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?
Kamala Harris, whose only interests appear to be demagoguing racial and social tensions with a shrinking vocabulary?
Senator John Fetterman (D-Penn.), who was elected on the argument it was unkind not to vote for a candidate who was physically and mentally impaired?
Energy Department kingpin Sam Brinton, the cross-dresser in lipstick, now charged with felonies for stealing women’s luggage at airport carousels?
Pete Buttigieg, our transportation secretary, who virtue signals melodramas of the past when he is clueless how to fix crises in the present?
Our Pentagon brass who fixate on saying the correct thing now to ensure the lucrative defense contractor billets later?
Allies fear that after abandoning billions of dollars in weaponry in Kabul to the terrorist Taliban, and pumping billions of dollars more of arms into the Ukrainian meat grinder, and failing to increase U.S. armaments production, Washington simply does not have the resources to match China in either a looming proxy or head-to-head war.
Browse through any media account of the U.S. military, and the storyline is one of racial, gender, gay, or transgendered wokeism, or a looming manpower shortage—not a new lethal weapon, a new division of veteran soldiers, or a new program to up the level of training, physical prowess, and mental attitude among the ranks.
The men and women, whom Russia and China most fear, feel that they are unwelcome in the U.S. military and so no longer join. Those whom our enemies hope do enlist, sign up to the delight of their quota-driven, identify politics recruitment officers—and our enemies as well.
NATO member Turkey is calling for an ecumenical Islamic effort combining Shiites and Sunnis, Persians and the Arabs, Middle Easterners and all Muslims—to unite against Israel. And why not when Biden had gratuitously insulted and yet begged Saudi Arabia and the Gulf exporting states, ignored the Abraham Accords, ostracized Israel, radically cut back on U.S. energy production capability, and groveled to Iran to reenter the Iran Nuclear Deal?
China now openly talks of war with the United States. Beijing claims the Taiwan Strait as its own de facto territorial waters. It partners with Russia to add to a growing alliance of Iran, and North Korea, and beckons Turkey, ostensibly a NATO ally.
After refusing to come clean about its birthing in Wuhan of the gain-in-function, engineered COVID-19 virus that killed 1 million Americans, China is unapologetically defiant about sending a spy balloon over key classified sites throughout the continental United States—part of the continual, humiliating follow-up to its inaugural smack down of Biden’s diplomats at the Anchorage mini-summit.
Oil producers, China, hostiles like Russia and Iran, and opportunists like Turkey and India all foresee the end of the dollar as the international currency. After the American humiliation in Afghanistan, the Islamic world, particularly on the West Bank and in Syria, all see the United States as increasingly weak.
The Biden Administration brags that it has saved NATO by pouring weapons into European Ukraine. But Europe is starving for fossil-fuel energy, about exhausted with emptying its arsenals in aid to Ukraine, and terrified that Biden is just enough a multilateralist to lead the alliance into a confrontation with Russia, but also so incompetent as to ensure either an economic depression or nuclear standoff.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador basks in the publicity of helping an ailing Biden mount stairs, as he brags that 40 million Mexican nationals have entered the United States—the majority of them illegally. He prods Mexican expatriates to vote for Democrats to ensure the border is wide open and a perpetual vehicle for Mexican, not U.S. interests, in ensuring billions of dollars in remittances, defusing social tensions at home, and encouraging them abroad in the United States. Do we help defend the borders of Ukraine because we cannot defend our own? Are 100,000 dead Americans due to imported fentanyl mere collateral damage from open borders?
The more our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of defense tour the world, sound off on contemporary strategic issues, or weigh in on domestic politics, the more apprehensive our allies become, wondering how the once-vaunted U.S. Armed Forces have descended into some bizarre woke commissariat.
The international financial community is terrified of $33 trillion in aggregate U.S. debt, a record 130 percent of annual American GDP. It was aghast as the Biden Administration blundered ahead printing money to encourage labor non-participation during a supply chain crisis, inciting inflation, inviting high interest rates, and all but ensuring bank collapses.
The world abroad will tolerate no more lectures from American grandees about the evils of tribal hatred or the benefits of democracy—not when race relations in America are regressing to Balkan-like venom. Anti-democratic rogue regimes indict their former presidents; they put on trial their current political rivals; and they let criminals go free if they serve ideological ends. Now the United States does the same, driven by the Left’s paranoid and irrational hatred of Donald Trump, and its eagerness to destroy all customs and traditions to vent its antipathy to all things Trump.
Foreigners assume that downtown Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, San Francisco, or Washington are medieval—filthy, unsafe, vacant, and malodorous. Western civilization discovered 2,500 years ago how to remove excrement from its city cores; now it has either lost or forgotten that ability along with the knowledge that crime and disease thrive amid sewage and garbage.
The U.S. media was once the world’s gold standard. The New York Times claimed it was the paper of record. Network news was liberally slanted but often fair. Crusading independent journalists often kept government honest. But all that has now become a global laughingstock: ridiculously wrong about “Russian collusion,” predictably partisan about “Russian disinformation” and Hunter Biden’s laptop, egging on Alvin Bragg’s pathetic indictment of candidate and former president Trump, and giddy when an ex-president’s home is raided by FBI, or he is tried as a private citizen by a partisan Senate.
So as the military, political, financial, economic, and cultural status of the United States reaches a nadir, what is the reaction of a blinkered America?
What remedies are Americans preparing, as they totter on the abyss of disasters comparable to the U.S. Civil War, Great Depression, World War II, or 1960s-style cultural madness?
Marshall Plans to balance budgets? A 600-ship navy? Two more crack army divisions? A continental missile-defense system? A restoration of the cores of American cities? Plans to secure the border? To ratchet up oil and gas production? To drop the racial and sexual tribalism and restore a meritocracy? To reform higher education? To begin charging criminals with the felonies they have committed? A cleaning of the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and IRS?
Hardly.
Instead Americans are wondering why a local prosecutor has charged with felonies the first president in history, and currently the leading 2024 presidential candidate, for having a purported liaison 16 years prior and concluding a non-disclosure agreement supposedly to hide it.
A man pretending to be a woman is cashing in on his media-created persona, winning million-dollar advertising contracts from woke corporations for hawking their beer and sports bras. Do these corporations believe that America’s women are so un-endowed that CEOs must hire a man without bosoms to become their national spokesperson for best accommodating cleavage he doesn’t have in a competition he doesn’t enter?
America’s downtowns are reaching a breaking point of vacancy, vagrancy, and violence that makes life there unsustainable, while the country argues over gender pronouns. As violent crime soars, especially hate crimes, interracial crimes, and inner-city crime, a mostly black woman’s championship basketball team stages a media psychodrama of pouting and hurt feelings—as it claims it was “disrespected” by left-wing First Lady Jill Biden and will not go to the White House but prefers instead to be hosted at one of the Obamas’ three mansion estates—a duo not heretofore known for welcoming in strangers, especially of the poorer sort.
What else rises to America’s fiddling attention as the world burns up abroad?
Students in American universities, whether at Stanford Law School or San Francisco State University, shout obscenities at federal judges or seek to beat up invited speakers. Their disruptions are encouraged by their own deans’ silence or active encouragement. The common denominator in both cases is that the disrupters and attackers freely admit they violate university rules and/or the law, and yet assume their ideology and their claims on victimhood exempt them from any consequences for their atrocious conduct. And they are proven right on both counts.
All know that a few expulsions of the elite and pampered lawbreakers would restore sanity to lectures; all know that administrators either side with the culprits or fear their own careers would suffer should they enforce the rules they are charged to uphold
As transgenderism sweeps the country and wins the attention of the White House, the media do their best to hide the facts that the transgendered mass murderer in Nashville wrote a blueprint of how and why she would soon be killing 9-year-olds, that another would-be transgendered mass killer was stopped just in time in Colorado, that another transgender would-be assassin traveled to the home of Supreme Court Justice Kavanagh to murder him.
To speak the truth that men not just in cross-dress perform sexualized dance skits for audiences that include children, but remain both exempt from legal ramifications and are in hot demand is nearly felonious. Best-selling novelist J. K. Rowling, tennis great Martina Navratilova, and All-American swimmer Riley Gaines—they all cannot go out in public alone without assuming they will be physically attacked by the “peaceful” transgendered community. Their sin? The mere suggestion that those born as biological men cannot declare themselves women and thus assume thereby they are.
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.
It seems that the global community shares an odd number of very specific concerns about the United States with Hanson and even sees them in his particular language and with his particular nuances. This is why we used to have “Kremlinologists” and talk today about “Putin Whisperers”: seeing the Other according to our own categories and concerns is a beast of a bias to deal with.
Ah yes.
Truth hurts but lies hurt more:
“Top secret US documents that have been leaked to the public show that corporate media is blatantly lying about the level of death and overall casualties experienced by Russian military forces in their special operation in Ukraine and that the US government is using artificially low numbers provided by the Ukrainian government to cover up that nation’s true battlefield death tolls.”
You forgot to mention the documents you mention were ALTERED to show those numbers. Bellingcat has the original research, but this can be found by reading ANY article on the subject across the net.
If you aren’t focused on election integrity you are being distracted.
Elections have consequences. Joe Biden got 81 million votes in the freest and fairest election ever.
Georgia’s reforms were so bad he called them ” Jim Eagle”. The left knows what is at stake, does the right?
Right on the money dude. Any peaceful, meaningful reform is now impossible.
Does anyone believe for a second that folks in AZ want millions more illegals pouring across their border and so voted for Hobbs?
Does anyone believe for a second that the 2022 election really was a vote of confidence in this administration’s policies? True 20%+ inflation? $8 eggs? Another endless(and pointless) war? $6 gas?
I don’t know what will wake us fookin” up but talking about reform through voting ain’t it.
China definitely got its money’s worth by buying Biden off for only a few million.
Excellent remark!
Probably bought him at his home garage sale. Everything is cheaper there.
National suicide. Deliberate, premeditated.
Has anyone including the Dems themselves know what the vision is? How will our children and their children be better off in the world the Dems are creating? Sorry if I can’t see it but when I catch a glimpse, it looks dystopian at best, oblivion at worst, with little room between. .
“A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other.
Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.
Today we find ourselves in the thralldom of a new form of slavery that is just as cruel as the one we once employed in our early history. Those who wish to perpetuate this new slavery are like the spoiled child who has never been taught self-discipline, civility, and the consequences of one’s actions. I hear the stanzas in my ears of the Battle Hymn Of The Republic.
I don’t see any mainstream venue where Americans can organize to address these issues. The middle appears to be hostage to this extreme agenda.
Well done and spot on as usual
An old saying – “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, first drive mad” It’s like watching a train wreck, but unfortunately we are on the train.
“Elections have consequences” as Barack Obama once famously said – and we are witnessing it now, after electing a degenerate basement dwelling, hair sniffing cretin, named Biden; head of the Biden crime syndicate. None of this political nonsense will end until the electorate finds its voice and sends these people to the political garbage heap where they belong.
Wow! My favorite first names right now are Ron and Nikki.
Have you heard Ron speak recently? And Nikki is a fraud.
We aren’t going to vote our way out of this mess. Sadly. Only targeted killing or the civil war that our enemies want
Victor my friend, well said. You have a way of putting words together that I could never dream. I am a 65 year old DOD employee working as a Civil Engineer, I have 40 years of service starting in 1980, the end of the Carter era when troops didn’t have bullets to shoot. I never thought I would see this country sink to these levels. What can we do? Keep up the great work Victor and thank you.
I think of you as Cassandra, Dr. Hanson. You are warning, but sadly, it seems that, like the Trojans, no one in power is listening. The litany of stupidities and crimes ignored, accepted, and celebrated by the zombies in this country is astonishing. I can’t think of a way to reset this madness. We had such high hopes with the 2022 elections. I honestly don’t see why we should look to the 2024 cycle to solve our problems. Chicago’s new mayor is worse, by all accounts, than Lori Lightfoot. The left is arrogant because they see no future going forward where they are not in power.
Accurate and chilling analysis Professor. Great Job
ONLY HEBREW WILL DO HERE:
כל הכבוד לך ויישר כוח!!!
Translation please.
He said “ Good for you and good luck”
Congrats for being able to know and write such a difficult language. Could you translate it please?
ACTUALLY THE HEBREW WAS FOR VICTOR–WHO AS A PHILOLOGIST, AS WELL AS A GREEK AND LATIN SPEAKER CAN NOW HAVE THE CHANCE TO CRACK IN SOME HEBREW AS WELL.
THERE IS OF COURSE A TRANSLATION, BUT LIKE “EVERYTHING VDH” IT’S ALSO LONG–AND HOPEFULLY INTERESTING.
THE FIRST HEBREW PHRASE IS SIMPLER: LITERALLY “ALL THE RESPECT TO YOU”–COLLOQUIALLY SPEAKING “WELL DONE” OR “HATS OFF TO YOU” IN MODERN HEBREW.
THE SECOND SENTENCE IS ALSO FREQUENTLY USED–BUT IS NOT ONLY MODERN BUT HAS TALMUDIC AND CURRENT HISTORICAL ORIGINS AS WELL.
LITERALLY “KEEP GOING STRAIGHT ON WITH YOUR STRENGTH,” IT IS A BIBLICAL PHRASE COMPLIMENTING WARRIORS AFTER EPIC BATTLES.
BUT BEN-GURION–(THE FIRST PRIME MINISTER AND FATHER OF MODERN ISRAEL; ORIGINALLY DAVID GREENE FROM RUSSIA WHO “HEBRAIZED” HIS NAME TO “DAVID SON-OF-LION-CUB)–ALWAYS USED THIS
TALMUDIC PHRASE TO CONGRATULATE HIS WARRIORS:
FROM THE CAPTAIN OF “THE EXODUS”
IN 1947 AND THE WINNING GENERALS IN THE ’48 WAR OF INDEPENDENCE; TO THOSE WHO STOLE, BUILT AND DEVELOPED ISRAEL’S NUCLEAR ARSENAL IN 1963 (B-G’S FINAL YEAR AS PRIME MINISTER–ISRAEL’S LONGEST SERVING ONE UNTIL BIBI).
AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST, AN EXPLANATION FOR VICTOR AS TO WHY IN ALL OF MY MYRIAD OF CORRESPONDENCE I USE CAPITAL LETTERS.
BEN-GURION, IN MANY WAYS A GENIUS BUT WITHOUT DOUBT A SKILLED PHILOLOGIST–DISAGREED WITH MANY OF THE NEW GRAMMATICAL TENETS OF MODERN HEBREW, AND STUBBORNLY REFUSED TO COMPLY WTH THEM–NOT UNLIKE ONE WHO WRITES ENGLISH ONLY IN CAPITAL LETTERS.
Damn Victor, that’s depressing, but , I believe, an accurate description of the cancer that seems to be consuming America, setting us up for a great fall. However, is it fair to gloss over the vital whole of this national superorganism? Day-to-day life in my hometown seems as normal as ever. People are civil, even friendly & courteous at times. It’s a college town in the midst of the East coast megalopolis. Our local newspaper folded years ago, too little salacious gossip, I guess. The county news is mainly local sports and obits. Oobla-dee, obla-da.
I never had any problem with my pronouns; maybe I don’t hang with the in-crowd. Never saw a man dressed as a woman, that I was aware of, except on TV. Our cops are good neighbors. In the second year of the ‘pandemic’ half the shoppers in the Target went without masks and some would scowl at them, but no one got bent out of shape over it. But nurses in doctors’ offices still insist on it – no problem.
Maybe I’m just a head-in-the-sand independent. I like Trump, tho he’s a tad uncouth. His ability to withstand the ‘slings & arrows of outrageous’ hysteria against him has made him my hero. To have a doddering bobo as our current commander-in-chief seems comically tragic, yet appropriate to the circus occupying the capitol.
Who was the Greek mathematician who ignored the invading army to complete his calculations in the sand?
Bruce, your comment is on the money. See Rachel Lu’s review of Hanson’s The Dying Citizen over at Law and Liberty for a perspective similar to your own.
That was sobering! I feel that we must hit bottom before we begin the path to healing. But does the bottom look like? That I fear the most. Thank you VDH, you are so important in these times. There will be a clear, concise and honest record of these times in this young country thanks to you!
Steadfastly yours, Patrick!
Thank you for the sobering summary of how the U.S. has fallen both domestically and internationally. Once trusted institutions have lost that trust by “focusing on the irrelevant…while ignoring the existential that we know we can no longer solve,” a phrase that sounded somehow familiar to me. I then reviewed Romans 1: 17-31. As I reviewed that passage, it was like going to the doctor. The only thing I as a patient can do is tell about the disagreeable symptoms I’m experiencing; only he or she can tell me the diagnosis. In that passage, the diagnosis is plainly spoken, and remains the diagnosis whether I agree with it or not. Worsening symptoms will continue to be ignored with no felt need to go to any type of physician, including the Great Physician.
What Mr. Hansen said is all true. Unfortunately I feel like a prisoner in a concentration camp
And my fellow prisoners say every day “ We are all going to die soon” and I wish he would just be quiet what’s the point?
May God have mercy on us…. and intervene.
You have provided a vast array of examples detailing multiple catastrophes that will lead to our downfall as a nation. The goal of the leftists is to cause division and ultimately a civil war. The world will watch, wait, and ultimately pounce when we are too weak to respond. We are leaving a destroyed country to the next generation. You have warned us in this tremendous essay. Thank you.
Dr. Hanson, once again, nails the idiocy of where we are and the complete lack of leadership and serious people on DC. AOC rails that Justice Thomas should be impeached, ignoring the complete debacle in her home district. The US today is Nero indeed, and we are going to be wiped out unless serious people show up. I am guessing we need a significant military defeat (although losing 1 MM US citizens to C 19 can hardly not be called a defeat) in order for the nation to either come together, or go down on the ash heaps of history. And all this has occurred in my adult life time (1980-) with the financial crap show post Bill Clinton.
Where in the hell are the leaders???
What will the future look like with America no longer the Super Power? What would happen to us. Victor – I would love to hear your thoughts.
We should use Sal Alinsky “tactics” against the purveyor of those Alinsky methods that is creating fear in corporate, campus, and government leadership. Fight fire with fire! The leader is Obama with Soros as his banker.
Somehow conservatives seem too numb to do this. Only by Alsnsky ing back and grabbing and initiating the narratives can we keep this sane and somewhat bloodless.
Thank you Mr. Hanson for your wisdom and you articulate evaluation of where we are as a country right now. Only God can help us get back on the right track. May we as a nation have a revival of the importance of making God the most important part of our lives!
I’ve been saying for the last few years it would take something catastrophic to change this country back to sanity. I thought the state of the country such as crime, open borders, wokeness, inflation and debacles such as Afghanistan would bring in a huge red wave but I was wrong. I now believe we’re on the verge of something worse than we’ve ever seen before in this country such as a war on our homeland. I hope we survive.
Thank you Dr. Hanson. I clearly see everything that you have described. I sure don’t have the answers but I will just say two things:
1) I think each one of us, individually, needs to speak up when the opportunity presents itself.
2) This is actually more of a question. Where are the women in this Country? My answer is absent or focused on abortion, or so it seems. The transgenders are degrading and making a mockery of women in sports and elsewhere. I could say more but women in this country need to step up, and step up big time. (Step up = Vote with your Mind and Soul)
Isn’t Sam Brinton rather a queenpin, than a kingpin?
Like Italy at the fall of the Byzantine empire, Japan and Australia would benefit from opening immigration to traditional Catholics and Protestants fleeing religious persecution in the United States. I think the time will come soon when earnest Christians would be willing to leave all their possessions in the U.S. to worship and live as unmolested followers of the true Way…You may have already guessed that I have already started planning my escape route for my family now.
Your analysis breaks my heart. The swiftness in which we are witnessing the destruction is breathtaking. My father, who lived under Communism and was a Russian soldier during WW II, reminded me, “It is very easy to destroy, much more difficult to build.” 🙁 my heart is broken.
God has abandoned America and has left it to it’s on devices because America has abandoned God. Our nation is first and foremost spiritually sick this the failure of all institutions and areas of our society.
The first paragraph/sentence says it all; We have met the enemy and they is US.
Few capture the ills of this nation they way Professor Hanson ‘judiciously’ does. It appears even fewer are listening, but I find that not the case as I RV around the country where flags fly, “Let’s go Brandon” (some in the more descriptive vernacular) and Trump 2024 (many in the more appreciative slogans) abound.
This nation is not racially segregated as the politicians like indicate, we are segregated politically which makes it hard to understand since so many love this nation the way it was founded.
All this chaos has been planned for over 75 years. The Communists have “taken over”. The chaos that’s going on is planned and Americans should wake up and read the Communist Manifesto.
As Krushchev stated years ago, “we will take over the United States without guns!