The Democrat primary has devolved into an extremism arms race to see who can adopt the most radical position.

Last week’s winner, despite steep competition, was Elizabeth Warren, who tweeted out, “On my first day as president, I will sign an executive order that puts a total moratorium on all new fossil fuel leases for drilling offshore and on public lands. And I will ban fracking — everywhere.”

Sundance covered ten negative effects of this action at Conservative Treehouse. The bottom line is that it would take a sledgehammer to the U.S. economy while tipping the geopolitical map in favor of the world’s worst regimes, such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and China.

It’s a twofold nightmare, attacking the U.S. economy while threatening its national security. It’s hard to come up with a more damaging position. Perhaps next she can propose handing all of America’s nuclear weapons over to North Korea in the interest of global peace.

One wonders what is going through Warren’s mind when committing to something so obviously catastrophic to the nation she is hoping to lead. In borrowing a strategy oft used by C.S. Lewis, there are only three possible explanations for Warren’s position: she is lying, an intellectual lightweight, or a lunatic.

Let’s look at each of these in increasing order of likelihood.

Warren as Liar

Perhaps Warren actually realizes the incredible damage this would cause and is simply lying to Democrat primary voters to win their votes. This would be the least damaging option and can at least be considered within a primary, where Democrats are saying increasingly outrageous things to improve their standing with propagandized socialist voters who are members in good standing in the nonsensical Church of the Global Warming Jihad. Warren famously built much of her career on the big lie, her false American Indian heritage, and then upped the ante when she lied to smear an innocent policeman as a murderer. In a saner world, either of those lies would have disqualified her for any office.

This seems like the least likely choice of the three. If she was really lying, she would have left herself more room to evolve once in office. The specificity of the claim speaks to her commitment to it. If given the chance, she will do as promised.

Warren as Intellectual Lightweight

While the media routinely claim that all Democrats are transcendent intellects and all Republicans are Neanderthals, they have reserved some of their highest accolades for Warren’s brainpower. Almost every leftstream media outlet has gotten in on the action and declared her brilliant or running a brilliant campaign. Nicholas Kristoff at the New York Times called her a “geyser of smart proposals.” She is so brilliant that she committed one of the dumbest political errors any politician has ever committed when she released that she was perhaps 1/1,024 American Indian and then bragged about it. Brilliant!

Since the media look at everything through a liberal lens, they are handing out intelligence and idiocy prizes based on who most agrees with their extreme liberal positions. Within this context, it is no surprise that they are overwhelmed by Warren’s brilliance and regularly declare President Trump America’s worst dunce.

Nonetheless, while I think Warren’s intellectual prowess is highly overrated (after all, she contributed a recipe for crab with tomato mayonnaise dressing to an American Indian cookbook), I don’t think she is so daft as not to comprehend the implications of what she is proposing. I see her as more of the shifty politician who will say whatever she thinks she needs to say at any given time. That’s my takeaway from Ben Shapiro’s recent piece on her in which he argues she is a creative thinker who has been corrupted by power.

Warren as Lunatic

If Warren is not an intellectual lightweight and is not lying, then she is willing to play the arsonist, burning the U.S. economy in a sacrificial bonfire to America’s enemies. This makes her a lunatic with a twisted messiah complex reminiscent of the Joker of Batman fame or perhaps a modern-day Nero, fiddling while the American middle class and the country’s industrial manufacturing base burn to the ground, fueled by $5-a-gallon gas. Maybe she really does think the system is so corrupt that she needs to burn it all down and start over. That certainly sounds like the way a socialist would think.

I believe that this move is all about power. Hyper-ambitious Warren wants it, and this is a means to get it. The Democrat primary electorate has gone all in on climate extremism and has elevated that to the top of their altar. Warren, like the rest of the field, has taken notice. At risk of being outflanked on her left by someone like Kamala Harris, steely-eyed Warren nodded once and tweet-raised her. Not only will she destroy the U.S. energy industry and end fracking, as Harris also promised, but she’ll do it on day one. If promising to destroy the economy is what it takes, Warren is onboard.

Bernie Sanders is the true-believing lunatic of the race. Warren, living up to her Fauxcahontas nickname, is the fake believer, which perhaps makes her lunacy even worse. She is a geyser of insanity.

Going Forward

While I still put my money on Joe Biden winning the nomination since Warren and Bernie Sanders are largely canceling each other out, Warren is maneuvering to grab the nomination if Biden falters. In fact, betting odds now have her as a ten-percentage-point favorite over Biden. She owns the media darling mantle, which will pay big dividends over the next several months.

This incident further increases my confidence that nearly all foreign election interference in 2020 will favor the Democrats. All these candidates are promising to shackle the U.S. economy and tilt the playing field back to America’s enemies. They are universally promising a return to globalism over nationalism, subordinating American interests to those of other countries. The Democrats will welcome that foreign support, as they have in the past.

This is also why I think the polls are dramatically underestimating President Trump’s chances at re-election. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, yes, when that tree is the CNN Climate Town Hall and the soundbites are recorded. And Warren is pacing the pack in producing a boatload of choice soundbites.

Trump will rightfully and effectively attack the surviving candidate for every outrageous position. Is Texas really going to vote for ending fracking on day one of a new administration? Michigan? Pennsylvania? Is any of these states going to vote for a candidate who fully endorsed, as Joe Biden just did, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s cow- and car-killing Green New Deal? These actual policy positions are not even remotely baked into the numbers, which will start to shift as independents grapple with what they are hearing when this moves to a binary general election.

We have reached an interesting inflection point — where Democrats feel compelled to adopt such outrageous positions and believe they won’t pay a political price for it.

Fletch Daniels blogs at deplorabletouchdown.com and can be found on Twitter at @fletchdaniels.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.