Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Content Agency
Sheer chaos and anarchy on the border?
Afghanistan — the most humiliating defeat in recent U.S. military history?
A labor-starved supply chain in shambles and holiday shelves emptying out?
The worst inflation in 30 years that seems soon ready to match Carter-era levels?
Gas hitting $5 a gallon with winter heating fuels soaring?
Free-for-all looting in the major cities without consequences?
Joe Biden’s policies and Biden himself diving in the polls?
Never in recent American history has any administration birthed such disasters in its first nine months.
Yet most Americans are arguing not over the sheer chaos and disasters of the Biden Administration, but rather how could such sheer pre-civilizational calamity occur in modern America?
Were these disasters a result of historic incompetency? Or mean-spirited nihilism? Or a deliberate effort to create the necessary turbulence to birth a new American revolution? Or a bit of all three?
Start instead with the idea that what most Americans see as sheer ruin is not what the left-wing puppeteers, who are pulling the strings of the Biden marionette, see.
Our catastrophes are their minor glitches. For them bad polling is mostly a public relations problem of an occasional uncooperative media. Otherwise, a few broken eggs are always necessary to create the perfect socialist omelet.
The Left now controlling Washington believes that the U.S. border is a mere construct. Every impoverished person has a birthright to cross into America illegally. The 2 million who are scheduled to enter this fiscal year alone is a wonderful, if occasionally sloppy, event.
Our border calamity is their celebration of humanity and a long-overdue recalibration of ossified American demography, one that will properly warp the Electoral College to provide the necessary election result.
If you believe that a culturally imperialistic America needs to be taken down a notch overseas, then the flight from Afghanistan is “impressive” and a “success” — by how quickly and efficiently we skedaddled.
Why worry about a lost $1 billion embassy, a $300 million refit of the Bagram airbase, or $80 billion lost in military hardware and training?
Empty shelves? Boohoo.
Grasping, upper-middle-class consumers are angry that the working classes are not willing to risk COVID infection to supply them with their accustomed holiday trinkets.
So, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg intoned that the shortages mean only that the consumer class has to wait a wee bit — until Christmas Eve — to splurge on gifts.
Who worries about a little inflation? Under new monetary theory, printing dollars brings prosperity. Or as White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain put it in a retweet, inflation is a mere “high class problem” of the Peloton elite.
Only those with money worry their ill-begotten pile shrinks. But the majority without money will eventually rejoice that it is everywhere now — finally and properly “spread,” as former president and now multimillionaire Barack Obama once promised.
As AOC swore, gas and oil are going to be gone anyway in 10 years. So, if Joe Biden slashes over 2 million barrels a day in U.S. oil production, what’s wrong with that?
Didn’t Steven Chu, Obama’s energy secretary, long ago brag that when we hit $8 to $10 a gallon, we’d approach European levels of proper fuel usage? Why whine about paying over $100 to fill up, when the planet more quickly cools?
Did not Americans learn “critical legal theory” and “critical race theory”?
Or as the architect of the “1619 Project” reminded us, destroying or taking someone’s property is no big deal. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey shrugged off torched downtown buildings; such torched stuff, he said, is mere “bricks and mortar.”
It is only a crime to “steal” over $500 of needed merchandise from a Walgreens in San Francisco, because the rich who make such absurd laws never have to steal goods from a pharmacy shelf.
If racists wish to point out that African American male youths are disproportionately represented in the latest crime wave, then maybe America should be learning not to create the conditions that force them to break the law.
In sum, we are on a left-wing roller coaster headed to a socialist nirvana.
Most Americans believe it is instead an out-of-control “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” nightmare with incompetents at the wheel.
But the architects of such “hope and change” shrug that the occasional disturbing news that the media sometimes accidentally leaks out is merely the cost of an equitable America.
One man’s anarchy is another’s road to justice.
Keep that mentality in mind and the absurdities that are mouthed by Biden, Klain, press secretary Jen Psaki, Homeland “Security” Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Pete Buttigieg, or the ravings of the Squad make perfect sense.
They are merely trying to explain to us dummies that what we think is purgatory is actually the new paradise — a promised land that, once we are properly programmed and educated, we too will welcome and thank them for our deliverance.
I agree with the Chinese who recently said that the current US govt is the most incapable and degenerate in US history.
#LetsGoBrandon
Greedy, vicious, hateful psychopaths. They simply want to bleed America dry. They are promoting death and chaos while enriching themselves. The same thugs are leading Europe, Canada, Australia and NZ.
Were we not sufficiently warned about what Biden would do if elected president? The Biden-Sanders Unity Platform was posted at joebiden.com.
The Media did very little to highlight the true intentions of a Biden presidency. Mark Levin talked about the Biden plan for the Border, and I think a writer at National Review explained what Team Biden had in store for the suburbs. But to my knowledge, that was about it.
Putting aside the massive voter fraud that surely played a large role in electing Joe Biden, who really is to blame for the current morass we find ourselves in?
Independents wanted an end to the 24/7 Trump circus and his so called “mean Tweets.” – Well you got it.
Never Trumpers wanted to get even with the man they love to hate. – Well you got it.
Moderate Democrats wanted to be party first loyalists, the country be damned. – Well you got it.
Assuming there is another Republican tidal wave in 2022, will a Speaker McCarthy be able to clean out the institutional rot and save our nation from a totalitarian calamity?
Doubt it.
Your observation that an engerized, educated, and informed middle class is an essential balance in a democratic system is probably well understood by the strategists who direct the progressive movement. Debasing public education, refusing to protect property, encouraging violence and disrectful behavior by students, and applying ideological filters in the application of the law, all have the effect of isolating and marginalizing the middle class. The more chaotic and dysfunctional a city becomes, the more likely the middle class will simply leave. I’ve watched this process work its way through Seattle and King County for the last 40 years, and the results must be encouraging to the radical left. Just as you have watched the collapse of the Golden State. Correcting this situation will require reformation of many things, but the most important is likely to be an atomization of the educational system. This could be done rather simply by giving parents vouchers instead of assignments to failing schools. Support the formation of functional schools by eliminating all requirements for “taching credentials”, meaning nonsensical course work in what used to be called teachers colleges. Attendance at a school should be dependant upon good behavior, and expulsion should be simple and quick. If the state wants to run a school, let that school be the repository for those who cannot behave themselves. The rest should be private and subject to market forces controlled by those who are most
Dear Robert Stewart,
You make some good points about our current public education monopoly. I’ve lived and worked in the Seattle/King County area for the 35 years, so know too well what you’re talking about. My ex-wife was an elementary school teacher. She worked very hard, often putting in 12 hour days and rarely ever calling out sick. But she and every one of her teacher friends all suffered greatly from monotheistic groupthink. They all thought the same way and voted uniformly. They would fiercely protect the corrupt system that has been clearly failing our kids and steadfastly refused to listen to common sense reform ideas.
I think the left wing stranglehold of our k-12 education system is unlikely to change anytime soon.
(cont.) … interested in the students, their parents.