Victor Davis Hanson
The grotesque assassination of Charlie Kirk by a pro-Antifa zealot Tyler Robinson, following the macabre throat slitting of 23-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska by a freed 14-felon Decarlos Brown, proved the proverbial straws that broke the national camel’s back. The status quo is over. Kaput. And what follows will not be the same.
More than half the country is in the midst of an exasperating “enough is enough,” or perhaps “I cannot take the madness anymore.”
The people are waking up and realizing things do not have to be this way, and indeed they are the majority and have the power to ensure that the madness stops.
You really should be able to take a light rail ride at night and be free to look at your cell phone without having your throat sliced by a 14-time felon sitting behind you. You are not in a combat zone that demands you drop everything and become, as we are told, “situationally aware.”
You really do have the right to debate students without being shot.
You certainly have a right to expect that foreign guests abide by our laws or go home. And you of course have a right to take a stroll at dusk near the White House without getting shot by a recidivist thug.
Everyone deserves the freedom to drive on a Florida freeway without a jackknifing truck making an illegal U-turn and killing you, driven by a heartless and callous illegal alien, who neither speaks nor reads English but somehow got a California professional license.
Jewish students do not have to be slandered, assaulted, and bullied on college campuses. Conservative speakers should not have to have security guards to speak freely at colleges. Do leftist speakers need such protection?
Why do we say “both sides” are violent, when all college administrators know that they must beef up security only when conservatives speak. They accept that only their leftist faculty and students disrupt lectures, trash conservative information tables, and spout hate speech and profanity to guests.
Foreign students have no God-given right to enter the homeland of their hosts. And if they insult their hosts, break their laws, then they can easily return home—and stay there.
Why would you leave beloved Gaza, the West Bank, or Syria, connive to obtain a U.S. visa, fly to America—only to scream hatred at the host, and protest violently and destructively in a land that is not your own?
Career violent criminals do not have a right to be freed to murder, assault, and rape again. If it takes more prisons to ensure the safety and security of women, the vulnerable, and the elderly, then the people are now saying “bring it on.” If any particular racial or ethnic group objects that they will be overrepresented in prisons, then the people simply shrug, “then stop preying on the innocent.”
Live and let live the people say. But they also believe that if you are trans and hate the nuclear family, then it is a free country and so say or do as you please. But no longer are we the people going to censor our speech, lie that there are three genders, or pretend that biological men can compete in women’s sports or undress in front of teen girls. Period. No apologies. No regrets.
America no longer has to accept open borders, 10 million new illegal aliens and 500,000 criminal aliens in our midst. If you object to ICE rounding up illegal aliens with criminal records, then do not enter the United States illegally, and do not dare to break even more of our laws. The problem of illegally entering our country is yours, and the solution of returning you to your own nation is ours.
Discussion (3)
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This is a beautifully written article. I wish it to be in some publication where it would not normally find itself. Center left readers would accept this because there are not "finer points" and nuance to quibble over. The finer points and nuance is what my brain literally salivates over, daily, when it comes to VDH. BUT THIS! This is simply is where we are at. Powerful.
Dr. Hanson: Your article reminds me of reading Albert Camus "The Rebel" when I was in college in the late 60's. One particular passage has always stuck with me, that where Camus describes a rebel: He is one who is tolerant, but only up to a point. I remember, as best as posibble, "he will tolerate 1,000 lashes, but will NOT tolerate the 1,001st. He will tolerate walking up to a line he has drawn, but not anything over it." (Please forgive my paraphrasing). I see the term "_____ fatigue", I believe many adverbs can be applied to "********** fatigue". I believe many, many Americans are at the 1001st lash. That for the vast majority of Ameicans, our tolerance is now exhausted.
VDH - Amazingly articulate and right on point! Wish the locals in my city (left-leaning) would read this, but I'm afraid they wouldn't want to get through the first sentence. I see them with hands over their ears yelling "La la la la la". Your colleague Niall Ferguson from the Hoover Institution was on 60 Minutes last Sunday. Yep, I still watch the show. Great segment about the new university in Austin, TX. Very insightful.