The normalization of antisemitic terror we have witnessed among protestors since the October 7 attacks on Israel is a portentous landmark on the West’s road to civilizational degeneration. Every dimension of our socio-political order––all three branches of the federal government, and many blue-state governments; popular entertainment and high-brow culture; mainline churches; corporate boards and C-suites; national security and defense agencies, and education from K-12 to universities–– has been corrupted by illiberal, if not antihuman ideologies that undercut the foundations both of our political freedom and equality, and the morality and ethics that nourish both.
We’ve known for decades that our educational systems have been failing to educate the young, even as politics, social fads, and culture war propaganda have replaced foundational skills like reading, writing, basic science, critical thought, and history. More inimical to learning is the illiberal attacks on First Amendment rights to free speech and academic freedom, and the enforcement of a rigid orthodoxy that punishes and “cancels” those who challenge the party line. Such a regime stifles truth and replaces history with false narratives that serve autocratic agendas.
The protests in support of Hamas, antisemitism, and genocide show how ignorant of basic historical facts are many students attending our most prestigious universities. Consider the historical terms like “imperialism” and “colonialism” incessantly chanted like mantras. They are now stripped of their meaning and reduced to question-begging epithets ––“mind-blockers” and “thought-extinguishers,” as the great historian of Soviet mass murder Robert Conquest describes them, which serve “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.”
“Inflammation” is exactly the purpose of similar clichés like “genocide,” “settlers,” “famine,” “disproportionate,” “Palestinian homeland,” and all the other slogans and chants we’ve heard over the last eight months from the callow, self-righteous protestors. But it’s not just ignorance of history, but also moral idiocy that afflicts the “activists” siding with sadistic killers
And how grotesque is the lack of self-awareness among affluent “snowflake” undergrads who want to trespass, destroy, assault, and burn, and then demand they be fed, accommodated, and never required to be held accountable by the police, district attorneys, their universities, or future employers? They are the products of the same pathologies to which Sallust, the 1st century B.C. Roman historian, attributed the Roman Republic’s demise: “decadence and hubris—the natural dividends of prosperity.” Just as in Rome, the same cultural malignities now dominate our civilization.
Next, federal agencies such as the Department of Justice and FBI now regularly ignore and corrupt the 14th Amendment and its principles of equality under law and due process, the foundation of political equality and freedom. These agencies, especially their leadership, have sacrificed these principles in order to advance factional political interests.
Donald Trump’s astounding defeat of consummate insider Hillary Clinton began the assault on his presidency by the bipartisan political guild. The FBI was mobilized around the Russian collusion hoax, which had been exposed as a fraud even before the special counsel Robert Mueller began his investigation. The corporate media, a wholly owned subsidiary of Democrats Inc., churned out an endless, fictive narrative of Trump’s alleged crimes against “our democracy” and “norms.” No president in history, not even Richard Nixon, has ever had an administration willfully undermined and sabotaged.
Yet Biden’s manifest failures both at home and abroad, along with his obvious cognitive decline on top of his notorious lies and gaffes, began to show up in the polls as voters––including usually reliable voters like blacks and Latinos–– started defecting from the Donks. Worse for the president, his failure reminded voters of Donald Trump’s successes at energizing the economy and restoring America’s prestige after eight years of Obama’s apologies and appeasement.
So the media and progressives turbo-charged their double standards by upgrading them to a form of lawfare, one comprising Trump’s “crimes” so obviously manufactured that only a deeply corrupt federal judicial that could tolerate it. No tactic was too dirty for their witch-hunts: from ignoring statutes of limitations, to magically transforming misdemeanors into felonies; from resurrecting old canards like “election interference,” to calling witnesses like Stormy Daniels, who contributed nothing to making the prosecutor’s case other than providing cringingly salacious gossip for titillating the Trumpophobic media.
Hence the ongoing spectacle of several tinpot Inspector Javerts beclowning our judicial system and besmirching the Bill of Rights, all in political service to reelecting one of the most destructive presidents in American history.
Which brings us to the most important landmark on the road to decline, the Biden presidency itself. Both at home and abroad, Biden––or more accurately, the cabal of Edgar Bergens moving his mouth––has piled up failure after failure.
At home he has hampered our economic growth with hyperregulation, inflation-breeding runaway entitlement spending and wealth redistribution; put into place suicidal “green energy” policies like “renewable,” net-zero carbon energy and the abolition of the internal combustion engine, driving up the cost of energy with restrictions on developing new domestic supplies of cheap fossil fuels; promoted, facilitated, and celebrated unscientific transgender policies that have maimed and poisoned children and youngsters, scarring them for life; willfully created chaos on our southern border, allowing millions of unvetted, mostly young males to enter the country, many from regions whose regimes are our enemies; and has done nothing about the explosion of crime abetted by radical, anti-police prosecutors who have turned some of our biggest cities into scenes from dystopian movies like Road Warrior.
Bad as that litany of dysfunction is, it has been accompanied by equally egregious blunders abroad. He restarted and doubled-down on Obama’s feckless appeasement of Iran, sending the mullahs billions in cash that they are using to attack our interests in the region and those of our allies, even as they move relentlessly to possession of nuclear weapons. He precipitately left Iraq, leaving behind Afghan allies, 12 dead Americans, and billions in weapons, resulting in the Taliban once more hosting al Qaeda and other terrorist gangs. And he has ignored his duty as commander-in-chief by allowing the military to remain underfunded and deficient in manpower and materiel, and therefore assure our country is ready to meet the manifold challenges from autocratic regimes who want to supplant our global power and influence.
Yet all those foreign policy errors––and others from previous administrations––do not come close to Biden’s treatment of our important ally Israel. From the start of Hamas’ terror-war, Biden, despite his “ironclad” assurances of support, has second-guessed, criticized, undercut, and even kept from Israel critical intelligence regarding Hamas’ leaders. And most heinous of all, he has held back on delivering “smart bombs” that Israel needs to minimize civilian casualties––almost as though the administration considers more casualties as a way to pressure Israel to bend to Biden’s will.
Finally, this betrayal signals Israel’s and our enemies that they can count on Biden to keep Israel from neutralizing at last a terrorist gang that for decades has murdered her citizens, and bombarded her towns, cities, and fields with missiles and mortars.
Why? Why this betrayal of a liberal democracy that shares our beliefs in ordered freedom and human rights, in a region fraught with autocracy and tyranny hostile to our way of life and foundational beliefs? Politics and fear. Biden’s cratering poll numbers are making every constituency necessary for defeating Trump. Congressional anti-American hacks like the radical “Squad” must be appeased, along with the foreign students and home-grown poseurs roiling our universities with their morally moronic slogans and chants.
What the Biden regime and its political operators don’t consider is the severe damage Biden’s betrayal has done to our prestige and deterrent power, as allies wonder about our reliability as a partner, and our enemies calculate that we can be rolled, and bullied from securing and protecting our national security and interests.
Another four years of this disaster and we will discover the devastating cost of sacrificing our principles and virtues for a mess of political pottage.