USA 2024 Elections Thread

[grarpamp]

Democrats caused and furthered much damage...


Victor Davis Hanson: Our Parasitic Generation

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/11/our-parasitic-generation/

    "Be assured young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation."
    - Adam Smith

Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?

We are $31 trillion in collective debt. The new normal is $1.5
trillion budget deficits. The military is politicized and short of
recruits.

We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to
confirm our enemies’ cynical stereotypes.

Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley
contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections. We practice
segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the
right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it.
The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate
humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist
Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of
friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware—and
hard-earned deterrence.

We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized
life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and
baby formula. Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or
stroll at dusk in many major American cities. Medieval London’s
roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco.
Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.

The Breakdown of Basic Society

Our California always is a preamble to America’s future. Our present
is likely your tomorrow.

Each summer here we impotently expect forest conflagrations. Millions
of acres of flames pour more millions of tons of smoke and carbon and
soot in the skies. Tens of millions of hated combustion engines cannot
begin to match the natural blankets of aerial dirt.

The state seems to shrug it off, saying wildfires are both inevitable
and natural. Old-fashioned forest management and fire-fighting
strategies, honed over centuries, are deemed obsolete by our green
experts. So, we let fiery nature take its better course. What is the
implicit message to those in the way of fires that devour homes and
trees? Nature’s way? Natural wood mulch? Or that such fools should not
build their cabins or homes where they are not wanted?

What was bequeathed to us from a state of 15 million—magnificent
aqueducts, once brilliantly designed freeways and airports, superb
universities and schools, perfectly engineered reservoirs, and
downtowns of majestic skyscrapers—in a California of 41 million are
frozen in amber or in decay. They have few updates and even fewer
replacements. The decrepitude recalls the weedy forums and choked
fountains of Vandal-era Roman cities, which is what happens when a
later parasitic generation mocks but still consumes what it inherits
but cannot create.

Our own generation’s pale contributions are multibillion-dollar,
quarter-built, graffiti-defaced high-speed rail Stonehenge monoliths.
We prefer to shut down rather than build nuclear plants. Our solar
battery plants are as prone to combust as they are to store
electricity. And our urban streets reek of feces. All seem testaments
to our incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance. We fear the idea of
homelessness, and so cede to the homeless our downtowns and avoid what
follows.

Our great universities, once the most esteemed in the world from
Berkeley and Stanford to UCLA and USC, grow burdened with commissars,
too many of their outnumbered faculties are weaponized, and their
students have never been more confident in their abilities, and with
so little reason for that confidence.

A return to syllabi and grading standards of just 30 years ago would
result in mass flunkings. Failure on tests apparently means the test,
not the test taker, is found wanting.

What follows is the erosion of meritocracy and competence. And that
reality is starting to explain the great unraveling: why our bridges
take decades to build rather than a few years, why train tracks are
not laid after a decade of “planning,”and why to drive down a once
brilliantly engineered, but now crammed and dangerous road is to
revisit the “Road Warrior” of film. Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth
Holmes are the apt characters of our age.
Institutions That Went Rogue

The FBI has imploded. It has all but become a Third World retrieval
and investigatory service for the Democratic Party. Its last four
directors either have lied, misled, or pleaded amnesia while under
oath.

In 2016, the bureau with the Democratic National Committee sought to
destroy the integrity of an election by fabricating a Russian
collusion hoax. Its continuance and coverup ultimately required FBI
agents and lawyers to alter legal documents, to lie under oath, to
destroy subpoenaed phone data, and to outsource illegal suppression of
First Amendment rights to Silicon Valley contractors. The nation now
fears there isn’t anything the FBI might not do.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/25/lets-call-the-russian-collusion-hoax-what-it-really-is/

As we became hyper-legal with Trump, we are more sublegal with the
entire Biden family. For a decade, with impunity, it gorged
multimillion profits from selling the “Big Guy”/Mr. “10 Percent” Joe
Biden’s name and access—sums for the most part hidden and likely not
completely taxed. We all know it is true, and we all know the FBI and
Department of Justice know it is true, and we know further that the
truth means nothing.

This self-satisfied generation constantly brags of transforming
elections. But it will be known more as the destroyer of a once
hallowed Election Day. Not so long ago 70-80 percent of the electorate
took the trouble of voting under transparent protocols. We replaced it
in most states with 60-70 percent of the votes without audit and the
product of vote harvesting and curing. Our generation, in just a
couple of years, destroyed Election Day voting and Election Night
counting.
The New Medievalism

Despite different calibrations, various data reveal what is
self-evident to the naked eye. The American middle class is shrinking,
if not insidiously sliding into indebted peasantry. Westerners are
regressing and by design, now deciding daily whether to top up the
tank, turn up the heat, or buy beef.

Society is also bifurcating. A tiny powerful minority has more
leverage than any other elite in the history of civilization. And a
large underclass of subsidized poor shares with the wealthy a disdain
for the struggling middle class, the old bulwark of democracy.

In place of knightly penances and chivalric oaths, our elite takes
Bankman-Fried-like vows to “fight climate change,” support
“transitioning,” and ensure “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” But
like their Medieval brethren, they do so only by first enhancing, not
endangering, their own careers.

For the ruling class, prep schools, alphabetic certifications from
tony universities, and revolving-door résumés are modern versions of
having an abbey on site, a stately coat-of-arms, or taking vows from
the correct religious orders. Otherwise, it is the same medievalism
masked by pretension.
Our Rhine and Danube

America is rapidly resembling something like wide-open fifth-century
A.D. Rome, when its traditional inviolable northern borders on the
Rhine and Danube rivers vanished. Thousands of unassimilated tribes
crisscrossed as they pleased on the premise that no one among their
overripe, soft hosts could or would dare stop them.

Joe Biden just remarked that he is too busy to visit the southern
border. And why not? There may have been roughly 5 million illegal
aliens who have crossed it since his inauguration. He earns contempt
both from those who try to enforce the border and those who cross
illegally over it.

Biden surrealistically trashes Trump’s supposed archaic idea of a
wall—always without noting self-evident truths about it: anywhere
Biden stopped the wall or has not replaced prior rickety fencing,
there are the most porous and trafficked entry points.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ various mendacities
that the border is “secure” translate to allowing as many million
aliens as possible to break the law to enter the United States in the
four years of the Biden experiment. The administration sees itself in
a race to create a one-off window of historic laxity through which
millions can pour in—before a comatose nation wakes up and shuts it
down.

We are approaching an historic 50 million residents who were not born
in the United States, and of various legal and illegal statuses. In a
sane world, we might survive the challenge—if newcomers had all come
legally, learned the customs and language of their desired new home,
were audited and queued by some logical meritocratic process, and were
quickly assimilated and integrated by a confident host population that
assumed any who wished to live in America surely desired help in
becoming an American and felt gratitude to their hosts.

Instead, there is only chaos—and it is by design.

The legal immigrant waiting in line to enter the United States is
considered a fool, while illegal aliens and residents instead quickly
absorb three messages from their hosts.

    First, illegal residents will often be treated better than
American citizens, at least in terms of lax law enforcement, various
legal exemptions and amnesties, and unaudited entitlements.

    Second, many will soon learn they can assume immediate moral
claims against the majority population of their new home, who can be
seen as racist oppressors and obligated to offer reparatory
concessions in terms of hiring, admissions, and entitlements.

    Third, too many will quickly learn, Ilhan Omar-style, to harbor a
quiet derision for their benefactors. Their contempt is not due to
Americans’ dearth of magnanimity and generosity, much less to
“systemic racism.” Instead, their American hosts are silently assumed
to be naïve, timid, overly solicitous, malleable, easily manipulated,
rolled, and conned—especially when it is understood that if the roles
were reversed and the entrants were the hosts, they would have a
different notion of borders.

The idea of 330 million American citizens of different incidental
races and ethnicities united by a common American identity of shared
values, customs, and traditions is all but mocked. In its place is
arising something like the former Yugoslavia—an undefined mishmash of
competing and increasingly hostile tribal interests, with residents
sorting themselves out into red and blue states that eventually will
lead to two antithetical Americas.

So once assumed services, customs, institutions, and expectations are
eroding—from a safe walk to a government office in a large city’s
downtown, to a visit to the local public emergency room in extremis
for humane, rapid, and competent care, to a clean, safe subway ride in
a major city, or watching election returns conclude on Election Night.
A Nation of Thieves?

In a nearby Home Depot the other day, there were two long lines to
check out. The other six were closed, as was the largest exit with
several self-check-out counters.

Why? When asked the clerk whispered that the theft rate is high in the
store and that from time to time it shuts down various exits to limit
stealing or perhaps to confuse calculating thieves. I added that I had
learned that almost any large item in a box purchased at Home Depot
had to be first opened to ensure that key parts like knobs, wires, and
screws had not been ripped off.

A local Walmart stopped its 24-hour service; again, the clerk said it
was due to unsustainable looting during the early morning hours.

I also went to Walgreens and Rite-Aid recently. Much of what anyone
wanted, from razors to antihistamines, was under lock-and-key. None of
this was true just a decade ago. I live in a rural area among small
towns—a world away from Los Angeles and San Francisco where
smash-and-grab robberies and unapologetic looting have caused the mass
closures of pharmacies and all-service stores.

Exemptions given thefts under $950 in some states may be the culprit.
Others cite the post-George Floyd riots and the climate of unpunished
street criminality. Maybe years of mask-wearing made us forget who
normally had used masks and for what reasons.

Weaponized activist district attorneys and virtue-signaling mayors
also signal to criminals that property crimes don’t warrant arrest,
much less conviction, much less incarceration.

But whatever the cause, a once famously lawful America has become a
veritable land of thieves. The criminal is all but exempt. And the
middle class and poor suffer as a result from poor services, higher
prices, reduced hours, and fewer stores.

We know the solution is to deter crime by assured punishment for the
guilty. But the majority of Americans either cannot or will not demand
a return to sanity for fear of some sort of undefined pushback from
their elites. Pick your charge: “racism,” “privilege,” “bias,”
“discrimination.” Any will do.

We have seen lots of cultural revolutions in this country, but never
one that was so singularly focused on razing the foundations of
America—until now.

Yes, there is a lot of ruin in great nations. But even America is by
now running low on it.