Americans Fight for Their Ancient Rights As Left Tries to Kill Citizenship

Victor Davis Hanson
The Federalist

How did our southern border simply vanish — in complete nullification of all federal immigration laws?

Since when did our unelected leaders — Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, James Comey and Andrew McCabe, the former directors of the FBI, former director of the CIA John Brennan, and James Clapper, former director of national intelligence — feel they could routinely exceed their legal authority?

Who allowed them to spin untruths or feign memory loss while under oath before our Congress? Who gave these unelected partisans the power to warp the very political process of the nation?

How is it that our tax-exempt universities and publicly funded colleges ignore the First Amendment and due process with impunity in their campus kingdoms?

How did a small number of extremists hijack our culture — toppling statues in the night, erasing ancient names from streets and monuments, canceling our Founders, hounding their critics, and assuming birthright amnesty for rioting, looting, and arson?

Why did America abruptly give up its long aspirations to be a racially blind society?

Why did our universities, our media, our professional sports teams, our corporations, and Hollywood revert to pre-civilizational tribalism, insisting that our superficial appearances were now central not incidental to who we American citizens are?

When did our generals and admirals begin talking down to citizens about their supposed biases, prejudices, and conspiracies, while on their watch nonchalantly suffering the worst military defeat in the last half-century?

Why are citizens struggling to fuel their cars? Is it because an arrogant Biden administration deliberately cut back oil and gas production, canceled pipelines, and put vast swaths of federal lands off-limits to drillers?

Is first-world America now Venezuela, as are our store shelves empty, our ports stay paralyzed, and our streets of the major cities after dark grow as unsafe as medieval cities?

Why do the homeless freely violate health and public safety laws, in a way the middle-class citizen would be jailed if he did the same?

Since when do the formerly hardest working people in the world sit home awaiting inflated government checks while their country is in desperate need of their labor?

How did it happen that thrifty citizens permitted their government to run up $30 trillion in debt, and to claim printing money would bring anything other than rampant inflation? Are we so rich or so stupid that we can just abandon tens of billions of dollars of our best military equipment to terrorists in Afghanistan, so secure that we can flee in ignominious defeat and abandon our allies?

American citizens must show their passports when they reenter their own country, but not noncitizens who enter illegally and for whom our borders are their open doors.

Federal employees and soldiers must be vaccinated, but not so refugees and illegal immigrants who are exempt from such mandates.

Citizens go to jail if they lie under oath, not so their unelected grandees. Everyone must show an ID to board a plane, but not so to vote — as if the sacred right of a citizen is less important than a vacation.

The very wealthy and the very poor often are de facto exempt from onerous regulations. But middle-class citizens lack the clout of the former and the romance of the latter, and so are targeted unduly because they follow the law, pay their fines and taxes, and become the bureaucrats’ primary targets. When societies go broke, their desperate regulators and functionaries fixate on the shrinking law-abiding middle class that alone always complies and pays up.

The root cause of the chaos? The American citizen is dying and is losing civilian control of the country. Eroding is the ancient idea of an empowered and self-reliant middle-class that makes its own laws, sees that they are enforced, and ensures that accountable elected officials — and not unelected functionaries — govern the country.