By Victor Davis Hanson | The Center For American Greatness
1. Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air.
Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much.
Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at
least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid
back. Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of
annual GDP, our elites either believe permanent zero interest rates make the
cascading obligation irrelevant, or the larger the debt, the more likely we
will be forced to address needed income redistribution.
2. Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. Joe Biden took
an oath to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." But he
has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are
prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests,
prosecutions and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still
considered a law.
Crime rates do not necessarily matter. If someone is
carjacked, assaulted or shot, it can be understood to be as much the victim’s
fault as the perpetrator’s. Either the victim was too lax, uncaring and
insensitive, or he provoked his attacker.
How useful the crime is to the larger agendas of the left
determines whether a victim is really a victim, and the victimizer really a
victimizer.
3. Racialism is now acceptable. We are defined first by
our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American
commonality. The explicit exclusion of whites from college dorms, safe spaces
and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial. It is unspoken payback for
perceived past sins, or a type of "good" racism. Falsely being called
a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist.
4. The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. The
newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America’s founding and
history. Most citizens currently must follow quarantine rules and social
distancing, stay out of school and obey all the laws.
Yet those entering the United States illegally need not
follow such apparently superfluous COVID-19 rules. Their children should be
immediately schooled without worry of quarantine. Immigrants need not worry
about their illegal entry or residence in America. Our elites believe illegal entrants
more closely resemble the "founders" than do legal citizens, about
half of whom they consider irredeemable.
5. Most Americans should be treated as we would treat
little children. They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote. "Noble
lies" by our elites about COVID-19 rules are necessary to protect
"Neanderthals" from themselves.
Americans deserve relief from the stress of grades,
standardized testing and normative rules of school behavior. They still are
clueless about why it is good for them to pay far more for their gasoline,
heating and air conditioning.
6. Hypocrisy is passé. Virtue-signaling is alive. Climate
change activists fly on private jets. Social justice warriors live in gated
communities. Multibillionaire elitists pose as victims of sexism, racism and
homophobia. The elite need these exemptions to help the helpless. It is what
you say to lesser others about how to live, not how you yourself live, that
matters.
7. Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to
ending it. It is more humane to let thousands of homeless people live, eat,
defecate and use drugs on public streets and sidewalks than it is to
green-light affordable housing, mandate hospitalization for the mentally ill
and create sufficient public shelter areas.
8. McCarthyism is good. Destroying lives and careers for
incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers. Cancel culture and the Twitter
Reign of Terror provide needed deterrence.
Now that Americans know they are one wrong word, act or
look away from losing their livelihoods, they are more careful and will behave
in a more enlightened fashion. The social media guillotine is the humane,
scientific tool of the woke.
9. Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. Neither
statue-toppling, nor name-changing, nor the 1619 Project require any evidence
or historical knowledge. Heroes of the past were simple constructs.
Undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees reflect credentials, not
knowledge. The brand, not what created it, is all that matters.
10. Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and
larger than Christianity. Its priesthood outnumbers the clergy and exercises
far more power. Silicon Valley is the new Vatican, and Amazon, Apple, Facebook,
Google and Twitter are the new gospels.
Americans privately fear these rules while publicly
appearing to accept them. They still could be transitory and invite a reaction.
Or they are already near-permanent and institutionalized.
The answer determines whether a constitutional republic
continues as once envisioned, or warps into something never imagined by those
who created it.
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Victor
Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/radical-new-rules-changing-america-victor-davis-hanson
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America at the End of Empire
By Mark Tapson | FRONTPAGE Magazine
Ascendant China is hell-bent on world domination and
makes no apology for it. America, meanwhile, is suffering from decades of
accelerated, corrosive, Marxist subversion that has saddled us with a
power-lusting leftist regime, aided and abetted by an unofficial state news media;
a school system that has jettisoned rigorous education in favor of identity
politics indoctrination; a woke corporate culture showering hundreds of
millions of dollars on support for Critical Race training and on the communist
revolutionaries of Black Lives Matter; an obscenely decadent entertainment
industry (itself in thrall to Chinese influence) that peddles anti-Americanism,
anti-Christianity, anti-capitalism, and anti-white racism; and a politicized
military establishment prioritizing “gender equity” over warrior readiness.
In short, America (and the Western world more generally),
once the most prosperous and powerful civilization in history, is no longer
operating “from a position of strength.” It is, in fact, bleeding out from
self-inflicted wounds, and our enemies foreign and domestic smell the blood in
the water. Gatestone Institute Distinguished Senior Fellow Gordon Chang
believes Chinese leader Xi Jinping is confident in provoking a civilizational
war between East and West, because he feels “America is in terminal decline.”
Indeed, the Chinese state media are already openly celebrating the Alaska
confrontation as a decisive victory in that conflict.
…
The problem is “civilizational fatigue,” the concept that
at some point a grand world power – e.g. ancient Rome, 19th-century
England, America under a desiccated Joe Biden – peaks and then implodes
(“gradually and then suddenly,” as a Hemingway character once put it when asked
how he went bankrupt). The empire succumbs to lassitude, corruption, and moral
decadence, undone by its very prosperity and success. Having conquered the
world, the fire in its belly that powered it to the top cools to ash. It can no
longer muster the civilizational conviction and warrior spirit necessary to
keep the barbarians at the gates from swarming the battlements.
In our case, the barbarians – i.e., the
forces of anti-civilization – have been inside the gates for over half a
century, making their Long March through the institutions. We allowed their
Marxist poison and their postmodern anti-rationality to seep throughout our
schools and universities, and their false but seductive narratives to be
promoted in our news and entertainment programs, until they secured the culture
and corrupted the political landscape as well – so successfully that we
elected, twice, a President who denied American exceptionalism, explicitly
declared his agenda to “fundamentally transform” the country, and inspired his
followers to believe, "Yes, we can."
Meanwhile, the cultural corrosion continued, as
insidious, cancerous concepts like “whiteness,” “Critical Race Theory,” and
“gender fluidity” began metastasizing at light-speed throughout every
institution in America, inculcated in schoolchildren as young as
kindergartners.
Finally, those of us who love our heritage, our
Constitution, and our country rallied behind a President who called on us to
Make America Great Again. But it was too little, too late. The barbarians, who
had long since infiltrated and taken control of all the cultural structures of
society, launched a furious, violent resistance against the President, against
his supporters, against democracy, against history, against truth itself. They
seized political control and began the systematic marginalization of America’s
defenders as white supremacists (regardless of color) and domestic terrorists.
And now we find ourselves where the barbarians wanted us
all along: at the end of empire.
Is civilizational decline inevitable? If history is any
measure, then yes. Only the kingdom of God lasts forever. The question before
us now, though, is this: is America’s decline reversible?
The answer is unequivocally yes. Even in Donald Trump’s
brief White House tenure we saw America gathering momentum toward greatness
again after eight years of Barack Obama diminishing our leading role on the
world stage. We can do it again.
But it will take a courageous commitment from every
American patriot on every level: personal, local, national, even international.
We must recognize that the flame of American exceptionalism is in danger of
being snuffed out, that our God-given rights are being threatened; and once
gone, we will have no leverage with which to throw off the totalitarianism that
will fill the void.
If Americans (and the rest of the West) hope to restore
our former glory, we must begin by ceasing to be, as Bill Maher labeled us, a
nation of silly people. We must be as serious as our enemies. We must reignite
the fierce, uncompromising, give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death passion for
independence that drove our Founding Fathers and George Washington’s ragtag
army to persevere against an occupying power. We must ruthlessly reject the
evil ideologies that have subverted us, and begin re-instilling our
Judeo-Christian values, our love of country, our devotion to Constitutional
rights, and our zeal for liberty in the next generation.
This will be an uphill battle. We will face violent
leftist resistance, even more than we witnessed in 2020. But 74 million Trump
voters make a formidable army. Can we make America great again? Yes, we can.
CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ENTIRE ARTICLE.
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Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
