 2020 was to
end local oversight of the voting process. The Left wanted to make
permanent all the loosened regulations of the lockdown, including ballot
harvesting, ballot curing, no checks on signatures, etc. in order to remove
the authority of local officials and ballot box observers to keep an eye on
the process.
In the name of clean elections, the Left wants to obscure all the processes
associated with them. In order to keep voting fair, the Left wants to make
it easier to cheat. And to keep elections equitable, localities and states
must have to get federal approval to do anything related to voting.
This chapter will detail the many ways in which the Left, while bleating
about “defending Our Democracy,” does all they can to dismantle it. It will
explain how “Our Democracy” is meant literally—it belongs to them, not us.
Chapter 5: Defund the Police
It has been noted that the Left calls racist anything it doesn’t control.
Local police forces are the one government institution that, despite a
unionized workforce, is largely “non-woke” and remains responsive to the
needs of the law-abiding citizenry. Police draw heat for arresting
nonwhites out of proportion to their population, but this is simply a
reflection of their higher rates of crime, which is beyond dispute. The
“Defund” movement blew up after the George Floyd riots, but the
“abolitionist” perspective has been growing since the re-election of Obama
in 2012.
This chapter will review the attack on police, policing, and law and order.
Theorists such as Michelle Alexander content that slavery and Jim Crow
never really ended, because America developed police forces to manage and
discipline the black population. Others admit that “mass incarceration” is
fueled not by harsh sentences for minor crimes but by the wide prevalence
of major violent crimes.
Chapter 6: Public Safety vs Political Crime
Defunders claim they want to “reimagine” public safety, but what this
really means is the redirection of control of the policing function to “the
community,” which in effect means federally-approved non-profit
organizations such as those that have been the beneficiaries of massive
payouts by former District Attorney of New York Cy Vance. The Left has
nothing against policing, surveillance, the security state, or police
violence: they simply want it directed against their enemies.
The vision the Left has of policing in the future would be a federalized
structure that attends largely to political crime (“hate crime”) and
worries itself with “anti-democratic activists.” Violent crime and street
crime would be handled by well-funded community groups that pursue violence
interruption and restorative justice practices.
Chapter 7: Let No Child Get Ahead
The Left is obsessed with how schools have failed nonwhite children, but
the fact that schools are staffed and run almost entirely by leftists is
not permitted to enter the conversation. Instead, we are told that the
reason why every single school district in America demonstrates the same
“achievement gap” between white and Asian students on one hand, and black
and Latino students on the other, is a question of funding. The Left
insists that the inequitable funding of schools by local property taxes is
a legacy of segregation, and entrenches segregationist principles even when
public education is nominally integrated. 
While many localities do fund public schools through property taxes, the
disparities are less than is commonly imagined. Many districts, such as New
York City, the largest school district in the nation, fund schools on a
per-pupil basis. Many states allocate state money to make up for funding
disparities, and all poor schools receive federal Title I funding. Of
course, it’s not at all clear that more money equals better educational
outcomes. New York City spends more than almost anywhere else in the
country, and its outcomes are subpar. 
This chapter will review the arguments regarding local funding of schools
and the false allegations that the achievement gap is caused by so-called
segregation. I will discuss charter schools and other “choice”
considerations as possible solutions to the problem.
Chapter 8: Your Children Are Our Resource
But the effort to control local schools goes beyond the question of local
funding. As the pandemic demonstrated, the national teachers union wields
astounding power over educational policy and practice, and coordinates with
the Democratic Party at the highest levels. The federal government even
colluded with an obscure committee of state school board associations to
classify parents who attend school board meetings as domestic terrorists.
Efforts to impose critical race theory instruction, transgender education,
and other radical ideologies through the schools are a key tenet of leftist
activism. This chapter will review attempts to subvert parental input or
even knowledge of curricular content, and the extent to which the Left sees
control of the schools as key to its control of the future. A key part of
this chapter will explore the war on charter schools, religious schools,
and homeschooling, which are increasingly described as dangerous, a threat
to democratic institutions, the locus of sexual abuse, and failures even by
their own terms.
Chapter 9: Segregation Forever
It is now widely believed on the Left that U.S. residential and
developmental patterns have entrenched inequality throughout the nation.
“Redlining,” or the federal practice of guaranteeing mortgages in stable or
growing neighborhoods, has been cast as a vast exercise in segregation. In
reality, while many black people did have trouble obtaining mortgages, so
did everyone who lived in poor, substandard housing stock in the 1930s, 40s
and 50s. 
The Left is also preoccupied by the idea that the highway system
intentionally divided nonwhite neighborhoods; we hear this argument about
New York City. However, in many cases, the communities that were divided
were entirely white, and only became minority neighborhoods later. 
This chapter will review the arguments and myths about postwar urban
development, the real estate market, and trillion-dollar efforts to expand
homeownership among nonwhites. Certain claims about Robert Moses’ racism
will be given special attention.
Chapter 10: Magic Dirt, Tragic Dirt
The power of neighborhoods to determine what they should be like through
regulation of development is crucial to community identity and
self-determination. But a concerted army of pro-density activists known as
YIMBYs (“Yes In My BackYard”) are motivated by an ideological fixation on
destroying the suburban model of single-family housing, which they view as
racially exclusionary, environmentally destructive, and economically
destructive. They blame single-family zoning as the root cause of
persistent inequality, homelessness, and climate change.
Their vision of the future is hyperdense mixed-use residential living, mass
transit, and a trend toward socialized housing. The principle that “ZIP
code is destiny” animates their desire to effect population transfer to
ensure that all communities are racially mixed, at the same time that they
decry the gentrification of minority neighborhoods. 
Laws to restrict the right of cities and neighborhoods to impose land-use
restrictions have passed at the state level in Washington, Minnesota, and
to a limited extent California. This is a nationwide movement that aims to
repair the long-lasting effects of redlining, which supposedly denied
blacks the ability to build “generational wealth.” 
Tied back to the original point of the book, YIMBYism is a form of Open
Borders on the local level. The idea is that Americans have no right to
determine what their own communities should be like. That prerogative
belongs to people who haven’t gotten there yet.