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Victor Davis Hanson: We’ve Never Had a Presidency Like This; Predicts a Reckoning in 2022
A recent stay at my sister’s home presented a microcosm of American life under the Biden regime — the new normal.
My niece told me that some of her unvaccinated friends had dined outdoors at a Manhattan restaurant. One young man entered the restaurant to use the restroom only to find an employee stationed outside the door asking patrons to show proof of vaccination before they could use the facilities.
Refusing to get vaccinated, my other niece had recently left her position with a large wealth management company based in the city. Her husband’s best friend had recently died suddenly one day after taking the second dose of the vaccine. He leaves behind a wife who is eight months pregnant with their first child.
Finally, in order to renew her real estate license, my sister was forced to take a new mandatory course called “Understanding and Preventing Racial Bias in Real Estate.” The Connecticut Realtor website for this three-hour virtual class says the group “strives for inclusion for all” and is “committed to bringing awareness and education to our members. We remain dedicated to taking actionable steps to help rectify discriminatory practices that unfairly impact people of color.”
America is barely recognizable from its former self. The changes began just hours after President Joe Biden solemnly swore that he would “faithfully execute the office of president of the United States” and, to the best of his abilities, “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
He has done none of those things.
Over the past nine months, this administration has worked methodically to fundamentally transform the United States of America from a democratic republic into a socialist nation.
For those who have either denied it or ignored it, the one-two punch of the Afghanistan fiasco, which left America’s moral authority in tatters, and Biden’s authoritarian vaccine mandate, the unintended consequences of which we’re just starting to see, have made it impossible to ignore.
The strong-arm tactics weren’t acts of incompetence; they were part of a deliberate scheme to turn America into an authoritarian state.
Speaking with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night, historian Victor Davis Hanson said we’ve never seen a presidency like this. And he predicted that Biden will face a reckoning in the 2022 midterm elections.
Carlson began with a discussion of the unintended consequences of the vaccine mandate. We’re going to see shortages of airline pilots, air traffic controllers, hospital and long-term care facility workers, police officers, and firefighters, he said. “You’re seeing the core institutions of American life destroyed by this one mandate.”
“What’s the point of this?” he asked Hanson.
“It’s not Tucker Carlson that’s saying this alone,” he noted. “It’s Barack Obama who says the border is unsustainable. Or Larry Summers saying the economic agenda won’t work. Or senators on the Democratic side said Afghanistan is a disaster. It’s everybody saying, ‘What’s going on?’ We’ve never seen anything like it.”
Hanson asked, “Is it incompetence? Accidental? Is it non compos mentis problems with the president? Or is it by design an anarchy, a chaos, a nihilism … to have an agenda that doesn’t pull on any of its items 50% but through the sheer fear of this chaotic, anarchic ‘We are going to have a new agenda that is socialist, and nobody knows … ’”
“The academic world has filtered down to the concrete world under this agenda, and they are really, really frightened, and they are saying we’ve never seen something like this before,” he said.
“When they looked to these institutions you mentioned, they look at the military or professional sports or entertainment or Hollywood or Silicon Valley or social media or network news or Wall Street or the corporate boardroom, and they say what happened? We don’t recognize it anymore. We have been asleep, and they have filtered into all these institutions with this agenda we don’t want, and it doesn’t work.”
“There’s going to be a reckoning,” Hanson said. “I think whether it’s Mexican-American communities on the border or where I live, or soccer moms mad about what’s being taught in schools, it’s not a top-down, woke revolution. It’s a grassroots populist revolution. We’re going to see it in the next midterms. I think a lot of these institutions are going to rue the positions they’ve taken and the damage they’ve done.”
Using the pandemic as an excuse, this administration first placed restrictions on our civil liberties and then sought to remove them entirely. The vaccine mandate amounts to medical tyranny.
Hanson is right. We’ve never experienced a presidency like this. Let’s also hope he’s right about a reckoning in 2022, which the entire administration so richly deserves.
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Published in Healthcare
A good medical scare is one of the favorite crises the Left doesn’t want to waste. The governor of Virginia wants to solve the “public health crisis” of “gun violence” by banning “assault weapons.”
I can’t quote a Leftist without hammering on the quote marks key.
One quibble: tyranny is never so localized. If you read the Executive Orders and the material that complying companies are putting out, you will see that in accepting this, “we” are accepting unlimited, arbitrary powers over ourselves from this point forward.
Yeah.
I am afraid he is wrong.
No worries. The fix is already in. Democrats will survive, and possibly improve their numbers.
I was struck by VDH saying that the academic world has filtered down to the concrete world. We may be gobsmacked at the pace things are happening now, but this sort of thinking has pervaded academia, even down to the local level, for decades. I sincerely hope and pray that the reckoning comes at the ballot box and not in some other way.
There will he a reckoning but will it be aimed at the Democrats, or those who rise up against them.
You’re absolutely right. None of it is reversible. Same with the entitlements they’re trying so hard to establish.
If the election were held today, VDH would be right. But a lot can happen in 12 and a half months.
I think he’s already lost a lot of Independents, even some Democrats.
Me too. 😱
Did we somehow fix the fraud of 2020, throw the fraudsters in prison, and I missed it?
Republicans are too chicken to call out the fraud, which only emboldens the Democrats more.
Oh my, yes. The thought of all those freshman Republican legislators giving harsh press conferences before cleverly finding a way to let Biden have his way – so they can hang the disastrous results around his neck in the next election – fills me with unspeakable …
There will be no reckoning, the votes are already assembled and just need to be tallied. The reversal of Roe v. Wade will also lead to a catastrophic outpouring of leftists and to a dismantling of SCOTUS.
What was Ms Psaki’s comment the other day? Words to the effect of “POTUS wants to effect a fundamental change in our economy and he feels that coming out of a panDEMic is a good time to do this”. Well it’s working. But whence does POTUS get authority to dictate the form of our economy?
If there is a reckoning there actually needs to be a reckoning. The idea that we vote for the GOP in huge numbers for them to go sorry guys we can’t do anything but continue to fund planned parenthood and rack up massive deficits is not what voters are looking for. There was a reckoning after Obamacare. What did we get? Did we get fiscal conservatism with a conservative congress? Did we get Obamacare repealed? Did anyone get punished for Benghazi or the IRS tax scandal? We got nothing. And if we have a “reckoning” like that you can kiss 2024 goodbye. Voters won’t show up except for someone who is going to throw the table over.
The next reckoning will not be through voting. No clue who’s gonna get reckoned, though.
I agree, but if we elect Republicans there is at least a chance that they will listen to us. Democrats are convinced that they know better than us foolish peons what is right for us, and will ignore us completely. I’ll take the Republican option.
On a local level, my daughter (who has a degree in Politics and has run for town board) pointed out something that I think is a basic truth. Republicans tend to come up through the system: school board, town board, county, state, national. Democrats tend to come up through the political machine, ward heeler to city government to state to national. That’s one reason Democrats tend to be urban and Republicans rural. Not there isn’t a Republican hierarchy, but it tends not to be Tammany Hall.
I think you are right. But we need to get out of this mindset that the GOP maybe possibly should listen to us. It is something we shouldn’t have to hope for. They are a tool and our servants and need to be treated as such. They aren’t rock stars. It is consent of the governed. They are elected to enact our will and vision and get power because we bestow it to them. Anyone who doesn’t agree with that who is in office needs to be humiliated publicly and thrown out.
Certainly if the election problems of 2020 remain. Lots of 11PM vote drops.
Any Republicans out there working to fix those problems? Or are they sweeping them under the rug so they don’t look “too Trumpy”?
I wish that people would stop talking like this. It’s self defeating. We certainly can’t win if we give up before the election.
Well, then show me the Republicans who are working to fix our fraudulent elections. A lot of them are afraid to even question the 2020 outcomes lest they be seen as aligning with President Trump. Quelle horreur! So I’m tired of Republicans turning a blind eye to reality. This is not about giving up, this is about facing what is true. And what is true is that our elections are absolutely fraud-ridden. Anyone who claims that 2020 was the most secure election ever needs to be kicked in the head.
You call it “self-defeating.” I call it speaking plainly what is true.
A lot of Republicans are like this: telling us to just pipe down about the fraud and continue to pretend everything is fine. That to speak the truth will drive people away. So how are we going to fix our election process if we can’t say out loud what everyone knows to be true? Maybe telling Republicans that we won’t vote until they fix the process will get them off their rapidly-expanding behinds and do something.
Agree. We need to hold their feet to the fire. My point is that they are more likely to respond to us than Democrats. Not all of them will, but our chances are better with Republicans.
Primary the star-spangles out of ’em.
I’d primary every single one — even the ones I like — just to break them out of their complacency.
But ideally, the GOP would fold up their tents, the Coastal Elite RINOs would go join their natural home with the Democrats, and the real, honest lovers of liberty would form a new party.
We should have done that more than a decade ago. We might have a better opposition party today if we did. We might even have a better Democrat party.
We also can’t win if Demoncrats are allowed to cheat.
Also, VDH and Tucker are only preaching to the choir, and that’s saddest of all. Our/their influence with highly influential big media other than Fox is negligible. Am I too pessimistic?
Glen, this is factually incorrect, particularly on the fiscal issue.
You can look at the figures here, from President Trump’s FY 2020 budget. I’ll provide the figures, but if you want to check them, look at historical table 1.2 (Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits as Percentages of GDP).
Here is the surplus/(deficit) as a percentage of GDP, by year. The negative number indicates a deficit.
That’s a lot of improvement after the 2010 election. Remember that due to the fiscal year method, some of the spending would have been locked in when the Republicans took office in early 2011.
There was an economic recovery during this period, albeit an anemic one. Here are the figures for federal outlays for the same years, again as a percentage of GDP:
Again, that’s progress. Not as much as I would like, but it’s a significant shift in the right direction.
On Obamacare, while the whole program wasn’t repealed, the mandate was repealed. I think that it was in 2017. So that’s progress, too.
It’s not fair to say that we’ve had nothing but losing, losing, losing. There have been successes and setbacks.
On the main point of the OP, I’m a fan of VDH, but I’m finding myself a bit disappointed in this analysis.
Off the top of my head, I would guess that FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, kicking off in 1933 and 1965 respectively, were worse and more consequential lurches to the Left than anything that we’ve seen under Biden.
I’m not happy with Biden’s Presidency so far, except for getting us the heck out of Afghanistan, finally, with minimal losses, thank the Lord. My contentment on this one issue is somewhat spoiled by the importation of 100,000+ Afghans into our country, apparently. I wanted us out of Afghanistan, but wasn’t keen on the idea of bringing any part of that nightmare of a country home with us.
You are just being realistic.
Its not Joe Biden. Nancy Pelosi had it right when she called it “the Obama build back better agenda” … Obama set this all up for Hillary Clinton. When she failed – the people they’d hired just went into standby for 4 years… Now that Biden is president this 5th column of radical actors are springing into action before they get shut down by a republican congress (and hopefully a republican senate) 2022…
That’s why they’re moving so fast … they need to get things in place – because they know even if they loose the white house in 2024 republicans never roll back or repeal the structures they’ve built in prior administrations…