OPINION:
It turns out that reality is real after all. Fantasies that have infected the judgment of the governing cadre are being exposed, starting with funny money and foolhardy science. The realization must come as a shock to those fabulists, who are now confronted with a day of reckoning. While the unfolding events are unsettling, there is comfort in the affirmation that common sense is making a comeback.
The sudden collapse of two California banks in rapid succession last week broke the calm like an ear-splitting klaxon. First, Silvergate Bank went belly up, a victim of the ongoing cryptocurrency pullback. Then Silicon Valley Bank, the financial hub of trendy venture capitalists, pleaded for help when nervous depositors smelled the fear and rushed to extract their money by the billions.
When federal regulators seized New York’s crypto-friendly Signature Bank on Sunday to break a chain reaction of crashes, Americans could sense the same fright seeping into Washington. Hurriedly, President Biden reassured the nation on Monday morning: “Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe. Your deposits will be there when you need them.”
The failed banks’ customers are told their money is to be returned — even beyond the guaranteed quarter-million-dollar cap — replenished by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., at least until its $125 billion deposit insurance fund is depleted. All such guarantees stand upon “the full faith and credit of the U.S. government,” of course, which weakens with each trillion the president loads onto the $31 trillion national debt.
On Fox News, Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus pointed to the root cause of financial mismanagement that is now proving unsustainable: “These banks are badly run because everybody is focused on diversity and all of the woke issues and not concentrating on the one thing they should, which is shareholder returns.”
Indeed, wokeism demands that race-based diversity, equity and inclusion drive economic activity rather than profitability. It shouldn’t be surprising that failure results when banks focus on anything but the bottom line.
Meanwhile, running on a parallel collision with reality is the outbreak in Washington of facts surrounding the origin of the global coronavirus pandemic. A Republican-led House committee last week heard loud and clear what Democrats had spent two years suppressing: COVID-19 was likely spread as the result of an accidental lab leak in Wuhan, China.
Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified that, in his expert opinion, the lab was conducting gain-of-function research to make the virus more deadly, that U.S. tax dollars funded the research, and that Dr. Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, took steps to hide these facts from Americans. Such practice of inclusion with a foreign adversary is wokeism gone global.
A Republican bill to declassify all evidence relating to the origins of COVID-19 passed both the Senate and, on Friday, the House — with no dissent from Democrats. By signing it, Mr. Biden would signal that he, too, has given up on shielding the politicization of medical science from public view.
Fabulism that has covered up both China’s deadly pandemic and U.S. financial foolishness is exposed. Chalk up two bold wins for common sense.
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