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A few weeks back I was asked on a Zoom invite about the impact that new, progressive-minded legislators might have at the Hawaii Legislature.

I replied that what often happens is that new members tend to come in to the Capitol with plenty of vim and vigor but eventually become subsumed into the greater whole. Unless they can find their way into leadership posts, their influence may not be that great and their own ideas for policy may not get far.

In retrospect, my response may have been too cynical. I am also reconsidering my view in light of a new development: the launching of a brand new Progressive Legislative Caucus.

The caucus, a House of Representatives press release explained on Jan. 12, will focus on the key issues of equality and justice and will work to develop and empower public leaders who will improve the economic and social conditions in the state.

In that short time Caucus Chair Matt LoPresti says the hui has grown from 16 members to 18 all of them Democrats: Reps. LoPresti, Sonny Ganaden, Cedric Asuega Gates, Greggor Ilagan, Jeanne Kapela, Bertrand Kobayashi, Nicole Lowen, Lisa Marten, Takashi Ohno, Amy Perruso, Jackson Sayama, Adrian Tam, Tina Wildberger and Chris Todd; and Sens. Stanley Chang, Jarrett Keohokalole, Joy San Buenaventura and Laura Acasio.

While none of the progressives yet carry the clout of top leaders in the House and Senate the Saikis, Lukes, Kouchis, Dela Cruzes and their ilk it is an impressive number in the 76-member Legislature and suggests that the caucus might have some sway.

LoPresti, who is on his second stint in the House after a failed run for the Senate, describes the caucus as a resource for encouraging members to build up one another, have real policy discussions and debates, and find ways to empower progressive legislative voices and ideas that most Americans in general and Hawaii state residents in particular support.

We want to build a more just society, LoPresti told me.

For him, that means introducing legislation to raise the minimum wage from $10.10 to $17. Another issue is paid family leave. Both issues were considered in the 2020 session before the coronavirus invaded our state last spring and snuffed out all but the most essential legislation.

For San Buenaventura, who was elected to the Senate last year after serving in the House, the focus is on reforming asset forfeiture laws. That involves not only trying to change rules that allow law enforcement to seize and keep the possessions of people who have been charged but not necessarily convicted in criminal cases but also people trying to protect their savings and wages from creditors.

It goes back to what I saw as an attorney where I represented a lot of working-class people, she said. I saw a lot of people who had worked all their lives and all of a sudden, because of the impact of the 2008 recession, they basically lost everything.

San Buenaventura said the harsh impact of that recession continued for years. The COVID-19 pandemic has only made things worse, hence the need for enabling legislation on asset forfeiture.

Legislative caucuses can be made up of members from both chambers and even from both major parties.

There are today at least nine recognized caucuses at the Hawaii Legislature and they include the Filipino Caucus, the Legislative Native Hawaiian Affairs Caucus, Senate Native Hawaiian Caucus, the Womens Legislative Caucus, the House Small Business Caucus and caucuses focused on keiki and kupuna.

Usually the groups propose specific legislation. In the case of the Progressive Caucus, however, because it was formed only late last year it wont produce a package of bills until the 2022 session, said LoPresti.

Members will instead meet regularly to talk story about ideas and issues, and weigh in on proposed legislation.

LoPresti says he sees little daylight between the terms liberal and progressive, but he points out that the Progressive Caucus has a lot of freshmen and skews younger in age. Like LoPresti, San Buenaventura and Keohokalole were part of the freshmen class of 2014.

Rep. Matt LoPresti on the House floor in 2018. He chairs the new Progressive Legislative Caucus at the Capitol.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

Historically, the progressive movement dates to the late 19th century and early 20th century and centered on a wide range of issues such as the right of women to vote, the end to harsh child labor standards, efforts to root out government corruption and to break up powerful business conglomerates.

Today the movement is perhaps best exemplified by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have pushed ideas like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

There has been pushback from moderate Democrats and especially Republicans. Just last week the Biden administration terminated the Trump administrations 1776 Commission that was characterized by The New York Times as a sweeping attack on liberal thought and activism that calls for a patriotic education, defends Americas founding against charges that it was tainted by slavery and likens progressivism to fascism.

Hawaii has from time to time embarked on a progressive path, most significantly with the passage of the 1974 Prepaid Health Care Act that requires Hawaii employers to provide health care coverage for all eligible employees.

Rep. Joy San Buenaventura in 2018 at the Capitol. She is now serving in the Senate and is a member of the Progressive Caucus.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

The power of ideologies ebb and flow, but the Legislature in recent years has approved progressive-leaning laws allowing for same-sex marriage, medical marijuana and decriminalization, and medical aid in dying, to name just a few. But progressives are always seeking more progress.

The main purpose of the Progressive Legislative Caucus is to at least start talking about ideas to make things better in our world.

I basically want to talk to like-minded legislators and see if, even if bills dont pass, whether we can at least have the conversation, said San Buenaventura. Its really easy to feel like your voice is drowned out when your bills are too progressive and dont seem to pass or get mileage.

The new caucus is also about mentoring.

There are opportunities for legislators like me to help with leadership training for younger legislators, said LoPresti. Its about trying to expose them to opportunities early and to help elevate progressive voices and policy proposals. We need to push the changes our society deserves.

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Chad Blair: New Progressive Caucus Hopes To Be A Force At The Legislature - Honolulu Civil Beat

If there is one thing that 2020 has taught me, it is that the real political and cultural divide in our country is not between Republicans and Democrats, or even conservatives and liberals, but between traditionalists and progressives.

At the core of progressivism is not the optimistic American belief that things are improving and that our children can live better lives than we did, but the belief that man is a perfectible product of evolutionary forces. Rather than being made in Gods image and then fallen, progressives believe we must throw off the shackles and prejudices of the past in order to move forward to build utopia.

The traditionalist is not against growth and change, but he recognizes, as Edmund Burke did in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, the danger of trying to remake society and man in the image of a new ideology that radically redefines such words as truth, justice, and equality. The progressive has no qualms about running roughshod over the established beliefs, institutions, and mores of a nation if he can only achieve his goals. At its most extreme, progressivism can justify to itself any present-day atrocity as long as it claims to be helping usher in a future brave new world of absolute egalitarianism.

The genealogy of progressivism runs from Jean-Jacques Rousseaus nave belief in the noble savage to the bloody social engineering of the French Revolution to the deterministic dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, out of which arose the horrors inflicted on their own people by Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-Il. According to all these progressive leaders, history was moving unstoppably toward their workers paradise, and anyone who sought to hinder its arrivalby deed, word, or thoughtwas backward, unenlightened, and, to use a cherished word of Marxist elites, atavistic.

Since the true face of progressivism revealed itself in the French Revolution, a number of brave critics have risen up to expose its destructive pretensions and its false view of man. A short list of these critics includes Burke, Alexis Tocqueville, the authors of the Federalist Papers, Cardinal John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, and Pope John Paul II. The critic, however, who saw and understood the dangers most clearly, partly because he suffered greatly at the hands of progressivism run amok, was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Born one year after the Russian Revolution, Solzhenitsyn was raised as a loyal Soviet and even served as an officer in the armyuntil he was arrested in 1945 for saying something negative about Stalin. He spent eight years in the prison camps of the Gulag.

After being released, he lived in exile in Kazakhstan, where he taught physics. He later returned to Russia and published a novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), which he based on his experiences in the Gulag. Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970, when his literary expos, The Gulag Archipelago, appeared in the 1970s, he was forced to flee the country, eventually moving to the United States in 1976.

Hailed as a hero of democracy and freedom, Solzhenitsyn was invited to give the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978. After sincerely praising American freedom, Solzhenitsyn went on to criticize Western secularism, rationalism, and materialism. His address lost him the support of many in the media and academy, but it stands as a bold witness to the poisonous excesses of the progressivist spirit.

Similarly, when he was awarded the Templeton Prize in England in 1983, his speech, which drew a straight line from godlessness to the Gulag, caused him to be further labeled as old-fashioned, out of touch, reactionary, and, yes, atavistic. Solzhenitsyn, ostracized by the liberal thinkers who had once hailed him as a champion of freedom, lived the life of a recluse in Vermont until, remarkably, he was allowed to return to Russia in 1994, where he lived out the remainder of his long life in peace.

Like Ivan Denisovich, all of Solzhenitsyns major novels incorporate autobiographical elements. The three-volume The Gulag Archipelago critiques and exposes both Leninism-Stalinism and Western secular rationalism. Cancer Ward is a profound meditation on death by an author who almost died of cancer.

The First Circle is a conversation between inmates in a Soviet white-collar prison for educated scientists, with one of the characters based on the authors own younger self as he moved from rationalism to religion. The four-volume The Red Wheel is a re-imagining of the Russian Revolution that blends fiction and non-fiction, historical documents and Solzhenitsyns own incisive analysis of how the fated revolution could have been avoided by different choices on the part of free, volitional individuals.

Thankfully for those who are familiar with Ivan Denisovich and the Harvard Address but have yet to work up the energy to read his long, complex, circuitous novels, a collection of essays has appeared that illuminates the many facets of Solzhenitsyn the man, the writer, and the prophet.

Edited by David P. Deavel, co-director of the Terence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, and Jessica Hooten Wilson, Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West explores Solzhenitsyns links to Russian culture, Orthodoxy, politics, and other Soviet writers, as well as the influence that he and his fellow Russians have had on twentieth-century American writers. Although the collection is wide-ranging in its analysis, its especially valuable for illuminating what Solzhenitsyn can teach us about the dangers of progressivism today.

In the opening essay, The Universal Russian Soul, Nathan Nielson, a graduate of St. Johns College, quotes this passage from Solzhenitsyns 1993 speech The Relentless Cult of Novelty: And in one sweeping gesture of vexation, classical Russian literaturewhich never disdained reality and sought the truthis dismissed as next to worthless. Denigrating the past is deemed to be the key to progress. And so it has once again become fashionable in Russia to ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion toward all human beings, and especially toward those who suffer.

Needless to say, the fear Solzhenitsyn prophetically expresses here has been realized in increasingly shameless attempts by American universities to ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard our Western heritage as a prelude to building an egalitarian, multicultural society, despite the fact that the legacy they want to jettison has provided the sole foundation for liberal democracy and individual freedom. Solzhenitsyn knew that no stable future could be built on hatred of the past, since hatred of the past inevitably leads to hatred of the self, not to mention hatred of ones neighbor and ones society.

The two essays that follow, The New Middle Ages and The Age of Concentration, are not analyses of Solzhenitsyn, but reflections by a modern Russian novelist, Eugene Vodolazkin, who shares Solzhenitsyns spirit and his mistrust of all progressive attempts to build a perfect society.

It is wrong to think of utopias as harmless dreams, he warns. Combined with the idea of progress, utopian thought is a dream that motivates action. It establishes a goal so lofty that it cannot be reached. The more ideal it becomes, the greater the stubbornness with which it is pursued. There comes a time when blood is spilled. Oceans of blood. In one way or another, all of Solzhenitsyns novels work out just that terrifying cause and effect, ripping away the faade of humanitarianism or revolutionary consciousness or classless equality to reveal the beast within.

In that vein, David Walsh, professor of politics at Catholic University, locates in The Red Wheel a central struggle between those who seek to remake Russia in accordance with their own idea of it and those who seek to submit to the idea of Russia as itself the guiding principle of their action. It is the difference between ideology and truth. The protagonists of ideology are driven by the conviction of the superiority of their conception to all that has existed. The servants of truth subordinate themselves to what is required to bring what is already there more fully into existence.

What is at issue here is not only the destructive nature of ends-justifies-the-means thinking, but the anti-humanistic arrogance that invests Marxist ideology (dialectical materialism, economic determinism, identity politics) with a sacred imprimatur for radically remaking society.

In his analysis of The Gulag Archipelago, Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, considers a question that Solzhenitsyn asks himself: Why do Shakespeares greatest villains kill only a few people while Lenin and Stalin killed millions?

The reason, Morson explains, is that Macbeth and Iago had no ideology. Real people do not resemble the evildoers of mass culture, who delight in cruelty and destruction. No, to do mass evil you have to believe it is good, and it is ideology that supplies this conviction. All of us are capable of small, independent evil acts, but progressivism, by allowing governments to submerge their moral qualms beneath a sea of ideology, unleashes that evil on all of society.

Joseph Pearce, who interviewed Solzhenitsyn in Russia in 1998 and wrote an excellent biography, teases out Solzhenitsyns anti-progressivism by contrasting him with Leo Tolstoy. Unlike Tolstoy, Pearce argues, Solzhenitsyn laments the modern belief in eternal, infinite progress which has practically become a religion, adding that such progressivism was a mistake of the eighteenth century, of the Enlightenment era. Technological progress in the service of philosophical materialism was not true progress at all but, on the contrary, was a threat to civilization. In his novels, Solzhenitsyn drives these points home, not by offering philosophical disquisitions, but by incarnating these ideas in the lives of flesh-and-blood characters.

James F. Pontuso, Patterson Professor of Political Science at Hampden-Sydney College, offers an example of this incarnation. In The First Circle, writes Pontuso, Solzhenitsyn captivatingly captures the allure of ideology in the character of Lev Rubin. Despite all evidence to the contrary, including his own undeserved arrest and imprisonment, Rubin is devoted totally and insensibly to the Communist cause. . . . Rubin fails to acknowledge what he experiences; instead he accepts what he chooses to believe. For him every crime committed in the present is justified by the glorious future of peace, prosperity, and universal brotherhood that Marxs principles purport to bring about.

Such is the power of Marxs progressive ideology that Rubin discounts his personal experience. If such self-deception in the name of ideology sounds unbelievable, just think of the American politicians and media people who, during the summer of 2020, watched businesses being looted and burned but could only see peaceful protests in the name of racial justice and economic equity. They are those who not only live and propagate the lie, but who come to believe it themselves.

Perhaps the best summation of what Solzhenitsyn can teach us about the dangers of progressivism is found in a reconsideration of The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn scholar Daniel J. Mahoney. Central to Solzhenitsyns moral and political vision, he explains, is the nonnegotiable distinction between truth and falsehood. Solzhenitsyns target was precisely the ideological Lie that presented evildoing as a historically necessary stage in the fated progress of the human race. He always asserted that the ideological Lie was worse than violence and physical brutality, ultimately more destructive of the integrity of the human soul.

I can think of no better analysis of the true legacy of 2020: Not the Coronavirus itself, but the way it was used to justify the illegal power grabs of bureaucratic, progressivist elites; not the riots themselves, but the lie they were justified by (that America is riddled with systemic racism); not the attacks on Donald Trump per se, but the fact that his enemies in the government, media, and big corporations were willing to tell any lie to take him down.

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn Takes On The Progressives - The Federalist

Early in the morning on Jan. 6, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio woke up pleasantly surprised. Democratic victories in both Georgia Senate runoffs the night before meant he was suddenly poised to become chairman of the Senate Banking and Housing Committee, whose expansive purview includes oversight of the nations central bank, our financial system, the housing market and a wide network of executive branch agencies.

Only hours later, Mr. Brown found himself sheltering in place in a secure location with 74 other senators as an insurrectionist mob of Trump supporters laid siege to the Capitol building to stop the certification of President-elect Joe Bidens victory in Novembers election.

On Tuesday, six days after the attack on the Capitol, still determined to pursue a populist economic agenda amid impeachment debates and the Covid-19 crisis, Mr. Brown briefed me on his priorities for the committee, one the most powerful lawmaking beachheads in Congress.

He talked about his willingness to work around the filibuster and how he and his allies will push Mr. Biden to embrace a host of major reforms that could empower the executive branch, the Federal Reserves egalitarian mandate and bolster the working class.

Evading Republican obstruction and convincing Mr. Biden, an instinctually cautious politician, to go it alone if necessary is certain to put his earnest Midwest optimism to the test.

Talmon Joseph Smith: President-elect Joe Biden is expected to announce the details of an economic stimulus proposal thats set to be in the trillions. What do you want to see out of that package?

Sherrod Brown: We have to avoid the wave of evictions that was inevitable before Congress passed the scaled down but important December recovery act and extend the moratorium on evictions and the $25 billion for rental assistance. The other important components will be what we do with significant dollars for state and local government and getting significantly better treatment for unemployed workers and more help for small business.

Then, very important long term components should be expanding the child tax credit, the earned-income tax credit, and that they be entirely refundable. The child tax credit, in some sense, disadvantages lower income people, because its not fully refundable.And there is huge interest in the Democratic caucus for fixing that from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin.

I would combine that with something we want to do in this committee, but that will not be part of this package: Set up Fed accounts so that anybody that wants a bank account in this country a no-fee bank account, where they dont get nickeled and dimed and payday lenders dont swoop down on them can have basic banking access.

TJS: Speaking of the Fed, I wanted to ask if you support reopening any Federal Reserve emergency lending facilities similar to the Municipal Lending Facility and the Main Street Lending Facility that the Trump Treasury Department and Republican senators shut down during the last set of negotiations? Mayors have said the interest rate and the three-year payback window that was offered to cities by the Fed was far too onerous.

SB: Yeah, I opposed Secretary Mnuchins doing that at the time. And I leave it up to the administration on where they want to go. But the reason I opposed Mnuchin then was that there was no avenue for state and local governments. This new Biden economic proposal will surely include, I would think, hundreds of billions of dollars for state and local governments. So I am really looking to what the administration wants to do, where they want to go on whether to resurrect them.

TJS: Looking at so many of your priorities: A lot of it seems impossible unless you all pass things through simple majorities rather than through the bipartisan wrangling needed to get to the 60-vote filibuster-proof threshold required under normal circumstances.

The incoming Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders plans to push for using the reconciliation process to pass, via simple majorities, a much larger follow-up relief bill than what could be possible with a typical 60-vote threshold. But he also wants to push other major reforms through reconciliation which will push the processs legal limits. How far do you think you all can responsibly go?

SB: As far as we can go! I would start with what has unanimous or close to unanimous support in the Democratic Caucus. And, you know, there are many of Bernies plans that dont. So I start with that. But I take it from a different direction, I would say, What can we get done?

Ill illustrate it this way. If we were to bring to the floor the $2,000 direct payment, I think that we could very well get 10 Republicans to vote for that. I would like to do as many of these things as we can through regular order. But we cant allow this health crisis to turn into even more of a housing crisis and then turn in to a financial-slash-banking crisis, which it will if we dont address it in a much bigger way than [Senator Mitch] McConnell was willing to.

TJS: Finance experts I spoke to said that, as a consequence of the regulatory rollbacks in the latest relief bill which allow major banks to hide from the markets the scale of their troubled pandemic-related loan restructuring even civil servants at the Fed have no clear idea about whats actually going on with banks balance sheets right now.

Is there action that you all on the committee can take if not through legislation, then through hearings to get some more insight into whats going on here?

SB: Id answer it this way: The days of Wall Street running the banking committee are past, and with Democrats in control of the Banking/Housing Committee, things are going to be different. It will mean hearings to unearth special deals that Wall Street has extricated. When Wall Street runs things, the stock market goes up and C.E.O. pay explodes, but wages barely budge, the middle class shrinks those days need to be over.

TJS: One of Joe Bidens plans that didnt get as much coverage was his proposal to greatly expand the Section Eight Housing Choice Voucher Program, by essentially taking that federal rental assistance program and making it available to every family who qualifies.

As you know, around 11 million people who qualify are left out right now. Housing advocates say you all could actually pass this expansion with a simple majority. So is that on the docket?

SB: I dont really know from a parliamentary aspect whether that can go through with a simple majority or if it cant. But youve heard some of these numbers that, before the pandemic, 25 percent of renters in this country paid more than half their income in rent and utilities one thing goes wrong, their car breaks down, their child gets sick, they miss a week of work because of a minor injury, and theyre evicted and their lives are turned upside down.

I see it in my city. I was talking to a banker in Cleveland yesterday about how there are a lot of homes that are livable, that with a few $1,000 renovations could be a pretty nice, decent place to live. They would maybe only cost $40,000 or $50,000 to buy. But people cant get a loan for it because the banks dont lend for that. And how do we deal with that? We need to figure that out.

Some of its what youre saying Section 8, some of its tax credits of some sort. Some of its just how we figure out how to provide loans to make this neighborhood that was a prosperous working-class neighborhood be that again.

TJS: You saw how there was palpable concern in Washington that a Republican-led Senate would have veto power over President-elect Bidens appointments.

SB: You did and then we won two runoff elections.

TJS: Exactly. So with that threat now presumably removed, whats the reason for not, along with others in your caucus, pushing the incoming administration to appoint people with strong progressive track records and clearly projected plans to unlock some of the dormant powers within these agencies? Democrats have had a tendency to hand out some of these roles as rewards for party loyalists.

SB: Progressives like me are going to be pretty happy with some of these regulatory people. Im thrilled with Janet Yellen. In the coming days, I think that were going to see people in a number of these agency offices that are good progressives. I wouldnt have necessarily done it the same way. But I didnt run for president.

And people like me are going to put pressure on these agencies to make sure theyre doing the right thing, because theyre getting plenty of pressure from the other side.

TJS: It is almost impossible under current congressional rules to incentivize Senator Joe Manchin, or anybody else who might be a crucial vote, to line up in favor of legislation that they have serious doubts about. Thats because of the current ban on earmarks, which allow lawmakers to add special provisions to bills that fund spending in their local districts and states. Do you support bringing them back?

SB: Yeah, I think earmarks make sense. I think earmarks work for good government. Im not going to be spending a lot of time advocating for the change in policy, but Im fine with it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Opinion | Sherrod Brown: Progressives Will Be Pretty Happy With Biden - The New York Times

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a wellspring of truly terrible ideas for years, but her new one might be her worst on yet: A Ministry of Truth.

During a live stream on her Instagram page, Ocasio-Cortez was asked by a viewer if, to help with national healing, there were congressional plans to institute any truth and reconciliation or media literacy initiatives.

The socialist congresswoman replied that, yes, indeed, she and some of her colleagues have been exploring media literacy initiatives to help rein in the press and combat misinformation after last weeks riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Its one thing to have differentiating opinions but its another thing entirely to just say things that are false, Ocasio-Cortez added. So thats something that were looking into.

Oh, are they?

Now, perhaps in the political systems favored by AOC citizens are impelled to look to government for ultimate truth, but thats not the case in the United States. At least, not yet. Here, the Constitution reins in Congress from intruding on the speech of citizens, journalists, or any private institutions, not the other way around.

As a practical matter, we can already envision from lived experienced as a progressive might say how sanctioning the state to adjudicate the veracity of journalism can be abused.

We need only point to our media factcheckers, journalists with political and ideological biases who have regularly, and arbitrarily, labeled completely debatable contentions as falsehoods, while either ignoring or justifying scores of other unsettled contentions. Are these the arbiters of facts who will be manning the government commission appointed by those storied truthtellers in congress?

Only this fall, the traditional news media teamed up with Big Tech platforms to censor inconvenient reporting by The New York Post, which had uncovered the shady business dealings of the president-elects son, Hunter Biden. The pretext for this concerted and blatant attack on open discourse and journalism was the alleged need to uphold accuracy and standards.

As some of us suspected, and we all soon learned, the entire act was put on to shield the preferred candidate of elites. The Posts reporting was accurate, which is not something anyone can say about the four years of endless conspiracy theorizing by major media outlets regarding Trumps alleged criminal collusion and Russias alleged theft of American democracy.

Has anyone ever proposed a truth commission to heal the nation from those wounds?

This kind of state intrusion into discourse on whatever level AOC envisions it would, like all other facets of society lorded over by Congress, inevitably lead to giant rent-seeking corporations like CNN, ABC, NBC, Washington Post, The New York Times, gaining favor with government and consolidating power. The less powerful would either be left to contour their speech to please the states factcheckers or be branded liars. The press should challenging those in power, not obsequiously trying to earn gold stars from unelected bureaucrats on a state-run committee.

For those unaware, the truth and reconciliation commission the AOC fan asked about was most famously used in South Africa after the fall of apartheid as means of restorative justice. The insinuation by those who use this phrase is that 74 million Americans who voted for the Republican presidential candidate are racist thugs in need for similar programs. Its a disgusting smear, and speaks to the dangerous and illiberal inclination of progressives.

As for AOCs ideas: Its just creepy, not to mention wholly un-American, for an elected official to advocate the state as adjudicator of veracity of our political speech.

Its also crassly hypocritical. If anyone could use a truth commission, its Congress.

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AOC and other progressives have a new goal: Silence the press - New York Post

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Former vice president Joe Biden holds a rally ahead of the Nevada Democratic Caucuses on January 10, 2020. (Trevor Bexon / Shutterstock)

EDITORS NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvels column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrinas column here.

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Last week exposed both the poison and the promise of America. Not surprisingly, the poisonWednesdays riot at the Capitol by a mostly white mob that looked, as Mike Davis noted, much like a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbariansreceived global attention. Meanwhile, the promisethe stunning election of an African American and a Jew to represent Georgia in the Senatewas virtually lost in the universal condemnation of the mob and President Trump. Yet, while prosecution of the perpetrators and repudiation of Trump are imperative, the incoming Biden administration should focus on building on the success in Georgia.

Democrats wins last week demonstrated that, with intensive organizing and passionate mobilization, the emerging majority can overcome both historical and current obstruction. As Eric Foner wrote for The Nation, Georgias history includes the 1915 lynching of the Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank, the turn of populist Tom Watson into a rabid racist and anti-Semite in wake of electoral defeat, and the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 in which white mobs killed between 25 and 40 African Americans. Wednesdays runoff resulted from a 1963 law that required office seekers to receive more than 50 percent of votes, a measure enacted to block the victory of a Black-supported candidate if several conservatives split the white vote. More recently, the states beleaguered Republican Party has systematically deployed modern mechanisms to suppress the vote, from purging the voter rolls to reducing early voting days to closing polling places.

Overcoming these obstacles required extraordinary long-term organizing, led by Stacey Abrams and LaTosha Brown of Black Voters Matter among others, courageous candidates and a majority of Georgians rejecting Republicans hysterical claims that a GOP-controlled Senate was the last redoubt against radical socialism. But the victories of the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.s historic church, and Jon Ossoff were more than symbolic. They displaced Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the master of obstruction, as majority leader and elevated Democrats to Senate control and committee chairmanships. That Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will likely head the Budget Committee demonstrates the sea change involved.

Read the full text of Katrinas column here.

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Progressives Know How to Turn the Page on the Trump Years. Biden Should Listen. - The Nation