Biden Marks a Turning Point for Polarization

What this election has shown us

While the 2020 election was an extremely close call for the Democrat shoe-in Joe Biden, it was also a wake up call for Republican voters, and politically conservative individuals. The main thing I noticed during this election time was how talking points had shifted and how race and identity politics were no longer a point of interest for the Democratic hopefuls. It seemed like the political environment no longer reflected the feminist ideology or really addressed the racist tendencies of Creepy Uncle Joe. Suddenly it became about the way Trump was incapable of curing COVID in America, and how he was a “mouthpiece for the Russian agenda.” Even in debate, Biden’s talking points were far from specific and heavily relied on buzzwords and phrases. 

However, despite this, I am not entirely sure that the shift in agenda is entirely purposeful, or if the reason behind covering up sexual assault allegations is in fact because of Biden. It seems like the Democratic Party has shifted its focus in order to placate a larger audience and give them scraps of digestible talking points. I firmly believe that Joe Biden will make no difference in the long run, moreover, his presidency will serve as a reminder that liberals do not care about sexual harassment as long as you’re a Democrat. I remember the Kavanaugh confirmation, people went so far as to wear black as a sign of protest, there were riots, and there were extreme protests. It became a largely pressing issue, and was a major part of core Democratic values; yet the same shouting voices in 2018 are silently supporting Biden, despite accusations of pedophilia and unwanted advances on women. 

In my opinion, it seems as though she [Kamala Harris] is presented as a willing accomplice to his racism and sexual assault allegations by providing a singular counterexample of his ‘good’ behavior.

Many people who support Biden may object by stating that Kamala Harris functions as a juxtaposition to his more egregious behavior, but to that I say, why does she have to? Is her role as the Vice President to function as a counter to his irresponsible and offensive behavior? In my opinion, it seems as though she is presented as a willing accomplice to his racism and sexual assault allegations by providing a singular counterexample of his ‘good’ behavior. In social clubs we talk about the detriment of tokenizing POC, but the Democratic Party has brandished the same troublesome tendencies. Something that truly appalls me is the way that they address the sexual assault allegations. It has been on record that, despite women coming forward to verify the claims, they have cherry picked certain people to testify the opposite. The Democratic Party’s hypocrisy is screaming to America that, although Biden is accused of being inappropriate with young women, Democrat politicians and supporters are willing to snuff out the allegations by enough women claiming that it “never happened to them.” Therefore allegations against Biden must not be true. The platform of the #MeToo movement is being destroyed because it no longer aligns with the way Democratic candidates need to be perceived. This shows us that the social platforms of the Democratic Party are a sham and will be abandoned at a moment’s notice. The Democratic Party has no true social values, as we can see in the difference between the way they addressed Kavanaugh versus Biden. 

Additionally, I have made this argument throughout the course of my academic career, there should be more representation in government. In my opinion, it would be good to have more representation in Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Senate to incorporate more diversity; and yet when the opportunity arises for more female representation in the Supreme Court, it is met with liberal backlash. When the primary candidates for the Democratic seat are old, white men, we are left to question the integrity of the liberal slogan to promote diversity. When I bring this up to many of my friends who identify as either Socialist or generally left-leaning, they seem to no longer support the motto of diverse representation because of Bernie Sanders. Why is it that left-leaning individuals are able to chastise right-leaning voters for supporting a candidate who has been known to be inappropriate when they do the exact same thing?

It was never about the values Biden stands for, nor his economic policy. This election season has acted as revenge against the Trump Administration.

 I feel as though with the results of this election, it says more about forced voting tendencies of a two party system more than anything else. It was never about the values Biden stands for, nor his economic policy. This election season has acted as revenge against the Trump Administration. I firmly believe that voting matters, but voting with reactionary tendencies leads to the wrong types of politicians representing the people of America. Not only was the Biden election reactionary, but also the Trump election. This election, for the most part, was not about voting to voice an individual opinion but to create a reactionary echo-chamber against the Trump Administration. It was an attempt to get the masses to push Trump out of office at any cost by casting a ballot solely for the presidency. The 2020 election will serve as a turning point for the polarization of the two party system in which someone like Biden, who many people remark as the worst option for Democratic presidential candidacy, was able to win the popular vote, not because of his merits, but because of the color of his tie. 

The Darsch Report: March 25 – 31

US Marshall Arrested in San Antonio

On Saturday, March 30, US Marshal Reynaldo Chavera was charged with drug possession following an arrest Saturday morning outside a San Antonio strip club. Bexar County booking records show he has been charged with possession of less than one gram of a controlled substance under “penalty group one” of the Texas Controlled Substances Act.

San Antonio police officers arrested Chavera around 5:30 am Saturday at XTC Cabaret near San Antonio International Airport after security workers detained him when he refused to leave the club. Officers then identified Chavera as a U.S. Marshal and found that he had narcotics in his possession.

U.S. Marshals Service spokesman Christopher Bozeman said the agency is aware of Chavera’s arrest and ”takes seriously any allegation of misconduct by its employees which do not reflect our core values of justice, integrity, and service.”

Possession of less than one gram of a controlled substance in that category is a state jail felony punishable by a maximum two-year prison sentence.

Attorney General and Chick-Fil-A

On Thursday, March 28, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he would launch an investigation into whether the city of San Antonio’s rejection of Chick-fil-A from its airport violates state law.

The San Antonio city council excluded the business from the airport after a ThinkProgress report claimed they support anti-LGBTQ+ organizations.

“The Constitution’s protection of religious liberty is somehow even better than Chick-fil-A’s chicken,” Paxton wrote in a letter to San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg. “Unfortunately, I have serious concerns that both are under assault at the San Antonio airport.”

Paxton said he is also encouraging Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao to look into whether the city broke any federal law or regulation.

“I trust the City will fully cooperate with my investigation into this matter and will abide by relevant federal and state laws in the future,” he wrote.

“The City’s Attorney’s Office is reviewing the letter. I am withholding comment until we have had adequate time to analyze it,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg stated.

Paxton also told San Antonio officials that he asked U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to investigate whether the city’s actions violated federal law and regulations prohibiting religious discrimination by federal grant recipients.

Is Joe Biden Getting #MeToo-ed?

On Friday, March 29, former Nevada Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor Lucy Flores wrote an essay in The Cut alleging that Joe Biden acted inappropriately with her and made her feel “uneasy, gross, and confused”.

“As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze… I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified… He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head,” Flores wrote.

She says she was more than relieved when her name was called and she was able to get away from Biden.

Even though Biden had come to Nevada to help Flores win her election, she claims his behavior was unprofessional. “He stopped treating me like a peer the moment he touched me,” Flores stated. “Even if his behavior wasn’t violent or sexual, it was demeaning and disrespectful.”

As she points out, however, this isn’t the first time Joe Biden has gotten too close for comfort.

“Time passed and pictures started to surface of Vice President Biden getting uncomfortably close with women and young girls. Biden nuzzling the neck of the Defense secretary’s wife; Biden kissing a senator’s wife on the lips; Biden whispering in women’s ears; Biden snuggling female constituents.”

Joe Biden has brushed past the allegations. “In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once—never—did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention,” said Biden.

If betting markets are to be trusted as charts for public approval, this allegation has seriously hurt Joe Biden’s chances of becoming the 2020 Democratic nominee. On Election Betting Odds and PredictIt, Biden plummeted from the favorite Democratic contender to the fourth and third place, respectively.

US Economy

It was a good week for US stocks. The Dow Jones increased to 25,928.68 on Friday, increasing by +426.36 points, or +1.67 percent over its March 22 close of 25,502.32. The S&P 500 increased by +33.69 points or +1.20 percent on Friday. In addition, the Nasdaq increased on Friday by +0.70 percent. With this, the stock market has overall erased the losses it suffered the previous week.

There are signs of a global economic slowdown on the horizon but if President Trump can get a favorable trade deal with China in the coming weeks then it should at least delay the slowdown as tariffs between the two largest economies are lowered.

California Magazine Ban Unconstitutional

On Friday, March 29, San Diego-based U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez ruled that California’s ban on the possession of magazines able to hold more than 10 rounds at a time is unconstitutional citing home invasions where a woman used the extra bullets in her weapon to kill an attacker while in two other cases women without additional ammunition ran out of bullets.

“Individual liberty and freedom are not outmoded concepts,” Benitez wrote as he declared the law to be unconstitutional.

California’s 2000 law and its 2016 removal of a provision made the buying, selling, and possession of magazines that can carry more than 10 rounds illegal. The California arm of the National Rifle Association sued and Benitez sided with the group’s argument that banning the magazines infringes on the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Chuck Michel, an attorney for the NRA and the California Rifle & Pistol Association, said that the ruling may even go so far as to strike down the entire ban.

“We’re still digesting the opinion but it appears to us that he struck down both the latest ban on possessing by those who are grandfathered in, but also said that everyone has a right to acquire one,” Michel said.

Attorney General Xavier Becerra came out against the ruling. “[My office] is committed to defending California’s common sense gun laws,” Becerra said.

This ruling is a big win for gun owners throughout California. With Trump having appointed over 90 judges since the start of his presidency, this ruling could carry shockwaves across the US and act as precedent against other similar bills in the US.

Texas House Budget Bill

In the night between March 27 and 28, the Texas State House voted 149-0 to advance a budget that grows the size of government by nearly 16 percent and provides little property tax relief.

Despite many Republican lawmakers campaigning on property tax relief and adding an amendment that would slow the growth of government spending, most of the amendments were either heavily changed or surrendered in exchange for Democratic votes on other amendments, such as those proposed by State Reps. Jonathan Stickland (R–Bedford), Briscoe Cain (R–Deer Park), Matt Krause (R–Fort Worth), and Matt Schaefer (R–Tyler).

Not every bill that was cut dealt with property tax relief. According to Capitol sources, freshman State Rep. Mayes Middleton (R–Wallisville) agreed to discard his amendment, which would prevent illegal aliens from receiving state dollars set aside for Hurricane Harvey assistance, in exchange for lawmakers moving his bill to ban taxpayer-funded lobbying forward in the process.

Property tax relief is perhaps the most vital issue for Texas residents but, as it currently stands, it is in the hands of the State Senate to determine the bill’s fate.

Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier

In a bit of good news, a NASA study released on Monday in Nature Geoscience found that Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier is actually growing.

From 2003 to 2016 the Jakobshavn glacier was one of the fasting shrinking glaciers in the world and in 2016 its thickness had diminished by about 500 feet and was retreating by about 1.8 miles annually.

However, between 2016 and 2017 the glacier began to grow in thickness again. Between 2016 and 2017 parts of the glacier grew in thickness by anywhere between 65.6 to 98.4 feet (20 meters to 30 meters).

A natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters likely caused the glacier to reverse course, according to the study’s lead author Ala Khazendar, a NASA glaciologist on the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project. Khazendar and colleagues say this coincides with a flip of the North Atlantic Oscillation, a natural cycle of cooling and warming of parts of the ocean.

The water in Disko Bay, where Jakobshavn hits the ocean, cooled by about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit between 2014 and 2016, study authors said.

Hopefully, with the cooling of the Northern Atlantic Ocean, the Jakobshavn glacier will begin to advance back into Disko Bay and erase the losses it suffered over the past 20 years.

We Wanted to be Surprised by #MeToo

This article was co-written by Luke Ayers

When the stories of sexual assault, harassment, and general impropriety began to surface, often with #MeToo, neither of us were particularly surprised. We really, really wanted to be. We wanted to be shocked that figures representing films and television series we enjoyed could be guilty of such horrendous offenses, but we weren’t, not in the slightest.

It’s difficult to be surprised about #MeToo when we are living in a culture which does not encourage a respect for human dignity in sexuality. A culture which is saturated with things such as pornography and casual sex, diminishing the value of intimate relationships. This has led to people, especially men in positions of power, believing that they have the right to sexually take advantage of women without repercussions. If we don’t expect people to stand for human dignity in public, why should we expect them to do so in private?

By this point, if you’re someone who consumes pornography or has casual sexual relationships, or at least don’t think there’s anything wrong with these, you’re probably getting a little peeved (at the very least) and thinking we’re a couple of prudes who need to get our minds out of the 1300’s. While you aren’t entirely wrong on our preferred century, the problems with the attitudes that accompany a flippant use of pornography or consistent participation in casual sex are well documented. The harmful effects of pornography in particular are well documented by psychologists and behavioural scientists.

In case you’re doubting the truthfulness of this claim, we’ve selected just three of the worst effects that pornography has been shown to have. There are many, many more to be found.

1. Even non-violent porn makes men more likely to use violence, drugs, and alcohol to coerce women into having sex with them.

2. Porn is addictive in the same way that drugs are, because of the release of dopamine in the brain, sending users on a destructive path towards more and more dehumanizing porn to satisfy their addiction.

3. Porn contributes heavily to the sex trafficking business, with even many of the women who do consent often being coerced into doing things they don’t feel comfortable doing.*

These numbers do not represent fringe research. In light of this growing body of research, four states (Utah, South Dakota, Arkansas and Tennessee) have declared pornography a public health crisis, and Florida has similar legislation introduced at the moment. Virginia has passed a resolution recognizing porn as having harmful effects. Similar efforts are being discussed in Texas and other states.

The second attitude that contributes to the acceptability of sexual offenses like those highlighted by #MeToo is the prevalence of hookup culture and an assumption that sex can or should be casual. Admittedly, some of our issues with extramarital sex are religious in nature, and to hide that would be disingenuous. However, even allowing for sex outside the context of marriage, the fact remains that hookup culture approaches a person as a mere means to an end. It degrades a human person to simply a tool that provides sexual pleasure. While these fleeting relationships do have the important aspect of consent, no amount of consent to an activity can change the attitude with which one or both parties approach it.

There is a whole host of issues that come with our generation’s hookup culture, in which 80% of today’s college students take part. According to the Kinsey Institute, having a high amount of previous sexual partners is one of the top five factors leading to infidelity in adults. It also increases your chances of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, which is one of the reasons that 23% of American adults have some form of HPV. Consequences of having casual sex spill out into your emotional life as well—as a study from Durham University shows that 80% of men had overall positive feelings the morning after a one night stand, while only 54% of women felt satisfied.

By participating in this culture, young men and women open themselves up to brokenness and falling away from the original purpose of sex. “Lust and sin increase the rupture between body and spirit. When we use our own and others bodies as objects for pleasure or to fill the emptiness inside us, there is an increased break,” says Katrina Zero, who is the coordinator of the John Paul II Resource Center for Theology of the Body and Culture.

It is for this reason that hookup culture has frankly eroded the morals of our generation. It has created an environment in which one night stands are not only viewed as normal but also as healthy, as was shown in a popular article from babe.net, an up and coming young women’s lifestyle site. The same site that, ironically, that posted the non-sexual assault story about Aziz Ansari. It is true cognitive dissonance that a publication can discuss the negative consequences of a poorly thought out hookup, while at the same time lauding casual sex as a necessary and positive thing for women.

Rape and other violations of a person’s bodily autonomy ultimately originate because the perpetrator does not truly believe in the dignity of the person they are attacking. This is not to say that everyone who uses porn or has casual sex will be a rapist—neither logic nor the statistics supports this. However, the prevalence of these two things, among our age group and in society as a whole, certainly do not help decrease the number of these violations. Moreover, the statistics surrounding the higher propensity towards a lack of concern for consent among men who use porn, and the commodification of the human person that occurs with pornography and hookups make it clear how someone could go down the road to justifying more and more egregious offenses against the individual.

Offenses against the dignity of one person are offenses against the dignity of all—we should all take issue with the way that women and men are portrayed as mere vehicles of sexual pleasure, if we wish to truly be a society that cares about the rights of each person. One of our country’s founding values is individual liberty, which means that respecting the basic human decency of our fellow man is paramount to who we are as Americans. This must extend to our culture in regards to casual sex and pornography, as these are the things that are holding us back from eradicating the problems of sexual abuse and harassment in the times of #MeToo.

*Sources for Pornography Statistics:

• Boeringer, S. B. (1994). Pornography and Sexual Aggression: Associations of Violent and Nonviolent Depictions with Rape and Rape Proclivity. Deviant Behavior 15, 3: 289–304
• Check, J. and Guloien, T. (1989). The Effects of Repeated Exposure to Sexually Violent Pornography, Nonviolent Dehumanizing Pornography, and Erotica. In D. Zillmann and J. Bryant (Eds.) Pornography: Research Advances and Policy Considerations (pp. 159–84). Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
• Hald, G. M., Malamuth, N. M., and Yuen, C. (2010). Pornography and Attitudes Supporting Violence Against Women: Revisiting the Relationship in Nonexperimental Studies. Aggression and Behavior 36, 1: 14–20
• Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (2016). Liking, Wanting, And The Incentive-Sensitization Theory Of Addiction. American Psychologist, 71(8), 670-679. Doi:10.1037/Amp0000059; Hilton, D. L. (2013). Pornography Addiction—A Supranormal Stimulus Considered In The Context Of Neuroplasticity. Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology, 3, 20767. Doi:10.3402/Snp.V3i0.20767; Pitchers, K. K., Et Al. (2013). Natural And Drug Rewards Act On Common Neural Plasticity Mechanisms With DeltaFosB As A Key Mediator. Journal Of Neuroscience, 33(8) 3434-3442. Doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4881-12.2013; Salamone, J. D., & Correa, M. (2012). The Mysterious Motivational Functions Of Mesolimbic Dopamine. Neuron, 76, 470-485. Doi:10.1016/J.Neuron.2012.10.021
• Peters, R. W., Lederer, L. J., and Kelly, S. (2012). The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking and Pornography. In M. Mattar and J. Braunmiller (Eds.) Journal of Human Rights and Civil Society 5: 1-21.
• U.S. Department of Justice. (2012). Two Men Sentenced to Multiple Life Sentences for Enticing Women to South Florida to Engage in Commercial Sex Acts and Distributing Date Rape Pills. Press Release, Feb. 17.