Today, Democrats and their media, social media, teacher union, Black Lives Matter and “mostly peaceful” Antifa rioter allies advance 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory (CRT) claims that America was founded on racism and is still plagued by systemic racism – while hiding, whitewashing and rewriting the Democrat Party’s long, sordid role.

Commentators accurately observe, “This is not your parents’ Democrat Party.” Indeed. The Democrat Party now embraces some of the most radical, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-energy, America-bashing elements in American history. A favorite tactic is “greenwashing” policies with assertions that Democrats are “saving the Earth” from climate change and other purported environmental disasters.

Their power grabs recently led an African-American Democrat California Assemblyman to say these policies “systematically drive racial economic inequities and fuel environmental racism,” by constantly and repeatedly increasing energy costs for poor and minority families and businesses.

It’s not rocket science. Ban leasing, drilling, fracking, pipelines and coal use, as the Biden-Harris team is doing – and energy prices skyrocket as supplies dwindle. Since the 2020 election, crude oil prices have doubled, to over $80 a barrel, and US gasoline is up more than a dollar a gallon. Families that heat with natural gas could pay up to 50% more this winter than last year.

That’s still well below Europe’s Green Madness prices, but congressional Democrats continue to push “clean power” fantasies that would eradicate secure, reliable, affordable US energy – and the Biden-Harris Administration could unilaterally impose numerous equally destructive measures. And for what?

A recent study in Nature calculated that reducing US carbon dioxide emissions 95% by 2050 would have an annual price tag greater than what America spent in 2019 on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid combined: nearly 12% of our Gross Domestic Product – $11,300 per person per year! Meanwhile, China, India and 100 other countries will continue using fossil fuels and emitting prodigious amounts of plant-fertilizing CO2. Net climate benefits? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.06 to 0.30 degrees F by 2100!

Moreover, this entire energy-and-climate-crisis charade is based on the assumption, the assertion that – after countless millions of years of natural climate change – every climate and weather fluctuation and aberration today is due to fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. The Democrat ruling class and its government-funded “scientist” acolytes have models but no actual data or evidence to back up their claims.

But they don’t need any, because pressure groups, the media and academia endlessly repeat and validate their unfounded claims – and cancel, silence, deplatform and defund alternative viewpoints and evidence. Meanwhile, their corporate collaborators rake in billions in taxpayer subsidies and guaranteed loans.

Climate change is their ticket to controlling our livelihoods and living standards: they as our masters, we as their servants – with no accountability for their mistakes and lies, or the damage and death they cause.

Wags like Dave Chappelle would be banished if they suggested that the Master Race has devolved into the Master Party. But today’s Democrats are the most radical in Congressional and Executive Branch history. Egged on by even more radical activists, they truly think they’re smarter than the rest of us, and were ordained to rule us unwashed masses, employing all the powers of centralized government.

The way they see it, we and our states and communities must simply accept our new subservient status, our lost personal freedoms, our reduced living standards – and the overseas child and slave labor and environmental desecration that Green New Deal technologies are inflicting.

40,000 Congolese children as young as four already labor alongside their parents – for slave wages, under constant threats of cave-ins and exposure to toxic mud, dust and water – to mine the cobalt needed for electric vehicle and backup batteries. The ore is sent to China for processing in plants with equally abominable safety and pollution conditions.

Rare earth mining and processing in Inner Mongolia has destroyed agriculture, created a vast toxic dump, and brought life-threatening health issues to workers and residents. China also uses thousands of Uighur slave laborers to manufacture solar panels for sale to the US and EU.

John Kerry doesn’t think Uighur slavery should affect America’s climate strategy – and Democrat California legislators voted down a bill requiring that the state certify that electric vehicles sold there must be free of any materials or components involving child labor. Certification would cost too much and imperil state climate goals, they said.

Fair Trade and Fair Wages are vital for T-shirts, coffee and sneakers. But ignore them for Green Tech.

Green New Deal schemes would multiply these human rights abuses many times over. They would make the US dangerously dependent on an increasingly belligerent China for “green” metals and minerals.

Worse, Democrat overseer roots have metastasized into a global cancer that infects government programs, foreign aid and financial institutions, with often deadly results. It is eco-imperialism – Green power that brings widespread Black death.

People desperately seeking better health and lives in Africa, Asia and Latin America are told any US and Western help will be limited to what radical activists determine is ecological and climate friendly.

Improve your living standards, the Masters say, but only to degrees that can be supported by wind and solar power – not by fossil fuels, nuclear or even hydroelectric power. Our banks and other institutions will approve and finance only land-intensive, wildlife-killing, raw materials-hungry “renewable” energy.

Improve your agricultural productivity and crop yields – but only through agro-ecology. Modern herbicides, insecticides, fertilizers and even tractors must be banned. Stoop labor will reign supreme.

Reduce malaria and yellow fever – but only with bed nets and “integrated pest management.” Larvacides and insecticides, or DDT to keep mosquitoes out of homes for months with one spray – absolutely not.

Climate change will make summers hotter and winters colder; people will die. Wrong. With today’s housing and energy systems, people will do just fine – unless climate and energy policies take away their air conditioning and heating, ration them, make them unaffordable, or subject them to recurrent blackouts.

Americans “use too much” and “live too well,” they claim – so our overseers want to limit our homes to 640 square feet and “allow” us to fly on vacation or to see family only once every three years!

Bear in mind, all this is just the climate and energy cabal of the Democrat Master Party. Other equally loud, demanding, unaccountable elements want to defund the police, and disarm us as crime skyrockets. They’re indoctrinating our kids in CRT, gender fluidity, preferred pronouns, explicit sex, and far more.

Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe doesn’t think parents should have a say in what schools teach. (The UN Human Rights Declaration specifically says “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”) Attorney General Merrick Garland has a growing list of outspoken parents and other conservatives whom he and the National School Boards Association want investigated, harassed, prosecuted and even jailed as “domestic terrorists.” They embrace and impose seemingly endless totalitarian Covid mandates.

All this is why the 2021 Virginia elections are so critical: Glen Youngkin versus Terry McAuliffe, Winsome Sears vs. Hala Ayala for Lt. Governor, Jason Miyares vs. Mark Herring for AG, and dozens of senate and delegate seats. Other state elections two weeks hence are equally important. And the 2022 national elections will be a watershed moment in US history. Responsible voting is an absolute must.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.