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In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture.
The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military. These symptoms of decay share common themes.
Our descent is self-induced; it is not a symptom of a foreign attack or subterfuge. Our erosion is not the result of poverty and want, but of leisure and excess. We are not suffering from existential crises of famine, plague, or the collapse of our grid and fuel sources. Prior, far poorer, and war-torn generations now seem far better off than what we are becoming.
What is happening to us is not due to an adherence to a too strict conservative tradition but is almost exclusively the wage of the progressive project.
In short, we are seeing fissures that America has not experienced in our cultural history since the Civil War. The radical Left apparently feels such chaos, anarchy, and nihilism are necessary to topple past norms and customs and thereby adhere to a socialist, equity agenda that no one in normal times would stomach.
Some of the decay is existential and fundamental; some anecdotal and illustrative. But either way, while decline came about gradually over decades, its sudden and abrupt chaos during the three years of Biden’s presidency has shocked Americans.
Financial Implosion
As long as interest rates were de facto zero, both parties ran up gargantuan debt. Now the national debt has hit $34 trillion. But two odd things have also happened under the Biden administration that are beginning to undermine the very existence of the U.S. financial system:
1) Interest rates have soared from de facto zero and are on a trajectory to 5.5%—meaning that the interest on the debt, in theory, in the not too distant future will require 20 percent of the annual budget, squeezing out both entitlements and defense.
2) Yet the upcoming rendezvous with economic Armageddon has not slowed a Biden administration intent on borrowing nearly $2 trillion in the current fiscal year.
The public is baffled: is the Left playing chicken with us? Is the strategy to “gorge the beast,” thereby demanding even higher federal taxes, which, combined with many state taxes, now exceed 50 percent of one’s income?
Is the goal massive “redistribution” by ensuring “equity” by gouging the middle class and rich? Or is the left’s goal more nihilistic: to force a remedy for insolvency by ensuring high inflation, renouncing government debt, or government appropriation of private capital?
Military Crises
Americans have lost deterrence abroad.
Confusion reigns among the public over why the Biden administration fled from Afghanistan, leaving behind billions of dollars of munitions and equipment in the hands of Taliban terrorists. Why did it allow a Chinese spy balloon to traverse the continental U.S. with impunity?
And why did Biden signal to Russia when preparing an invasion of Ukraine that our reaction would depend on the magnitude of Putin’s offensive? Why has military recruitment cratered, shorting the Pentagon of thousands of soldiers?
Why do Iranian proxies attack almost daily U.S. installations abroad and ships in the Red Sea, apparently without fear of reprisal? Why did Hamas slaughter Israelis on October 7? What explains our indifference or ennui?
Is the answer a deliberate effort to curb supposed American “arrogance” by once more leading from behind? Are we rebooting the Obama Administration’s bankrupt idea of empowering an Iranian crescent from Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza to ensure “creative tension” between Israel and the moderate Arabs and Persian-led theocratic Shiites?
Why do our officer classes rotate in and out of lucrative military consultantships, lobbying billets, and board membership on corporate defense contractors—as if their innate talents rather than their lifelong contacts with current serving procurement officers earned their exorbitant fees?
Why did our retired four stars with disdain violate the uniform code of military justice by serially and publicly trashing the commander in chief? Why has the Pentagon revolutionized the entire system of recruitment, promotions, and tenure in the armed forces by predicating them in large part on race, gender, and sexual orientation rather than merit or battlefield efficacy? Did we learn anything from the old Soviet commissariat system? Would we prefer to lose a war by promoting equity than win one by ensuring liberty?
Why did the top brass go after supposedly “insurrectionist” white males (who died at twice their demographics during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan) in the military, only to discover from their own internal investigations that no such cabal of “domestic terrorists” existed, and only to drive out thousands more of the maligned by stupidly requiring COVID vaccinations from those with naturally acquired immunity?
In sum, the U.S. will either undergo a post-Vietnam-like revolution in the military or, in late Roman imperial fashion, our armed forces will be unable to defend the interests or indeed, the very safety, of the U.S.
Race
Why, when so-called non-white ethnicities and races were achieving parity with or exceeding the majority population in per capita income and when racial intermarriage was commonplace, did we blow up the values of the civil rights movement and revert to precivilizational tribalism? Who were the sophists who convinced us that racially segregated dorms, safe spaces, and graduations, or using race as an arbiter of admissions and hiring, were not racist?
When did we lump together an entire cadre of diverse ancestries, ethnicities, religions, politics, classes, and values and dub them all “white,” and then smear them collectively in stereotypical fashion? When did we calibrate race as the chief determinative factor in our identities? Have we become premodern tribal people—feuding clans right out of the Norse sagas, ghosts of the Balkans nursing ancient grievances and hatreds? Since when in history has a nation’s “diversity” ever been preferable to its “unity”?
The Sexes
Did anyone in, say, 2004 believe that in just twenty years, the Left would try to mainstream the previously rare medical malady of gender dysphoria into a transgendered civil rights issue by insisting on three rather than two sexes?
Would anyone have believed that leftists, gays, and feminists would have done their best to destroy a half-century of female athletic achievement by allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports and thereby erase the record performances of three generations of women?
Would anyone have believed that a feminist and accomplished swimmer like Riley Gaines would be cornered, swarmed, threatened, and barricaded in at a university for the crime of daring to state the obvious: that transgendered women are still, in terms of their musculoskeletal physiques and frames, males and thereby have no business competing in women’s sports?
Would anyone have believed that a gay senate aide would have engaged in passive, unprotected sex in a public and hallowed Senate chamber, filmed in graphic detail his act of sodomy, had it circulated among friends and social media, and then, when outrage followed, claimed victimhood by accusing those offended of being homophobic toward him and his active homosexual partner?
Lawlessness
We are witnessing the steady erasure of jurisprudence, both civil and criminal. Does the law as we knew it a mere decade ago still exist? Massive looting with impunity is now largely exempt from justice in our major blue-state cities. In Compton, a van slams into a Mexican bakery as waiting crowds swarm, loot, and destroy the business. And for what? Some free pies and cakes? Or the nihilist delight in ruining the livelihood of a hardworking family business?
Such smash-and-grabs rob stores of billions of dollars in revenue each year. Can we even comprehend that employees and security guards are now ordered to stand down, as if the apprehension of such thieves might in some way seem illiberal or racist?
Does anyone even care that pro-Hamas protestors—many in America as guests on green cards and student visas—shouted support for the October 7 massacre of Jews, screamed for the destruction of Israel and the Jews in it, shut down the Manhattan and Golden Gate Bridges, defiled the Lincoln Memorial and White House gates, and disrupted Christmas celebrations in our major cities with complete exemption? Is storming the California legislature, and disrupting it in session, now a felony in the manner of those convicted after January 6, or do we have two sets of laws, dependent on ideology, race, and party affiliation?
In one of the most chilling videos in memory, Las Vegas Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus was recently violently attacked by an unshackled career felon defendant (with three prior violent felony convictions and facing additional new felony counts). The assailant, Deobra Redden, leaped over the justice’s bench with ease and began beating her and pulling her hair before two bailiffs, with great difficulty, managed to restrain him. Why was Redden out on parole given his violent record, and why was he not shackled given his toxic past? His self-admitted effort to kill the judge, his ability nearly to pull it off, and the record of past leniency accorded him are a commentary on a sick society.
But then again, in our major cities, George-Soros-subsidized prosecutors have all but destroyed civil society. They have been systematically releasing felons with violent criminal records on the same day they are arrested, freeing convicted felons early from prisons and jails, and sabotaging the law by arbitrary enforcement on the grounds that it is inherently either unfair or racist.
The post civilization civil bookend to that precivilizational subterfuge was a systematic legal effort, for the first time in American history, to remove in an election year the leading primary and general election candidate Donald Trump from various state ballots. The Soviet-like charge was that he was guilty of “insurrection,” a crime he has never been charged with, much less convicted of. Meanwhile, three state prosecutors and one special federal counsel—all leftists and some previously bragging in their own election campaigns of their intention to destroy Trump—have charged candidate Trump with an array of felonies. The vast majority of Americans agree Trump would never have been so charged had he just not sought to seek reelection—or had been a liberal Democrat.
Education
In ancient times, the President of the Harvard Corporation was a signature scholar and intellectual, befitting Harvard’s own self-regard as the world’s most preeminent university. No longer.
Now-resigned president Coleen Gay’s meteoric career was based on a flimsy record of a mere 11 articles—the majority of them plagiarized. Her entire career was fueled by the tired pretext that the privileged Gay was somehow deserving of special deference given her race and gender.
Confronted with such corruption, the Harvard Corporation, its legal team, and 700 faculty sought to downplay Gay’s intellectual theft. Indeed, they smeared her critics as racist—only then to deal with her new billet as a professor of Political Science with a long record of plagiarism that was exempt from the sort of punishments dealt out to students and faculty for less egregious defenses.
How did Ivy League degrees so quickly become mostly certifications of ideological and woke orthodoxy? Or is it worse than that? Does a Stanford history major or Yale literature graduate know anything, respectively, about the Civil War or Shakespeare’s plays? Do they even know that we, the public, know that they don’t know?
Was Elizabeth Warren really Harvard’s first law professor of color? Was Claudine Gay truly an impressive and respected scholar of political science? Are the governing members of the Harvard Corporation the nation’s best and brightest?
How in less than five years did our elite universities destroy meritocracy, abolish SAT requirements, require DEI oaths and pledges, and mirror the worst commissariat institutions of the old Warsaw Pact nations and Soviet Union? How and why these elite universities blew themselves up in a mere decade will baffle historians for decades to come.
The End of Sovereignty
The Biden administration has shattered federal immigration law, as some 10 million illegal entries will have crossed unlawfully and with impunity in the first Biden term—all by intent. The southern border is not merely porous; it no longer even exists.
Did the Left want new constituents? New entitlement recipients to grow government and raise taxes on the clingers and deplorables?
Did it want a larger DEI base to replace the steady exodus of non-whites from left-wing agendas? Does it shun sovereignty, preferring a global village without arbitrary borders? Do these utopians in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard similarly feel their own yards and grounds need no walls, no barriers, and no boundaries to deny the underprivileged their rights to enjoy what the predatory classes possess?
In this new America of ours, Joe Biden is hale and savvy, while Hunter did nothing wrong. Our heroes are Dylan Mulvaney, Gen. Rachel Levine, and the two Sams, Bankman-Fried and Brinton.
In today’s America, Karin Jean-Pierre is truthful, while Alejandro Mayorkas is honest. An innocent and saintly George Floyd was randomly murdered; his death proof of systemic police racism. And defunding the police brought calm and quiet, in the way our border is secure and the homeless are mere victims.
Dr. Jill is an impressive academic. Oprah and LeBron are the downtrodden and victimized. Gen. Mark Milley is a brave maverick, and so is Adam Schiff. The flight from Afghanistan marked a brilliantly organized retreat.
The Chinese balloon really did not take too many pictures of sensitive areas. January 6 was an armed insurrection, preplanned by fiery conspirators and revolutionaries. Ashli Babbitt deserved to be blasted in the neck for entering a broken window.
Kamala Harris is a wordsmith. Russian collusion really happened. So did Russian laptop disinformation. Christopher Steele’s dossier was mostly true, in the fashion of Claudine Gay’s dissertation and Barack Obama’s memoir. And 51 former intelligence authorities bravely came forward to offer their expertise in certifying that Hunter’s laptop was cooked up in Moscow.
With all this, what do we think the Iranians, Putin’s Russians, the communist Chinese, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas now think of the United States?
That we are the nation that won World War II or fled from Afghanistan? Did the eight million who broke our laws and simply walked across our border respect us, fear us, admire us, or come here to manipulate and use us? Did Hamas appreciate the hundreds of millions of dollars we gave them, in the same way Iran was friendlier after we lifted the sanctions?
In sum, American civilization has been turned upside down, and we have a rendezvous soon with the once unthinkable and unimaginable.
I am an older fellow now, but I do know that if anyone had told me that what we have now was in our future, I would have judged them nuts.
The tranny tyranny alone is enough to make me think America has gone insane, and Hanson notes so many crazy things going on now that I once thought would be impossible that I have no hope for our future.
This is post America and anybody who thinks otherwise is fooling himself. I’m surrounded by retards and they’re bringing me down with them.
Yes, sir. As you and I probably are generational partners, I see what you see.
From decency to the deplorable is on our doorstep. VDH is giving us a wake
up call. Unfortunately, there is a fast infecting virus running rampant in our society.
The name of that virus is Apathy.
And also fear of a tyrannical all watching vicious government. Is it so different than Nazis or Hamas?
Err, Ayn Rand knew this would happen, as depicted in her novel “Atlas Shrugged.”
Yeah, but her story had some intelligent and talented heroes ready to restore the order after the collapse. I don’t see anybody like that around.
As usual for Victor, he succinctly catalogued our country’s current condition. None of this is news. Our Republic is being devoured by narcissistic cowards with no goal but self aggrandizement perpetuated by a dumbed down public locked into an internet and cultural bread and circuses downward spiral. Our founders designed our Republic for a citizenry that seems to no longer exist. We’ve replaced faith in God with man. Always a bad idea.
Some may not have heard this quote….
“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.”
― D.H. Lawrence
The rot at Harvard started decades ago. It’s abundantly clear to me that Barack Obama didn’t earn a Harvard law degree or an undergraduate degree at Columbia University.
The evil of Harvard was a cover up for years. They were building a secret army of Marxists to take over the institution. How does one fight back when they are kept in the dark? Exactly.
And, I never understood all the talk about how brilliant Zero is supposed to be. Whenever he spoke he came across as an idiot to me
“ Is the goal massive “redistribution” by ensuring “equity” by gouging the middle class and rich? ”
Yes and it is in clear view within the UN 17 sustainable development goals being implemented through Agenda 2030, openly calling for depopulation of the Western world.
Their previous Agenda 2021 culminated with the creation and deliberate release of covid and the deadly vaccine mandates.
Defund the UN now!!!!
Yes!
Watch Rosa Koires videos about Agenda 21 before they’re all removed from utube etc! The elites have told us what they want to do and are currently in the process of doing it to us! Please watch!
I respect and admire Victor Hansen and believe he is a true Christian and statesman. But the bottom line answer to the horrible state we are in, is found in Psalm 2:
“Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.”
He who sits in the heaven laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. Then He will speak to them in His wrath, and terrify them in His fury, saying, “As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill……….You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces…..”
God did not promise that America would never fall. The only nations that prosper are the ones “whose God is the Lord.” Psalm 33:12
Victor, I have been thinking the same thing, I am afraid you are right. I fear there is an apocalyptic future for us.
Heard a quote from Winston Churchill last night… and it seems quite apropos given VDH’s concise cataloging of this collapse:
“The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.”
The “virtuous” are not merely cannon fodder in this asymmetric “unrestricted warfare” that the Left is waging, but facilitators. Think on the virtue of Chamberlain’s naiveté.
Bye Bye American Pie.
The filthy Democrats are leading the charge that’s destroying America.
America was great because she was good. But America is no longer great, because she has ceased to be good. America has become a corrupt and decadent nation, and the biggest exporter of bad ideas.
We were “good” becuz of our Judeo/Christian background from our founders.
The more we move away from our Christian roots, the more chaos is the norm.
And that explains the gleeful crowd calls to gen o cide all Jewish human beings. We represent the roots they long to extract.
But don’t feel left out.
You’re next.
Disney, Porn, LGBTQ+ confusion and backward baseball hats come to mind . . .
Not all our ”descent is self-induced”. For decades the Soviet Union flooded American society with Stalin’s agents who mostly weren’t here to steal secrets but to spread leftist influence in journalism, academia, and Hollywood. Even after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union they bore fruit beyond their wildest dreams. Communist China has now picked up the torch and allowed their allies in the Democratic Party to steal a presidential election. The American people didn’t choose that; we voted against it by the tens af millions, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the fraud machine. No one can any longer doubt that the Covid plague was a deliberate Chinese assault on our country, a biological weapon used to terrorize our citizens and allow a Democrat Party takeover they could never have achieved by the ballot box.
I’m in my seventies and this is not the same country I get up in. It’s not even the same country of five years ago.
The American people have literally been replaced by another.
Real proof is their screaming: + = -, 1 = 2, mathematics is racist, male = female, gender is a social construct, secularism = Christianity, FJB won the election of 2020.
There’s a theory within the realm of military war theory that is entitled “Unrestricted Warfare”… also known as, Omni-Directional Warfare.
It was first published around the 1999 timeframe by China’s People’s Liberation Army. I’ve made the analogy of… think of a disco ball, and every shaft of light is a different form of warfare.
One beam is economic warfare, another media warfare, diplomatic warfare, cyber warfare, psychological warfare, trade warfare, sanctions warfare, the list is truly limited by the imagination.
A key component is to keep all of these beams of warfare occurring just below the “media horizon” so as to ensure the story gets lost in the ambient noise of current events, playing upon their knowledge of the “decadent West’s ‘ limited attention span and their adolescent irrelevances.
I think we may soon find out the covid plague was not a solely Chinese endeavor. Mr. Fauci and his ghouls played a larger part in the creation of the virus than we now know. The Wuhan “lab leak” may have been an accident but what was going on inside was not. Hopefully the truth will come out about just what Fauci and company were really up to and heads will roll.
The scientists are so smart that they are creating the viruses that will kill them too.
In a randomly ordered universe one can assume that these calamities aren’t all occurring at the same time as a coincidence. As the Marxists say, it is no accident. The reason for all these things is that the Left has achieved sufficient institutional power to push these destructive policies are are doing so because the Left is revolutionary and wishes to destroy our society. The column asks, is the Left playing chicken with us? No. It is trying to collapse our economy by insane levels of spending while, at the same time, bringing in millions of illegals who will forever be a drain on our resources. Think of it as Cloward-Piven 2 since there just weren’t enough domestic welfare recipients to collapse the economic system and result in the population clamoring for socialism as Cloward-Piven 1 predicted. Objectively, none of the policies listed in the column are beneficial to the U.S. but are, instead, designed to destroy it but by bit. And many in our too uninformed, incurious, gullible, and soft minded population don’t seem to realize it. They’ve been grooved to be non-judgemental and accept these changes with passivity and compliance believing that, at the worst, the people behind these policies are well-intentioned but misguided when they are neither. And so it goes.
Excellent input.
The Left has always had a disdain for the US military, ergo, they NEVER study military history.
They also have a disdain for the field of Western Economics as seen by their self-righteous ignorance of the Free Market, oblivious of their self-imposed blinders to the true cost Freedom.
There is an underlying method to this madness, and a purpose: human extinction.
I agree: Malthusian and Darwinist mindset of the instigators is largely to blame.
Claudine Gay, not Coleen
Claudine not gay, but gay. The left is never happy.
The photo at the top of this article tells what America will look like as millions join the homeless.
This is my last post as I will be shutting down the internet at the end of the day.
Very sad for the UK, the best friend America has ever had despite what Biden says, to see the way the Biden/ OBAMA regime has reduced the status of America
powerful indictment of leftist ideology / culture.
he would make a great speech writer for Trump
all that is necessary is remarking on how to correct these unnatural and odious cultural artifacts
that should also be easy for this whirlwind – like comprehensive mind
Welcome to a world system that is getting what’s it’s always wanted, a world without the accountability of a Holy God. Only, an powerful act of God can save us from the wrath to come.
Oh wait, God already did that over 2000 years ago by sending His son, Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World, the Savior of the soul. Come to Him, all you who are burdened and heavy laden and He will give you rest. Come now.
I sigh with regret, as I consider that Mr. Hanson is but another voice in the desert crying out. His observations are completely accurate of course, but I wonder how far his words reach. I hope that somewhere out there, we have enough learned men and women who can pick where the original Founders left off. Finding the next Thomas Paine might be a good place to start.
By any metric American civilization is on the rocks.
On the rocks indeed or better yet “hitting an iceberg” . Here’s a thought no one wants to ponder. If we happen to allow (through inactivity or lack of useful response) another stolen election, that is the iceberg.that sinks the ship.
Maybe an asteroid will upset the applecart… If it’s not TOO big, it’ll be written off as a localized incident.
Well, the fissures are actually unprecedented and were not nearly so bad before and during the Civil War. We disagreed about slavery then (with all the machinations to defend it), but other than that, we fundamentally shared the same values. Witness the Confederacy’s Constitution, which fundamentally differed from the U.S. Constitution only in that it called out slavery. Does anyone not believe that if the Left and Right went their separate ways and had their own two countries, that the Right would retain the current Constitution and the Left would create one unrecognizable to Americans? The two sides today share no values. We have irreconcilable differences. We largely were able to reconcile after the Civil War once slavery was ended, although there was a long, lingering fight over civil right by the atavistic rear guard. The resolution of today’s schism will not be nearly as simple.
The current state of America is the triumphant product of the successful completion of the long march through the institutions by Marxists. America’s collapse is assured barring an unforeseen force acting on an object in motion.
….I do not like to correct, but many, MANY RINOs are a large part of the problem.
I do not need to name them. You know who they are.
Today I regret my votes for RINO Ryan.
Electing Democrats has consequences.
We are like Israel of the Old Testament.
When citizens of a proud and prosperous nation say “no” to God and turn to their own idols, they lose EVERYTHING including common sense and civil peace.
There are no “moderate” Arabs, nor Muslims.