Victor Davis Hanson has recently pondered in back-to-back essays whether there is any way out of America’s previously “fast-tracked” and now accelerating decline.
Meanwhile, Julie Kelly appears to see no way out of the “near-certainty” that a “D.C. grand jury . . . will indict Trump on multiple counts” in ways that will cause him to be treated “[n]ot as a former president but as a traitor.”
Columnist Josh Hammer, addressing both Trump’s judicial travails and the broader “decadent civilizational morass,” insists in his own consecutive submissions that “sometimes, the only way out is through”—tit-for-tat action from the Right.
The depressing reality? This time, with the progressive Left’s assault on America, in Hammer’s words, having far passed the “point of no return,” the only way out is: out.
Across his two discourses, Hanson laments various “self-inflicted wounds.” “Dilapidated, dangerous, and dysfunctional” urban areas. Declining global trust in and fear of Uncle Sam under laughable leadership, and as “the once-vaunted U.S. Armed Forces have descended into some bizarre woke commissariat” that cannot keep secrets. Devastating debt and infinite inflation generated by perpetual-motion money-printing. Non-existent borders spawning social tension and drug-induced death. The descent of “America’s former strength” of “transparent, accurate and trustworthy” elections into “its greatest liability.” And of course, “predictably partisan” media “egging on” rank political persecution.
Hanson’s sad conclusion: sensible, generally agreed-upon “remedies” such as instilling fiscal discipline, rebuilding military strength, restoring urban cores and meritocracy, enforcing the law, and educational reform are “now seen as worse than the original maladies”—in large part because today, in contrast to the past, “the elected government is what caused the crisis.”
Focusing on one aspect of this “self-inflicted” crisis—weaponization of the justice system—Kelly warns that “Trump almost certainly will be charged with obstruction of an official proceeding . . . But [Special Counsel Jack] Smith might decide to pursue seditious conspiracy charges . . . a crime comparable to treason.”
While “decent Americans still want to believe this can’t, and won’t, happen,” the unstoppable investigative journalist is resigned to merely urging “flat-footed Republican leaders” to “prepare.”
In contrast, Hammer, calling even Alvin Bragg’s comparatively lesser, state-level prosecution of Trump “the point of no return,” considers the way through, and therefore out, to be to “fight fire with fire” on multiple fronts.
He nods approvingly at “the dramatic pushback” to, and financial losses from, Bud Light’s transgender misstep; the expulsion of two Tennessee state legislators for disrupting the House chamber; and federal judges’ boycotts of potential clerks from speech-stifling law schools.
And insists that “[t]here is simply no choice” but for “Republican prosecutors in deep-red jurisdictions across the country to prudentially and reasonably respond in kind” to Bragg’s outrageous legal attack on a former president. “Surely there is some creative and ambitious right-wing prosecutor in the Oklahoma Panhandle or West Texas who would like to summon Hunter Biden or Anthony Fauci out to ‘flyover country,’ right?”
Yet his “fighting-with-fire” examples are mere candles in hurricane-force winds as “the modern Left” progresses inexorably in efforts to “permanently vanquish the forces of traditionalism and Americanism.” One minor brand among thousands still fully sold out to the LGBTQ agenda. A handful of boycotting judges amid nearly 900 on the federal bench. The two legislators? Already reinstated.
And would some Capra-esque prosecutorial Jefferson Smith be willing and/or crazy enough to risk reputation, position, and personal security for a lost cause? Doubtful. So-called “lawfare” clearly only runs one way. Heard anything lately about the John Durham investigation into the roots of “Russia, Russia, Russia?” Exactly. That Hunter Biden corruption probe? Yep.
“Billary,” Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Clinesmith, Clapper, Brennan? All waltzing around free as birds and laughing their way to the bank, the CNN studio, or both.
The bottom line, as both Hanson and Kelly clearly recognize: America’s leftist Ruling Class has moved too far beyond Hammer’s “point of no return” to even be reached, much less fought, with fire.
This was all demonstrated when Democrats spied on White House servers and a “cabal” of operatives, influencers and media brazenly stole a presidential election, discovered myriad ways to criminalize any questioning that outcome, and colluded in censoring truthful information to rig that election and leverage a pandemic to ratchet up government’s size and power.
It was clear when child mutilation and kindergarten drag queen shows were normalized and the usurper president of the United States declared that deviant personalities “shape the soul of the nation.”
As President Trump points out, hooligans from among the millions of scofflaws and traffickers now pouring over America’s nonexistent border are pampered in upscale New York hotels while veterans sleep on the street.
America’s hard-won energy security and hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs are abandoned for dependence on unreliable, energy-poverty-inducing, landscape-scarring, wildlife-killing, non-recyclable and non-renewable “renewables” and electric vehicles—produced by coal-burning, slave-labor-powered facilities in China.
When we see all of these things and note, too, that liberals may have bought a key state Supreme Court seat aided by megadonors, purchased votes and laundered money, and limp-wristed establishment Republicans blame so-called failure to find a “middle ground” on abortion less than 10 months after the pro-life’s greatest triumph, we can safely say we’ve passed the point of no return.
All in all, elites are pursuing an agenda so radicalized, reckless and ruthless—so far beyond the pale and yes, the point of no return—that on every meaningful political, economic, social, cultural, judicial, security and electoral matter there is no more middle nor common ground, and no more way out except out.
Red America, for whom Hanson’s sensible “remedies” to our “self-inflicted wounds” are as plain as Hunter’s cocaine-sniffing nose, must go its own way.
How this “Greater American Opt-Out” can and should occur is a subject for this correspondent’s upcoming next missive. But it must happen.
And the ground-laying must begin here and now, at this point well-past the point of no return, before further misgovernment and another purloined election thrusts the nation into utter social and economic chaos and even civil war.