Daily Broadside | The Regulators Are Running (and Ruining) Your Life

As if doing away with incandescent bulbs back in the early aughts wasn’t enough, now our government minders are going after gas stoves and washing machines.

Biden’s Energy Department last month proposed new efficiency standards for washing machines that would require new appliances to use considerably less water, all in an effort to “confront the global climate crisis.” Those mandates would force manufacturers to reduce cleaning performance to ensure their machines comply, leading industry giants such as Whirlpool said in public comments on the rule. They’ll also make the appliances more expensive and laundry day a headache—each cycle will take longer, the detergent will cost more, and in the end, the clothes will be less clean, the manufacturers say.

The article goes on.

The proposed washing machine rule marks the latest example of the administration turning to consumer regulations to advance its climate change goals. Last month, the Energy Department published an analysis of its proposed cooking appliance efficiency regulations, which it found would effectively ban half of all gas stoves on the U.S. market from being sold. The department has also proposed new efficiency standards for refrigerators, which could come into effect in 2027. “Collectively these energy efficiency actions … support President Biden’s ambitious clean energy agenda to combat the climate crisis,” the Energy Department said in February.

Notice who is proposing these regulations — “Biden’s Energy Department.” The Energy Department, like all federal agencies, was created by an act of Congress in the form of “The Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977.” This “department” of the federal government is made up of unelected bureaucrats who use their delegated power to interfere with and to impose their vision of appropriate energy consumption and conservation, even if it is based on something as provably false as so-called “climate change.”

Hence rules about what light bulbs are allowed.

Do you really think the founders had in mind that the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT would be involved in making rules about the minutia of everyday life? Do we think this is a good use of our taxpayer dollars — to fund a government organization that has no basis in the U.S. Constitution yet carries the gravitas of a law-making body?

The representatives and senators who created such agencies delegated their power to them which is unconstitutional. Only Congress has the legal authority to make law — but they created a legal method by which they outsourced such rule-making to unelected partisans who increasingly exert more control over our lives and choices.

Instead of letting the market economy do its work, the federal government is picking winners and losers.

The attack on the incandescent bulb is just one item in a laundry list of government regulations and mandates attempting to promote conservation. Energy efficiency standards already exist for vehicles, appliances, and buildings, and recently introduced legislation calls on the Secretary of Energy to identify additional appliances and equipment that “have significant national energy savings potential” to be included for future performance standard mandates.

All of these mandates have unintended consequences that their advocates fail to foresee, including increased energy use. If consumers want a product, the market is capable of providing it.

When the government picks winners and losers, it reduces the incentive for companies to innovate and increases the incentive for companies to lobby the government for special handouts and protections. When the government creates specific mandates and regulations, it purposely narrows the path businesses can take. These policies distort normal market forces and encourage government dependence.

It’s not hard to surmise what motivates these regulatory decisions. In this case, it’s worshiping a false god called “Climate.” Or as Buck Throckmorton calls it, “The Sustainable Organic Church of the Carbon Apocalypse.”

That clause in our Declaration of Independence — “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government” — has never looked more appealing since it was first written.

Daily Broadside | Brandon Gives Brinton the Recognition He Longs For

Daily Verse | Numbers 4:20
“But the Kohathites must not go in to look at the holy things, even for a moment, or they will die.”

Monday’s Reading: Numbers 9-12

Monday and we’re off to a new week in the ever more increasingly bizarre clown world that is the Brandon administration.

Politico reported last week that Sam Brinton, an LGBTQ+ activist and drag queen “pup” fetishist, has been appointed to serve as deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy (ONE).

Behold your new high-level official of a key federal department:

There’s no doubt the “non-binary” man seems capable of his job.

According to a biography Brinton provided to the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network (LGBTQ-RAN), he holds a dual Master’s degree from MIT in engineering systems and nuclear science and engineering, is the founder of “Core Solutions Consulting that provides technical expertise on topics ranging from nuclear waste management to advanced nuclear reactor innovation and nuclear non-proliferation policy to advanced nuclear companies,” and has advised Congress on related issues.

But there’s more to Sam Brinton than his degree, and I’m not going to spend any time on his “pup” fetish or his interest in sex with animals. You can find that on your own if you’re interested. What I’m more concerned about is his activism and what this unprecedented step means for the future of our government and nation.

However, the biography also details Brinton’s work as an adviser to the Obama administration on LGBT issues and an activist for campaigns to ban talk therapy for unwanted same-sex attraction, such as the BornPerfect Campaign and 50 Bills 50 States, ostensibly driven by his experience as a “survivor of a traumatic and torturous conversion therapy experience.”

This is the key. Perhaps you wonder what his sexual proclivities have to do with his ability to do his job.

Nothing. He can (apparently) do the job.

The problem is the agenda that comes with Sam Brinton.

He also openly says, on his website, that he uses his nuclear background to gain access to senior corridors of power, to influence leaders to accept the full panoply of sexual deviance:

You might believe that Brinton’s capacity to do the DOE job has nothing to do with his kink activism, but he doesn’t share your belief. He believes that it is good and right to gain access to senior levels of government, and use that access for advocacy. Anybody inside DOE who has to work with this guy now should be on notice that he is going to be watching them for signs that they don’t affirm him in every way — and he will make trouble for them. Guaranteed.

Here’s the thing: Brandon and his cohort of activists don’t care about you and your conservative norms. The appointment of Sam Brinton is so in our face, so depraved, so contrary to what has been considered “normal” and “moral” for generations, that it offends the sensibilities of Normal Americans.

But “normal” Americans are a dying breed. Brinton is not universally seen as a perverted and mentally unwell person. As Rod Dreher writes, “We live in a culture in which Brinton is not seen as a failure, but as a success.”

It is going to be quite interesting to see how official conservative Washington responds to the Sam Brinton hire. I bet response is muted to positive. Why? Because though what Brinton represents is being championed by liberals, and he is a progressive hero, objecting publicly to people like Brinton and what they represent is something that is no longer done in elite circles, even among conservative elites. By the time the Boomers and the Xers die out, there will be no one left to object.

Meanwhile, as I’ve said, this is radically changing our society. Read the Rensselaer Polytechnic story: the young are being taught, and accepting the teaching, that perverts like Sam Brinton are liberating and sympathetic figures, figures that incarnate possible futures for themselves. Is this what you want for your children? Because we are all going to get it.

We need to all realize — and I’m talking to myself here too — that classical liberalism is not going to save us from this decadence. I have long resisted the implications of this conclusion, because I really do want to live in a world of relative tolerance. I am not as confident as others that this is the natural end point of liberalism, because we lived within classical liberalism for centuries without this kind of thing. What is becoming clear to me is that this is what classical liberalism is when separated from Christian faith, or at least from a metaphysical/religious structure that sets boundaries within the classical liberal framework. This is what the Founding Father John Adams meant when he said:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”

And here we are today: post-Christian, and plunging into decadence because we have unbridled our basest passions. If Sam Brinton kept his base passions hidden, that would be one thing. But he parades them, has built a lucrative public profile and career on them, and openly exploits them for cultural and political hegemony. When Brinton was in short pants, his predecessors in the movement appealed to liberal values of tolerance and individual dignity to open the doors to people like him. Now that they are in command of the culture, there will be no more liberal tolerance, only compelled affirmation of the kind of deviance that was unimaginable a generation ago to most people.

Giving Brinton a highly elevated role in the federal government validates his sexual perversions, his debased morality, and his mental unwellness. It also pokes a very large finger in the eyes of what’s left of a modest and largely Christian culture.

But this is our country now and it’s defining deviance down further than we ever thought possible.