Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson
Trump, His Disrupters, and a Chance to Return to Normalcy?

Many of Trump first-round picks share some common themes.

One, many, who were in the past victimized by government bullies and cowardly bureaucratic grandees, or proved sharp critics of the administrative state, are now, in karma-style, in charge of the very agencies that hounded him.

So, Elon Musk, perennial target of government regulatory functionaries, was once policed, but now he polices the bureaucratic police.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., proposed overseer of government health programs, was often blasted as a crank by the subsidized scientists and the administrators within HHS whom he will now direct.

Pete Hegseth fought the military DEI machinery while a solider in the ranks and wrote a book about the corruption of the Pentagon. He will now, if confirmed, run the Pentagon.

Tulsi Gabbard was improperly put on a national security travel watch list as a supposed security threat—and now will be a guardian of our security as Director of National Intelligence.

Tom Homan was derided by the Biden administration and its Homeland Security minions as a fanatic border hawk; now he will run ICE and deal with the detritus of Biden fanaticism on the border.

Two, none of these appointments are traditional swamp creatures. Few rotate from the think tanks. This time around there are no retired “Wise Men” or retired four-stars. Few are Uniparty magnificoes revolving back into high government from their DC university or New York corporate and investment waystations. None are DEI, cover-our-identity-politics-base candidates.

By design, their past government service resumes are thin—few past undersecretaries of these or special assistant to those. And there are not a lot of suffixed alphabetic letters or prefixed long-winded titles that adorn their names.

In other words, they are vaxed from the sort of acculturated administrative state mindset that has alienated and terrified the citizenry.

Three, they all share a reputation from the mainstream media, bicoastal elite, or administrative state guardians as a little “out there” or even “crazy” and “nuts”, whether RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, or Pete Hegseth. So, their opponents rightly fear they are immune from mainstream media disparagements, the usually leftwing generated hoaxes, and beltway tsk-tsk scorn.

Fourth and finally, they are not radicals or nihilists. Rather, they are reformers who are trying to trim or eliminate bloated government machinery, or return institutions and agencies to their normal functions and original missions. In contrast, the last few years of Biden governance chaos and near insurrection were abnormal—and dangerous.

Destroying the border and breaking the law to allow 12 million to enter illegally were nihilist.

Stealthily routing government cash, to circumvent the law, to a communist Chinese-run viral gain-of-function engineering lab is beyond the belief.

Creating a commissar system in the military that demanded ideological orthodoxy over meritocracy, or the Chairman of the JCS secretly communicating with his People’s Liberation Army counterpart to warn about his own commander-in-chief’s stability was insurrectionist.

Weaponizing the DOJ by performance-art swat home raids on opponents, and collusion lawfare waged by local, state, and federal indictments against a former president and presidential candidate were un-American.

Asymmetrical prosecutions and FBI fusion with social media to censor the news were sheer government anarchy.

There are legitimate questions about the confirmability of Matt Gaetz, or his prosecutorial experience, or some of his alleged past excesses, but his very accusers were mostly quiet about the weirdos, creeps, and revolutionaries in the Biden administration—accused of stealing women’s luggage at airports, or lying that a subordinate “racist” border patrol whipped in slave-master fashion innocent would-be immigrants, or trying to fix a felonious presidential son’s sentencing to avoid the accustomed legal consequences of his criminal behavior.

In sum, the currently loud censors have zero credibility given the unprofessional, weaponized, and nihilist examples they have bequeathed.

Our Revolutionary Times

By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

May 30, 2024

Sometimes unexpected but dramatic events tear off the thin veneer of respectability and convention. What follows is the exposure and repudiation of long-existing but previously covered-up pathologies.

Events like the destruction of the southern border over the last three years, the October 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war, the campus protests, the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, and the systematic efforts to weaponize our bureaucracies and courts have all led to radical reappraisals of American culture and civilization.

Since the 1960s, universities have always been hotbeds of left-wing protests, sometimes violently so.

But the post-October 7 campus eruptions marked a watershed difference.

Masked left-wing protestors were unashamedly and virulently anti-Semitic. Students on elite campuses especially showed contempt for both middle-class police officers tasked with preventing their violence and vandalism and the maintenance workers who had to clean up their garbage.

Mobs took over buildings, assaulted Jewish students, called for the destruction of Israel, and defaced American monuments andanti commentaries.

When pressed by journalists to explain their protests, most students knew nothing of the politics or geography of Palestine, for which they were protesting.

The public concluded that the more elite the campus, the more ignorant, arrogant, and hateful the students seemed.

The Biden administration destroyed the southern border. Ten million illegal aliens swarmed into the U.S. without audit. Almost daily, news accounts detail violent acts committed by illegal aliens or their surreal demands for more free lodging and support.

Simultaneously, thousands of Middle Eastern students, invited by universities on student visas, block traffic, occupy bridges, disrupt graduations, and generally show contempt for the laws of their American hosts.

The net result is that Americans are reappraising their entire attitude toward immigration. Expect the border to be closed soon and immigration to become mostly meritocratic, smaller, and legal, with zero tolerance for immigrants and resident visitors who break the laws of their hosts.

Americans are also reappraising their attitudes toward time-honored bureaucracies, the courts, and government agencies.

The public still cannot digest the truth that the once respected FBI partnered with social media to suppress news stories, surveil parents at school board meetings, and conduct performance art swat raids on the homes of supposed political opponents.

After the attempts of the Department of Justice to go easy on the miscreant Hunter Biden but to hound ex-president Donald Trump for supposedly removing files illegally in the same fashion as current President Biden, the public lost confidence not just in Attorney General Merrick Garland but in American jurisprudence itself.

The shenanigans of prosecutors like Fani Willis, Letitia James, and Alvin Bragg, along with overtly biased judges like Juan Merchant and Arthur Engoron, only reinforced the reality that the American legal system has descended into third-world-like tit-for-tat vendettas.

The same politicization has nearly discredited the Pentagon. Its investigations of “white” rage and white supremacy found no such organized cabals in the ranks. But these unicorn hunts likely helped cause a 45,000-recruitment shortfall among precisely the demographic that died at twice their numbers in the general population in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Add in the humiliating flight from Kabul, the abandonment of $50 billion in weapons to the Taliban terrorists, the recent embarrassment of the failed Gaza pier, and the litany of political invective from retired generals and admirals. The result is that the armed forces have an enormous task to restore public faith. They will have to return to meritocracy, emphasize battle efficacy, enforce the uniform code of military justice, and start either winning wars or avoiding those that cannot be won.

Finally, we are witnessing a radical inversion in our two political parties. The old populist Democratic Party that championed lunch-bucket workers has turned into a shrill union of the very rich and subsidized poor. Its support of open borders, illegal immigration, the war on fossil fuels, transgenderism, critical legal and race theories, and the woke agenda are causing the party to lose support.

The Republican Party is likewise rebranding itself from a once-stereotyped brand of aristocratic and corporate grandees to one anchored in the middle class.

Even more radically, the new populist Republicans are beginning to appeal to voters on shared class and cultural concerns rather than on racial and tribal interests.

The results of all these revolutions will shake up the U.S. for decades.

Soon we may see Georgia Tech or Purdue degrees as far better proof of an educated and civic-minded citizen than a Harvard or Stanford brand.

We will likely jettison the failed salad bowl approach to immigration and return to the melting pot as immigration becomes exclusively legal, meritocratic, and manageable.

To avoid further loss of public confidence, institutions like the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the DOJ will have to re-earn rather than just assume the public’s confidence.

And we may soon accept the reality that Democrats reflect the values of Silicon Valley plutocrats, university presidents, and blue-city mayors, while Republicans become the home of an ecumenical black, Hispanic, Asian, and white middle class.

Civilizational Collapse Follows When Laws and Consequences Mean Nothing

By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part One – May 14, 2024

America is facing a number of existential crises—an open border, 30 million illegal immigrants, $36 trillion in debt, borrowing at the rate of $1 billion every 100 days, a suicidal war on gas, oil, and coal production, a recrudescence of premodern racial and ethnic tribalism, the destruction of deterrence abroad, blue state exoduses to red states, the implosion of America’s big blue cities, 1 million plus homeless people, a military that is woke, short recruits, warped by lobbyists and revolving door ex-4 star defense contractors, and a corrupt administrative state.

But amid such bad news, one common denominator seems to explain the collective suicide of America—the end of consequences, or the expectations that laws will never be enforced, threats never realized, and punishments negotiable. And we can extend that to include national debts not paid down and student loans never repaid—all to be rationalized by lies.

Punishment for breaking the law does not deter most people, whether the fear of shaming oneself and family or the reality of losing six months of freedom to a jail cell. But when there is no bail release, or an exemption of $950 for looting, then theft soars, and the law becomes a lie.

The criminal in a cost-to-benefit analysis figures his theft can be fenced for more profit than the chance of going to jail for stealing something that is not his. So even the enabler Rep. Adam Schiff becomes not safe as he robbed of the very clothes on his back. After serial profitable stealing, the criminal class has less respect for the authorities who empower them than for the rare mayor or district attorney who prosecutes them.

In other words, the longer the law is trampled, the more emboldened the criminal, and ironically the weaker and more impotent and more despised become the authorities who allow it.

Even the worst criminal in his dark heart yearns a bit for an adversarial relationship with the police and prosecutors, rather than being given free rein to run wild and so easily destroy civilization.

In a Road Runner/Mad Max/The Book of Eli world, even among the chaos there emerge criminals who try to reconstruct some sort of codes and laws. Even the Hell’s Angels amid their felonious creed live by codes, a low sort of law to create animal order among their ferity.

After all, to paraphrase Plato, even thieves must resort to some sort of protocols or law when they divide up equally the profits from their criminality—to prevent a free-for-all fight that might squander their loot.

Yet in a land without any laws and consequences, the criminal has too much competition, and so ironically functions better with fewer rivals in an ordered and lawful society. And so given that human nature innately has respect for strength and confidence, even the worst murderer has more respect for the hardest-nose penalty prosecutor determined to try, convict, and put him away for good than the buffoonish George Gascóns or Oakland’s Pamela Prices who destroy the distinction between lawfulness and illegality.

The same logic applies to campus unrest. The more mobs grow, as the rhetoric becomes sicker, and as the masked punks become more aggressive, so even more the college president issues serial platitudes. Usually, the president simply levels obviously empty threats, sometimes daily sermons that sort of praise the “courage” of the thuggish students, sometimes expressing worries that he might have to, just maybe, one day, sooner than later, enforce his own campus rules.

Have you sensed what might follow if just one brave campus president announced:

I may be fired, I might be hated by my faculty, but by God, I am going to enforce this campus’s rules and protect the freedom of passage and speech and communication of most of my hard-working students who are paying for instruction, knowledge, security, and the protection of the Bill of Rights. And so, anyone who breaks our campus laws will be arrested, immediately suspended, and face a hearing on permanent expulsion. Anyone who damages campus property, or who forces the university to clean up after his mess, will have the ensuing costs added to his tuition payments and be prosecuted for vandalism. Anyone who is not a student will be subject to arrest and prosecution for trespassing and unlawful entry. And anyone, who is a foreign student or resident immigrant, and breaks campus rules and laws, shall be summarily expelled and face deportation on suspension of his student visa.

We know that such a college president might be fired, would be certainly reviled in the media, spat upon by the faculty, but also canonized by the country and admired as a rare profile in courage.

And yet no one wishes to be martyred. So, the loud therapeutic talk continues without even a small twin of enforcement.

Part Two – May 15, 2024

In short, if Alvin Bragg or Letitia James or Fani Willis were to forsake lawfare and the publicity it earns, and instead treat the criminals in their big city with steep bail, speedy trials, and stiff sentences upon conviction, we know calm would return to urban America.

We know that truth because such a renaissance occurred in the 1990s when the power of the law returned and even the rock-thrower who broke windows, and the squeegee jaywalker who harassed motorists into forking over tips for his bad windshield cleaning, faced big fines and some jail time. The killer thought that if New York stooped to arrest a window-breaker, then it would surely go after the manslayer.

Just as lawlessness begets chaos, and a law unenforced becomes all laws unenforced, so too a law that has teeth spreads lawfulness, gaining respect from the lawful and earning fear from the lawless. And soon then safety, security, and happiness return.

Almost any current pathology is due to timidity and equivocation when simple rules and customs needed to be reenergized and revived.

Take transgenderism. What if our society encouraged a transgendered sports category, a third league between male and female? That is, a coach, a principal, a college president, a mayor, or a governor might simply have said:

“After 60 years of seeking parity between women’s and men’s sports, we are not going to allow biological males to wreck six decades of hard work, much less participate in contact sports where they might injure smaller and less strong female athletes.”

He would be canonized and begin a movement where reality returns and the rule of the absurd ends. Transgenderism would return to its status of the pre-hysterical 2010s when gender dysphoria was treated sympathetically as a rare disjunction between sex at birth and one’s natural affinity with the attributes of the opposite sex. In other words, we would go back to a world where transgenderism/trans-sexualism/gender dysphoria was an identifiable malady, but one affecting about .01 percent of the population, not a fetish of 10-30 percent of elite campus youth.

And our open border? Is it not yet another example of the destruction of the rule of law and the ensuing suicide of Western civilization?

In November 2020, the border was secure. Illegal aliens had been deterred by Trump’s resumption of building the wall, fear of deportation, a war on the cartels, and ultimata to Mexico to cease its own efforts to destroy its own northern border. We relearned the truth of Voltaire’s admonition—il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres—or Napoleon’s reported restoration of law and street order through “a whiff of grapeshot.”

Translated, that means if a new administration in its first 30 days began building a vast new wall, stopped catch-and-release, ended refugee status applicable inside the United States, and deported as a start 20,000 recently arrived illegal aliens, then would not the illegal immigrant come in fewer numbers, with legality, and more respect for his soon to be adopted homeland?

Would ex-admirals and retired generals become more circumspect about smearing their commander-in-chief as a “Nazi,” a “Mussolini,” and a “liar,” if Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (i.e., “Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”) was just enforced one time (applicable to retired and serving officers as well)? If the offenders were court-marshaled, then would we have a less weaponized military and fewer megaphonic officers?

Part Three – May 17, 2024

The people yearn for laws to regain their potency. They are sickened by statutes on the books that vaporize upon needed enforcement. They are tired of excuses and inaction. We feel the chaos everywhere from the trivial to the existential. How many times has Joe Biden threatened the Houthis? Is the Red Sea safely navigable—or not?

What does Joe mean when he virtue-signals “Don’t!”? Did his “don’t” stop Putin from attacking Kyiv? From Iran targeting Israel with missiles and drones?

I recently flew on a Southwest flight. I had purchased a first-class ticket to board and earned a second in line according to Southwest’s singular protocols. But first were the supposedly invalided. And there were 12 such that claimed serious maladies that not only required wheelchairs but also the accompaniment of their families. All told some 20 boarded first. And purchased first-class ticketholders were relegated to 6-7 rows in the rear.

I lingered before deboarding. Some 10 of the 12 walked out easily along with 7 or 8 of their relatives.

I said nothing, but just listened to the other passengers, who complained that there were zero rules to ascertain disability and their first-class tickets were a bitter joke. I thought silently that had all the stricken been apprised they could board first, but would have to disembark last, then some of the “disabled” might have thought of boarding with the majority.

Why does not one pay any attention to federal servants who swear under oath to tell the truth to Congress and federal investigators, and then summarily lie so boldly?

Again, there are no consequences. No consequences for once CIA Director John Brennan who with exemption lied twice under oath. So did Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. And with self-confessed impunity.

Add in Anthony Fauci and Andrew McCabe. How could James Comey seriously claim amnesia 245 times when interrogated by the House Intelligence Committee? How could “51 Intelligence Authorities” simply lie on the eve of the 2020 election by swearing the authentic Hunter’s laptop was likely a product of Russian disinformation? Did Leon Panetta or Mike Morrel suffer ostracism, ridicule, or public censor for boldly lying on the eve of a presidential debate and upcoming election?

If we just charged one government grandee with perjury who lied under oath, and if convicted jailed him, perhaps the truth would return to the government. Or for the public liars who prevaricate with impunity, what if we just ostracized them, as if lying was a cardinal sin?

If laws were enforced, if lying earned a perjury charge or at least social ostracism, then the order would follow. Deterrence would reappear, and the smash-and-grabber, the carjacker, and the knockout-game puncher would recede into the shadows.

A final note. Laws must not just be enforced but done so equally and symmetrically.

No one believes Trump would be prosecuted by Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis were he Biden and not Trump.

No one believes that the laws were enforced against arson, rioting, murder, mayhem, and looting during the summer of 2020. And yet illegal parading was charged against many of the January 6 demonstrators.

Some like Peter Navarro go to prison for refusing a congressional subpoena; other refuseniks like Eric Holder claim hero status. Does anyone believe if the evidence against the Biden conglomerate were comparably applied to the Trump clan, the latter would be similarly excused and exempt?

If a special prosecutor in 2017 found that Trump had removed classified files in the manner of Robert Hur’s findings of Biden’s illegality, then surely Trump would have been impeached, convicted, jailed, and removed from office.

In sum, when laws are not enforced, or enforced erratically, unfairly, and dishonestly, then there is no civilization. And so, we witness why America has become what it is: home of the unfree and home of the lawless.

Try a Little Honesty About Israel

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
May 9, 2024

Scan news accounts of anti-Israel campus and street protestors. Read their demands and manifestos. Collate the confusion after October 7 from the Biden administration.

Here are ten of their most common untruths about October 7 and the war that followed.

“Progressive Hamas”: Gay and transgendered student protestors in America would be in mortal danger in Gaza under a fascistic Hamas that has banned homosexual acts and lifestyles. Anyone protesting publicly against Hamas or its allies would be arrested and severely punished.

Women are segregated in most Hamas-run educational institutions. Under the Hamas charter, women are valued mostly as child-bearers. By design, there are almost no women in high positions in business or in government under Hamas.

“Colonists and Settlers”: Students scream that Israelis are “settlers” and “colonists” and sometimes yell at Jewish students to “go back to Poland.”

But the Jewish presence in present-day Israel is deeply rooted in ancient tradition. Dating back at least three millennia, the concept of “Israel” as a distinct Jewish state, situated roughly in its current location, is ingrained in history.

By contrast, the much later Arab invasions of the Byzantine-controlled Levant and their arrival in Palestine occurred about 1800 years after the establishment of a Jewish Israel.

“Two-state Solution”: When student protestors scream “from the river to the sea,” that is not advocacy for a two-state solution. It is a call to eliminate the state of Israel—lying in between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea—and its 10 million Jewish and Arab citizens. The Hamas charter is a one-state/no-Israel agenda, which we saw attempted on October 7.

“Occupied Gaza”: Gaza was autonomous. The Israeli border is closed, but so is the Egyptian border. There have not been any Jews in Gaza for nearly two decades.

So on October 7, Gaza was not occupied by Israel. It was under the control of Hamas, designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization. After being elected to power in 2006, Hamas cancelled all subsequent elections and ruled as a dictatorship. Gaza forbids Jews from entering Gaza and has driven out most Christians. Israel hosts two million Arabs, both as Israeli citizens and residents.

“Netanyahu is the Problem”: The U.S. and Europe claim that the conservative government of Benjamin Netanyahu is alone behind the Israeli tough response in Gaza. Thus, both the EU and the U.S. are doing their best to undermine or even overthrow the elected Netanyahu administration.

Yet, most Israelis support Netanyahu’s coalition government’s agenda of destroying Hamas in Gaza. There is no evidence that any other alternative Israeli government would do anything differently from the present policies toward Hamas.

“Targeting Civilians”: After murdering nearly 1,200 Israelis on October 7, Hamas scurried back to Gaza and hid in tunnels and bases beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques. Its preplanned strategy was to survive by ensuring Gaza civilians would be killed. Hamas has indiscriminately launched more than 7,000 rockets at Israel, all designed to kill Jewish civilians.

Outside assessors have concluded that Israel has not inadvertently killed a greater ratio of civilians to terrorists compared to most other urban fighting conflicts elsewhere, and perhaps even fewer than American engagements in Mosul and Fallujah.

“Protestors Are Pro-Palestine”: Increasingly, protestors make no distinction between supporting “Palestine” and Hamas. Their chants often echo the original Hamas eliminationist charter and recent genocidal ravings of its leadership. Some protestors wear Hamas logos and wave its flag. Many cheered the Hamas massacre of October 7.

“Anti-Israel Is Not Anti-Semitic”: When protestors scream to Jewish students to “go back to Poland” or call for the “Final Solution,” or assault them or bar them from campus facilities, they do not ask whether they are pro-Israeli. For protestors, anyone identifiable as Jewish becomes a target of their anti-Semitic invective and violence.

“Genocide”: Israel has not tried to wipe out the Palestinian people in the fashion of Hamas’s one-state solution plan for Jews. Before October 7, some 20,000 Gazans a day requested to work in Israel—on the correct expectation of much higher wages and humane treatment.

If Hamas had come out of its tunnels, separated from its impressed civilian shields, released its surviving Israeli hostages, and either openly fought the Israeli Defense Forces or surrendered the organizers of the October 7 massacre, no Gaza civilians would have died.

According to Hamas’s questionable “genocide” figures, roughly 4 percent of the Gazan population died during the Israeli response to October 7. At least a third to almost half of those deaths, according to various international observers, were Hamas terrorists.

“Disproportionate Response”: Iran tried to send 320 missiles and rockets into Israel. Israel replied with three. Hamas launched 7,000 rockets into Israel and slaughtered 1,200 Israelis before the IDF responded in Gaza, often dropping leaflets and sending texts to forewarn citizens.

Israel has been disproportionate only in the effectiveness of its response. Hamas and its Iranian benefactor intended disproportionately to hurt Israel but utterly failed.

So Israel proved to be competent, and Hamas incompetent in their similar efforts to use disproportionate force.

War By Affirmative Action?

By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
April 22, 2024

Why does Biden play Iranian poker with American and Israeli lives?
Answer? He envisions war sort of like affirmative action, in which the less accomplished belligerent is allowed all sorts of concessions for the sake of equity.

Israeli and American military capability, and particularly their missile defenses, are seen as unfair, almost like high achievers’ top SAT scores that are seen as unearned and used to privilege some over others and therefore must be countered or dropped.

Given Iran’s and its surrogates’ incompetence, the administration, then, must extend the theocracy some allowances “to level the playing field.” Biden believes in an equality of opportunity in war, when an aggressor does its best to attack or indeed destroy a defender, who in turn does its own best to retaliate and achieve victory.

Instead, the Biden administration sees war leading to equality of result as something to be waged “proportionally,” especially when the power attacked is stronger and Western while the attacking aggressor is weaker and non-Western. The method, then, is to restrain the western power and give repeated chances for the non-western aggressors to catch up.

As a result, the Biden administration’s strategic attitude toward Iran ignores Iranian intent and agendas. So it does not respond fully to its acts of aggression and thereby almost rewards the incompetence of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis without consideration of their murderous aims.

Americans are thus baffled that Biden has not responded to some 170 or more attacks on U.S. installations in the Middle East by Iranian-backed terrorists in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. But in his calculus, Americans “can take the hit” due to their superior defenses—appeasement that only assures more hits.

Thus, other than a few apparently acceptable wounded or dead, there is no need for disproportionate responses to reestablish deterrence and end such opportunistic attacks. Such calculus in the Biden team’s mind would be “over the top,” perhaps “unfair,” or even “medieval.” And yet, it certainly would stop all such aggression quickly and warn aggressors not to touch a single American.

After the successful but mostly demonstrative Israel April 19 retaliatory strike against the Iranian anti-aircraft missile batteries at Isfahan, Biden cautioned Israel “to take the win” and apparently not to rub in the fact of Iranian incompetence, much less stage a follow-up and much greater response.

But what if instead, Biden had warned the Iranians that Israel was not through. Rather, he would tell the Iranians that the restrained Israeli response was a one-off warning and demonstration to Iran that:
1) Israel had the ability to strike and destroy the very protective shield of the nuclear installations at nearby Natanz, and thus Natanz itself and plants like it;
2) that unlike the 320 missile/drone Iranian attack on Israel, even Israel’s tiny response was entirely successful;
3) and that in any future Iranian-envisioned nuclear attack on Israel, Iran’s rockets would likely either fail at launch or in the air (half did so on April, 13), with the remnant having a 99 percent surety of being shot down, while earning a 100 percent surety of a devastating Israel counter-attack with the same sort of weapons that Iran claims it will shortly use.

Would such a warning have been more likely to end the current tit-for-tat, “de-escalatory escalation” than the Biden administration’s advice to Israel to “take the win”–in an endless cycle of supposedly managed violence as Iran and its terrorists seek to get it right and respond commensurately?

Similarly, recently, third-party communications with Iran were disclosed about its earlier April 13 attack on Israel. Apparently, the Turkish third-party emissaries claimed that “Iran informed us in advance of what would happen. Possible developments also came up during the meeting with (Secretary of State Antony) Blinken, and they (the U.S.) conveyed to Iran through us that this reaction must be within certain limits.”

Translated, that meant that apparently launching over 320 cruise, ballistic missiles and drones were acceptable Iranian responses as long as they did not kill too many Jews?

So what did Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan actually define as damage “within certain limits?” Something like the relatively small number of dead and wounded Americans who have fallen victim to Iranian-backed terrorist attacks from the Red Sea to Iraq and Jordan?

“Within certain limits” for Iran certainly could not mean the huge number of lethal projectiles Iran sent into Israel that were intended by Iran to kill thousands, but apparently only how many Israelis were killed by them?

So again, what would have been beyond “certain limits” for team Biden? One dead Israeli for each launched rocket, missile, or drone? 320 Jews or so in total? Did Biden and Blinken assume that some 300 or so projectiles would be mostly shot down or blown up, and thus they played poker with Israeli lives and assumed that the attack would probably fail?

But what might have happened had instead Biden transmitted to Iran the following warning:
“Given your record of unleashing terror and death throughout the Middle East, I warn you not to send a single rocket into Israel. If you do, we will ensure that none get through, but we will not ensure that there will be any limits on what will likely be a devastating Israel response to your homeland.”

Would Iran have then sent the 320 missiles?

When Israel went into Gaza to end the medieval violence perpetrated by the Hamas cowardly terrorists, it had already been the target of some 7,000 Hamas rockets aimed at its civilian centers and bases. Did Biden see that failed Hamas effort to kill thousands of additional Jews as a legitimate cause for Israel to go into Gaza and destroy the rocket-launching Hamas?

Or instead, did Biden consider Israel’s unique ability to conduct war—again, sort of like having high SAT scores and a straight A average as proof of unwarranted privilege in admissions—as a disproportionate (and likely “unfair”) advantage over Hamas that thus should be ignored or discounted rather than admired? But had Hamas killed 1,000 Jews with its 7,000 rockets, would Biden have given Israel the green light to respond fully? Or would it have taken only 500 deaths? Or was the magic number 250 killed?

What would have happened had Biden not specified certain restraints on the IDF but instead, on October 21, transmitted the following message to Hamas: “You began this war with inhuman slaughter on October 7 and massive rocket attacks on Israeli cities, and Israel will now end the war with your destruction.”

Six months later, would the Middle East now be safer without Hamas?

In mid-October 2023, a failed Islamic jihad rocket hit Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital, prompting the blood libel that it was Israelis who supposedly were responsible and had killed hospital patients. An upset Joe Biden was asked about the identification of the perpetrator.

He answered with a joke, but a jest nevertheless quite revealing: “And I’m not suggesting that Hamas deliberately did it either. It’s that old thing; gotta learn how to shoot straight.” Aside from the embarrassing fact that Biden seemed more wary about wrongly blaming the murderous Hamas for the Islamic Jihad rocket than his ally Israel, did he really mean that the global condemnation of Israel for the act of Islamic jihad—and the predicament it put Biden in—would have simply vanished had only Islamic Jihad shot “straight”?

And further translated, did Biden logically mean—if only the Islamic Jihad rocket had not fallen short on Gazans but instead had reached its intended target of civilians inside Israel, then there would have been no controversies, no melodramas, given the stronger power Israel could more easily have “taken the hit?”

Note that Biden did not really express much anger that Islamic Jihad was shooting rockets to kill Jewish civilians. He was only lamenting that its incompetence had led to a blood libel, which required embarrassing explanations from Biden himself.

Biden, note, said something somewhat similar about a possible Putin invasion of Ukraine. He had predicted the U.S. response on whether it was a “minor” offensive or not. In other words, the American response was not predicated on the violation of national borders by an aggressor against an independent nation, but how effectively the aggressor attacked.

In the American Left’s vision of contemporary war, the West brings too many advantages in science, technology, and wealth, especially when fighting in the skies and not in the messy suburbs of Mosul, Fallujah, or Gaza City.

The result is disproportionate. Accordingly, it does not matter that Hamas only stopped butchering, raping, and mutilating Israelis at about 1,200 deaths because of an impending IDF arrival or killed few despite 7,000 rocket launches into Israel, when their rocketeers had sought to kill tens of thousands of Israelis.

Instead, by their very failures at the art of war, Iran and its surrogates are constructed as victims, not aggressors, at the moment when either their targets do not suffer too many causalities or their own losses vastly exceed those whom they sought to slaughter.

Third-party managed proportionality, accompanied by the banality of “both sides are at fault,” is not morality but pretentious amorality—as well as a sure prescription for endless war.

Or, in other words, what is unfolding now in the Middle East.

Victor Davis Hanson

@VDHanson

Why Are They Destroying Us? If someone wished to destroy America, could he do anything more catastrophic than what we currently see and hear each day? What would an existential enemy do that we have not already done to ourselves? Here are eleven now familiar steps to civilizational destruction:
1) Wipe out a 2,000 mile border. Allow 10-million foreign nationals to enter unlawfully. Have no audit of any; nullify all federal immigration laws. Let toxic drugs in that kill 100,000 Americans a year. Give free support for those millions who broke the law. Smear any objectors as racists and xenophobes.

2) Run up $35 trillion in national debt. Keep adding $1 trillion to it each 100 days. Defame anyone wishing to cut wild spending as cruel and inhumane.

3). Appease or subsidize enemies like Iran and China. Demonize allies like Israel. Allow terrorists to attack Americans without response. See Islam as either similar or superior to Christianity. Make amends to leftist governments for supposedly past toxic American international behavior. Follow the lead of international agencies like the UN, ICC, and WHO to atone forpast American neocolonial and imperialist behavior. Recede to second-tier international status, befitting American decline.

4) In a multiracial democracy, redefine identity only as one’s tribal affiliation. Ensure each identity group rivals the other for victimhood and the state spoils it confers. Redefine all political issues by race and sex oppressors and oppressed. Destroy all meritocratic standards of admission, retention, promotion, and commendation.

5) Redefine violent crime as understandable, cry-of-the-heart expressions of social justice. Ensure no bail and same-day release for arrested, repeat violent felons. Empathize with the violent killer and rapist; ignore their victims, especially if slain police-officers.

6). Emasculate the military by using non-meritocratic standards of race, gender, and sexual orientation to determine promotion and commendation. Deliberately smear as racists and insurrectionists the largest demographic in the military who in recent wars died at twice their numbers in the population—so that they leave or never join the military. Encourage retired high officers to slander their Commander-in-Chief. Cut the defense budget. Stop producing sufficient weapons, but leave billions of dollars’ worth of arms to terrorists.

7) Reinvent the justice system to indict, bankrupt, convict, jail and eliminate political opponents. Use ballot removal, impeachment, civil suits, and state and federal indictments rather than elections to defeat an opponent. Mob the homes of non-compliant Supreme Court Justices, attack them personally by name.

8) Encourage the fusion of the bureaucratic state with the electric media to form a powerful force for political audit, surveillance, censorship, and coercion. Marry the FBI to Silicon Valley and hire its contractors to warp the news and hound supposed enemies of the people.

9.) Make war on affordable gasoline and natural gas. Substitute inefficient, unreliable, and expensive wind and solar power, even as energy prices bankrupt the middle class.

10.) Marry late, but preferably not at all. Consider males toxic, especially boys. Have no children, or as few as possible. Otherwise, assure children they are entitled, and must be sheltered. Raise them to have grievances against past generations and current norms.

11.) Turn world-class universities into indoctrination centers. Suspend the Bill of Rights on campuses. Train youth to graduate despising their own culture and civilization. Recruit foreign students from hostile nations to subsidize campus commissarbloat. Replace the curriculum with therapeutic propaganda. Ban the SAT/ACT and do not evaluate high school GPAs. Ensure merit does not select the student body. Charge tuition higher than the rate of inflation. Bill the government when students default on their loans.

So why are those controlling Biden using him to advance much of such a destructive agenda that would end America as we know it?

1) They are delusional and think their socialist and globalist agendas are working and will save us.

2) They are raging nihilists who do not like the U.S. and deliberately want it destroyed as a service to the world. A ruined U.S. is preferable to a strong America.

3) They are Jacobin revolutionaries who are intentionally erasing the old United States as a prerequisite for creating an entirely new America that will arise from the ashes with no trace or even memory of its past.

4) They have no agenda. They are aimless fools, and utter incompetents. These bunglers just wing it day-to-day, in response to what their radical media, academic, and political masters dictate is necessary for them to retain power. They have no idea of the damage they are doing.

5. A bit of 1-3, but probably not 4.

Gearing Up for ‘Biden’ Versus Trump:
Not If, But When and How to Replace Biden

By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
March 4, 2024

President Joe Biden is declining at a geometric, not an arithmetic, rate. His cognitive challenges are multifaceted.

His gait is shaky. His daily use of stairs now risks the chance of a tenure-ending fall. Even when he sticks to the teleprompter, he so slurs his speech, mispronounces words, and glides his syntax that at times he becomes as incomprehensible at the podium as he is unsteady in his step.

He now speaks a strange language foreign and untranslatable to most Americans. White House transcribers leave hiatuses in their written texts of his remarks to reflect that they either have no idea what he said, do not wish to publicize their guesses at what he said, or do not wish the public to know what he was trying to say.

Despite the circling-the-wagons media and the passive-aggressive sycophants like the opportunistic Gov. Gavin Newsom in waiting, the left understands that Biden will be lucky to get to the August convention. This spring and early summer, he will not campaign as a normal presidential candidate, and this time around, there is no pretense of the COVID epidemic to excuse his absence.

The people have already polled numerous times that their president is unfit to serve now and, in the future, should not run. So the 2020 Faustian bargain is in shambles. Remember its quid pro quos: all the major Democratic presidential candidates of 2020 nearly simultaneously pulled out the primaries to coronate Biden—but only on the condition that Biden would play to the hilt his “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton” schtick that would offer a veneer to the otherwise unpopular hard left agenda of the new Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren/the Obamas/Squad Democratic Party.

The people voted for a “return to normalcy,” all while the left destroyed the southern border, unleashed a critical legal theory/George-Soros crime wave, dismantled hard-won deterrence abroad, and printed money to spur hyperinflation.

Moreover, it is increasingly clear that the entire Biden family consortium is compromised and corrupt. Neither Hunter, Jim nor Frank Biden had any consulting skills, business expertise, or corporate experience to warrant leveraging over $25 million from foreign interests. Their only commodity was to sell corrupt parties the appearance that Joe Biden would be quite willing to help their various causes if they enriched his family. Everyone knows that to be true, and only now, as Biden sinks into incoherence, are his protectors shrugging about the obvious money-making schemes that revolved around a corrupt senator, vice president, and private citizen, Joe Biden.

None of Biden’s record is popular. His policies on the border, economy, energy, foreign policy, and crime poll below 50 percent. And this trifecta of Biden’s mental deterioration, family corruption, and failed presidential record will only grow worse.

Then there is the Kamala Harris issue—the Spiro Agnew insurance policy of our age that so far has protected Biden from overt efforts to replace him. She is as unpopular as Biden and often as incomprehensible, but without the excuse of age or mental diminishment. Of all the major Beltway elected officials, only Sen. Mitch McConnell polls worse.

By August, Democratic donors and politicos may well conclude that the only way to rid the party of both is to release Biden’s delegates, open up the convention, and let candidates fight over the now-free delegates. Harris then will not be nominated, but not through a backroom, Machiavellian removal of a black woman. Instead, she will “fairly” lose an “open” and “transparent” free-for-all of various Democratic want-to-be replacements and recede into a sober and judicious Mike Pence-like retirement.

The problem with this scenario, of course, is that late-season convention or post-convention machinations in the modern era don’t work out too well. In 1976, Ronald Reagan, after losing a series of early primaries and being declared nearly inert, suddenly caught fire and entered the August 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City within striking distance of incumbent Gerald Ford. President Ford, remember, had never been elected either president or vice president.

In the end, in one of the most acrimonious Republican conventions in memory, a wounded Ford won the nomination by only 117 delegate votes out of some 2,257 cast. In some sense, Ford never recovered and lost the election to Jimmy Carter, even as the tumult gave Reagan the exposure and his team the experience needed to win the nomination in 1980.

About two weeks after the 1972 Democratic convention, a desperate George McGovern and the Democratic hierarchy removed Vice President running mate Sen. Thomas Eagleton from the ticket due to revelations of little-known past electric shock treatments given to combat depression. After futile efforts, the Democrats settled on the Kennedy clan’s Sargent Shriver, who had never run for office. McGovern would have lost anyway to an incumbent Nixon. But the margin of defeat in one of the greatest landslides in presidential history was often attributable to the sheer chaos of changing a vice presidential candidate so late in the campaign.

In sum, the Democrats can—and may have to—replace Joe Biden, and they can ensure that Kamala Harris is not the nominee, but the means of doing so will be chaotic and messy and will wound the winner for the rest of the campaign.

Trump’s Circuitous Path to Victory
Donald Trump’s challenges have now been discussed ad nauseam, and they are threefold: he must either beat or postpone campaign-season court trials—and find perhaps $800 million to $1 billion to post bonds, pay interests on them, and meet gargantuan legal fees—without turning off donors and supporters and by avoiding the diversion of Republican National Committee and various campaign funds to his own personal defense.

As in the past, Trump will be vastly outspent, perhaps by 3-1 or 4-1. Molly Ball’s infamous Time 2022 essay outlined the left-wing scheming that ensured a mail-in/early balloting election by aggregating the deep state, the corporate boardroom, the social media monopolies, and the 2020 riotous street thugs of Antifa and BLM. What she called a “cabal” and “conspiracy” was designed not so much as a one-off to defeat Trump as to create a permanent system by which a Trump-like candidate could never win a presidential election, both in 2020 and afterward.

Given changes in the 2020 state voting laws that saw 60-70 percent of the ballots in many swing states not cast on Election Day, while the rejection rate of faulty ballots counter-intuitively plunged despite such an influx, Trump will have to win by 3–4 points. Otherwise, in the swing states, we will again stare at the late-evening televised wizardry in which his huge leads mysteriously melt on the screen as drop boxes and mail sacks are tallied.

To achieve a 51-plus majority in the popular vote—no Republican has achieved such a national ballot margin in 36 years since George H.W. Bush beat Mike Dukakis in 1988—Trump will have to win, or win back, more Independents, apostate Democrats, and RINO Never-Trumpers.

He can do that in only two ways:
One, he must hammer away at Joe Biden’s disastrous record on the border, energy, race, foreign affairs, the economy, and social issues that scare moderates and fence-sitters, especially when comparisons are made to the achievements of 2017-2020. Inner-city residents are being tag-teamed by both the influx of thousands of illegal aliens who apparently have first claims on stretched social services and street criminals who loot, assault, and carjack their law-abiding neighbors mostly with impunity.

Two, Trump needs to model his remarks after his Iowa Primary victory speech or his recent Fox Townhall event with Fox’s Laura Ingram. Translated, that means there is no reason to reference Nikki Hayley’s deployed husband, to refer to her as a “birdbrain,” or to say much of anything other than she will lose, and in the process, she is needlessly hurting more than half of America by draining resources away from the only real chance to repeal the current socialist agenda.

Hayley is imploding without any need for a Trump push. Magnanimity, rather than salt in her self-inflicted wounds, is the better strategy to unite the party. Trump has cemented his base. He will increase his share of minority voters who have been hurt the worst by the Biden socialist agenda. But to ensure victory and a Republican Congress, he cannot give swing voters a reason not to vote for policies and initiatives that they overwhelmingly prefer over those of the now hard-left Democratic Party.

In sum, after Super Tuesday, when Hayley will either quit the race or become inert, Trump needs to call her, politely remind her of her promise to support the nominee, and welcome her back into the fold. If she is wise, she will likely agree to disagree, let bygones be bygones, and thus pledge to support the assured nominee, Trump.

Two of her three choices are in her own interest:
1) She endorses him, and Trump wins, and she is vibrant in 2028;
2) she endorses him, and Trump loses, and she is still viable;
3) she opposes him, and Trump either wins—and she is persona non grata—or he loses, and she is blamed for splitting the party and his defeat.
Breaking her public promise to support the nominee will bleed what support she retains, and would prove a suicidal blunder.

Trump has achieved the greatest political comeback since Richard Nixon arose from the ashes of defeat in California in 1962 to win the nomination and presidency in 1968. Trump’s Phoenix-like rebirth from January 2021 to the present was achieved by Biden’s failure, the natural empathy accruing from the weaponization of the law by partisan or corrupt prosecutors against him, and Trump’s greater success in giving independents fewer reasons to vote against him. If he can praise those he defeats, call for unity, and campaign in 50 states in non-Republican strongholds, then he can win—even despite the hatred of the left, the corruption of the media, the weaponization of the bureaucracy, and the eroding trust in the way we vote.

The Crazy Story
Behind the Disturbing News
By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part Five – February 2, 2024
The Strangest Case of E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump

80-year-old E. Jean Carroll, a former relationship- and sex-advice columnist, just won a huge $83.3 million settlement from Donald Trump in connection with a previous finding that she was “defamed” by Donald Trump.

New York is not a hospitable place for any conservative politician or celebrity, much less one ex-president Donald Trump—as we have seen from prosecutors Alvin Bragg and Letitia James, who both promised voters that they would get Trump if just elected.

But here are some strange facts about the case—with the proviso we have no idea of what exactly happened when both Carroll and Trump consensually and strangely entered into ribald banter in a department store’s lingerie section, then mutually and apparently willfully entered a dressing room, at which point their stories radically diverge (as opposed to somewhat diverged, since Trump at various times said he didn’t recall meeting her at all).

Trump appeared raucously in person in court to turn the civil suit into a referendum on the supposedly coordinated leftwing efforts to damage his presidential candidacy. But he was fighting with a Bill Clinton-appointed judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, and with a New York liberal jury pool, in a suit concerning his denials of a sexual assault of Carroll some 30 years ago. She won an earlier ruling that his mea culpa was excessive and entered the realm of character assassination and therefore was suing for defamation damages.

Judge Kaplan certainly grew tired of Trump’s editorialization and like most New York jurists probably did not enjoy Trump in his courtroom in the first place. And although a jury earlier did not find Trump guilty of “rape,” Kaplan de facto has stated that it was OK to claim publicly that Trump was nevertheless guilty of rape. Or as the judge put it, “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

But if that’s true, Judge Kaplan, why didn’t the jury, on the judge’s prior own instructions, simply convict Trump of rape, which it certainly had the power to do? How can someone not guilty of the definition of rape be guilty of rape?

Carroll could never decide what year the “assault” took place, only sometime in the 1994,1995, or 1996 three-year time frame. That and dozens of other inconsistencies in her narrative prompted the Christine Blasey Ford sort of question of how would one remember such minute details of an alleged violent encounter but not even the year in which it took place. For well over 20 years, she did not write about the alleged attack, much less accuse Trump of sexual assault—at least until he became a controversial rightwing presidential candidate in 2015–16.

There were no witnesses to the alleged assault. Still, Carroll drew her complaint from earlier material she had published in a 2019 book, What Do We Need Men For? and has variously characterized the alleged assault not as rape but a “fight.” If one claims one is damaged in the public square from the attention fueled by outrageous denials by Donald Trump to charges that nearly 30 years ago he assaulted a woman, why would one, for the first time in three decades and during the Trump presidency, write a widely covered and publicized article accusing the then president of the United States of an alleged rape? Would not that be designed to gain publicity, and much of it given the chronological lapses, bad publicity?

Carroll claimed she was defamed and ruined by Trump’s vehement denials of her charges of rape. But her employer at ELLE magazine denied her spat with Trump had anything to do with the decision to fire her at 76 (how many fashion/boyfriend/sex/ dating columnists are still writing in their late seventies?).

Part Six – February 6, 2024
The Strangest Case of E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump (continued)

As for Carroll’s suits, there were originally no criminal or civil charges filed because the statute of limitations had long since expired. But that changed in 2022 when a new law (“The Adult Survivors Act”) was passed in the New York legislature.

The law created a one-year window (beginning six months from the signing of the bill) that allowed survivors of long-ago alleged sexual assaults to sue the accused perpetrator, regardless of the statute of limitations. That opening suddenly gave Carroll’s prior unsuccessful efforts an entirely new life and she quickly refiled.

But the origin of the legislation is a bit strange: the legislator who introduced the bill, Brad Hoylman-Sigal, was a known Trump antagonist. More interesting, he had earlier introduced and passed another Trump-targeted bill. His so-called TRUST Act had empowered particular federal Congressional committees to have access to the New York State closed tax returns of high-ranking government officials. That bill’s subtext was that suddenly members of Congress could review Donald Trump’s tax returns.

In sum, while these new laws were perhaps not quite bills of attainder or ex-post-facto laws explicitly forbidden by the Constitution’s Article 1, sections 9 and 10, Hoylman-Sigal successfully got them passed with a view of targeting Trump for long past behavior, in a manner that would have been difficult if not impossible without such new legislation.

Translated, if you think something Donald Trump did in the past was wrong or illegal but there is no legal remedy to address it, then we now in America simply pass a new law that allows one to prosecute someone that before the law was not actionable.

Do you see where we are going? When we wish to go after our political enemies and there is no current law to prosecute them, we pass a new one and claim it applies to something they did in the distant past.

Only Carroll and Trump know exactly if both of them really did go from the lingerie section to a dressing room, or why, if they did sequester themselves, what exactly transpired, other than a He said–She said something or other. But there are doubts given past contradictory statements of Carroll, assertions that she remembers the dress type she wore (though it was not in existence at the time of the alleged crime), and her raucous and flamboyant journalistic career (hunting down ex-boyfriends and then moving in with them and their wives for a spell, listing all of Trump’s prior sexual encounters, etc.).

In 2015, Carroll marketed a strange app game she invented about wrecking people’s love lives: “Your object is to break them up…to stir up shit.” Or as Axios described it more fully:
The game, Damn Love, is available for iPhones and Androids, and it’s as simple as a game can get: You’re shown two people who are madly in love. Your object is to break them up. Shown a pair of options, you choose the ones more likely to stir up shit, given each person’s personality and proclivities, and the quicker you can make them split, the more you increase your evilness and rise through the ranks.

In sum, when one has 25 years to find legal redress and does not—until the chance encounter person of the past becomes the most famous person in the world––then one should ask, “Why him now?”

And when arch-Trump hater and leftwing billionaire Reid Hoffman heard about Carroll and decided to fund her multimillion-dollar suit against Trump, then we can only confirm that the Carroll mess is a tessera in the larger Bragg/James/Smith/Willis lawfare effort to bankrupt, destroy, and imprison an ex-president to ensure the people cannot be trusted once again to elect him to the presidency.

Is Biden Malicious,
Incompetent, or Conniving?

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
February 5, 2024

What Excites Biden?
Things are becoming so strange, so surreal, so nihilistic in contemporary America that the chaos can only be deliberate. Chance, incompetence, and accident could not alone explain the series of disasters we now witness daily that are nearly destroying the country.

When the ailing and non-compos-mentis president now speaks, he rarely becomes excited about Iranian or terrorist provocations. Biden seems restrained even at Russia’s outlawry in Ukraine. The atrocities of Hamas now earn only measured objections from Biden. He does not seem too angered by the collapse of the border. Nor do the deaths of 100,000 Americans to imported fentanyl earn a loud trademark Biden scream.

No, what earns his unchecked ire, often expressed in shouts and hysterical tones, are Donald Trump and his supporters. Most recently, out of nowhere, Biden resurrected the old and proven falsehood that Trump had libeled the Normandy dead as losers and suckers. He then compounded that libel by claiming Trump’s supposed dismissal of the heroic dead was a grievous family insult to his late son, who did not die either in combat or while in uniform but in 2015, tragically, from brain cancer.

During these anti-Trump fits, Biden wakes up and his face tightens up. He begins screaming, in uncharacteristic, animated fashion, anytime he can smear half the nation’s voters as “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA”extremists. In private, he swears that Trump is a “f—ing asshole” and “sick f—k.” If only Biden substituted “cartel” or “Iran” or “Hamas” for“Trump” or “MAGA.” we might see an animate president.

A Borderless Nation
Meanwhile, a mob of illegal aliens recently tried to kick and stomp sprawled New York peace officers into senselessness—felonies that would earn any such violent citizen a decade or more on Rikers Island.

Yet somehow, only a few were arrested. Stranger still, all of them were immediately let go without bail—as if freeing wolves to prey further upon sheep.

Upon release, a few smirked and flipped their middle fingers to bystanders. Apparently, they wished to show Americans that they are violent, crude, unrepentant, and exempt. And thus they tell us that their newfound hosts are fools for letting the likes of themselves in.

And why not, given the attackers bussed with impunity to California—the land of free everything if only one qualifies as illegally residing in the U.S.

These grotesque bullies are part of the eight million illegal aliens who pranced across the southern border without background checks—all taking Biden up on his 2019 encouragement to “surge” the border with impunity.

Many brandish their cartel affiliations. Some pay for their transit by smuggling cartel fentanyl, which contributes to 100,000 American overdose deaths per year. Others sport lengthy criminal records. All seemed to have been welcomed out of their countries by conniving Latin American governments and mysteriously invited into our country by our derelict president.

The Death of the Law
There is a continuing pattern here. Sometime around late 2020, Americans woke up in a country they no longer recognized. That summer, tens of thousands of rioters had looted, burned, killed, maimed, and assaulted for four months with veritable impunity. Leftwing mayors and governors dubbed the violence as “largely peaceful” demonstrations or a “summer of love.”

The 2020 legacy of defunding the police and exempting criminals based on their race or ideology is that each week now videos circulate of massive looting, smash-and-grab epidemics, and deadly car-jackings in our major cities. No one cares much about the small business owners who are ruined.

Who laments for the poor who lose their last shopping outlet? Does the Biden administration worry over the terrified employees who are ordered to stand back or the occasional security officer totem instructed to stand down?

Instead, we are to empathize with the thief, the assaulter, the rapist, and the carjacker—at least in the sense that he does not deserve punishment for the mayhem he caused, given we, not he, are supposedly the true guilty parties. A lot of innocent and defenseless people have been assaulted and killed since 2020 as the wage of that toxic theory.

So the subtext of all these violent acts is exemption based on perceived correct race, ideology, or membership in the supposed victim/oppressed binary. The perpetrators are either not arrested, let out the same day as arrested, never charged, or never convicted. The result is a growing distrust of the law and a cynicism that there is little law anymore, just statutes used against political undesirables.

If, for just one month, the Biden justice department used the same resources and budget it has spent the last three years rounding up bystanders at the January 6 riot and instead prosecuted, convicted, and jailed these big-city violent assailants, then the crime epidemic could be solved.

The Implosion of the University
As a general rule, in 2024, the more “prestigious” our universities, and the more they prided themselves as elite or Ivy League, the more likely there were racially segregated dorms and graduations, a virtual anti-Semitic hounding of Jewish students, grade inflation, watered-down courses, and pro-Hamas terrorist demonstrations.

For nearly a hundred years, universities told us that the SAT or ACT admittance exam was critical in determining their admissions. It was sold as a way to confirm the potential and preparation necessary to perform at a level demanded by these elite schools. The tests were praised as a meritocratic tool to determine talent by honing grade point averages and allowing opportunity to those without money and contacts. Then suddenly, in 2021, these tests were mostly junked.

That dismissal of standardized tests was a de facto admission that:
1) Universities had been admittedly wrong for a century that standardized admissions tests had any value in determining the degree of student preparation needed to complete a rigorous Ivy League class load.
2) in the interest of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the university would now be free to admit students who could not meet their prior unrealistic or unnecessary standards and instead would accommodate new students by suddenly inflating grades, introducing easier classes, or diminishing required course work.

Of course, the university admits to neither of these realities. It compounds the deception and fraud by claiming new generations of students are more competitive and gifted than ever and will leave with degrees that guarantee employers rigorously trained graduates. Time will soon tell.

The End of Deterrence
The same nihilism characterizes our foreign policy.

Our worst enemies could not have planned a more disastrous and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan than the Biden administration’s August 2021 scamper. We simply, without an afterthought, abandoned billions of dollars of sophisticated weapons to Taliban terrorists.

We left behind a $1 billion new embassy and a remodeled Air Force base. We bragged about taking out terrorists with a “righteous strike” that wiped out an entire friendly Afghan family, while 13 American service personnel were blown up trying to secure a non-securable escape route.

Then followed the mysterious laxity as a Chinese spy balloon lazily traversed the U.S. with impunity. Next was the radical drop-off in military recruitment. If one wished to ensure that the one group that serves—and dies—in combat units at twice its demographics would exit the military en masse, prompting an enlistment crisis, the Pentagon could not have done a better job.

The top brass all but accused its white male recruits of being prone to toxic white supremacy, only to form a task force to root it out—and then discover such rage and hatred never existed in the first place.

It nonetheless drummed out 8,400 veterans for not receiving the mRNA vaccinations, many of whom had naturally acquired immunity and real doubts about the efficacy or safety of the inoculations. And, finally, the Pentagon made it known that prior standards of recruitment, promotion, and evaluation had apparently weakened the military. Therefore, new race- and gender-based criteria would ensure fewer and now unneeded white males in positions of rank and influence.

Abroad, China serially threatens to annex Taiwan. A hungry and perennially restless Vladimir Putin once upon a time thought he was restrained from invading his neighbors by fear of more costs incurred than the likelihood of benefits to be gained. But like an earlier reaction to a weakened U.S. in 2008 and 2014, Putin assumed that the 2022 Biden administration would likely do little if he annexed greater swaths of Ukraine. And so he invaded.

National security advisor Jack Sullivan, on the eve of the October 7 Hamas massacres of Jewish citizens, claimed the Middle East was at last calm. Now it is on the verge of a theater-wide war, once Iran sensed that the Biden team would appease and beg it to behave.

So the Biden administration was eager to end oil sanctions, plead with Iran to reenter the Iran Deal, remove the Houthis from terrorist designations, route billions of dollars to Tehran for hostages, junk the Abrams accords, and restore millions of dollars in please-be-nice bribe money to the Palestinians.

Biden’s abject misreading of human nature has ensured that a thuggish theocracy that slaughters abroad and tortures at home would interpret that reproachment as either naiveté or stupidity. And thus it would respond with contempt and escalating aggression. And so it has.

Somehow, in over just three years, the Biden administration did to the Middle East what it did to the southern border: blew it up in the same exact manner of mindlessly undoing any policies that had previously worked with Trump’s fingerprints on them.

What Is Going On?
What is the common denominator, what is the rationale behind the anarchy, and what is the reason why a president would so willingly rend the fabric of America?

Why would the government privilege the illegal alien over the law-abiding citizen? The violent pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic foreign-born protestor over the peaceful pro-Israel, U.S. citizen? The smash-and-grabber over the dutiful security guard?

We are nearing a French Revolution, reign-of-terror moment. The law seems to be what a cabal of hardcore leftists who control the Oval Office says it is.

Joe Biden’s administration offers no better confirmation of warnings from Thucydides to Thomas Hobbes that the veneer of civilization is precious, hard-won, quite thin, and beneath it churns innate human savagery and chaos roaring to be released.

So why did Biden unleash the hounds of anti-civilization? Did he despise the supposedly boring middle-class citizen who follows the law, pays all his taxes, and never gets arrested? Does he hate the idea of meritocracy? In Biden’s puppeteers’ dangerous calculus, is all this savagery and chaos a deliberate mechanism to ensure parity? Equity? Inclusion?

So is the deliberate nihilism—economic, social, cultural, social, and political—a way of leveling the field? Making life difficult for the more successful? Making those who cherish the traditions and protocols of America pay?

Is that the plan to take the country to near collapse, and then only at the abyss itself to force revolutionary change—or else?

How else can anyone explain the descent of our city downtowns into dank medieval cesspits, our notion of male and female transformed into the sexual circus right out of Petronius’s Satyricon, our race relations into a mixture of Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and our universities into Soviet-like “People’s Universities of Correct Thought?”

None of this was by accident. It is the dividend of a philosophy that says, “We have to blow up your America before we can reboot it for us.”