There is more than an average share of discontent brewing from sea to shining sea as ever more Americans get the sense that their country, which has been pivotal to ensuring global security, stands on the edge of a cliff. Many comfort themselves by looking at other pivotal moments in our history where the country’s future was in doubt right before the ship was righted. But, due to a confluence of factors, it is hard to imagine America bouncing back.
There are four problems that, if not reversed soon, will lead to collapse, and America will fall.
1. The most obvious problem is out-of-control government spending. The interest on the national debt is pushing toward a cool trillion dollars, clocking in at $659 billion for fiscal 2022, gobbling up ever more American tax dollars. While wise politicians should be sobered by that number, they instead are pushing the ship to ludicrous speed in search of Mad Max. It is forcing ever higher deficit spending since it is mathematically impossible to bring in enough tax revenue to buy off voting blocs, meaning that it will skyrocket in the years ahead. It’s a serious problem that demands serious politicians in both parties. But you first need a serious electorate, something in short supply these days. The “ask not what your country can do for you” ethos of yesterday has transformed into the “give us more free stuff and we’ll take some reparations on the side” grievance ethos of today. America’s political leadership, voted in by an electorate addicted to handouts, will take the approach of Belshazzar, the Babylonian king who was partying even as the armies of doom were at the gates. What’s the tipping point? Few of our leaders seem to care. I suppose that when collapse comes, we can at least take great comfort in the fact that we paid for the retirements of the charmingly corrupt Ukrainian cocktail class.
2. So how did we get to this state where solutions seem impossible? That’s where the second trend comes in, which is the complete takeover of our institutions by real radicals, not the pretend kind that the Mitt Cheneys of this world see behind every rock.
The core of this problem was the complete fall of the American university, which has been in motion for decades. All institutional rot flows from that. The teachers who are radicalizing America’s kids, the Pravda press who control the narrative, the social media kingpins kicking up a pining among our youth for Bin Laden, the politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats, writers, publishers, and industry leaders all have one thing in common: they were indoctrinated and radicalized in American universities.
We’ve reached an interesting point in our history where Americans are far more likely to be intelligent, wise, and self-controlled if they never set foot in an American university. Once the university system fell and started cranking out generations of people who see the world only through an oppressor versus oppressed lens, the other institutions toppled like dominoes. Why study something useless like math when you can marinate in classes focused on whom you should resent and hate the most?When a nation faces tough times, it relies on its norms and institutions to pull it out of the nosedive. But most of our institutions have reached a point from which they cannot be saved, and, sadly, we aren’t going to adapt Ripley’s advice from Aliens and nuke them from orbit since it is the only way to be sure.But we should starve them of resources at every opportunity.
3. A big part of why these institutions stand secure in their corruption and toxic missions is the lack of common values and decency within America today. We can all see what is happening on the surface since it is largely happening out in the open at this point. But the spiritual condition that underpins it is a deeper concern. We are suffering from a societal lack of respect for life and from an inability to see a common humanity within our fellow citizens. These Jewish and Christian spiritual values are what allowed us to see other people as neighbors instead of enemies. The collapse of those values is what enables a gang of fifteen boys to take joy in beating someone to death.
The recent elections were somewhat instructive as to where we are as a nation — not because of who won, but due to how they did it.In the weeks leading up to the election, there was a never-ending parade of commercials in my home state of Virginia featuring Democrats extolling the wonderful glories of abortion. They could have replaced the “D” with an “A” after their names because they ran as the abortion party.It was the only issue they ran on, the one value to rule them all. And the electorate embraced many of them for it. It is already a certainty that it will be the one issue that Democrats run on in 2024.When it comes to basic societal values, diversity is not our strength.
Our once common values, even if we sometimes failed to live up to them, were enshrined in our founding documents and formed the foundation of our society. That foundation has now been shattered, and we are left with nothing that binds us together.Remove agreed upon norms of decency that are expected of everyone, and you end up with Lord of the Flies, or the latest “mostly peaceful” fiery protest du jour by the lovely lemmings who make up the core of the Democrat party, or what passes for San Francisco these days.
4. So what would an American collapse leave behind? That should be more obvious now than perhaps it was before the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7. Most of Europe is falling to Islam and is too far gone to reverse course. Death-spiral birth rates among native Europeans combined with out-of-control migration from the Islamic world has led Europe to where it is today: a continent full of countries whose policies will increasingly reflect its population. While the blatant antisemitism is on full display for all to see, it’s going to get a lot worse, to the point where anyone who is not willing to convert to Islam will find himself either under attack or marginalized as a second-class citizen. The left prattles on about Islamophobia, even as it tries to ignore and gloss over very real antisemitism, but no such thing as Islamophobia can actually exist, since a phobia is an irrational fear.
The pro-terrorist mobs who blot out the scenery in London and other European cities (and take over the previously mentioned American universities) will seem quaint in another decade. Even if migration were cut off tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter at this point based on disparity of birth rates.
Why does this matter to America? For one, our politicians are every bit as foolish as the globalist Europeans we are emulating. The only thing that has slowed down America from suffering the same fate is geography. As horrific as our open borders are, they would be far worse if we bordered Islamic states.Even at that, Islamic migration is already influencing our electoral politics and policy positions, which was on display when the president tried to bully Israel into a foolish ceasefire, almost certainly out of concern over losing Michigan, as just one obvious example.More importantly, it is hard to imagine America flourishing in a world where most of its traditional allies have fallen to Islam. Indeed, this will only exacerbate the descent into brutish darkness.How could Israel even survive in such a world?
While there are plenty of other trends to be concerned about, these four all but ensure that the American moment, short of a spiritual reawakening, will end far sooner than most expect and it is wise to start preparing for that outcome. In the meantime, these are the areas where conservatives should focus their efforts, or at least be aware of these trends and how they are influencing other policy discussions. We need to educate as many people as we can on the stakes involved, and now is a great moment for that, when so many of the systemic problems should be obvious to all.
Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
The Biden Clan’s Con is Coming to an End
Perhaps we will finally learn the full story of the most corrupt presidential family in American history.
August 30, 2023 by Victor Davis Hanson 19 Comments
Newsletter
Despite years of Biden family and media disinformation, we are finally learning that President Joe Biden really did fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for looking into state corruption involving the oil company Burisma and Hunter Biden — and ultimately Joe Biden himself.
As vice president, Biden, in his own words, bragged that he had threatened to cancel the deliverance of American foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was dismissed.
So what is Congress to do now — un-impeach and exonerate an innocent impeached Donald Trump, and instead impeach a guilty Biden for essentially the same allegations?
After all, the Left redefined the impeachment bar in 2019 as leveraging foreign aid to Ukraine to benefit one’s political career.
And that is exactly what Joe Biden did to ensure his son could continue to raise millions for the Biden family with foreign governments, while being shielded from political consequences.
An impeached Trump also was accused of using the power of government to go after his likely 2020 presidential rival by suggesting that Joe Biden and his family were corrupt, and should be investigated by Ukrainian officials for fraud and bribery.
Despite Joe Biden’s denials, Trump was right: there was plenty of evidence to link Ukrainian unwarranted payoffs going into Biden family coffers.
So Trump in 2019 had good reasons to ensure that none of the Bidens were still burrowed deeply into the Ukrainian payoff machine.
In contrast, Biden had far less grounds to unleash the full powers of government against his probable 2024 rival ex-president Trump.
Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is not charging Trump with bribery of the Biden sort. He does not allege that Trump gave special foreign policy preferences for those foreigners who paid his family for such services.
Instead, Smith argues that Trump unlawfully took out classified presidential papers –although Joe Biden did nearly the same.
Biden kept quiet about his vast removal of classified documents for over a decade. Not until Trump was being investigated did Biden suddenly notify the government of his illegal removals.
In contrast, a combative and boisterous Trump fought openly and constantly with federal archivists over which of his papers at his Mar-a-Lago estate were truly classified.
Prosecutorial leaks floated all sorts of unproven nefarious agendas that had prompted Trump’s disputes over his presidential papers.
But no one to this day has seriously asked why senator and then Vice President Biden secretly and weirdly removed and kept such sensitive material for years.
Recent reports allege that Hunter Biden may have been treated with kid gloves by prosecutors, partly because Hunter’s lawyers had threatened otherwise to call Joe Biden to the stand as a favorable witness.
Government prosecutors under pressure from the White House apparently balked at the nightmare of a befuddled president of the United States testifying under oath about the supposed innocence of the very guilty Hunter Biden.
In truth, the former drug addict Hunter has played lots of such strange games with his own family.
In his laptop communications, Hunter whined that no one in the family appreciated his hard work at family grifting.
He sounded petulant that his father forced him to fork over half his income to the Joe and Jill Biden household.
At time of universal scrutiny of Hunter, the last thing any sane first son might do would be to hawk his own childish paintings at exorbitant prices to those wishing to buy influence with his father the president.
In effect, Hunter was almost daring the White House to stop his blatant grifting artistry.
Instead, the Bidens moved Hunter into the White House, apparently to keep him under closer watch.
Hunter is still out of control. He could take the family down with him unless President Biden continues to shield him from prosecution.
Ironically, the double standard used by Biden and the media to hound Trump has only raised new questions of fairness.
Why had the Biden family — with its far greater legal exposure — never faced such serial indictments?
A Republican House of Representatives had ended prior Democratic protection given to the Bidens.
And the Ukraine war has again turned attention to the Biden-Burisma connection and Hunter’s shaking down of Ukrainian officials.
Finally, Joe Biden can no longer work a full day. He mutters. He stumbles. He serially lies.
He hijacks solemn occasions commemorating national tragedies by trying to one up the grieving with his own self-absorbed stories — most of them irrelevant and narcissistic half-truths.
If a cognitively and criminally challenged Biden cannot finish his term, we will finally learn the full story of 15 years of Biden family corruption. The Bidens will lose the only impediment — Joe Biden’s political machinations — left in the way of an honest, full-blown felony investigation into what is likely the most corrupt presidential family in American history.
Who is Pulling the Puppet Strings?
The Nazi rise to power was an aberration in world history.
Or was it?
Based on recent events, is it impossible to believe we could be re-living 1938 Germany's past? Could we see another Kristallnacht occur in America at any moment? Our country is visibly in freefall, with no leader willing to unequivocally call out the evil that is Hamas and its puppetmaster, Iran. The lunatics are running our asylum, and they hold immense sway.
No, I'm not talking about the titular head of our country, President Biden, either. He is a figurehead, no longer capable of deep thought, if ever before. If Biden ever had any 'seichel' (wit or intelligence), it's been too long since he's shown any. For a minute, forget about recent polling creating shockwaves running through Democrat circles. You are left to believe the country is firmly in a box of its own making.
But let's leave Biden recharging in his Rehoboth Beach home and talk political realism. Outsiders are hard-pressed to name anyone who influences Biden's actions. Listen to a daily briefing with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, which displays three recurring themes:
- Constant reformation of the President's comments. "What the President meant was…"
- "I would refer you to "X" for additional comments."
- An ever-growing hostility to reporters who "push" beyond Jean-Pierre's scripted verbiage as delivered straight from her notebook.
This president's administration, supposedly the most transparent of all time, is perhaps the least forthcoming in a generation. None other than CNN states: "Failed to act on a number of transparency issues. Worse, the administration embraces its predecessors' opaque and undemocratic policies." If the Biden administration is the keeper of light and truth, why does it exhibit such a cloistered, closed administration? Perhaps Biden is trying to hold his party together in the face of complex and contrary crosscurrents endlessly battering him.
Because the Biden administration is untruthful on so many issues, one is left to puzzle over what at first appears to be either schizophrenic or just patently wrong decision-making followed by equally inappropriate actions.
The following issues are the foundational issues backed and supported by Biden, despite what recent narratives or statements to the contrary made that infer something different.
- First, he was 100% in support of Israel. Now, he wants to give Israel the benefit of his experience in how to fight terrorists.
- Trillions spent electrifying everything in sight and demagoguing anyone who stands up and says, "Joe! We don't want electric cars, stoves, or aircraft or having to eat less meat to appease your supporters whose endgame is to control our lives."
- Watching millions of illegal aliens admitted to the heartland, unvetted, unable to take care of themselves, and some here to do us physical harm or undermine our republic.
- Inflation is allowed to ravage middle-class people, making our savings worth far less.
- Woke-ism and racism have our country divided over endless pseudo issues that hide the critical issues. Instead, we see either inaction or the worst possible outcomes.
It's the lies that should worry us the most. Bidenomics is eye candy designed to take in the gullible, the uninformed, and those who believe in a better tomorrow based on loving Big Brother. The statistics, like labor growth, are fundamentally deceiving. What's been consistently growing is the number of people working for the government. The latest figures tell the truth: the government is the leading growth sector in report after report.
You have been lied to, not once, but repeatedly, with millions lapping it up.
But exactly who is lying to us? Some obvious and perennial actors include politicians, special interest groups, big business, foreign interests, and the vast and unaccountable thousands in our mammoth bureaucracies. It's likely not a conspiracy, but there must be more than the usual suspects. Since Obama, we have been entirely off the rails. We've been Slouching Towards Gomorrah for a very long time. Sure, there's Iran, Russia, China, and others that seek to destabilize and/or take advantage of us in our distress. But even that isn't the reason we seek.
The honest answer is the worst because it is us, just as Pogo warned when he said, "We have met the enemy, and it is us!" We've become believers in the "Prison of Two Ideas." As Greg Gutfeld of Fox's "The Fives" describes it, "They set up an issue as having only two positions -- you're either for or against "X" -- and then place you on the side that sounds most evil."
Too many of us retreat into default positions instead of insisting on logic and truth. This leads us to the most malign contrivance of all: forgetting that truth matters. Without truth, we can be controlled in every way. Are we just building another box of our own making? Whoever is pulling the strings, perhaps President Obama, George Soros, or other partisans, they are wearing down our country and the requisite psychic energy necessary to fight back.
As much as I want to see Biden as the face of the destroyers, I can't. He's a symptom, not a cause, which makes me wonder about the next person in line if not Biden. Will he be just as bad? Will we just be building another box? Who can we trust with the running of our country, and who will be faithful to our Constitution and the Founders' intent? In America's Democrat party today, who is happy? Certainly not the rank and file. Many Democrats have read the tea leaves and want someone else to run.
So what about the next person in line? Will he or she be just as bad? Who can we trust with the running of our country, and who will be faithful to our Constitution and the Founders' intent?
Right now, as imperfect as former President Trump may be, he's the only one that we have a prayer of electing and who will stand up to the forces that try to destroy us. Even if he becomes a convicted felon as he will likely be if his haters get their way, I'd vote for Trump again. If he is to be kept in jail and prohibited from governing, I'll be one of the millions demanding his return.
God Bless America.
Allan J. Feifer is a patriot, author, businessman, thinker, and strategist. Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow at www.1plus1equals2.com.
His (BILLARY CLINTON) wife is equally and personally devious and corrupt; she had the fake “dossier” concocted she was certain would take Trump out of the running for president in 2016. Hillary used her position as Secretary of State to rake in millions of dollars to her phony Clinton Foundation, much of that money from other nations that sought to benefit from her largesse when President. PATRICIA McCARTHY
REMEMBER THE SAUDIS INVASION OF SEPT 11.
Images of 9/11: A Visual Remembrance
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/11/images-911-visual-remembrance/
THERE IS A CONSISTENT PATTERN OF OBAMA, GEORGE SOROS AND THEIR PUPPET BIDEN ALWAYS BEING ON THE OTHER SIDE. JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY RIGHT INTO BIDEN'S POCKETS!
The U.S., the West, free markets and trade, and democracy need strong forceful anti-Iran U.S. leadership and they need it now. The Saudis know that. U.S. leadership may well be forfeited by the Biden Administration, either deliberately or by incompetence.
Recently Barack Obama opined on Israel’s war with Hamas, and predictably reprised all the received wisdom that our politicians on both sides of the aisles have indulged since 9/11. One comment in particular evoked one of the more dangerous takes on the conflict with modern jihadism––that this venerable doctrine of Islam is some sort of heresy or extremism that doesn’t represent Muslims worldwide.
In the context of the current war with Hamas, according to ABC news, Obama said of Israel’s campaign, “‘There are people right now who are dying who have nothing to do with what Hamas did,’ Obama said, making the distinction between Palestinians who live in Gaza and the militant group Hamas, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization.”
We’ll pass over the mendacious euphemism “the militant group Hamas,” and the implication that the accurate description “terrorist organization” is merely a prejudiced slur by U.S. security agencies. More important is Obama’s variation on the cringing and dishonest phrase “nothing to do with what Islam,” an echo of the Western apologists after 9/11 who regularly chanted this lie.
The use of this duplicitous formula transcends political party. After 9/11, the Bush administration no doubt thought that such rhetorical distortions would pacify Muslims and show them that we’re “not at war with Islam.” Verbal preemptive cringes abounded in Bush’s speeches, such as the following: “Our enemy [al Qaeda] doesn’t follow the great traditions of Islam. They’ve hijacked a great religion . . . All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true face of Islam . . . It’s a faith based upon love not hate.”
Anybody even vaguely familiar with traditional Islamic doctrine and history knows that this flabby ecumenicalism is at best well-meaning wishful thinking, at worst a talking-point for malignant apologists. Listen to Ibn Khaldun (d.1406), one of Islam’s most significant and revered historians and philosophers: “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” So too, Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), another important Muslim theorist of jihad: “Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.” Are these titans of Islamic thought “hijackers” or “heretics”?
In the current crisis, such distortions of jihad like Obama’s serve to cast Hamas as victims, and to demonize Israel for its alleged callous disregard of innocent lives, as Obama implies. But “innocence” is not so simple, not when the enemy is utterly indifferent to their own peoples’ security and lives, and hide their weapons in schools, tunnels under hospitals, mosques, apartment buildings, and other civilian infrastructure. Moreover, Hamas has the support of about half of Gazans, who voted Hamas into power in 2006. Nor was there any mystery about Hamas’s genocidal violence, which is codified in its founding covenant.
Also, support for “armed struggle” against Israel and its people is shared by most Gazans. As Andrew McCarthy recently reported, a poll “from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research tells us that, by a margin of 58 percent to 20 percent, Palestinians would prefer a renewal of the intifada (the ‘armed struggle’) to peaceful negotiations aimed at ending ‘the occupation.’ That’s consistent with last year’s polling, as is the finding that about seven in ten Palestinians oppose the two-state solution.”
Other recent polls from the Washington Institute similarly report that “there is widespread popular appeal for competing armed Palestinian factions, including those involved in the attack. Overall, 57% of Gazans express at least a somewhat positive opinion of Hamas—along with similar percentages of Palestinians in the West Bank (52%) and East Jerusalem (64%).”
Moreover, smaller but more fanatic outfits like Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Lion’s Den have “receive the most widespread popular support in Gaza. About three quarters of Gazans express support for both groups, including 40% who see the Lion’s Den in a ‘very positive’ light, an attitude shared by a similar percentage of West Bank residents.” Given that the Palestinian Arabs have no formal military, “armed struggle” means terrorism.
No surprise, then, that many “civilians” took part in the massacre on 10/7. Photographers embedded with Hamas terrorists have publicized the carnage with photos that appeared in Western media like AP, the New York Times, Reuters, and CNN. The media watchdog website HonestReporting wondered, “Is it conceivable to assume that ‘journalists’ just happened to appear early in the morning at the border without prior coordination with the terrorists? Or were they part of the plan?” And wouldn’t that make those reporters and media outlets “accomplices in crime,” as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said?
Indeed, according to the Coalition for Jewish Values managing director Rabbi Yaakov Menken, “What we now know is that ‘civilians’ drew maps for Hamas, guiding them to each house, to each child, to each pet . . . ‘Civilians’ came after the terrorists to murder and kidnap those who had been spared,’” and “‘civilians’ were embedded with the terrorists to report on the atrocities committed. Also, ‘civilians’ deliberately gather around the terrorists, even, barbarically, bringing their children.”
These delusions about the doctrines of Islam have vitiated our response to jihadist terror since before 9/11. There was the misinterpretation of the Iranian revolution by our national security and intelligence agencies, who seemingly knew little of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s religious motives in the 1978-79 revolution that created the Islamic [N.B.] Republic of Iran. More egregious was the similar failure in the Nineties to understand the origins and motives of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
And it’s not like we weren’t warned before then. In 1993, a group of jihadists associated with Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheik,” bombed the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center, leaving a 100-foot crater and killing six. Federal Prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who successfully prosecuted Rahman and his accomplices, laid out during the trial the jihadist doctrines that also would motivate Osama bin Laden.
Nor was Abdel Rahman a nutty cult leader, a Muslim “beard from the fringe” similar to David Koresh or Jim Jones, both of whose beliefs were obviously bizarre interpretations of Christian doctrine. In contrast, Abdel Rahman had a doctorate, with distinction, in Koranic studies from Cairo’s famed al-Azhar University, the Islamic equivalent of Harvard or Oxford. As McCarthy’s analysis of jihadist doctrine showed, Abdel Rahman’s preaching on jihad was completely consistent with traditional Islamic orthodoxy as set out in the Koran, the Hadith, the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and later theorists like the traditionalist Ibn Taymiyyah mentioned earlier.
Yet nobody in our security and defense agencies seemed to take seriously McCarthy’s explanation of jihadist doctrine during Rahman’s trial. Throughout the Nineties, scores of our citizens and service members were murdered, and our national security and interests damaged by al Qaeda’s string of terrorist attacks against our embassies in East Africa and military housing in Saudi Arabia.
All these attacks were treated by the Clinton administration as crimes rather than battles in Osama bin Laden’s declared war against the infidels’ greatest power and challenger to Islam’s religiously sanctioned dreams of global domination. And as we saw earlier in Bush’s remarks, not even the gruesome finale on 9/11 and the 2996 dead could awake our foreign policy mavens from their dogmatic slumbers.
Finally, this willful blindness, as McCarthy titled his important book on the first World Trade Center bombing, serves the therapeutic, self-loathing narrative that makes our jihadist enemies the victims of Western historical depredations abetted by Israel, particularly colonialism. Barack Obama, in his cringing flattery of Islam during his 2009 Cairo speech, recycled this dubious received wisdom about the West’s guilt.
Just like today’s Western supporters of Hamas and their ahistorical chatter about “settler colonialism,” Obama blamed “tensions” between Islam and the West on “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.” Obama neglected to point out that Islam created one of history’s greatest colonial empires, and those Muslim nations were paid billions of dollars in foreign aid to align with the U.S..
So now, due to our decades of delusions, we are facing a more dangerous Middle East dominated by Iran and its terrorist proxies, an Iran partnering with Russia and China to compromise our national interests and security. Yet still we disregard the facts of history, and more important continue to indulge our own moral idiocy.
For the moral truth is, if a man stands behind his family and shoots at yours, and you return fire in self-defense, killing members of his family, then the moral culpability is his for putting them in danger in the first place. We need to stop pressuring Israel to value the enemy’s civilians more than their own, and speaking the truth about jihad is a good place to start.
Bruce S. Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents: The Tyranny of the Majority from the Greeks to Obama.
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