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In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence—the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.
With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor—obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.
The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.
After getting elected through temporarily pivoting to racial ecumenicalism and pseudo-calls for unity, they reverted to form and governed by dividing the country. And then the two left the White House as soon-to-be mansion living, mega-rich elites, cashing in on the fears they had inculcated over the prior eight years.
To push through the accompanying unpopular agendas of an open border, mandatory wind and solar energy, racial essentialism, and the weaponization of the state, Obama had begun demonizing his opponents and the country in general: America was an unexceptional place. Cops were racist. “Clingers” of the Midwest were hopelessly ignorant and prejudiced. Only fundamental socialist transformation could salvage a historically oppressive, immoral, and racist nation.
The people finally rebelled at such preposterousness. Obama lost his party some 1,400 local and state offices during his tenure, along with both houses of Congress. His presidency was characterized by his own polarizing mediocrity. His one legacy was Obamacare, the veritable destruction of the entire system of a once workable health insurance, of the hallowed doctor-patient relationship, and of former easy access to competent specialists.
Yet Obama’s unfufilled ambitions set the stage for the Biden administration—staffed heavily with Obama veterans—to complete the revolutionary transformation of the Democratic Party and country.
It was ironic that while Obama was acknowledged as young and charismatic, nonetheless a cognitively challenged, past plagiarist, fabulist, and utterly corrupt Joe Biden was far more effective in ramming through a socialist woke agenda and altering the very way Americans vote and conduct their legal system.
Stranger still, Biden accomplished this subversion of traditional America while debilitated and often mentally inert—along with being mired in a bribery and influence-peddling scandal that may ultimately confirm that he easily was the most corrupt president to hold office in U.S. history.
How was all this possible?
Covid had allowed the unwell Biden to run a surrogate campaign from his basement as he outsourced his politicking to a corrupt media.
Senility proved a godsend for Biden. His cognitive disabilities masked his newfound radicalism and long-accustomed incompetence. Unlike his past failed campaigns, the lockdowns allowed Biden to be rarely seen or heard—and thus as much liked in the abstract as he had previously been disliked in the concrete.
His handlers, the Obamas, and the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren radical Democrats, saw Biden’s half-century pretense as a gladhander—good ole Joe Biden from Scranton—as the perfect delivery system to funnel their own otherwise-unpopular leftwing agendas. In sum, via the listless Biden, they sought to change the very way America used to work.
And what a revolution Biden’s puppeteers have unleashed in less than three years.
They launched a base attack on the American legal system. Supreme Court judges are libeled, their houses swarmed, and their lives threatened with impunity. The Left promised to pack the court or to ignore any decision it resents. The media runs hit pieces on any conservative justice deemed too influential. The prior Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer whipped up a mob outside the court’s doors, and threatened two justices by name. As Schumer presciently put it, they would soon “reap the whirlwind” of what they supposedly had sowed and thus would have no idea what was about to “hit” them.
Under the pretense of Covid fears, balloting went from 70 percent participation on election day in most states to a mere 30 percent. Yet the rates of properly rejected illegal or improper ballots often dived by a magnitude of ten.
Assaults now followed on hallowed processes, laws, customs, and institutions—the Senate filibuster, the 50-state union, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, Election Day, and voter IDs.
Under Biden, the revolution had institutionalized first-term impeachment, the trial of an ex-president while a private citizen, and the indictment of a chief political rival and ex-president on trumped up charges by local and federal prosecutors—all to destroy a political rival and alter the 2024 election cycle.
Biden destroyed the southern border—literally. Eight million entered illegally—no background checks, no green cards, no proof of vaccinations. America will be dealing with the consequences for decades. Mexico was delighted, receiving some $60 million in annual remittances, while the cartels were empowered to ship enough fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year.
“Modern monetary theory,” the Leftist absurdity that printing money ensures prosperity, followed. It has nearly bankrupted the country, unleashed wild inflation, and resulted in the highest interest rates in a quarter-century. Middle-class wages fell further behind as a doddering Biden praised his disastrous “Bidenomics.”
Biden warred on fossil fuels, cancelling federal leases and pipelines, jawboning lending agencies to defund fracking, demonizing state-of-the-art, clean-burning cars, and putting vast areas of oil- and gas-rich federals lands off-limits to drilling.
When gas prices predictably doubled under Biden and the 2022 midterms approached, he tried temporarily to lease out a few new fields, to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and to beg the Saudis, and our enemies, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, and the Russians, to pump more oil and gas that Biden himself would not. All this was a pathetic ruse to temporarily lower gas prices before the mid-term elections.
Biden abandoned Afghanistan, leaving the largest trove of military equipment behind in U.S. military history, along with thousands of loyal Afghans and pro-American contractors.
Biden insulted the parents of the 13 Marines blown up in this worst U.S. military debacle since Pearl Harbor. He lied to the parents of the dead that he too lost a son in the Iraq war, and when among them later impatiently checked his watch as he seemed bored with the commemoration of the fallen—and made no effort to hide his sense that the ceremony was tedious to him.
Vladimir Putin summed up the Afghan debacle—and Biden’s nonchalant remark that he wouldn’t react strongly to a “minor” invasion of Ukraine if it were minor—as a green light to invade Ukraine.
When Biden did awaken, his first reaction was an offer to fly the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the country as soon as possible. What has followed proved the greatest European killing ground since the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge, albeit one that has now fossilized into a Verdun-like quagmire that is draining American military supply stocks and killing a half-million Ukrainians and Russians.
Suddenly, there are three genders, not two. Women’s sports have been wrecked by biological men competing as women, destroying a half-century of female athletic achievement. Young girls in locker rooms, co-eds in sororities, and women in prison must dress and shower with biological men transitioning to women by assertion.
There is no longer a commitment to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union is a woke, intolerant group trying to ban free expression under the pretense of fighting “hate” speech and “disinformation.”
The Left has revived McCarthyite loyal oaths straight out of the 1950s, forcing professors, job applicants, and students applying for college to pledge their commitment to “diversity” as a requisite for hiring, admittance, or promotion. Diversity is our era’s version of the Jacobins’ “Cult of Reason.”
Race relations hit a 50-year nadir. Joe Biden has a long history of racist insults and putdowns. And now as apparent penance, he has reinvented himself as a reverse racial provocateur, spouting nonsense about white supremacy, exploiting shootings or hyping racial tensions to ensure that an increasingly disgusted black electorate does not leave the new Democratic Party.
The military has adopted wokeism, oblivious that it has eroded meritocracy in the ranks and slashed military recruitment. It is underfunded, wracked by internal suspicion, loss of morale and ginned up racial and gender animosity. Its supply stocks are drained. Arms productions is snail-like, and generalship is seen as a revolving door to corporate defense contractor board riches.
Big-city Democratic district attorneys subverted the criminal justice system, destroyed law enforcement deterrence, and unleashed a record crime wave. Did they wish to create anarchy as protest against the normal, or were they Jokerist nihilists who delighted in sowing ruin for ruin’s sake?
Radical racial activists, with Democrat endorsement, demand polarizing racial reparations. The louder the demands, the quieter they remain about smash-and-grab looting, carjacking, and the swarming of malls by disproportionally black teens—even as black-on-black urban murders reach record proportions.
In response, Biden tried to exploit the growing tensions by spouting lies that “white supremacy” and “white privilege” fuel such racial unrest—even as his ill-gotten gains, past record of racist demagoguery and resulting lucre and mansions appear the epitome of his own so-called white privilege.
This litany of disasters could be vastly expanded, but more interesting is the why of it all?
What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism. The border is not porous but nonexistent. Mass looting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences. Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must. The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become precivilizational—there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.
The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade. Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.
Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.
In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist. Nothing escapes it—not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.
The operating principle is either to allow or to engineer things to become so atrocious in everyday American life—the inability to afford food and fuel, the inability to walk safely in daylight in our major cities, the inability to afford to drive as one pleases, the inability to obtain or pay back a high interest loan—that the government can absorb the private sector and begin regimenting the masses along elite dictates. The more the people tire of the leftist agenda, the more its architects furiously seek to implement it, hoping that their institutional and cultural control can do what ballots cannot.
We could variously characterize their efforts as destroying the nation to save it, or burning it down to start over, or fundamentally transforming America into something never envisioned by the Founders.
Will their upheaval succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.
If you want to know what’s going on out there, start by reading VDH. My advice to young friends.
If you want to understand what’s going on start reading Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff.
Read “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom In America”.
The upheaval is working so far. If by fucking over the country is considered working
The bad guys are winning.
Whoever down voted me sucks demon dicks, On fire.
How does that taste? Like a campfire hot dog?
Based on the number of down votes, it is apparent that the inhabitants of America do not deserve their birthright, and the country is doomed. Too few grasp the philosophy that gave rise to the greatest country ever. The vast majority, whether left, right, or other, hold that self-sacrifice is the ultimate virtue. Sacrifice to others or sacrifice to a god; makes no difference. When that is your base philosophy, one is defenseless against the onslaught of the drooling beast currently destroying the country. They have no answer; only gradations of the same, poor philosophy that has plagued civilized man since time immemorial.
Thank you.
In the end if Americans wish to survive and flourish Ayn Rand and her philosophy will be there waiting for them.
They have no idea how historical her philosophy is, what a paradigm-shift it offers them, and how benevolent and beneficent for them it actually is. If America survives it will be ultimately because of her philosophy.
As Ms. Rand so perceptively and accurately said, “In the history of mankind it is EARLIER than we think”.
“America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal….
From her start, America was torn by the clash of her political system with the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.” – Ayn Rand
Did a Bolshevik Communist Dem sneak in here? Or is this just blatently confusing to read? I spent 44 loved years in our “Free Enterprise” system of life. The word “Capitalism” is used far more by Communist haters than by real Americans. One seldom succeeds life-long in our Free Enterprise business world without ‘altruism” i.e. without a clean record of honesty and integrity which is the soul of “caring for others.” The most effective transaction is always the one in which the buyer and seller both achieve what they most want and move on happy and with trust.
I have news for you. The farther we move past the blip in history that was Objectivism and Ayn Rand the harder it will be for you to be successful.
No one wants to read that incomprehensible twaddle. We have better things to do like, well trying to make it to the next election, or buy food not made with bugs.
Why did this get upvotes when it is nothing but an echo of THX? And since when did Ayn Rand create “the philosophy that gave rise to the greatest country ever”?
…when she started using the word “altruism” in every sentence.
To James Keir Baughman,
Altruism does not mean “a clean record of honesty and integrity”. Nor does it mean “caring for others”.
The MORAL purpose of Laissez-Faire Capitalism is NOT caring for others but the achievement of personal, individual, happiness. Loving and caring for DESERVING others is ABSOLUTELY a very important part of a man’s happiness but before you can love another person you must first love yourself, before you can care for others you must care for yourself.
Altruism actually means that you are a sacrificial animal to be sacrificed to others. Altruism is the moral basis of communism and Nazism. The individual must be sacrificed to society or the Aryan Race. The individual has no right to exist for his own sake but only as a sacrificial animal for others.
“The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve “the common good.” It is true that capitalism does—if that catch-phrase has any meaning—but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.” – Ayn Rand
“Ayn Rand – Why Altruism is Evil”
Oh God, not another homework assignment.
Well, at least we didn’t get a longwinded post. But with all of the spam posts you have done over the years I think we have already been exposed to Objectivist propaganda to last a lifetime.
Is there a vaccine for that?
What is that? VDH? Please let us know.
I don’t know if anybody is smarter and more alert to what’s going on in our country and world than Victor Davis Hanson. Thank God and goodness for him and his writing. One of the smartest guys on the planet. Thank you sir.
Great picture – the 2023 version of the three stooges.
Moe (Obama) should be in the middle.
I would add the act of demonitizing people for their speaking out truths and opinions that don’t dovetail with official narratives. Locking bank accounts and censure of social media by FBI pressure
Recognizing the failure of the vaccines, inner city criminality, asserting 2 genders can get you shut down by the powers that be.
You were careful to minimize the vote fraud of 2020. Given the behavior of the leaders you describe, why suggest the American people voted for this (for Biden or some say Obama term 3)? They did not.
This all-all occurred and continues because of vote fraud. Given a fair vote we might stand a chance. Maybe.
Look at the bigger picture, not enough Americans care intensely enough about the vote fraud of 2020 to stand up and form a revolution. Because a revolution is what is needed not simply an election. The indifference and apathy would be shocking to the Founders’ generation.
A republic of freedom if you can keep it? Well, Americans no longer have the will to keep it. They haven’t had the will to keep it for over a hundred years. Piecemeal and gradually, they have given freedom up. Why?
Freedom demands the responsibility of self-reliance, paying your own way, carrying your own weight, paying your own bills out of your own pocket. Paying yourself, through hard work, for everything you need and everything you want.
Not even the conservatives have the will for self-reliance. If you were to take all the conservatives in America and put them in Florida, let’s say, and Florida seceded, the conservatives would not have the will to get rid of the government safety net. Things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, free government schools, etc. And the government safety net IS socialism in embryonic form.
Once you accept the anti-freedom, anti-self-reliance, government safety net, the rest is only a matter of time, the cancer of socialism will grow.
Amazing! A comment (and a sensible one at that) that doesn’t mention Alice O’Connor! Maybe those downvotes are having some effect.
Gee another uplifting message from the Master of Political Disaster on how horrible we are. And for you it really doesn’t matter who’s in office.
You obviously don’t get out much do you. Well, you do live in Liberal Socialist heaven NYC. How could you possibly know what middle America thinks or feels.
He has a bit of a point with his pessimism. Every red line imaginable has been crossed by the Left in America, and all the gun owners haven’t even considered using them yet. The 2nd amendment interpreted to mean only personal ownership of arms doesn’t seem to provide much of a threat to today’s tyrants, although they would definitely like to get rid of that also. What about that part about a ‘militia’?
It matters not to me what he says about anything. He is relentlessly negative about everything. He thinks he is superior because he thinks he is a philosopher, because he has read a few books. And he hates everyone who believes in God.
His religion is Objectivism and his god is Ayn Rand.
“After getting elected through temporarily pivoting to racial ecumenicalism and pseudo-calls for unity”
How about “born-again” religiosity? Does anyone even remember that Obama’s campaign speeches in 2008 were full of references to God, whom he immediately forgot about after the election.
What the Left is Doing to Our Country and it’s citizens is punishment. These people are extremely angry and have acquired the power to finally lash out in a fit of anger and exact pain and a punishment against the country and the people they hate so much. This is a scorched earth apoplectic temper tantrum to burn the country and it’s people down permanently. This is the coup de grâce.
You have hit the nail on the head. This is exactly what happens when people who hate themselves every time they look in the mirror acquire power and control. The only thing they have to share is their hatred, so they “stand united against hate.” If it weren’t so tragic it would be comical.
Its not a temper tantrum, it’s POLICY ; to tear down and build again from ground zero : GERMINAL !
re: the article picture: Perp Walk?
As far as “beginning to wake” it would be helpful for personalities to speak more of the uniparty. Non political people think of republicans as comprised of the politicians & the voters. They are not the same which is why the MAGA movement happened. The republican voters see 90% of the republican politicians as uniparty & we’re tired of it. The pundits ask why the congress & senate aren’t pushing back & actually do something of consequence? But to MAGA it’s obvious, they want the same outcome as the democrats. I believe it is crucial to make this connection known.
I blame our media and the American people. Most Americans don’t have any knowledge or appreciation of what is going on in this country. The great majority say they don’t trust the media but still take their opinions from it even though it has obviously become just an adjunct of the Democrat Party. They have available the greatest invention for the dissemination of information in human history and, instead of taking any time to research alternative facts and viewpoint, they use it as a platform on which to post photos of their lunch and view games and pornography. This cannot and will not turn out well.
I once posted a photo of my breakfast years ago when I used Facebook. Don’t ask me why people post pictures of their food. I did it though.
Once.
It’s annoying.
Bread and circuses. The fed govt will continue to go trillions of dollars into debt to prop up the lifestyles of the oblivious. We’re long past the point where our consumer demands have surpassed our production capabilities so govt subsidies make up the difference. (Student loan forgiveness, reparations, govt health care, etc.) The “working class” will continue to dwindle as more people throw in the towel, take the black pill and join the welfare lines. “Democratic Socialism” is just around the corner. It’s at that point where we will “own nothing and be happy”, rugged individualism will be a fading memory and the Constitution deemed a failed experiment.
The leftists scum suckers who work for the M.S. Media then Hollywood with leftists Directors like Stone, Moore, Weinstein(Now in Prison)and leftists leaning celebrities as well
The Democrat agenda is furthered by Cloward-Piven strategies. Overburden, then collapse the system. Then, like the evil Fabians, remold the Earth to their twisted view of the way things should be. The result is what Hanson has so astutely outlined. What to do about it? Therein lies the rub.
Ever since I first heard about Cloward-Piven (maybe 10-15 yrs ago), I have been pointing out that a collapse, while certainly painful and difficult for all, gives the opportunity to both or all sides to try to rebuild in their own way. The Left shouldn’t be so certain that they will be in charge after everything falls apart (especially since they are mostly the non-productive, impractical talkers rather than the doers.)
Actually it’s not what the left did it what the churches of America did. They were supposed to stand watch against Roman Catholicism (Abraham Lincoln knew that) they failed in their duty as watchmen and the devil came in hence the liberals etc.
You’re not by any chance anti-Catholic, are you? It ain’t the religions, dearie! Obammy could care less about Christendom; pretty much all of its followers feel the same. They don’t care about Judaism, either; just check their position on Israel! So what religions are left! Work on it a few seconds!
I know my history with the Dark Ages and I know my Bible. And I go with the truth remember the devil only has power if it’s given to him. Otherwise he is a defeated foe. Calvary will always be my song of praise not religion.
The new liberal world order won’t be a democratic republic. The D stand’s for Dictatorship.
Of course they didn’t vaccinate the illegals. Someone will need to be well enough to work the unskilled jobs in the Woke Utopia that will resemble every other slave camp of history–only this time biometrical monitored.
The March of the Left to destroy this Nation will be complete when the stupid support of a Non- NATO Country will have led to MAD by a Therm-Nuclear WAR. Caused by the Evil Sades who are on the Left and would rather Burn the World to a Cinder than relinquish one I-oata of Power! Well the Dead sang it right. ” And the kids just dance and shake their bones, as Ashes, Ashes all fall the down.”…