The endless war against merit

 

This blog frequently links to historian Victor Davis Hanson’s essays. At his recent essay at American Greatness, he considers the definitions and consequences of socialism and its derivatives ("Do We Even Know We Are All Socialists Now?”).  Here’s his conclusion:

. . . A final note: the Orwellian police state is central to socialism, since the ideology is contrary to innate human nature and when fully implemented quickly ruins all that it touches and is commensurately despised in its fruition. So to force compliance is a 360 degree, 24/7 project that transcends all our institutions and culture.

That is why the woke FBI goes after counter-revolutionary parents at school board meetings or traditionalist Catholics rather than Pentagon leakers or Islamic terrorists.

That is why the FBI and the CIA respectively tried to warp the 2016 election with the phony Steele dossier and in 2020 probably did so by suppressing the truth about the “bombshell” evidence found on wayward Hunter Biden’s laptop.

That is why news disappears off Facebook and the old Twitter. That is why the order of Google search results seems bizarre. That is why Disney or Budweiser suddenly virtue signal their nihilist politics, or why Nike makes the mediocrity Colin Kaepernick a multimillionaire, or Stanford University attempts to purge vocabulary such as “citizen,” “immigrant,” and “American.”

Once socialism takes hold, every mediocrity, every ossified bureaucracy, every constipated careerist, every hack writer and nobody actor, comes out of the woodwork to find his socialist “fair share” of what he lacked in talent or accomplishment.

In the end, perhaps the best definition of socialism is simply “The endless war against merit.”

Read the rest here.

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The only way out is: out

 

Bob Maistros thinks America has passed the point of no return.  Here’s the opening of his essay at American Greatness:

Victor Davis Hanson has recently pondered in back-to-back essays whether there is any way out of America’s previously “fast-tracked” and now accelerating decline. 

Meanwhile, Julie Kelly appears to see no way out of the “near-certainty” that a “D.C. grand jury . . . will indict Trump on multiple counts” in ways that will cause him to be treated “[n]ot as a former president but as a traitor.” 

Columnist Josh Hammer, addressing both Trump’s judicial travails and the broader “decadent civilizational morass,” insists in his own consecutive submissions that “sometimes, the only way out is through”—tit-for-tat action from the Right. 

The depressing reality? This time, with the progressive Left’s assault on America, in Hammer’s words, having far passed the “point of no return,” the only way out is: out.  . . .

Read the full essay here.  Not for the faint of heart.

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The Democrat Party we grew up with

 

Ben Garrison cartoon

The Democrat Party that many of us grew up with in the 50’s and 60’s is long gone.  Long gone.  The Progressive left has taken it over.  At PJ Media, Victor Davis Hanson (VDH) explains why so many of our family and friends can’t see it:

President Joe Biden is now 80 years old. He will be 82 when he campaigns for the 2024 presidency — and a clearly debilitated 86 should he be elected and fill out his second term. He has been in government for over a half-century.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and current representative from California is 83.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the second-ranking Democratic House member behind Pelosi, was House majority leader until early this year. He is 83, and has been an elected official for nearly 60 years.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is 72, with 48 years in elected government.

Democratic luminary and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is 89, and ailing — after 53 years as an elected official.

James Clyburn, D-S.C., is House minority whip and 82.

These are the official faces of the Democratic Party.

They came into power and maturity three decades ago during the Clinton years of 1993-1999.

Decades ago, they sometimes supported strong national defense, secure borders, gas and oil development, fully funding the police, and a few restrictions on partial-birth abortions.

Not now.

Their role has changed from that of liberals of the Clinton era to serving as the thin power-holding veneer that masks the new real Democratic Party.

The party has been changed beyond recognition by Senators Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the so-called Squad, the Congressional Black Caucus, newly elected senators like the Georgia duo of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock – and Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Yet Biden and company are still familiar American faces.

Their final role is to acculturate the electorate to the new Democratic Party.

Its radicals are breathing down their necks to get out of the way. Yet for a while longer they still need such an ossified veneer of respectability to ease the transition to what is now essentially a socialist-European green party. . . .

A socialist-European green party”.  That’s putting it nicely.  Some might say the “Progressive left” is completing the “fundamental change” of America’s constitutional republic into the New World Order.  Global communism.    

VDH concludes:

The new majority of radical Democrats allows the old fogies to bask in the limelight until they drop — exempt from counter-revolutionary criticism or inter-party primary challenges or demands to retire.

In return, the codgers reassure the nation that old faces like theirs cannot possibly be polyester revolutionary socialists — despite their role in airbrushing and photo-shopping the radical catastrophe unfolding before our eyes.

Read all about it here.

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Civilization in the Danger Zone

 

Darlene Casella's posting links to a documentary this blogger has not seen, but it looks like one that we expect to watch and review here.  Here’s Darlene Casella at American Thinker on Civilization in the Danger Zone:

Gloria Greenfield's potent documentary, Civilization in the Danger Zone, explores Western civilization and what happens when crucial components are targeted for destruction.  The film brings together scholars and guiding lights of conservatism who share razor-sharp insights about the critical interconnectedness of God, family, and nation, which are necessary to maintain Western civilization in the world.

When one's sex or skin color or political outlook is more important than competence, intelligence, or character, a slippery slope of value erosion is created.  This paradigm is a precursor to communism and anarchy, the evil opposites of Western civilization.

For 65 minutes, the individual narrations of 23 celebrated intellectuals flow together.  They tell a compelling story about the targeted destruction of the Western concept of civilized society and behavior.  The dangers to Western civilization are dismaying, yet the speakers bring finesse and charm to their delivery. . . .

Read the full column here. Among the “celebrated intellectuals” whose names you may recognize are Larry P. Arnn, Frank Gaffney, Victor Davis Hanson, Heather Mac Donald, Christopher Rufo, and Carol Swain.

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Can We Do Anything About America’s Decline?

 

At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson asks what we’re all thinking:

Can We Do Anything About America’s Decline?

In the next five years, either cities will seek new governance to reduce taxes, break up municipal unions, mandate charter schools, restore police funding and manpower, recalibrate pensions, and prosecute criminals and corrupt officials—or Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and a score of others will become Detroit.

One of the strangest phenomena amid our current debility are the millions of affluent leftists and liberals who have fled their unworkable, now unlivable blue-run, but naturally beautiful cities like San Francisco or Portland. They seem to lack an abstract recognition why they are leaving, or why and how their new chosen destinations are so different and therefore so inviting to them. Is their motto, “I am fleeing what I created, but I still hate those who created what I want”?

To have a “border problem,” one must have a border. The United States has no southern border. . . .

VDH concludes his essay on a sad note:

Election night is a mere construct. It is mostly meaningless. Local, state, and federal election results are stalled and descend into days, weeks, and sometimes even months of bickering, counter charges of ballot tampering and fraud, ballot harvesting and curing, and a loss of confidence in the integrity of the final result. Debates mean little anymore, once a large portion of the electorate has already voted. No wonder deceased candidates can win. Gaffes are now determined by whether they occur before or after the majority of voters has cast their ballots. 

There should be a national uniform standard that allows states to set their ballot procedures—as long as they result in 70 percent of the electorate voting in person on election day. 

America is in a similar position to where it was in 1861, 1929, 1941, and 1968—only perhaps worse, given in all those cases, there was at least a president and Congress that identified and reacted to the crisis, whereas today our elected government is what caused the crisis.

Read the full column here.

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Fiddling America Away

 

So where are we now?  One of this blog's favorites, Victor Davis Hanson (VDH), looks at the big picture, and his column “Fiddling America Away” at American Greatness is not encouraging.  He begins:

The last few weeks, the world had been writing off the United States as either crazy or irrelevant as it watches America cannibalize itself. 

Friends tremble at our sudden decline. Enemies rejoice. Neutrals make the necessary adjustments to join the ascendant non-American side.

The symptoms of our decline abroad appear everywhere. The more Joe Biden brags about the crippling oil sanctions on Russia, friends like India and allies like Japan ignore them. And why not, when Biden has no idea how long the war in Ukraine will last, or how much wherewithal the United States can, should, or will give Kyiv, or how its on-to-Red-Square blank check will finally end?

Big Biden talks about more solar and wind farms, and green new deals won’t fill the gas tanks in Munich or heat the homes of Kyoto, or lower the price of imported oil in the United Kingdom. Claiming the Afghanistan mess was a success fools no one.

Allies ask who are our leaders. An impaired Joe Biden who never is quite sure where he is, what he is doing, or whom he is with?

And VDH concludes:

So America suffers the sins of omission—squabbling over the nonessential—and commission—losing wars, going broke, ruining its economy, flirting with civil war. We know these are all self-inflicted wounds. But apparently, we believe their remedies are worse than the original maladies. And so we fixate only on the irrelevant that we think we can address while ignoring the existential we know we no longer can solve.

The world is terrified and stunned at the result—and increasingly looking elsewhere to non-American solutions.

VDH’s full column is here.

RELATED:  Just the News reports that “President Joe Biden promised that he would bring back the "good old days" in international relations, but instead Europe and much of the world seem to be leaving America behind to move forward to the China days.” 

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Hillsdale College and government funding

 

In the wake of the Stanford University debacle, Victor Davis Hanson (VDH) scores again with “Who Owns The University?”  The entire column (at American Greatness) is, as usual, full of excellent insights, but these paragraphs particularly caught my eye:

. . . After all, Stanford, and thousands of private universities like it, are not Hillsdale College. Hillsdale long ago lost trust in federal and state government due to their efforts to use their partial funding as a means of politically leveraging the college. And therefore, it has refused all public monies ever since. 

Left-wing major colleges or universities have not done the same because they rightly assume the federal government shares their commitment to radical progressive change. And thus, Washington gives them free rein to discriminate in admission, housing, and hiring, as well as to suspend constitutional protections for faculty and staff—if in service to progressive-regressive agendas. 

But that was then, and this is now. If Stanford’s sordid law school psychodrama taught us anything, it was that the law school mob felt they could threaten, smear, scream, disrupt and shut down a public speaker and do so with complete impunity. And they were right on all counts. . . .

Hillsdale College has stood out for years as dedicated to offering a classical liberal arts education, including American history!  They can do so because they refuse all state and federal funding.  Our household subscribes to their newsletter Imprimus, which always contains a modified version of a recent lecture by a recognized conservative, such as VDH.  Read his column here.

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Man learns from history that man never learns from history

 

Your weekend read:  Victor Davis Hanson points out the alarming parallels between the collapse of the Byzantines and the collapse of America.  He begins:

When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the Byzantine Empire and its capital had survived for 1,000 years beyond the fall of the Western Empire at Rome.

Always outnumbered in a sea of enemies, the Byzantines’ survival had depended on its realist diplomacy of dividing its enemies, avoiding military quagmires, and ensuring constant deterrence.

Generations of self-sacrifice ensured ample investment for infrastructure. Each generation inherited and improved on singular aqueducts and cisterns, sewer systems, and the most complex and formidable city fortifications in the world.

Brilliant scientific advancement and engineering gave the empire advantages like swift galleys and flame throwers—an ancient precursor to napalm.

The law reigned supreme for nearly a millennium after the emperor Justinian codified a prior thousand years of Roman jurisprudence.

Yet this millennium-old crown jewel of the ancient world that once was home to 800,000 citizens had only 50,000 inhabitants left when it fell.  . . .

And he concludes:

Like Byzantines, Americans have become snarky iconoclasts, more eager to tear down art and sculpture that they no longer have the talent to create. 

Current woke dogma, obscure word fights, and sanctimonious cancel culture are as antithetical to the past generations of World War II as the last generation of Constantinople was to the former great eras of the emperors Constantine, Justinian, Heraclius, and Leo.

The Byzantines never woke up in time to understand what they had become.

So far neither have Americans.

VDH’s full column at American Greatness is here.

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Merit vs Diversity

AF Branco [Americans for Limited Government] cartoon at Townhall    

In his column “Destroying Meritocracy Is Deadly” at Townhall, Victor Davis Hanson discusses the decline in the aviation industries, both commercial and military, but his concerns could as easily be about the medical, educational, agricultural, energy and other professions. VDH concludes:

. . . America's security, safety, prosperity, and postmodern lifestyles are not our birthright.

They are the dividends of centuries of prior hard work, unfettered freedom of speech, disinterested research, and a meritocracy.

Tamper with any of that and the system begins to fall apart.

The United States will then resemble the miasma we see in most of the world abroad where ideology suppresses free inquiry, political correctness warps research, and tribalism trumps meritocracy.

Many of the major airlines have established racial and gender quotes for government pilot training programs. United Airlines has set quotas to ensure half of its trainees will be minorities or women. Since 2013, the FAA has been lowering standards for air traffic control qualifications to achieve de facto race and gender quotas.

In testimony before Congress our top military brass has bragged not of their reduction in standards for enlistment, but of their "diversity" hiring, as they purportedly ferret out "white supremacy" and "white rage."

In sum, our government is playing with our lives as it prefers diversity, equity, and inclusion over ensuring the best qualified employees are hired on the basis of racially and gender-blind competitive tests and experience.

Keep it up, and there are going to be a lot more Afghanistan-style surrenders, Chinese surveillance craft in our skies, and airline nightmares.

The full column is here.

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Not your father’s Democrat party

This column by the inimitable Victor Davis Hanson was published a few days ago at American Greatness, and it’s a cautionary analysis:

For all Joe Biden’s talk about “semi-fascist” and “un-American,” “ultra-MAGA” Republicans, it is the Democratic Party that has far more radically changed. It is descended into a woke, neo-socialist, radically green party. And it is committed, as Barack Obama once promised, to fundamentally transforming America. How it proceeds with that agenda is now as entirely predictable as it is creepy.

And Hanson expands on the agenda and methods by category, specifically:

• Election Warping
• Projection
• Suppression
• Changing the Rules
• Asymmetries

Hanson’s conclusion:

Conservatives should be aware that they are not dealing with the party of JFK and LBJ. The Democratic Party has nothing in common with the agendas of a slick Bill Clinton and is well beyond the “fundamental transformations” of arch-narcissist Barack Obama. 

We are faced with a strictly disciplined, no-nonsense revolutionary party, well known from history that aims to change the nation into something unrecognizable by most Americans. And it feels that it has now created the means to do it.

Read the full article here.

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The Decline of Higher Education

 

The great Victor Davis Hanson goes through all sorts of “woke” reasons that colleges and universities are failing.  The full article (“Are Universities Doomed”) is at The Daily Signal here, but here’s his conclusion:

How ironic that universities are rushing to erode meritocratic standards—history’s answer to the age-old, pre-civilizational bane of tribal, racial, class, elite, and insider prejudices and bias that eventually ensure poverty and ruin for all.

VDH could as well be describing the decline of western civilization itself.

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A great deal of ruin

Victor Davis Hanson does not like what he is seeing:

“Our Parasitic Generation”

Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?

We are $31 trillion in collective debt. The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits. The military is politicized and short of recruits. We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies’ cynical stereotypes. 

Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections. We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it. The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware—and hard-earned deterrence.

We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and baby formula. Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or stroll at dusk in many major American cities. Medieval London’s roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco. Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.

Lots more at American Greatness here.  It’s important.  And it’s grim.

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The Biden Administration’s Wrecking Balls

 

Victor Davis Hanson recently published his essay “If You Really Wanted to Destroy the United States, Then . . .” at American Greatness here.  John Dale Dunn has condensed the essay into a column at American Thinker.  Mr Dunn begins:

Victor Davis Hanson is one of the most deservedly admired conservative writers, authors, and commentators in America.  That's why his recent essay about what it will take to destroy America is worthy of your attention. . . .

Hanson's essay breaks down into ten steps, which he analyzes in some detail.  I've summarized those ten points, although I urge you to read his entire essay.

First, surrender America's energy independence.  In this regard, Hanson touches upon attacking coal and nuclear power, draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, canceling oil and gas leases while blocking pipelines, and focusing excessively and expensively on green energy.

Second, inflate the currency and punish those with fixed income while increasing the welfare state. 

Third, erase America's borders while diluting the number of assimilated and patriotic citizens.

Fourth, destroy the public's faith in elections by changing the rules so as to allow for easy fraud via ballot-harvesting and mail-in voting. 

Read the rest of the ten points here or here.  Here’s the grim conclusion of the essay:

We have done all of the above. It would be hard to imagine any planned agenda to destroy America that would have been as injurious as what we already suffered the last two years. 

When Victor Davis Hanson loses his optimism, you know America is collapsing.  

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Just out today: Against the New World Order

 

Book release Via Instapundit:

Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order  [Hardcover – October 18, 2022];  ed. Michael Walsh

Contributors include Victor Davis Hanson, Douglas Murray, Roger Kimball, the late Angelo M. Codevilla, Conrad Black, Michael Anton, and David Goldman.

Take that, Klaus Schwab.  Our household is ordering it on Kindle.  You can take a look at Mr Walsh's Introduction online at Amazon here.

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The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization

 

The great historian Victor Davis Hanson has another must-read:

. . . Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture. 

So, the great achievement of Western civilization—consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit—was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature. 

But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright. 

As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded—as civilization went headlong in reverse.  

We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis. 

. . .

He concludes:

As we suffer self-inflicted mass looting, random street violence, hyperinflation, a nonexistent border, unaffordable fuel, and a collapsing military, Americans will come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of their civilization. 

When stripped away, we are relearning that what lies just beneath is utterly terrifying.

Read the rest here at American Greatness. A Must Read.

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Victor Davis Hanson: Mar-A-Lago Raid and the Rule of Law

 

The interview took place on August 9, but I only just now came across it.  Michael W. Chapman at CNS News reports on Victor Davis Hanson take on the Mar-a-Lago raid:

When asked about the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump's home in Palm Beach, Fla., professor, author, and political commentator Victor David Hanson said, "right now, we don't have the rule of law in Washington," and added that, "The FBI is beyond redemption."

Hanson, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush, made his remarks on the Aug. 9 edition of FNC's Tucker Carlson Tonight, guest-hosted by Will Cain.  

Cain asked Hanson why the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and why were they targeting Trump.

"Well, they're afraid in the short term," he said, in reference to the Democrats and the left, "but in the long term they believe they're morally superior to America, and therefore any means necessary or justifiable for their morally superior ends."

"And right now, we don't have the rule of law in Washington," said Hanson. "Whether you're targeted or exempt depends on your ideology."

. . .

As for the FBI, Hanson remarked, "I never thought I would say this: The FBI is beyond redemption. It is -- all of its bureaus and its institutions that have to be farmed out and broken up. If you have a warrant, an FBI warrant, there is no guarantee that that has not been altered. If you subpoena and you want FBI records on phones ... they will be wiped clean."

"We just saw [FBI Director] Christopher Wray and he just stonewalled every question and then he flew on an FBI plane, our plane, a luxury jet because he had to go to his own vacation spot. He took over, remember, from Andrew McCabe -- what did he do? He lied four times to federal investigators, and his wife was running for an office with Clinton-related PAC money while he was investigating Hillary Clinton's e-mail scandal."

. . .

Read the rest here.

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VDH: Who Are the Real Insurrectionists?

 

click on image to embiggen

Victor Davis Hanson is a national treasure, and his recent column at American Greatness begins:

For 120 days in summer 2020, violent protesters destroyed some $2 billion in property and injured 1,500 police officers in riots that led to over 35 deaths.  

Because blue-state mayors and governors saw BLM and Antifa instigators as useful street soldiers, most of those arrested were never tried in court. Street thugs paid no price for declaring themselves de facto owners of downtown areas of Seattle, which police themselves conceded were no-go zones. Why did public officials in blue states ignore the violence? They were certain that it enjoyed majority support among their leftwing constituencies. 

Indeed, some leftist icons cheered on the violence. Well after the failed attempt to storm the White House grounds, in June 2020, the Democratic candidate for vice president Kamala Harris warned us that protestors were “not going to let up, and they should not.” What did Harris mean by “should not?”—when she knew numerous protests that summer had ended in terrible violence? Was she reckless in the manner Trump was said to be by encouraging a demonstration on January 6? 

The architect of the “1619 Project” Nikole Hannah-Jones assured the nation that vast destruction of (someone else’s property) was not a real crime. CNN’s Chris Cuomo gushed that violent demonstrations and riots were American traditions. Were these national voices urging calm during weeks of violent rioting and looting? 

There were no investigations, no congressional committees, and no voices of outrage from the left-wing establishment over months of such carnage. Indeed, much of the organization of the violent protests was facilitated by social media that was apparently unbothered that the medium under their stewardship was used to torch and loot. 

VDH chronicles the incitements to violence, the threats, and actual violence, all coming from the progressive left.  Full article is here.

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Must Read of the Day: Imagine The Unimaginable

Victor Davis Hanson’s sobering essay, “Imagine the Unimaginable”, has been cross-posted at several blogsites.  It’s a Must Read.  Here’s the link to PJ Media site.  Quick take-away:

Ruling elites would rather be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful, and popular. 

VDH closes his essay:

When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous—as we shall see over the next few months.

Sobering indeed.  Click here for the full essay.  

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America: out of order

 

As usual, Victor Davis Hanson nails it.  From American Greatness:

What explains an America that suddenly no longer works? 

First, all of these problems are self-induced. They did not exist until Biden [I would assume that when he refers to “Biden,” VDH means “the Biden Administration.”] birthed them for ideological or political reasons. Apparently, his administration wanted a changing, more favorable electorate and demography at any cost. 

. . .

Second, Biden has no solutions to these self-created problems because of the ideological restraints the Left has imposed on him.

The administration fears the anger of the hard Left more than the furor of the American people. So it will not change, preferring to be politically correct and a failure than to be ideologically incorrect and successful. 

Third, when people object, this administration answers either by blaming others for its self-created mess or by seeking distractions. Now it is faulting gun owners for the crime wave it fostered, supposed “white supremacists” for the racial tensions it fanned, and Putin, whom it appeased.

The common denominator? Biden knows that he inherited a stable, prosperous America and has nearly ruined it. 

Read VDH’s full column here.  But where is the good news?  Sundance at Conservative Treehouse sums up some encouraging and significant push-backs:

[A] more assertive, deliberate, strategic and determined MAGA movement is being noticed everywhere.  There are new combat rules in response to the leftist onslaught toward our children.  . . .

Leftist favorite Netflix, is hemorrhaging users and just lost 30% of its value.  Spotify just refused to renew the leftist idols, the Obamas.  The ultra-leftist Disney Corp just lost their special district status in Orlando, and leftist Twitter is on the verge of a hostile ‘free speech’ takeover by Elon Musk.

. . .

Click here for more.

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Victor Davis Hanson: “The Nihilism of the Left”

 

Victor Davis Hanson posted “The Nihilism of the Left” at American Greatness, and he concludes:  

The Left got what it wanted and now controls academia, the media, the internet, K-12 education, corporate boardrooms, the Pentagon, Wall Street, and Hollywood. And they more or less have turned each of these into versions of Pravda. The sermons, arrogance, and narcissism of these woke cultural imperialists now explain why they are disliked as much abroad as they are at home. 

In sum, we are watching a rare laboratory experiment in which the traditional American fringe is now in control of the government. In pursuit of its utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it. The result is an unmitigated disaster that not only has tarred the Democratic Party, corrupted once-revered agencies, and alienated half the country from our cultural institutions, but now endangers the very health and security of the United States. 

VDH’s full article is here.  Let us hope that what we are witnessing is indeed “a rare laboratory experiment” that can fail and be replaced by experiments that have worked – you know, a constitutional republic.

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