Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
As the long year of 2021 finally came to a close, there were a number of truths Americans on the Left found themselves privately acknowledging but unable to say in public for fear of doing damage to their political cause, their own reputations, or their sense of security. But as 2022 advances, it will become even more difficult to hide these truths.
Collusion, RIP
No one wishes to speak of the “dossier” anymore. Everyone knows why: it was never a dossier. It was always a mishmash concoction of half-baked fantasies and outright lies, sloppily thrown together by the grifter and has-been ex-British spy and Trump hater, Christopher Steele—all in the pay of Hillary Clinton, the original architect of the collusion hoax.
Steele himself admitted that he had no sources or notes to substantiate his “research.” Most of those who had seeded the dossier around Washington now either agree it was fake, or “partially” false, or remain silent in embarrassment.
The perpetual NeverTrump revisionism is reduced to “The Russian Hoax Hoax,” in pathetic fashion suggesting Putin still colluded with Trump and such “collusion” is provable even without the dossier.
The logic is Orwellian: in 2017-2020 we heard, “But the dossier shows that ….” In 2020-2021 we heard, “Whoever said the dossier had anything to do with Russian collusion?”
The FBI—that in part used their paid informant Steele’s lies to birth FISA warrants—now disowns it. The entire 22-month, $40-million Mueller charade ended up in tragicomic style with Robert Mueller under oath denying he knew much of anything about either the purveyor of the dossier, Fusion GPS, or the dossier itself.
James Comey when asked about it and the investigations it spawned, on 245 occasions under oath claimed he lost his memory or had no knowledge of it.
The Russian collusion hoax will go down in history as one of the most shameful examples of Washington, D.C. mass hysteria, and of a concentrated effort to destroy an elected president, in modern American political history.
In the end, we always come back to where we started: Hillary Clinton.
She used the three firewalls of the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie legal firm, and Fusion GPS, to pay Steele, a foreign national, likely barred by law from providing such dirt to a U.S. presidential campaign.
Steele then grabbed Clinton and FBI money, and in lazy fashion made a few calls to the now indicted Igor Danchenko, a Russian working in Washington, D.C. at the left-wing Brookings Institution, along with a Clinton crony Charles Dolan doing business in Moscow. Presto, Steele typed up their myths, in scary intelligence white-paper fashion, and passed them off as top-secret “Russian sources.” The dossier became the “proof” needed to show that Trump, in the words of former CIA director John Brennan, was “treasonous” or, as former Director of National Intelligence General (ret.) James Clapper alleged, was a “Russian asset.”
The Russian collusion hoax is now akin to Joe Biden’s cognitive decline; everyone knows it, but few bother to state the obvious—or rehash their now embarrassing earlier denials.
When the Musical Chairs Music Stops
Everyone knows the government cannot keep running up astronomical annual deficits. It is piling up a near $30 trillion national debt, printing trillions of dollars—and hoping to keep inflation down to 7 percent per year. Everyone knows that, and no one wishes to talk, much less do anything, about it.
Instead, we simply will go on redistributing money, inflating the economy, and hoping that the middle classes are naïve enough to believe that their inflated paychecks outpace their greater inflationary costs that, in truth, have more than wiped out all their wage gains.
When the interest rate hikes invariably come—the longer we wait, the worse will be the reckoning—we will again know the stagflation of the 1970s and 1980s.
The only calculus the Democrats weigh is whether they can print their way to a semblance of normality through 2022, in hopes the helium-over-inflated economy blows up only after the elections.
Who knows, maybe then they can blame Joe Biden in 2023 for empowering them to wreck the economy and losing the Congress, as a way of arguing his clear cognitive decline suddenly warrants resignation.
Spiraling Crimes without Criminals
Almost every statistic related to violent crime is up. Smash-and-grab has reached tony places like Union Square in San Francisco, Walnut Creek, and Carmel by the Sea.
Car-jackings are endemic. Gun sales are booming—among terrified upscale white liberals.
An entire blame-the victim protocol emerges—drive your oldest car, dress down, hide your jewelry, hire security guards for your person and business—because mysteriously there are no victimizers, or at least none that can be mentioned.
The once popular, but now discredited BLM has been reduced to a caricature, arguing that such violent crimes are constructs created by white people to jail black people, that Jussie Smollett was innocent and a victim of racism, and that the Waukesha massacre was the apparent start of a needed “revolution.”
Everyone knows that defunding the police failed and dangerously so. The public accepts that the Soros DAs are both incompetent and sinister. People of all classes and races look at crime statistics. They watch internet videos. They compare firsthand experience with robbery, assault, and theft. And they surmise that young black males are disproportionately—in terms of their percentages in the population—responsible for much of the violent crime wave, from murders to car-jackings to smash-and-grab mass thefts.
The more the media fails to print descriptions of suspects in criminal assaults, the more universities cavalierly violate the federal Clery Act by failing to provide their campus communities needed information about criminal suspects’ descriptions, and the more big-city mayors and district attorneys deny an epidemic of violent assault, the more the public knows that crime is even worse than what they hear, see, feel, and experience first-hand.
The public also assumes that voicing the truth is deemed “racist” and thus will earn them a doxing or canceling—and so in Soviet-style keep quiet. We do not dare speak of disproportionate black perpetrators of hate crimes, rare interracial crimes, and the killing of police.
Yet such silence does not hide the truth that cannot be quite smothered . In a recent op-ed, Heather Mac Donald estimated that “A police officer is about 400 times as likely to be killed by a black suspect as an unarmed black is to be killed by a police officer.”
So, we have a crime wave without criminals in the manner we had a SUV on autopilot without a driver that killed six and injured 62 in Waukesha.
Unofficially, the paradox plays out with the upscale blue-city suburbanite still with the BLM sign on his lawn but with a new 12-gauge under the bed, with the BLM hierarchs and their loud enablers living like Patrisse Cullors, Colin Kaepernick, or LeBron James in rich, mostly white areas, with ample walls and security fences and gates.
So, the year ended with a near record of black-on-black homicides, and a new record of lethal shootings—of police officers on duty.
Biden, A Robust 95?
Everyone knows that Biden may be chronologically 78, but mentally and physically he is at best 95 or more. People sense that he is failing at a geometric rate that makes his ability to last even another year “problematic.”
But no one says much because the nation has never removed a president or, other than Richard Nixon, had a president resign.
The Left knows that they were on record from 2017-2020 with incessant 25th Amendment coup talk and went so low as to wheel out a Yale psychiatrist to claim Trump was crazy and needed an intervention removal. Their constant haranguing forced Trump to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment—which he aced and which Joe Biden most assuredly will not take, nor will be encouraged to take.
Apparently, Biden’s handlers believe in the next three years he can imitate the last few months of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, where the inactive president was kept incommunicado in bed while the wall of his family and close associates deluded the country and lied about Wilson’s true health condition.
Kamala Harris plays a bad Spiro Agnew. True, she is so incompetent that calls to ask Biden to step down resemble the early voices who asked the same of Nixon but were met with, “So you want Agnew?”
But unlike Agnew who resigned in disgrace after pleading nolo contendere to a single charge of tax evasion, Kamala Harris is in no legal jeopardy. And so, the idea of a “President Harris” who is not non compos mentis apparently is more frightening to the public than keeping Joe Biden who is non compos mentis. And thus, talk of Biden’s diminishing capacity always is interrupted by “So you want President Harris?”
In the end, we are left only with such ironies. The Left, which damned John McCain for selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate, is mute about the far less qualified Kamala Harris as an actual vice president. The matters of race and gender preferences that ensured the incompetent Harris her job are now transmogrified into matters of racism that supposedly explain the charges of her critics.
The Virus is Dead, But the Virus Will Never Die!
We all know the administration has little clue how to deal with COVID-19. We nod that it does and meanwhile scramble in “everyman for himself” fashion. Who wishes to say or admit that his own government has no idea how to stop the virus, but has a great number of ideas about how to weaponize it for political purposes?
Now there are more dead from COVID-19 in Biden’s tenure than during Trump’s, despite well over 60 percent of the population being fully vaxxed and 2-years’ experience in treating the virus. A 2020-Biden would demand that 2021-Biden be charged with responsibility for well over 400,000 COVID-19 deaths on his watch and thus should resign.
Everyone knew Biden had no plan, at least not any different from what Trump was doing. His autopilot agenda was simply to claim ownership of the Warp Speed inoculations and assume that by March 2021 COVID was finally burning itself out as it bumped into too many people with prior natural or vaccinated immunity.
In Biden’s logic, nature and Trump had stopped COVID-19, but he would credit his own inaction and 90-day miracle leadership from Washington.
Now Biden is a sanctimonious, Oedipus-like figure, the deliverer who cannot stop the plague that in an eerie way exposes his existential flaws.
So, Delta and then Omicron arrived. Breakthrough cases accompanied both. Suddenly Biden was calling for the states to step up, given “there is no federal solution” to the crisis. He meant that vaccinations do not guarantee immunity from COVID infections anymore.
Masks and social distancing do not stop Omicron’s spread. There is no federal success in supplying easy testing and an array of therapeutics and medicines to the public.
Like the proverbial cranky “get off my grass” neighbor, an oblivious and irate Biden still ignores the shortage of tests, the value of therapeutics and natural immunity, and the reality of thousands of breakthrough infections—caught in his senility warp to croak on about “masks” and “vaccinations.”
In the end, Americans are in 2022 where they were at the beginning of the virus in March 2020: China has successfully hidden the origins of the COVID.
The WHO cannot be trusted.
The CDC, NIH, and NIAID are incompetent and politically weaponized.
The pharmaceutical industries see relief only in more multi-billion-dollar booster rollouts and $700-a-pill remedies.
Dr. “I am the science” Fauci in cyclical fashion is on TV all day.
He claims on Tuesday that what he said on Monday needed updating, with the intention of saying on Wednesday that his correction on Tuesday was also wrong, while he awaits more bookings for Thursday’s clarifications—all the while damning the ignorant mob who disseminates supposedly false information.
The Year’s Ironies
At the end of this second terrible year, we are left only with ironies.
Vaccinations are a must for soldiers and federal employees, but no barrier to entry for 2 million illegal aliens (is breaking the law a way to avoid the mandate?).
If you are vaxxed, you are safe; but if your antibody level is even higher from natural immunity, you are not?
If you get COVID, you are on your own, given the government has no idea what affordable pill you should swallow or what protocol you should follow.
Social distancing and masks are vital—unless you go out on the street protesting in concert with BLM or are a California official dining at the French Laundry, or a liberal politician getting your hair done.
Those Americans who thought up every conceivable legal and illegal way of forcing the hated Trump out of office are racking their brains in vain to use those talents to find just one way of easing out their beloved Joe Biden.
Those Americans, who love the free cash for staying home, fear that the money they got might help to explain why it is now less valuable.
Those Americans, who claimed moral superiority for their masks and three shots—and still got COVID—cannot decide whether they were lied to by Donald Trump, lied to by Joe Biden—or simply lied to themselves.
Those Americans who praised defunding the police and excused looting, arson, and violence are pondering whether it is better to renounce their idiocy, or to stay quiet and take one more carjacking, one more assault, or one more break-in—for the cause.
Those Americans who applauded the disreputable efforts of Michael Avenatti, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, Adam Schiff, Christopher Steele, and Alexander Vindman to destroy Trump at all costs, got all they wanted—and thereby have all but destroyed the progressive cause, and likely made Donald Trump all the more powerful, the more so they sought to ruin him.
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spot on Mr. Mr. Hanson
you elucidate the problems and consequences quite clearly: can you not offer some formative steps we can take to remedy these terrible situations?
UNBELIEVABLE
Whats happening to our country.
Thank you for your information ALWAYS TRUTH🙏📖✝️🇺🇸
My “what keeps me up at night” question:
What do we the “dying citizens” do about all of this? Elections do have serious consequences but don’t seem to matter much as a outcome for the concerned “dying citizen.” I am so concerned there is no returning to the principles and values our founding fathers intended for this “constitutional republic.” We are now ruled by an elitist dominated government(both Democrats and Republicans) along with a very sinister and elitist social media oligarchy. Difficult, if not impossible, for Liberty and Freedom to breathe in a climate where the free air is continually sucked out of the room.
Fritz Finn Heuer
The docile sheep in America get what they deserve. Any of this can end the moment citizens have had enough and make it stop. Until that happens, it will continue
Dear Professor Hanson,
I so enjoy your writing and listening to your podcasts. I just want to absorb all you write,the political, your life as a farmer form your childhood. The animal stories are endearing and amazing. When you write about your grandparents I think of mine and how many stories of their experiences they told me of growing up. I always like hearing what life was like for them. We are blessed that you continue your conservative fight for our freedom it is the last best hope.
Sincerely, LP
When the truth is spoken, it isn’t always refreshing, but it’s still necessary as a disinfectant.
One of the best, if not the best, thinkers of our time. Victor writes the absolute truth in a way that cannot be denied. And a great historian to boot.
Thanks
The insidious politics are now reaching down into the dreams of young kids in VDH’s town. Equal access is being denied by Fresno State. If the issue of proportionality is ever elevated in university athletic departments around the country, the onion will be peeled back and the access to a university education being denied to one culture and increased to another will expose the disparities of opportunites in our public college systems. At stake is the exposure of the hypocritical liberal CSU and UC systems and the systemic civil rights violations being perpetuated against Latinos and their access to universities through sport……potentially a Title VI violation. Though Title IX has been the star for decades, the unavoidable conversation will fall to population percentages and opportunity percentages not jiving. For example, there is a 100 mile diameter around Fresno State university in which 55% of the population is Latino and the Fresno State Male Athletic Department has only 7% Latinos. 800% diff. between population and access. 15 male Latinos in dept. of 200 athletes and 85 african-americans. That’s 600% difference. The Latino leadership is not excited about this and it should be noted that blue collar sports like wrestling’s opportunities are not to the big DI schools where the big companies recruit….another opportunity lost. And why do CSUs on California’s coast have swimming and water polo teams? Systemic proportionality, access & hypocrisy. Help VDH!
re “Crimes without Criminals” recalls to mind the Invisible Men in Ralph Ellison fashion, but new for 2021 we are seeing the participation of Invisible Women, especially with the smash-and-grab episodes. On Biden taking the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, nobody would expect him to ace the test as Trump did, but I’m sure many people (including myself) would be relieved if he could at least get a passing score (70%?). I think many people around the president might, with good reason, suspect he might not even be able to do that. But I don’t rule out that Uncle Joe’s stubborness will keep him in the Oval Office Occupant to spite the ambitions of Harris and her camp of supporters, who Biden and his camp are at odds with. I would add to “Virus is Dead” that one policy I believe Trump would have facilitated that Biden is now interferring with is in the parsing out of monoclonal antibodies treatments to the states, e.g. Florida and Texas having to request these from the federal government because the federal government is responsible for distribution, but the feds are using excuses of equity to justify rationing. I think they know Texas and Florida would be giving black eyes to Blue states who de-emphasize early treatments. Finally, the destruction of the progressive cause (I like to call it “The End of Progressivism”) is the silver lining to the loss of the presidency and control of the Congress. Now, if only we could have trust in the outcomes of the coming elections.
This country and the world is going to go through a hard and painful reset. It’s just a matter of when the capital markets collapse and resource contention mimics the old colonial and mercantile age.
Fantastic synopsis I look forward to hearing from you every week you are truly one of my heroes thank you
Hubris brings Nemesis indeed. It is fascinating on some level to see the societal fulfillment of the top-down malevolence. The incredible venom you can see in the first rebuttal tweet to anything that Donald Trump Jr or Rand Paul or (you get the idea) has leached into the aisles of stores and onto the streets. People are like small pots that boil over with the least provocation and dare you to cross them. It is not expressed but implicit in the complete absence (or the excessively ritualized) deference to others in making way or holding doors or cutting someone off in traffic. Road rage used to be amusing or at most embarrassing, but now it is obvious it could be lethal. Trust in those you share the road with, meet on the sidewalk, or walk through the stores with is vanishing. The saddest to me is seeing someone capitulate to the mob and mouth the platitudes that signal their surrender to their fear and their seeking to find safety from the enforcers of proper attitudes and discourse. I hope Victor keeps shining a light on all this darkness to help keep the shadows at bay.
We thank you Victor for your enlightenment. hard work and dedication. It does not go unnoticed. It is very much appreciated during these troubled times
This is an excellent summary. It’s much more satisfactory to read something like this than to plow through sprawling pages from either the left or the right that require one to edit everything down. Thanks to VDH.
We love you and your straight talk. If only the Liberals would read your posts; perhaps we could get this country turned around before we’re all speaking Chinese.
I wrote this letter to the Editor. 51% Voted for This
I have heard many people complain about the present administration and its bungling of its duties to provide leadership to the American people. Now their complaints fall on deaf ears because 51% of you voted for these failures. Yes, you voted for the disaster in Afganistan! Yes, you voted for the Afganistan women to be confined and tortured by the Taliban. Yes, you voted to open the southern border and allow a million or more aliens to enter the US illegally. Yes, you voted to have the coyotes from Mexico rape, pillage and kill those who would try to gain access to the US illegally. Yes, you voted for Hunter Biden to paint pictures and sell them to unidentified purchasers. Yes, you voted for empty shelves in our markets and delay deliveries of your on line purchases. Yes, you voted to stop the XL Pipeline and cause gas prices to inflate by 25%. Yes, you voted to help Russia finish its pipeline to Germany to help the Russian economy. Yes, you voted for France to remove its ambassador from the US and you voted for Iran to have nuclear weapons. Yes, You voted for the head of the administration to avoid any type of two way communication with the American people, including “lawn talk” out by the Marine One helicopter. Yes, you voted to educate six year old children in woke sexual practices yet your school administrators won’t allow the reading of those books in their public forums. You voted to deny that Natural Immunity exist
Hello Steve Ferry, I just want you to know that this 78 year old wife – mother and grandmother is in total agreement with your email. I have 3 adult children – a daughter who is very conservative as Am I , a son who is not very political and a younger son who says he is not really political but hates Donald Trump and thinks Biden is OK and that his Mom is being brainwashed by Fox News. That son makes his Mom sad but we love each other very much and mostly try hard not
to talk about politics. I cannot believe that one of my kids can believe the woke culture but he graduated from Syracuse University and I am blaming the college
professors for that. I am very sad and worried for my kids and grandkids that the country I grew up in will no longer be the American dream.. I will watch for
your posts.
You have written such a brilliant article here, explaining the idiocies with all too easy to understand order and logic. If only every American could be forced to read and initial this before voting. The only thing I take exception to is that those who received subsidies for staying home worry that the value of that amount has decreased because of the hand outs. I’m quite sure they don’t care. You give them far too much credit. Thank you again for another stellar assessment.
Just a few comments …… Waukesha happened to make people forget about the real Rittenhouse outcome. Pure ‘russky’ style. In the long run, ‘Dem’ people will choose to remember the original lying story ….. may even be made official, depending on the outcome of our present situation.
Brooks was ordered to do it …… fall guy! Not making excuses for him ….. this is truly modus operandi for the Official Left, the big bosses. Much like all the prisoners who were released under the guise of Covid, just so they could wreak havoc on the streets of New York and beyond.
As in the Russian hoax ….. when asked if he wasn’t worried about the Durham appointment, Clapper answered: ….. don’t see why we should …. after all, we were only following orders. Everybody knows
where the order came from but most likely, the rat will not be out-rightly exposed.
Used to watch “Uncommon Knowledge” on Roku, where have all the videos gone to?
rat= pimp for the communists.
Freedom of speech is alive here. Freedom of thought is alive, here. I have five days with my boy this week because he is being quarantined as a result of being around another boy his age who tested positive for Covid. The insanity of the email message from the school reads (edited for length and personal info):
“Dear Parent/Guardian,
Your student __________has been reported as a close contact with an individual who has tested positive for COVID-19. This contact occurred in community/non-school setting.
If your student is NOT vaccinated
OR
They competed the two-shot series of Pfizer or Moderna vaccine more than 6 months ago and are NOT boosted or
They received one dose of J&J vaccine more than 2 months ago and are NOT boosted:
They should quarantine and stay at home for 5 days from the last contact with the infected person. After that they may return to school but should continue to wear a mask around others for 5 additional days. It is recommended that they test on day 5 after exposure.
While in quarantine, your student should socially distance from other household members. When possible, they should sleep in a separate room, use a separate bathroom, avoid common space, and wash their hands frequently. Please watch for symptoms for a full 14 days. If they develop symptoms, they should get tested, isolate, and stay home.” We may have been randomly selected since we opted out of a vaccine for our 10 year old.
A well written summary of last year’s outcomes. VDH’s observations are sad … and painfully true. Another observation would be the how the mainstream media and social media censorship were able to shape public opinions … “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.” (Truman Show)