 March 21, 2024Special EditionWhen and How Did We Get Here?Gradually, then Suddenly.By: Victor Davis Hanson Part One – March 12, 2024Presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—have either doubled the national debt in their four- or eight-year tenures or added several trillion to it. We all know that adding a trillion dollars in debt to what we collectively owe every 100 days is unsustainable. But then again, we all know that to stop the borrowing, much less to concede the need to run surpluses, would earn a president the smears of “racist,” “uncaring,” and “cruel,” if not run the risk of a recession or worse. So our presidents, in how individual Americans handle credit card debt, embrace Louis XV’s much-quoted observation “Après moi, le déluge”—“after me, the flood.” Put in modern Americanese, it means enjoying the unsustainable while you can because the next generations will pay heavily for what we incurred. Presidents prime the economy by printing trillions of dollars in funny money, hoping, as in the game of musical chairs, that the money music won’t abruptly stop on their watch, leaving them without a seat. It is astonishing how our major downtowns so quickly, so easily transmogrified into near wastelands. Drive into downtown Los Angeles in 2019 and it was a crowded bustling city, with a rebooted downtown. Ditto San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Drive into them just five years later and they are dangerous and toxic moonscapes. Had we shown a photo of a 2024 San Francisco Walgreens to someone in 2019, he would have thought it a caged prison infirmary. So what or who tore off the thin Thucydidean veneer of civilization so quickly? First, we must concede the “gradually,” given we have been in decline for a long, slow time—printing money, turning our schools into feel-good therapeutics rather than rigorous learning, destroying merit, contextualizing crime, embracing racial tribalism and chauvinism, allowing our roads, reservoirs, and bridges to decay, weaponizing our agencies from the CIA and FBI to the IRS and Pentagon. No good could have come from jettisoning civic education, history, languages, science, and math—and crowding them out with the social sciences and their bastard children of -studies courses (black studies, green studies, queer studies, Chicano studies, etc., etc.) and faddish classes on comic books, social media, sports, and popular culture from rap music to TikTok. How did we end up with our elite universities amassing multi-billion-dollar tax-free endowments while the government is in hock for $2 trillion in student loans, with 30% of them nonperforming? All that was the “gradual,” but why in 2020 did the decaying nation suddenly start to implode? In the last four years, we discovered there is no free speech on campus, but plenty of anti-Semitism and tribal hatreds. We learned that our entire system of jurisprudence was hijacked by critical legal and critical race theory jackals, who either did not charge violent lawbreakers with crimes or let those out who were convicted or both. We now expect the Left to remove their opponents from ballots or to use the courts to achieve what they cannot through the ballot. When did these new Soviet versions of McCarthyism, the Salem Witch trials, and medieval iconoclasm take over—doxing, deplatforming, shadow banning, ghosting, ostracizing, erasing perceived rivals and opponents? When did the increasingly unmarried, childless, hook-up/break-up young males become the near norm—disengaging to stagnate amid video games in their parent’s basements? What were the forces that caused the statue toppling, the name changing, and the Trotskization of our past? Since when did states encourage 70 percent of their voters not to show up on Election Day, present an ID, and do their civic duty? Who destroyed the Oscars, the Emmys, the Tonys, and the Grammys? What turned the NBA of Julius Erving and Michael Jordan into the buffoonery of LeBron James? How did a mediocrity like Colin Kaepernick gain such attention for dishonoring the symbols of his country? Where did the Squad and its hatred of the American past come from? Why did corporations lavish tens of millions of dollars upon the thieving architects of the racist Black Lives Matter? Why did we allow Antifa to burn and destroy our cities? Why did the border simply disappear? Why did we canonize the law-breaking illegal alien and ignore the law-abiding legal immigrant? Since when were defecation, urination, injection, and fornication OK on our public streets—if committed by the homeless? And since when did Mexico, the cartels, and China face no repercussions for lacing all sorts of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs with fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year with impunity? Why does the government shut down its cheap energy sources, outlaw clean-burning natural gas stoves, and try to ban efficient gasoline and diesel engines? Was Afghanistan planned, given such lethal incompetence would be hard to replicate? Why was not the Chinese spy balloon shot down on day one of crossing into U.S. airspace? How and why did the most lethal military in history fly from Afghanistan, abandoning billions in weaponry to terrorists? How did Iran simply take over the Middle East through the bloodwork of its terrorist tentacles? So what exactly caused this “suddenly” that followed the “gradually”? Part Two – March 13, 2024Our nation’s change into something unrecognizable just four years ago had a few precursors and catalysts. The first was the Obama administration’s redefining of American norms. Before Obama, “racial relations” were largely defined as the historical 12 percent black/88 percent “non-black” dichotomy, in the context of dealing with the sins of southern slavery and Jim Crow and widespread discrimination—and the quest to make race incidental not essential to us all. Sixty years of serial Civil Rights acts, affirmative action, increased integration and assimilation, interaction, and intermarriage, and “content of your character, not the color of your skin” mentalities were all working toward an ecumenical society, in which soon we would not consider race relevant to who were are and instead focus on the individual not the collective. “Climate change” took over from “global warming” as Al Gore/John Kerry were unleashed. Suddenly clean-burning natural gas was a culprit, a fossil fuel supposedly wrongly disguised as a valuable transition fuel. Abroad, Iran was redefined as the oppressed Persian, Shiite counterweight to the overdog Gulf monarchies and Zionist Israel. We then would green-light a “Shiite Crescent”—Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza—that would balance our former pro-Western allies, Israel in particular. We then from time to time, as the rivalry heated up, would adjudicate the ensuing creative tension. America would be the honest broker with no real preference for a democratic Western Israel or pro-American autocratic governments in the Gulf, Jordan, or Egypt. A second catalyst in the “sudden” transformation of America was the ill-fated COVID-19 lockdowns, the first time in American history that the entire nation went into quarantine. The result, as we can finally see in retrospect, was a disaster in almost every dimension: increased suicides, spousal/familial/substance abuse, economic ruin, increased psycho-social problems, social polarization, unsustainable federal spending, and deficits, destruction of a critical two-years of K-12 education for millions of our school-aged children, universities shut down, GDP in freefall, and unemployment up. Yet in retrospect, the Swedish model of focusing on the vulnerable and elderly while keeping society open and functioning cost no more lives than COVID-19 but saved millions from life-long disastrous consequences of lockdowns. In the case of the U.S., millions were shut inside their homes, distant from human interaction. They became inert and dependent on their computers, cell phones, Zoom links, and televisions for news, communications, and information. The result was a caged, paranoid society now prone to rumor, hysteria, and fits of passive-aggressive mania. Without human interaction and conversation, a nation of 330 million recluses after a year or two became susceptible to what followed the death of George Floyd. Part Three – March 15, 2024The third catalyst that fueled our sudden madness and melted down the country was the aftermath of the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The eight-time felon was reportedly arrested after trying to pass counterfeit bills. He resisted arrest, was likely under the influence of recent (or very recent) fentanyl ingestion and amphetamine drugs, and suffered from cardiovascular disease and recent COVID sequelae. He tragically died in police custody purportedly due to asphyxiation and cardiac arrest caused by a police officer using a knee to compress his neck for nearly 10 minutes—a finding challenged in antithetical autopsies. The seemingly cruel grimace on the face of Officer Chauvin and his failure to stand down as Floyd claimed he was breathless were the matches that lit the ensuing explosions. The actual details of Floyd’s death mattered little to the public. Much less important were statistics that showed unarmed African Americans died no more commonly than whites from police, at least when their respective incidence of arrests and encounters were factored in. No matter. Murals appeared of Floyd with a halo and angel wings from Washington, D.C. to Kabul. Politicians damned the police in general. What followed were 120 days of mass rioting, looting, arson, murder, assault, and random violence that resulted in $2 billion in property damage, 1,500 injured police officers, 14,000 arrests (most subsequently let go or never charged), and 35-40 dead. The non-ending riot was egged on and led by Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and encouraged by the likes of Kamala Harris (“They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware. Because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after election day.” Note how fact-checkers preposterously claimed she meant only the peaceful protests, even as the streets were burning and mass looting was then the norm). In fear of the civilizational meltdown, terrified blue-state mayors and governors would not stop the madness, but pandered to and appeased it. We talk now about the crime of entering unlawfully the Capitol Rotunda (though not when protesting on behalf of Hamas), but shrug on the news that the 2020 mobs torched a police precinct, federal courthouse, the iconic St. John’s Episcopal Church, and tried to storm the White House grounds and get to the president, who was whisked away to the presidential bunker. (Is not an attempt to storm the White House grounds analogous to January 6th? Or perhaps the more recent pro-Hamas mob effort to block the presidential motor entourage to the Capitol that resulted in Biden delaying his State of the Union address for 20 minutes!). The New York Times laughed at Trump’s supposed cowardice of being escorted below, rather than condemning the insurrectionary act of trying to take over the White House grounds. Somehow all those violent months were “largely peaceful” and “a summer of love” while the buffoonish January 6th afternoon was an “insurrection” and “the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War.” In fear that our cities would go up in smoke, suddenly the cooped-up nation went nuts—defunding the police, hiring thousands of DEI commissars on campuses and in corporations, capitalizing “Black,” and turning over downtown streets to weeks-long occupation by the mob. Universities began reparatory admissions. Stanford restricted its white quota to 20-21 percent of its incoming classes and published the fact, proud of its new Kendi-“anti-racism” racism. Universities ditched the SAT after decades. New faculty were hired in various grievance studies. In some sense, this was the hour of the opportunist and the time of the manipulator and the careerist. George Soros stepped up his strategies of lavishing funds on critical legal theory prosecutors in otherwise usually below-the-radar elections—to ensure as many cities as possible would allow criminals to commit violence without ramifications. Fakers and grifters came out of the woodwork—from Professor Kendi to the shake-down artists of Black Lives Matter. Suddenly, publishing companies, Hollywood, corporations, and foundations competed in virtue signaling with each other to pour money into anti-policing causes, to create faculty and administrative positions, to solicit scripts and books—all to spread the lie that the United States was a systemically racist nation. Suddenly the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Chief of Naval Operations were revising their curricula to include Black Lives Matter nonsense while promising to hunt down “white supremacists” in the ranks. Two years later in December 2023, the Pentagon quietly released its internal investigation report that found no such cabal—but not before alienating thousands of would-be white-male soldiers who no longer wanted any of the new summer of 2020 military, and were certainly no longer willing to die in combat at twice their percentage of the population only to be libeled as conspiracists and insurrectionists or drummed out as “anti-vaxers.” Part Four – March 19, 2024The final catalyst that led to our collective implosion was the election year 2020 and the accelerating Trump Derangement Syndrome. As the cities burned, unbelievable madness followed in efforts to ensure the incumbent president would not be reelected. Suddenly, congressional officials, mayors, and governors all refused to keep the peace by requesting federal troops to stop the summer riots. The more the cities went up in flames, the more the blue states blamed Trump. It was almost as if they would fault Trump for the ongoing violence and blame him even more if he sent in the military to quell it. Had they forgotten the Rodney King LA riots of 1992, when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Colin Powell, called up President George H. W. Bush to encourage him to deploy the 5,000 Marines then ready to go into South Central and Watts to quell the violence? And so, Bush did just that and stopped the mass looting and rioting. No matter. The nation was now a Luche Libre of open anti-Trump craziness. Mark Zuckerberg poured in a historic $419 million to absorb the work of the registrars in key election precincts. Social media suppressed news unfavorable to Biden. Street riots and protests were modulated to aid the Biden campaign. Liberal Time essayist Molly Ball described the “conspiracy”: There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises resulted from an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy. Seventy percent of the electorate in many states voted by mail before Election Day (with a radical drop in the rate of rejected ballots), in the greatest revolution in national balloting in our history. Or as Ball gushed:Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers, and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks… Shortly after the first debate Trump got Covid—to the delight of his opponents—and was hospitalized (and may have been stricken during the actual debate itself). Biden had sought refuge in the Covid lockdowns to justify his eight-to-noon basement campaign, and there were only two debates. Trump lost the first, Biden the second—but the latter took place after 60 million people had already voted. In nineteenth-century front porch style and for the first time in a century, a major party candidate outsourced his entire campaign to subordinates, in Biden’s case the media, big money, and leftwing politicos. Suddenly, our retired generals were libeling their president as a veritable Nazi and a fascist. We were to learn later that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley had called up his Chinese communist counterpart to apprise the Chinese military that in times of international crises, Milley, now both general and apparently certified psychiatrist, would diagnose Trump, and if he was found unstable, would not necessarily follow his presidential orders but instead warn the Chinese. The FBI? It too was now actively paying Twitter and Facebook contractors to suppress the news to aid the Biden campaign. Its last three directors had either lied to federal investigators or pled amnesia when grilled before Congress. The CIA Director and the Director of National Intelligence under Obama had both lied under oath—with impunity. And now the two cheered on the lie that Trump was a “Russian asset.” The CIA? Its retired “authorities” had gone over to the dark side. They now organized 50 former intelligence officers knowingly to lie that Hunter’s laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.” That whopper they knew to be a lie, given the FBI had the laptop and had already authenticated it, but kept it tightly in their control. Leon Panetta, ex-CIA director, was assuring us that the Russians fabricated the embarrassing information in the Hunter Biden laptop. Whom to trust? What followed by 2023 were attempts to remove Trump from the 2024 ballot, to use lawfare to bankrupt, to indict, to convict, and to jail him before the election. Democrats were mobilizing to find ways to stop the certification of the 2024 election should Trump win—pretty much what they had accused Trump of doing in 2020. The country might have been able to remain unchanged as it recovered from the revolutionary seeds that Obama has sewn over his eight years in office. It might have survived its national quarantine and lockdown. It could have endured the George Floyd riots and the mass racial hysteria that followed them. And it might have sustained the Trump Derangement Syndrome and Election Day insanity. But it was not able to overcome all four incitements and goads. And so, what had been “gradual” became “sudden.” The result is that America has never been the same since. If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato |
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 