Hanson: The Decline of American Citizenship

 

In yesterday’s blog, I linked to historian Victor Davis Hanson’s essay on Cracked Icons of the Left.  Today I am posting on his message from Hillsdale College on his new course on The Decline of American Citizenship:

I wish to invite you to enroll in a seven-lecture course that I prepared with the help and under the auspices of Hillsdale College. It is called “American Citizenship and Its Decline,” and the online course is based on my latest book, the recently released The Dying Citizen.

Like the book, the course describes the current crises in America as symptoms of a far larger problem: the steady decline of the autonomy and political influence of the citizen.

The class describes the origins and history of citizenship in the West, reminding us that it is a rare phenomenon both in the past and the present—given the enormous responsibility placed on citizens to create and control their own government.

Citizenship then requires a large and self-reliant middle class—currently shrinking under enormous economic strains. Clearly defined and enforced borders are also essential to ensure a civic space in which citizens can nurture common customs, sustain traditions, and honor their own shared past.

Yet borders are now increasingly fluid as mere residence and citizenship seem often indistinguishable. Pre-civilizational tribalism—identifying by superficial appearance rather than through shared culture and values—is returning to America as so often the salad bowl replaces the melting pot.

These organic, bottom-up challenges are often matched by top-down stresses such as the growth of a huge permanent, but unelected, government of bureaucrats and administrators who combine judicial, executive, and legislative powers that overwhelm the citizen.

In addition, revisionists in law, the media, and politics seek to change the Constitution, long-held customs of governance, and political traditions for short-term partisan agendas, on the theory that a new changing and fluid Constitution must match an always evolving human nature.

Globalism is an ancient challenge to the sovereignty of the nation-state. But in the age of instant communications and unprecedented concentrations of globalized wealth, so often elites seek to supplant American laws and independence with international organizations and often without the consent of the legislative branch or the assent of the governed.

The course ends, however, on an optimistic note that citizens still have it within their power to restore our traditions of empowered citizenship and return government to the control of citizens.

“American Citizenship and Its Decline” is free to enroll in, and you can begin the course today by clicking on the secure link below.

https://online.hillsdale.edu/landing/american-citizenship-and-its-decline

Like most of Dr. Hanson’s messages, his summary is helpful on its own.

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Cracked Icons of the Left

 

Image credit:  Legal Insurrection

The inimitable Victor Davis Hanson provides a glimmer of hope in his American Greatness piece “Cracked Icons: The Corrupt and Mediocre Heroes of the Left are Imploding”:

With fits and starts, we are slowly returning to reality after four years of mass hysteria. Our media-deified, progressive icons are finally being exposed as the deceivers they always were.

. . .

He closes with “Basement Biden”:

Do we remember old Joe Biden from Scranton? He was the media fiction who hid his dementia in his basement for a year, spouting that Trump had wrecked everything and he would bring about decency, prosperity, an end to the virus, and “healing.” 

The Biden candidacy was one of the most cynical in American history. The unhinged far-Left adopted a befuddled Biden as the respectable veneer necessary to see their hard-core, but stealth socialist agenda finally enacted. Key to a virtual presidency would be virtual voting, as 102 million mail-in and early votes were never subject to the previous standards of authentication and statistical rejection rates of the past—rendering Election Day voting mostly a memory.

Good Joe was billed as the antithesis to the tweeting Bad Trump. Yet he clearly wasn’t. Even Joe’s tweets (e.g., “We are with you, Jussie”) were often more ridiculous.

Within days the “moderate” Joe Biden set in place policies that were guaranteed to begin wrecking the country, to send his polls down into the 30s, to ensure the likely wipe-out of his congressional majorities in 2022, and to make himself and the media who created his myth disliked, and the laughingstock of the country. Trump became unpopular when over 90 percent of media coverage was negative, and the Left concocted a never-ending circus of hoaxes, starting with Russian collusion; but Biden is disliked, despite an obsequious media and weaponized bureaucracies on his side.

We are in the first 10 months of a cognitively challenged president who is deteriorating geometrically not arithmetically, with a vice president in waiting whom the nation fears is more dangerous, even knowing Biden is half-senile. He may be reaching the point of embarrassment at which the media and Left no longer find him useful and begin leaking and staging his exit.

Single-handedly the Biden puppeteers have managed to restore the Trump record of achievement simply by doing the opposite of what Trump did, thereby ensuring their own failure and reminding voters of what once was working. 

Biden may end up with the most unrecognized achievement of the modern age: the radical transformation of leftwing Latinos into a conservative majority of fed-up voters—a development that will likely cause the Left to demand an end to open borders on the assumption too many Mexicans and Central Americans are ending up like wizened Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants.

We could add other fallen heroes of the Left who once saturated our recent air waves—Robert Mueller and his dream team that would rid the world of Trump, and the quartet of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe. They, by their dishonesty, prevarications, and careerism have almost single-handedly tarnished the reputations of the Washington-based intelligence and investigatory agencies. Yet now, the Left has no more need of them. They are already fading from the public awareness, as careerists who managed to erode support from all those who once most readily defended their own institutions.

The lesson of these fallen icons? 

They were deified for larger reductionist and anti-Trump agendas. Yet they were also always dispensable when their utility eroded, due to their mediocrity—of such a magnitude that even our American Pravdas could no longer continue to manipulate them for advantage.

Hanson further expands on “icons” Jussie Smollet, the Cuomo brothers, Kamala Harris, Adam Schiff, and BLM.  I hope he’s right (he usually is).  Full column is here.

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The Medical Profession Implodes

 

At American Thinker, Steve Karp, MD has this to say about his own profession:

In “normal” times, the practice of medicine has many challenges, some from within and some from outside the profession.  If you let it, much of your daily practice follows specialty guidelines, insurance company criteria, hospital formularies, and other annoyances.  None of those entities have any liability when it comes to our patients.  For the most part, liability lies with the treating physician.

Each specialty plays a particular role in a patient’s care and specialists often view issues from different angles while wearing their tunnel-vision glasses.  For instance, some physicians view elevated cholesterol as an indicator to assess other potential underlying medical issues, while a cardiologist will just write a prescription for a statin drug, just as a cat reflexively chases a mouse.

What changed overnight and across the board, was an anti-science attitude across all specialties to everything related to COVID.  A viral infection is not something requiring government management, rather, its encounter is part of a physician’s daily medical practice.  The government has seemingly accomplished what medical insurers, medical boards, and hospitals tried, but had not yet succeeded at: complete mind control of physicians.  And with that, the last vestige of respect I had for my profession died. 

. . .

Read the rest here.  It does seem as though it’s every man for himself when it comes to how any of us make choices about the “vaccine” or ivermectin / quercetin / zinc, etc.

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Dueling Headlines: Vaxx scams

 

Just a sampling of headlines from this past weekend:

Daily Wire:  HALF of the Chicago Bulls’ “Fully Vaccinated” and Mostly Boostered Roster Is Now Out With Covid

Liberty Loft: British Study Finds Jabbed Likely At Higher Risk Of Mortality, Japanese Study Says The Young At 7 Times Greater Risk To Shot Than COVID-19   

Liberty Daily: More Proof the “Vaccines” Are a Scam: 99% VAXXED Middlebury College Locks Down All Classes Over Covid Surge  

Natural News: Israel says Covid booster shots will now be ENDLESS   

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Vaxx Refusers are like terrorists

TITLE:  ‘Experts’ Claim Vaxx Refusers Need to be Deradicalized or Reeducated Like Cult Members and Terrorists.   If you declined to take the jab, you must be a domestic terrorist and need to be re-educated.  At NOQ Report, Matt Agorist explains:  

. . . The Independent interviewed one of these so-called experts who is advocating for “deradicalizing” folks who refuse the jab and his comments are certainly shocking.

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, chair in cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol, thinks that those who refuse to take the jab are akin to batsh*t crazy tinfoil hat-wearing loons, who think Hilary Clinton is a lizard. Seriously.

“They’ll refuse anything – ‘I’m not going to wear a mask’, ‘I’m not going to get vaccinated’, ‘I don’t think climate change is happening’, ‘Covid is a hoax’, and, you know, ‘Hillary Clinton is actually a reptilian shapeshifter’,” he told the Independent, adding, “You’re getting to people who hold a cluster of very exotic beliefs – now, they’re very difficult to reach.”

Lewandowsky called this faction of folks who choose not to take the jab, “hardcore refuseniks” who cannot be reached through conventional means — so, they need to be treated like cult members or terrorists.

“In the ideal world, time and money permitting, you can engage even those people in a very slow, long-term process where you affirm their right to have those beliefs… rather than telling them something about themselves they don’t want to hear, let’s put it that way,” he said.

“So you tell them something positive, and then engage in what is effectively the same as a deradicalization process for former terrorists, or cult members.”

By this logic, Joe Rogan and others — who have had covid-19 and choose not to take the jab because they trust their natural immunity — are akin to terrorists or cult members.

. . .

NOTE:  For the record, I do not think that Hillary Clinton is, literally, a “lizard.”  At any rate, read the rest here.

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Freedom and Basketball

Enes Kanter Freedom is a professional basketball player for the Boston Celtics.  He just published a piece in, of all places, The Atlantic.  Excerpts are below.  His statement will bring tears to your eyes;  he understands what America is all about, and he puts LeBron to shame.  Highly recommended!

When I first arrived in the United States, I had to adjust to a new language, new norms, and new traditions. But I was perhaps most stunned by a simple comment a teammate made. He criticized President Barack Obama, which I feared could have landed him in prison. He smiled and said: “This isn’t Turkey, brother. You have the freedom to say whatever you want.”

Americans might find the thought absurd, but the threat of prison is all too real for those living under authoritarian rule around the world. Since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became president of Turkey in 2014, after more than a decade as prime minister, at least 12,881 people have been convicted of the crime of insulting the president. Thousands have been sent to prison, including children, for offenses as trivial as posting something on social media that might hurt the feelings of an emotionally fragile dictator.

Over the past five years, Erdoğan has all but stamped out free expression in Turkey. He’s made Turkey one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists, imprisoning hundreds. Erdoğan’s regime has shut down more than 160 media outlets and hundreds of human-rights groups. Turkey’s dystopian new internet law gives the regime complete control over users’ data and enables online censorship. A current proposal would criminalize the spreading of so-called fake news online with up to five years in prison. Erdoğan has targeted every defender of freedom in my country. His regime has persecuted, jailed, and even tortured tens of thousands of educators, lawyers, judges, public officials, and activists after labeling them “terrorists.” And it has targeted me.

. . .

Human rights and democracy are under threat. Around the globe, authoritarian strongmen are getting stronger. Yet far too many celebrities, athletes, and corporations still choose their money over their morals. Speaking up for victims of authoritarian violence has somehow become controversial, just because it might alienate the perpetrators. It shouldn’t take the disappearance of a former No. 1 world-tennis star for some of us to make a statement. Freedom is not about staying silent in the face of a tyrannical dictatorship that commits genocide against the Uyghurs because you prefer to preserve your business deals.

For six long years, I was without a home. I know what it’s like for a people to have their freedom stripped away. And I know what it’s like to have my own freedom stripped away. But this week, I’m reclaiming my Freedom. I just became an American citizen, and I’m making America and its freedoms a part of my very identity.

I’m overwhelmed with emotion just writing these words: I, Enes Kanter Freedom, am proud to be a citizen of the United States of America, the land of the free, and home of the brave.

Mr. Freedom's full statement is here.  And it is inspiring.

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Exposing Pfizer vaccine: under-reported adverse reactions

 

Mark Wauck (at Meaning in History) has shocking Pfizer “vaccine” updates from the NZ Daily Telegraph:

This article appeared in the NZ Daily Telegraph. It’s addressing the recent FOIA induced revelations from Pfizer, which revelations give just a glimpse of how bad the adverse event data is. I say ‘just a glimpse,’ because Pfizer acknowledges that “the magnitude of [adverse event] underreporting is unknown”. Read that as many times as is necessary for the implications to sink in—

governments around the world are coercing millions upon millions of perfectly healthy and not-at-risk people to get injected with an experimental gene therapy that has produced unprecedentedly horrific side effects—and Pfizer acknowledges that, bad as that is, “the magnitude of [adverse event] underreporting is [as yet] unknown”.

And governments, knowing this, are pushing ahead with new, draconian mandates, regardless. This is the final breach of faith, now in plain sight whereas previous such breaches of faith were kept hidden.

We know all this already, but I’ll be quoting extensively from the NZ article because the author, Guy Hatcherd, puts it all in a brilliant perspective. Read it and share it widely. The pushback in the US appears to be getting stronger by the day, and this type of articulate, informed perspective is what’s needed to keep things going in the right direction. This is Guy Hatcherd:

Guy Hatchard PhD is a statistician and former senior manager at Genetic ID, a global food safety testing and certification laboratory.

And this is an excerpted version of his article—severely pruned to simply follow the main lines of the argument:

PFIZER DOCUMENT CONCEDES THAT THERE IS A LARGE INCREASE IN TYPES OF ADVERSE EVENT REACTION TO ITS VACCINE

• Document released by Pfizer apparently as a result of a Freedom Of Information court order in the USA reveals a vast array of previously unknown vaccine adverse effects compiled from official sources around the world.
• Pfizer concedes this is ‘a large increase’ in adverse event reports and that even this huge volume is under reported.
• Over 100+ diseases are listed, many very serious.
• This document was compiled by Pfizer in the very early days of the vaccine rollout in NZ but was possibly not supplied to our government.
• We examine the implications for government.

. . .

The sheer density of the technical medical terms and disease names are nevertheless broken down into recognisable and serious categories of illness—kidney failure, stroke, cardiac events, pregnancy complications, inflammation, neurological disease, autoimmune failure, paralysis, liver failure, blood disorders, skin disease, musculoskeletal problems, arthritis, respiratory disease, DVT, blood clots, vascular disease, haemorrhage, loss of sight, Bell’s palsy, and epilepsy.

Read the rest here. 

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