Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished scholar, steeped in ancient and modern history. His social/political commentaries are intelligent, even-keeled, and filled with insight, avoiding the kind of "Bombshell!" click bait we see everywhere.

Therefore, when he cautions us to "imagine the unimaginable" regarding what is in store for us in the coming months, I know from his previous work that he is not a "sky is falling" nut. I take what he says seriously.

Imagine the Unimaginable
Victor Davis Hanson

Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory. They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable.

Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power.

In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, now talks trash about the likelihood of nuclear war.

A 79-year-old President Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal, and a butcher who should be removed from power.

After a year of politicizing the U.S. military and its self-induced catastrophe in Afghanistan, America has lost deterrence abroad. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are conniving how best to exploit this rare window of global military opportunity.

The traditional bedrocks of the American system — a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal justice system — are dissolving.

Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels. Inflation is at a 40-year high. New cars and homes are unaffordable. The necessary remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the disease of hyperinflation.

There is no southern border.

Expect over 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into the United States without audit, COVID testing, or vaccination. None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigration law.

Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded. District attorneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges. (Literally 10,000 people witnessed a deranged man with a knife attack comedian Dave Chappelle on stage at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and the Los Angeles County D.A. refused to press felony charges.) Murder and assault are spiraling. Carjacking and smash-and-grab thefts are now normal big-city events.

Crime is now mostly a political matter. Ideology, race, and politics determine whether the law is even applied.

Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the budgets of millions of Americans. An American president — in a first — casually warns of food shortages. Baby formula has disappeared from many shelves.

Politics are resembling the violent last days of the Roman Republic. An illegal leak of a possible impending Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade that would allow state voters to set their own abortion laws has created a national hysteria.

Never has a White House tacitly approved mobs of protesters showing up at Supreme Court justices’ homes to rant and bully them into altering their votes.

There is no free speech any more on campuses.

Merit is disappearing. Admissions, hiring, promotion, retention, grading, and advancement are predicated increasingly on mouthing the right orthodoxies or belonging to the proper racial, gender, or ethnic category.

When the new campus commissariat finally finishes absorbing the last redoubts in science, math, engineering, medical, and professional schools, America will slide into permanent mediocrity and irreversible declining standards of living.

What happened?

Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are choices, not fate. The U.S. has the largest combined gas, coal, and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build the safest pipelines and to ensure the cleanest energy development on the planet.

Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. For short-term political advantage, he kept printing trillions of dollars, incentivizing labor non-participation, and keeping interest rates at historical lows — at a time of pent-up global demand.

The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politicized, impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the entire legal immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.

Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories — “modern monetary theory,” critical legal theory, critical race theory — now dominate policymaking in the Biden Administration.

The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism. Ruling elites would rather be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful, and popular.

Is that not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from 18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?

The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021-2022. Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Biden still push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and deliberate cabinet nonperformance.

Why? The Left has no confidence either in constitutional government or common sense.

So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more doxxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation, swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying, and likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer.

Meanwhile, left-wing elites will do their best to ignore Supreme Court decisions, illegally cancel student debts, and likely by the fall issue more COVID lockdowns. They will still dream of packing the Court, ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding more states, and flooding the November balloting with hundreds of millions more dollars of dark money from Silicon Valley.

When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous — as we shall see over the next few months.

Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of "The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won," from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/vi...nimaginable-n1597243

This message has been edited. Last edited by: justjoe,

Be nothing like we’ve ever seen, and that’s probably an understatement. Sleepy Joe ain’t doubling down on stupid, he’s quadrupling down.

quote:

Originally posted by spunk639:
Sleepy Joe ain’t doubling down on stupid, he’s quadrupling down.

Joe is just doing what he's told.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:

quote:

Originally posted by spunk639:
Sleepy Joe ain’t doubling down on stupid, he’s quadrupling down.

Joe is just doing what he's told.

100% Agree, as I’ve posted before my belief is the Kenyan’s calling the plays.

I really dislike cynicism. I have enough already. I guess he left out the massive meteor and the devastating earthquake. Nothing was darker than what Great Britain faced during the blitz.

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
I really dislike cynicism. I have enough already. I guess he left out the massive meteor and the devastating earthquake. Nothing was darker than what Great Britain faced during the blitz.

Yeah, but GB had us in the wings to help out. Who do we have?

flashguy

quote:

Originally posted by spunk639:


100% Agree, as I’ve posted before my belief is the Kenyan’s calling the plays.

Obama is calling nothing. He's doing what he's told (like when he was in office) and is merely a conduit along with Valerie Jarrett and Susan Rice.

Well it'll be a little like the guy who fell off a 40 story building.

As he headed down he was heard to shouting out the floor numbers.

It didn't keep him from serious decelleration trauma when he plowed into terra extra firms (he hit concrete) but everyone knew when he stopped.

quote:

five months

The time left until the mid-term elections? In the meantime, things are certainly going to be … interesting.

quote:

Originally posted by Blackmore:

quote:

Originally posted by spunk639:


100% Agree, as I’ve posted before my belief is the Kenyan’s calling the plays.

Obama is calling nothing. He's doing what he's told (like when he was in office) and is merely a conduit along with Valerie Jarrett and Susan Rice.

Agreed.

He didn't get to where he got to without a Helping and Controlling Hand.

Still, you have to admire the guy's perseverance, fortitude, and persistence in following the dreams of his father.

I think Obama is a tool. He lives the high life on Martha's Vineyard in an 11 million dollar mansion, hobnobs with the Hollywood elite, rappers, sport stars,he has always been about glitz and glamor, and he always will be. Every once in a while they trot him out in a ten thousand dollar suit, with his million dollar smile, and his baritone voice, and then he slips away back to the Vineyard.

Who controls him? I have some ideas, but truth is I don't know. I just feel sure that he plays a very limited role that perfectly suits the dimensions of his real abilities.

The one saving grace in this mess is that VDH and others like him - and us - are able to criticize the mess, instead of, say, being forcibly "disappeared" or rounded up and shipped off to gulags. There are people who would like to do that, make no mistake, but they have no power to make it happen. As long as this holds out, we have a chance.

VDH. Google yields Virginia dept of Health.

I’ll wager the 2nd five months after the first five months will be far worse…

quote:

I really dislike cynicism. I have enough already. I guess he left out the massive meteor and the devastating earthquake. Nothing was darker than what Great Britain faced during the blitz.

I think you are mistaken about "cynicism." Cynicism dismisses apparently good behaviour, ideals, values as ultimately pretexts for selfishness or evil. Like if you said, "Jordan Peterson is all about making big bucks." That does not even vaguely resemble what he does in this essay.

And he does not say that what is coming will be worse than the blitz or any other violent upheaval. He says things will come about-- are coming about-- that we would never imagine would happen here. How about the Orwellian "Ministry of Disinformation?" In the USA?? How is it "cynical" to point out such developments. Better to just ignore?

The only way, as I see it, that it might be better to just ignore is in terms of guarding your own tranquility. Tend your own little garden.

But I would suggest that you refute something he says rather than dismissing it as cynicism. He says a lot of things. What does he say that is flat out wrong?

It took living through the Jimmy Carter years to get to Ronald Reagan.
19.5% mortgage interest rates, gave away the Panama Canal that China may soon control, Iran Hostage Crisis, and we were facing the real Soviet Union at the time.

Sorry, I did not find his comments enlightening, insighftul or upbeat in any way. I had four semesters of Philsophy in college and do not wish to engage in a frutiless discussion. I am puzzled as to why you cannot take my brief statements at face value and wish to lecture me. I have nothing further to say.

Is the link to the original posted?
I cannot seem to find it.

(I did find one on the ’net.)

Thank you for the post. No one likes unending gloom and doom, but at least Hanson knows what he’s talking about, unlike the totally clueless at the opposite end of the spectrum and their never-ending, “We’re going to show them this time; yeah, for sure; don’t doubt it because doubting is heresy,” mantras that I find just as tedious.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
Is the link to the original posted?
I cannot seem to find it.

Here you go: https://amp.dailycaller.com/20...ine-the-unimaginable

I’ll trust the Central Valley Farmer any day over some elitist suburbanite Chicagoan.