Reader submitted content. This article was written by Victor Davis Hansen for American Greatness Magazine.
Did someone or something seize control of the United States?
What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?
Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?
When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent to dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?
Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d—s”?
Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?
How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?
When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked? Was it legal suddenly for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?
Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?
When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?
Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures?
What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?
When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, and assault is not a felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?
Was there ever a national debate about the terrifying flight from Afghanistan? Who planned it and why?
What happened to the once-trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie with impunity under oath?
Who redefined our military and with whose consent? Who proclaimed that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could call his Chinese Communist counterpart to warn him that America’s president was supposedly unstable? Was it always true that retired generals routinely libeled their commander-in-chief as a near Nazi, a Mussolini, an adherent of the tools of Auschwitz?
Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically dangerous to speak the truth on campus? Whose idea was it to reboot racial segregation and bias as “theme houses,” “safe spaces,” and “diversity”? How did that happen in America?
How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob us of our sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?
We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare to a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we never knew.
YUP!
The NEW WORLD ORDER beckons us forward into its maw.
Tall Poppy Syndrome is now here!
Fasten your seatbelts, folks, radar shows some serious turbulence ahead!
Mahatma Gandhi said, “If there is an idiot in power, it means those who elected him are well represented.”
Brilliant man. Thanks for printing this.
100% spot on!
V.D. H is a brilliant man! Right on!
Q: Did someone or something seize control of the United States?
A: Of course.
Way back at the beginning, and it is impossible to read the writings of the so-called Anti-Federalists, and not know it was going to happen, withy the riches of a whole new nation as the prize.
It says somewhere, “of, by and for the people,” but like a lot of other stuff said somewhere, the words are empty and devoid of meaning, because people fail to make them mean something.
And so we are here today.
I’m not the only older reader in here, so there are others who should not be or not, like me, at all surprised.
I have seen great change in my lifetime, so that today is not recognizable as other than a descent into mindless chaos.
A societal disruption, I would call it, while sociologists call it “social disruption,” to wit (from Wikipedia):
Social disruption is a term used in sociology to describe the alteration, dysfunction or breakdown of social life, often in a community setting.
Social disruption implies a radical transformation, in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging.
Social disruption might be caused through natural disasters, massive human displacements, rapid economic, technological and demographic change but also due to controversial policy-making.
Q: What happened to the U.S. border?
A: Nothing, actually.
Q: Where did it go?
A: People stopped believing in it.
People today don’t believe in “nations,” thinking themselves “citizens of the world.”
When people don’t believe in nations, then there are no borders!
Borders only exist as a state of mind if they are not defended, and when people no longer believe in borders, they no longer exist, simple as that.
Q: Who erased it?
A: Would have to be we, the people, would it not, in a nation (whoops, sorry, there is no nation) with a government of, by and for the people?
Who else is there?
Q: Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally?
The how is easy – they either walked in or came by vehicle of some sort.
Why did 5 million people enter our country illegally?
For the gravy train awaiting them – free this, free that, money to spend, an opportunity to vote if they live in NY.
Q: Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws?
A: Hard to say, actually, because I am not sure we even have any.
Q: Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?
A: Did he even have to?
That answer is no, all he has to do is the nothing he has been doing, and that way, he won’t get a blister on his finger from signing something with a pen.
Q: Since when did money not have to be paid back?
A: And there is an interesting question with a long history attached to it which goes back in time to Biblical times or earlier.
For example, debt forgiveness is mentioned in the Book of Leviticus in which God counsels Moses to forgive debts in certain cases every Jubilee year – at the end of Shmita, the last year of the seven-year agricultural cycle or a 49-year cycle, depending on interpretation, and the same theme was found in an ancient bilingual Hittite-Hurrian text entitled “The Song of Debt Release”.
Debt forgiveness was also found in Ancient Athens, where in the 6th century BCE, the lawmaker Solon instituted a set of laws called seisachtheia, which canceled all debts and retroactively canceled previous debts that had caused slavery and serfdom, freeing debt slaves and debt serfs.
In addition, the Qur’an (the Muslim scripture) supports debt forgiveness for those who are unable to pay as an act of charity and remission of sins for the creditor.
The injunction is as follows:
If the debtor is in difficulty, grant him time till it is easy for him to repay.
But, if ye remit it by way of charity, that is best for you if ye only knew.
— Qur’an 2:280
And Hammurabi, the original lawmaker and sixth Amorite king of the Old Babylonian Empire, reigning from c. 1792 to c. 1750 BC., decreed that all his subjects’ debts be forgiven four times throughout his reign,
Q: Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow?
A: Sounds like something Janet “TOODLES” Yellen would say and then insist upon as fact because she said it.
Whomever insisted that is devoid of knowledge of history, specifically the Weimar Republic.
Q: When did America embrace zero interest?
A: It can’t be answered in the manner in which the question is stated because I am unaware that America ever formally or even informally “embraced” zero interest, and today, the concept of zero interest most definitely does not exist in America at the governmental level.
Q: Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?
A: First of all, not everyone believes that.
However, who do they state that to?
How do they register their protest?
By voting for a Republican instead of a Democrat?
Or vice versa?
And perhaps more to the point, with the complexity of “ordinary” life for too many people, worrying about a huge number most people cannot even wrap their minds around and can’t do anything about, having no control over the number, don’t waste emotional energy on the subject, period, and in my experience, get hostile when the subject is broached.
Q: When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent to dirty coal?
A: It didn’t and it isn’t, except to those close-minded zealots who believe that to save the world, ALL combustion processes must come to an end, and the means to do that is to demonize and outlaw fuel itself.
No fuel, no combustion – thus, the global warming problem is solved.
Q: How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature?
A: There are 330 million some souls in America and I seriously doubt if more than a vocal and powerful handful believe that.
However, that majority has no voice, no say in the matter, and because the powerful handful do have the power, they disseminate that message which is another part of the anti-combustion agenda to save the world from global warming they believe is caused by CO2.
Q: Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?
A: None that I am aware of.
None that are sane and rational and capable of employing critical thinking skills, anyway.
Q: Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings?
A: There are indeed words on a piece of paper that say that, to wit:
18 U.S. Code § 1507: “Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”
Q: How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion?
A: According to news accounts, for example, the Fox News story “DOJ allowing illegal protests outside SCOTUS justices’ homes despite federal law, former officials say” by Timothy H. J. Nerozzi published June 21, 2022, it is because the Biden administration and its DOJ were refusing to enforce the law.
Q: How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d—s”?
A: Because the Biden administration first encouraged them to do so with its toxic anti-Supreme Court rhetoric, and then allowed them to do so by its actions of doing nothing to stop them or interfere with them.
It’s called “SACRED DEMOCRACY” in action, otherwise known as ochlocracy which is the rule of government by a mob or mass of people and the intimidation of legitimate authorities, or BIDEN-ism.
Q: Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth?
A: 1798, with the Sedition Act which made it a crime for American citizens to “print, utter, or publish… any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government.
Q: And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?
A: The FBI are called the “political police” because they are controlled by U.S. attorneys who are political appointees, all answerable to the Attorney General and ultimately, the president.
So the orders would have come from the DOJ.
Within the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI is responsible to the attorney general, and it reports its findings to U.S. Attorneys across the country.
The FBI’s intelligence activities are overseen by the Director of National Intelligence, so the orders could well have come from there.
Q: How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call?
A: In the United States, a president can literally be impeached for anything at all.
All it takes is a majority in the House of Representatives.
There is no such thing as due process involved.
The president has no say in the matter nor rights in the matter.
Those doing the impeaching do not have to be sane, rational, or free from hate.
Nothing will happen to them for bringing false charges.
Pretty simple how it happens when you think about it.
Q: Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television?
A: Or the Brooks–Sumner Affair, which occurred on May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate chamber, when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, used a walking cane to attack Senator Charles Sumner, an abolitionist Republican from Massachusetts.
He used a cane on the Senator because one used a cane to beat a dog back into its kennel, so there was an implicit message there.
All I can say is consider the source, which in the case of Nancy Pelosi, is the people of San Francisco who put her in that office as an insult to the rest of the nation.
Q: Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?
A: Personally, I never look for sanity and rationality in anything that occurs in Washington, D.C., and so I am not upset when I don’t find it.
I have read Roman history from the time of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus to its end, so I know well that civilizations reach a peak, and then rapidly fall, for the same reasons down through time, so for anyone who knows history, these are all mile markers that let the wise know where this road we are on now leads.
Q: When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked?
A: We did not assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked.
The FBI assumed it had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked, which it only could have done if the DOJ and sitting president wanted that campaign subverted, or if the DOJ and president were powerless to prevent it.
Certainly, we, the so-called people, are powerless to do anything about it, as the FBI does not answer to us, being the political police they are.
And let us not forget that the FBI has been playing at politics since its inception.
As the FBI itself tells us in the online article “A Byte Out of History – J. Edgar Hoover’s ‘Official & Confidential’ Files” on 07/11/05, J Edgar Hoover had some 17,000 pages of record contained in 165 files that Hoover retained in the privacy of his own office suite going back to 1924.
They included from notes both benign and derogatory on political leaders, media, and other individuals to materials for congressional hearings and briefings and notes on persons and organizations critical of the FBI.
So who knows what kinds of nefarious activities they have been up to since their creation, although we do know the following from the U.S. Senate article “Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities” on the Church Committee, to wit:
The committee held a series of public hearings in September and October of 1975 to educate the American public about the “unlawful or improper conduct” of the intelligence community, highlighting a few carefully selected cases of misconduct.
These hearings examined a CIA biological agents program, a White House domestic surveillance program, IRS intelligence activities, and the FBI’s program to disrupt the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.
These nationally televised events offered the American public an opportunity to learn about the secret operations conducted for decades by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Despite these numerous challenges, the Church Committee investigated and identified a wide range of intelligence abuses by federal agencies, including the CIA, FBI, Internal Revenue Service, and National Security Agency.
Committee staff researched the FBI’s long-running program of “covert action designed to disrupt and discredit the activities of groups and individuals deemed a threat to the social order,” known as COINTELPRO.
The FBI included among the program’s many targets organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and individuals such as Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as local, state, and federal elected officials.
After holding 126 full committee meetings, 40 subcommittee hearings, interviewing some 800 witnesses in public and closed sessions, and combing through 110,000 documents, the committee published its final report on April 29, 1976.
“Intelligence agencies have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens,” the final report concluded, “primarily because checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied.”
end quotes
A simple story, actually.
Q: Was it legal suddenly for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?
A: Hard to say, actually, and the more appropriate way to ask the question is whether it was illegal, which apparently it was not, given no charges of any kind ever resulted.
And let us not forget the FBI was involved in that matter, as well.
Q: Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports?
A: Who on earth knows or can tell what is or might be law today.
Consider that in the full transcript from President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress on 28 April 2021, Joe was quoted as follows:
“To all the transgender Americans watching at home – especially the young people who are so brave – I want you to know that your president has your back.”
end quote
“Your president has your back!”
A strong statement indeed.
So are there laws?
Joe Biden seems to think so.
Q: Did Congress enact such a law?
A: It does not appear so.
What we do know is that in April 2021, a federal judge dismissed Soule v. Connecticut Association of Schools, Inc., which argued that Connecticut’s high school sports authority and five school boards violated Title IX by allowing transgender students to participate on women’s sports teams.
But that was then and this is now, so who knows what congress might do next.
Q: Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women?
A: Not in a published decision, anyway.
And here, with respect to this series of questions which present us with issues I have never encountered before, either in my life, or in my studies of history, I would like to go back to 1944 and a series of essays entitled “What is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches” by Erwin Schrodinger, to the section “A Biological Blind Alley,” where the author muses as follows:
There is no reason whatever for believing that our brain is the supreme ne plus ultra of an organ of thought in which the world is reflected.
If one accepts the present theory of evolution – and we have no better – it might seem that we have been very nearly cut off from future development.
We may be approaching the end of a blind alley, we may even have reached it.
end quotes
Is this what the end of a biological blind alley looks like?
Something to think about, anyway.
Q: Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?
A: I seriously doubt it.
Q: When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic?
A: Around 1917 or so when the Spanish Flu was raging, perhaps, although the history of quarantines here in America goes back to colonial days in the 1730’s.
The practice of quarantine, as we know it, began during the 14th century in an effort to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics and since the fourteenth century, quarantine has been the cornerstone of a coordinated disease-control strategy, including isolation, sanitary cordons, bills of health issued to ships, fumigation, disinfection, and regulation of groups of persons who were believed to be responsible for spreading the infection.
Quarantine of sick people in the countryside by doctors when I was young was commonplace.
However, it is clearly recognized among public health professionals, anyway, that the use of quarantine and other measures for controlling epidemic diseases has always been controversial because such strategies raise political, ethical, and socioeconomic issues and require a careful balance between public interest and individual rights.
Q: In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension?
A: I seriously doubt it, but that doesn’t mean anything at all today.
And it must be kept in mind that today, health commissioners, and here I think of the pathetic loser Dr. Howie Zucker of New York, are no more than political extensions of the governor of the state, and are taking their orders from him or her, and canceling rental contracts and declaring loan payments in suspension are by their nature political decisio0ns having nothing to do with protecting public health and everything to do with partisan politics, so trace that back to its source is my thought and see whose office the policies originated from.
Q: How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?
A: The word “illegal” refers to laws.
There are no laws per se during a quarantine that say what or what not may be done.
There is no “book” on how to conduct quarantines.
They are ad hoc and political in nature.
So that is how it would be done, if done.
Q: Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day?
A: 70 percent of the voters WOULD NOT cast their ballots?
As worded, that implies a voluntary action on the part of the voters, themselves.
The other way to read that is that some small group of people with the power to be able to do so, were going to somehow deny the legitimacy of the ballots of 70 percent of the people or deny the counting of those votes, which would have to be either the Democrats or the Republicans or both for all we know, since between them, through election commissioners, they control all votes cast in an election.
Q: Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures?
A: Assuming that this in in reference to the 2020 presidential election which was decided by the Democrats in favor of Joe Biden on 6 January 2021, if one goes to the Federal register of 6 January 2021 and reads every speech word for word, one walks away with the clear knowledge that ultimately, if was Nancy Pelosi and her pack of Democrats who were responsible for the revolutionary change.
Simply stated, we emerged from 6 January 2021, the day of infamy when our Republic died in the House of Representatives, an entirely different nation than what existed on 5 January 2021.
Q: What happened to Election Night returns?
A: They still exist, at least in concept, and in practice in some states, which would be those with better run and less incompetently run elections.
Q: Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?
A: A rational and logical person would think otherwise.
The rational and logical person would make a presumption that computerizing the vote would make the tallies quicker.